20190116 : Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions ( Jan 16, 2019 , profile.theguardian.com )
Do some research it becomes clear quickly what the real story is. Hillary and her bunch
stink to high heaven and have or YEARS. Started with her and husband. They sold this country
o or personal gain.Just search a little and make sure to use factual information. It is there
for anyone to find.
divideand conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful,
so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment.
In its most
general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that
members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different
things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal,
but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's
radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into
identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting
through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes
harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism,
which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and
marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for
a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies.
As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that
some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they
then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies
of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals
claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better
than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan
for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in
Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi
government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy
but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups.
On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand
human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers
largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening
China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal
through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political
system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump
had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members,
who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so
of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with
Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the
"soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable
to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups,
such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals,
etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and
can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal
ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
I know Keynes said "In the long run we are all dead"
It might be not that long. The empire and war go together. And now this means the nuclear
war, which will be decided on much lower level that we suspect. Ukraine is a real flashpoint
as Russia is incensed with the USA stage coup d'état (aka the "Revolution of Dignity",
aka Nulandgate ) and feels greatly endangered by it. As Daniel Ellsberg puts it in his 2018
talk at Google ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cJG9j0NdY
):
But in terms of American traditions, we thought of ourselves as -- we didn't think -- of
having run the first war of national liberation. But it could have been called that, the
first war of separation for an empire. And we thought of ourselves as anti-imperial. And we
still think of ourselves that way, as not an empire like the others. That's false.
That's very clear from the Pentagon Papers where we're deciding who should run Vietnam
this year or next year or how they should stay in power, what criminal acts they're
entitled to take, how much we need to support them. And so it's very obviously the
documents of an empire. In fact, that's what I said to my wife, when she said, at one
point, before they came out, does it really matter to get this history out? And I said,
well, among other things, it's the first real history of imperial operations since the
Nuremberg documents were discovered, covered after the Second World War. And before that,
it probably goes back to Punic times, to the Syrian empire, to Sumerian empire, and so
probably all the same, but we don't have the documents for it.
And here they are. And yet, even so, I managed to think of it as an aberration. We had
somehow gotten ourselves into acting like an empire. Let me say just very briefly
now– I could spend the whole time on this. But I'll just say, I've come recently to
see what we are as a covert empire. And covert refers to plausibly denial covert
operations.
Covert operations, I should say, are defined as operations that are not just secret,
that you're not just keeping it safe, but that you lie about plausibly. And to make it
plausible, you provide in advance evidence, false evidence, misleading evidence as to
what's really going on and who's running it and why it's happening and who did it and so
forth, a false flag in some cases, whatever.
But you provide several layers of cover for what's being done to protect the president
from the notion that he is murdering, overthrowing governments, installing coup governments
in democracies and so forth, as so often in the third world then and now, up until now.
Well, you don't want the US to be associated with that. It's happening over there.
And if somehow a US hand surfaces, he or she wasn't working for any agency. And if you
find the agency, it wasn't the CIA. And if it was the CIA, it wasn't the president. So you
have layer after layer of cover stories with documents. I didn't know this. It didn't come
to my attention. This so-and-so did it and so forth. The Vietnam War was run from beginning
to end like that. That's how we run our empire.
We deny that we are an empire. And what is an empire? A country that determines the
regime of other countries, decides who the police chief was, who shall live and who shall
die, what the basic foreign policies are. We do that throughout Central America and always
have, often many other parts of the world as far apart as Indonesia, now the Middle East.
In general, we decide: Who do we want? Is this guy OK? We don't decide every detail but any
more than you decide every detail of a military commander's operations.
But generally, they work. If they don't do what we want, we replace them with somebody
else. We deny that we're an empire. We're against empire. When other people do the same
sort of thing, they're empires. They're acting imperially. First level of denial on the
American part. And then second, how do they get in power? Who has to be killed? What
paramilitary forces have to be paid and go in, as into Nicaragua, for example, and other
places? So the efforts are also plausibly denied OK, I could spend time. And I don't know
if people have it in mind.
The author makes clear that the accidental nuclear war scenarios laid out in Dr
Strangelove, Fail-Safe, The Bedford Incident et al are, in real life, very much more
probable than the authorities would have us believe.
The probability of one or other of these being triggered unofficially is terrifyingly
high.
"We have no concept of a preemptive strike," Putin told a forum of international experts
in the southern city of Sochi in response to a question from the audience.
"In such a situation, we expect to be struck by nuclear weapons, but we will not use
them" first, he said.
"The aggressor will have to understand that retaliation is inevitable, that it will be
destroyed and that we, as victims of aggression, as martyrs, will go to heaven.
"They will simply die because they won't even have time to repent,"
Europe is willing to defy the U.S. on Nordstream to the point of forcing the U.S. to openly and nakedly destroy its reputation
with European contractors and governments to stop one pipeline in a place where multiple gas pipelines will be needed for future
growth.
This is the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option. And the neocons in the Senate just pushed the button. Europe understands
what this is really about, the U.S. retaining its imperial position as the policy setter for all the world. If it can set energy
policy for Europe then it can set everything else.
And it's clear that the leadership in Europe is done with that status quo. The Trump administration from the beginning has used
NATO as an excuse to mask its real intentions towards Europe, which is continued domination of its policies. Trump complains that
the U.S. pays into NATO to protect Europe from Russia but then Europe buys its energy from Russia. That's unfair, Donald complains,
like a little bitch, frankly, even though he right on the surface. But if the recent NATO summit is any indication, Europe is no
longer interested in NATO performing that function. French President Emmanuel Macron wants NATO re-purposed to fight global terror,
a terrible idea. NATO should just be ended.
But you'll notice how Trump doesn't talk about that anymore. He wants more billions pumped into NATO while the U.S. still sets
its policies. This is not a boondoggle for the MIC as much as it's a Sword of Damocles to hold over Europe's head. The U.S.'s involvement
in should be ended immediately, the troops brought home and the billions of dollars spent here as opposed to occupying most of Europe
to point missiles at a Russia wholly uninterested in imperial ambitions no less harboring any of them.
And Trump also knows this but thinks stopping Nordstream 2 is the price Europe has to pay him for this privilege. It's insane.
The time has come for Europe to act independently from the U.S. As much as I despise the EU, to untangle it from the U.S. on energy
policy is the means by which for it to then deal with its problems internally. It can't do that while the U.S. is threatening it.
Circling the wagons against the immediate threat, as it were.
And that means protecting its companies and citizens from the economic depredations of power-mad neoconservatives in the U.S.
Senate like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
Allseas, the Swiss company laying the pipe for Nordstream 2,
has halted construction for now
, awaiting instructions from the U.S. Gazprom will likely step in to finish the job and Germany will green light any of the necessary
permits to get the pipeline done. Those people will be put out of work just in time for Christmas, turning thousands of people against
the U.S. Commerce drives people together, politics drives them apart.
But, at the same time, the urgency to finish Nordstream 2 on time is wholly irrelevant now because Ukraine and Russia came to
terms on a new five-year gas transit contract. This ensures Gazprom can meet its contractual deliveries to Europe that no one thought
could be done on time. But when the Nazi threat to Zelensky meeting with Merkel, Macron and Putin in Paris failed to materialize,
a gas deal was on the horizon.
And, guess what? U.S. LNG will still not have the marginal lever over Europe's energy policy because of that. Putin and Zelensky
outmaneuvered Cruz, Graham and Trump on this. Because that's what this boils down to. By keeping Russian gas out of Europe, it was
supposed to constrain not only Russia's growth but also Europe's. Because then the U.S. government can control who and how much energy
can make it into European markets at critical junctures politically.
That was the Bolton Doctrine to National Security. And that doctrine brought nothing but misery to millions.
And if you look back over the past five years of U.S./EU relations you will see this gambit clearly for what it was, a way to
continue European vassalage at the hands of the U.S. by forcing market share of U.S. providers into European markets.
Again, it gets back to Trump's ideas about Emergy Dominance
and becoming the supplier of the marginal erg of energy to important economies around the world.
The smart play for the EU now that the gas transit deal is in place is to threaten counter-sanctions against the U.S. and bar
all LNG shipments into Europe. Gas prices are at historic lows, gas supplies are overflowing thanks to fears of a deal not being
in place.
So, a three to six month embargo of U.S. LNG into Europe to bleed off excess supply while Nordstream 2 is completed would be the
right play politically.
But, in reality, they won't need to, because the U.S. won't be able to import much into Europe under current prices and market
conditions. And once Nordstream 2 is complete, LNG sales to Europe should crater.
In the end, I guess it's too bad for Ted Cruz that economics and basic human ingenuity are more powerful than legislatures. Because
Nordstream 2 will be completed. Turkstream's other trains into Europe will be built. Venezuela will continue rebuilding its energy
sector with Russian and Chinese help.
There is no place for U.S. LNG in Europe outside of the Poles literally burning money virtue signaling their Russophobia. Nordstream 2 was a response to the revolt in Ukraine, to replace any potential losses in market share to Europe. Now Russia will
have what it had before passing through Ukraine along with Nordstream 2. By 2024 there will be at least two trains from Turkstream
coming into Europe.
Iran will keep expanding exports, settling its oil and gas trade through Russian banks. And the U.S. will continue to fulminate
and make itself even more irrelevant over time. What men like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump refuse to understand is that when you go nuclear you can't ever go back. If you threaten
the nuclear option, there's no fall back position.
And when those that you threaten with annihilation survive they are made all the stronger for passing through the eye of the needle. Looking at Gazprom's balance sheet right now, that's my take.
Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day
establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of
Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian
refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.
In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood
government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist
ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.
On December 10,
Erdoğan said he could deploy troops in Libya if the UN-backed Government of National
Accord (GNA) in Tripoli (which Turkey supports) requested it. Erdoğan's talks with GNA's
head, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is fighting a war against the Libyan National Army (LNA) of General
Khalifa Haftar, produced two ostensibly strategic agreements: a memorandum of understanding on
providing the GNA with arms, military training and personnel; and a maritime agreement
delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters.
Greece and Egypt protested immediately while the European Council unequivocally condemned
the controversial accords. Meanwhile, the deals apparently escalated a proxy competition
between Turkey's old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) rivals.
With the al-Sarraj handshake, Erdoğan is apparently aiming to:
minimize Turkey's isolation in the Mediterranean, one which has gradually worsened since
2010, following one diplomatic crisis after another with Israel;
counter strategic cooperation between Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Israel, including joint
diplomatic, energy and military initiatives;
cut into the emerging Cypriot-Greek-Egyptian-Israeli maritime bloc;
push back against Arab (Egyptian and UAE) pressure on al-Sarraj;
fill the European vacuum in Libya; and
emerge as a deal-breaker in the Mediterranean rather than a deal-maker.
All that ambition requires military hardware as well as diplomatic software. Since 2011, a
year after the Mavi Marmara incident ruptured relations with Israel, Turkey has been investing
billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it
would one day require.
In the eight years since then, Turkey has built
four Ada-class corvettes; two Landing Ship Tank (LST) vessels; eight fast Landing Craft Tank
(LCT) vessels; 16 military patrol ships; two deep-sea rescue ships; one submarine rescue ship;
and four assault boats.
The jewel in the naval treasury box is a $1 billion Landing Platform Dock (LPD), now being
built under license from Spain's Navantia shipyards, to be operational in 2021. The TCG
Anadolu , Turkey's first amphibious assault ship, will carry a battalion-sized unit of
1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles; it
also will transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks. It also may be able to deploy short
takeoff and vertical landing STOVL F-35 fighter jets. Turkey will be the third operator in the
world of this ship type, after Spain and Australia.
Erdoğan's naval ambitions, however, are not limited just to an emerging fleet of
conventional vessels. In 2016, he said
that the LPD program would hopefully be the first step toward producing a "most elite" aircraft
carrier. He also said he "sees it as a major deficiency that we still do not have a nuclear
vessel."
On December 22, Turkey's first Type 214 class submarine, the TCG Piri Reis , hit the seas
with a ceremony attended by Erdoğan. "Today,"
he said , "we gathered here for the docking of Piri Reis . As of 2020, a submarine will go
into service each year. By 2027, all six of our submarines will be at our seas for
service."
Unsurprisingly the docking ceremony reminded Erdoğan of his Libyan gambit: "We will
evaluate every opportunity in land, sea and air. If needed, we will increase military support
in Libya."
Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an
offense. On December 15, Turkish Naval Forces
intercepted an Israeli research ship, the Bat Galim , in Cypriot waters and escorted it
away, as tension over natural resource exploration continued to rise in the region.
On December 16, Turkey dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the
Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus. A week before the drone deployment,
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Ankara could use its
military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.
Libya is another risky proxy war theater for Turkey. Its deals with the al-Sarraj government
over troop deployment and maritime borders will become null and void if the Libyan civil war,
begun in 2014, ends with Gen. Haftar's victory. The chief of staff of the LNA, Farag
Al-Mahdawi,
announced that his forces would sink any Turkish ship approaching the Libyan coast. "I have
an order; as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink
them myself," Al-Mahdawi warned, noting that the order was coming from Haftar. On December 21,
Haftar's forces seized
a Grenada-flagged ship with Turkish crew aboard, on the suspicion that it was carrying arms.
The ship was later released.
The European Union is another factor why Erdoğan, once again, is probably betting on
the wrong horse. Technically speaking, Turkey is a candidate for full EU membership, but it is
an open secret that accession talks have not moved an inch during the past several years, and
with no prospects of progress in sight. Making membership prospects even gloomier, EU foreign
ministers in November
agreed on economic sanctions for Ankara for violating Cyprus' maritime economic zone by
drilling off the island.
The Mediterranean chess game leaves Turkey in alliance with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot
statelet and one of the warring factions in Libya, versus a strategic grouping of Greece,
Cyprus, Egypt (and the UAE), Israel, and the other warring Libyan group.
One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor. After controlling Syria
in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and establishing permanent military bases inside and off
the coast of the country, Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a
bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military
presence. As in Syria, where divergent interests did not stop Turkey from becoming a
remote-controlled Russian player, Moscow can once again make use of the Turkish card to
undermine Western interests in Libya.
Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time
Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.
Instead of finding the real culprits - ISIS remnants, disgruntled locals, Kurds who want
to regain control over Kirkuk - the U.S. decided that Kata'ib Hizbullah was the group guilty
of the attack....
Yesterday's attacks guarantee that all U.S. troops will have to leave Iraq and will
thereby also lose their supply lines to Syria.
One wonders if that was the real intend of those strikes.
Just like with 9/11 and Iraq where the US government immediately pushed its pre-existing
agenda, so the US doesn't care who really launches attacks on US and US-client positions in
Iraq and Syria but automatically assigns them to Hezbollah and thus to Iran, in accord with
the pre-existing neocon wet dream of provoking a full-scale war with Iran.
If that's the US intent, to escalate against Iran, and if conversely the Iraq government
is serious about kicking out the US military, we'll have the confrontation discussed in the
open thread.
As for the idea that Trump was briar-patching here, wanting a good legalistic pretext to
withdraw troops from Iraq (which would then trigger the practical supply-based pretext to
withdraw them from Syria and not "take the oil" after all), well even if he had such confused
thoughts, we've already seen how spineless he is about trying to assert his will over that of
the neocon bureaucracies, civilian and military. Do we really expect them to agree to vacate
Iraq merely because the legally constituted supposedly sovereign government told them to? It
seems more likely they'll tell the government they're not going anywhere and demand that the
government help them suppress non-governmental resistance to their ongoing presence, or else.
(I don't know if there's yet been a formal order to leave from the Iraqi government, or just
rhetoric in an attempt to save face.)
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive
lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending
America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy
agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway
defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to
spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November
of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign
policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or
neoprogressivism for short.
Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his
administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive
foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled
by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led
crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive
narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will
lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot
ones too.
Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the
neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean
world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a
world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American
and Western European progressive values.
"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or
democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen
American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe,
including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to
win."
A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis"
which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as
limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous
consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally
-- is at stake."
Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals
at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive
regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats
like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist
authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."
The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent
progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped
as an "authoritarian Internationale."
Cold War Calling
Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in
November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense
industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and
middle classes.
"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the
second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use"
policy.
And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be
one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats
(Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt
capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here
in the United States and around the world."
Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the
Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the
state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."
The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive
writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists
Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies
preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."
Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives
must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among
right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and
supporter."
Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global
authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international
alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared
xenophobia."
Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the
world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War
nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready
to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."
The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU
professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian
school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute
power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom
of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."
Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the
internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow
revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.
Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global
movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context,
history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian"
nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.
By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the
neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and
neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence
that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies
allegedly don't fight wars against one another.
Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often
assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it
cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align
with the West."
George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession
with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So
too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith
and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad
policy.
True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are
global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in
the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the
right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little
sense.
Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the
neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to
anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western
interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific
to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a
mistake.
Echoes of Neoconservatism
The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign
policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S.,
according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and
refuge."
Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned
by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of
liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best
hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such
appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked
American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and
restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough
to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American
international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for
decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves
objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive
values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake
the world in the American self-image.
"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these
days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which
we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max
Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war
record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist
authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."
Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst
impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global
crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises
in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist
approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy
organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of
voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our
wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for
Trump.
Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close
while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests
provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in
Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran,
Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for
office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among
six-in-ten Americans in 2016.
Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering
voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign
policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11
failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained
militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S.
foreign policy.
But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is
urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace
dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of
defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a
footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar
fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.
One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a
post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile
from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than
the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids
can't afford to go to college?"
The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize
their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a
global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?
FDR's Good Neighbor Policy
The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world
becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will
find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And
stability requires balance.
In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root.
This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of
values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have
security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but
essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.
It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The
greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to
make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where
its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."
Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and
minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It
is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good
may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any
price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity
presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go
something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security
interests are at stake."
A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and
shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its
roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy,"
said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor
who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the
neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a
World of neighbors."
What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's
Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No
country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian
David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which
included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in
the domestic affairs of neighboring states."
These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign
policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely
resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the
neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order
to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running
away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.
James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a
member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
Dec 10, 2018 Iran has arrested more than 100 Christians in the last week,
charities report, amid a growing crackdown by the Islamic Republic. play_arrowplay_arrow 3 Reply reply Report flag CTG_Sweden
19 minutes ago ( Edited ) remove Share link Copy But so far they haven´t been kicked out of Iran, like a
considerable portion of the Palestinian Christians in Palestine/Israel back in 1947-48. 30 % of
the Palestinians who were driven out from Israel were Christians. Nor have they been starved to
death like the Christians who owned farmland in Russia/Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s when Lenin,
Trotsky, Stalin and Stalin´s "brother in law" Kaganovych ruled over Russian/Ukrainian
farmers. But I agree that Europe still is a better place for Christians than Iran. But does a
person like Barbara Lerner-Spectre want to keep it that way? Well, I´m not so sure about
that. CTG_Sweden 17 minutes ago remove Share link Copy
falconflight:
"christians, and btw Yazidies have been destroyed in those two nations."
My comments:
... by ISIS and Al-Qaeda which indirectly were supported by the West which also wished to
topple Assad. Israel even treated wounded ISIS fighters in Golan (which they had conquered from
Syria in 1967). TeraByte 1 hour ago remove Share link Copy Israel is too arrogant to be able to recognize the current altered
terror balance in ME, even when this is confirmed by their own military analysts. The country
will experience a very hard awakening, if attacking neighbour nations. How is it possible these
Choosenites swearing God chose them to reign over other people and their Holy Talmud telling
"the Universe was created for the fulfillment of the destiny of the Jewish people" now
simultaneously can claim they have a cool rational of their real position on real time. These
lunatics´ religious arguments simply do not add up.
I think some my still hold out the hope or expectation that the DOJ will get to the bottom of national-security state malfeasance,
beginning with FBI.
Kim Strassel of the WSJ quite pointedly asks why there was so little interest at the FIS court in the Nunez memo, which the
IG report now bears out. Covering for malfeasance might just be the FISC's job one.
Now, a similarly gimlet-eyed view of the FBI, as arguably beyond saving ...
Alligator Ed
on Wed, 12/25/2019 - 11:02pm After bravely contesting a nomination she knows she cannot
win, Tulsi Gabbard has and continues to exhibit a tenacious adherence to achievement of
purpose. What is that purpose? I believe it is evident if you only let your eyes see and your
ears hear. Listen to what she says. Looks at what she does.
What this does is obvious. However, please forgive me if I proceed to explain the meaning.
People see what apparently is her home milieu. I've been to Filipino homes for dinner as many
of my nurse friends were Filipino. Tulsi is so human. Despite Hindu belief, she is respectful
to the presence and perhaps the essence of Jesus, and does not sound pandering or
hypocritical.
Getting to know Tulsi at the beginning of her hoped-for (by me) political ascendancy. Get in
on almost the ground floor of what will become an extremely powerful force in future American
life.
Why? What's the hurry?
The more support and the earlier Tulsi receives it propel the campaign. That's what momentum
means: a self-generating growing strength.
One doesn't have to be a Tulsi supporter to hopefully receive some ideas which may not have
occurred to you. This essay does not concern any specific Gabbard policy. What I write here is
what I perceive of her character and thus her selected path. Mind-reading, perhaps. Arm-chair
speculation, possibly.
Tulsi has completed phase 2A in her career. The little that I know of her early life,
especially politically (such as how she voted in HI state legislature) limits a deep
understanding which such knowledge would provide. As the tree is bent, etc.
Phase 1A: youth, formative years, military
Phase 1B: state legislature
Phase 1C: Congress
Phase 2B and possibly subsequent: interim between Congress and Presidential campaigning with
realistic chance of victory.
We are in Phase 2B. Tulsi, as I wrote in another essay, is letting the tainted shroud of
Democrat corruption fall off her shoulders without any effort of her own. The Democrat party is
eating itself alive. It is all things to all people at once. That is a philosophy incapable of
satisfaction.
Omni Democraticorundum in tres partes est (pardon the reference to the opening of Caesar's
Gallic Wars, with liberal substitution by me).
The Dems trifurcate and the division will be neither pleasant nor reconcilable. Tribalism
will be reborn after Trump crushes whomever in 2020.
Tribe one: urban/techno/überkinden.
Tribe two: leftward bound to a place where no politician has ever ventured. Not socialism.
Not Communism. We could call it Fantasy Land, although I fear Disney owns that name.
Tribe three: progressive realists. By using such positive wording, you will correctly
suspect my bias as to which Tribe I belong to.
Once again, policy will not be discussed. Only strategy and reality. Can't have good
strategy without a good grasp of reality. This is why Establidems are bereft of thematic
variability. For the past 3.3 years, they have been singing from a hymn book containing but one
song. You know the title. Orange Man Bad. Yeah, that's it. If they don't like that
title, we establidems have another song for ya. It's called Orange Man Bad. Like that
one, huh? Wazzat, ya didn't like the song the first time. Hey, we thought the song would grown
on you.
Them Dems, noses up, can't see the sidewalk. Oops. Stepped in something there, huh? Oh, yeah
like the Impeachment.
But I digress: The latter part of Phase 2B is not clear. Tulsi will continue to accept small
donor contributions, even after not obtaining the nomination next year. Public appearances will
be important but should be low key with little press attention. Press attention is something
however that won't be available when most desirable. What else Tulsi will do may be to form a
nucleus of like-minded activists, thinkers, and other supporters to promote an agenda for a
more liberal, tolerant society.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to
the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an
examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked well for anyone,"
Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only two
things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about a
month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye towards
Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point memos,
have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape survivors. Of
course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it ain't
Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have pretty much
completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable? Not for me.
Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last go round absent a
Bernie miracle.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be
subjected to the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches.
That includes an examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked
well for anyone," Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only
two things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
@Wally
She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about
a month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye
towards Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point
memos, have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape
survivors. Of course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it
ain't Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have
pretty much completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable?
Not for me. Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last
go round absent a Bernie miracle.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she never
and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy record
regarding domestic affairs.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she
never and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy
record regarding domestic affairs.
@Alligator
Ed@Alligator
Ed be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would feel
comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone but
Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a Neutral
Party.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
@wokkamile
Her dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
#2.1.1.1.1.1
#2.1.1.1.1.1 be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would
feel comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last
time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone
but Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a
Neutral Party.
Don't forget that 15% state threshold for eligibility to be awarded delegates.
#2.1.1.1.1.1.2 Her
dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
I will be surprised if Tulsi gets so much as one delegate.
More than a few knowledgeable people think he has a very good shot of winning California.
I am less optimistic about NYS but I think he will do well enough to get a good number of
delegates especially if he does well in the earlier primaries (NYS comes April 28).
I don't feel solidly about making any kind of predictions at this point but given the
nature of the Democratic Party, I don't see it as falling into oblivion anytime soon or in
our lifetimes.
As far as Bernie goes, I am not optimistic but I still have some hope. I still fervantly
believe that his candidacy is the best chance we will have in our lifetimes of bringing about
any substantial change -- and if he and his critical mass of supporters can't pull it off
this time around, we're all phluckled big time, even alligators, in terms of combating
climate change and putting a kabosh on endless wars. I wish you good future luck with Tulsi
though. I just don't see it. But I've been wrong on more than one occasion in my life.
Lyttennburgh, I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd
rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country.
Second, he may have his eyes on Mediterranean oil. Lastly, he may see a friendly Libyan
government as an ally or province of his Ottoman Empire dream. No matter what the reason,
he's setting himself up for another confrontation with Russia.
Combating the scourge of US-supported terrorists in Syria at the behest of its government
aside, Russia's involvement elsewhere is diplomatic, including in Libya.
Obama regime-led aggression in 2011 transformed Africa's most developed nation into a
charnel house, a dystopian failed state, endless war raging with no resolution in prospect.
Wherever wars rage, chances are US dirty hands are involved, clearly the case in multiple
countries, including Libya.
Russia is not involved in the country militarily. Claims otherwise are fabricated. Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov strongly denied them, saying:
"I categorically refute speculations of this kind. We are acting in the interest of the
Libyan settlement," adding:
"We are supporting the existing effort, including through the United Nations. We maintain a
dialogue with those who somehow influence the situation."
"We do not think that there is any grounds for such statements, such fiction, but this is
not the first time that US media spread different speculations, wicked rumors, falsehoods
targeting us."
"We have already gotten used to this, and we take it in stride. However, I have to
acknowledge that recurrent hoaxes of this kind exercise a negative influence on the sentiment
of the US domestic public, and the general atmosphere in the United States."
"Unfortunately it does not promote normalization of our ties, although we strive for
it."
A November NYT propaganda piece falsely accused Russia of involvement militarily in Libya --
instead of focusing on how the Obama regime raped and destroyed the country.
Trump hardliners support warlord Khalifa Haftar, a longtime CIA asset, a former US resident,
commander of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) -- waging war on the UN-backed
Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).
Since US-led aggression toppled Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 and sodomized him to death,
the US continued to wage secret drone war on the country, conducting hundreds of strikes,
continuing since Trump took office.
The Times falsely claimed "Russian mercenaries (and) snipers" are involved in Libya -- no
evidence cited proving what's not so, adding:
Hundreds of "Russian fighters (are) part of a broad campaign by the Kremlin to reassert its
influence across the Middle East and Africa (sic)."
"It has introduced advanced Sukhoi jets, coordinated missile strikes, and precision-guided
artillery, as well as the snipers -- the same playbook that made Moscow a kingmaker in the
Syrian civil war (sic)."
There's nothing remotely "civil" about US aggression in Syria. No evidence suggests Russia
is involved militarily in Libya with heavy or other weapons.
The Kremlin didn't intervene in the country on behalf of anyone. Its involvement is
diplomatic to try resolving the mess US aggression created -- what the Times and other
establishment media cheerled.
Days earlier, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed false claims
about Kremlin involvement in Libya militarily, saying:
Moscow officials maintain diplomatic contact "with all current Libyan political forces,"
adding:
Congressional hardliners drafted the so-called Libya Stabilization Act -- imposing sanctions
on Russia for its "imaginary military presence in" the country.
The measure falsely accuses Moscow of "military intervention," blaming what doesn't exist on
destabilizing the country, ignoring how US-led NATO smashed Libya, massacring countless
thousands, displacing many more, destroying their livelihoods and well-being
"I wonder how US lawmakers describe the illegal US armed forces presence in Syria or the
reckless actions of the (Obama regime) in Libya to their voters," Zakharova stressed.
The Times propaganda piece barely acknowledged Trump regime support for Haftar, mentioning
it buried well into its article, ignoring its April 2019 piece, headlined:
So Turkey goes against Uncle Sam and Egypt. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed . ..."
"... In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict . ..."
"... Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? ..."
"... The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. ..."
Bloomberg has confirmed on Friday the prior rumors that Turkey will be sending mercenaries
to Libya -- where it is propping up the UN-backed government in Tripoli (the GNA) -- are true.
"Turkey is preparing to deploy troops and naval forces to support the
internationally-recognized Libyan government, joining a planned push by Ankara-backed Syrian
rebels to defeat strongman Khalifa Haftar,"
reports Bloomberg .
Though Ankara has yet to confirm or deny the new reports, Erdogan's Turkey has for years
overseen a Libya-to-Turkey-to-Syria arms
"rat line" which saw both heavy weaponry and jihadists fighters transported for the purpose
of toppling Assad. But now with Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa
Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed
.
This also as President Erdogan
in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as
well .
Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA),
with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace
Spring', will now be sent into Libya.
There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel'
willing to go to Libya .
TFSA source told me Turkey will be offering fighters from all TFSA factions $2,000/month
to go to Libya.
And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists
backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the
latest 'oil and gas prize' -- but with immensely more at stake. As Bloomberg notes:
In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its
troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior
Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that
serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business
contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict .
As we
predicted earlier , Libya and the southern Mediterranean is on its way to becoming the next
big Middle East conflict of 2020 , also with Egypt and even Russia warning of further
involvement to block Turkey's increasing role on the ground.
And as the mainstream media finally stops ignoring the looming catastrophe for north Africa
and the region (still in denial as to the fruits of US-NATO "liberated" Libya after Gaddafi was
overthrown and killed), it
must be remembered that in another ironic plot twist, the CIA trained the very FSA 'rebel'
fighters now on their way to Libya .
Gee who would have ever predicted? It's the foreign fighter 'rat line' in reverse.
Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to
topple Assad? Via a 2015
military study :
The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world.
More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of
jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these
foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. Who are these North African fighters, and why are they
going to Syria? What do they hope to accomplish there, and do they want to return to their home countries?
Considering the tens of thousands of foreign fighters which poured into Syria starting in
2011 and 2012 in the first place, many of them from Libya, perhaps many are now simply headed
"home" -- ready to further the proxy war chaos at Erdogan's bidding.
NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension
of the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the
radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do
the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive
responses from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the
trees.
What is naive is not understanding that Turkey is the current NATO nations gateway for
all manner of illicit and illegitimat activity to foment and perpetuate the forever wars in
the ME. This has been going on since well before Benghazi and has only gotten worse under
Erdogan.
If you have a way to snap your fingers and solve every problem simultaneously, then
please do so. Otherwise it must be undertaken one step at a time. Closing that Turkish
gateway permanently is an excellent start.
"... Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization " big bang ." ..."
"... The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation's Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power. ..."
"... Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department ..."
Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and
the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public
good.
The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized
American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters
allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine
regime .
They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European
Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine
assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU
taxpayers.
What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the
most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.
In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked "Confidential" Soros outlines a
detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, "A short and medium term comprehensive
strategy for the new Ukraine," the memo from Soros calls for steps to "restore the fighting
capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement." To do the restoring, Soros blithely
notes that "General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the
auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added -- f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko
how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement
."
Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army
personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine . The
Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank .
Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does
business in Poland.
Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999
bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina
International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia
peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson
refused Clark, retorting, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you ." Now Clark apparently decided to
come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.
Naked asset grab
In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko's "first
priority must be to regain control of financial markets," which he assures Poroshenko that
Soros would be ready to assist in: "I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him
out about the swap agreement."
He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special
EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU's "AAA" top credit rating to
provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.
Whose risk would the EU insure?
Soros details, "I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses.
This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine
must become an attractive investment destination."
Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, "The investments will be for-profit but I will
pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am
advocating policies in search of personal gain. "
For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe
and around the world since the late 1980's, will know that his supposedly philanthropic
"democracy-building" projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990's allowed Soros the
businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University's
"shock therapy" messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet
governments to privatize and open to a "free market" at once, rather than gradually.
The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless
interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa
George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel
Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had
been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and
working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi.
Before becoming Liberia's President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society
Initiative for West Africa ( OSIWA
).
Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian
gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts
as President was to also invite the Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose
purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and Rothschild
mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights ."
Naftogaz the target
The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly,
Naftogaz. He writes, "The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of
Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden
subsidies
"
In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime
Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy:
"I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your
wholehearted support to a radical, 'big bang' type of approach. That is to say,
administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly
rather than gradually Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden
subsidies
"
Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of
the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly
brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization "
big bang
."
The Puppet-Master?
The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is
effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation's Ukraine
branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His
IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet
Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also
admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government
into power.
Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought
the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in
the US State Department . In 2004 just weeks after Soros' International Renaissance
Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul
wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions,
who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of
influence would prefer different language to describe their activities -- democratic
assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. -- but their work, however
labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International
Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain
U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the
National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and
several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The
European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance
Foundation did the same .
Soros
shapes 'New Ukraine'
Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros' IRF money is behind creation of a
National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows
the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine's legislature. Soros writes,
"The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged.
The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the
cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International
Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole
financial supporter of the NRC until now "
Soros' NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate
to push through "reforms," with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and
raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt
country can hardly afford .
In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in
selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers -- Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State
Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics
Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to
his proposal for a "big bank" privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states,
"You are fortunate to have appointed three 'new Ukrainian' ministers and several natives
(sic) who are committed to this approach
."
Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current
government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated
every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will
convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March
2015 paper says that, "It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration
(sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as
an utterly corrupt country." That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion
insurance guarantee investment fund .
While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros
reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking
about his proposals to reform Ukraine's constitution to enable privatizations and other
Soros-friendly moves, he complains,
"The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper
procedures and total transparency
."
Soros suggests that he intends to create this "visible demonstration" through his
initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by
presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine's
legislature.
George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby
his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka
Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no
doubt laying a subtle role.
George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a
TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy
government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death
camps. Soros told the TV moderator, "There was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that
was–well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets–that if I weren't
there–of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would."
This is the same morality apparently behind Soros' activities in Ukraine today. It seems
again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February
2014 US coup d'etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from
the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of
"public-private-partnership." Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors
like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, "George
Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015."
And now we learn that our own State Department was filling Soros coffers with our taxpayer
money to use against us and destroy our republic.
Whenever Democrats scream about cuts in foreign aid, know that they are squealing because
their "cut" of the laundered funds is in jeopardy and they have to answer to Soros for the
rest.
He's contributed a lot of money to the Dem Party to be so insulated from not only
prosecution but from criticism. If and when he gets criticized in a publication or article,
he screams "Anti-Semitism!" He's become good at making everything a win-win for himself.
Preaches socialism out of one side of his mouth to "virtue signal" to the world and then
loots the objects thereof out of the other side of his mouth for the benefit of his alleged
foundations. Why we can't prosecute him for interfering in our elections with his stolen
money is something hard to understand.
Ukraine is *** infested. I would like to know Soros ties to Igor Kolomoisky.
"Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian
gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first
acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia
whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and
Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human
rights ."
Wherever there are wealthy *** Zionist fascist oligarch sociopaths there is trouble...
I don't think Warren is a stalking horse for neoliberalism or whatever, but her inability
to fight back against bad press (combined with her occasional baffling decisions to give
herself bad press) is a big mark against her candidacy. There will be bad press for either of
them.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston stated what he thought was obvious,
that "England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only
eternal and perpetual interests." Palmerston was saying that national interests should drive
the relationships with foreigners. A nation will have amicable relations most of the time with
some countries and difficult relations with some others, but the bottom line should always be
what is beneficial for one's own country and people.
If Palmerston were alive today and observing the relationship of the United States of
America with the rest of the world, he might well find Washington to be an exception to his
rule. The U.S., to be sure, has been adept at turning adversaries into enemies and
disappointing friends, and it is all done with a glib assurance that doing so will somehow
bring democracy and freedom to all. Indeed, either neoliberal democracy promotion or the
neoconservative version of the same have been seen as an overriding and compelling interest
during the past twenty years even though the policies themselves have been disastrous and have
only damaged the real interests of the American people.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is, for example, driven by a powerful and wealthy domestic
lobby rather than by any common interests at all yet it is regularly falsely touted as being
between two "close allies" and "best friends." It has cost Americans hundreds of billions of
dollars in subsidies for the Jewish state and Israeli influence over U.S. policy in the Middle
East region has led to catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq,
Syria, Mogadishu and Libya. Currently, Israel is agitating for U.S. action against the
nonexistent Iranian "threat" while also unleashing its lobby in the United States to make
illegal criticism of any of its war crimes, effectively curtailing freedom of speech and
association for all Americans.
Far more dangerous is the continued excoriation of the Kremlin over the largely mythical
Russiagate narrative. Congress has
recently approved a bill that would give to Ukraine $300 million in supplementary military
assistance to use against Russia. The money and authorization appear in the House of
Representatives version of the national defense authorization act (NDAA) that passed last
week.
The bill is a renewal of the controversial Ukraine
Security Assistance Initiative that Donald Trump allegedly manipulated to bring about an
investigation of Joe Biden's son Hunter. The new version expands on the former assistance
package to include coastal defense cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles as offensive weapons
that are acceptable for export to Kiev. It also authorizes an additional $50 million in
military assistance on top of the $250 million congress had granted in last year's bill, "of
which $100 million would be available only for lethal assistance."
Ukraine sought the money and arms to counter Russian naval dominance in the Black Sea
through its base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. One year ago the Russian navy
captured three Ukrainian warships and Kiev was unable to push back against Moscow because
it lacked weapons designed to attack ships. Now it will have them and presumably it will use
them. How Russia will react is unknowable.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration,
has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable
success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also
because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are
all on board in countering the "Russian threat" in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the
NDAA last week, which completed the process.
Far more ominously, Kuleba and his interlocutors in the administration and congress have
been revisiting a proposal first surfaced under Bill Clinton, that Ukraine and Georgia should
be admitted to the NATO alliance. Like the $300 million in military aid, there appears to be
considerable bipartisan support for such a move. NATO already has a major presence on the Black
Sea with Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey all members. Adding Ukraine and Georgia would completely
isolate the Russian presence and Moscow would undoubtedly see it as an existential threat.
The NDAA also provides seed money to initiate the so-called Space Force ,
which President Trump inaugurated by describing it as "the world's newest war-fighting domain.
Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital.
We're leading, but we're not leading by enough, but very shortly we'll be leading by a lot. The
Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground."
If that isn't bad enough, the new defense budget ominously also requires the Trump
administration to impose sanctions "with respect to provision of certain vessels for the
construction of certain Russian energy export pipelines." Last week the House of
Representatives and Senate
approved specific sanctions relating to the companies and governments that are
collaborating on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will cross the Baltic Sea
from Vyborg to Greifswald to connect Germany with Russian natural gas. President Trump has
signed off on the legislation.
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The United States has opposed the project ever since it was first mooted, claiming that it
will make Europe "hostage" to Russian energy, will enrich the Russian government, and will also
empower Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive. Engineering companies that will
be providing services such as pipe-laying will be targeted by Washington as the Trump
administration tries to halt the completion of the $10.5 billion project.
Now that the NDAA has been signed, the Trump administration has 60 days to identify
companies, individuals and even foreign governments that have in some way provided services or
assistance to the pipeline project. Sanctions would block individuals from travel to the United
States and would freeze bank accounts and other tangible property that would be identified by
the U.S. Treasury. One company that will definitely be targeted for sanctions is the
Switzerland-based Allseas, which has been contracted with by Russia's Gazprom to build the
offshore section of pipeline. It has suspended work on the project while it examines the
implications of the sanctions.
Bear in mind that Nord Stream 2 is a peaceful commercial project between two countries that
have friendly relations, making the threats implicit in the U.S. reaction more than somewhat
inappropriate. Increased U.S. sanctions against Russia itself are also believed to be a
possibility and there has even been some suggestion that the German government and its energy
ministry might be sanctioned. This has predictably resulted in pushback from Germany, normally
a country that is inclined to go along with any and all American initiatives. Last week German
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asked Congress not to meddle in European energy policy, saying "We
think this is unacceptable, because it is ultimately a move to influence autonomous decisions
that are made in Europe. European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S."
German Bundestag member Andreas Nick warned that "It's an issue of national sovereignty,
and it is potentially a liability for trans-Atlantic relations." That Trump is needlessly
alienating important countries like Germany that are genuine allies, unlike Israel and Saudi
Arabia, over an issue that is not an actual American interest is unfortunate. It makes one
think that the wheels have definitely come off the cart in Washington.
The point is that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and Mike Esper (admittedly too
many Mikes) wouldn't know a national interest if it hit them in the face. Their
politicization of policy to "win in 2020" promoting apocalyptic nonsense like war in space has
also reinforced an existing tunnel vision on what Russia under Vladimir Putin is all about that
is extremely dangerous. Admittedly, Team Trump throws out sanctions in all directions with
reckless abandon, mostly aimed at Russia, Iran, North Korea and, the current favorite,
Venezuela. No one is immune. But the escalation going from sanctions to arming the Kremlin's
enemies is both reckless and pointless. Russia will definitely strike back if it is attacked,
make no mistake about that, and war could easily escalate with tragic consequences for all of
us. That war is perhaps becoming thinkable is in itself deplorable, with Business
Insiderrunning a recent
piece on surviving a nuclear attack. New homes in target America will likely soon come
equipped with bomb shelters, just like in the 1950s. Tags Politics
Trump can be impeached as a war criminal just for his false flag Douma attack (along with
members of his administration). But Neoliberal Dems and frst of all Pelosi are war criminals too,
with Pelosi aiding and abetting war criminal Bush.
So this is a variation of the theme of Lavrentiy Beria most famous quote: "Show me a
man and I will find you a crime"
I think tose neolib Dems who supported impeachment disqualified themselves from the running.
That includes Warren, who proved to be a very weak, easily swayed politician. It is quote
probably that they increased (may be considerably) chances of Trump reelection, but pushing
independents who were ready to abandon him, back into Trump camp. Now Trump is able to present
himself as a victim of neoliberal Dems/neocons witch hunt.
The only real check left is impeachment. It is rarely invoked and (until very recently) has
atrophied as a credible threat. But that doesn't make it any less
indispensable.
The problem was exacerbated by the Clinton impeachment fiasco, which history has proved
foolhardy. (I supported it at the time, but I was a government lawyer then, not a public
commentator.) Republicans were sufficiently spooked by the experience that they seemed to
regard impeachment as obsolete. Faithless Execution countered that this was the wrong
lesson to take from the affair. Clinton's impeachment was a mistake because (a) his conduct,
though disgraceful and indicative of unfitness, did not implicate the core responsibilities of
the presidency; and more significantly, (b) the public, though appalled by the behavior,
strongly opposed Clinton's removal. The right lesson was that impeachment must be reserved for
grave misconduct that involves the president's essential Article II duties; and that because
impeachment is so deeply divisive, it should never be launched in the absence of a public
consensus that transcends partisan lines.
This is why, unlike many opponents of President Trump's impeachment, I have never questioned
the legitimacy of the Democratic-controlled House's investigations of misconduct allegations
against the president. I believe the House must act as a body (investigations should not be
partisan attacks under the guise of House inquiries), and it must respect the lawful and
essential privileges of the executive branch; but within those parameters, Congress has the
authority and responsibility to expose executive misconduct.
Moreover, while egregious misconduct will usually be easy to spot and grasp, that will not
always be the case. When members of Congress claim to see it, they should have a fair
opportunity to expose and explain it. To my mind, President Obama was the kind of chief
executive that the Framers feared, but this was not obvious because he was not committing
felonies. Instead, he was consciously undermining our constitutional order. He usurped the
right to dictate law rather than execute it. His extravagant theory of executive discretion to
"waive" the enforcement of laws he opposed flouted his basic constitutional duty to execute the
laws faithfully. He and his underlings willfully and serially deceived Congress and the public
on such major matters as Obamacare and the Benghazi massacre. They misled Congress on, and
obstructed its investigation of, the outrageous Fast and Furious "gun-walking" operation, in
connection with which a border patrol agent was murdered. With his Iran deal, the president
flouted the Constitution's treaty process and colluded with a hostile foreign power to withhold
information from Congress, in an arrangement that empowered (and paid cash ransom to) the
world's leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism.
My critics fairly noted that I opposed Obama politically, and therefore contended that I was
masquerading as a constitutional objection what was really a series of policy disputes. I don't
think that is right, though, for two reasons.
First, my impeachment argument was not that Obama was pursuing policies I deeply opposed. I
was very clear that elections have consequences, and the president had every right to press his
agenda. My objection was that he was imposing his agenda lawlessly, breaking the limitations
within which the Framers cabined executive power, precisely to prevent presidents from becoming
tyrants. If allowed to stand, Obama precedents would permanently alter our governing framework.
Impeachment is there to protect our governing framework.
Second, I argued that, my objections notwithstanding, Obama should not be impeached in the
absence of a public consensus for his removal. Yes, Republicans should try to build that case,
try to edify the public about why the president's actions threatened the Constitution and its
separation of powers. But they should not seek to file articles of impeachment simply because
they could -- i.e., because control of the House theoretically gave them the numbers to do it.
The House is not obliged to file impeachment articles just because there may be impeachable
conduct. Because impeachment is so divisive, the Framers feared that it could be triggered on
partisan rather than serious grounds. The two-thirds supermajority requirement for Senate
conviction guards against that: The House should not impeach unless there is a reasonable
possibility that the Senate would remove -- which, in Obama's case, there was not.
I also tried to focus on incentives. If impeachment were a credible threat, and Congress
began investigating and publicly exposing abuses, a sensible president would desist in the
misconduct, making it unnecessary to proceed with impeachment. On the other hand, a failed
impeachment effort would likely embolden a rogue president to continue abusing power. If your
real concern is executive lawlessness, then impeaching heedlessly and against public opinion
would be counterproductive.
I've taken the same tack with President Trump.
The objections to Trump are very different from those to Obama. He is breaking not laws but
norms of presidential behavior and decorum. For the most part, I object to this. There are lots
of things about our government that need disruption, but even disruptive presidents should be
mindful that they hold the office of Washington and Lincoln and aspire to their dignity, even
if their greatness is out of reach.
That said, impeachment is about serious abuse of the presidency's core powers, not behavior
that is intemperate or gauche. Critics must be mindful that the People, not the pundits, are
sovereign, and they elected Donald Trump well aware of his flaws. That he turns out to be as
president exactly what he appeared to be as a candidate is not a rationale for impeaching
him.
The president's misconduct on Ukraine is small potatoes. Democrats were right to expose it,
and we would be dealing with a more serious situation if the defense aid appropriated by
Congress had actually been denied, rather than inconsequentially delayed. If Democrats had
wanted to make a point about discouraging foreign interference in American politics
(notwithstanding their long record of encouraging it), that would have been fine. They could
have called for the president's censure, which would have put Republicans on the defensive.
Ukraine could have been incorporated as part of their 2020 campaign that Trump should be
defeated, despite a surging economy and relative peace.
Conducting an impeachment inquiry is one thing, but for the House to take the drastic step
of impeaching the president is abusive on this record. Yes, it was foolish of Trump to mention
the Bidens to President Zelensky and to seek Ukraine's help in investigating the Bidens. There
may well be corruption worth probing, but the president ought to leave that to researchers in
his campaign. If there is something that a government should be looking into, leave that to the
Justice Department, which can (and routinely does) seek foreign assistance when necessary. The
president, however, should have stayed out of it. Still, it is absurd to posit, as Democrats
do, that, by not staying out of it, the president threatened election integrity and U.S.
national security. Such outlandish arguments may make Ukraine more of a black eye for Democrats
than for the president.
But whoever ultimately bears the brunt of the impeachment push, I have to ask myself a hard
question: Is this the world I was asking for when I wrote a book contending that, for our
system to work as designed, impeachment has to be a credible threat? I don't think so . . . but
I do worry about it.
Back to the Clinton impeachment. I tried to make the point that that impeachment effort --
against public opinion, and based on misconduct that, while dreadful, was not central to the
presidency -- has contributed significantly to the poisonous politics we have today. Democrats
have been looking for payback ever since, and now they have it -- in a way that is very likely
to make impeachment more routine in the future.
I don't see how our constitutional system can work without a viable impeachment remedy. But
I may have been wrong to believe that we could be trusted to invoke the remedy responsibly. I
used to poke fun at pols who would rather hide under their desks than utter the dreaded I-word.
Turns out they knew something I didn't.
"... Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger) ..."
Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the
Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality
where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger)
Stimson said in '42>
"We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be
recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of
overwhelming power on the other." (Capra Why We Fight")
If Power is overwhelming, then Power defines freedom. Stimson's rhetoric presents a
false equality. A deception. Essentially a lie.
The "Reds" are onto this, however, see VVP's informal disquisition at
"Change we can believe in" the second series ? That's a real warning sign ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg. ..."
"... as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship .. ..."
So, the fact that Obama is willing to put in a good word for Warren on behalf of the
wealthy elite should give you a clue as to which side Warren is really on. While many
non-political "normies" look upon the Obama years with rose-tinted glasses, I wonder if the
disillusionment that many people had in retrospect with Obama has sunk in to mainstream
political consciousness yet. If that is the case, an Obama endorsement might actually
backfire among progressives, seeing as how it has become evident that Obama was basically a
silver-tongued neoliberal in the same mold as Clinton and Pelosi.
I know that Warren is a political careerist at heart, but I was willing to give her the
benefit of the doubt when she first launched her 2020 presidential campaign. However, it has
become increasingly clear that she has hitched her wagon to the wrong horse as the neoliberal
corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship. I honestly do not
think that she would even be fit to be Sander's vice presidential pick at this point
considering how wide the political gulf between Warren and Sanders actually is. A better
choice would be Nina Turner as Sander's running mate, with Tulsi Gabbard as his Secretary of
State if he gets that far.
My guess is that this is why he's working behind the scenes, minimizing the chances of a
backfire on the left. Of course, how behind-the-scenes is it if it's reported by Politico?
Still.
I'm actually undecided on Warren. There was that story last week about her supposedly
pushing Hillary in 2016 to name decent people to her cabinet if elected. But then you have to
ask why that particular story surfaced at the particular time when Warren was sinking in the
polls.
If true, though, and if what the new Politico story says about her clashes with Obama are
true, maybe Warren isn't quite as objectionable as we tend to think. Then again, she came
right out last week (I believe) and said Medicare for All would be a matter of choice under
her plan, emphasizing that "choice" factor.
So I'm confused. But maybe that's what she, her campaign and various surrogates want at
this stage.
It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New Deal,
the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and
infrastructure by 2030.
having the pentagon 'lead the fight' against climate change is akin to appointing prince
andrew as head of the global task force against pedophilia and child trafficking.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like
Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's
finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and
Buttigieg.
Buttigieg takes no votes from Sanders. While Warren does on the margins. I think Obama's
calculation is simple as that. She also has special appeal to the virtue signaling liberals
that are Obama's base.
as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking
ship ..
Bingo. Trump's letter goes right to the heart of it. These clowns are completely exposed
and Obama hawking Warren to donors while the blob talks up a gay McKinsey/CIA Indiana Mayor
shows just how far they have fallen.
It's rare that I read something on the Washington Post that I don't find highly biased, even
repugnant. But with
their recent article on the Afghanistan Papers, they truly knocked the ball out of the
park.
The facts they shared should have every American protesting in the streets.
Trillions of dollars have been spent on a war that the Pentagon knew was unwinnable all
along. More than 2300 American soldiers died there and more than 20,000 have been injured. More
than 150,000 Afghanis were killed, many of them civilians, including women and children.
And they lied to us constantly.
Congress just proved that the truth doesn't matter, though. A mere 22 hours after the
release of this document, the new National Defense Authorization Act that breezed through the
House and Senate was signed by the President. That bill authorized
$738 billion in military spending for 2020 , actually increasing the budget by $22 billion
over previous years.
So, how is your representation in Washington, DC working out for you?
What are the
Afghanistan Papers?
The Afghanistan Papers are
a brilliant piece of investigative journalism published by the Washington Post and the
article is very much worth your time to read. I know, I know – WaPo. But believe me when
I tell you this is something all Americans need to see.
This was an article that took three years of legal battles to bring to light. WaPo acquired
the documents using the Freedom of Information Act and got more than 2000 pages of insider
interviews with "people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid
workers and Afghan officials." These documents were originally part of a federal investigation
into the "root failures" of the longest conflict in US history – more than 18 years
now.
Three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have been involved in this
ongoing war. It turns out that officials knew the entire time this war was "unwinnable" yet
they kept throwing American lives and American money at it.
Here's an excerpt from WaPo's report. Anything that is underlined is taken verbatim from the
papers themselves – you can click on them to read the documents.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went
wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of
warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints,
frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
The important thing to note about these interviews is that the interviewees never expected
their words to become public. They weren't "blowing the whistle." They were answering questions
for a federal investigation. So they didn't hold back. These aren't "soundbites." It's what the
real witnesses are saying.
The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has
spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International
Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an
inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and
co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the
Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded
veterans.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?" Jeffrey Eggers, a
retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers.
He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in
his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan." (
source )
The US government deliberately misled the American people.
What's more, if you officials, up to and including three presidents, knew they were throwing
money at something that could never be achieved. They did it anyway and they lied to our faces
about it.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents,
military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making
progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S.
government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military
headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear
the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
It's been an epic 18-year-long exercise in CYA. (Cover Your A$$). I don't see how anyone
could fail to be outraged by this. And what I've cited here is just the crap icing on the
maggot cupcake. It's a festering mess and I urge you, if you really want to know the truth, to
read this article on WaPo and click on these links.
How was all this money spent?
A lot of it went to building infrastructure in Afghanistan. It was flagrantly and
frivolously used there while we live in a place where people are going bankrupt at best and
dying at worst because they
can't afford medical care and there are places in our country without clean running
water or toilets.
The defense industry certainly reaped rewards and it's highly likely a lot of people who had
the power to allow it to go on made some "wise investments" that have paid off for them. But
for the rest of us, this conflict has done nothing except ensure that our tax dollars are not
here improving our infrastructure or helping Americans lead better and more productive
lives.
Dr. Ron Paul refers to this as the crime of the century.
It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of
this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan
activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International
Relations Committee, I do not recall a single "expert" witness called who told us the truth.
Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon
war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just
around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we'd be
celebrating the end of the war.
Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the
three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the
American people as "expert" witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think
tankers.
What is even more shocking than the release of this "smoking gun" evidence that the US
government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more
than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin
drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington
Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream
media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century. (
source )
And it's most likely that nobody will ever face punishment for this deception. If this is
not the very definition of the term "war crimes" I can hardly imagine what is. Dr. Paul
continues:
We've wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade – a
conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US
history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the "Afghanistan Papers" will ever be
brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to
trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear
justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice . (
source )
The response? Silence and a budget increase.
The people in government don't care that we know about all this. Sure, it's mildly
inconvenient but "whatever."
How do I know this?
Simple. Less than a full day after the story broke, the new NDAA ended up on President
Trump's desk and was signed, authorizing an additional 22 billion dollars for next year's
defense spending. And all anyone can talk about is, "Oooohhhh Space Force!!!"
Government: "Merry Christmas. We're going to blow through more of your tax money and you
won't get a damned thing for it."
I couldn't make this up if I tried. In a notable, must-read op-ed ,
Darius Shahtahmasebi cited some horrific incidents and concluded:
We can't let this recent publication obscure itself into nothingness. The recent reaction
from Congress is a giant middle finger designed to tell you that (a) there will never be
anything you can do about it and (b) they simply don't care how you feel. Democracy at its
finest from the world's leading propagator of democratic values. ( source )
When is enough going to be enough? Why are we not enraged en masse? Why haven't we recalled
these treasonous bastards and taken our country and our budget back?
For a country that is ready to take up arms and waste countless hours "impeaching" Trump
over something he said on a phone call, it sure says a lot about those same people ignoring 18
years of treasonous behavior by three separate administrations.
Why isn't the media raising hell over this? Why aren't these lives important? Why isn't
sending trillions of our dollars to be frittered away an outrage?
People love to say "America First" and "impeach Trump for treason" and all that jazz. They
love to call anti-war people "un-American" and recommend a quick, one-way trip to Somalia if we
don't "support our troops." However, I think is far more evidence of supporting our troops to
want out of there, not risking their lives based on a castle of lies that further enriches
powerful and wealthy people who have nothing to lose.
Most people love to be outraged about frivolous matters. But when a report like this and its
following insult are met with resounding silence, it's pretty obvious that hardly anybody is
really paying attention.
So, cut funding for prisons; cut necessary levels, to insure safety, prison guard
staffing; watch as prison violence escalates; then print a story where the Union leader,
trying to protect his remaining too small workforce from the rising violence, sounds like an
inhuman bad guy in the story. Neolibs gotta love that angle.
I'm seeing the same thing in my US state over the past several years. The politicians'
answer is not to increase staffing of unionized prison guards or spend more on safety for
state prisons, but to outsource prisoner housing to the private sector. Neolibs love that
angle.
It would be impossible for Trump to re-energize his base in any other way. Pelosi acts as
covert agent for Trump re-election? Peloci calculation that she can repar "Mueller effect" of
2018 with this impeachment proved to be gross miscalculation.
Warren who stupidly and enthusiastically jumped into this bandwagon will be hurt. She is such
a weak politician that now it looks like she does not belong to the club. Still in comparison
with Trump she might well be an improvement as she has Trump-like economic program, which Trump
betrayed and neutered. And her foreign policy can't be worse then Trump foreign policy. It is
just impossible.
I am convinced that the Dems are not actually interested or focused on defeating Trump, or
they would adopt an effective strategy. The question I keep wrestling with is, what is the point
to the strategy that is so ineffective?
Notable quotes:
"... The fact that the impeachment is dead in the water, by Pelosi's own admission , is evident in Trump's being adamant that indeed it must be sent to the Senate – where he knows he'll be exonerated. But even if it doesn't go to the Senate, what we're left with still appears as a loss for Democrats. Both places are his briar patch. This makes all of this a win-win for team Trump. ..."
"... fake impeachment procedure ..."
"... For in a constitutional republic like the United States, what makes an impeachment possible is when the representatives and the voters are in communion over the matter. This would normally be reflected in a mid-term election, like say for example the mid-term Senatorial race in 2018 where Democrats failed to take control. Control of the Senate would reflect a change of sentiment in the republic, which in turn and not coincidentally, would be what makes for a successful impeachment. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi is evidently extraordinarily cynical. Her politics appears to be 'they deserve whatever they believe'. ..."
"... little else can explain the reasoning behind her claim that she will 'send the impeachment to the Senate' as soon as she 'has assurances and knows how the Senate will conduct the impeachment', except that it came from the same person who told the public regarding Obamacare that we have to 'We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.". ..."
"... "We have been attacked. We are at war. Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy, angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge – taking advantage of the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-soviet Russia and becomes president. ..."
"... He establishes an authoritarian regime, then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy – the United States. And like the KGB spy that he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to attack democracies around the world. Using social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political processes, even their neighbors. And he wins." ..."
"... We'll say we impeached him, because we did, and we'll say he was impeached. We'll declare victory, and go home. This will make him unelectable because of the stigma of impeachment. ..."
And so it came to pass, that in the deep state's frenzy of
electoral desperation, the 'impeachment' card was played. The hammer has fallen. Nearly the
entirety of the legacy media news cycle has been dedicated to the details, and not really
pertinent details, but the sorts of details which presume the validity of the charges against
Trump in the first place. Yes, they all beg the question. What's forgotten here is that the use
of this process along clearly partisan lines, and more – towards clearly partisan aims
– is a very serious symptom of the larger undoing of any semblance of stability in the US
government.
The fact that the impeachment is dead in the water,
by Pelosi's own admission , is evident in Trump's being adamant that indeed it must be sent
to the Senate – where he knows he'll be exonerated. But even if it doesn't go to the
Senate, what we're left with still appears as a loss for Democrats. Both places are his briar
patch. This makes all of this a win-win for team Trump.
Only in a country that produces so much fake news at the official level, could there be a
fake impeachment procedure made purely for media consumption, with no real or tangible
possible victory in sight.
For in a constitutional republic like the United States, what makes an impeachment
possible is when the representatives and the voters are in communion over the matter. This
would normally be reflected in a mid-term election, like say for example the mid-term
Senatorial race in 2018 where Democrats failed to take control. Control of the Senate would
reflect a change of sentiment in the republic, which in turn and not coincidentally, would be
what makes for a successful impeachment.
Don't forget, this impeachment is fake
Nancy Pelosi is evidently extraordinarily cynical. Her politics appears to be 'they
deserve whatever they believe'. And her aim appears to be the one who makes them believe
things so that they deserve what she gives them. For little else can explain the reasoning
behind her claim that she will 'send the impeachment to the Senate' as soon as she 'has
assurances and knows how the Senate will conduct the impeachment', except that it came from the
same person who told the public regarding Obamacare that we have to 'We have to pass the bill
so that you can find out what is in it.".
In both cases, reality is turned on its head – for rather we will know how the Senate
intends to conduct its procedure as soon as it has the details, which substantively includes
the impeachment documents themselves, in front of them, and likewise, legislators ought to know
what's in a major piece of legislation before they vote either way on it. Pelosi's assault on
reason, however, isn't without an ever growing tide of resentment from within the progressive
base of the party itself.
We have quickly entered into a new era which increasingly resembles the broken political
processes which have struck many a country, but none in living memory a country like the US.
Now elected officials push judges to prosecute their political opponents, constitutional crises
are manufactured to pursue personal or political vendettas, death threats and rumors of coups
coming from media and celebrities being fed talking points by big and important players from
powerful institutions.
This 'impeachment' show really takes the cake, does it not? We will recall shortly after
Trump was elected, narrator for hire Morgan Freeman made a shocking public service
announcement. It was for all intents and purposes, a PSA notifying the public that a military
coup to remove Trump would be legitimate and in order. Speaking about this PSA, and recounting
what was said, would in any event read as an exaggeration, or some allegorical paraphrasing
made to prove a point. Jogging our memories then, Freeman spoke to tens of millions of viewers
on television and YouTube
saying :
"We have been attacked. We are at war. Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy,
angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge – taking advantage of
the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-soviet Russia and becomes
president.
He establishes an authoritarian regime, then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy
– the United States. And like the KGB spy that he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to
attack democracies around the world. Using social media to spread propaganda and false
information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their
political processes, even their neighbors. And he wins."
This really set the tone for the coming years, which have culminated in this manufactured
'impeachment' crisis, really befitting a banana republic.
It would be the height of dishonesty to approach this abuse of the impeachment procedure as
if until this moment, the US's own political culture and processes were in good shape. Now
isn't the time for the laundry list of eroded constitutional provisions, which go in a thousand
and one unique directions. The US political system is surely broken, but as is the case with
such large institutions several hundreds of years old, its meltdown appears to happen in slow
motion to us mere mortals. And so what we are seeing today is the next phase of this
break-down, and really ought to be understood as monumental in this sense. Once again revealed
is the poor judgment of the Democratic Party and their agents, tools, warlords, and
strategists, the same gang who sunk Hillary Clinton's campaign on the rocks of hubris.
Nancy Pelosi also has poor judgment, and these short-sighted and self-interested moves on
her part stand a strong chance of backfiring. Her role in this charade is duly noted. This
isn't said because of any disagreement over her aims, but rather that in purely objective terms
it just so happens that her aims and her actions are out of synch – that is unless she
wants to see Trump re-elected. Her aims are her aims, our intention is to connect these to
their probable results, without moral judgments.
The real problem for the Democrats, the DNC, and any hopes for the White House in 2020, is
that this all has the odor of a massive backfire, and something that Trump has been counting on
happening. When one's opponent knows what is probable, and when they have a track record for
preparing very well for such, it is only a question of what Trump's strategy is and
how this falls into it, not whether there is one.
Imagine being a fly on the wall of the meeting with Pelosi where it was decided to go
forward with impeachment in the House of Representatives, despite not having either sufficient
traction in the Senate or any way to control the process that the Senate uses.
It probably went like this: ' We'll say we impeached him, because we did, and we'll say
he was impeached. We'll declare victory, and go home. This will make him unelectable because of
the stigma of impeachment. '
Informed citizens are aware that whatever their views towards Trump, nothing he has done
reaches beyond the established precedent set by past presidents. Confused citizens on the other
hand, are believing the manufactured talking points thrown their way, and the idea that a US
president loosely reference a quid pro quo in trying to sort a corruption scandal in dealings
with the president of a foreign country, is some crazy, new, never-before-done and
highly-illegal thing. It is none of those things though.
Unfortunately, not needless to say, the entirety of the direct, physical evidence against
Trump solely consists of the now infamous transcript of the phone call which he had with
Ukrainian president Zelensky. The rest is hearsay, a conspiracy narrative, and entirely
circumstantial. As this author has noted in numerous pieces, Biden's entire candidacy rests
precisely upon his need to be a candidate so that any normal investigation into the wrongdoings
of himself or his son in Ukraine, suddenly become the targeted persecution of a political
opponent of Trump.
Other than this, it is evident that Biden stands little chance – the same polling
institutions which give him a double-digit lead were those which foretold a Clinton electoral
victory. Neither their methods nor those paying and publishing them, have substantively
changed. Biden's candidacy, like the impeachment, is essentially fake. The real contenders for
the party's base are Sanders and Gabbard.
The Democratic Party Activist Base Despises Pelosi as much as Clinton
The Democratic Party has two bases, one controlled by the DNC and the Clintons, and one
which consists of its energized rank-and-file activists who are clearer in their populism,
anti-establishment and ant-corporate agenda. Candidates like Gabbard and Sanders are closest to
them politically, though far from perfect fits. Their renegade status is confirmed by the
difficulties they have with visibility – they are the new silent majority of the party.
The DNC base, on the other hand, relies on Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, and the likes for their
default talking points, where they have free and pervasive access to legacy media. In the
context of increased censorship online, this is not insignificant.
Among the important reasons this 'impeachment' strategy will lose is that it will not
energize the second and larger base. Even though this more progressive and populist base is
also more motivated, they have faced – as has the so-called alt-light – an
extraordinarily high degree of censorship on social media. Despite all the censorship, the
Democrats' silent majority are rather well-informed people, highly motivated, and tend to be
vocal in their communities and places of work. Their ideas move organically and virally among
the populace.
This silent majority has a very good memory, and they know very well who Nancy Pelosi is,
and who she isn't.
The silent majority remembers that after years of the public backlash against Bush's war
crimes, crimes against humanity, destruction of remaining civil liberties with the Patriot Act,
torture, warrantless search – and the list goes on and on – Democrats managed to
retake the lower house in 2006. If there was a legitimate reason for an impeachment, it would
have been championed by Pelosi against Bush for going to war using false, falsified,
manufactured evidence about WMD in Iraq. At the time, Pelosi squashed the hopes of her own
electorate, reasoning that such moves would be divisive, that they would distract from the
Democrats' momentum to take the White House in '08, that Bush had recently (?) won his last
election, and so on. Of course these were real crimes, and the reasons not to prosecute may
have as much to do with Pelosi's own role in the war industry. Pelosi couldn't really push
against Bush over torture, etc. because she had been on an elite congressional committee
– the House Intelligence Committee – during the Bush years in office which starting in
2003 was dedicated to making sure that torture could and would become normalized and
entirely legal.
It seems Pelosi can't even go anywhere with this impeachment on Trump today, and therefore
doesn't even really plan to submit it to the Senate for the next stage .
The political stunt was pulled, a fireworks show consisting of one lonely rocket that sort of
fizzled off out of sight.
Trump emerges unscathed, and more to the point, we are closer to the election and his base
is even more energized. Pelosi spent the better part of three years inoculating the public
against any significance being attached to any impeachment procedure. Pelosi cried wolf so many
times, and Trump has made good on the opportunities handed to him to get his talking points in
order and to condition his base to receive and process the scandals in such and such way. This
wouldn't have been possible without Pelosi's help. Thanks in part to Pelosi and the DNC, Trump
appears primed for re-election.
Trump energizes his base, and the DNC suppresses and disappoints theirs. That's where the
election will be won or lost.
"... Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. ..."
"... The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case. When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion. ..."
"... But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration. ..."
"... Obama told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules, China will " ..."
"... Obama takes as a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack. ..."
Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as
limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. With that in mind,
I had a meeting with a delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians and government officials a couple of weeks ago. I tried to explain
to them why many Americans are wary of helping them by providing lethal, potentially game changing military assistance in what Kiev
sees as a struggle to regain control of Crimea and other parts of their country from militias that are clearly linked to Moscow.
I argued that while Washington should be sympathetic to Ukraine's aspirations it has no actual horse in the race, that the imperative
for bilateral relations with Russia, which is the only nation on earth that can attack and destroy the United States, is that they
be stable and that all channels for communication remain open.
I also observed that the negative perception of Washington-driven
democracy promotion around the world has been in part shaped by the actual record on interventions since 2001, which has not been
positive. Each exercise of the military option has wound up creating new problems, like the mistaken policies in Libya, Iraq and
Syria, all of which have produced instability and a surge in terrorism. I noted that the U.S. does not need to bring about a new
Cold War by trying to impose democratic norms in Eastern Europe but should instead be doing all in its power to encourage a reasonable
rapprochement between Moscow and Kiev. Providing weapons or other military support to Ukraine would only cause the situation to escalate,
leading to a new war by proxies in Eastern Europe that could rapidly spread to other regions.
The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced
the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case.
When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will
have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion.
I explained that Russia does not have the economic or military resources to dominate Eastern Europe and its ambitions appear to
be limited to establishing a sphere of influence that includes "protection" for some adjacent areas that are traditionally Russian
and inhabited by ethnic Russians. Crimea is, unfortunately, one such region that was actually directly governed by Moscow between
1783 and 1954 and it is also militarily vitally important to Moscow as it is the home of the Black Sea Fleet. I did not point that
out to excuse Russian behavior but only to suggest that Moscow does have an argument to make, particularly as the United States has
been meddling in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine where it has "invested" $5 billion, since the Clinton Administration.
I argued that if resurgent Russian nationalism actually endangered the United States there would be a case to be made for constricting
Moscow by creating an alliance of neighbors that would be able to help contain any expansion, but even the hawks in the U.S. Congress
are neither prepared nor able to demonstrate a genuine threat. Fear of the expansionistic Soviet Union after 1945 was indeed the
original motivation for creating NATO. But the reality is that Russia is only dangerous if the U.S. succeeds in backing it into a
corner where it will begin to consider the kind of disruption that was the norm during the Cold War or even some kind of nuclear
response or demonstration. If one is focused on U.S. interests globally Russia has actually been a responsible player, helping in
the Middle East and also against international terrorism.
So there was little to agree on apart from the fact that the Ukrainians have a right to have a government they choose for themselves
and also to defend themselves. And we Americans have in the Ukrainians yet another potential client state that wants our help. In
return we would have yet another dependency whose concerns have to be regarded when formulating our foreign policy. One can sympathize
with the plight of the Ukrainians but it is not up to Washington to fix the world or to go around promoting democracy as a potential
solution to pervasive regional political instability.
Obviously a discussion based on what are essentially conflicting interests will ultimately go nowhere and so it did in this case,
but it did raise the issue of why Washington's relationship with Moscow is so troubled, particularly as it need not be so. Regarding
Ukraine and associated issues, Washington's approach has been stick-and-carrot with the emphasis on the stick through the imposition
of painful sanctions and meaningless though demeaning travel bans. I would think that reversing that formulation to emphasize rewards
would actually work better as today's Russia is actually a relatively new nation in terms of its institutions and suffers from insecurity
about its place in the world and the respect that it believes it is entitled to receive.
Russia
recently celebrated the 70 th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. The celebration was boycotted by
the United States and by many Western European nations in protest over Russian interference in Ukraine. I don't know to what extent
Obama has any knowledge of recent history, but the Russians were the ones who were most instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany,
losing 27 million citizens in the process. It would have been respectful for President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry to
travel to Moscow for the commemoration and it would likely have produced a positive result both for Ukraine and also to mitigate
the concern that a new Cold War might be developing. But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was
a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons
who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration.
And I also would note a couple of other bad choices made during the past several weeks. The Trans-Pacific multilateral trade agreement
that is currently working its way through Congress and is being aggressively promoted by the White House might be great for business
though it may or may not be good for the American worker, which, based on previous agreements, is a reasonable concern. But what
really disturbs me is the Obama explanation of why the pact is important. Obama
told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules,
China will "
Fear of the Yellow Peril might indeed be legitimate but it would be difficult to make the case that an internally troubled China
is seeking to dominate the Pacific. If it attempts to do so, it would face strong resistance from the Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos
and Koreans among others. But what is bothersome to me and probably also to many in the Asian audience is that Obama takes as
a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby
designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack.
And finally there is Iran as an alleged state sponsor of terrorism. President Obama claims that he is working hard to achieve
a peaceful settlement of the alleged threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. But if that is so why does he throw obstacles irrelevant
to an agreement out to make the Iranian government more uncomfortable and therefore unwilling or unable to compromise? In an
interview with Arabic
newspaper Asharq al-Awsat Obama called Tehran a terrorism supporter, stating that "it [Iran] props up the Assad regime in
Syria. It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It aids the Houthi rebels in Yemen so countries in the region
are rights to be deeply concerned " I understand that the interview was designed to reassure America's friends in the Gulf that the
United States shares their concerns and will continue to support them but the timing would appear to be particularly unfortunate.
The handling of Russia, China and Iran all exemplify the essential dysfunction in American foreign policy. The United States should
have a mutually respectful relationship with Russia, ought to accept that China is an adversary but not necessarily an enemy unless
we make it so and it should also finally realize that an agreement with Iran is within its grasp as long as Washington does not overreach.
It is not clear that any of that is well understood and one has to wonder precisely what kind of advice Obama is receiving when fails
to understand the importance of Russia, insists on "writing the rules" for Asia, and persists in throwing around the terrorist label.
If the past fifteen years have taught us anything it is that the "Washington as the international arbiter model" is not working.
Obama should wake up to that reality before Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush arrives on the scene to make everything worse.
Tom Welsh, May 19, 2015 at 7:02 am GMT 100 Words
All of this misses the point, IMHO. There is really no need to explain that Russia has no plans to conquer Europe, China has
no plans to take over the Pacific, etc. Anyone with a little historical knowledge and some common sense can see that plainly.
What is happening is that the USA has overweening aspirations to control (and then suck dry) the entire world and Europe, Russia
and China are next on its hit list.
So it naturally accuses those nations of aspiring to what it plans to do. Standard operating procedure.
The Priss Factor, May 19, 2015 at 7:19 am GMT 100 Words
"The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now."
I can understand Ukrainian animus against Russia due to history and ethnic tensions.
But that is ridiculous. They can't possibly believe it. I think they're repeating Neocon talking points to persuade American
that the fate of the world is at stake.
It's really just a local affair.
And Crimea would still belong to Ukraine if the crazies in Ukraine hadn't conspired with Neocons like Nuland to subvert and
overthrow the regime.
"... Some, such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal. ..."
When Will the Afghan War Architects Be Held Accountable?
Even after the release of the Afghanistan Papers, our elites are still determined to escape
without blame. CERNOBBIO, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Chairman of the KKR Global Institute David
Howell Petraeus attends the Ambrosetti International Economic Forum 2019 "Lo scenario
dell'Economia e della Finanza" on September 6, 2019 in Cernobbio, Italy. (Photo by Pier Marco
Tacca/Getty Images)
Almost two weeks after the Washington Post 's Craig Whitlock published his six-part
series on the trials, tribulations, and blunders of Washington's 19-year-long social science
experiment in Afghanistan, those involved in the war effort are desperately pointing fingers as
to who is to blame. An alternative narrative has emerged among this crop of elite policymakers,
military officers, and advisers that while American policy in Afghanistan has been horrible,
the people responsible for it really did believe it would all work out in the end. Call it the
"we were stupid" defense.
There were no lies or myths propagated by senior U.S. officials, we are told, just honest
assessments that later proved to be wrong. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who
has advised U.S. commanders on Afghanistan war policy, wrote that "no, there has not been a
campaign of disinformation, intentional or subliminal." Former defense secretary Jim Mattis,
who led CENTCOM during part of the war effort, called the Post 's reporting "not really
news" and was mystified that the unpublished interviews from the U.S. special inspector general
were generating such shock. Others have faulted the Post for publishing the material to
begin with, claiming that public disclosure would scare future witnesses from cooperating and
threaten other fact-finding inquiries (the fact that the newspaper was legally permitted to
publish the transcripts after winning a court case against the government is apparently
irrelevant in the minds of those making this argument).
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
All of these claims and counter-claims should be seen for what they truly are: the flailings
of a policymaking class so arrogant and unaccountable that it can't see straight. That they're
blaming the outrage engendered by the Afghanistan Papers on anything other than themselves is
Exhibit A that our narcissistic policy elite is cocooned in their own reality.
Analysts have been pouring over the Afghanistan interview transcripts for over a week in
order to determine how the war went wrong. Some of the main lessons learned have long been
evident. The decision to impose a top-down democratic political order on a country that
operated on a system of patronage and tribal systems from the bottom-up was bound to be
problematic. Throwing tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction assistance into a nation
that had no experience managing that kind of money -- or spending it properly -- helped fuel
the very nationwide corruption Washington would come to regret. Paying off warlords to fight
the Taliban and keep order while pressuring those very same warlords into following the rules
was contradictory. The mistakes go on and on and on: as Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said,
"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
One of the most salient findings about this ghastly two-decade-long misadventure surfaced
after the Afghanistan Papers were released: the commentariat will stop at nothing to absolve
themselves of the slightest responsibility for the disaster they supported. The outright
refusal of the pundit class to own up to its errors is as disturbing as it is infuriating. And
even when they do acknowledge that errors were committed, they tend to minimize their own role
in those mistakes, explaining them away as unfortunate consequences of fixed withdrawal
deadlines, inter-agency tussling, Afghanistan's poor foundational state, or the inability of
the Afghans to capitalize on the opportunities Washington provided them. Some,
such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right
track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled
the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal.
It's always somebody else's fault.
Whether out of arrogance, ego, or fear of not being taken seriously in Washington's foreign
policy discussions, the architects of the war refuse to admit even the most obvious mistakes.
Instead they duck and weave like a quarterback escaping a full-on defensive rush, attempting
yet again to fool the American public.
But the public has nothing to apologize for. It is those who are making excuses who have
exercised disastrous judgment on Afghanistan. And they owe the country an apology.
Daniel R. DePetris is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a contributor
to The American Conservative.
In Canada the cost of living outpaces wages by a considerable margin, consumer debt is the
highest in the G7, permanent homeless camps are a fixture in major cities and popping up in
smaller ones, people, including families, living in their vehicles is becoming normalized, an
ongoing opioid epidemic is still killing hundreds of people a month, etc. etc.
But the media keeps telling me unemployment is at record lows and the economy is "red hot"
and "booming" so it's all good, nothing to worry about thank God because the free and
democratic media here in the west never lies or traffics in distorted facts and
disinformation. It only prints and broadcasts The Truth and I'm really happy about that, very
relieved that everything is just fine and wonderful and all the bad things and the bad people
and the bad economies are in China, Russia and scary places like that. It's great living in a
place that's so free and awesome and knows only joy and prosperity!
If Putin was smart and freedom loving he'd get some western economic experts, from Harvard
Business School say, to help get the Russian economy booming but he's paranoid and doesn't
trust the west for some reason.
The uneasiness I feel as I stumble over the sleeping homeless people on my way to the bus
stop in the morning is irrational and foolish and was planted in my mind by Russian troll
bots on Facebook. I understand this now. Everything is wonderful here, now and always. With
Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland at the helm and a first class media dedicated to Truth
why would anyone worry or be mistrustful of our great Leaders and our Democratic
Institutions? We are the envy of the world and that makes Putin's Russia jealous and
meddlesome. I understand this now and channel all my news through an Atlantic Council Fake
News Filter plugin so all the Putinist mind warping stuff on Facebook can't affect me
anymore.
Sorry that was a long post, lol. Anyways my friend I hope you are well even though I am
sad that you still have a false paranoia about Our Western Media spreading Fake News. It's
Putin bro, not "us"! I understand this now broke lurker cover to share my insight with you so
that you too can learn to speak only Teh Truth. The Russian economy is spluttering badly and
here in Canada everything is wonderful! In Germany too! They hate our freedom and therefore
it's always bad there. The Democratic West will save the Putinist economy when Putin learns
to love and trust the West like I do (and hopefully you)! Peace out bro and much love, eh,
haha.
On September 27, 2018, Yale's Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and
the Poynter Fellowship for Journalism hosted Vladimir Pozner, the acclaimed Russian-American
journalist and broadcaster. Pozner spoke on the impact of US foreign policy towards Russia
after the Soviet Union has been disbanded, and shared his opinions on a range of issues raised
by the audience, from the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections,
to Skripal poisoning, to the state of independent media in Russia and the US.
Where is AOC in all this? She was the prime mover on impeachment, specifically impeachment
over a phone call rather than concentration camps and genocide.
And now with impeachment she gave Pelosi cover to sell the country out again.
I was wondering why many libreral centrists were expreasing admiration for her, a
socialist. Maybe they recognized something?
"Prime mover"? What planet are you from? They were Schiff, Nadler, and Pelosi. Did you
miss that Russiagate was in motion while AOC was still tending bar? AOC isn't even on any of
the key committees (Judiciary and Intel).
I shouldn't have said THE prime mover, but ONE OF the prime movers in the House in
actually pushing it over the line against Pelosi's opposition. It seems like the House Dem
consensus ever since Russiagate was just to tease their base with it and milk the suspense
for all it was worth, until AOC, among others, rallied the base.
There were other reps who pushed for impeachment, but AOC has one of the biggest platforms
and crucially, expanded popular support for impeachment outside the MSNBC crowd. So yes, a
key figure in the political/PR effort to move from conspiracy theories to actual
impeachment.
"AOC is one of the highest-profile members of Congress and she blasted Pelosi for
resisting impeachment since May."
Liz Warren is the one who made it a part of her campaign before anyone else. Rashida
Tlaib was the one who made t-shirt with her "impeach the mf'er" quote on it. A lot of them
were "blasting" Pelosi for dithering. AOC also "blasted" her for giving ICE more money and a
lot of their things .
Your central focus on AOC for the impeachment fiasco while ignoring her active role in
spotlighting so many other issues of importance which no one else speaks about is
interesting. Did you catch any of her speaking at the Sanders rally in LA today? Any other
"high profile" Dems pushing such important issues and campaigns?
Thanks for this comment. I don't trust *any of them* except Sanders, but AOC has been
making more good noises than bad, and to claim that it was she who's been driving Pelosi to
impeachment is quite a stretch. Poor, helpless/hapless Rep. Pelosi sure.
Pelosi has repeatedly stared down the progressives in the House. The overwhelming majority
of the freshmen reps are what used to be called Blue Dogs, as in corporate Dems. AOC making
noise on this issue would not move Pelosi any more than it has on other issues.
IMHO Pelosi didn't try to tamp down Russiagate, and that created expectations that
Something Big would happen. Plus she lives in the California/blue cities bubble.
What Dem donors think matters to her way more than what AOC tweets about. If anything,
Pelosi (secondarily, I sincerely doubt this would be a big issue in her calculus) would view
impeachment as a way to reduce the attention recently given to progressive issues like single
payer and student debt forgiveness.
"... My paranoid fear is that Pelosi or McConnell might try to time the proceedings so as to take Bernie and Warren off the campaign trail at a crucial moment, helping Biden. ..."
"... Amfortas the hippie , December 21, 2019 at 5:40 pm ..."
"... that, and sucking the air out of the room for the primaries. When's super tuesday, again? surely they can engineer it so that their "high drama" coincides. ..."
"... "let's talk about universal material benefits" " ok, Vlad trying to distract us from whats really important " ..."
"... Hepativore , December 21, 2019 at 6:49 pm ..."
"... Happy winter Solstice, everyone! ..."
"... Anyway, the funny thing is, that Biden himself has said that he only wants to be a one-term president. It makes me wonder if he knows that he has neither the energy or presence of mind to hold the office, and that he is merely doing so because of establishment pressure to stop Sanders at all costs. ..."
Please bone up on US procedure. It's not good to have you confuse readers.
The Senate can't do anything until the House passes a motion referring the impeachment to
the Senate. The House ALSO needs to designate managers as part of that process.
Michael
Tracey argued that it's only Senate rules that require that the House formally transmit
the impeachment verdict. The Constitution says that the Senate has to try an impeached
president, and the Constitution trumps the Senate's rules. Logically, then, the Senate could
just modify its rules to try the president.
But the whole delay is weird and impeachment has only been done twice before, so not a lot
of precedent.
My paranoid fear is that Pelosi or McConnell might try to time the proceedings so as
to take Bernie and Warren off the campaign trail at a crucial moment, helping Biden.
that, and sucking the air out of the room for the primaries. When's super tuesday,
again? surely they can engineer it so that their "high drama" coincides.
"let's talk about universal material benefits" " ok, Vlad trying to distract us from
whats really important "
Anyway, the funny thing is, that Biden himself has said that he only wants to be a
one-term president. It makes me wonder if he knows that he has neither the energy or presence
of mind to hold the office, and that he is merely doing so because of establishment pressure
to stop Sanders at all costs. Plus, if the Democrats get the brokered convention they
are after, he can bow out, satisfied that he helped the DNC protect the donor class from the
Sanders threat.
"... The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington? ..."
"... A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. ..."
"... If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01. ..."
"... The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." ..."
"... "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." ..."
"... senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds ..."
"... One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry. ..."
The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of
the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior
bureaucrats who have long believed that their status makes them untouchable, giving them license to steal and even to kill. The sad
fact is that while whistleblowers have been imprisoned for revealing government criminality, no one in the federal bureaucracy has
ever actually been punished for the crimes of torture, kidnapping and assassination committed during the George W. Bush and Barack
H. Obama presidencies.
Why is accountability important? After the Second World War, the victorious allies believed it was important to establish responsibility
for the crimes that had been committed by officials of the Axis powers. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation
of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed
at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia, including several guilty of waterboarding. Those
who were not executed for being complicit in the actual launching of war were tried for torture of both military personnel and civilians
and crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians as well as of soldiers who had surrendered or been captured.
No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2015, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression,
precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after
1946. High level US government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States but they nevertheless described
an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones flying
across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. The precedent of Iraq,
even though it was an abject failure, has led to further military action against Libya and Syria to bring about "regime change" as
well as a continuing conflict in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US has been waging a largely secret "long war" against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. The
American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being
spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and
what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the
Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington?
Many Americans would now consider the leading figures in the Bush Administration aided and abetted by many enablers in congress
from both political parties to be unindicted war criminals. Together they ignited a global conflict that is still running strong
fourteen years later with a tally of more than 7,000 dead Americans and a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans,
Libyans, Somalis and Syrians.
War breeds more war, due largely to the fact that guilty parties in Washington who piggyback on the prevailing narrative move
onward and upward, rewarded in this life even if not necessarily so in the hereafter. A friend of mine recently commented that
honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television
contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. Though not 100% accurate as I know at least a couple of honorable
former senior officials who wound up teaching, it would seem to be a generalization that has considerable validity. The implication
is that many senior government officials ascend to their positions based on being accommodating and "political" rather than being
honest and they continue to do the same when they switch over to corporate America or the equally corrupted world of academia.
I thought of my friend's comment when I turned on the television a week ago to be confronted by the serious, somewhat intense
gaze of Michael Morell,
warning about the danger that ISIS will strike the US over the Fourth of July weekend. Morell, a former senior CIA official,
is in the terror business. He had no evidence whatsoever that terrorists were planning an attack and should have realized that maneuvering
the United States into constantly going on alert based on empty threats is precisely what militant groups tend to do.
When not fronting as a handsomely paid national security consultant for the CBS television network Morell is employed by Beacon
Global Strategies as a Senior Counselor, presumably warning well-heeled clients to watch out for terrorists. His lifestyle and substantial
emoluments depend on people being afraid of terrorism so they will turn to an expert like him and ask serious questions that he will
answer in a serious way suggesting that Islamic militants could potentially bring about some kind of global apocalypse.
Morell, a torture apologist, also has a book out that he wants to sell, positing somewhat ridiculously that he and his former
employer had been fighting The Great War of Our Time against Islamic terrorists, something comparable to the World Wars of the past
century, hence the title. Morell needs to take some valium and relax. He would also benefit from a little introspection regarding
the bad guys versus good guys narrative that he is peddling. His credentials as a warrior are somewhat suspect in any event as he
never did any military service and his combat in the world of intelligence consisted largely of sitting behind a desk in Washington
and providing briefings to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which he presumably told them what they wanted to hear.
Morell is one of a host of pundits who are successful in selling the military-industrial-lobbyist-congressional-intelligence community
line of BS on the war on terror. Throw in the neocons as the in-your-face agents provocateurs who provide instant intellectual and
media credibility for developments and you have large groups of engaged individuals with good access who are on the receiving end
of the seemingly unending cash pipeline that began with 9/11. Frances Townsend, who was the Bush Homeland Security adviser and who
is now a consultant with CNN, is another such creature as is Michael Chertoff, formerly Director of the Department of Homeland Security,
who has successfully marketed his
defective airport
scanners to his former employer.
But the guys and gals who are out feathering their own nests are at least comprehensible given our predatory capitalist system
of government. More to the point, the gang that ordered or carried out torture and assassination are the ones who should be doing
some hard time in the slammer but instead they too are riding the gravy train and cashing in. To name only a few of those who knew
about the torture and ordered it carried out I would cite George Tenet, James Pavitt, Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez from the intelligence
community. The assassination program meanwhile is accredited to John Brennan, currently CIA Director, during his tenure as Obama's
Deputy National Security Advisor. And then there are Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with John Yoo at Justice
and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice at the White House, all of whom outright lied, dissimulated and conspired their way
to bring about a war of aggression against Iraq.
There are plenty of nameless others who were "only carrying out orders" and who should be included in any reckoning of America's
crimes over the past fifteen years, particularly if one also considers the illegal NSA spying program headed by Michael Hayden, who
defended the practice and has also
referred to those who oppose enhanced interrogation torture as "interrogation deniers." And then there are Presidents Bush and
Obama who certainly knew what was going on in the name of the American people as well as John Brennan, who was involved in both the
torture and renditions programs as well as the more recent assassinations by drone.
So where are they now? Living in obscurity ashamed of what they did? Hardly. Not only have they not been vilified or marginalized,
they have, in most cases, been rewarded. George W. Bush lives in Dallas near his Presidential Library and eponymous Think (sic) Tank.
Cheney lives in semi-retirement in McLean Virginia with a multi-million dollar waterfront weekend retreat in St. Michaels Maryland,
not too far from Donald Rumsfeld's similar digs.
George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his "slam-dunk" comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the Iraq war possible
to curry favor with the White House, has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ,
and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been
described
as a "self-justifying apologia," in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the US invaded
Iraq for no good reason.
James Pavitt, who was the point man responsible for the "enhanced interrogation" program as Tenet's Deputy Director for Operations,
is currently a principal with The Scowcroft Group and also serves on several boards. Cofer Black, who headed the Counter-Terrorism
Center, which actually carried out renditions and "enhanced interrogations," was vice chairman of Blackwater Worldwide (now called
Xe) and chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-off. He is now vice president of Blackbird Technologies, a defense
and intelligence contractor. Rodriguez, who succeeded Black and in 2005 illegally destroyed video tapes made of Agency interrogations
to avoid possible repercussions, is a senior vice president with Edge Consulting, a defense contractor currently owned by IBM that
is located in Virginia.
John Yoo is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley while Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of mushroom clouds and
is widely regarded as the worst National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history, has returned to Stanford University.
She is a professor at the Graduate School
of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She
is occasionally spoken of as either a possible GOP presidential candidate or as a future Commissioner of the National Football League.
Her interaction with students is limited, but when challenged on her record she has responded that it was a difficult situation post
9/11, something that everyone understands, though few would have come to her conclusion that attacking Iraq might be a good way to
destroy al-Qaeda.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the "intellectual" driving force behind the invasion
of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and advises Jeb Bush on foreign policy. A bid to
reward Wolfie for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free
failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair. His chief
deputy at the Pentagon Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service
at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts
about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith's acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the
neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did
not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01 plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go
by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01.
The over-rewarding of former officials who have in reality done great harm to the United States and its interests might well seem
inexplicable, but it is all part of a style of bureaucracy that cannot admit failure and truly believes that all its actions are
ipso facto legitimate because the executive and its minions can do no wrong. It is also a symptom of the classic American character
flaw that all things are of necessity measured by money. Does anyone remember the ancient Roman symbol of republican virtue Lucius
Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm after being named Dictator in order to defeat Rome's enemies? He then handed power back
to the Senate before returning to his plowing after the job was done. The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act,
writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great
honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." George Washington was America's Cincinnatus and it is
not a coincidence that officers of the continental army founded the Cincinnati Society, the nation's oldest patriotic organization,
in 1783. It is also reported that Edward Snowden used the alias "Cincinnatus."
Lord Acton once observed that "Power tends
to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." More recently essayist Edward Abbey
put it in an American context, noting
"Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." That senior government officials and politicians
routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds is a
fault that is perhaps not unique to the United States but it is nevertheless unacceptable. Handing out a couple of exemplary prison
sentences for the caste that believes itself untouchable would be a good place to start. An opportunity was missed with David Petraeus,
who was fined and avoided jail time, and it will be interesting to see how the Dennis Hastert case develops. Hastert will no doubt
be slapped on the wrist for the crime of moving around his own money while the corruption that was the source of that money, both
as a legislator and lobbyist, will be ignored. As will his molestation of at least one and possibly several young boys. One thing
for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry.
"... oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all. ..."
Long ago (1968) after returning from Vietnam with a bullet hole in my leg (my 90 wonder, post-ROTC officer shot me when he
panicked) I wondered off to a down-at-the-heel cow college. There I took a class and C Wright Mills 'The Power Elite' was required
reading.
I had just finished 'War is a fraud' and read an article by Paul Ehrlich an then 'The Population Bomb' shortly thereafter.
The three books created an interesting fusion in my mind:
More or less after the year 2000 the world would be plagued by resource wars;
The primary role of the military is to enforce what capitalists want; and
Behind the alleged scenes of our form of government hovered oligarchs who would demand more and more.
I recently found a paper I had written long ago. It wasn't very well written, but even then the handwriting was on the wall:
oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton
began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the
hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all.
I guess the point of all of this is (except for the details) Ehrlich, Mills and Butler warned us. As did Huxley and Orwell
... we were just too damned dumb (or distracted) to see it.
Maybe with the Queen of Chaos, the above will result in either annihilation or in a severe reduction in the numbers of people
... (hopefully including all of the oligarchic class) and the chance to start over?
Nah ... we'll just fuck it up again ... as a species we refuse to learn. Sigh ...
Mark Galli, its current editor (who is leaving the publication in two weeks)
takes on Trump directly -- a courageous move on his part, as his magazine has largely been
apolitical. "The facts in this instance are unambiguous: the president of the United States
attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of
the president's political opponents," Galli writes. He draws the obvious conclusion for
Christians: "That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is
profoundly immoral." Galli goes further, digging into the behavior of the man in the Oval
Office, noting that Trump "has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration." He gets
specific: "He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals." As if
that wasn't enough, Galli adds, "He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his
relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone -- with its
habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders -- is a near perfect example of a
human being who is morally lost and confused." Galli's warning to Christians is clear. "To the
many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we
might say this: remember who you are and whom you serve," Galli writes. "Consider how your
justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an
unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump's immoral words and behavior
in the cause of political expediency. If we don't reverse course now, will anyone take anything
we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?" Galli also
acknowledged Friday in an interview on CNN's "New Day" that his stand is unlikely to shake
loose Trump's strong hold on this voter segment, a crucial portion of his political base.
Galli's move is even more admirable when you consider that he published his editorial even
knowing that, as he said in his interview, he's not optimistic that his editorial will alter
Trump's support among white evangelicals. It's not a stretch to say that white evangelicals put
Trump into office in 2016. About
80% of them voted for him. They did so because of the abortion issue, mostly. They wanted
pro-life judges throughout the justice system. But this was a devil's bargain, at best.
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us"
src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg">Faith
could bring us together. But too often it divides us Younger evangelicals, those under 45,
have been slowly but steadily
moving away from Trump during the past two years or so, unhappy about his example. A key
topic that has driven them away is immigration. Loving your neighbor as yourself has always
been a bedrock Christian value. And Trump's stance on immigrants (especially those of color)
has upset the younger generation of evangelicals, with two-thirds of them saying in surveys
that immigrants strengthen our country, bringing their work ethic and talents with them from
Mexico or Central America or Syria. Climate change is another issue that has caught the
imagination of younger evangelicals. "I can't love my neighbor if I'm not protecting the earth
that sustains them and defending their rights to clean water, clean air, and a stable climate,"
Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, told
Grist . Needless to say, Trump's contempt on this subject grates badly on these young
Christians. Perhaps naively, Americans have always looked to the presidency for exemplary moral
behavior, and when there are obvious personal or moral failures, as with Nixon and Clinton,
there is disappointment, even anger. But if you're a Christian -- and I lay claim to this for
myself -- you understand that it's human to fail at perfect behavior. There is always
forgiveness. And, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Humility is endless."
Humility lies at the heart of
Christian behavior. As does honesty. In these, Trump has set a terrible example, and he's now
been taken down for this by an important Christian voice. If only another 10 percent of
evangelicals take this seriously, and I suspect they will, Donald J. Trump's presidency is
destined for the ash heap of history.
Delaying the Senate trial erodes the Democrats' argument that impeachment was so urgent that
they could not wait for the courts to act on Trump's aggressive claims of privilege.
Seven Democratic presidential candidates who gathered on a debate stage in Los Angeles on
Thursday represent another argument for moving beyond impeachment.
... ... ...
Washington is fixated on the daily turns of the impeachment saga, but polls indicate that
most Americans are not. Business executive Andrew Yang pointed out that, even when the current
president is gone, the struggles of many people will remain, particularly in parts of the
country that helped elect Trump in 2016.
"We blasted away 4 million manufacturing jobs that were primarily based in Ohio, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri. I just left Iowa -- we blasted 40,000 manufacturing jobs
there," Yang said. "The more we act like Donald Trump is the cause of all our problems, the
more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what's going on in our communities and solve
those problems."
That is what voters are waiting to hear, and the sooner the better for Democrats.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
How dare anyone question official findings, details, and situations. Official means
official and that is official. Furthermore, no representatives should be challenged on their
representativiality or leadershipiality. When it is stated and found that various unnamed
letter organizations are working diligently on behalf of the people, that is fact and the
summation of de factos and prima facia that exists, period FULL STOP. Thank you and have a
great day!
It seems particular representatives of government and specific corporate interests are
responsible for the wars, while the intelligence agencies are involved with the terrorist
activities and the drugs/gun trade. I do not understand how souls can be so evil with
intentionally murdering and harming innocent civilians for political agendas, control, and
profits.
Most of the people are moral and wish for a peaceful, happy life with their family and
friends, so we need a society where virtue conquers the demons.
Get to the point. And "Secret Armies" to fight a Soviet invasion?...as opposed to all the
Non Secret Armies all over Europe and the US to fight a Soviet invasion?
Operation Gladio first came to light in Italy in 1990, after over 40 years of
clandestine operations. Members of the project revealed that similar projects existed in
most if not all countries of Western Europe. These stay-behind networks were... involved in
anti-communist activities including anti-democratic agitation and false flag terrorism. [It
was called "stay behind" because their alibi was they were preparing to wage a guerrilla
war in case of Communist invasion.]
In his 2004 book NATO's Secret Armies, arguably the most shocking book ever to be
ignored by the corporate media, Daniele Ganzer [documented] terrorism directed against the
people by secret armies funded and organized by NATO and answerable to deep state elements
within NATO, MI6 and the CIA rather than the respective governments.... And yet the claims
have been substantiated by juridical inquiries in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium and have
been debated (and condemned) in the European Parliament.
The scandal originally came to light in Italy in 1984 when an Italian judge Felice
Casson reopened the case of a terrorist car bomb in Peteano in 1972 and uncovered a series
of anomalies in the original investigation. The atrocity which had originally been blamed
on the communist Red Brigades turned out to be, in fact, the work of a right wing
organization called Ordine Nuovo . Following the discovery of an arms cache near
Trieste in 1972 containing C4 explosives identical to that used in the Peteano attack,
Casson's investigation revealed that the bombing in Peteano was the work of the military
secret service SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) in conjunction with Ordine Nuovo. The
intention had been to blame the bombing on the extreme left wing militant outfit, the Red
Brigades. The right wing terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra was arrested and charged and
confessed to planting the bomb.
Judge Casson's investigation also revealed that the Peteano bombing was the continuation
of a series of bombings begun at Christmas 1969, the most well-known of which, on the
Piazza Fontane in Milan, killed 16 and injured 80. The bombing campaign culminated on 2
August 1980 with a massive bomb in the waiting room of Bologna railway station which killed
85 and injured 200. It was one of the largest terrorist outrages on mainland Europe in
modern times.
During his trial, Vincenzo Vinciguerra revealed that, in addition to discrediting left
wing political groups, there had been a second, even darker aim behind the bombings, namely
to inculcate a climate of fear among the general populace. This was known as the 'strategy
of tension' which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage
the population to appeal to the state for protection.
Vincenzo Vinciguerra claimed during his trial: 'You had to attack civilians, the people,
women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The
reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public to
turn to the State to ask for greater security.'
You create fear with lies. And the state then suppresses dissent. The state media define
Communists as the enemy. Anything is justified to crush them. Communism and terrorists and
Islamic fundamentalists and today 'immigrants.'
One of these is not like the others. "Immigrants" (illegal) in their millions are a real
problem in the US and a worse one in Europe.
Create fear with lies? He forgot to mention "Climate Change" and the much hyped Turdburn
phenomenon.
"Gladio" Hoax ? Just like Op Mockingbird, Franklin child prostitution ring? Wake Up!
Operation Gladio is "a secret anti-Communist organization formed during the cold war
years," as
quoted in the New York Times . Kept secret for 45 years, operatives of
government-sponsored Operation Gladio in various European countries staged false flag events
which were blamed not just on Communists, but on leftists and other progressive organizations
to damage their credibility.
Also in case you think false flags are imaginary... "False flag terrorism" occurs when
elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be
a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely
blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy.
Hey fukkup! "Franklin" was real... and yeah... the Repulsivan administrations of 42 and 43
REALLY were ... in the bizness of paying their jobbers to kidnap and program innocent kids
for their bent sexual pleasures. How you wanna work that into the "Gladio" thing asshat?
Maybe a lil 'Pope a dope' with the choirboys?
I got all the time in the world for punters who wish to challenge my premise on grounds of
factual and reasoned argument.
I got no time at all for your ******** straw man attempts to work around your own absence
of an argument by going "Franklin"
"Also in case you" don't know... your clown team don't allow quotes from anti-agent Orange
rags like the "NYT." Capiche?
Back up your butt and start churning the butt butter a lil better this time button
bouy!
Get a grip Guiseppe! Talmudists hate n despise all their lil enablers. Pooties no
different from Frimpf in that regard. Their puppet princes are the first ones under the
bus... when their usefulness expires.
Gladio has morphed over the years and presently active with all the FF mass shooting
"DRILLS" (sic).......
See the news about Va. for the pending ending results of how it got there.
Another test run for the election rigging from Sore-azz and company.
BOLO for MSM projecting upon the GOP and then the more free **** and 'evil guns' meme to pick
up.
So far it's all about Blooming-idiot and Tom Steyer hawking their snake oil in
Texas......gonna be a loooooog friggn year listening to these scum shovel bovine
excrement.....60 seconds at a time....like digital water boarding for the farm
animals....
Disinformers try to explain away the nefarious acts of a rogue CIA as "conspiracy" a term
coined by William Casey, CIA Director as a disinformation tool... These same disinformers
deny the Craigslist cattle call for crisis actors as well as call "coincidence" for FEMA or
Homeland Security drills the day before. They also deny postmortems conducted on video
footage of the attack to PROVE the fallasies of the event. These disinformers will go to
their grave asserting Building 7 collapsed due to the heat of an imaginary fire.
Meanwhile, at this same time the Russians had very nearly raped every human vagina in
Berlin when they rolled into town. They brutally put down revolts in Poland, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia each with its own special brand of tortures and purges for decades after.
Mao was literally starving 40 million of its own people. Then he decided to wipe
China clean of any cultural "residue" at all. Who knows how many people got killed in that
storm.
Pol Pot thought he should finally create a true communist state and killed 2 million
out of 5 million of his own people trying to establish it.
As a monument to utter stupidity, Gaither Stewart ignores these facts and shits the bed
about Operation Gladio. And to kick it off, he face-plants about the need for Aristotelian
moderation!
I know, I know, don't let facts get in the way. Junk away, ignorant and angry
tapeworms.
It was an ugly era....let's not forget Eisenhower starving millions of innocent Germans,
in POW camps, and exposure to the elements to their slow agonizing deaths.
Patton defied the order and fed them.
Clearly a human trait the OSS scum and cabal did not like. So Patton was off'd.
The Russian soldiers who perped those rapes/murders were not Christian white Russians.
They were the Far East peoples (Chechnyans, Uzbeks, Mongols, et al) who were conscripts and
turned loose to perpetrate that mayhem against the German people and at the behest of Soviet
jews who wanted vengeance against Germany.
Mussolini defeated the mafia.
The communist partisans defeated Mussolini.
The CIA re-imported the mafia to defeat the communists
And armed the remaining fascists for Operation Gladio.
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
"... Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false) meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress should declare war. And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941. ..."
I just read your article in TD. In my opinion you buried the reason for never ending wars.
You mention exceptionalism. I call that concept preeminence. With it is one of the few ways
we try to fill the void, or as you said in fewer words, try to give meaning to life. There
can be no doubt our lives are becoming increasingly meaningless so we double down and double
down again with what we know despite the self-destruction. https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2015/6/25/life-a-reaction-to-the-void
Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false)
meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress
should declare war.
And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941.
Doug Barr–It appears to me you are trying to blur some lines, or perhaps you are
confused about, what one might call general human psychology and the official policies of a
specific government, that of the USA. [As a student of Anthropology, I point out that though
our primate ancestors are prone to outbursts of violence, there is no evidence that making
war, especially in the contemporary phase of human society, fulfills an innate "need."] Yes,
the US seeks to be "pre-eminent"–or to be blunter, DOMINANT–over the rest of the
globe. Where "exceptionalism"–which I have designated the American Disease–enters
the picture is the attempt to justify military aggression by suggesting (some are less subtle
and openly assert) that the US somehow has been granted a "right" to do this by "a higher
power." (Apparently God Himself revealed to George W. Bush that he was born to be "a war
president" and the genius Rick Perry asserted recently that Donald Trump was put in the
presidency by direct Divine action.) A "right" to send assassin drones anywhere, anytime, to
target anyone who's been designated a Bad Guy. This is absurd, if not insane, on the face of
it. (In olden times, Rudyard Kipling called it "the white man's burden" to bring civilization
to less "enlightened" peoples.) If there was an international court that had some teeth, the
US would be vigorously swatted down, ordered to cease and desist. But one of the greatest
tragedies of our time is that there is no power on Earth that could stand up to this Monster
(as John Kay and his band Steppenwolf rightly identified the US 50 years ago) even if it
could find the backbone to make the attempt.
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
"... One key, yet often overlooked, player behind the push to prevent a full U.S. troop withdrawal in Syria in order to "keep the oil" was current U.S. ambassador to Turkey, David Satterfield ..."
"... Over the course of his long diplomatic career, Satterfield has been known to the U.S. government as an Israeli intelligence asset embedded in the U.S. State Department. Indeed, Satterfield was named as a major player in what is now known as the AIPAC espionage scandal, also known as the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal, although he was oddly never charged for his role after the intervention of his superiors at the State Department in the George W. Bush administration. ..."
"... WINEP's close association with AIPAC, which has spied on the U.S. on behalf of Israel several times in the past with no consequence, combined with Jeffrey's long-time acquaintance with key U.S. figures in Iraq, such as McGurk, provided an ideal opening for Israel in Iraq. Following the implementation of Jeffrey's plan, Israeli imports of KRG oil constituted 77 percent of Israel's total oil imports during the KRG's occupation of Kirkuk. ..."
"... the role played by the U.S. Israel lobby in this capacity, particularly in terms of orchestrating oil sale agreements for Israel's benefit, is hardly exclusive to Iraq and can accurately be described as a repeated pattern of behavior. ..."
The outsized role of U.S. Israel lobby operatives in abetting the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil reveals how this
powerful lobby also facilitates more covert aspects of U.S.-Israeli cooperation and the implementation of policies that
favor Israel.
Kirkuk, Iraq
--
"We want to bring our soldiers home. But we did leave soldiers
because we're keeping the oil," President Trump stated on November 3, before adding, "I like oil. We're keeping the
oil."
Though he had promised a withdrawal of U.S. troops from their illegal occupation of Syria, Trump shocked many with
his blunt admission that troops were being left behind to prevent Syrian oil resources from being developed by the
Syrian government and, instead, kept in the hands of whomever the U.S. deemed fit to control them, in this case, the
U.S.-backed Kurdish-majority militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Though Trump himself received all of the credit -- and the scorn -- for this controversial new policy, what has been
left out of the media coverage is the fact that key players in the U.S.' pro-Israel lobby played a major role in its
creation with the purpose of selling Syrian oil to the state of Israel. While recent developments in the Syrian conflict
may have hindered such a plan from becoming reality, it nonetheless offers a telling example of the covert role often
played by the U.S.' pro-Israel lobby in shaping key elements of U.S. foreign policy and closed-door deals with major
regional implications.
Indeed, the Israel lobby-led effort to have the U.S. facilitate the sale of Syrian oil to Israel is not an isolated
incident given that, just a few years ago, other individuals connected to the same pro-Israel lobby groups and Zionist
neoconservatives manipulated both U.S. policy and Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in order to allow Iraqi oil
to be sold to Israel without the approval of the Iraqi government. These designs, not unlike those that continue to
unfold in Syria, were in service to longstanding neoconservative and Zionist efforts to balkanize Iraq by strengthening
the KRG and weakening Baghdad.
After the occupation of Iraq's Nineveh Governorate by ISIS (June 2014-October 2015), the Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG) took advantage of the Iraqi military's retreat and, amidst the chaos, illegally seized Kirkuk on June
12. Their claim to the city was supported by both the U.S. and Israel and, later, the U.S.-led coalition targeting ISIS.
This gave the KRG control, not only of Iraq's export pipeline to Turkey's Ceyhan port, but also to Iraq's largest oil
fields.
Israel imported massive amounts of oil from the Kurds during this period, all without the consent of Baghdad. Israel
was also the
largest customer of oil
sold by ISIS, who used Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk to sell oil in areas of Iraq and Syria
under its control. To do this in ISIS-controlled territories of Iraq, the oil was sent first to the Kurdish city of
Zakho near the Turkey border and then into Turkey, deceptively labeled as oil that originated from Iraqi Kurdistan. ISIS
did nothing to impede the KRG's own oil exports even though they easily could have given that the Kirkuk-Ceyhan export
pipeline passed through areas that ISIS had occupied for years.
In retrospect, and following
revelations from Wikileaks
and new information regarding the background of relevant actors, it has been revealed
that much of the covert maneuvering behind the scenes that enabled this scenario intimately involved the United States'
powerful pro-Israel lobby. Now, with a similar scenario unfolding in Syria, efforts by the U.S.' Israel lobby to
manipulate U.S. foreign policy in order to shift the flow of hydrocarbons for Israel's benefit can instead be seen as a
pattern of behavior, not an isolated incident.
"Keep the oil" for Israel
After recent shifts in the Trump administration in its Syria policy, U.S. troops have controversially been kept in
Syria to "
keep
the oil
," with U.S. military officials subsequently claiming that doing so was "a subset of the counter-ISIS
mission." However, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
later claimed
that another factor behind U.S. insistence on guarding Syrian oil fields was to prevent the extraction
and subsequent sale of Syrian oil by either the Syrian government or Russia.
One key, yet often overlooked, player behind the push to prevent a full U.S. troop withdrawal in Syria in order to
"keep the oil" was current U.S. ambassador to Turkey, David Satterfield. Satterfield was previously the assistant
secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, where he yielded great influence over U.S. policy in both Iraq and Syria
and worked closely with Brett McGurk, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran and later special
presidential envoy for the U.S.-led "anti-ISIS" coalition.
Over the course of his long diplomatic career, Satterfield has been known to the U.S. government as an Israeli
intelligence asset embedded in the U.S. State Department. Indeed, Satterfield was named as a major player in what is now
known as the AIPAC espionage scandal, also known as the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal, although he was oddly never
charged for his role after the intervention of his superiors at the State Department in the George W. Bush
administration.
David
Satterfield, left, arrives in Baghdad with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, right, and Joey Hood, May 7, 2019. Mandel
Ngan | AP
In 2005, federal prosecutors cited a U.S. government official as
having illegally passed
classified information
to Steve Rosen, then working for AIPAC, who then passed that information to the Israeli
government. That classified information included intelligence on Iran and the nature of U.S.-Israeli intelligence
sharing. Subsequent media reports from the
New York Times
and other outlets revealed that this government
official was none other than David Satterfield, who was then serving as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near
East Affairs.
Charges against Rosen, as well as his co-conspirator and fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman, were dropped in 2009
and no charges were levied against Satterfield after State Department officials shockingly claimed that Satterfield had
"acted within his authority" in leaking classified information to an individual working to advance the interests of a
foreign government. Richard Armitage, a neoconservative ally with
a long history
of ties to CIA covert operations in the Middle East and elsewhere,
has since claimed
that he was one of Satterfield's main defenders in conversations with the FBI during this time
when he was serving as Deputy Secretary of State.
The other government official named in the indictment, former Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, was not so lucky
and was charged under the Espionage Act in 2006. Satterfield, instead of being censured for his role in leaking
sensitive information to a foreign government, was subsequently promoted in 2006 to serve as the Coordinator for Iraq
and Senior Adviser to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
In addition to his history of leaking classified information to AIPAC, Satterfield also has a longstanding
relationship with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a controversial spin-off of AIPAC also known by its
acronym WINEP. WINEP's website has long listed Satterfield as
one of its experts
and Satterfield has spoken at several WINEP events and policy forums, including several
after his involvement
with the AIPAC espionage scandal became public knowledge. However, despite his longstanding
and controversial ties to the U.S. pro-Israel lobby, Satterfield's current relationship with some elements of that
lobby, such as the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), is complicated at best.
While Satterfield's role in yet another reversal of a promised withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria has largely
escaped media scrutiny, another individual with deep ties to the Israel lobby and Syrian "rebel" groups has also been
ignored by the media, despite his outsized role in taking advantage of this new U.S. policy for Israel's benefit.
US Israel Lobby secures deal with Kurds
Earlier this year, well before Trump's new Syria policy of "keeping the oil" had officially taken shape, another
individual with deep ties to the U.S. Israel lobby secured a lucrative agreement with U.S.-backed Kurdish groups in
Syria.
An official document
issued earlier this year by the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political arm of the
Kurdish majority and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a New Jersey-based company,
founded and run
by U.S.-Israeli dual citizen Mordechai "Motti" Kahana, was given control of the oil in territory held by the SDC.
Per the document, the SDC formally accepted the offer from Kahana's company -- Global Development Corporation (GDC) --
to represent SDC in all matters pertaining to the sale of oil extracted in territory it controls and also grants GDC
"the right to explore and develop oil that is located in areas we govern."
The
SDC's formal acceptance of Global Development Corporation's offer to develop Syrian oil fields. Source |
Al-Akhbar
The document also states that the amount of oil then being produced in SDC-controlled areas was 125,000 barrels per
day and that they anticipated that this would increase to 400,000 barrels per day and that this oil is considered a
foreign asset under the control of the United States by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
After the document was made public by the Lebanese outlet
Al-Akhbar
, the SDC claimed that it was a forgery,
even though Kahana had
separately
confirmed
its contents and shared the letter itself to the
Los Angeles Times
as recently as a few weeks
ago. Kahana previously attempted to distance himself from the effort and
told the Israeli newspaper
Israel Hayom
in July that he had made the offer to the SDC as means to prevent
the "Assad regime" of Syria from obtaining revenue from the sale of Syrian oil.
The Kurds currently hold 11 oil wells in an area controlled by the [Syrian] Democratic Forces. The overwhelming
majority of Syrian oil is in that area. I don't want this oil reaching Iran, or the Assad regime."
At the time, Kahana also stated that "the moment the Trump administration gives its approval, we can begin to export
this oil at fair prices."
Given that Kahana has openly confirmed that he is representing the SDC's oil business shortly after Trump's adoption
of the controversial "keep the oil policy," it seems plausible that Kahana has now received the approval needed for his
company to export the oil on behalf of the SDC. Several media reports
have speculated
that, if Kahana's efforts go forward unimpeded, the Syrian oil will be sold to Israel.
However, considering Turkey's aversion to engaging in any activities that may benefit the PKK-SDF there are
considerable obstacles to Kahana's plans. While the SDF -- along with assistance from U.S. troops -- still controls
several oil fields in Syria, experts assert that they can only realistically sell the oil to the Syrian government. Not
even the Iraqi Kurds are a candidate, considering Baghdad's firm control over the Iraq-Syria border and the KRG's
weakened state after its failed independence bid in late 2017.
Regardless, Kahana's involvement in this affair is significant for a few reasons. First, Kahana has been a key player
in the promotion and funding of radical groups in Syria and has even been
caught hiring
so-called "rebels" to kidnap Syrian Jews and take them to Israel against their will. It was Kahana,
for instance, who financed and orchestrated the now infamous trip of the late Senator John McCain to Syria, where he met
with Syrian "rebels" including Khalid al-Hamad a "moderate" rebel who gained notoriety after a video of him eating the
heart of a Syrian Army soldier
went viral online
. McCain had also
admitted meeting
with ISIS members, though it is unclear if he did so on this trip or another trip to Syria.
In addition, Kahana was also the mastermind behind the "Caesar" controversy, whereby a Syrian using the pseudonym
"Caesar" was brought to the U.S. by Kahana and went on to make claims regarding torture and other crimes allegedly
committed by the Assad-led government Syria, claims which were
later discredited
by independent analysts. He was also
very involved
in Israel's failed efforts to establish a "safe zone" in Southern Syria as a means of
covertly expanding Israel's territory
from the occupied Golan Heights and into Quneitra.
Notably, Kahana has deep ties -- not just to efforts to overthrow the Syrian government -- but also to U.S. Israel
lobby, including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) where Satterfield is as an expert. For instance,
Kahana was a key player in
a 2013 symposium
organized by WINEP along with Syrian opposition groups intimately involved in the arming of so-called "rebels." One of
the other participants in the symposium alongside Kahana was Mouaz Moustafa, director of the "Syrian Emergency Task
Force" who assisted Kahana in bringing McCain to Syria in 2013. Moustafa
was
listed
as a WINEP expert on the organization's website but was later mysteriously deleted.
Kahana is also intimately involved with the Israeli American Council (IAC), a pro-Israel lobby organization, as
a team member
of its national conference. IAC was co-founded and is chaired by
Adam Milstein
, a multimillionaire and convicted felon who is also on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs, Birthright
and other prominent pro-Israel lobby organizations. One of IAC's top donors is Sheldon Adelson, who is also the top
donor to President Trump as well as the entire Republican Party.
Though the machinations of both Kahana and Satterfield to guide U.S. policy in order to manipulate the flow of
Syria's hydrocarbons for Israel's benefit may seem shocking to some, this same tactic of pro-Israel lobbyists using the
Kurds to illegally sell a country's oil to Israel was developed a few years prior, not in Syria, but Iraq. Notably, the
individuals responsible for that policy in Iraq shared connections to several of the same pro-Israel lobby organizations
as both Satterfield and Kahana, suggesting that their recent efforts in Syria are not an isolated event, but a pattern.
War against ISIS is a war for oil
In
an email
dated June 15, 2014, James Franklin Jeffrey (former Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey and current U.S. Special
Representative for Syria) revealed to Stephen Hadley, a former George Bush administration advisor then working at the
government-funded United States Institute of Peace, his intent to advise the KRG in order to sustain Kirkuk's oil
production. The plan, as Jeffery described it, was to supply both the Kurdistan province with oil and allow the export
of oil via Kirkuk-Ceyhan to Israel, robbing Iraq of its oil and strengthening the country's Kurdish region along with
its regional government's bid for autonomy.
Jeffrey,
whose hawkish views on Iran and Syria are well-known
, mentioned that Brett McGurk, the U.S.' main negotiator between
Baghdad and the KRG, was acting as his liaison with the KRG. McGurk, who had served in various capacities in Iraq under
both Bush and Obama, was then also serving Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran. A year later, he would
be made the special presidential envoy for the U.S.-led "anti-ISIS" coalition and, as previously mentioned, worked
closely with David Satterfield.
James
Jeffrey, left, meets with Kurdish Regional Government President Massoud Barzani, April 8, 2011, at an airport in
Irbil, Iraq. Chip Somodevilla | AP
Jeffrey was then a private citizen not currently employed by the government and was used as a non-governmental
channel in the pursuit of the plans described in the leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Jeffrey's behind-the-scenes
activities with regards to the KRG's oil exports were done clandestinely, largely because he was then employed by a
prominent arm of the U.S.' pro-Israel lobby.
At the time of the email, Jeffrey was serving
as a
distinguished fellow
(2013-2018) at WINEP. As previously mentioned, WINEP is a pro-Israel foreign policy think-tank
that espouses neoconservative views and was created in 1985 by researchers
that had hastily left AIPAC to escape investigations
against the organization that were related to some of its
members conducting espionage on behalf of Israel. AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, is the largest
registered Israel lobbyist organization in the US (albeit registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act would
be more suitable), and, in addition to the 1985 incident that led to WINEP's creation, has had members indicted for
espionage against the U.S. on Israel's behalf.
WINEP's launch was funded by former President of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, Barbara Weinberg, who is its
founding president and constant Chairman Emerita. Nicknamed 'Barbi', she is the wife of the late Lawrence Weinberg who
was President of AIPAC from 1976-81 and who JJ Goldberg, author of the 1997 book
Jewish Power,
referred to as
one of a select few individuals
who essentially dominated AIPAC regardless of its elected leadership.
Co-founder alongside Weinberg was Martin
Indyk. Indyk, U.S. Ambassador to Israel (1995-97) and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (1997-99),
led the AIPAC research time that formed WINEP to escape the aforementioned investigations.
WINEP
has
historically
received funding from
donors
who donate
to causes of special interest for Zionism and Israel. Among its trustees are extremely prominent names in political
Zionism and funders of other Israel Lobby organizations, such as
Charles and Edgar Bronfman
and
the Chernicks
.
Its
membership
remains dominated by individuals who have spent their careers promoting Israeli interests in the U.S.
WINEP has become more well-known, and arguably more controversial, in recent years after its research director
famously called for false-flag attacks to trigger a U.S. war with Iran in 2012, statements well-aligned with
longstanding attempts by the Israel Lobby
to bring about such a war.
A worthy partner in crime
Stephen Hadley, another private citizen who Jeffrey evidently considered as a partner in his covert dealings
discussed in the emails, also has his own past of involvement with Israel-specific intrigues and meddling.
During the G.W. Bush administration, Hadley tagged along with
neoconservatives
in their numerous creations of fake intelligence and efforts to incriminate Iraq for possessing
chemical and nuclear weapons. Hadley was one of the promoters from within the U.S. government of the false claim that
9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi officials in Prague.
What this particular claim had in common with the
'Iraq meets Atta in Prague'
disinformation, and other famous lies against Iraq fabricated and circulated by the
dense neocon network, was its source: Israel and pro-Israel partisans.
The distribution
network
of these now long-debunked claims was none other than the neoconservatives who act a veritable Israeli fifth
column that has long sought to promote Israeli foreign policy objectives as being in the interest of the United States.
In this, Hadley played his part by helping to ensure that the United States was railroaded into a war that had long been
promoted by both Israeli and American neoconservatives, particularly Richard Perle -- an advisor to WINEP -- who had been
promoting regime change in Iraq
for Israel's explicit benefit
for decades.
In short, for covert intrigues to serve Israel that would likely be met with protest if pitched to the government for
implementation as policy, Hadley's resume was impressive.
Israeli interests pursued through covert channels
Given his employment at WINEP during this time, Jeffrey's intent to advise the KRG to sustain Kirkuk's oil production
despite the seizure of the Baiji oil refinery by ISIS is somewhat suspect, especially since it required that 100,000
barrels per day pass through ISIS-controlled territory unimpeded.
Jeffrey's email from June 14, therefore, demonstrated that he had foreknowledge that ISIS would not disturb the KRG
as long as the Kurds redirected oil that was intended originally for Baiji to the Kirkuk-Ceyhan export pipeline,
facilitating its export and later sale to Israel.
Notably, up until its liberation in mid-2015 by the Iraqi government and aligned Shia paramilitaries,
ISIS kept the refinery running
and, only upon their retreat, destroyed the facility.
One would normally expect ISIS to be opposed to such collusion given that the KRG, while a beneficiary of the
ISIS-Baghdad conflict, was not an ally of ISIS. Thus, a foreign power
with strategic ties to ISIS
used its
close ties to the KRG
and assurances that it was on-board for the oil trade, to deliver a credible guarantee that
ISIS would 'cooperate' and that a boom in production and exports was in the cards.
This foreign power -- acting as a guarantor for the ISIS-KRG understanding vis-a-vis the illegal oil economy,
represented by Jeffrey and clearly not on good terms with Iraq's government -- was quite clearly Israel.
Israel
established considerable financial support
as well as the provision of armaments to other extremist terrorist groups
active near the border between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Southern Syria when war first broke out in Syria
in 2011. At least four of these extremist groups were led by individuals
with direct ties to Israeli intelligence
. These same groups, sometimes promoted as 'moderates' by some media, were
actively fighting Syria's government an enemy of Israel and ally of Iran before ISIS existed and
eagerly partnered with ISIS
when it expanded its campaign into Syria.
Israel has also long promoted the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, with Israel having provided Iraq's Kurds with
weapons, training and teams of Mossad advisers
as far back as the 1960s
. More recently,
Israel was the only state
to support the KRG independence referendum in September 2017 despite its futility, hinting
at the regard Israel holds for the KRG. Iraq's government subsequently militarily
defeated the KRG's push for statehood
and reclaimed Kirkuk's oil fields with assistance from the Shia paramilitaries
which were responsible for defeating ISIS in the area.
A
2014 map shows the areas under ISIS and Kurdish control at the time. Source |
Telegraph
This arrangement orchestrated by Jeffrey, served the long-time neoconservative-Israeli agenda of empowering the
Kurds,
selling Iraqi oil
to Israel and weakening Iraq's Baghdad-based government.
WINEP's close association with AIPAC,
which has spied on the U.S. on behalf of Israel
several times in the past with no consequence, combined with
Jeffrey's long-time acquaintance with key U.S. figures in Iraq, such as McGurk, provided an ideal opening for Israel in
Iraq. Following the implementation of Jeffrey's plan, Israeli imports of KRG oil constituted
77
percent of Israel's total oil imports
during the KRG's occupation of Kirkuk.
The WINEP connection to the KRG-Israel oil deal demonstrates the key role played by the U.S. pro-Israel Lobby, not
only in terms of sustaining U.S. financial aid to Israel and ratcheting up tensions with Israel's adversaries but also
in facilitating the more covert aspects of U.S.-Israeli cooperation and the implementation of policies that favor
Israel.
Yet the role played by the U.S. Israel lobby in this capacity, particularly in terms of orchestrating oil sale
agreements for Israel's benefit, is hardly exclusive to Iraq and can accurately be described as a repeated pattern of
behavior.
caucus99percent
free-range politics, organic community
Trump is stealing Syria's oil for the Saudis
gjohnsit
on Fri, 12/20/2019 - 4:28pm
President Trump recently said the quiet part
out loud
.
"We may have to fight for the oil. It's O.K.," he said. "Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in
which case they have a hell of a fight. But there's massive amounts of oil." The United States,
he added, should be able to take some of Syria's oil. "What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a
deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly," he
said. The goal would be to "spread out the wealth."
At the very least this amounts to pillaging, but then respect for the law isn't on Trump agenda.
Trump is "protecting" Syria's oil in the
exact
same way that the mob "protects" a
small businessman from arson.
Not
kind of
the same way. EXACTLY the same way.
Trump comment US intends to keep the oil in
Syria. Guard with US armored forces. Bring in US oil companies to modernize the field. WHAT ARE
WE BECOMING.... PIRATES? If ISIS is defeated we lack Congressional authority to stay. The oil
belongs to Syria.
https://t.co/Leko5s1hXF
So what "great companies" would be willing "to go in there" and "spread out the wealth?"
That company turned out to be
ARAMCO
.
Sources have disclosed that the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, commonly referred to as Aramco, has
sent a delegation of experts to discuss
investment opportunities in the oil fields and
wells in the Eastern Syrian city of Deir Ez-Zor.
According to the oppositionist news site Deir Ezzor 24, Aramco "started implementing
practical steps in this field, where a group of the company arrived in an official mission to
al-Omar oil field in the eastern Deir Ezzor countryside."
There is no legal means to do this. This is the outright theft of resources.
And it keeps getting worse.
It is believed that the
investments will be made through contracts signed between Aramco
and the US government
, whose armed forces have steadily been increasing their military
presence in terms of manpower and equipment around the oil fields.
That is trafficking in the sale of stolen property, but it gets even worse than that.
The Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces (formerly known as the YPG) currently control most of the
country's oil fields and have shifted towards an alliance with the Syrian government after
losing American protection in the north-east of the country in the wake of Trump's "withdrawal"
and ensuing Turkish offensive dubbed "Operation Peace Spring" to clear the area of Kurdish
militias
So we can't even pretend to be doing this for the benefit of the local population, our regional
allies, or any other justification except naked theft.
Trump should be in jail for this.
"I think in this case we are not talking about an operation associated with a huge share of
risk, but, on the contrary, about a well-thought-out operation."
- Professor RSUH Grigory Kosach
The Pentagon is enthusiastically cooperating in this blatant violation of international law.
US troops have
returned
to six out of 16 bases in Syria that had been previously abandoned during the October
withdrawal.
What's more, our military is
settling in
for the long haul.
Barely two months after US President Donald Trump's demagogic announcement that he was pulling
US troops out of northeastern Syria to fulfill his campaign promise to bring a halt to
Washington's "endless wars," the senior civilian and uniformed Pentagon chiefs told a House
panel Wednesday that
there is no foreseeable end to the American presence there.
...
Esper went even further, insisting that US military forces had to remain in Syria not so much to
counter any existing military force, but rather an "ideology".
"I think the defeat, if you will, will be hard because it's an ideology," Esper told the
House panel after repeated questions regarding US strategy in Syria.
"It's hard to
foresee anytime soon we would stamp it out,"
he added.
Everyone that somehow finds a way to defend Trump based on his so-called aversion to foreign
wars needs to take a good, hard look at this. Because THIS is 100% Trump's doing.
US-led forces have blown up three oil tankers in Syria as the United States increases
its pressure on Syria by thwarting the oil trade between the PKK/YPG and the Assad
regime, according to local sources quoted by several media sources.
The YPG are our Kurdish allies that the warmongers were so concerned about just a few
months ago. We "care" about them, right up until they want to sell oil to the Assad
regime. Then they deserve death.
That's OUR oil.
I think the powerful foreign policy cabal in Washington have him by the balls and give
them a squeeze when he gets off point.
One day he is pulling out. The next day he says
he staying in to "protect" the oil fields. The third day he sends US forces back in so he
can sell the oil so that the Syrians don't "steal" it.
What's going to happen on the fourth day when a half dozen American soldiers get
eviscerated by a roadside bomb while on patrol?
but just like congress won't make him withdraw troops from Yemen and stop supporting the
Saudis, they are in complete agreement with him doing that.
Israel bought Syria's oil from ISIS all during Obama's tenure as he watched them take
it out through Turkey.
But it's Russian aggression that is causing all the problems in the Middle East right?
And Iran's too. Why we can't make deals for resources instead of spending gawd only knows
how much money. But then the defense companies wouldn't get all of our money now would
they? We pay for the defense companies CEOs large bonuses and salaries. Great gig!
Regarding your last sentence: this is the great truth that Washington's world hegemonists would have you forget. Taking into
account the untapped vast resources of Canada and Alaska and its expansive offshore economic zones extending deep into the Atlantic,
the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, the North American anglosphere could be entirely self-sufficient and do
quite nicely on its own for hundreds of years to come, it just wouldn't be the sole tyrannical state presumably ruling the entire
planet.
Why, it might even entertain the idea of actually cooperating with other regional powers like Russia, China, the EU, India,
Iran, Turkey, the Middle East, greater central Asia, Latin America and even Africa to everyone's benefit, rather than bullying
them all because god ordained us to be the boss of all humans.
America's major malfunction is its lack of historical roots compared to the other societies mentioned. All those places had
thousands of years to refine their sundry cultures and international relationships, certainly through trial and error and many
horrible setbacks, most notably wars, famines, pestilence, genocide and human bondage which people did not have the foresight
to nip in the bud. They learned by their mistakes and some, like the great world wars, were doozies.
The United States, and some of its closest homologues like Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina, were thrown together very
rapidly as part of developing colonial empires. It was created through the brute actions of a handful of megalomaniacal oligarchs
of their day. What worked to suppress vast tracts of aboriginal homelands, often through genocide and virtual extinction of the
native populations, was so effective that it was institutionalized in the form of slavery and reckless exploitation of the local
environment. These "great leaders," "pioneers" and "founding fathers" were not about to give up a set of principles -- no matter
how sick and immoral -- which they knew to "work" and accrued to them great power and riches. They preferred to label it "American
exceptionalism" and force it upon the whole rest of the world, including long established regional powers -- cultures going back
to antiquity -- and not just conveniently sketched "burdens of the white man."
No, ancient cultures like China, India, Persia and so forth could obviously be improved for all concerned merely by allowing
a handful of Western Europeans to own all their property and run all their affairs. That grand plan fell apart for most of the
European powers in the aftermath of World War Two, but Washington has held tough and never given up its designs of micromanaging
and exploiting the whole planet. It too is soon to learn its lesson and lose its empire. Either that or it will take the world
down in flames as it tries to cling to all that it never really owned or deserved. The most tragic (or maybe just amusing) part
is that Washington still had most of the world believing its bullshit about exceptionalism and indispensability until it decided
it had to emulate every tyrannical empire that ever collapsed before it.
Realist , April 30, 2019 at 02:08
"ex·tor·tion /ik?stτrSH(?)n/ noun The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats."
"Racketeering refers to crimes committed through extortion or coercion. A racketeer attempts to obtain money or property from
another person, usually through intimidation or force. The term is typically associated with organized crime."
I see. So, American foreign policy, as applied to both its alleged enemies and presumed allies, essentially amounts to an exercise
in organised crime. So much for due process, free trade, peaceful co-existence, magical rainbows and other such hypocritical platitudes
dispensed for domestic consumption in place of the heavy-handed threats routinely delivered to Washington's targets.
That's quite in keeping with the employment of war crimes as standard "tactics, techniques and procedures" on the battlefield
which was recently admitted to us by Senator Jim Molan on the "60 Minutes" news show facsimile and discussed in one of yesterday's
forums on this blog.
Afghanistan was promised a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs as incentive to bend to our will (and that of Unocal which,
unlike Nordstream, was a pipeline Washington wanted built). Iraq was promised and delivered "shock and awe" after a secretary
of state had declared the mass starvation of that country's children as well worth the effort. They still can't find all the pieces
left of the Libyan state. Syria was told it would be stiffed on any American contribution to its rebuilding for the effrontery
of actually beating back the American-recruited, trained and financed ISIS terrorist brigades. Now it's being deliberately starved
of both its energy and food requirements by American embargoes on its own resources! North Korea was promised utter annihilation
by Yankee nukes before Kim's summit with our great leader unless it submitted totally to his will, or more likely that of Pompous
Pompeo, the man who pulls his strings. Venezuela is treated to cyber-hacked power outages and shortages of food, medicines, its
own gold bullion, income from its own international petroleum sales and, probably because someone in Washington thinks it's funny,
even toilet paper. All they have to do to get relief is kick out the president they elected and replace him with Washington's
chosen puppet! Yep, freedom and democracy blah, blah, blah. And don't even ask what the kids in Yemen got for Christmas from Uncle
Sam this year. (He probably stole their socks.) A real American patriot will laughingly take Iran to task for ever believing in
the first place that Washington could be negotiated with in good faith. All they had to do was ask the Native Americans (or the
Russians) how the Yanks keep their word and honor their treaties. It was their own fault they were taken for suckers.
"... Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious. It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest of the wealthy. ..."
"... America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla. ..."
"... Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators; it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending your kids to die. Never. ..."
Idealistic Realist , Apr 27, 2019 1:24:45 PM |
link
Best analysis by a candidate for POTUS ever:
American foreign policy is not a failure. To comfort themselves, observers often say that our leaders -- presidents, advisors,
generals -- don't know what they're doing. They do know. Their agenda just isn't what we like to imagine it is.
To quote Michael Parenti: "US policy is not filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly
and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own all of it."
The vision of our leaders as bunglers, while more accurate than the image of them as valiant public servants, is less accurate
and more rose-tinted than the closest approximation of the truth, which is that they are servants of their class interest.
That is why we go to war.
Those who buy the elite class's foreign policy BS, about the Emmanuel Goldsteins they conjure up every three years, are
fools. Obviously Hussein and Miloević were bad; but "government bad" does not mean we must invade. Wars occur for economic,
not humanitarian, reasons.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is a kleptocrat, murderer, and alleged cannibal. This is
him and his wife with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, was said to have boiled political prisoners to death, massacred hundreds
of prisoners, and made torture an institution. This is him with John Kerry.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, has been involved in the assassination of political opponents, perpetrated obvious
election fraud, and had his term extended until 2034. This is him with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious.
It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest
of the wealthy.
America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian
reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support
Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla.
Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators;
it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending
your kids to die. Never.
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
New book by David NorthA Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 19902016
Notable quotes:
"... "Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly." ..."
"... Typical American philosophy... "War is peace!"... ..."
We publish here the preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North.
The book will be published on August 10, and is available for preorder today at Mehring Books in both
softcover
and hardcover
.
***
"In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than
in the period of boom."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1928
"U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must
be redivided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.' The United States must 'organize' the world. History is bringing
mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1934
This volume consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response
of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 199091. The
analyses of events presented here, although written as they were unfolding, stand the test of time. The International Committee does
not possess a crystal ball. But its work is informed by a Marxist understanding of the contradictions of American and world imperialism.
Moreover, the Marxist method of analysis examines events not as a sequence of isolated episodes, but as moments in the unfolding
of a broader historical process. This historically oriented approach serves as a safeguard against an impressionistic response to
the latest political developments. It recognizes that the essential cause of an event is rarely apparent at the moment of
its occurrence.
Much of what passes for analysis in the bourgeois press consists of nothing more than equating an impressionistic description
of a given event with its deeper cause. This sort of political analysis legitimizes US wars as necessary responses to one or another
personification of evil, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the "warlord" Farah Aideed in Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Osama
bin Laden of Al Qaeda, the Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; and, most recently, Bashar al Assad in Syria, Kim
Jong Un in Korea, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. New names are continually added to the United States' infinitely expandable list
of monsters requiring destruction.
The material in this volume is the record of a very different and far more substantial approach to the examination of the foreign
policy of the United States.
First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in
198990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the entire global nation-state system, as it
emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown of the established postwar equilibrium would
lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism. As far back as August 1990 -- twenty-six years ago -- it was able to foresee
the long-term implications of the Bush administration's war against Iraq:
It marks the beginning of a new imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means the end of the
postcolonial era. As it proclaims the "failure of socialism," the imperialist bourgeoisie, in deeds if not yet in words, proclaims
the failure of independence. The deepening crisis confronting all the major imperialist powers compels them to secure control
over strategic resources and markets. Former colonies, which had achieved a degree of political independence, must be resubjugated.
In its brutal assault against Iraq, imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of unrestrained domination
of the backward countries that existed prior to World War II. [
1 ]
This historically grounded analysis provided the essential framework for an understanding, not only of the 199091 Gulf War, but
also of the wars that were launched later in the decade, as well as the post-9/11 "War on Terror."
In a recently published front-page article, the New York Times called attention to a significant milestone in the presidency
of Barack Obama: "He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president." But with several months remaining
in his term in office, he is on target to set yet another record. The Times wrote:
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama's term -- a near-certainty
given the president's recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria -- he will leave
behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war. [
2 ]
On the way to setting his record, Mr. Obama has overseen lethal military actions in a total of seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The number of countries is growing, as the United States escalates its military operations
in Africa. The efforts to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency involve a buildup of US forces in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad.
Without any sense of irony, Mark Landler, author of the Times article, notes Obama's status as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
in 2009. He portrays the president as "trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate. . . ." Obama "has wrestled
with this immutable reality [of war] from his first year in the White House . . ."
Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the
order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize,
in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes
necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
During the Obama years, folly has clearly held the upper hand. But there is nothing that Landler's hero can do. Obama has found
his wars "maddeningly hard to end."
The Times ' portrayal of Obama lacks the essential element required by genuine tragedy: the identification of objective
forces, beyond his control, that frustrated and overwhelmed the lofty ideals and humanitarian aspirations of the president. If Mr.
Landler wants his readers to shed a tear for this peace-loving man who, upon becoming president, made drone killings his personal
specialty, and turned into something akin to a moral monster, the Times correspondent should have attempted to identify the
historical circumstances that determined Obama's "tragic" fate.
But this is a challenge the Times avoids. It fails to relate Obama's war-making record to the entire course of American
foreign policy over the past quarter century. Even before Obama entered office in 2009, the United States had been at war on an almost
continuous basis since the first US-Iraq War of 199091.
The pretext for the Gulf War was Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. But the violent US reaction to Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein's dispute with the emir of Kuwait was determined by broader global conditions and considerations. The historical context
of the US military operation was the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was finally carried out in December 1991. The
first President Bush declared the beginning of a "New World Order." [
3 ] What Bush meant by this phrase was
that the United States was now free to restructure the world in the interests of the American capitalist class, unencumbered by either
the reality of the countervailing military power of the Soviet Union or the specter of socialist revolution. The dissolution of the
USSR, hailed by Francis Fukuyama as the "End of History," signified for the strategists of American imperialism the end of military
restraint.
It is one of the great ironies of history that the definitive emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power,
amid the catastrophe of World War I, coincided with the outbreak of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which culminated in the establishment
of the first socialist workers state in history, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. On April 3, 1917, President Woodrow
Wilson delivered his war message to the US Congress and led the United States into the global imperialist conflict. Two weeks later,
V.I. Lenin returned to Russia, which was in the throes of revolution, and reoriented the Bolshevik Party toward the fight to overthrow
the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin and his principal political ally, Leon Trotsky, insisted that the struggle for socialism was indissolubly linked to the
struggle against war. As the historian R. Craig Nation has argued:
For Lenin there was no doubt that the revolution was the result of a crisis of imperialism and that the dilemmas which it posed
could only be resolved on the international level. The campaign for proletarian hegemony in Russia, the fight against the war,
and the international struggle against imperialism were now one and the same. [
4 ]
Just as the United States was striving to establish its position as the arbiter of the world's destiny, it faced a challenge,
in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, not only to the authority of American imperialism, but also to the economic, political,
and even moral legitimacy of the entire capitalist world order. "The rhetoric and actions of the Bolsheviks," historian Melvyn P.
Leffler has written, "ignited fear, revulsion and uncertainty in Washington." [
5 ]
Another perceptive historian of US foreign policy explained:
The great majority of American leaders were so deeply concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution because they were so uneasy about
what President Wilson called the "general feeling of revolt" against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of
that dissatisfaction. The Bolshevik Revolution became in their minds the symbol of all the revolutions that grew out of that discontent.
And that is perhaps the crucial insight into the tragedy of American diplomacy. [
6 ]
In a desperate effort to destroy the new revolutionary regime, Wilson sent an expeditionary force to Russia in 1918, in support
of counterrevolutionary forces in the brutal civil war. The intervention was an ignominious failure.
It was not until 1933 that the United States finally granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The diplomatic rapprochement
was facilitated in part by the fact that the Soviet regime, now under Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship, was in the process of repudiating
the revolutionary internationalism that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was abandoning the perspective of world revolution
in favor of alliances with imperialist states on the basis of "collective security." Unable to secure such an alliance with Britain
and France, Stalin signed the notorious Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, and the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941, the exigencies of the struggle against
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan required that the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forge a military alliance
with the Soviet Union. But once Germany and Japan were defeated, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly
deteriorated. The Truman administration, opposing the extension of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe, and frightened by the growth
of Communist parties in Western Europe, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 and triggered the onset of the Cold War.
The Kremlin regime pursued nationalistic policies, based on the Stalinist program of "socialism in one country," and betrayed
working class and anti-imperialist movements all over the world. But the very existence of a regime that arose out of a socialist
revolution had a politically radicalizing impact throughout the world. William Appleman Williams was certainly correct in his view
that "American leaders were for many, many years more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were
of the actual power of the Soviet Union." [
7 ]
In the decades that followed World War II, the United States was unable to ignore the existence of the Soviet Union. To the extent
that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which was established in 1949, provided limited political and material
support to anti-imperialist movements in the "Third World," they denied the US ruling class a free hand in the pursuit of its own
interests. These limitations were demonstrated -- to cite the most notable examples -- by the US defeats in Korea and Vietnam, the
compromise settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, and the acceptance of Soviet domination of the Baltic region and Eastern Europe.
The existence of the Soviet Union and an anticapitalist regime in China deprived the United States of the possibility of unrestricted
access to and exploitation of the human labor, raw materials, and potential markets of a large portion of the globe, especially the
Eurasian land mass. It compelled the United States to compromise, to a greater degree than it would have preferred, in negotiations
over economic and strategic issues with its major allies in Europe and Asia, as well as with smaller countries that exploited the
tactical opportunities provided by the US-Soviet Cold War.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, combined with the restoration of capitalism in China following the Tiananmen
Square massacre of June 1989, was seen by the American ruling class as an opportunity to repudiate the compromises of the post-World
War II era, and to carry out a restructuring of global geopolitics, with the aim of establishing the hegemony of the United States.
There was no small element of self-delusion in the grandiose American response to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The bombastic
claims that the United States had won the Cold War were based far more on myth than reality. In fact, the sudden dissolution of the
Soviet Union took the entire Washington foreign policy establishment by surprise. In February 1987, the Council on Foreign Relations
published an assessment of US-Soviet relations, authored by two of its most eminent Sovietologists, Strobe Talbott and Michael Mandelbaum.
Analyzing the discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at meetings in Geneva and Reykjavik in 1986, the two experts concluded:
No matter how Gorbachev comes to define perestroika in practice and no matter how he modifies the official definition
of security, the Soviet Union will resist pressure for change, whether it comes from without or within, from the top or the bottom.
The fundamental conditions of Soviet-American relations are therefore likely to persist. This, in turn, means that the ritual
of Soviet-American summitry is likely to have a long run. . . . [
8 ]
The "long run," Talbott and Mandelbaum predicted, would continue not only during the reign of "Gorbachev's successor," but also
his "successor's successor." No substantial changes in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were to be expected.
The two prophets from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded:
Whoever they are, and whatever changes have occurred in the meantime, the American and Soviet leaders of the next century will
be wrestling with the same great issue -- how to manage their rivalry so as to avoid nuclear catastrophe -- that has engaged the
energies, in the latter half of the 1980s, of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. [
9 ]
In contrast to the Washington experts, who foresaw nothing, the International Committee recognized that the Gorbachev regime marked
a climactic stage in the crisis of Stalinism. "The crisis of Gorbachev," it declared in a statement dated March 23, 1987, "has emerged
as every section of world Stalinism confronts economic convulsions and upheavals by the masses. In every case -- from Beijing to
Belgrade -- the response of the Stalinist bureaucrats has been to turn ever more openly toward capitalist restorationism." [
10 ]
The Cold War victory narrative encouraged, within the ruling elite, a disastrous overestimation of the power and potential of
American capitalism. The drive for hegemony assumed the ability of the US to contain the economic and political centrifugal forces
unleashed by the operation of global capitalism. Even at the height of its power, such an immense project was well beyond the capacities
of the United States. But amid the euphoria generated by the end of the Soviet Union, the ruling class chose to ignore the deep-rooted
and protracted crisis of American society. An objective observer, examining the conditions of both the United States and the Soviet
Union between 1960 and 1990, might well have wondered which regime was in greater crisis. During the three decades that preceded
the dissolution of the USSR, the United States exhibited high levels of political, social, and economic instability.
Consider the fate of the presidential administrations in power during those three decades: (1) The Kennedy administration ended
tragically in November 1963 with a political assassination, in the midst of escalating social tensions and international crises;
(2) Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was unable to seek reelection in 1968, as a result of urban riots and mass opposition
to the US invasion of Vietnam; (3) Richard Nixon was compelled to resign from office in August 1974, after the House of Representatives'
Judiciary Committee voted for his impeachment on charges related to his criminal subversion of the Constitution; (4) Gerald Ford,
who became president upon Nixon's resignation, was defeated in the November 1976 election amid popular revulsion over Nixon's crimes
and the US military debacle in Vietnam; (5) Jimmy Carter's one term in office was dominated by an inflationary crisis that sent the
federal prime interest rate to 20 percent, a bitter three month national coal miners strike, and the aftershocks generated by the
Iranian Revolution; and (6) Ronald Reagan's years in office, despite all the ballyhoo about "morning in America," were characterized
by recession, bitter social tension, and a series of foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Central America. The exposure
of an illegal scheme to finance paramilitary operations in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra crisis) brought Reagan to the very brink of
impeachment. His administration was saved by the leadership of the Democratic Party, which had no desire to remove from office a
president who was politically weakened and already exhibiting signs of dementia.
The one persistent factor that confronted all these administrations, from Kennedy to Reagan, was the erosion in the global economic
position of the United States. The unquestioned dominance of American finance and industry at the end of World War II provided the
economic underpinnings of the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility that formed the basis of global capitalist growth
and stability. By the late 1950s, the system was coming under increasing strain. It was during the Kennedy administration that unfavorable
tendencies in the US balance of trade first began to arouse significant concern. On August 15, 1971, Nixon suddenly ended the Bretton
Woods system of fixed international exchange rates, pegged to a US dollar convertible at the rate of $35 per ounce of gold. During
the 1970s and 1980s, the decline in the exchange rate of the dollar mirrored the deterioration of the American economy.
The belligerent response of the United States to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union reflected the weakness, not the strength,
of American capitalism. The overwhelming support within the ruling elite for a highly aggressive foreign policy arose from the delusion
that the United States could reverse the protracted erosion of its global economic position through the deployment of its immense
military power.
The Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by the Department of Defense in February 1992, unambiguously asserted the hegemonic ambitions
of US imperialism:
There are other potential nations or coalitions that could, in the further future, develop strategic aims and a defense posture
of region-wide or global domination. Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global
competitor. [ 11 ]
The 1990s saw a persistent use of US military power, most notably in the first Gulf War, followed by its campaign to break up
Yugoslavia. The brutal restructuring of the Balkan states, which provoked a fratricidal civil war, culminated in the US-led 1999
bombing campaign to compel Serbia to accept the secession of the province of Kosovo. Other major military operations during that
decade included the intervention in Somalia, which ended in disaster, the military occupation of Haiti, the bombing of Sudan and
Afghanistan, and repeated bombing attacks on Iraq.
The events of September 11, 2001 provided the opportunity to launch the "War on Terror," a propaganda slogan that provided an
all-purpose justification for military operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and, with increasing frequency, Africa.
They furnished the Bush administration with a pretext to institutionalize war as a legitimate and normal instrument of American foreign
policy.
The administration of the second President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. In speeches that followed
9/11, Bush used the phrase "wars of the twenty-first century." In this case, the normally inarticulate president spoke with precision.
The "War on Terror" was, from the beginning, conceived as an unending series of military operations all over the globe. One war would
necessarily lead to another. Afghanistan proved to be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Iraq.
The military strategy of the United States was revised in line with the new doctrine of "preventive warfare," adopted by the US
in 2002. This doctrine, which violated existing international law, decreed that the United States could attack any country in the
world judged to pose a potential threat -- not only of a military, but also of an economic character -- to American interests.
In a verbal sleight of hand, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive war, undertaken in
response to the imminent threat posed by the country's "weapons of mass destruction" to the national security of the United States.
Of course, the threat was as non-existent as were Saddam Hussein's WMDs. In any event, the Bush administration rendered the distinction
between preemptive and preventive war meaningless, by asserting the right of the United States to attack any country, regardless
of the existence or non-existence of an imminent threat to American national security. Whatever the terminology employed for propaganda
purposes by American presidents, the United States adheres to the illegal doctrine of preventive war.
The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation
of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext
was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the
US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are
component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.
It is through the prism of America's efforts to assert control of the strategically critical Eurasian landmass, that the essential
significance of the events of 199091 is being revealed. But this latest stage in the ongoing struggle for world hegemony, which
lies at the heart of the conflict with Russia and China, is bringing to the forefront latent and potentially explosive tensions between
the United States and its present-day imperialist allies, including -- to name the most significant potential adversary -- Germany.
The two world wars of the twentieth century were not the product of misunderstandings. The past is prologue. As the International
Committee foresaw in 199091, the American bid for global hegemony has rekindled interimperialist rivalries simmering beneath the
surface of world politics. Within Europe, dissatisfaction with the US role as the final arbiter of world affairs is being openly
voiced. In a provocative essay, published in Foreign Affairs , the journal of the authoritative US Council on Foreign Relations,
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has bluntly challenged Washington's presumption of US global dominance:
As the United States reeled from the effects of the Iraq war and the EU struggled through a series of crises, Germany held
its ground. . . .
Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership. The 2003 invasion of Iraq damaged the
United States' standing in the world. After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence ripped Iraq apart, and U.S. power
in the region began to weaken. Not only did the George W. Bush administration fail to reorder the region through force, but the
political, economic, and soft-power costs of this adventure undermined the United States' overall position. The illusion of a
unipolar world faded. [ 12 ]
In a rebuke to the United States, Steinmeier writes: "Our historical experience has destroyed any belief in national exceptionalism
-- for any nation." [ 13 ]
The journalists and academics, who work within the framework of the official narrative of the defense of human rights and the
"War on Terror," cannot explain the progression of conflicts, from the 199091 Gulf War, to the current expansion of NATO eight hundred
miles eastward, and the American "pivot to Asia." On a regular basis, the United States and its allies stage war games in Eastern
Europe, in close proximity to the borders of Russia, and in strategically critical waters off the coast of China. It is not difficult
to conceive of a situation in which events -- either as a result of deliberate calculation or of reckless miscalculation -- erupt
into a clash between nuclear-armed powers. In 2014, as the centenary of World War I approached, a growing number of scholarly papers
called attention to the similarities between the conditions that precipitated the disaster of August 1914 and present-day tensions.
One parallel between today and 1914 is the growing sense among political and military strategists that war between the United
States and China and/or Russia may be inevitable. As this fatalistic premise increasingly informs the judgments and actions of the
key decision makers at the highest level of the state, it becomes a dynamic factor that makes the actual outbreak of war more likely.
A specialist in international geopolitics has recently written:
Once war is assumed to be unavoidable, the calculations of leaders and militaries change. The question is no longer whether
there will or should be a war, but when the war can be fought most advantageously. Even those neither eager for nor optimistic
about war may opt to fight when operating in the framework of inevitability. [
14 ]
Not since the end of World War II has there existed so great a danger of world war. The danger is heightened by the fact that
the level of popular awareness of the threat remains very limited. What percentage of the American population, one must ask, realizes
that President Barack Obama has formally committed the United States to go to war in defense of Estonia, in the event of a conflict
between the small Baltic country and Russia? The media has politely refrained from asking the president to state how many human beings
would die in the event of a nuclear war between the United States and either Russia or China, or both at the same time.
On the eve of World War II, Leon Trotsky warned that a catastrophe threatened the entire culture of mankind. He was proven correct.
Within less than a decade, the Second World War claimed the lives of more than fifty million people. The alarm must once again be
sounded. The working class and youth within the United States and throughout the world must be told the truth.
The progressive development of a globally integrated world economy is incompatible with capitalism and the nation-state system.
If war is to be stopped and a global catastrophe averted, a new and powerful mass international movement, based on a socialist program,
and strategically guided by the principles of revolutionary class struggle, must be built. In opposition to imperialist geopolitics,
in which national states fight brutally for regional and global dominance, the International Committee counterposes the strategy
of world socialist revolution. As Trotsky advised, we "follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle. . . ." [
15 ]
In the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were mass protests against the war policies of the United States and
its allies. Millions took to the streets. But after the war began, public opposition virtually disappeared. The absence of popular
protest did not signify support for the war. Rather, it reflected the repudiation, by the old middle-class protest movement, of its
former Vietnam-era opposition to imperialism.
There are mounting signs of political radicalization among significant sections of the working class and youth. It is only a matter
of time before this radicalization gives rise to conscious opposition to war. It is the aim of this volume to impart to the new antiwar
movement a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective and program.
The quotes from Trotsky are glaring. These and others were used to argue against socialism in the post war decades, but all that
was needed was time and the working of the forces of capitalism itself. History never ended, it is right on schedule
"Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving
the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel
Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that
war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
VI lenin crushed the Krondstadt rebellion that was the true 'soviet union' model and instituted a hard right revolutionary regime
of ruthless dictatorial control from smolny, not a workers state. The US borgeouis (and french and english) intervened to keep
russia in the war and 160 german divisions from leaving the eastern front. The threat of a workers state was not the concern of
the victors. The failure of revolutionary russia to represent what this article is propping it up to be (some kind of genuine
workers state) leaves me deeply suspect about the other conclusions he's bent history to. Anyone who's read "2 years in russia"
by emma goldman, and "the victors dilemma" - john silverlight and any number of books on the russian civil war, it is clear that
the intervention was for military tactical reasons and that the nascient state was in no ways a workers state but a totalitarian
military dictatorship. Emma Goldman's disillusionment is not her falling out of love with her ideals, but her coming to terms
with the reality vs the PR of Russia. Which is why this website (Wsws) advertised a book repudiating the rejection of socialism
with the faiure of the soviet union as a false narrative a year or few ago.
The historical memoir is clear, diaries, memos, news articles, and the Western soldier revolts, time to smash the revolution.
Kronstadt was a tragedy, but the regime was under threat. history is messy.
I can imagine that
the leadership of imperialist countries was underestimating the bolsheviks in 1917, but once the Russian revolution had given
enough confidence to the German masses to make the war stop one year later, once the French black sea fleet had rebelled in 1919,
etc... they were all very conscious of the risks (potential risks, not immediate threats).
The evidence in favour of what Trotsky wrote about Kronstadt is simply overwhelming. A cmd above gave some basic evidence. Trotsky
was absolutely right and absolutely honest on what he wrote later on ("hue and cry over Kronstadt")
The working class has been the victim of betrayal after betrayal by pseudo-left forces in the 20th century, which led to two catastrophic
world wars and all the other conflicts that have created needless bloodshed around the world. The great task will be, when the
new mass working class anti-war movement arises, to give the working class the political knowledge it needs to not fall for the
traps that dissipated anti-war movements in the past. It must be made clear to the workers of the world that for us, it's do or
die time - literally, as the obscene levels of social inequality and the prospect of nuclear confrontation prove.
I understand this very well, having seen what happened to what I thought at the time was a powerful antiwar movement in the 1960s
against the war in Vietnam. I was quite politically naive at the time and became so disillusioned with politics in general and
what I then thought to be the "left" in particular, that I went off politics completely and started reading Ayn Rand.
After being turned off by Rand's misanthropy and hatred of the working class (even though I admired her atheism), I became
more or less apolitical until 1998, when I first read the World Socialist Web Site and found what I had been looking for.
for this affirming comment. Me too, having all but given up on politics and following a last ditch
search of the web I was rewarded with a political program and party that was more than compatible with my world view and personal
values. Something I had not thought possible, thank you ICFI/SEP.
There are times when even we as Marxists find ourselves scouring the past for a word that befits the character and luminosity
of a moment in human understanding. In this respect David North has given new meaning to the word 'Biblical'.
As a word, its essence is transcendent. For whoever defines an epoch in the clearest and most profoundest way as this, is elevated
to the realms of Greatness.
As the bourgeoisie now scrabbles, in fights, and drowns in the last dregs of its alchemy, a Phoenix arises out of their chaos
lest the bourgeoisie commits all to the Fires of Hell ....
Most excellent words comrade David ...a most excellent call to class struggle .
This is a remarkably panoramic account, grounded in both history and economics, of the unfolding of U.S. militarism and imperialist
warfare over the past 30 or so years. It is without peer in anything else I have seen in terms of showing that events and tendencies
- which we may have been separately aware of - were in fact part of a historical continuum growing out of economic developments
and the perceived interests of the U.S. ruling class.
Always interesting to read cmd. North. ''First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in 198990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the
entire global nation-state system, as it emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown
of the established postwar equilibrium would lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism''. This is great but we also
have German militarism on the rise and we should not underestimate. The working class must be prepared for economic and even actual
wars in Europe and elsewhere. The redivision of markets and resources is evident with Germany and China on the table.
March 12, 2019 at 5:25
pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN
Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law
prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."
Hi AnonfromTN.
Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli
"dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly
given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.
They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.
What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President
t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.
Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type
of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US
military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an
Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!
Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland"
law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman
raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on
the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.
@ChuckOrloski I
can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery.
As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and
donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these
should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally,
desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and
severely punish those who expose these crimes.
I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of
any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves
are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash.
Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel
influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
The USA 'lost' in Syria, the opposing coalition incl. Iran and Russia couldn't be faced off successfully.
Destroying Afgh., Iraq, Lybia, - all 'failures' in the sense of not garnering 'advantage' for the USA as a territory, a Federated
Nation, its citizens, its trade, boosting hopeful expansion, etc. One aim rarely mentioned is keeping allies on board, e.g. Sarkozy's
France, to invade Lybia. In France many say it was Sark I who did DE-ss-troy! Lybia.
The word *failure* is based on the acceptance of a stated aim reminiscent of old-style-colonialism: grab resources, exploit
super-cheap labor, control the natives, mine, exploit, shunt the goods / profits to home base.
If the aim is to stop rivals breathing, blast them back to the Stone Age, the success is good but relative. (see Iraq.) Private
GloboCorps (e.g. Glencore.. ) are in charge behind the curtain, many Gvmts are just stooges for them in the sense of unawoved
partnerships, the one feeding into the other, in a kind of desperado death spiral.
I have always been struck by the fact that Oil Projects / Management in Iraq, even wiki gives lists that shows major movers
and profiteers are not USA oil cos. / interests, but China, Malaysia, many others.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
"... The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. ..."
"... Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional "war" it's pretty cheap ..."
In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military
bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term,
but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.
Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called
defense contractors, and the " emergency
men " (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the
national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some
quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits,
promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course,
that's part of the problem.
Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they
come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service
rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this:
in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they
have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation,
they've played just about every card in the Pentagon's deck -- without coming up with a winning
hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and
departing after a couple years to
make way for someone else to give it a try.
... ... ...
Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election
already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to
declare: "Enough! Stop this madness!" Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white,
that person will deserve the nation's gratitude and the support of the electorate.
Until that occurs, however, the American penchant for war will stretch on toward infinity.
No doubt Saudi and Israeli leaders will cheer, Europeans who remember their Great War will
scratch their heads in wonder, and the Chinese will laugh themselves silly. Meanwhile, issues
of genuinely strategic importance -- climate change offers one obvious example -- will continue
to be treated like an afterthought. As for the gravy train, it will roll on.
1. WW1 had total casualties (civilian and military) of around 40M. WW2 had total
casualties of 60M. So yes WW2 was more deadly but "pales in comparison" is hardly justified,
especially relative to population.
2. Marshal Foch, 28 June, 1919: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20
years."
WW1 inevitably led to WW2.
The only politician with a modest national stage to have said that (and meant it) in the
last 50 years was Ron Paul, who was booed and mocked as crazy. Trump made noises in that
direction, but almost as soon as the last words of his oath echoed off into the brisk January
afternoon, he seemed to change his tune. Whether he never meant it, or decided to avoid the
JFK treatment, who knows.
No, as I believe Will Rogers said, democracy is that form of government where the people
get what they want, good and hard.
I supported Ron Paul in 2012. But after his candidacy was crookedly subverted by the
Establishment (cf., Trump's) I vowed never to vote again for anyone that I believe unworthy
of the power wielded through the public office. I haven't voted since, and don't expect to
until the Empire collapses.
Kirk Douglas starred in a great film about fighting in World War I: "Paths of Glory." I
highly recommend the film for its accuracy, best described in Wiki by the reaction of
governments:
Controversy
On its release, the film's anti-military tone was subject to criticism and censorship.
In France, both active and retired personnel from the French military vehemently
criticized the film -- and its portrayal of the French Army -- after it was released in
Belgium. The French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists, (the European
distributor) to not release the film in France. The film was eventually shown in France in
1975 when social attitudes had changed.[17]
In Germany, the film was withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival to avoid straining
relations with France;[18] it was not shown for two years until after its release.
In Spain, Spain's right-wing government of Francisco Franco objected to the film. It was
first shown in 1986, 11 years after Franco's death.
In Switzerland, the film was censored, at the request of the Swiss Army, until
1970.[18]
At American bases in Europe, the American military banned it from being shown.[18]
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they
supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders.
I'd say both. The generals have greatly assisted in stringing along the trusting public,
always promising that victory is just around the corner, provided the public supports this or
that final effort. Petraeus in particular willingly played his part in misleading the public
about both Iraq and Afghanistan. His career would be a great case study for illuminating what
is wrong with the U.S. today.
As to the apparent failure of the Afghanistan war – one must be careful to separate
stated goals from real ones. What kind of "lasting success" can the U.S. possibly hope for
there? If they managed to defeat the Taliban, pacify the country, install a puppet regime to
govern it, and then leave, what would that achieve? The puppet regime would find itself
surrounded by powers antagonistic to the U.S., and the puppets would either cooperate with
them or be overthrown in no time. The U.S. are not interested in winning and leaving –
they want to continue disrupting the peaceful integration of East, West, and South Asia.
Afghanistan is ideally placed for this purpose, and so the U.S. are quite content with
dragging out that war, as a pretext for their continued presence in the region.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises – and he was quickly
beaten down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored.
When are you going to stop insulting our intelligence with this Boy's State civics crap?
You're calling on political leaders to stop war, like they don't remember what CIA did to
JFK, RFK, Daschle, or Leahy. Or Paul Wellstone.
Your national command structure, CIA, has impunity for universal jurisdiction crime. They
can kill or torture anyone they want and get away with it. That is what put them in charge.
CIA kills anybody who gets in their way. You fail to comprehend Lenin's lesson: first destroy
the regime, then you can refrain from use of force. Until you're ready to take on CIA, your
bold phrases are silent and odorless farts of feckless self-absorption. Sack up and imprison
CIA SIS or GTFO.
Since Spain was smart enough to stay out of both World Wars (as was Switzerland, of
course), I wonder what Franco was thinking when he banned the film. Anyway, the final scene
may be the best final scene in the history of movies.
This writer, a retired military officer whose son died in service to the yankee imperium
seems to have as good a grasp as any if not a better grasp than any about the nature of the
yankee system of permanent war.
While I agree the slave-American is ignored, I think the elected, salaried members of the
elected government are also ignored.. The persons in charge are Pharaohs and massively
powerful global in scope corporations.
Abe Lincoln, McKinnley, Kennedy discovered that fact in their fate.
Organized Zionism was copted by the London bankers and their corporations 1897, since then
a string of events have emerged.. that like a Submarine, seeking a far off target, it must
divert to avoid being discovered, but soon, Red October returns to its intended path. here
the path is to take the oil from the Arabs.. and the people driving that submarine are
extremely wealthy Pharaohs and very well known major corporations.
I suggest to quit talking about the nation states and their leaders as if either could
beat their way out of a wet paper sack. instead starting talking about the corporations and
Pharaohs because they are global.
The yawning silence accompanying the centennial of the Great War is baffling to me. It was
the pivotal event of the 20th century. It was the beginning of the unmanning, the
demoralization of Western Civilization. It was the calamity that created the World we inhabit
today.
I've heard nary a peep about it in the U.S. over the last four years. It's as if it were
as remote in people's consciousness as the Punic Wars.
The World Wars (I and II) can be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt of a fading
British Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, with the material, human,
and moral cost of the wars actually accelerating the empire's demise.
Likewise, the current endless "War on Terra" can be seen as an increasingly desperate
attempt of a fading American Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, again
with the material, human, and moral cost of this war actually accelerating its demise.
But in the meantime, in both examples, the Bankers and the MIC just keep reaping their
profits, even at the expense of the empires they purportedly support and defend.
In a traditional sense the author is right. Strategy is the attainment of political goals,
within existing constraints. (diplomatic, political, resources etc)
"Goals" traditionally means "victories". (WWI is a great example of the sometimes dubious
idea of victory)
Has the US ceased to have a strategy ? No. (Their strategy is myopic & self destructive
– ie it's not a "good" strategy)
The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony
over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. Afghanistan,
at (relatively) minimal cost, US controls key land mass (& with possible future access to
fantastic resources). Threaten, mess up Russian – Chinese ambitions in this area. Iraq:
Israeli enemy, strategic location, resource extraction. Syria: Israeli enemy, strategic
location, key location for resource transfer to markets (EU esp). Deny Russia an ally. Libya:
who cares ? Gaddafi was a pain in the arse. Iran: Israeli enemy, fantastic resources, hate
them regardless.
Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that
it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional
"war" it's pretty cheap ( which is funny, because it's such a yummy gravy train for the
1% sorry, actually, forgot the FIRST core principle of US strategy: enrich all the "right"
people)
'There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the
instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so
many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for
the war. The pulpit will– warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great,
big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be
a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is
no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side
will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing
and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently
the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this
curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of
furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as
earlier– but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and
all– will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who
ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that
the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception'.
- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" (1908)
European politicians, the war on terror, and the triumph of Bankers United: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/12/europe-brainwashed-normalize-relations-russia/
"Europe has not had an independent existence for 75 years. European countries do not know
what it means to be a sovereign state. Without Washington European politicians feel lost, so
they are likely to stick with Washington .
Russian hopes to unite with the West in a war against terrorism overlook that terrorism is
the West's weapon for destabilizing independent countries that do not accept a unipolar
world."
The world is ripe for barter exchange. Screw the money changers.
On January 8, 2018, former government advisor Edward Luttwak wrote an opinion piece for
Foreign Policy titled "It's Time to Bomb North Korea."
Luttwak's thesis is relatively straightforward. There is a government out there that may
very soon acquire nuclear-weapons capabilities, and this country cannot be trusted to
responsibly handle such a stockpile. The responsibility to protect the world from a rogue
nation cannot be argued with, and we understandably have a duty to ensure the future of
humanity.
However, there is one rogue nation that continues to hold the world ransom with its nuclear
weapons supply. It is decimating non-compliant states left, right, and center. This country
must be stopped dead in its tracks before anyone turns to the issue of North Korea.
In August of 1945, this rogue nation dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets, not
military targets, completely obliterating between 135,000 and
300,000 Japanese civilians in just these two acts alone. Prior to this event, this country
killed even more civilians in the infamous
firebombing of Tokyo and other areas of Japan, dropping close to 500,000 cylinders of
napalm and petroleum jelly on some of Japan's most densely populated areas.
Recently, historians have become more open to the possibility that dropping the atomic bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not actually necessary to end World War II. This has also been
confirmed by those who actually took part in it. As the Nation
explained:
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public
address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that 'the atomic bomb played
no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan ' Adm. William
"Bull" Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that 'the first
atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . It was a mistake to ever drop it . [the
scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
A few months' prior, this rogue country's
invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa also claimed at least one quarter of Okinawa's
population. The Okinawan people have been protesting this country's military presence ever
since. The most recent ongoing protest
has lasted well over 5,000 days in a row.
This nation's bloodlust continued well after the end of World War II. Barely half a decade
later, this country bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories,
5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and
eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country's population. As the Asia
Pacific Journal has noted, the assaulting country dropped so many bombs that they eventually
ran out of targets to hit, turning to bomb the irrigation systems, instead:
By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every
significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the
spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the
North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to
the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating
whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans."
This was just the beginning. Having successfully destroyed the future North Korean
state, this country moved on to the rest of East Asia and Indo-China, too. As Rolling Stone's
Matt Taibbi
has explained :
We [this loose cannon of a nation] dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam
from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win
'hearts and minds' that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease
– including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen
heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of
view, of course.
This mass murder led to the deaths of between 1.5 million and 3.8 million people,
according to the Washington Post. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were unleashed
during the entire
conflict in World War II . While this was going on, this same country was also
secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia, too, where there are over 80 million
unexploded bombs still killing people to this day.
This country also decided to bomb Yugoslavia ,
Panama
, and
Grenada before invading Iraq in the early 1990s. Having successfully bombed Iraqi
infrastructure, this country then punished Iraq's entire civilian population with brutal
sanctions. At the time, the U.N.
estimated that approximately 1.7 million Iraqis had died as a result, including
500,000 to 600,000 children . Some years later, a prominent medical journal attempted
to absolve the cause of this infamous history by refuting the statistics involved despite
the fact that, when interviewed during the sanctions-era, Bill Clinton's secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, intimated that to this rogue government, the
deaths of half a million children were "worth it" as the "price" Iraq needed to pay. In other
words, whether half a million children died or not was irrelevant to this bloodthirsty nation,
which barely blinked while carrying out this murderous policy.
This almighty superpower then invaded Iraq again in 2003 and plunged the entire region
into chaos . At the end of May 2017, the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)
released a study
concluding that the death toll from this violent nation's 2003 invasion of Iraq had led to over
one million deaths and that at least one-third of them were caused directly by the invading
force.
Not to mention this country also invaded Afghanistan prior to the invasion of Iraq (even
though the militants plaguing Afghanistan were
originally trained and financed by this warmongering nation). It then
went on to bomb Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and the
Philippines .
Libya famously
had one of the highest standards of living in the region. It had state-assisted healthcare,
education, transport, and affordable housing. It is now a lawless war-zone
rife with extremism where slaves are openly traded like commodities
amid the power vacuum created as a direct result of the 2011 invasion.
In 2017, the commander-in-chief of this violent nation took the monumental death and
destruction to a new a level by removing
the restrictions on delivering airstrikes, which resulted in thousands upon
thousands of civilian deaths. Before that, in the first six months of 2017, this country
dropped
over 20,650 bombs , a monumental increase from the year that preceded it.
Despite these statistics, all of the above conquests are mere child's play to this nation.
The real prize lies in some of the more defiant and more powerful states, which this country
has already unleashed a containment strategy upon. This country has deployed its own troops all
across the border
with Russia even though it promised in the early 1990s it
would do no such thing. It also has a specific policy of
containing Russia's close ally, China, all the while threatening China's borders with talks
of direct strikes on North Korea (again, remember it already did so in the 1950s).
This country also elected a president who not only believes it is okay to embrace this rampantly violent
militarism but who openly calls other
countries "shitholes" – the very same term that aptly describes the way this country
has treated the rest of the world for decades on end. This same president also reportedly once
asked three times in a meeting
, "If we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?" and shortly after proposed a policy to
remove the constraints protecting the world from his dangerous supply of advanced nuclear
weaponry.
If we have any empathy for humanity, it is clear that this country must be stopped. It
cannot continue to act like this to the detriment of the rest of the planet and the safety and
security of the rest of us. This country
openly talks about using its nuclear weapons, has used them before, and has continued to
use all manner of weapons unabated in the years since while threatening to expand the use of
these weapons to other countries.
Seriously, if North Korea seems like a threat, imagine how the rest of the world feels while
watching one country violently take on the rest of the planet single-handedly, leaving nothing
but destruction in its wake and promising nothing less than a nuclear holocaust in the years to
come.
There is only one country that has done and that continues to do the very things North Korea
is being accused of doing.
Take as much time as you need for that to resonate.
1 The Korean War ends (1953
2 President Kennedy invades South Vietnam (1962)
3 The US overthrows Allende in Chile (1973)
4 The West installs Iranian dictator the Shah (1953)
5 The US-led Iraq invasion (2003)
Many honorable mentions including:
– NATO bombing of Serbia
– Libya
– Afghanistan
– Syria (support of ISIS and its predecessors and spinoffs)
The US body count is simply staggering – many millions killed, millions more wounded
or poisoned (Vietnam – agent orange and other chemical agents) and tens of millions of
lives forever damaged.
USA! USA! USA! (its elites that rule us of course!)
"... In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam. ..."
"... The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers ..."
"... Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this." ..."
"... Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941. ..."
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its
"exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its
lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was
burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in
Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported
our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed
perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More
than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have
taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right
from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of
fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags"
that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident"
in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official
documents, notably the Pentagon Papers , which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be
for many Americans ! it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps,
unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
... ... ...
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987
Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche
Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is
increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst
mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev
and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training
ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this."
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders' "revolution" in
last year's presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of
America's violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like
Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record,
including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected
government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's
western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
"... While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation". ..."
"... Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'ιtat against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ? ..."
"... Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place. ..."
While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and
liberation".
I hate how America exploit the weak. president moon should offer an olive branch to fatty Kim by sending back the
thaad to America and pulling out American base and troops. he should convince fatty Kim that should he really like to proliferate
his nuclear missile development as deterrence, aim it only to America and America only. there is no need for Koreans to kill fellow
Koreans.
Very good idea, after having pushed Ukraine and Georgia to a war lost in advance, lets hope US will abandon South Korea and
Japan because they were helpless in demilitarizing one of the poorest countries in the world....
Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia?
Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'ιtat against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life
isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say
farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining
ground btw. Ask yourself why ?
In this person's opinion, the article raises a good point with regards to US defense subsidies. However, its examples are dissimilar.
Japan spends approximately 1% of its GDP on defense; South Korea spends roughly 2.5% of its GDP defense.
In fact, it seems to this person that a better example of US Defense Welfare would be direct subsidies granted to the state
of Israel.
"... Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies professor from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team created an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014. ..."
"... " Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions. ..."
Tyler Durden
Aug 26, 2017 9:15 PM 0
SHARES
US has had a military presence across the world
, from almost day one of its independence.
For those who have ever wanted a clearer picture of the true reach of the United States
military - both historically and currently - but shied away due to the sheer volume of research
required to find an answer,
The Anti Media points out
that
a crew at the
Independent
just made things a whole lot simpler.
Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies
professor
from Evergreen State College in
Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team
created
an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from
Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014.
To avoid confusion, indy100 laid out its prerequisites for what constitutes an invasion:
" Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US
intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military
support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions.
But indy100 didn't stop there.
To put all that history into context, using
data
from the Department
of Defense (DOD), the team also put together a map to display all the countries in which nearly
200,000 active members of the U.S. military are now stationed.
"... As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits? ..."
As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the
end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits?
You start by assuming that the absence of war is the ultimate good, but none can say what a world without war would be like,
or how long it would last.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace
Has the world seen moral progress? The answer should not depend on whether one has a sunny or a morose temperament. Everyone
agrees that life is better than death, health better than sickness, prosperity better than privation, freedom better than tyranny,
peace better than war. All of these can be measured, and the results plotted over time. If they go up, that's progress.
For John Gray, this is a big problem. As a part of his campaign against reason, science and Enlightenment humanism, he insists
that the strivings of humanity over the centuries have left us no better off. This dyspepsia was hard enough to sustain when
Gray first expressed it in the teeth of obvious counterexamples such as the abolition of human sacrifice, chattel slavery and
public torture-executions. But as scholars have increasingly measured human flourishing, they have found that Gray is not just
wrong but howlingly, flat-earth, couldn't-be-more-wrong wrong. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty
and despotism, a steadily growing proportion of humankind is surviving infancy and childbirth, going to school, voting in democracies,
living free of disease, enjoying the necessities of modern life and surviving to old age.
And more people are living in peace. In the 1980s several military scholars noticed to their astonishment that the most
destructive form of armed conflict wars among great powers and developed states had effectively ceased to exist. At the
time this "long peace" could have been dismissed as a random lull, but it has held firm for an additional three decades.
In my opinion Gray, though wrong that violence is not decreasing, is onto something about the future being bleak because of
the rise of meliorist assumptions, because perpetual peace will be humanity's tomb.
While many suggest a danger for our world along the lines of
Brian Cox's explanation for the Fermi Paradox (ie intelligent life forms cross grainedly bring on self-annihilation through
unlimited war) I take a different view.
Given that Pinker appears substantially correct that serious war (ie wars among great powers and developed states) have effectively
ceased to exist, the trend is for peace and cooperation. Martin Nowak in his book The Supercoperators shows cooperation, not fighting,
to be the defining human trait (and indeed the most cooperative groups won their wars in history, whereby nation states
such the US are the result of not just individuals but familial tribal regional , and virtually continental groupings coming together
for mutual advantage and defence .
The future is going to be global integration pursuit of economic objectives, and I think this exponential moral progress bill
begat technological advances beyond imagining.. An escape from the war trap is almost complete and the Singularity becomes. The
most likely culprit in the paradox is a technological black hole event horizon created by unlimited peace and progress.
Cross-grained though it may be to say that the good war hallows every cause, I think it not so bad in comparison with the alternative.
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are
part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from
the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but
can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and
he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and
integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy
of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor
and messianic in its language.
The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of
globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that
globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization
could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap,
may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global
depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking
the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.
The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle
yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States
and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals
cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in
North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood
of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows
all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because
global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had
no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life
are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing
globalization.
After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next
places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells
us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of
such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation
of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the
actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation
of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this
rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S.
now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end
international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle
East), but a condition (disconnectedness).
Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it
occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs.
individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states
or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with
evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many
government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."
Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything
else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not
likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea,
Syria or Iran.
Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization
as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies
and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly
discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future,
system-wide dangers to globalization.
At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore
never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited
some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by
claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard
wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem,"
yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion
that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.
Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like
links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon
its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there
is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand
strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory
is built.
What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely
as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying
that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are)
the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination
of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global
insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are,
leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance
on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.
Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in
the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian
states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."
Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies
worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world
is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics
claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should
have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes
the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put
in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen
18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael
Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting
economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction
strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security
in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims
that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?
Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?
Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned
us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too
many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid
overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the
ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history
as Barnett councils; heed it.
Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet.
Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the
U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America
needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and
leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly
debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride.
Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.
I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend
it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the
military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.
It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the
New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.
I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization,
which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely.
Neither is guaranteed.
I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well
argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire
gets its hands on.
For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama
(but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse
and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender
war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing
"The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking
and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.
"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate
name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.
Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful,
guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets
---- quite yet!
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding
wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem,
or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or ....
ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.
"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but
a Global Empire only posing as your former country."
"... Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003. ..."
"... If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents. ..."
People who seem to think that Trump's generals will somehow go along and support his original vision are sadly mistaken.
Since 2003, Israel has had an increasingly strong hand in the vetting who gets promoted to upper positions in the American
armed forces. All of the generals Trump has at his side went through a vetting procedure which definitely involved a very close
look at their opinions about Israel.
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened
in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003.
Officers who openly oppose the dictates of the Israel Lobby will see their prospects for advancement simply vanish like a whiff
of smoke.. Those who support Israel's machinations are rewarded with promotions, the more fervent the support the more rapid the
promotion especially if this knowledge is made known to their congressman or senator..
Generals who support Israel already know that this support will be heavily rewarded after their retirements by being given
lucrative six figure positions on company boards of directors or positions in equally lucrative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institution or the Hoover Institute. They will receive hefty speaking fees. as well. They learned early that their
retirements could be truly glorious if they only "went" along with The Lobby. They will be able to then live the good life in
expensive places like Washington, New York or San Francisco, often invited to glitzy parties with unlimited amount of free prawns
"the size of your hand".
On the other hand, upper officers who somehow get then get "bad" reputations for their negative views about Israel ( like Karen
U. Kwiatkowski for instance) will end up, once retired, having to depend on just their often scanty pensions This requires getting
an often demeaning second jobs to get by in some place where "their dollar goes further". No bright lights in big cities for them.
No speaking fees, no college jobs. Once their fate becomes known, their still active duty contemporaries suddenly decide to "go
along".
If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years
ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents.
Face it, we live in a country under occupation by a hostile power that we willingly pay large amounts monetary tribute to.
Our government does whatever benefits Israel regardless of how negatively this effects the USA. We are increasing troop strength
in Afghanistan because, somehow, this benefits Israel. If our presence in Afghanistan (or the Mideast in general) didn't benefit
Israel, our troops would simply not be there.
Well put. These people are like the "nobles" of medieval times. They care not a whit about the "peasants" they trample. They
are wealth bigots, compounded by some ethnic bigotry or other, in this case Jewish supremacism. America has an oligarchy problem.
At the center of that oligarchy is a Jewish mafia controlling the banks, and thereby the big corporations, and thereby the media
and the government. This oligarchy sees America as a big, dumb military machine that it can manipulate to generate war profits.
"... There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris. ..."
The Russians were there in Yugoslavia but they were not following NATO's script. There was an incident where Russian forces
took control of a key airport to the total surprise of NATO. The US overall commander ordered the UK to go in and kick the Russians
out. The UK ground commander wisely said he was not prepared to start WW III over Russian control of an airfield.
There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion
of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was
removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess
this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris.
According to some commenters at MoA the US neocons can be viewed as a flavor of political psychopaths: "Linear thinking is precisely
how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation.
It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking
because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates
think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone
straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced
and banished from the Washington tribe."
and " the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath
manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops
in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things
to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create
our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single
time. "
Notable quotes:
"... Provided the gross flaws of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying. ..."
"... Barack CIA 0bama. ..."
"... It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. ..."
"... Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit? ..."
"... Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives. ..."
"... you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals? ..."
"... it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion. ..."
"... the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him. ..."
"... Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP. ..."
"... There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade. ..."
"... My only gripe with his work is that he always describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc. ..."
"... Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe. ..."
"... the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told, break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed. ..."
"... Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but who cares, the cash keeps flowing. ..."
"... It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end - but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that. ..."
"... Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them! ..."
"... Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic damage. ..."
"... America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road to destruction. ..."
"... the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single time. ..."
"... The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization is the embodiment of that propaganda. ..."
"... The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored. The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated. The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story. ..."
"... Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is often quite noticeable in comments at SST. ..."
"... The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality. The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane. If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it. ..."
"linear"?, I would say amateurish and often stupid! It seems that the USA cannot see far enough as it's submitted to regime changes
every 5 years and decisions are finally left to powerful lobbies that have a better continuity.
Provided the gross flaws
of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive
universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying.
"Linear" and all that is the mushy feel-good stuff on top of your arrogance. Kleptocracy only NOW putting down its roots? Come
on. Let's get back to the 90's where it started. Vengeance for 9/11? Cover?
It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. All's well in the world with
them as long as the USSA is grinding away on some near helpless ME country. Drugs and other natural resources flow from and death
and destruction flow to the unsuspecting Muslim targets.
With America, you're our friend, (or at least we tolerate you) until you're not (or we don't), then God help you and your innocent
hoards.
The organized and well scripted chaos has been just one act in the larger play of destroying western civilization with throngs
of Muslims now flooding western Europe and to a lesser degree, USA. Of course, the Deep State had felt confident in allowing Latinos
to destroy America...Trump has put a large crimp in the pipeline--one of the reasons he is hated so badly by the destructive PTB.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
It is entirely possible that the underlying objective of, for instance, invading Iraq was to win a war and bring democracy.
Subsequent behaviour in Iraq (and Afghanistan) indicates that there might be (likely is) a hidden but central other objective.
I do not want to state that I know what that is because I am not "in the know". However, much that you attribute to failure from
linear thinking just as easily can be explained by the complexity of realizing a "hidden agenda".
Perhaps we can learn from history. Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a
game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power
and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having
sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit?
Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted
by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as
partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make
them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives.
Russia learnt a huge lesson from their experience in Afghanistan. There they retreated in the face of a violent Wahabist insurgency
and paid the price. The Soviet union collapsed and became vulnerable to western free-market gangsterism as well as suffering the
blowback of terrorism in Chechnya, where they decided to play it very differently. A bit more like how Assad senior dealt with
the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980's.
Russia knew that if ISIS and friends were allowed to destroy Syria like the Mujahadeen
had done in Afghanistan, then it would only be a matter of time before blowback would come again to Russia.
Russia's involvement is entirely rational and in their national interest. It should never have come as a surprise to the US,
and the US should shake off their cold war propaganda and be grateful that people are willing to put their lives on the line to
defeat Wahabist terrorism. Russia has played a focused line with integrity. Many Syrians love them for this, and many more in
the Middle East will likewise adopt a similar line.
In other words, the linear mindset blocks out all non-conforming realities in the present and those contingent elements
which might arise in the future
you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals?
i kinda skimmed this piece, but it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy
without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion.
Brenner: Washington never really had a plan in Syria.
Really? Firstly, the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on
a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the
strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him.
Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in
this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities
has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic
to Al Qaeda.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January [2007], Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said
that there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East," separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the Sunni
states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that divide."
Lastly, Brenner's complaint that Obama has been "scape-goated" as having created ISIS conveniently ignores Obama's allowing ISIS
to grow by down-playing the threat that it represented. Obama's called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" and senior intelligence analysts
dutifully distorted intelligence to down-play the threat (see below). This was one of many deceptions that Obama took part in
- if not orchestrated (others: "moderate rebels", Benghazi, the "Fiscal Cliff", bank bailouts).
After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States
Central Command's most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command's intelligence products to downplay the threat from
ISIS in Iraq" . . .
The Joint Task Force can find no justifiable reason why operational reporting was repeatedly used as a rationale to change
the analytic product, particularly when the changes only appeared to be made in a more optimistic direction . . .
There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade.
Russia has also benefited through the non-linear analysis of US diplomacy failures of the last two decades. Russia has created
a coalition backing up their military entry into the Middle East that allows achievement of tangible objectives at a sustainable
cost.
But b's article is about the US's dismal diplomacy that is exacerbating its rapid empire decline and it does very well to help
explain the rigid lack of thought that hastens the deterioration of US influence.
This article makes a lot of good points, but I didn't really grasp exactly what "linear" thinking is. OK. Venezuela very well
may be turning into a situation. What is the "linear" approach? What, instead, would be the "non-linear" approach? This article
cites many "linear" failures. It would be helpful also to learn of some non-linear successes. If not by the United States then
by somebody else.
Let me clarify my prior posting. This article seems to be asserting that the United States has attempted to pound the square peg
of its policy objectives into the round hole of the Middle East. I pretty much agree with that idea. But how is this "linear,"
as opposed to "bull-headed"? How does being "non-linear" help with the pounding? Would not adapting our policies to pound a round
peg instead be just as "linear" but more clever?
Thanks for posting these great observations by Michael Brenner, b.
The link to his bio on University of Pitsburg site is broken and the page is gone, but it still exists for now in Google's
cache from Aug. 1st
here . His bio can also be found under this ">https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-common-man-forgotten-by-elites/">this
article from The Globalist
Everything I've read of Dr. Brenner that I've stumbled across is brilliant. My only gripe with his work is that he always
describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never
goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy
infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc.
While he is quite accurate in describing the symptoms, one is left with the impression that they are the things to be
fixed. Linear thinking in a U.S. foreign policy of aggression? Absolutely, but it's pointless to 'fix' that without understanding
the cause.
Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population
for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money,
guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear
thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters
will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels
that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe.
Does anyone in Washington REALLY want to 'save' the Persians and 'rebuild' Iran as they imagine America did post WWII to German
and Japan? Or is the more overriding intent to punish and destroy a leadership that will not submit to the political and commercial
interests in the US? Of course the U.S. fails to deliver any benefits to the 'little people' after destroying their country and
government - they are incapable of understanding what the 'little people' want (same goes for domestic issues in the U.S.).
The U.S. government and leadership do not need lessons to modify their techniques or 'thinking' - they are incapable of doing
so. You can't 'talk a psychopath into having empathy' any more than you can talk them out of having smallpox. 'The law' and voting
were intentionally broken in the U.S. to make them all but useless to fix Washington, yet a zombified American public will continue
to use the religiously (or sit back and watch others use them religiously) with little result. Because we're a democracy and a
nation of laws - the government will fix anything broken with those tools.
In a certain sense, I'm glad Brennan does NOT go on about psychopathy in his articles. He would sound as tedious and nutty
as I do here and would never be allowed near Washington. I'll just be grateful for his thorough illustration of the symptoms for
now.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
First, this is more an analysis of military failure to "do the job" that Washington "strategic thinkers" tell them to do, and
the reasons why it's such a futile game. In our system of government, the military does tactics, not strategy. And the above article,
which should be passed out to every politician in this country, isn't really about "the objective".
For example, the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors
and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected
strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told,
break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency
gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever
dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed.
Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from
reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and
breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers
and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling
arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to
keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but
who cares, the cash keeps flowing.
And if you want to know why the Borg State got firmly behind Hillary Clinton, it's because they could see her supporting this
agenda wholeheartedly, especially after Libya. Here's a comment she wrote to Podesta on 2014-08-19, a long 'strategy piece' ending
with this note:
Note: It is important to keep in mind that as a result of this policy there probably will be concern in the Sunni regions of
Iraq and the Central Government regarding the possible expansion of KRG controlled territory. With advisors in the Peshmerga
command we can reassure the concerned parties that, in return for increase autonomy, the KRG will not exclude the Iraqi Government
from participation in the management of the oil fields around Kirkuk, and the Mosel Dam hydroelectric facility. At the same
time we will be able to work with the Peshmerga as they pursue ISIL into disputed areas of Eastern Syria, coordinating with
FSA troops who can move against ISIL from the North. This will make certain Basher al Assad does not gain an advantage from
these operations. Finally, as it now appears the U.S. is considering a plan to offer contractors as advisors to the Iraqi Ministry
of Defense, we will be in a position to coordinate more effectively between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.
It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end
- but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation
between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead
on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that.
Regardless, it looks like end times for the American empire, very similar to how the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s, and
the last days of the French and British empires in the 1950s. And good riddance, it's become a dead weight dragging down the standard
of living for most American citizens who aren't on that gravy train.
Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems
is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power
to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such
a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them!
Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there
are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such
policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic
damage.
America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down
on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on
committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that
raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road
to destruction.
There's a lot in both this piece and the comments. In a sense, I wonder if the core issue behind the Neocon/Imperial mindset isn't
a complete inability to see the other side's point of view. Psychopathy, short-termism (a common fault in businesspeople), divorce
from reality and hubris are likely a good part of it, as somebody, Paveway IV, Makutwa and nonsense factory put it, but the
Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to
fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the
troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way
of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly,
that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to
disaster every single time.
I would paraphrase critics of b that he (she?) has fallen into linearity trap: one point is the resources spent by USA on wars
of 21-st century (a lot), the second points are positive results (hardly any), and an intellectual charge proceeds from A to B.
However between A and B there can be diversity of problems. We can stock enough gasoline, run out of potable water. And indeed,
you can encounter pesky terrain. I recall a family vacation trip where we visited Natural Bridges National Monument and we proceeded
to Arizona on an extremely straight highway through pretty flat plateau. Then the pavement end, and the acrophobic designated
driver has to negotiate several 180* hairpins to get down on a cliff flanking Monument Valley. After second inspection, the map
had tiny letters "switchbacks" and a tiny fragment of the road not marked with the pavement. Still better than discovering "bridge
out" annotation on your map only when you gaze at the water flowing between two bridge heads. (If I recall, during late 20-th
century Balkan intervention, US military needed a lot of time to cross Danube river that unexpectedly had no functioning bridge
where they wanted to operate. Landscape changes during a war.)
That said, military usually has an appreciation for terrain. But there are also humans. On domestic side, the number of experts
on those distant societies is small, and qualified experts, minuscule. Because the qualified ones were disproportionally naysayers,
the mere whiff if expertise was treated as treason, and we had a purge of "Arabists". And it was of course worse in the lands
to charm and conquer. Effective rule requires local hands to follow our wishes, people who can be trusted. And, preferably, not
intensely hated by the locals they are supposed to administer. And like with gasoline, water, food, etc. on a vacation trip (who
forgot mosquito repellent!), the list of needed traits is surprisingly long. Like viewing collaboration with Israel supporting
infidels as a mortal sin that can be perpetrated to spare the family from starvation (you can recruit them, success!), but it
has to be atoned through backstabbing (local cadres are disappointing).
Great analysis! This is an excellent example for why I read MOA at least once a day and most of the comments! There's something
of a sad irony that Trump has made at least some kind of effort to thwart the neocons and their relentless rush toward armageddon,
seeing as how lacking in any real intellectual capcity they all seem and with Trump at the helm?
Mostly tptb, our political class, and the pundits for the masses, seem all to exhibit an astonishingly dull witted lack of
true concern or humanity for anybody anywhere, and in my years on earth so far, at least in America, they have inculcated in the
population very dubious ethical chioces, which you would think were tragic, and decisions, which you would believe were doomed,
from the wars being waged, to the lifestyles of the citizenry especially toward the top of the economic ladder, and I don't know
about others here but I for one have been confronting and dealing with these problems both in family and aquaintances for my entire
adult life! Like the battle at Kurushetra. At least they say they "have a plan," scoffingly.
Where is chipnik to weigh in on this with his poetic observations, or I think long ago it was "slthrop" who may have been bannned
for foul language as he or she raged on at the absurdities that keep heaping up exponentially? I do miss them!
Oh well, life is relatively short and we will all be gone at some point and our presense here will be one and all less than
an iota. An awareness of this one fact and its implications you would think would pierce the consciousness of every human being
well before drawing their final breath, but I guess every McCain fails to realize until too late that the jig is up?
Justin Glyn@20 "but the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda."
The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate
their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression.
Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession
with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization
is the embodiment of that propaganda.
The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing
Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored.
The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated.
The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story.
Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in
US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is
often quite noticeable in comments at SST.
That it why the US in its arrogance has failed in Syria, and Russia with its tiny force has been so successful.
The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality.
The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such
a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The
country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial
designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading
to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually
incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like
John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane.
If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime
change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to
decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it.
"... A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it. ..."
"... My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us. ..."
"... Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again. ..."
Consider this article a work of speculation; a jumble of ideas thrown at a blank canvas.
A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating,
if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature,
is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to
teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it;
of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it.
For example, America's overseas wars today are both abstractions and distractions. They're also somewhat surreal to most Americans,
living as we do in comparative safety and material luxury (when compared to most other peoples of the world). Abstraction and surrealism:
two art styles that may say something vital about America's wars.
If some aspects of America's wars are surreal and others abstract, if reports of those wars are often impressionistic and often
blurred beyond recognition, this points to, I think, the highly stylized representations of war that are submitted for our consideration.
What we don't get very often is realism. Recall how the Bush/Cheney administration forbade photos of flag-draped coffins returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of all the war reporting you've seen on U.S. TV and Cable networks, and ask how many times you saw
severed American limbs and dead bodies on a battlefield. (On occasion, dead bodies of the enemy are shown, usually briefly and abstractly,
with no human backstory.)
Of course, there's no "real" way to showcase the brutal reality of war, short of bringing a person to the front and having them
face fire in combat -- a level of "participatory" art that sane people would likely seek to avoid. What we get, as spectators (which
is what we're told to remain in America), is an impression of combat. Here and there, a surreal report. An abstract news clip. Blown
up buildings become exercises in neo-Cubism; melted buildings and weapons become Daliesque displays. Severed limbs (of the enemy)
are exercises in the grotesque. For the vast majority of Americans, what's lacking is raw immediacy and gut-wrenching reality.
Again, we are spectators, not participants. And our responses are often as stylized and limited as the representations are. As
Rebecca Gordon put it from a different angle at
TomDispatch.com , when it comes to America's wars, are we participating in reality or merely watching reality TV? And why are
so many so prone to confuse or conflate the two?
Art, of course, isn't the only lens through which we can see and interpret America's wars. Advertising, especially hyperbole,
is also quite revealing. Thus the US military has been sold, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama, as "the world's finest military
in history" or WFMH, an acronym I just made up, and which should perhaps come with a copyright or trademark symbol after it. It's
classic advertising hyperbole. It's salesmanship in place of reality.
So, when other peoples beat our WFMH, we should do what Americans do best: sue them for copyright infringement. Our legions of
lawyers will most certainly beat their cadres of counsels. After all, under Bush/Cheney, our lawyers tortured logic and the law to
support torture itself. Talk about surrealism!
My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least
in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the
ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us.
As I said, this is me throwing ideas at the canvas of my computer screen. Do they make any sense to you? Feel free to pick up
your own brush and compose away in the comments section.
P.S. Danger, Will Robinson. I've never taken an art theory class or studied advertising closely.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools
and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at
[email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing
Views with the author's permission.
Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a
Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again.
"... It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. ..."
"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has two big pronouncements as the Trump administration starts reshaping
the government: "The United States of America is truly an exceptional country," and "it is clear that something is wrong."
Dimon, leader of world's most valuable bank and a counselor to the new president, used his 45-page annual letter to shareholders
on Tuesday to list ways America is stronger than ever -- before jumping into a much longer list of self-inflicted problems that
he said was "upsetting" to write.
Here's the start: Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has dumped trillions of dollars into wars, piled huge debt onto students,
forced legions of foreigners to leave after getting advanced degrees, driven millions of Americans out of the workplace with felonies
for sometimes minor offenses and hobbled the housing market with hastily crafted layers of rules.
Dimon, who sits on Donald Trump's business forum aimed at boosting job growth, is renowned for his optimism and has been voicing
support this year for parts of the president's business agenda. In February, Dimon predicted the U.S. would have a bright economic
future if the new administration carries out plans to overhaul taxes, rein in rules and boost infrastructure investment. In an
interview last month, he credited Trump with boosting consumer and business confidence in growth, and reawakening "animal spirits."
But on Tuesday, reasons for concern kept coming. Labor market participation is low, Dimon wrote. Inner-city schools are failing
poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure planning and spending
is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous it's driving capital
and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive.
" It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and
governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free
enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. "...
"Inner-city schools are failing poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure
planning and spending is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous
it's driving capital and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive."
Let's unpack his list. The 4th (last) sentence is his hope that his bank can back to the unregulated regime that brought us
the Great Recession. His 3rd sentence is a call for more tax cuts for the rich.
We may like his first 2 sentences here but who is going to pay for this? Not Jamie Dimon. See sentence #3.
Why would you object to government creating more demand for labor? Over time, wages will rise and higher wages will fund more
demand for labor produced goods.
"... As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror" into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice. ..."
Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize -- for not being George W. Bush. This seemed unseemly at the time, but not outrageous.
Seven years later, it seems grotesque.
As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror"
into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY
(Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS
(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is
In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the
Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy)
at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Illusion (AK Press).
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' Franηois Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolαs Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chαvez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chαvez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolαs Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chαvez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon,Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive
was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
"... Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria, which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse to impose sanctions. ..."
"... Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S., which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk. ..."
"... Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been pioneering anti-sanction measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity. ..."
Washington's Proposed New Sanctions Against Turkey also Aimed Against Russia
December 18, 2019 A Opinion Leave a commentWith the world fixated on Turkish actions
against Syria, Greece and Libya at the moment, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate
of the United States Congress approved a bill, "Promoting American National Security and
Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," spearheaded and thoroughly promoted by staunch
anti-Syria/Venezuela/Iran/Russia Democratic Senator Robert Menendez who celebrated the bills
passing
on his Twitter . The Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 18-4 to send
the bill for a vote in the full Senate.
The approval of the bill was widely reported in the mainstream media as an "anti-Turkey
bill." Senator Jim Risch, the panel's Republican chairman, a fellow endorser of the bill with
Menendez, said that the approval of this bill is because of the "drift by this country, Turkey,
to go in an entirely different direction than what they have in the past. They've thumbed their
nose at us, and they've thumbed their nose at their other NATO allies."
According to
the draft bill , the Turkish acquisition of the powerful S-400 missile defense system gives
grounds to impose sanctions against this country, under the Countering America's Adversaries
Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In particular, the document restricts the sale of U.S. weapons
to Turkey and imposes sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for supplying weapons towards
their
illegal military operation in Syria.
Turkey signed in December 2017 the first contract with Russia for the purchase of the S-400
for a value of $2.5 billion, which caused tension in relations between Ankara and Washington.
The U.S. demanded that Ankara renounce that transaction and buy U.S. Patriot systems, and
threatened to delay or cancel the sale of the F-35 fighters to Turkey. Ankara refused to make
concessions and assured that its purpose of acquiring Russian systems remains firm.
What was missed, perhaps intentionally by the majority of the mainstream media is that this
bill has a heavy anti-Russian/Syrian component to it. Although not as detailed and expansive as
the Turkish section of the bill, it claims that "the Russian Federation and Iran continue to
exploit a security vacuum in Syria and continue to pose a threat to vital United States
national security interests," without explaining what these security interests are, exactly as
we have become accustomed to.
According to the bill, there will be a
"list of each Russian person that, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly exports,
transfers, or otherwise provides to Syria significant financial, material, or technological
support that contributes materially to the ability of the Government of Syria to acquire
defense articles, defense services, and related information."
Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that
there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria,
which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list
will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United
States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the
same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse
to impose sanctions.
These proposed new sanctions that will have to pass the House of Representatives, which
passed its own anti-Turkish sanctions bill by an overwhelming 403-16 vote in October, is part
of a wider effort for the U.S. to keep pressurizing Russia's economy. On December 9, the
committees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress previously agreed on the military budget for
2020, which includes restrictions against the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream pipelines to bring
Russian energy to Europe, infrastructures designed to raise Europe's energy security. The U.S.
bill that provides sanctions against companies participating in the laying of the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline aims to obtain unilateral advantages in the gas area to the detriment of the
interests of the countries of Europe. This prompted the chairman of the Board of Directors of
the Russian-German Foreign Chamber of Commerce, Matthias Schepp, to explain that the new
measures against Nord Stream 2 affect not only Russia, but, above all, European companies and
Germany's energy interests.
Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S.,
which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky
measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed
by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk.
Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS
Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS
terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or
Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this
will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been
pioneering anti-sanction
measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a
Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity.
"... One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries: ..."
"... The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare. ..."
"... The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. ..."
"... When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else. ..."
One of the most revealing and absurd responses to
rejections of forever war
is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:
Just like @POTUS , who put a limited op of NE
#Syria under heading of "endless
war," this op-ed has "drone strikes & Special Ops raids" in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war.
Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw
War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other
than "real war." We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts
have started rejecting endless war, the war's
defenders have often
chosen to
pretend
that the U.S. isn't at war at all. The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is
a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and
Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare.
Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently
given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed "realism" and "restraint." Insofar as
he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those
terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will
be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because
of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.
The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been
going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they
came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the
Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't
engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for
redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't
engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that
gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment
of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something
else.
It isn't just physical war that results in active service body bags but our aggression has alreay cost lives on the home front
and there is every reason to believe it will do so again.
We were not isolationists prior to 9/11/2001, Al Qaeda had already attacked but we were distracted bombing Serbia, expanding
NATO, and trying to connect Al Qaeda attacks to Iran. We were just attacked by a Saudi officer we were training on our soil to
use the Saudis against Iran.
It remains to be seen what our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and our continued use of Afghanistan
as a bombing platform will cost us. We think we are being clever by using our Treasury Dept and low intensity warfare to minimize
direct immediate casualties but how long can that last.
This article confirms what the last Real Commander-in-Chief, General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about when he retired
58 years ago.
His wise Council based on his Supreme Military-Political experience has been ignored.
The MSM, Propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex, won't remind the American People.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could,
with time and as required, make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on
military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total
influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The psychological contortionism required to deny that we are at war amazes me. US military forces are killing people in other
countries – but it's not war? Because we can manufacture comforting euphemisms like "police action" or "preventive action" or
"drone strike," it's not war? Because it's smaller scale than a "real" war like WWII?
Cancer is cancer. A small cancer is still a cancer. Arguing that it's not cancer because it's not metastatic stage IV is, well,
the most polite term is sophistry. More accurate terms aren't printable.
Jewish financists are no longer Jewish, much like a socialist who became minister is no
longer a socialist minister. Unregulated finance promotes a set of destructive behaviors which
has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity.
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they're doing is not illegal, but it should be (in my
opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for Icahn,
Soros etc. Still Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his
co-ethnics in this multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don't behave that
way.
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature
is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their
activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities.
Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how
they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I
want us to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background
of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable
origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by,
and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of
each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management
-- Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
Cerberus -- Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub,
Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman
Baupost Group -- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua
Friedman, Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
GoldenTree Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management --
Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce
Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb,
Jonathan Stern Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level
of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory
of Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more
than
$74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was
owed to
all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal
austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island
in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This
provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering
from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in
several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in
late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of
money to your friends on Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's
statement, like all of Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of
the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the
president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt
problem." In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass
evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers
are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil
promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to
socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing
no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial
predators is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the
Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On
its most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews
that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1] S. Baron
(ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7. The activities of the
Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in
usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and
when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets,
bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United
States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our
political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in
2016. He's given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's
rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate
than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh
yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by
hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American
Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a
commentary on Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May
2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued,
"They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing
press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The
productive efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics
who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately
believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places
himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned
about." That's because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to
socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property.
This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free
enterprise Jews learn about -- as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely
to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority
of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be
discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and
regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's
Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated
island for bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much
aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational
damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists,
investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies
(Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who -- in addition to having worked directly
with Baupost -- seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship with a
firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about
Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought
better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back
(apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in
important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to
get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer
and has clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person
standing right in front of him -- literally, standing right in front of him -- while I rudely
insisted on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by
Klarman under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health
provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his "
areas of
focus " which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community
and Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman
and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and
access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest,
are the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the
Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting
pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also
contributes to candidates
who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,
has said "The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I
work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has
commented :
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing
an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians
and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls,
and utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling
loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly
purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at
the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university,
comments : "The
aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn
recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital,
owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to
leave the house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like
the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the
largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also
connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was
the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in
2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S.
policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from
Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the
Senate's most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a
"retaliatory strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These
exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are
lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put
it, "These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at
the heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of
regurgitated profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are
now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a
vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move
onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt
support of "free enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture
capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
An application of "chutzpah" to business, if you will -- the gall to break social
conventions to get what you want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle
your way in at the joints of social norms and conventions -- not illegal, but selfish and
rude.
Krav Maga applies the same concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the
things that every other martial art forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In
other sports this is considered "low" and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for
Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of
the drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence'
and similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of
Jerusalem -- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
@anon'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and highly
uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think
myself the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff,
and the question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the
sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the
other direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises. The
capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is just
another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their products
and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street
players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running
each. It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government
of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina
Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott -- unlike most of the bonds' owners --
refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in
pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval
training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its
government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer's fund received $2.4 billion, almost
four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for
corruption.
@Lot
You give partial information which seem misleading and use arguments which are also weak and
not enlightening.
1- Even if its natural that unsafe bonds are sold, this doesn't justify the practices and
methods of those vulture fonds which buy those fonds which are socially damaging. I'm not
certain of the details because it's an old case and people should seek more information. Very
broadly, in the case of Argentina most funds accepted to make an agreement with the country
and reduce their demands. Investors have to accept risks and losses. Paul Singer bought some
financial papers for nothing at that time and forced Argentina to pay the whole price. For
years Argentina refused to pay, but with the help of New York courts and the new Argentinian
president they were forced to pay Singer. This was not conservative capitalism but
imperialism. You can only act like Singer if you have the backing of courts, of a government
which you control and of an army like the US army. A fast internet search for titles of
articles: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer's ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs,
suing governments and seizing their navy's ships". "How one hedge fund made $2 billion from
Argentina's economic colapse".
Andrew Sayer, professor in an English university, says in his book "Why we can't afford
the rich" that finances as they are practiced now may cost more than bring any value to a
society. It's a problem if some sectors of finances make outsized profits and use methods
which are more than questionable.
2- You say that if borrowers become more protected "lenders become more conservative,
investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments." I doubt this is true. In
the first place, risk investments by vulture fonds probably don't create any social value.
The original lenders who sold their bonds to such vulture fonds have anyway big or near total
losses in some cases and in spite of that they keep doing business. Why should we support
vulture fonds, what for? What positive function they play in society? In Germany, capitalism
was much more social in old days before a neoliberal wave forced Germany to change Rhine
capitalism. Local banks lended money to local business which they knew and which they had an
interest that they prosper. Larger banks lended money to big firms. Speculation like in
neoliberal capitalism wasn't needed.
3- The point which you didn't grasp is that there is a component of those business which
isn't publicly clear, the fact that they funcion along ethnic lines.
4- It would be easy to fix excesses of capitalism. The problem is that the people who
profit the most from the system also have the power to prevent any change.
@Robjil
This is an example of what I was saying. Less Euro whites in the world is not going to be a
good world for Big Js. Non-Euros believe in freedom of speech.
Jewish Bigwigs can't get control of businesses in East Asia. They have been trying. Paul
Singer tried and failed. In Argentina he got lots of "success". Why? Lots of descendants of
Europeans there went along with "decisions" laid out by New York Jews.
Little Paulie tried to get control of Samsung. No such luck for him in Korea. In Korea
there are many family monopolies, chaebols. A Korean chaebol stopped him. Jewish Daniel Loeb
tried to get a board seat on Sony. He was rebuffed.
I was moved to reflect on the universality of this theme recently when surveying media
coverage on Korean and Argentinian responses to the activities of Paul Singer and his
co-ethnic shareholders at Elliott Associates, an arm of Singer's Elliott Management hedge
fund. The Korean story has its origins in the efforts of Samsung's holding company, Cheil
Industries, to buy Samsung C&T, the engineering and construction arm of the wider
Samsung family of businesses. The move can be seen as part of an effort to reinforce
control of the conglomerate by the founding Lee family and its heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong.
Trouble emerged when Singer's company, which holds a 7.12% stake in Samsung C&T and is
itself attempting to expand its influence and control over Far East tech companies,
objected to the move. The story is fairly typical of Jewish difficulties in penetrating
business cultures in the Far East, where impenetrable family monopolies, known in Korea as
chaebols, are common. This new story reminded me very strongly of last year's efforts by
Jewish financier Daniel Loeb to obtain a board seat at Sony. Loeb was repeatedly rebuffed
by COO Kazuo Hirai, eventually selling his stake in Sony Corp. in frustration.
Here is how the Koreans fought off Paul Singer.
The predominantly Jewish-owned and operated Elliott Associates has a wealth of
self-interest in preventing the Lee family from consolidating its control over the Samsung
conglomerate. As racial outsiders, however, Singer's firm were forced into several tactical
measures in their 52-day attempt to thwart the merger. First came lawsuits. When those
failed, Singer and his associates then postured themselves as defending Korean interests,
starting a Korean-language website and arguing that their position was really just in aid
of helping domestic Korean shareholders. This variation on the familiar theme of Jewish
crypsis was quite unsuccessful. The Lee family went on the offensive immediately and,
unlike many Westerners, were not shy in drawing attention to the Jewish nature of Singer's
interference and the sordid and intensely parasitic nature of his fund's other
ventures.
Cartoons were drawn of Singer being a vulture.
Other cartoons appearing at the same time represented Elliott, literally, as humanoid
vultures, with captions referring to the well-known history of the fund. In the above
cartoon, the vulture offers assistance to a needy and destitute figure, but conceals an axe
with which to later bludgeon the unsuspecting pauper.
ADL got all worked about this. The Koreans did not care. It is reality. Freedom of speech
works on these vultures. The west should try some real freedom of speech.
After the cartoons appeared, Singer and other influential Jews, including Abraham
Foxman, cried anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact the cartoons contain no reference
whatsoever to Judaism – unless of course one defines savage economic predation as a
Jewish trait. Samsung denied the cartoons were anti-Semitic and took them off the website,
but the uproar over the cartoons only seemed to spur on even more discussion about Jewish
influence in South Korea than was previously the case. In a piece published a fortnight
ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless
and merciless." Last week, the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco, Park Jae-seon,
expressed his concern about the influence of Jews in finance when he said, "The scary thing
about Jews is they are grabbing the currency markets and financial investment companies.
Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination." The next day, cable news channel YTN
aired similar comments by local journalist Park Seong-ho, who stated on air that "it is a
fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are born." It goes
without saying that comments like these are unambiguously similar to complaints about
Jewish economic practices in Europe over the course of centuries. The only common
denominator between the context of fourteenth-century France and the context of
twenty-first-century South Korea is, you guessed it, Jewish economic practices.
The Koreans won. Paulie lost. Good win for humanity. The Argentines were not so lucky.
They don't have freedom speech like the Koreans and East Asians have.
In the end, the Lee strategy, based on drawing attention to the alien and exploitative
nature of Elliott Associates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder
vote on the Lee's planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said: "We should
score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the upper hand in a
looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from taking short-term
gains in the domestic market." When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a
conclusive 69.5% of Samsung shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving
Elliott licking its wounds and complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind
the merger.
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing
dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with
their own eyes.
Zion had the opportunity to go to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to
have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury,
as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.
The fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by
maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by
continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake.
Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language.
These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call
the practical country.
@Anon
"If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."
Is this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a
susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be
forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of
such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things
all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not
a big rotten cancer.
Lobelog ran some articles in Singer, Argentina, Iran Israel and the attorney from Argentina
who died mysteriously . Singer is a loan shark. Argentinian paid dearly .
Google search –
NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors – LobeLog
https://lobelog.com/tag/paul-singer/
Paul Singer NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors' Financial Conflict of Interest
by Eli Clifton On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took
The Right-Wing Americans Who Made a Doc About Argentina
https://lobelog.com/the-right-wing-americans-who-made-a-doc-about-argentina/
Oct 7, 2015 One might wonder why a movie about Argentina, in Spanish and . of Nisman's and
thought highly of the prosecutor's work, told LobeLog, FDD, for its part, has been an
outspoken critic of Kirchner but has From 2008 to 2011, Paul Singer was the group's
second-largest donor, contributing $3.6 million.
NYT Failed to Note Op-Ed Authors' Funder Has $2 Billion
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections,
killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to
see with their own eyes.
"The CIA was the central protagonist in Russiagate. The origins of the New Cold War are found
in Bill Clinton's first term, when administration neo-cons looted, plundered and moved NATO
against a prostrate Russia in
contradiction to explicit guarantees not to do so made by the George H.W. Bush
administration. Vladimir Putin's apparent crime was to oust the Clintonites from Russia and
restore Russian sovereignty." CounterPunch.org
"Russiagate was a declaration of war by the 'intelligence community' against a duly elected
President. As argued below, the CIA's motive is to move its own foreign policy agenda forward
without even the illusion of democratic consent." CounterPunch.org
Notable quotes:
"... Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the problem, never part of the solution. ..."
Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US
war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and
abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the
problem, never part of the solution.
Her long disturbing congressional record shows she exclusively serves wealth and power
interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans she disdains, proving it time and
again.
Her deplorable voting record speaks for itself, backing:
the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Blily Act repeal of Glass-Steagall, permitting some of the most
egregious financial abuses in the modern era;
the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), permitting endless
wars of aggression in multiple theaters, raging endlessly;
annual National Defense Authorization Acts and US wars of aggression;
Obama's neoliberal harshness, continuing under Trump, along with tax cuts for the rich,
benefitting her and her husband enormously, without admitting it;
increasingly unaffordable marketplace medicine, ripping off consumers for profit, leaving
millions uninsured, most Americans way underinsured;
the USA Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and other police state law;
the 9/11 whitewash Commission Recommendation Act;
the FISA Amendments Act -- permitting warrantless spying post-9/11, Big Brother watching
everyone;
NAFTA and other anti-consumer/corporate coup d'etat trade bills;
the repressive US gulag prison system, the world's largest by far; incarcerating
millions by federal, state, and local authorities, it includes global torture prisons;
unapologetic support for Israeli apartheid viciousness;
fierce opposition to Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and other
nonbelligerent sovereign states threatening no one;
the Russiagate witch hunt and Ukrainegate scams.
Calling exploitive/predatory "free market (capitalism) our greatest asset" shows her
contempt for equity and justice.
Her support for the military, industrial, security, media complex is all about backing
endless wars of aggression against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Pelosi represents what belligerent, plutocratic, oligarchic, increasingly totalitarian rule
is all about, notably contemptuous of nations on the US target list for regime change --
Russia, China and Iran topping the list.
On Friday, she falsely accused Russia of involvement in Ukrainegate, a failed Russiagate
scam spinoff with no legitimacy, supported by undemocratic Dems and their echo-chamber
media.
Repeating the long ago debunked Russian US election meddling Big Lie that won't die, she
falsely accused Moscow of "ha(ving) a hand in this."
Referring to the Ukrainegate scam, she offered no evidence backing her accusation because
none exists.
During a Friday press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York,
Sergey Lavrov slammed Pelosi's Big Lie, saying:
"Russia's been accused of all the deadly sins, and then some. It's paranoia, and I think
it's obvious to everyone."
It's unacceptable anti-Russia hate-mongering, what goes on endlessly, Cold War 2.0
raging.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following on her facebook
page:
"Speaker of the lower house of Congress Nancy Pelosi believes that Russia is involved in the
scandal over July telephone conversation between us and Ukraine Presidents Donald Trump and
Vladimir Zelensky."
"This (baseless) assumption was made on Friday Pelosi (not) explaining what it means, and
without providing evidence of her words."
"Considering that it was Nancy Pelosi who caused the 'Scandal around the telephone
conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine,' then, according to the
speaker's logic, Russia attached the hand to her."
What's going on is continuation of the most shameful political chapter in US history,
ongoing since Trump took office, along with railroading Richard Nixon.
Both episodes represent McCarthyism on steroids – supported by establishment media,
furious about Trump's triumph over Hillary, targeting him largely for the wrong reasons,
ignoring plenty of right ones.
Mueller's probe ended with a whimper, not the bang Dems wanted, Ukrainegate their second
bite of the apple to try discrediting Trump for political advantage ahead of November 2020
elections.
That's what Russiagate and Ukrainegate are all about.
These actions by undemocratic Dems and their media press agents are further clear proof that
Washington's deeply corrupted political system to its rotten core is far too debauched to
fix.
All pretense of our country being a representative democracy@snoopydawg
is gone. Our two party uniparty government has completely turned its back on serving
the needs of the vast majority of the people of this country, and of the wider world. Profit
sits at the head of our government. The monikers "Fascist" and "Totalitarian" are apt
descriptors of the direction of our current trajectory. A dystopian future surely awaits us on
this beautiful, fragile and life sustaining planet that we are trashing with such abandon.
Other than that, things are going quite nicely. Nancy is wearing her power pants and fools
are applauding.
"... In a previous post I have compared the Clintons and their followers to be the 21st Century's version of Typhoid Mary. Anybody who works with the Clinton's is invariably infected with corruption. ..."
Watching the House impeachment live on TV reminds me of what the 19th century writer,
historian and political observer Lord Acton said: "Never underestimate the influence of
stupidity on history." This exercise in political sado-masochism however, must traced back to
Hillary Clinton and the Clintonista hold on the Democratic Party. It began when Hillary
started crying sour grapes about her loss in the 2016 election.
In a previous post I have
compared the Clintons and their followers to be the 21st Century's version of Typhoid Mary.
Anybody who works with the Clinton's is invariably infected with corruption.
Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't
stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation
and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the
MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.
This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors
in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party
system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.
Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much
for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying
jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out
like a garbage.
"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept.
of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered
his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded
on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship;
3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.
Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially
instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984.
Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced
by Rachel Maddow show ;-)
Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will
be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.
One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are
bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar
think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's
famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last
refuge of scoundrels."
The Washington Post, through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has
published a long investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400
testimonies from American diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that
reports about Afghanistan were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the
ground.
After the tampering with and falsification of the report of the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we are witnessing another event that will certainly
discomfit those who have hitherto relied on the official reports of the Pentagon, the US State
Department and international organizations like the OPCW for the last word.
There are very deliberate reasons for such disinformation campaigns. In the case of the
OPCW, as I wrote some time back, the aim was to paint the Syrian government as the fiend and
the al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked "moderate rebels" as the innocent souls, thereby likely
justifying a responsibility-to-protect armed intervention by the likes of the US, the UK and
France. In such circumstances, the standing and status of the reporting organization (like the
OPCW) is commandeered to validate Western propaganda that is duly disseminated through the
corporate-controlled mainstream media.
In this particular case, various Western capitals colluded with the OPCW to lay the
groundwork for the removal of Assad and his replacement with the al-Nusra Front as well as the
very same al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked armed opposition officially responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
As if the massaging of the OPCW reports were not enough in themselves to provoke
international outrage, this dossier serves to give aid and comfort to jihadi groups supported
by the Pentagon who are known to be responsible for the worst human-rights abuses, as seen in
Syria and Iraq in the last 6 years.
False or carefully manipulated reports paint a picture vastly different from the reality on
the ground. The United States has never really declared war on Islamic terrorism, its
proclamations of a "War on Terror" notwithstanding. In reality, it has simply used this
justification to occupy or destabilize strategically important areas of the world in the
interests of maintaining US hegemony, intending in so doing to hobble the energy policies and
national security of rival countries like China, Iran and the Russian Federation.
The Post investigation lays bare how the US strategy had failed since its inception, the
data doctored to represent a reality very different from that on the ground. The inability of
the United States to clean up Afghanistan is blamed by the Post on incorrect military planning
and incorrect political choices. While this could certainly be the case, the Post's real
purpose in its investigation is to harm Trump, even as it reveals the Pentagon's efforts to
continue its regional presence for grand geopolitical goals by hiding inconvenient truths.
The real issue lies in the built-in mendacity of the bureaucratic and military apparatus of
the United States. No general has ever gone on TV to say that the US presence in Iraq is needed
to support any war against Iran; or that Afghanistan is a great point of entry for the
destabilization of Eurasia, because this very heart of the Heartland is crucial to the
Sino-Russian transcontinental integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and
the Belt and Road Initiative. In the same vein, the overthrow of the Syrian government would
have ensured Israel a greater capacity to expand its interests in the Middle East, as well as
to weaken Iran's main regional ally.
The Post investigation lays bare the hypocrisy of the military-industrial complex as well as
the prevailing political establishments of Europe and the United States. These parties are not
interested in human rights, the wellbeing of civilians or justice in general. Their only goal
is to try and maintain their global hegemony indefinitely by preventing any other powers from
being able to realize their potential and thereby pose a threat to Atlanticist preeminence.
The war in Iraq was launched to destabilize the Middle East, China's energy-supply basin
crucial to fueling her future growth. The war in Syria served the purpose of further
dismantling the Middle East to favor Saudi Arabia and Israel, the West's main strategic allies
in the Persian Gulf. The war in Afghanistan was to slow down the Eurasian integration of China
and Russia. And the war in Ukraine was for the purposes of generating chaos and destruction on
Russia's border, with the initial hope of wresting the very strategically area of Crimea from
Russia.
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and this has been on full display in
recent times. Almost all of Washington's recent strategic objectives have ended up producing
results worse than the status quo ante. In Iraq there is the type of strong cooperation between
Baghdad and Tehran reminiscent of the time prior to 1979. Through Hezbollah, Iran has
strengthened its position in Syria in defense of Damascus. Moscow has found itself playing the
role of crucial decider in the Middle East (and soon in North Africa), until only a few years
ago the sole prerogative of Washington. Turkey's problems with NATO, coupled with Tel Aviv's
open relation with Moscow are both a prime example of Washington's diminishing influence in the
region and Moscow's corresponding increase in influence.
The situation in Afghanistan is not very different, with a general recognition that peace is
the only option for the region being reflected in the talks between the Afghans, the Taliban,
the Russians, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. Beijing and Moscow have well known for over a
decade the real intent behind Washington's presence in the country, endeavoring to blunt its
impact.
The Post investigation only further increases the public's war weariness, the war in
Afghanistan now having lasted 18 years, the longest war in US history. Jeff Bezos, the owner of
the Post, is a bitter opponent of Trump and wants the president to come clean on the
Afghanistan debacle by admitting that the troops cannot be withdrawn. Needless to say,
admitting such would not help Trump's strategy for the 2020 election. Trump cannot afford to
humiliate the US military, given that it, along with the US dollar, is his main weapon of
"diplomacy". Were it to be revealed that some illiterate peasants holed up in caves and armed
with AK-47s some 40 years ago are responsible for successfully keeping the most powerful army
in history at bay, all of Washington's propaganda, disseminated by a compliant media, will
cease to be of any effect. Such a revelation would also humiliate military personnel, an
otherwise dependable demographic Trump cannot afford to alienate.
The Washington Post performed a service to the country by shedding light on the
disinformation used to sustain endless war. But the Post's intentions are also political,
seeking to undermine Trump's electoral chances by damaging Trump's military credentials as well
as his standing amongst military personnel. What Washington's elite and the Post do not know,
or perhaps prefer to ignore, is that such media investigations directed against political
opponents actually end up doing irreparable damage to the political and military prestige of
the United States.
In other words, when journalist do their job, the military industrial complex finds it
difficult to lie its way through wars and failures, but when a country relies on Hollywood to
sustain its make-believe world, as well as on journalists on the CIA payroll, on compliant
publishers and on censored news, then any such revelations of forbidden truths threaten to
bring the whole facade crashing down.
Philip Giraldi Ph.D., Executive Director of the
Council for the National Interest
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
The Dems have given Trump's insane military budget more than he asked for, they got no
bargains in renewing the NDAA (both of which betray the lie they think Trump is compromised),
and finalized a huge new trade deal with him.
The impeachment farce and most of the battle
with Trump is kabuki for the rubes. Business as usual continues in DC, except the swamp
realizes more and more that their grip on power is slipping. They are far more frightened of
Bernie Sanders. These are dangerous times.
"The Democrats did the "right" thing - considering their options.
Option A: Counter Trump with real policy issues; policies that the majority of Americans
support: ending unending wars, healthcare, environmental protection, income equality, etc..
But that would cost them money from their BIG DONORS, and as such all privileges of the Dem
bosses. Not a good option
Option B: Follow the Russiagate/Ukrainegate/Impeachment path and thereby avoid having to
oppose Trump on policy. Their BIG DONORS are happy (because there is no policy change). Even
if the Dems lose 2020 election, the party bosses still retain their privileges.
Disclaimer: The Dims and the Repugs are the same party - just two different brands of it.
Anyone doubting this assertion should check out who finance them .... big oligarchy, even if
there may be slight differences in composition.
Posted by: Nathan Mulcahy | Dec 18 2019 23:07 utc | 31
This IMO is the best synopsis posted to date. Salient, and to the point. Thanks NM!!
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Forgive me for the somewhat redundant post, and again I hope this is not a waste of anyone's
time, but this is the source of the Interfax report I posted just above currently at #56. It
is relevant to the Ukrainegate impeachment fiasco.
The U.S. and lapdog EU/UK media will not touch this with a 10 foot pole.
KYIV. Dec 17 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine and the United States should investigate
the transfer of $29 million by businessman Victor Pinchuk from Ukraine to the Clinton
Foundation, Ukrainian Member of Parliament (independent) Andriy Derkach has said. According
to him, the investigation should check and establish how the Pinchuk Foundation's
activities were funded; it, among other projects, made a contribution of $29 million to the
Clinton Foundation. "Yesterday, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies registered criminal
proceeding number 12019000000001138. As part of this proceeding, I provided facts that
should be verified and established by the investigation. Establishing these facts will also
help the American side to conduct its own investigation and establish the origin of the
money received by [Hillary] Clinton," Derkach said at a press conferences at
Interfax-Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, December 17.
According to him, it was the independent French online publication Mediapart that first
drew attention to the money withdrawal scheme from Ukraine and Pinchuk's financing of the
Clinton Foundation.
"The general scheme is as follows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent money to
Ukraine in 2015. The same year, Victor Pinchuk's Credit Dnepr [Bank] received UAH 357
million in a National Bank stabilization loan from the IMF's disbursement. Delta Bank was
given a total of UAH 5.110 billion in loans. The banks siphoned the money through Austria's
Meinl Bank into offshore accounts, and further into [the accounts of] the Pinchuk
Foundation. The money siphoning scam was confirmed by a May 2016 ruling by [Kyiv's]
Pechersky court. The total damage from this scam involving other banks is estimated at $800
million. The Pinchuk Foundation transferred $29 million to the Foundation of Clinton, a
future U.S. presidential candidate from the Democratic Party," Derkach said.
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
"... Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world. ..."
Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep
State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials,
often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and
incipient tyranny.
Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of
European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring
their power to bear on domestic policy as well.
Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and
corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM)
taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be
running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be
just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly
technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which
push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.
Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of
globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole
Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is
globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never
win in a free clash of ideas.
Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides
its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the
culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees
with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too
damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think
they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest
of the world.
Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.
hey b... i like your title - "How The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party" ... could change
it to" How the Deep State Sunk the USA" could work just as well...
Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave
the impulse for impeachment.
is this intentional?? it sort of looks like it...
good quote from @ 26 lk - "The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be
mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones."
@babyl-on 35
yes that is about right. The top power networks are all a tight mix of names from govt, MIC,
and private equity (incl. top 2-3 investment banks). With the latter group naturally paying
the salaries of the whole policy making ecosystem, and holding the positions that select
future generations who will eventually take their place.
They want the security of knowing noone in the world will mess with them. This
necessitates that noone in the world *can* mess with them. Pretty straightforward from
there.
"... People are constantly saying the deep state wants this or it wants that and that is off the mark. The deep state follows the orders of the oligarchy it does not make policy or make independent decisions. ..."
"... The oligarchy and its empire laugh at all the pledbs caught up in their macabre pantomime covering the non-stop for 75 years slaughter of innocent people. ..."
"... We live in a dictatorship of global private finance ..."
"... The far left, if it exists, know that Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton bears no claim to anything left of fascism. ..."
I would like to put forward my understanding of the "deep state" and see if I have any
company.
In my view the deep state (the interagency consensus) is the hired help of the oligarchy,
which infects the gov and occupies every key position of power(except president for the first
time in over 75 years).
People are constantly saying the deep state wants this or it wants that and that is
off the mark. The deep state follows the orders of the oligarchy it does not make policy or
make independent decisions.
In effect, the CIA is nothing more or less than a secret army of the oligarchy.
The dems funded the wall, they gave the treasonous Trump another 100+ billion to do
Putin's bidding with, the dems fast tracked 115 Trump judges (Bernie could have stopped it
and did not) at least two nuclear treaties were abandoned and a third will be soon. The
oligarchy and its empire laugh at all the pledbs caught up in their macabre pantomime
covering the non-stop for 75 years slaughter of innocent people.
It should be clear who is in charge - the people who own the world run the world.
I am moving my comment from the Open Thread where karlof1 had provided a link to the
Trump/Pelosi letter
@ Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 18 2019 17:53 utc | 131 with the Trump letter to Pelosi
Thanks for that.
I just read it and besides what you and others have said I was struck by the blame for the
impeachment attempt being put on the "deranged and radical representatives of the far
left"."
That sentence was then followed by one saying that the Dems are motivated by and living in
fear of socialist primary challengers.
Think about that context in lieu of what many barflies here understand to be reality.
1. We live in a dictatorship of global private finance
2. The far left, if it exists, know that Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton bears no
claim to anything left of fascism.
3. America use to have a socialist government, because that is what government is by
definition, and still has, to a degree, a mixed economy of socialism and capitalism....(gawd
I hate those terms anymore)
My 2nd set of thoughts follow my first and those of other barflies comments and b's posting
1. Trump is giving the Dems cover to neuter the "socialist" candidates like Bernie and
Tulsi
2. Trump is setting the stage for a new McCarthyism.
3. As Posted by: Babyl-on | Dec 18 2019 23:21 utc | 35 who wrote
"
In effect, the CIA is nothing more or less than a secret army of the oligarchy.
"
This true and goes for all of the Deep State
4. This impeachment shit show will continue to override any social discussion of domestic or
foreign issues including the Depression that the US is clearly in....never having recovered
from the Recession of 2008
5. This is what control of the narrative looks like......get out in front of the train, make
lots of noise and carrying on to obfuscate reality.
And meanwhile the rest of the world is getting on with the evolution of a multi-polar
world.....while America and Americans are being thrown under the bus in a managed Shock
Doctrine event.
While former
Weekly Standard writer Warren thought the news was Cheney going after Pence, the real news
is Cheney's neoconservative crowd -- much of the GOP foreign policy establishment, which can be
counted on to advocate for intervention overseas -- being mad that President Trump won't listen
to their terrible advice.
Cheney was one of the
chief architects of the Iraq War, now in its seventeenth year with no end in sight. Given
the neverending morass that war has become, and its utter failure to concretely benefit
Americans in exchange for lives lost and trillions
spent , it is preposterous that he would be lambasting the current vice president over
foreign policy. He should instead be issuing public mea culpas.
Neocons Believe in
America as Global Policeman
Cheney's accusation that Trump is conducting Obama's foreign policy is inaccurate, because
both Obama and neocons are internationalists, and Trump is not. Neocons generally think global
peace can be achieved through spreading of freedom and democracy, often by using military
force. They tend to think any region in which America is not actively involved risks being
filled with a menacing geopolitical force. They often view themselves as global citizens, and
see America's power as the perfect tool for peace and democracy spreading. America should act
in its own interest, say the neocons, but America's interest is the global interest, and
vice versa.
Among other things, this leads neoconservatives to currently advocate for regime change or
at least continued U.S. presence in Syria, continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan (even as that
war is nearly two decades-old), a very hardline approach to Russia (which is oddly deemed an
equal or even greater threat than China), and a U.S. military presence in
more than 20 African countries that you have never heard of, to fight Islamic
terrorists.
Internationalists might disagree about how much force should be used to spread liberalism.
President Obama took out Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and presided over a terribly ineffective and
dangerous effort to fund Syrian rebels in that country's civil war. Republican neocons like
Cheney just wish Obama had done even more, and put U.S. troops on the ground in Libya and Syria
as well.
The Problem with Defaulting to Intervention
Despite their certainty about launching the United States into myriad global conflicts,
neocons have lots of problems. First, they are incredibly naïve about fundamentalist Sunni
Islam. Take the Syria example. ISIS and al Qaeda are both forms of fundamentalist Sunni Islam,
which is incredibly popular across the Middle East and Northern Africa. Fighting the ideology
that creates ISIS and al Qaeda could literally take forever.
It could also be self-defeating. Bombing and occupying a foreign land might make young men
there more prone to outright terrorism, and infantilize the domestic forces that must take a
stand in order for true progress against radicalization to occur.
In other areas too, neocons often cheer endeavors that shoot our country in the foot. They
want us to stay in Syria to fight terrorism, but they were more than happy to fund and arm
rebels --
many of whom were radical Sunnis with ties to al Qaeda -- in order to try to take down the
regime of Bashar al-Assad. Ditto with the intervention in Shia-majority Iraq, which ultimately
emboldened and empowered the dominant Shia power, Iran.
Academically speaking, neocons have learned the lesson of World War II, but haven't the
lessons of World War I, Vietnam, or countless other conflicts where intervention and war had
unforeseen outcomes and consequences. Thus they have a stunning record of getting foreign
policy wrong. Leading neocon Bill Kristol was a huge
advocate for the Iraq War , for example, and famously predicted it would be over in two months .
Despite how poorly many U.S.-involved conflicts have gone, neocons have refused to question
their ideology. They will question someone's motives if -- for example -- he disagrees with
entering Syria's civil war. You can point out that neither side is good, that this is largely a
Shia-Sunni religious struggle that we should stay out of, and that taking out Bashar al-Assad
would create a power vacuum for jihadists, but
Kristol and Max Boot will respond by calling you a Russian stooge.
Trump Is Right to
Not Listen to Failed Advice
Even though he still has neocons advising him in the White House, President Trump is thus
smart to frequently ignore these people. In fact, pushing back against neocons is a big reason
Trump got elected.
The American people agree that we shouldn't be
subsidizing wealthy European countries' welfare states by fronting their defense. Germany's
military is literally falling apart, but the country is more than happy to give Russia billions
for natural gas. If Germany isn't concerned about Russia, is it our job to do all the work?
The American people also appreciate that Trump is trying to end the war in Afghanistan, and
get American troops out of Syria, among other conflicts. Pence's statement, that Trump wants us
to be thoughtful about where we place U.S. troops, jives with the thoughts of a vast bipartisan
majority of Americans.
The GOP Is a Conservative Party
Trump had an easy go of his GOP contenders in 2015-16 because the GOP is not a
neoconservative party, it is simply a conservative party. There is a big difference. For
neocons like Cheney to act as if Donald Trump stole the party is laughable. The neocons were an
aberration in conservatives' coalition.
The roots of the Grand Old Party are nationalism, foreign policy realism, and fiscal
(spending) restraint. In but one example, President Eisenhower wrote a friend that cutting
taxes was a reward for finding wasteful spending. President Nixon went to Communist China to
exploit the rift between Beijing and Moscow. Democrats got us in the Vietnam War, and Nixon and
Ford got us out.
There is a fundamental long-run contradiction between U.S. nation-building
overseas and limited government here at home.
Conservative voters care about localism, and tempered, non-utopian nationalism. It isn't
just nice to care about the people around us, and demand our politicians do what's best for
them, it is a high moral ideal
-- even commanded by
scripture .
Some neocons just aren't conservatives. Many are socially
liberal , and view the pro-life cause as a way to get the so-called hayseeds to turn out on
election day, not as a pressing moral issue. Because of this, some neocons may eventually find
a home in the establishment Democrat Party.
True, neocons say they are fiscal conservatives, and many have criticized President Trump
for not talking about entitlement reform (as has this writer), but in practice neocons are
fiscal fakers. Their priorities never lead to downsizing the federal government. Rather, they
bargain with Democrats to increase domestic welfare spending as long as the military budget
also increases. There is a fundamental long-run contradiction between U.S. nation-building
overseas and limited government here at home.
That's why neocons have already lost the GOP, and Trump's presidency is only just the
beginning of a necessary shift. The Republican Party is finding its roots, and eventually going
back to true fiscal conservatism (spending restraint that allows tax cuts, not just tax cuts
for their own sake) and foreign policy realism.
But because of the American political system, this shift will occur in bits and spurts. Just
this January, 47 Republican senators
(that's most of them) joined Democrats to vote for an amendment pushed by Senate Majority
leader Mitch McConnell that sought to keep the United States in Syria and Afghanistan
indefinitely. Try getting anything close to half of the American public to sign on to that.
That's the real story here. Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a JD
and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and works in the financial services industry.
The views expressed are those of the author only. You can follow Willis on Twitter @WillKrumholz .
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
USSR, Yugoslavia, US, EU, and the Indian Union are predicated on the ideas of the
Enlightenment Tradition. So far, USSR and FRY have disintegrated. If EU fails, could US and
EU be too far behind. In US, we have the political ascendancy of foolish Protestantism, in
India that of Hindu masses.
Can any states, predicated on secularism of the Enlightenment Tradition survive the rise
of religious politics?
"... Andrew O'Hehir personifies the sore loser. The EU is fascism. In their attempt to overthrow Ukraine, the EU armed and trained Nazis. The EU helped start both the Libya and Syria wars. Obama was only their errand boy, trying to give them back two colonies. ..."
"... The EU destroyed Greece for the banks. The EU is a far greater threat to Europe than the Third Reich was. Is Andrew stupid enough to think European powers should give up their power to print money to these corporate fascists? ..."
Andrew O'Hehir personifies the sore loser. The EU is fascism. In their attempt to
overthrow Ukraine, the EU armed and trained Nazis. The EU helped start both the Libya and
Syria wars. Obama was only their errand boy, trying to give them back two colonies.
The EU destroyed Greece for the banks. The EU is a far greater threat to Europe than the
Third Reich was. Is Andrew stupid enough to think European powers should give up their power
to print money to these corporate fascists?
Fascist EU enablers, like the author, have called the Brits racists for years, simply
because they want out of the Nazi-arming EU. Andrew doesn't want any lessons from his
crushing defeat -- they relate to the perils of being a fanboy for corporate war-mongering
fascists.
The interesting info here is that the article states Haftar's "eastern-based Libyan
National Army (LNA), backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, France, Russia and
Turkey".
The NATO rift between Turkey and its other members has escalated with the Evil Outlaw US
Empire's Senate voting to recognize the Armenian Genocide and Greece to help the LNA (Bengazi
gov't) defend against Turkish shipments of militia/terrorists and weapons to the besieged GNA
in Tripoli. This
site is very helpful and up-to-date regarding what's occurring. And
this PDF Briefing Paper is very good and quite detailed.
All of the above's added to the tense situation around Cyprus, Turkey's threat to close
Incirlik, and Greek offers to house those NATO facilities. It increasingly looks like the
Turkish S-400s are aimed at Greece and NATO.
/div>
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it to
abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis, but
most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and that "If
only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with the future
deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but most of the
time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an example out of
it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have no
checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this un-democratic
way.
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it
to abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis,
but most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and
that "If only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with
the future deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but
most of the time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an
example out of it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have
no checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this
un-democratic way.
The infinity war We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? The infinity war We say
we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? Sam Ward (For The Washington Post) By Samuel Moyn
and Stephen Wertheim December 13, 2019
Add to list On my list
Now we know, thanks to
The
Afghanistan Papers published in The Washington Post this past week, that U.S. policymakers doubted almost from the start that
the two-decade-long Afghanistan war could ever succeed. Officials didn't know who the enemy was and had little sense of what an achievable
"victory" might look like. "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," said Douglas Lute, the Army three-star
general who oversaw the conflict from the White House during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
And yet the war ground on, as if on autopilot. Obama inherited a conflict of which Bush had grown weary, and victory drew no closer
after Obama's troop "surge" than when Bush pursued a small-footprint conflict. But while the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 during
the Vietnam War, led a generation to appreciate the perils of warmaking, a new generation may
squander this opportunity
to set things right. There is a reason the quagmire in Afghanistan, despite costing thousands of lives and
$2 trillion
, has failed to shock Americans into action: The United States for decades has made peace look unimaginable or unobtainable.
We have normalized war.
President Trump sometimes disrupts the pattern by
vowing to end America's "endless
wars." But he has
extended and escalated them at every turn, offering nakedly punitive and exploitative rationales. In September, on the cusp of
a peace deal with the Taliban, he discarded an agreement negotiated by his administration and
pummeled
Afghanistan harder than ever (now he's back to wanting to talk). In Syria, his promised military withdrawal has morphed into
a grotesque redeployment to
"secure" the country's
oil .
It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond the proclivities of the current president,
or the previous one, or the next. The United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world.
The ideal of peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of the Cold War offered
an unparalleled opportunity to advance the cause. But U.S. leaders from both parties chose another path. War -- from drone strikes
and Special Operations raids to protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in practice
and even in aspiration.
Given World War II, Korea, Vietnam and many smaller conflicts throughout the Western Hemisphere, no one has ever mistaken the
United States for Switzerland. Still, the pursuit of peace is an authentic American tradition that has shaped U.S. conduct and the
international order. At its founding, the United States resolved to steer clear of the system of war in Europe and build a "new world"
free of violent rivalry, as Alexander Hamilton put it
.
Indeed, Americans shrank from playing a fully global role until 1941 in part because they saw themselves as emissaries of peace
(even as the United States conquered Native American land, policed its hemisphere and took Pacific colonies). U.S. leaders sought
either to remake international politics along peaceful lines -- as Woodrow Wilson proposed after World War I -- or to avoid getting
entangled in the squabbles of a fallen world. And when America embraced global leadership after World War II, it felt compelled to
establish the United Nations to halt the "scourge of war," as
the U.N. Charter says right at the
start. At America's urging, the organization outlawed the use of force, except where authorized by its Security Council or used in
self-defense.
Even when the United States dishonored that ideal in the years that followed, peace remained potent as a guiding principle. Vietnam
provoked a broad-based antiwar movement. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) to tame the imperial presidency. Such opposition
to war is scarcely to be found today. (The Iraq War inspired massive protests, but they are a distant memory.) Consider that the
United States has undertaken more armed interventions since the end of the Cold War than during it. According to the Congressional
Research Service, more than 80 percent of all of the country's
adventures abroad since 1946 came after 1989. Congress, whether under Democratic or Republican control, has allowed commanders in
chief to claim the right to begin wars and continue them in perpetuity.
Legal constraints on U.S. warmaking -- including international obligations, domestic statutes and constitutional duties -- ought
to have returned to the fore after the Cold War, the rationale for America's vast mobilization in the second half of the 20th century.
Instead, they have eroded to dust. At the outset of the 1990s, as President George H.W. Bush promised a
"peace dividend" for Americans and a "peaceful international
order" for all, the United States did rely more faithfully than before on Security Council approval for military operations.
The Persian Gulf War, blessed by the United Nations to repel Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was legal under international law. But
enthralled by its exorbitant primacy in world affairs, the United States turned away from international prohibitions on war, finding
the rules too restricting.
The next two presidents, attracted to liberal internationalist and neoconservative creeds that embraced armed force, treated international
law cavalierly. Bill Clinton abused U.N. resolutions meant to control Saddam Hussein's weaponry to justify new attacks, including
the bombing of Iraq in December 1998. The next year, the U.S.-led NATO operations in Kosovo suggested that America would unleash
its military for ostensibly noble causes -- in this case to prevent heart-rending atrocity -- even without the pretense of legality.
Despite failing to obtain U.N. approval, the Clinton administration said the intervention should not be treated as a precedent (though
it became one). Others excused it as "illegal but legitimate," with self-professed moral intentions permissibly trumping law. "For
the purpose of stopping genocide," commented
the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, "the use of force is not a last resort; it is a first resort."
Once such arguments gained currency, their authors lost control of them. Conservative hawks found that a law-optional approach
suited their agenda as well, and their liberal counterparts, if they disagreed at all, did so mostly as a matter of tactics, not
principle. George W. Bush benefited from this permissive context when he launched the Iraq War, whose
illegality was
flagrant and catalytic, since it was unauthorized by the United Nations and
relied on the administration's dangerous claim that "anticipatory
self-defense" justifies invasion. The world took notice. Russia, in particular, seized on the new U.S. position as a
spectacular excuse to make incursions of its own in
Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.
Obama won election in part because he ran against the Iraq War. In office, however, he cemented more than reversed America's disregard
of international constraints on warmaking. While failing to end the war in Afghanistan, his administration
exceeded the Security Council's authorization
by working to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, converting a permission slip to avert atrocity into a blank check for regime
change. Then, to punish the Islamic State, Obama bombed Syria on a contrived
rationale
-- one that allowed attacks against nations unwilling or unable to control terrorists on their territory. When he nearly struck
again in response to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, Obama
laid the legal
foundation for Trump to strike the Syrian government, again without a U.N. sign-off. Once highly valued, then defied only with
controversy, international law now scarcely figures in U.S. decisions of war and peace.
Like international law, U.S. domestic law enshrines an expectation of peace, setting a high bar for the resort to war. If war
is to be waged, the Constitution requires Congress to declare it -- a purposeful grant of authority to the branch of government that
best reflects the diverse interests of the people and therefore should be harder to rouse to conflict than one commander in chief.
Yet the nation has drifted from that tradition, too. After defaulting on its constitutional obligation during the Cold War (partly
on the grounds that the speed of a potential nuclear strike required a president who could respond quickly), Congress declined to
reassert its authority after the Soviet threat passed.
In the 1990s, Congress might at least have kept faith with the WPR, which it passed in 1973 to rein in future presidents. The
resolution calls for Congress to authorize "hostilities" within 60 days of their start; otherwise U.S. forces must withdraw. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, members of the House of Representatives
brought presidents to
court for taking military action in violation
of the statute -- in El Salvador
, the Persian Gulf War and
Kosovo , for example. But advocates of the strategy
all but gave up, and Congress itself increasingly deferred to presidential wars in the age of terrorism. By the time Obama intervened
in Libya, the WPR lay in tatters. In a final indignity during the Libya operation, one administration lawyer
explained that "hostilities" was an "
ambiguous term of art
" that might exclude aerial bombardment, so Congress did not need to approve a war that toppled a regime.
This deference has proved costly, allowing Trump to pose as an antiwar candidate against the mainstream of two political parties,
a somnolent Congress and inactive courts. Once in power, this wildly unpredictable chief executive finally clarified the danger of
entrusting the world's mightiest military to one man's whims. Congress has begun to stir. In voting this year to end U.S. involvement
in Yemen's civil war, it invoked the WPR for the first time while forces were active in battle.
President Trump speaks to U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan last month.
though he has pledged to end America's "endless wars,"
Trump, like past presidents, has instead extended them. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Ultimately, elevating peace as a priority will require not merely changing legal norms but overturning the militarized concept
of America's world role that permeates Washington. Somehow, despite waging near-perpetual war, the leaders of the most powerful country
on Earth have convinced themselves that America is always on the brink of turning "isolationist," a peril against which
every president since Ronald
Reagan has warned as their terms wound down. Trump is likely to deviate from that rhetorical tradition, but the rest of the establishment
carries on and doubles down. Today, it is military withdrawals, not destructive deployments, that freak out pundits and spur Cabinet
members to resign, as Jim Mattis
did last year over Trump's vow to pull troops from Syria. Abandoning the Kurds there this fall was Trump's "
great betrayal ," lamented Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, who did not appear to lose sleep over our past
military incursions.
Under Trump, who applies "maximum pressure" to all foes foreign and domestic,
American militarism is more perilous than ever. It is also more undeniable. That is one reason the current moment is surprisingly
hopeful. The call to
end
"endless war" continues to rise on the flanks of both parties, even as it is flouted by leaders of each. More and more Americans
insist that, whatever interests are served by endless war, their own are not. More than
twice as many Americans prefer
to lower than raise military spending, according to a 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation survey.
Veterans support
Trump's pledge to bring Middle East wars to a close: A
majority of vets deem the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria not to have been worth fighting. The Afghanistan Papers ought to
strengthen the consensus. Americans deserve a president who will act accordingly.
The United States would find partners far and wide, in nations great and small, if it put peace first. It could make clear that
while spreading democracy or human rights remains worthwhile, values cannot come at the point of a gun or serve as a pretext for
war -- and that international peace is, in fact, a condition for human flourishing. Every time Washington searches for a monster
to destroy, it shows the world's despots how to abuse the rules and hands demagogues a phantom to inflate. The alternative is not
"isolationism" but something closer to the opposite: peaceful, lawful international cooperation against the major threats to humanity,
including climate change, pandemic disease and widespread deprivation. Those are the enemies worth fighting, and bombs and bullets
will not defeat them.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce professor of jurisprudence and professor of history at Yale University and a fellow of the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Stephen Wertheim is deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute
for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University
Follow @samuelmoyn and @stephenwertheim
It's a bit like calling 9/11 an intelligence failure. First, identify the actual measure
of success against which this outcome should really be judged...
An excerpt:
"Here's the real "secret history" of the Afganistan war: It wasn't a failure, it was a
success. In every facet, on every front, Afghanistan is exactly what America needed it to be.
They dripfeed in the blood of young Americans, they destroy 100,000s of Afghan lives, and
they reap the rewards they always intended to reap:
The permanent slow-simmer conflict gives them an excuse to keep thousands of US military
personnel in a country which borders Iran, Pakistan AND China. (Not to mention a host of
ex-Soviet states).
It keeps military expenditure nice and high, so Congressman, ex-generals and everyone else
on the boards of Boeing or Lockheed Martin get great big bonuses every year.
They have sole access to the rare-Earth elements and other vital metals in the Afghan
mountains. Lithium, most importantly of all.
They have control of the world's opium industry. A vital cog in the relations of the US
intelligence agencies, and organised crime. It's essentially reverse money-laundering –
turning tax-payer funds into dark money that can be spent hiring mercenaries, organising
assassinations, arranging coups or simply be stolen.
They have access to all the "radicalised" young men they could ever want. A little Jihadi
farm, where "terrorists" can be named, trained and sent off to fight proxy wars in Syria, or
spread fear and chaos in the West."
The recent shootings of three U.S. soldiers in Florida at the hands of a Saudi citizen raises a standard question in the U.S.
government's perpetual "war on terrorism": "Why do they hate us?"
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the official mantra began being issued: The terrorists just hate us for our "freedom and values."
No other explanation for motive was to be considered. If anyone suggested an alternative motive -- such as "They are retaliating
for U.S. governmental killings over there" -- U.S. officials and interventionists would immediately go on the attack, heaping a mountain
of calumny on that person, accusing him of treason, hating America, loving the terrorists, and justifying their attacks.
It happened to me and other libertarians who dared to challenge the official motive behind the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after the
attacks, I spoke at a freedom conference in Arizona consisting of both libertarians and conservatives. When I pointed out that the
attacks were the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that kills people over there, another of the speakers was filled with
anger and rage over such an "unpatriotic" suggestion. Then, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, FFF published an article by me entitled,
" Is This the Wrong Time
to Question Foreign Policy? " in which I pointed out the role that U.S. interventionism had played in the attacks. FFF was hit
with the most nasty and angry attacks I have ever seen.
Eighteen years later, the evidence is virtually conclusive that the reason that the United States has been suffering a constant,
never-ending threat of terrorism is because U.S. military and CIA forces have been killing people in the Middle East and Afghanistan
since at least the end of the Cold War, and even before.
After all, if the terrorists hate us for our "freedom and values," why haven't they been attacking the Swiss? They have pretty
much the same freedom and values that Americans have. And they are much closer geographically to Middle East terrorists than the
United States is. Why haven't the terrorists been attacking them?
The answer is simple: the Swiss government, unlike the U.S. government, hasn't been killing, maiming, and injuring people and
hasn't been bombing and destroying countries in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
A long history of U.S. interventionism
U.S. interventions in the Middle East began, of course, long before the 9/11 attacks. There was the 1953 CIA coup that destroyed
Iran's experiment with democracy with a coup that replaced the democratically elected prime minister of the country with a tyrannical
pro-U.S. dictator. Not surprisingly, that produced the violent Iranian revolution almost 25 years later. The Iranian revolutionaries
didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America for the U.S. government's installation, training, and support
of the tyrannical regime against which they revolted.
In the 1980s, there was the sending of U.S. troops into Lebanon as interventionist "peacekeepers." The terrorists ended up blowing
up a Marine barracks, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. The terrorists didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America
for the federal government's interventionism into Lebanon. As soon as all U.S. troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, which was the
right thing to do, there were obviously no more deaths of U.S. soldiers in that country.
It was after the Pentagon and the CIA lost their official Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia), that they proceeded
headlong into the Middle East and began killing multitudes of people. There was the Persian Gulf War, waged without the constitutionally
required congressional declaration of war, where thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured. That was followed by a decade of brutal
sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Thus, when Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who tried to bring down the World Trade Center with a bomb in 1993, appeared before
a federal judge for sentencing, he angrily told the judge that it was U.S. officials who were the butchers, for killing multitudes
of innocent children in Iraq.
As those Iraqi children were dying, there were retaliatory terrorist strikes on the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Once again, however, U.S. officials continued to steadfastly maintain that was all about hatred for America's "freedom and values"
and had nothing to do with the deadly and destructive U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.
Then came Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States, in which he expressly cited U.S. interventionism in
the Middle East as his motivating factor. That was followed by the 9/11 attacks, along with other terrorist attacks both here and
abroad. Through it all, U.S. officials and interventionists have blindly maintained that the terrorists hate us for our "freedom
and values," not because the U.S. government kills, maims, injures, and destroys people over there.
The recent Florida killings
And now we have the latest killing spree, this one at the hands of a Saudi citizen in Florida. According to
a story in yesterday's Washington Post about the killing of three U.S. soldiers, the killer, Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani
was described as "strange" and "angry." "He looked like he was angry at the world," said one person who knew him. Another said that
he looked at people in an "angry, challenging" way.
The article says that "the FBI has not yet determined a motive for the mass shooting."
Well, of course it hasn't. That's undoubtedly because the FBI hasn't yet found any statements in which the killer states that
he hates America for its "freedom and values."
But the Post article does point out something quite interesting. The article states: "The gunman, who was shot dead by
a sheriff's deputy responding to the shooting, is thought to have written a 'will' that was posted to the account a few hours before
the rampage. In it, he blasts U.S. policies in Muslim countries."
Well, isn't that interesting! Unfortunately, the Post didn't provide a verbatim transcript of the killer's "will" in which
he "blasts U.S. policies in the Muslim countries." The Post does point out though that "the writer says he does not dislike
Americans per se -- 'I don't hate you because of your freedoms,' he begins -- but that he hates U.S. policies that he views as anti-Muslim
and 'evil.'"
I n an article at antiwar.com entitled, " Pensacola: Blowback Terrorism ," Scott Horton provides a verbatim transcript of the
killer's "will," in which the killer states in part:
I'm not against you for just being American, I don't hate you for your freedom, I hate you because every day you supporting,
funding, and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity. I am against evil, and America as a whole has turned
into a nation of evil. What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie, I see invasion
of many countries by it's troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV.
Now, if one goes back to Ramzi Yousef's sentencing hearing in 1995 -- some 24 years ago -- one will see that Yousef angrily said
much the same thing to the federal judge who was getting ready to sentence him to jail for his 1993 terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center.
Americans have a choice:
One, continue the U.S. government's decades-long killing spree in the Middle East, in which case America will continue to experience
never-ending terrorist retaliation, the perpetual "war on terrorism, and the ongoing destruction of our liberty and privacy at the
hands of our government, which is purportedly protecting us from the terrorist threats that it produces with its foreign interventionism.
Or, two, stop U.S. forces from killing any more people, bring them all home and discharge them, which would help get America back
on the right track, one toward liberty, peace, prosperity, morality, normality, and harmony with the world.
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received
his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for
twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987,
Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced
freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren
shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch . View these interviews at
LewRockwell.com and from
Full Context
. Send him email .
Warren's awkward attempts to portray herself as a woman of color, even if a etsy weeny
tiny bit, always seemed strange to me, ignoring the resume nonsense. It makes sense with the
realization that Women of Color, have become a new politically privileged class, in spite of
some of them being not very oppressed.
Indian (subcontinent) women come from a tradition of a caste based society of wealth and
privilege. The most succesful ones intuitively home in on and game American race-based
identity politics in spite of their advantages, such as being one of the wealthiest religious
groups in the nation,
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/
No Bernie style economic class based socialism for them, no way. It's maintain privilege,
Silicon Valley corporate caste based salaries, Republican reductionism, Hillary hopium and
yet, they proudly proclaim their affiliation with real women of color, on whose backs they
surf, like last generation's black cleaning women, the grandparents of which might have
actually been slaves.
3 examples: Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, Neera Tanden and Kamala Harris.
Women-of-color in general are not a privileged class. The not-very-poor women of color are
perhaps a newly privileged class.
The Goldman Sachs women-of-color have become a new privileged class, in line with the
tenets of Goldman Sachs Feminism. " The arc of history is long, and it bends towards rainbow
gender-fluid oligarchy."
As Dean Baker pointed out in his book Rigged, the neoliberal capitalism of America is
rigged to benefit the top 1%. After all, they were the architects. Most Americans appreciate
that. Nevertheless, the vast majority willingly wade into its rigged quicksand. All economies
are rigged in the sense that there is a structure to it all. Moreover, the architects of that
system will ensure there is something in it for themselves – rigged. Our school system
does not instruct Americans on how their own economic system works (is rigged), so most of us
become its victims rather than its beneficiaries.
Books by Liz Warren and her daughter offer remedial guidance on how to make the current US
economic system work for the average household. So, in a sense, Liz comes across as an
adherent to the system she is trying to help others master .
This seems to be a losing proposition for candidate Warren because most Americans want a
new system with new rigging; not a repaired system that has been screwing them for
generations.
"I wish that people would realize that to interfere, in any way shape or form in wars that
occur in Islamic States is pissing into the wind.
We simply cannot and do not understand the religious/tribal and feudal component of these
societies.
It is better that we just let them go at each other. Sooner or later one despot will end
up being top dog - so be it."
Hmm. Do you know the history of colonialism in MENA? I did not think so.
My guess is that your 'knowledge' of Afghanistan and its history is based on your obvious
xenophobia aka Islamophobia and lofty Western superiority complex. Don't feel alone, that's
what folks use to make themselves feel better and able to sleep at night. Check this out:
"Despite close relations to the Axis powers, Zahir Shah refused to take sides during World
War II and Afghanistan remained one of the few countries in the world to remain neutral. In
1944 and 1945, Afghanistan experienced a series of revolts by various tribes.[13] After the
end of the Second World War, Zahir Shah recognised the need for the modernisation of
Afghanistan and recruited a number of foreign advisers to assist with the process.[14] During
this period Afghanistan's first modern university was founded.[14] During his reign a number
of potential advances and reforms were derailed as a result of factionalism and political
infighting.[15] He also requested financial aid from both the United States and the Soviet
Union, and Afghanistan was one of few countries in the world to receive aid from both the
Cold War enemies.[16] In a 1969 interview, Zahir Shah said that he is "not a capitalist. But
I also don't want socialism. I don't want socialism that would bring about the kind of
situation [that exists] in Czechoslovakia. I don't want us to become the servants of Russia
or China or the servant of any other place."[17]
Zahir Shah was able to govern on his own during 1963[9] and despite the factionalism and
political infighting a new constitution was introduced during 1964 which made Afghanistan a
modern democratic state by introducing free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women's
rights and universal suffrage.[14]"
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
The US lied about the Gulf of Tonkin in order to justify attacking North Vietnam, it then
proceeded to lie about the conduct of the war and the terrible genocide it was committing. No
lesson learned because in a heartbeat the US was lying about Chile, Brazil, Argentina,
Colombia, Nicaragua and El Salvador, committing a wide range of atrocities in each.
Add Somalia, Libya, proxy wars in Angola and Yemen, efforts to destabilize Cuba, Venezuela
and Iran, illegal wars in the Lebanon and Syria, the annihilation of Afghanistan in
retaliation for what was actually a Saudi terrorist act, the destruction of modern Iraq and
her people using trumped up claims, to say nothing of Clinton's cheery disregard for the
welfare of Balkan residents when the US rained (illegal) uranium bombs down on the hapless
inhabitants.
And now the WP and Congress are worked up over spending a trillion dollars when plainly
they could care less about the Afghan casualties and American war crimes. Heck this goes back
to Theodore Roosevelt seizing Cuba claiming he was saving it from the ravages of Spain or
even further back to government backed settler land grabs "saving their white women from the
savages". Savages, indeed. Zero accountability and Britain still playing faithful lap
dog.
My take on this is that the American Department of Defense war machine remained in a state of
perpetual excitement after their successes in WW11.. almost as if they had to continuously
invent an enemy in order to maintain their war time budget.. (and therefore demonstrate their
ongoing prowess etc etc) in a cycle of wars starting with Korea and bringing us up to date
with Afghanistan.. so that's nearly 70 years worth of international hubris on display.
All on the excuse of spreading their version of democracy.. is money talks!!
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the
weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
That both the Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq could happen at all tells us that the UN
Security Council is not fit for purpose. These wars also told us that British pretense at
being the voice of reason or the steadying hand that prevents US foreign policy being
subsumed by the visceral and synthesised reactions of a US public is no more than empty cant.
If the US is unable to prevent foreign and defence policy being captured by money
interests and remains inclined to deliver revenge to its public on demand howsoever it might
be misdirected then the US should not be on the UN Security Council at all. They are fast
becoming the number one major rogue state. And the outlook suggests this is more likely to
get worse than improve. Whatever happens to Trump One more (and likely smarter) Trumps are
coming down the track. More Dick Cheneys too. More Bushes, more Rumsfelds, more Nixons,
Boltons, Kissingers, Johnsons and a host of others we'd all much rather were one offs. The US
is the biggest extant threat to world peace. It is too powerful and far too easily played by
warmongers and terrorists of every stripe and every persuasion. And by those seeking to
profit from war.
To call war profiteering and murder a geopolitical "mistake" is to EXCUSE criminal activity.
Anyone responding to this latest revelation of military dishonest as a "mistake" is
actually part of the crime. They are aiding the abettors. Everyone in Congress knows what
everyone in this comments section knows: our military and its global actions are, first and
foremost, a financial fraud.
But not American oil companies which were basically shut out outside of a few minor service
and procurement contracts. Looks like all the "Blood for Oil" poster were BS.
The Iraq War was only partly, however, about big profits for Anglo-American oil
conglomerates - that would be a bonus (one which in the end has failed to materialise - not
for want of trying though).
Yes, and it made no conclusion as to whether the war was legal or not.
" The inquiry did not reach a view on the legality of the war , saying this
could only be assessed by a "properly constituted and internationally recognised court", but
did make a damning assessment of how the decision was made."
Just think - the USA spends more on its military then the combined amount of the next 10
nations in the list (incl. China/Russia/India). That is a major major spend commitment. A
small percentage of that could be used for US citizens to fund their healthcare - but I
suppose they prefer to spend it to threaten and bomb other nations to their will.
Just to think - a similar report was produced post Vietnam and in the 50's even Eisenhower
was worried about the US military backed by private companies becoming a perpetual spending
machine.
But there's one big question the Post report raises but does not address: why? Why did
so many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about
how the war in Afghanistan was going?
Because "how the war is going" is not the operating question. Because it does not matter
if the war is just or unjust, whether it's winnable or not winnable, nor whether it's
supported in the "homeland" or not. No, the operating principle is that there is a war. By
its existence, the war creates funding and jobs and profits for the people that matter, the
people the author mentions, from the Security/Military complex corporations all the way to
careerists in the Pentagon and State.
So, it is NOT a waste of $1 trillion dollars ... it is just as it was supposed to be. That
is why the war president (W), the peace president (Obama), and the swamp drainer (Trump) have
all supported it. The war is doing what it's supposed to do.
In time, the US national debt will force them to rein in their military spending. By lowering
taxes while continuing to spend like drunken sailors on military adventures the national debt
is ballooning. US government debt is currently rated AA whereas Canada is AAA. US debt to GDP
is significantly higher than Canada's. (and that's just Canada vs the US). Trump is trying to
create a mafia style protection racket to force other countries to subsidize reckless US
military spending. "Pay up or who knows what might happen?" It is high time US taxpayers ask
why the US can't lower its' out of control military spending rather than pressuring others to
match their profligate ways? Some US citizens say they pay low taxes but it seems they get
nothing in return; no health care, no equal access to education, decaying public
infrastructure, etc. The rest feel overtaxed when they realize they get nothing in return but
don't question the elephant in the room. If other countries maintain responsible levels of
military spending the US will dig itself deeper into debt until the debt markets force them
to see sense.
Military spending is a fine way to transfer wealth from the general population to the rich.
War has always been a fabulous business opportunity, but what has never been so very clear is
how, even for the winning side, it represents a major defeat as wealth is transferred from
the common good into the hands of the rich.
In such matters always consider 'Who will prosper'.
Follow the money...
Considering the United States has been involved in one war or another, directly or
indirectly, for all but about 20 years of its existence, this latest revelation shouldn't
shock anyone. We're a violent country with a violent history and never more so than now, with
our built-on-conflict empire losing steam. We point fingers ("It's the Russians!" "It's the
Chinese!" It's the Iranians!") to deceive ourselves and others, but we're the real threat to
peace. Us. The United States.
Every time I see a person on the street nobly collecting 50ps or the odd fiver for a good
cause like Cancer Research or some other charity, I wonder why they have to do this when the
US has spent over a USD$1 trillion on the Afghan war and other militaries continue to soak up
massive amounts of funding. How much more could we have achieved by now for the real good of
humanity if these funds were focused on research and real human need?
Te US military has been practicing genocide around the world since WW2, millions have been
murdered and still are. But hey, they are the leaders of the free world, the corruption in
the US government, corporations, and military has no bounds. Their own poorer members of this
society are dying in their thousands for lack of medical care, innocent black people are
murdered by police, yet the greed must go on nothing else matters. The only question now
being, which country will they invade next, which government will they plot to overthrow. How
many will be murdered in the process, not that it matters, greed cannot be measured in dead
people.
World peace and the safety of the American public has never been a priority. Entirely the
opposite. Standard procedure: foment fear to wage immoral, endless, profitable war.
This isn't conjecture or "conspiracy theory"; it's as obvious as the sun rising. Anyone
casting this in any other way is either behind the curve or dangerously soft pedaling -- or
lying to stave off actual accountability.
Please stop pretending that our "leaders" are mistaken. They aren't They're doing the jobs
for which they were paid.
It's worse even than a crime... it's insanity to keep excusing a failed 18 year strategy
costing a trillion dollars, resulting in the death of more than 100,000, and the country
ending up worse than when they started. The military, politicians and the media are all to
blame. The military for being too frightened and too stupid to admit they were losing and had
no idea how to correct it.. the politicians for being too frightened to call out their
beloved but incompetent military, and for not "getting it" after more than a trillion dollars
had already been spent; the press and media for being embedded (sometimes literally) with the
military and acting as no more than unquestioning cheerleaders for a self-evidently failed
strategy. It is a terrible indictment of the US on so many levels... where were the public
anti-war protests or activists? Couldn't they see or didn't they care? Either way it's
pathetic.
Almost every year US generals stood before the media and politicians, jutting jaws and
feeble minds, to say that this year was going to be decisive against the Taliban. The fact
is, after Al Qaeda was scattered in 2001, the US picked on the Taliban pointlessly. They
stayed pretending they were engaged in countering the return of al Qaeda (that was never
going to happen) but actually made a new enemy of the Taliban by picking the wrong side in
what was a civil war. The US never understood what it was trying to do so it lied and lied
out of fear of being found out. I find it sickening that this country -the US - pretends it
is a force for good in the world when they are quite prepared to keep killing innocent people
in order to mask the generals' cowardice about facing the truth of their own
incompetence.
A terrible but interesting dichotomy. You have Governments and a broad part of the public
fiercely opposed to public spending and any kind of redistribution. It is all about the
individual.
Yet they sport and actually worship an institution where the individual counts for naught.
In the military it always is about the collective. They throw huge swaths of money to the
military. Which is the only place in the US where dreaded universal healthcare, pensions and
free education exists. Not only that, even the army shops sell goods as subsidised prices,
something unthinkable outside the barracks.
Entirely intentional according the PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defences, Orwellian for
we're going to make a lot of pointless weapons with huge mark-ups for profit by bombing the
shit out of foreigners.
I was listening to NPR about how Veterans turned against the Vietnam war. The people of south
Vietnam would collect shells and explosives that did not detonate and gave to US troops for a
small financial reward. In one such case - the shell exploded killing few kids and injuring a
girl. That girl was refused treatment from US medics because she was one of them. That
soldier involved later joined the anti war movement.
All the veterans were surprised with the image that soldiers coming back from war were spat
at and disrespected by the anti war protesters - this could not have been further from truth.
Back in Vietnam you were taught how to destroy a village, poison drinking water sources
etc. And understandably many GIs fought back.
There are similar stories out of Afghanistan - the naked prisoners with soldiers acting as
if they are engaging in a sexual act and many such shameless incidents. These soldiers were
acquitted which is another way of saying - An Afghan and his life and honor are below us. It
has de-stabilized the region for many decades.
There is a bright side to Donny and his conmen - maybe there will be less intervention and
more introspection - which can only be good for the World.
I think it should have been seen as a thirty year campaign and the same with Iraq and Libya.
The northern Ireland campaign took 30 years and many people are as bitter as they ever were
much of it secondhand from younger people who weren't even alive during the conflict. The
idea of a quick war is a very big mistake I think and flawed short-term thinking.
The West and the USA in particular have always taken the stand that their ideology is the
only right one. That they have a right to interfere in the interns, affairs of other
countries but their own internal affairs are sacrosanct.
So - USA, with UK support decided that Saddam Hussein had to be removed. They moved in to
do so - they killed Saddam but had no plan to return the country to a functioning nation.
Instead they facilitated the unleashing of internal wars and have now left the citizens of
that country in utter turmoil.
& then went and repeated the exercise n Libya.
Decades ago, Britain decided that Palestinians could be thrown out of their homes to make
way for the creation of Israel and laid the foundation for the Middle-East turmoil that has
caused untold misery and suffering. They followed that up with throwing out the Chagosians
out of their homes and making them homeless. Invited Caribbean's to the 'Mother Country' to
serve their erstwhile lords, ladies, masters and mistresses only to then drive to despair the
children and grandchildren of the invitees who had contributed to the 'Mother Country' for
decades.
We are 18 years into an illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. We are the invaders,
the terrorists. The Taliban are fighting for their country, they may use brutal methods but
so did the French, Dutch, Russian freedom fighters during the Nazi invasions. America's
puppet regime in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the Quislings of WW2. And to use drones to
kill Afghans and to say it is progress that there is more transparency is the height of
hubris. All it does is show the corrosive effect of unfettered power in America and it's
military. Why do we tolerate this inhuman action on another country's society? America is by
far the greatest contributor to the rise in terrorism in the world and if not somehow stopped
the greatest threat to world peace. It keeps on invading country after country with it's MSM
propaganda machine claiming it is spreading Democracy throughout the globe. Thank you America
!
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I have just finished reading William
Shirer's
Berlin Diary
. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first
encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer's account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of
the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press,
convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala
threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification
whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge
numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of
rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon
of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from the
United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear
weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by
the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it
says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press,
informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn't challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public as the
Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying
infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said
America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and
human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)
Fallujah, Iraq, after the American military brought it democracy, human rights, and freedom.
Guernica, after the visit of the Kondor Legion. For the historically challenged, this was the Spanish
city bombed during the Spαnish Civil War by the Germans in support of the Falangists.
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people
whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human
rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely
illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward's war with warplanes
butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as
does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis
different?
The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening
torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these,
men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and
periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian,
or German, are Nazis.)
Photos of Iraqis at the American torture
operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this
differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to
have been edited.)
Abu Ghraib.
A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many
female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A
female general ran the operation.
Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist
who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in
prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.
An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having
fun yet?
President Trump has just
pardoned
several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the "confidence to
fight." This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to
extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what
soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I
covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was "Crush Their Skulls and Eat
Their Faces.")
Perhaps the best known example of
implied approval was Nixon's pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which
he received three years of house arrest.
The Germans wanted empire,
lebensraum,
and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows
control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring
democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have
lots
of oil, while it
has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump
occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.
As Shirer points out, the German public
was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today.
Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is
the difference?
The parallels with the Reich are not
complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being
content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the
vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew
exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and
Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler,
Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically
aggressive as any in the Fuehrer's entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an
uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are
connected to God on broadband. O'Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and
Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.
My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say,
brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.
Wikipedia:
"Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers Victims
included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as
were children as young as 12.")
For this Calley got three years house
arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said,
and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let
the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.
The German Nazis worshiped Blood and
Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all
others. Americans can't easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a
Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance,
slightly different foundation.
Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America,
intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in
Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently
buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental
nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).
Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway,
Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a
brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran
with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.
The Third Reich was, and America is, the
chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.
Is this something to be proud of?
Other stuff
La FIL,
Feria Internacional
de Libros
, International Book Fair, Guadalajara, an annual event. I post the photo with the joyous sense
of mischief of an eleven-year-old poking a nest of wasps. It will infuriate the Dissident Right, or Alt
Right, or Race Realists. Their leaders excepted, most of these are ill-tempered naifs who insist, and seem
to hope desperately, that Latin Americans are illiterate. I occasionally have conservative friends down and
they are astonished to find that Guadalajara, a large international city, has the sorts of bookstores had by
large international cities. Duh. (If interested,
here
are a couple of dozen.)
Another and cherished conceit of the
Dissident Right is that Latin Americans who can read must be white. Well, I guess. Why, you could easily
mistake the crowd above for Norwegians. Their ancestors probably arrived with Leif Erikson.
Merry Christmas to all! Happy "Winter
Holidays" to none.
Write Fred at
[email protected].
Put the letters "pdq" anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion. All read, reply not guaranteed due
to volume.
This meritorious and beneficial column
will go into hibernation until after New Year, after which it will likely return.
It's almost a century since Smedley Butler wrote his incisive pamphlet War is a Racket.
If you've never read it, it takes about 15-20 minutes to do so. It will astound, anger and
depress you that the only thing that's changed is the number or zeroes on the eye waterering
profits. Oh, and the players. What is it exactly that makes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
untouchable? (Answers on a postcard C/O Beelzebub.)
Smedley Butler knew of what he lectured about, being the most decorated officer in the
history of the Marine Corps.
A brief insight into this insightful all American action man man Hollywood seems to have
overlooked:
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this
country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks
from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time
being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street.
"The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its
way unmolested.
"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.
Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could
do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
There's been a century of endless war and profits since then with this century shaping up
nicely for the racketeers, whose finest day might well have been September 11th, 2001.
Anyway, here's a link to a pdf file of War is a Racket if you're interested.
A few days ago, veterans' group VoteVets endorsed Pete Buttigieg. It has previously supported
Tulsi Gabbard. Details:
New York Times, "Liberal Veterans' Group Endorses Pete Buttigieg in 2020 Race":
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-votevets-endorsement.html
"... Public choice economics has big influence and a bad name. It is a school of economic thought that has at different times been associated with scholars at the University of Rochester, Virginia Tech, and George Mason University. ..."
"... Samuelson, in his famous and influential textbooks, saw a clear role for government in regulating markets. Public choice scholars vehemently disagreed . For political and theoretical reasons, they instead saw government as a fountain of corruption. Public choice economists argued that government regulations were the product of special interest groups that had "captured" the power of the state, to cripple rivals and squeeze money from citizens and consumers. Regulations were not made in the public interest, but instead were designed to bilk ordinary citizens. ..."
"... The conventional story is that as Warren moved from the right to the left, she abandoned the public choice way of thinking about the world, in favor of a more traditional left-wing radicalism. A more accurate take might be that she didn't abandon public choice, but instead remained committed to its free-market ideals, while reversing some of its valences. ..."
"... A recent popular history book, which qualified as a finalist for the National Book Award, depicts public choice as a kind of stealth intellectual weapons program , developed by economist James Buchanan to provide Chilean President Augusto Pinochet with the justification for his dictatorial constitution, and the Koch brothers with the tools to dismantle American democracy. ..."
"... Warren's ideas have a close family resemblance to those of Olson, a celebrated public choice theorist. (Perhaps she has read him; perhaps she has just reached similar conclusions from similar starting points.) Olson, like other public choice scholars, worried about the power of interest groups. He famously developed a theory of collective action that shows how narrowly focused interest groups can dominate politics, because they can organize more cheaply and reap great benefits by setting rules and creating monopolies at the expense of the ordinary public. This means that government programs often actively harm the poor rather than helping them. ..."
"... Olson also castigated libertarian economists for their "monodiabolism" and "almost utopian lack of concern about other problems" so long as the government was chained down. He argued that the government was not the only source of economic power: Business special interests would corrupt markets even if the government did not help them. ..."
"... Warren shares far more intellectual DNA with Mancur Olson and his colleagues than with traditional socialism. However, there are important differences. Olson wrote his key work in the 1980s, before the globalization boom. His arguments for free trade depend on the assumption that open borders will disempower special interests. ..."
Elizabeth Warren's politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets,
but also wants to tax billionaires' capital. Her enemies on the right claim that
she is a socialist , but Warren
describes herself as "capitalist to my bones."
Warren's politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is
even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between
conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and
liberals on the left, who favored the government.
It has been clear since 2016 that the traditional coalition of the right was breaking up.
Conservatives such as U.S. President Donald Trump are no fans of open trade and free markets,
and even favor social protections so long as they benefit their white supporters. Now, the left
is changing too.
Warren is reviving a pro-market left that has been neglected for decades, by drawing on a
surprising resource: public choice economics. This economic theory is reviled by many on the
left, who have claimed that it is a Koch-funded intellectual conspiracy designed to destroy
democracy. Yet there is a left version of public choice economics too, associated with thinkers
such as the late Mancur Olson. Like Olson, Warren is not a socialist but a left-wing
capitalist, who wants to use public choice ideas to cleanse both markets and the state of their
corruption.
Public choice economics has big influence and a bad name. It is a school of
economic thought that has at different times been associated with scholars at the University of
Rochester, Virginia Tech, and George Mason University. Public choice came into being in fervent
opposition to the mainstream of economics, which was dominated by scholars such as Paul
Samuelson.
Samuelson, in his famous and influential textbooks, saw a clear role for government in
regulating markets. Public choice scholars vehemently disagreed . For
political and theoretical reasons, they instead saw government as a fountain of corruption.
Public choice economists argued that government regulations were the product of special
interest groups that had "captured" the power of the state, to cripple rivals and squeeze money
from citizens and consumers. Regulations were not made in the public interest, but instead were
designed to bilk ordinary citizens.
Perhaps the most influential version of public choice was known as law and economics. For
decades, conservative foundations supported seminars that taught judges and legal academics the
principles of public choice economics. Attendees were taught that harsh sentences would deter
future crime, that government regulation should be treated with profound skepticism, and that
antitrust enforcement had worse consequences than the monopolies it was supposed to correct. As
statistical research by Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu has shown
, these seminars played a crucial role in shifting American courts to the right.
Warren was one of the young legal academics who attended
these seminars , and was largely convinced by the arguments. Her early work on bankruptcy
law started from public choice principles, and displayed a deep skepticism of intervention.
The conventional story is that as Warren moved from the right to the left, she abandoned the
public choice way of thinking about the world, in favor of a more traditional left-wing
radicalism. A more accurate take might be that she didn't abandon public choice, but instead
remained committed to its free-market ideals, while reversing some of its valences. Her work as
an academic was aimed at combating special interests, showing how the financial industry had
shaped bankruptcy reforms so that they boosted lenders' profits at borrowers' expense.
Notably, she applied public choice theory to explain some aspects of public choice, showing how
financial interests had funded scholarly centers which
provided a patina of genteel respectability to industry's preferred positions.
Now, Warren wants to to wash away the filth that has built up over decades to clog the
workings of American capitalism. Financial rules that have been designed by lobbyists need to
be torn up. Vast inequalities of wealth, which provide the rich with disproportionate political
and economic power, need to be reversed. Intellectual property rules, which make it so that
farmers no longer really own the seeds
they sow or the machinery they use to plant them, need to be abolished. For Warren, the problem
with modern American capitalism is that it is not nearly capitalist enough. It has been
captured by special interests, which are strangling competition.
It is hard to see how deeply Warren's program is rooted in
public choice ideas, because public choice has come to be the target of left-wing conspiracy theories. A recent popular
history book, which qualified as a finalist for the National Book Award, depicts public choice as a kind of
stealth intellectual weapons program , developed by economist James Buchanan to provide
Chilean President Augusto Pinochet with the justification for his dictatorial constitution, and
the Koch brothers with the tools to dismantle American democracy.
For sure, the mainstream of public choice is strongly libertarian, and the development of
the approach was funded by conservative individuals and foundations. What left-wing paranoia
overlooks is that there has always been a significant left-wing current of public choice, and
even a potent left-wing radicalism buried deep within public choice waiting to be uncovered.
The free-market ideal is a situation in which no actor has economic power over any other. As
many of Warren's proposals demonstrate, trying to achieve this ideal can animate a radical
program for reform.
Warren's ideas have a close family resemblance to those of Olson, a celebrated public choice
theorist. (Perhaps she has read him; perhaps she has just reached similar conclusions from
similar starting points.) Olson, like other public choice scholars, worried about the power of
interest groups. He famously developed a theory of collective action that shows how narrowly
focused interest groups can dominate politics, because they can organize more cheaply and reap
great benefits by setting rules and creating monopolies at the expense of the ordinary public.
This means that government programs often actively harm the poor rather than helping them.
However, Olson also castigated libertarian economists for their "monodiabolism" and "almost
utopian lack of concern about other problems" so long as the government was chained down. He
argued that the government was not the only source of economic power: Business special
interests would corrupt markets even if the government did not help them.
The result, according to Olson, was that societies, economies, and political systems became
increasingly encrusted with special-interest politics as the decades passed. Countries
benefited economically from great upheavals such as wars and social revolutions, which tore
interest groups from their privileged perches and sent them tumbling into the abyss.
Olson wanted to open up both politics and the economy to greater competition, equalizing
power relations as much as possible between the many and the few. He argued that under some
circumstances, powerful trade unions could benefit the economy. When unions and business groups
were sufficiently big that they represented a substantial percentage of workers or business as
a whole, they would be less likely to seek special benefits at the expense of the many, and
more likely to prioritize the good of the whole. Olson also believed strongly in the benefits
of open trade, not just because it led to standard economic efficiencies, but because it made
it harder for interest groups to capture government and markets. Northern European economies
such as Denmark, which combine powerful trade unions with a strong commitment to free markets,
represent Olsonian politics in action.
Warren shares far more intellectual DNA with Mancur Olson and his colleagues than with
traditional socialism. However, there are important differences. Olson wrote his key work in
the 1980s, before the globalization boom. His arguments for free trade depend on the assumption
that open borders will disempower special interests.
As economists such as Dani Rodrik and political scientists such as Susan Sell have shown,
this hasn't quite worked out as Olson expected. Free trade agreements have become a magnet for
special interest groups, who want to cement their preferences in international agreements that
are incredibly hard to reverse. The U.S. "fast track" approach to trade negotiations makes it
harder for Congress to demand change, but allows industry lobbyists to shape the
administration's negotiating stance. Investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms provide
business with a friendly forum where they can target government rules that hurt their economic
interests. All of this helps explain why Warren is skeptical of arguments for the general
benefits of free-trade agreements: they aren't nearly so general as economists claim.
Close attention to Warren's public choice influences reveals both her radicalism and its
limits. Like Olson, she is committed to the notion that making capitalism work for citizens
will require changes that border on the revolutionary. The sweeping proposals she makes for
changes to America's gross economic inequality, its economic relations with the rest of the
world, its approach to antitrust legislation, and its tolerance of sleazy relationships among
politicians, regulators, and industry are all aimed at creating a major upheaval. Where she
proposes major state action, as in her "Medicare for All" plans, it is to supplant market
institutions that aren't working, and are so embedded in interest group power dynamics that
they are incapable of reform.
Yet this is a distinctly capitalist variety of radicalism. Socialists will inevitably be
disappointed in the limits to her arguments. Warren's ideal is markets that work as they
should, in contrast to the socialist belief that some forms of power are inherent within
markets themselves. Not only Marxists, but economists such as Thomas Piketty, have suggested
that the market system is rigged in ways that will inevitably favor capital over the long run.
The fixes that Warren proposes will at most dampen down these tendencies rather than remove
them.
If Warren wins, she will not only disappoint socialists. Her proposals may end up being too
radical for Congress, but not nearly radical enough to tackle challenges such as climate
change, which will require a rapid and dramatic transformation of the global economy if
catastrophe is to be averted. Libertarians and mainstream public choice scholars will attack
her from a different vantage point, arguing that she is both too skeptical about existing
market structures and too trusting of the machineries of the state that she hopes to use to
remedy them. State efforts to reform markets can easily turn into protectionism.
What Warren offers, then, is neither a socialist or deep green alternative to capitalism,
nor a public choice justification for why regulators ought to leave it alone. The bet she is
making is that capitalism can solve the major problems that the United States faces, so long as
the government tackles inequality and defangs the special interests that have parasitized the
political and economic systems. Like all such bets, it is a risky one, but one that might
transform the U.S. model of capitalism if it succeeds.
Henry Farrell is a professor of
political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Any particular American war has no purpose, but the USA waging it does. The main points of
what war does:
1. Transfers wealth from social services to the military industrial complex. Americans
don't have education, infrastructure, or healthcare, but they do have a generation of
soldiers with PTSD, national debt, worldwide hatred, and an ever increasing sense of
exceptionalism.
2. Traps Americans in a cycle of fear and persecution. Americans don't need a bogeyman,
but our corporate overlords do, its how they monetize the populace. Find some disparate
population of brown people who want self autonomy, send in the CIA to fuck them up, and when
they retaliate tell Americans that people who live in a 3rd world land locked country several
thousands of miles away are a threat to their very existence and way of life because they
don't like God and Walmart.
Sadly the US uses the MIC to keep a large chunk of its population under control, as well as
providing a convenient coverup of the actual numbers of people who are unemployable or would
be unemployed if it were'nt for the taxpayer funding humungous spending in the so-called
defence sector, which needs a a constant supply of conflict to keep going. The frankly
moronic 'thank you for your service' soundbite drives me insane but it shows how much the
American public has been brainwashed.
For years my home state of Washington had a New Deal Democrat Senator named Henry Jackson,
AKA the Senator from Boeing.
He did good things for the state & was hugely popular here. One reason being that because
he brought the Federal pork back home.
IMO the things Gen. Butler wrote about in the 1920s are still the modus operandi of US
foreign policy.
If the Afghanistan war ends, the USA will go to war with someone else. You cannot spend so
much on military & not be at war. America must have an enemy. And, don’t forget,
they always have “God on our side!”
The neocons in power during 2001 were hell bent on taking out Saddam Hussein. When 9/11
happened, they were looking for avenues to blame Iraq so that they could launch the war on
that nation. Since things could not be put together, and all evidence pointed to Afghanistan,
they took a detour in their war plan with a half hearted approach.
In fact Afghanistan was never the problem - It was Pakistan that held Afghanistan on the
string and managed all terror related activities. Everything related to 9/11 and beyond
pointed directly at Pakistan. Whatever threat Bush and his cronies projected about Iraq was
true in the case of Pakistan. The war was lost when they made Pakistan an ally on the war on
terror. It is like allying with Al Capone to crack down on the mafia.
Pakistan bilked the gullible American war planners, protected its assets and deflected all
the rage on to the barren lands of Afghanistan. They hid all key Al Qaeda operatives and
handed off the ones that did not align with their strategic interests to the US, while
getting reward for it. War in Iraq happened in a hurry because the Bush family had scores to
settle in Iraq. Pressure was lifted on Afghanistan. This is when the war reached a dead
end.
The Taliban knew time was on their hands and waited it out. Obama did understand the
situation and tried to put Af-Pak together and tightened the grip on Pakistan. He got the
troops out of Iraq. Pakistan is almost bankrupt now for its deep investment on terror
infrastructure. The US has drained billions of dollars and lives in Afghanistan due to
misdirected goals. I am surprised Bush and Cheney have not been sent to jail on lies to
launch the Iraq war and botching the real war on terror.
he American people have known that the war in Afghanistan was a lost cause for quite some
time. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans' views of the war
started to go south right around the end of 2011, until eventually a majority started
seeing the writing on the wall about two years later.
That's why the Washington Post
report this week on the so-called "Afghanistan Papers", detailing how US officials
"deliberately mislead the public" on the war's progress, is almost sort of unremarkable. If the
piece took away any shred of innocence left from this ghastly enterprise, it's that perhaps
some of us thought our leaders, while failing miserably at building a nation thousands of miles
away, were at least acting in good faith.
At the same time, the Post report is rage inducing, not just because of the sheer stupidity
of American leaders continuing to fight a war they knew they could not win, but also how their
unwillingness to take responsibility for a failed policy caused so much death, destruction and
heartbreak, particularly among those American families who have admirably dedicated their lives
to serving their country, and the countless number of Afghan civilians trapped in a cycle of
endless war they have nothing to do with.
Of course, the "Afghanistan Papers" immediately recalled memories of the Pentagon variety
leaked to the New York Times nearly a half century ago because they too were government
documents outlining how numerous American administrations had lied to the public about Vietnam
– another long, costly and unnecessary war with no military solution.
But there's one major difference: the war in Afghanistan doesn't have as direct an impact on
the lives of everyday Americans as the Vietnam war did, when the military draft meant that
everyone had to deal with the cold war proxy conflict in south-east Asia
one way or another . Therefore, it's entirely possible, likely even, that this major and
important report from the Post will drift into the wilderness just like the dozens of Trump-era
stories that would have,
for example , taken down any other US president in "normal times".
But there's one big question the Post report raises but does not address: why? Why did so
many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to state
department and National Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about how the
war in Afghanistan
was going?
The easy answer is that there's a long tradition in Washington, particularly among the
foreign policy establishment, that self-reflection, taking responsibility and admitting failure
is a big no-no. Heck, you can get convicted of lying to Congress about illegal arms sales, and
cover up brutal atrocities and still get a job at the
state department . Did you torture anyone? No problem .
While DC's culture of no culpability certainly plays a role in this case, the more
compelling answer lies somewhere near the fact that once the American war machine kicks into
gear, no amount of facts undermining its very existence is going to get in the way.
Indeed, the United States has so far doled out nearly one trillion dollars for the war in
Afghanistan (the true cost of the war
will be trillions more ) and everyone's on the take: from defense industry executives,
lobbyists and US political campaign coffers to Afghan government officials and poppy farmers to
anyone and anything in between.
What's more is that this
military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability,
so what's the incentive to change course? The Pentagon's entire budget operates in much the
same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions
of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at
the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the
money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison.
The bottom line is that the Afghanistan Papers clearly show that a lot of people were
killed, injured and subject to years, if not lifetimes, of psychological trauma and financial
hardship because a bunch of men – yes, mostly men – in Washington didn't want to
admit publicly what they knew privately all along. If we don't start holding these people to
account – and it's not just about Afghanistan
– the DC foreign policy establishment will continue to act with impunity, meaning that
it's probably more likely than not that in 50 years there'll be another batch of "papers"
revealing once again that we've failed to learn obvious lessons from the past.
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
Why did so many people -- from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials -- feel the need to lie about how
the war in Afghanistan was going?
This is because it's easy cash cow for the old boys club by sending working class kids
to be killed in a far off land.
The pentagon with the full cooperation of MSM will sell it as we are defending our ways of
life by fighting a country 10,000 kms away. This show the poor literacy, poor analytical
thinking of US population constantly brain washed by MSM, holy men, clergy, other neo con
organisations like National rifle club etc.
I never knew USA dropped 2.7 millions tons of bombs and now so many left unexploded and
its same in Vietnam, Cambodia as neutral,
but i met so many injured kids etc from the bombs,.
the total MADNESS OF USA IS NAZI SM AT ITS BEST,.NO SHAME OR COMPASSION FOR THE
VICTIMS.
I cannot comprehend the money it cost USA,. AN ALSO PROFITS FOR SOME,.
With the exceptions of two attacks on American soil-Pearl Harbor and 911- the American people
and for the most part their legislative representatives in Congress- will always remain
cluless what the United States Government does overseas.
This country runs on its own drum beats. The ordinary man on the street needs to take care
of his economic needs. The Big Boys always take care of themselves. That includes the
military establishment, that is always entitled to an absurd amounts of monies, fueled by an
empire building machinery, pushed by the elites that control the fate of economic might, and
political orchestra that feeds its ego and prestige.
Time and again, our American sociopaths in power have a strangle hold on us, regardless of
the destruction and animosity they heap on distant peoples and lands the world over in the
name of national security and the democratic spiel, as they like to tell us ....
Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson- Vietnam and the South East Asian countries of
Laos , Cambodia, are an example .
Years later, the establishment manufactures blatant cover-ups with lies upon lies to accuse
on record, as general Powell eloquently presented at the United Nations: That Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction and needs to be held accountable.And now, this report on
Afghanistan with all this pathological violence.
Is it reasonable to conclude that our democracy and its pathological actors in government
and big business will always purchase it by demagoguery and self vested interest, because the
ordinary man whose vote should count will never have the ultimate say when it comes to war
and destruction!
I seem to be missing something here. Isn't Marxism where the proletariat own the means of
production? So, doesn't this look more like fascism where the corporations own
everything?
"The proletariat" don't make decisions collectively - it's not possible given the nature
of man. Every authoritarian system is fascism in practice - where a cabal of chosen ones call
the shots. Whether it's corporate execs, billionaire playboys, demagogues, bureaucrats, union
bosses, soldiers, intellectuals, or aliens at the top... it really only changes the
flavor.
Ok, so it's not just me. The repeating of the word Marx in that article was getting weird.
Can we actually talk about what that guy wrote instead of the symbol that name has become? It
seems very boomer-ish to be reviving the talk of communism all the time when that system is
essentially dead. Now a bunch of retirees are red-baiting again when Russia isn't communist,
China isn't communist, and about the only communist country on earth is Cuba.
Meanwhile, just about every country on earth is becoming an oligarchic bureaucracy. They
don't generally give a **** about **** Marx was on about.
"... The Washington Examiner first reported Friday that lawyers for the Free Beacon -- a conservative outlet based in the nation's capital -- funded the project from fall 2015 to spring 2016, when it pulled its funding as Trump looked set to clinch the nomination. ..."
"... Washington Free Beacon ..."
"... After the Democrats took over funding of the operation in mid-2016, Fusion GPS would hire former British spy Christopher Steele and would lead to the production of the so-called "Trump dossier," filled with salacious but unconfirmed claims about how Trump was compromised by the Russians. ..."
"... The Free Beacon noted in its statement that it had "no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele." ..."
"... The Free Beacon is funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire and major GOP donor Paul Singer. The New York Times reports that Singer initially supported Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for the Republican nomination, but later spearheaded a campaign to deny Trump the nomination even after Rubio dropped out of the race. ..."
"... While supporting Republican establishment favorites such as Rubio and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Singer was a major backer of Common Core and was the founder of a super-PAC that has the express purpose of turning the GOP pro-gay marriage. ..."
"... Kristol is also the founder of the Weekly Standard, which like the Free Beacon has a neoconservative foreign policy outlook. The Free Beacon was co-founded by two former Weekly Standard writers, chairman Michael Goldfarb and editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti. ..."
The Washington Free Beacon, funded by GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, was the original funder of
Fusion GPS' research project that attempted to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump -- a
project that would later be funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's
campaign.
The Washington Examiner first
reported Friday that lawyers for the Free Beacon -- a conservative outlet based in the
nation's capital -- funded the project from fall 2015 to spring 2016, when it pulled its
funding as Trump looked set to clinch the nomination.
Lawyers for the Free Beacon informed the House Intelligence Committee of its role in the
funding on Friday. The outlet issued a statement
standing by its decision to fund the project:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained
third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us
and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to
provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we
retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.
After the Democrats took over funding of the operation in mid-2016, Fusion GPS would
hire former British spy Christopher Steele and would lead to the production of the so-called
"Trump dossier," filled with salacious but unconfirmed claims about how Trump was compromised
by the Russians.
Fusion has come under scrutiny for its
alleged ties to Russia, including the fact that many of the claims
originate from Kremlin sources -- meaning that the information came from inside the Russian
government.
The Free Beacon noted in its statement that it had "no knowledge of or connection to the
Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or
provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele."
"The Washington Free Beacon has issued a statement asserting that it had no involvement with
Christopher Steele or the dossier he compiled from Russian sources," Jack Langer, spokesman for
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News. "The Beacon has
agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this
assertion."
Yet, the revelation is likely to fuel questions about the role the so-called "Never Trump"
movement played in an effort that would eventually inflict damage on President Trump, and that
was possibly part of a Russian misinformation scheme.
The Free Beacon is funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire and major
GOP donor Paul Singer. The New York Times reports
that Singer initially supported Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for the Republican nomination, but
later spearheaded a campaign to deny Trump the nomination even after Rubio dropped out of the
race.
While supporting Republican establishment favorites such as Rubio and 2012 presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, Singer was a major
backer of Common Core and was the
founder of a super-PAC that has the express purpose of turning the GOP pro-gay
marriage.
The Examiner reports that the Free Beacon was originally part of the 501(c)(4)
tax-exempt organization -- the Center for American Freedom -- but in 2014 became a for-profit
organization. The Center's original board of directors includes William Kristol, a prominent
"Never Trump" activist.
Kristol is also the founder of the Weekly Standard, which like the Free Beacon has a
neoconservative foreign policy outlook. The Free Beacon was co-founded by two former Weekly
Standard writers, chairman Michael Goldfarb and editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti.
***Update***
"The Washington Free Beacon has issued a statement asserting that it had no involvement with
Christopher Steele or the dossier he compiled from Russian sources," Jack Langer, spokesman for
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News. "The Beacon has
agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this
assertion."
TrumpAlways •
2 years ago • edited I smell McCain. Anyone else smell McCain with a little bit of
Bush in there...
One of things which concerns me most about this site and most others inhabited by
contrarian blokes of a certain age is the way that topics discussed are most often the same
topics as those fed to the mugs via corporate media.
Sure the opinions are vastly different, but the subjects are not. So much energy and
time wasted on pointless topics like the amerikan prez when we all know that it really
doesn't matter who jags that gig nothing meaningful will alter for amerikans or the people
outside amerika oppressed by empire.
Now the prez thing is a bit of a troll since so many amerikans have been intensely
indoctrinated right through their lives to believe that all the prezdency guff is
meaningful when it so obviously isn't. That in reality the odds of any amerikan suddenly
having an epiphany about the pointlessness of DC kibuki from reading this, or something
similar written by someone else, are negligible.
So we have to accept, to a degree, that Washington Housewives and Days of Our Lives DC
will continue to feature at MoA.
But what happens when the corporate media chooses not to consider much larger, more
pernicious forms of imperialism than is currently occurring in the ME because that
imperialism is nascent, awful things are being done to humans western populations who have
not been sufficiently propagandised against, so may not greet the tales of murder and
mayhem generated by the actions of french foreign legionaires, english SAS or amerikan
special forces with sufficient approval?
Easy, we just don't talk about it except when told to or where there is no choice
because some action by the imperial thugs for hire has attracted too much attention. In
that case the barest of details make it into the news and we will be told that whoever it
was who had their families butchered belonged to an organisation which 'western
intelligence' said was 'associated with ISIS'. No specificity, not details at all apart
from the one unsubstantiated claim, which lets face it says any village of humans anywhere
that contains a single resident which western intelligence believes is somehow associated
with ISIS, is worthy of being genocided out of existence.
I reckon one of the best indicators of imperial violence is displaced persons. We saw in
the ME that various forms of ethnic cleansing were practised to persuade people to move off
their traditional lands in order to either exploit the natural resources in the area (see
Saudi Amerika driving tribes from the newly discovered hydrocarbon prospects in North
Yemen), or to create lebensraum for another group of humans currently held in favour by the
empire (see the shifting of arabs and Turkamen from North Syria to give ready made villages
to Kurds which only lasted for as long as the Kurds were needed by empire).
So many people were displaced in the ME during the first half of the teens that shock,
horror some european countries felt obliged to allow a few of those whose lives had been
destroyed into their communities.
That was then, yet we still all talk about the ME as though it is where the empire is
committing its most egregious harm, but that is no longer the case.
If you check
this Pew Center article you will see
The total number of people living in
sub-Saharan Africa who were forced to leave their homes due to conflict reached a new high
of 18.4 million in 2017, up sharply from 14.1 million in 2016 -- the largest regional
increase of forcibly displaced people in the world" .
If one checks the chart Pew has provided we can see that the numbers of decent humans in
the ME who have been displaced from their land is alleged to currently be 21.5 million
while the number of persons displaced in sub-Sahara Africa is about 3 million less at 18.4
million.
See so more action in the ME still. No, firstly the ME curve has flattened right out
over the years since 2016 meaning that new displacements are relatively low unless of
course it is your whanau that has been displaced in which case it wouldn't feel
nearly as benign. Secondly if you look at the fine-print on that chart you will see the 21.5 million line is
labelled "Middle East-North Africa".
Libya is an African state which happens to have a proportion of arabic speaking people
in its population, it also contains Berbers (e.g. Muammar Ghadaffi) and what the chart
calls "sub-Saharan Africans when they want say negro but the unfortunate connotations
associated with that term (99% the result of horrific whitefella behaviour) means that
negro is no longer a la mode in whitefella land.
Not enough to rape, steal & steal from black Africans, now we also remove the means
to identify them as a distinct group.
The Libya africa/ME issue matters a great deal because prior to the fukusi rape of
Libya, that nation acted as a bulwark for all the supra-saharan nations, some Saharan eg
Niger and that was just as likely a reason for amerika to destroy Libya setting loose the
ethno-centrists of Misratah to kill black africans, standover Berbers & Turks to ensure
that only Arab speaking semites can get control. This is the deal the empire struck. Not to
enable italy to get some of that sweet sweet crude at the sort of bargain basement prices
Italy hadn't enjoyed since Mussolini invaded Libya - that was purely a minor side benefit,
now the good colonel was no more, fukus became the only game in town. There was no longer any white knight determined to protect his/her neigbours from the
outright theft, extortion, bribery, rape & murder which are the empire's stock in
trade.
It is foolish and counterproductive to ignore the horrors that a US-led fukus mission
which runs across the entire African continent has created in the name of more billions to
the already rich. Do it if you want, but all you are really achieving is enabling the arseholes.
There is a scarcity of relevant links for the usual reasons. Not only are you more
likely to put faith in info from sources you already know & trust, getting there will
help you comprehend this crime far better than something easily digestible from a user, and
most importantly the final paras were done long after the sun rose over the yardarm
here.
@ A User 72
All very true. I would place the de jure war onslaughts within the overall context of
globalization and in particular the imperialistic assault of corporate industrial agriculture
upon Africa, the last great semi-frontier which wasn't fully assimilated by the first "Green
Revolution" onslaught. A main goal as the global empire faces decline or collapse is to seize
control of all land and drive the people OUT.
Globalization acts to destroy all local production and distribution. It destroys this
outright or seizes control of it in order to force it into the global commodity framework. It
seizes control of indigenous land and resources. It dumps subsidized Western goods. It
destroys any functional politics and democracy. It imposes the control of multinational
corporations over every part of life it can. It does this purely in the power interests of
Western elites. Any benefits it lets trickle down to locals are purely calculated payouts to
accomplices. Much of the global South has been crushed under the corporate boot this way, and
Africa has already been subject to the IMF and World Bank’s debt indenture shock
treatment (“structural adjustment”).
All this has been accompanied by the systematic ravaging of African ecosystems,
culminating in the rising climate chaos driven by the patterns of energy consumption, waste,
and ecological destruction practiced and imposed by Western industrialized productionism and
consumerism. Climate change is caused by these actions. Since corporate state elites and
their supporters have long known this and in spite of lots of lip service have refused to do
anything to avert the worst of it, it’s long been true that climate change is an
intentional campaign of aggression against the Earth and all vulnerable peoples. Thus climate
change takes its place as the most extreme and far-reaching of the corporate campaigns
designed to cause disaster, destruction, and chaos. According to this pattern of disaster
capitalism the corporations then proceed to use the crises they intentionally generate as
further opportunities for aggression and profit. All corporate sectors practice this, and
corporate agriculture is the most aggressive and destructive practitioner of all. Today
Africa is its primary new target.
Corporate control of agriculture and food has always been at the core of the globalization
onslaught. In accordance with its food weapon the US government systematically has waged
economic, political, chemical, biological (both of the former in the form of poison-based
agriculture and other pretexts for systemic and systematic environmental poisoning), and
often literal shooting warfare. Throughout this history of war and sublimated war, corporate
agriculture has been a constant weapon and battleground as well as its aggrandizement being a
constant goal.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who
assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Look at this:
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public.
They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear
the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap
of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.
On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan
-- more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.
If you can get through it all, good for you. I got so mad that I had to quit reading not long after the paragraph above. We have
lost about 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and sustained about 21,000 casualties of war. (Not to mention all the dead innocent Afghan
civilians, and the dead and wounded troops of our NATO allies.) We have spent altogether almost $1 trillion on that country. The
Afghan officials stole a fortune from us. We never knew what to do there. And every one of our leaders lied about it. Lied! All those
brave American soldiers, dead or maimed for life, for a war that our leaders knew that we could not win, but in defense of which
they lied.
It's the Pentagon Papers all over again. You know this, right.
Trump is negotiating now with the Taliban over the possibility of US withdrawal. The story says US officials fought the Post
in court over these documents, and have said most recently that publishing them would undermine the administration's negotiating
position. I don't care. Tell the truth, for once. Let's cut our losses and go before more Americans die in this lost cause. Poor
Afghanistan is going to fall under the tyrannical rule of the mullahs. But if, after 18 years, a trillion dollars, and all those
dead and wounded Americans, we couldn't establish a stable and decent Afghan regime, it's not going to happen.
If any of my children want to join the US military, I'm going to go to the mat to talk them out of it. I do not want them, or
anybody's sons or daughters, sent overseas to die in hopeless countries in wars that we cannot win, and shouldn't have fought, but
kept doing because of bipartisan Establishment foreign policy delusions. To be clear, we should have bombed the hell out of Afghanistan
after 9/11. The Taliban government gave shelter to Al Qaeda, and brought retribution upon itself. But the Bush Administration's nation-building
insanity was never going to work. Eight years of Obama did not fix this. Nor, so far, has three years of Trump, though maybe he will
be the one to stop the bleeding. If he does withdraw, I hope he blasts the hell out of his two predecessors and the military leadership
for what they've done here.
I've been writing lately in this space, and in the book I'm working on, about the parallels between late-imperial Russia and our
own time and place. And I've been writing about what Hannah Arendt had to say about the origins of totalitarianism. Arendt says that
one precursor of totalitarianism is a widespread loss of faith in a society's and a government's institutions.
According to a 2019 Gallup poll, the
US military is one of the few institutions that enjoys broad confidence. How can anybody possibly believe them after this? How can
we believe our Commanders-in-Chief? According to the secret documents, the men in the field have been were their commanders for a
long time that this Afghan thing was not working, and wasn't ever going to work. But they kept sending them back in.
Why? Pride? Too full of themselves to admit that it was a failure? As soldier John Kerry turned antiwar activist said back in
the 1970s, about Vietnam, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" No more American dying in and for Afghanistan.
Bring the troops home. They did not fail. Their superiors did.
How do you convince young people to join an institution whose leadership -- civilian as well as military -- is prepared to sacrifice
them for a lost cause, and then lie, and lie, and lie about it? How do you convince mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters
with confidence to that military? How do you convince taxpayers to support throwing more money into the sh*thole that is the Pentagon's
budget?
The questions that are going to come up sooner than most of us think, and, in some version, from both the Left and the Right:
just what kind of order do we have in America anyway? Why do I owe it my loyalty? What does it mean to be a patriot when you cannot
trust the nation's leaders and institutions?
These are the kinds of questions that, depending on how they are answered, can lead to the unraveling, and even the overthrow,
of a regime. It has been said that the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a prime mover in the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the
collapse of the Soviet system. We are not the Soviet Union -- but I wouldn't be so quick to take comfort in that, if I were a political
or military leader.
We learned nothing from Vietnam, did we? Not a damn thing. It is beyond infuriating. It is beyond demoralizing. And you know,
the only thing more infuriating and more demoralizing than this will be if there are no consequences for it, or if people fall back
into partisan positions. The report makes clear that this is a disaster that was launched by a Republican administration, continued
under a Democratic administration, and has been overseen by another Republican administration.
One of the reasons Donald Trump is president today, and not some other Republican, is he was the one Republican primary candidate
who denounced the wars. If he can't get us out of Afghanistan, what good is he?
UPDATE: I was just thinking about something a military friend told me almost 15 years ago, based on his direct personal knowledge
of the situation: that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was lying to the nation about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were
going. And if Rumsfeld was lying, so was the administration. My friend was deeply discouraged. Rumsfeld left office in 2006 -- but
the habit remained with our leadership.
The only thing that surprised me in the WaPo article was that it was published in the CIA's house organ.
EDIT: I should have added that the squandering of blood and treasure, fighting a pointless war that benefits nobody but the
financiers, contractors, arms manufacturers and generals, all while the politicians and generals proclaim that victory is just
at hand, we can't turn back now, - all this reminds me of nothing so much as a smaller scale WWI.
Trump wants us out of Afghanistan, but Iran is a different story. He's sending more troupes to Saudi Arabia to defend the Saudi's
from Iran, how is that disentangling from the ME. I think the Saudi's Wahhabism, basically the same as ISIS practices, is the
most dangerous religion in the word today and they are busy exporting it to the rest of the world. I really think Trump is a false
prophet, a lying prophet, who serves first himself.
Didn't vote for Trump - but: He has attempted to stand up to the elite establishment intelligence-military-arms manufacturing
complex and start cutting back the forever wars. Everyone attacks him for this--establishment Republicans, Democrats, State Department,
Military, Intelligence, Media--everybody. The attacks are immediate and intense. He is almost always forced to pull back. He seems
determined to keep trying, but, as is evident, they will do anything it takes to stop him.
"... "I'm opposed to conditioning the aid, and I would fight it no matter what," Engel told Al-Monitor. "The Democratic Party has traditionally been a pro-Israel party, and I see no reason for that to change now. If there are people who are Democrats who don't feel that way, then I don't think they should be elected president of the United States." ..."
"... Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is the most vocal proponent of conditioning Israeli military aid in the presidential race -- going even further left than J Street and all his primary opponents. At J Street's conference in October he said that some of the $3.8 billion in annual assistance "should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza." ..."
"... J Street has set any formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank as its red line for placing conditions on Israeli military aid. But it also supports the $38 billion memorandum of understanding. ..."
"... Shortly after the vote, Sanders campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., as well as Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked colleagues to sign a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking him to clarify whether Israel has used US military equipment while demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank. ..."
"... The letter, seen by Al-Monitor, notes that the Arms Export Control Act "narrowly conditions the use of transferred US-origin defense articles" and requires the president to inform Congress if the equipment is used for unauthorized purposes ..."
The Jews try to run US policy ..but lately the Dem base (and part of the party) has become
more pro Palestine.
Democratic (Jewish) lawmakers reckon with 2020 rhetoric on Israel aid
December 6, 2019
Presidential candidates who want to place conditions on Israeli military aid have prompted
pro-Israel House Democrats to go on the offensive.
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
It's becoming harder and harder for pro-Israel Democrats on
Capitol Hill to ignore the increasingly critical voices of the US ally within their party and
the presidential race.
House Democratic leaders -- who happen to be some of the staunchest Israel supporters on
Capitol Hill -- this week added language supportive of the annual $3.8 billion military aid
package to Israel to a symbolic resolution that endorses a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The stalled resolution passed 226-188, largely along party lines, today. But pro-Israel
Democrats only came on board after House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel,
D-N.Y., added their new language to the bill. The new provision is a response to the fact
that several presidential candidates have come out of the woodwork in recent months with
calls to place conditions on the largest recipient of US military aid.
"I'm opposed to conditioning the aid, and I would fight it no matter what," Engel
told Al-Monitor. "The Democratic Party has traditionally been a pro-Israel party, and I see
no reason for that to change now. If there are people who are Democrats who don't feel that
way, then I don't think they should be elected president of the United
States."
When Engel's committee first advanced the resolution in July, Democratic leaders opted not
to put it on the floor, even as they passed another nonbinding resolution condemning the
pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement 398-17, which was backed by the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
That changed last month after the Trump administration repealed a decades-old legal
opinion maintaining that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international
law.
"There are those on the far-left side of the Democratic Party -- and some of the
presidential candidates -- who are pushing for new conditions on aid, especially in their
interactions with Gaza, which is run by Hamas -- a terrorist organization," Gottheimer told
Al-Monitor.
An October poll from the liberal Center for American Progress found that 56% of
American voters, including 71% of Democrats, oppose "unconditional financial and military
assistance to Israel if the Israeli government continues to violate American policy on
settlement expansion or West Bank annexation."
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is the most vocal proponent of conditioning Israeli
military aid in the presidential race -- going even further left than J Street and
all his primary opponents. At J Street's conference in October he said that some of the $3.8
billion in annual assistance "should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza."
J Street has set any formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank as its red line for
placing conditions on Israeli military aid. But it also supports the $38 billion memorandum
of understanding.
Presidential hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South
Bend, Indiana, have jumped on board with J Street's position. However, the current
front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, has flatly ruled out conditioning the aid.
Notably, J Street did not oppose the effort to amend the Lowenthal resolution with the
military aid language. That said, progressive Democrats do not necessarily view that
provision as incompatible with calls to attach strings to that assistance. Congressional
Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., called the Engel language
"meaningless."
"It's just restating what current practice or current law is," Pocan told Al-Monitor. "We
don't really see it as affecting the bill one way or the other. At any time if we feel like
we're better off putting conditions on money and holding back money, Congress could always do
that with any country through the normal process."
Shortly after the vote, Sanders campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., as well as
Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked colleagues to sign a letter to
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking him to clarify whether Israel has used US military
equipment while demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
The letter, seen by Al-Monitor, notes that the Arms Export Control Act "narrowly
conditions the use of transferred US-origin defense articles" and requires the president to
inform Congress if the equipment is used for unauthorized purposes
"... Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force. ..."
"... These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved. ..."
"... September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it. ..."
"... For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific." ..."
"... The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. ..."
"... This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com . ..."
The unrivaled and unchallenged exertion of American military power around the world, or
what's known as "primacy," has been the basis for U.S. Grand Strategy over the past 70 years
and has faced few intellectual and political challenges. The result has been stagnant ideas,
poor logic, and an ineffective foreign policy. As global security challenges have evolved, our
foreign policy debate has remained in favor of primacy, repeatedly relying on a select few,
poorly conceived ideas and arguments. Primacy's greatest hits arguments are played on repeat
throughout the policy and journalism worlds and its latest presentation is in a recent
article in
the Wall Street Journal, written by its chief foreign policy correspondent, titled,
"America Can't Escape the Middle East." The piece provides a case study in how stagnant these
ideas have become, and how different actors throughout the system present them without serious
thought or contemplation.
Hyping the threat of withdrawal
The WSJ piece trotted out one of the most well-worn cases for unending American military
deployments in the region. "The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved to be a debacle," it rightly
notes. However, there's always a "but":[B]ut subsequent attempts to pivot away from the region
or ignore it altogether have contributed to humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist outrages and
geopolitical setbacks, further eroding America's standing in the world."
Primacists often warn of the dire security threats that will result from leaving Middle East
conflict zones. The reality is that the threats they cite are actually caused by the
unnecessary use of force by the United States in the first place. For example, the U.S. sends
military assets to deter Iran, only to have Iran increase attacks or provocations in response.
The U.S. then beefs up its military presence
to protect the forces that are already there. Primacists use the security threats that
are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't
stop, or in fact increase, the use of force.
These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently
ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example,
veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at
unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even
draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't
induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the
Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and
don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all
parties involved.
Terrorism safe havens
And how many times have we heard that we must defend some undefined geographical space to
prevent extremists from plotting attacks? "In the past, jihadists used havens in Afghanistan,
Yemen, Syria and Iraq to plot more ambitious and deadly attacks, including 9/11," the WSJ piece
says. "Though Islamic State's self-styled 'caliphate' has been dismantled, the extremist
movement still hasn't been eliminated -- and can bounce back."
The myth of the terrorism safe havens enabling transnational attacks on the United States
has
persisted despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and significant scholarly research
that contradicts it. The myth persists because it provides a simple and comforting narrative
that's easy to understand. September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the
ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and
denying this space wouldn't have prevented it.
Terrorists don't need safe havens to operate, and only gain marginal increases in
capabilities by having access to them. Organizations engage in terrorism because they have such
weak capabilities in the first place. These movements are designed to operate underground with
the constant threat of arrest and execution. The Weatherman Underground in the United States
successfully carried out bombings while operating within the United States itself. The Earth
Liberation Front did the same by organizing into cells where no cell knew anything about the
other cells to prevent the identification of other members if members of one cell were
arrested. Organizations that engage in terrorism can operate with or without safe havens.
Although safe havens don't add significantly to a terrorist groups' capabilities, governing
your own territory is something completely different. ISIS is a commonly used, and misused,
example for why wars should be fought to deny safe havens. A safe haven is a country or region
in which a terrorist group is free from harassment or persecution. This is different from what
ISIS created in 2014. What ISIS had when it swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014 was a
proto-state. This gave them access to a tax base, oil revenues, and governing resources. Safe
havens don't provide any of this, at least not at substantial levels. The Islamic State's
construction of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq did give them operational capabilities they
wouldn't have had otherwise, but this isn't the same as the possible safe havens that would be
gained from a military withdrawal from Middle Eastern conflicts. The conditions of ISIS's rise
in 2014 don't exist today and the fears of an ISIS resurgence like their initial rise are
unfounded .
Credibility doesn't work how you think it works
For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always
be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America
withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea
and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the
Pacific."
Most commentators have made this claim without recognition of their own contradictions that
abandoning the Kurds in Syria would damage American credibility. They then list all the other
times we've abandoned the Kurds. Each of these betrayals didn't stop them from working with the
United States again, and this latest iteration will be the same. People don't work with the
United States because they trust or respect us, they do it because we have a common interest
and the United States has the capability to get things done. As we were abandoning the Kurds
this time to be attacked by the Turks, Kurdish officials were continuing to
share intelligence with U.S. officials to facilitate the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi because both the United States and the Kurds wanted Baghdadi eliminated and only
the United States had the capability to get it done.
Similarly, the idea that pulling out militarily in one region results in a direct chain of
events where our adversaries move into countries or areas in a completely different region is
quite a stretch of the imagination. Russia moved into Crimea because it's a strategic asset and
it was taking advantage of what it saw as an opportunity: instability and chaos in Kiev. Even
if we left troops in every conflict country we've ever been in, Russia would have correctly
assessed that Ukraine just wasn't important enough to spark a U.S. invasion. When the Soviets
withdrew from Afghanistan, did the United States invade Cuba? What alliance did the Soviets or
Chinese abandon before the United States entered the Korean War?
Assessments of credibility , especially in times of crisis (like that in Ukraine), are made
based on what leaders think the other country's interests are and the capabilities they have to
pursue those interests. There is no evidence to support -- in fact there is a lot of evidence
that contradicts -- the idea that withdrawing militarily from one region or ending an alliance
has any impact on assessments of a country's reliability or credibility.
Not all interests are created equal
Threat inflation isn't just common from those who promote a primacy-based foreign policy,
it's necessary. Indeed, as the WSJ piece claimed, "There is no avoiding the fact that the
Middle East still matters a great deal to U.S. interests."
The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need
to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists
couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve
all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and
importance. Vital interests are those that directly impact the survival of the United
States. The only thing that can threaten the survival of the United States is another powerful
state consolidating complete control of either Europe or East Asia. This would give them the
capabilities and freedom to strike directly at the territorial United States. This is why the
United States stayed in Europe after WWII, to prevent the consolidation of Europe by the
Soviets. Addressing the rise of China -- which will require some combination of cooperation and
competition -- is America's vital interest today and keeping troops in Afghanistan to prevent a
terrorism safe haven barely registers as a peripheral interest. There are U.S. interests in the
Middle East, but these interests are not important enough to sacrifice American soldiers for
and can't easily be secured through military force anyway.
Consequences
Most of these myths and arguments can be summarized by the claim that any disengagement of
any kind by the United States from the Middle East comes with consequences. This isn't entirely
wrong, but it isn't really relevant either unless compared with the consequences of continuing
engagement at current levels. We currently have 67,000 troops in the
Middle East and Afghanistan and those troops are targets of adversaries, contribute to
instability, empower hardliners in Iran, and provide continuing legitimacy to insurgent and
terrorist organizations fighting against a foreign occupation. One
article in The Atlantic argued that the problem with a progressive foreign policy
is that restraint comes with costs, almost ironically ignoring the fact that the U.S.'s current
foreign policy also comes with, arguably greater, costs. A military withdrawal, or even
drawdown, from the Middle East does come with consequences, but it's only believable that these
costs are higher than staying through the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions that inflate
such risks and costs. No wonder then that these myths have become the greatest hits of a
foreign policy that's stuck in the past.
From page 12 of Martyanov's RRMA, " people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom had spent a
day serving in cadre officer uniform "
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years and retired from the Navy Reserve as a full
Captain.
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years
A Tracker, in 1950s for a couple of years, while having a degree in Political Science. That sure qualifies him for making strategic
decisions, right? Especially in the 21st century. Well, we all saw results, didn't we?
@Jim Christian Jim, a lot of truth in what you say. But especially this:
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was Stars and Stripes and we served
in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Here is a quote from one of Russian undercover intelligence assets which was outed when Anna Chapman was outed. Unlike her,
however, this guy was a real deal. Here is what he had to say recently about US:
What is THEIR weakness? As enemies these guys are mediocrities, second rate. They overate. Their previous generation was
stronger. They respected us, we respected them. We don't respect these ones,they didn't deserve it. They can bully, as for
the real fight–we'll see about that They are enraged that soon they will have to live within their means.They forgot how to
do so long time ago. That is why they want to solve a problem with us now, while others are still afraid of them.
I remember 70s and 80s clearly, being myself a Cold Warrior, these were different times. many different people. Today, as you
say, I see decay everywhere in everything, the country (the US) was literally robbed, people blinded and all for a reasons of
bottom line in "business" and for Israel's, Saudi and corporate interests. The America I encountered in 1990s is gone.
This is the net result of Clinton policies and neocon dominance in the USA foreign policy.
And it is not a pretty picture. It might difficult to win Russia back as an ally after those
Russiagate nonsense. They feel really offended by it and might overreact as is evident from the
test below.
I'll just say again that imbecilization is a completely normal historical phenomenon in declining empires, Empires also tend to have a very
flexible conception of truth, that is, they believe they can
fabricate reality for the simple reason they are geopolitically dominant.
The fact that the MSM have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has
played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false
narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real
Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily
"news".
It feels like the world has gone crazy. They push someone's wallet in our pocket, and then
shout "catch the thief!". We try to debunt this false flag, show surveillance footage, which
clearly shows the setup. But the continue shout in chorus - " thief, thief, thief!".
Acquaintances turn away, hide their eyes. Those "Western partners" iare numerous and they
silence our weak attempts to protest. We were driven into a corner... They try to strangulate
us with sanctions.
Unfortunately, this is our new reality. For the next decade. The question is "Why?" Because
we are a force in international arena again. We're ruining their racketeering business. We are
a vivid example that it is possible to escape the system of the global racket of which they
feed, That there is an alternative.
So now there is a player who does not wan to pay the racketeers, And he is still alive. This
means that others may not pay either. They hate such a situation, because other players may
refuse to pay, and that also means that sooner or later they might be force to live within this
own meanss. It has been a long time since they live within their means, and they completely
lost the habit of doing so. So they want to "solve" the problem with us now ones and forever,
while others are still afraid of them.
Plus they have a new gang leader. Like all newbies, he wants to be the toughest. And raises
the stakes.
Let's face the truth. They won't let us go easily. It's pointless to explain. We will be
hunted, subjected to the array of false flags, persecuted and sanctioned to death. And if they
feel the slack – they will beta us to the death, much more thoroughly then they did in
1990th. The question of whether this can be avoided is no longer worth asking. Today we have
one question – how to survive the next two decades?
We need finally exhale and turn on the brain... The key to victory, as Sun Tzu wrote –
is in knowing the enemy and knowing yourself.
What is their strength?
First, there are many. And they have money. They can buy everything, including witnesses and
judges. We'll be blamed for for anything; they will attack and we will be framed as the
attacker.
Second, they scream loudly. In chorus. That control world mass communications. And their
propaganda works. It is useless to argue otherwise. All our arguments are useless. They will
fall of death ear and will be ignored. Nobody will question their validity -- they will be
simply swipe under the carpet. No matter how ridiculous is their "version of events" is
(Skripals, Russiagate, Ukrainegate) the label "the guilty party" is already put on us like a
yellow patch on the Jews in Nazi Germany. Before any investigation or God forbid judicial
process. And most people on the planet still take their word for it.
What is their weakness?
As opponents these guys, I mean their neoliberal elites are the second grade; they belong to
the "grey zone", the zone of mediocrity. Too greedy, too arrogant, and too lazy. Sometime
semi-senile. Their previous generation was much stronger. They respected us. And we them.
We do not respect this new neoliberal elite and they feel that. And we don't respect them
because such mediocrities do not deserve our respect, and are not trustworthily partner. They
generally can be classified as "Unable to adhere to any legal treaties" (Nedogovorosposobnie")
. And that scares us, almost to death, because you need to deal with completely unpredictable,
bizarre partner for whom treaties and agreements are not worth the paper they were printed on.
But they will avoid open fight, unless the success guaranteed. We need to ensure that such
situation never occur.
Their nervousness, their fidgeting, their second-rateness now is staring to be felt by other countries who would
prefer to hedge their bet and join only a sure winner. They see that the outcome of the USA quest for Full Spectrum Dominance is not yet
decided.
In addition, our opponents are now engaged in brutal showdown with each other. Western
Europe recovered and became competitor of the USA. They also are openly laughing over their new chief. Half of the major
Europium countries leadership probably hates him. For how long he can stay in
power is completely unclear. But this is a new and unexpected development. .
And those in the second row, the stooges, are generally ready to escape from this virtual
battlefield. It became too expensive to catch hot potatoes for Uncle Sam as the amount of loot
for partners shrunk dramatically. And problems with neoliberalism at home mounted. Neoliberal
chickens start coming to roost. They were promised money and a share of loot, not a beating in a real fight
with a strong determined opponent.
What is our strength?
First of all we no longer have any illusions about the the USA or West in general, illusions
that cost us so dearly in 1990th. They are predators who want to colonize, fleece and dismember
our nation. An having no illusions means that they can't repeat economic rape they committed in
1990th. Now we know what awaits us if we give up. They'll devour us completely. Those gangsters
will kick the lying opponent with feet until he is dead. They won't let us survive a second
time.
We also have a grenade as the last resort. They know it, and they're terrified we'll pull
the pin.
They don't understand how we can be defeated, so they try new ways to make us surrender
without a fight. Looking for a weak spot.
What is our weakness?
Our first problem is that we are alone. We are a big and clumsy country with a lot of
internal problems and convoluted history. Which refuse to became the USA vassal. We were a difficult neighbor in the past. Some
people are afraid of us because or our past.
Our second and main problem is the lack of money for economic reconstruction. We don't have enough money for the restoration of the
economy and the standard of living of our people after 1990th rape to the level we deserve as
the major European country. Say the level the Germany managed to achieve, despite being
defeated in WWII. And nobody is going to help us, at least on acceptable conditions. They will
try to slow down our economic development by all mean possible. that's why they already imposed
sanctions under bogus pretext. They will impose more to slow down the process. They will
manipulate oil prices and engage us in "gas wars." If we can solve this problem and restore the
economy and the standard of living of people after 1990 collapse other problems will be easier
to take on.
Also a nice thing about having money is that you instantly have a lot of fiends ;-) At
once.
Now some panoramic view on the situation like in oil painting.
First of all out willingness to fight back is a guarantee that they will not get into a real
fight. We need to hold out for the next ten-twenty years or so. I think this is what we can
expect for neoliberalism to last before the collapse.
But that doesn't solve all our problems. We need that they stop punching us with new
sanctions. Better forever but, at least for the next twenty years. Until their racket finally
falls apart.
So the second goal is to earn to earn money need to reconstruction of the economy and
creating first class infrastructure. Which will allow us to grow. and we need to do this while
there is time. That probably means that invest our money in growth and stop saving "for a rainy
day" in US treasures and Western banks. Otherwise, this rainy day may come in a very unexpected
fashion and way too soon: money will simply be confiscated as long as they can do it with
impunity.
Andrey Bezrukov is the associate Professor of the chair of applied analysis of
international problems, MGIMO
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
Could Tax Increases Speed Up the Economy?
Democrats Say Yes https://nyti.ms/2RlDbJx
NYT - Jim Tankersley - December 5
WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Warren is leading a liberal rebellion against a long-held economic
view that large tax increases slow economic growth, trying to upend Democratic policymaking
in the way supply-side conservatives changed Republican orthodoxy four decades ago.
(Warren Would Take Billionaires Down
a Few Billion Pegs https://nyti.ms/2CtMPRN
NYT - November 10)
Generations of economists, across much of the ideological spectrum, have long held that
higher taxes reduce investment, slowing economic growth. That drag, the consensus held, would
offset the benefits to growth from increased government spending in areas like education.
Ms. Warren and other leading Democrats say the opposite. The senator from Massachusetts,
who is a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, contends that her
plans to tax the rich and spend the revenue to lift the poor and the middle class would
accelerate economic growth, not impede it. Other Democratic candidates are making similar
claims about their tax-and-spend proposals. Some liberal economists go further and say that
simply taxing the rich would help growth no matter what the government did with the
money.
Democrats in the past, including the party's 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, have argued
that a more modest combination of tax increases and spending programs would expand the
economy. But no Democratic nominee before Ms. Warren had ever proposed so many new taxes and
spending programs, and leaned so heavily into the argument that they would be, in economist
parlance, pro-growth.
That argument tries to reframe a classic debate about the economic "pie" in the United
States by suggesting there is no trade-off between increasing the size of the pie and
dividing the slices more equitably among all Americans.
Ms. Warren has proposed nearly $3 trillion a year in new taxes on businesses and
high-earners, largely focused on billionaires but sometimes hitting Americans who earn
$250,000 and above per year. The taxes would fund wide-reaching new government spending on
health care, education, and family benefits like universal child care and paid parental
leave.
Last month, Ms. Warren wrote on Twitter that education, child care and student loan relief
programs funded by her tax on wealthy Americans would "grow the economy." In a separate post,
she said student debt relief would "supercharge" growth.
The last batch of economists to disrupt a political party's consensus position were
conservative -- the so-called supply-siders who built influence in the late 1970s and gained
power in the Reagan administration. Previous Republican presidents had focused on keeping the
budget deficit low, which constrained their ability to cut taxes if they did not also cut
government spending. Supply-siders contended that well-targeted tax cuts could generate big
economic growth even without spending cuts. ...
Ms. Warren is making the case that the economy could benefit if money is redistributed from
the rich and corporations to uses that she and other liberals say would be more productive.
Their argument combines hard data showing that high levels of inequality and wealth
concentration weigh down economic growth with a belief that well-targeted government spending
can encourage more Americans to work, invest and build skills that would make them more
productive.
They also cite evidence that transferring money to poor and middle-class individuals would
increase consumer spending because they spend a larger share of their incomes than wealthy
Americans, who tend to save and invest.
"The economy has changed, our understanding of it has changed, and we understand the
constricting effects of inequality" on growth, said Heather Boushey, the president of the
Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank focused on inequality.
Inequality has widened significantly in America over the last several decades. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans more
than tripled from 1979 to 2016, before taxes and government transfer payments are taken into
account. For the middle class, incomes grew 33 percent. More than a decade after the
recession, wage growth for the middle class continues to run well behind previous times of
economic expansion, like the late 1990s.
Research by the economist Emmanuel Saez and colleagues shows that the last time such a
small sliver of Americans controlled such a large share of the nation's income and wealth was
in the late 1920s, just before a stock market crash set off the Great Depression. World Bank
researchers have warned that high levels of inequality are stifling growth in South Africa,
which has the globe's worst measured inequality.
"We have an economy that isn't delivering like it used to," said Ms. Boushey, who advised
Hillary Clinton's 2016 Democratic presidential campaign. "That's leading people to say let's
re-examine the evidence."
The contention that tax and spending increases can lift economic growth is not the only
challenge to traditional orthodoxy brewing in liberal economic circles. Some Democrats have
also embraced modern monetary theory, which reframes classic thinking that discourages large
budget deficits as a drag on growth. Its supporters, including Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the economist Stephanie Kelton, an adviser to Senator Bernie
Sanders of Vermont, argue that the United States government should be spending much more on
programs to fight inequality, like a federal job guarantee, without imposing new taxes.
Some of the inequality-focused economists say they are hoping to build new economic models
to predict the effects of their policies, though they acknowledge few of those models exist
yet. Instead, they rely on evidence about the likely effects of individual programs, added
together.
Many economists who study tax policy contend that Ms. Warren's plans -- and other large
tax-and-spend proposals from Democratic candidates this year -- would hurt the economy, just
as classic economic models suggest.
"Some elements of the large increase in government spending on health and education
proposed by Senator Warren would promote economic growth" through channels like improved
education, said Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, who has written some of the most influential research in the profession on the
relationship between tax rates and growth.
But, he said, "I am very skeptical that these growth effects would offset the negative
effects on growth of the higher taxes, particularly given that the spending increases are not
specifically targeted toward enhancing growth."
Ms. Warren disagrees. In the latest Democratic debate, she said the spending programs
funded by her wealth tax would be "transformative" for workers. Those plans would raise
wages, make college tuition-free and relieve graduates of student debt, she said, adding, "We
can invest in an entire generation's future."
An emerging group of liberal economists say taxes on high-earners could spur growth even
if the government did nothing with the revenue because the concentration of income and wealth
is dampening consumer spending.
"We are experiencing a revolution right now in macroeconomics, particularly in the policy
space," said Mark Paul, an economist who is a fellow at the liberal Roosevelt Institute in
Washington. "We can think of a wealth tax as welfare-enhancing, in and of itself, simply by
constraining the power of the very wealthy" to influence public policy and distort markets to
their advantage.
Taken together, Ms. Warren's proposals would transform the role of federal taxation. If
every tax increase she has proposed in the campaign passed and raised as much revenue as her
advisers predict -- a contingency hotly debated among even liberal economists -- total
federal tax revenue would grow more than 50 percent.
The United States would leap from one of the lowest-taxed rich nations to one of the
highest. It would collect more taxes as a share of the economy than Norway, and only slightly
less than Italy.
Mr. Sanders's plan envisions a similarly large increase in tax levels. Former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s proposals are much smaller in scale: He would raise taxes on
the wealthy and corporations by $3.4 trillion over a decade, in order to fund increased
spending on health care, higher education, infrastructure and carbon emissions reduction.
If Ms. Warren's tax program is enacted, said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at Berkeley who
is an architect of her wealth tax proposal, "in my view, the most likely effect is a small
positive effect on growth, depending on how the revenues are used."
Another economist who has worked with the Warren campaign to analyze its proposals, Mark
Zandi of Moody's, said he would expect her plans to be "largely a wash on long-term economic
growth."
Researchers at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College projected this summer that Ms.
Warren's wealth tax and spending policies would generate a 1.7 percent increase in the size
of the economy. A preliminary study of a wealth tax like Ms. Warren's proposal, by the Penn
Wharton Budget Model, found that it would reduce the size of the economy by a similar 1.7
percent. The model uses the sort of classic methodology that liberals are now rebelling
against and did not evaluate Ms. Warren's spending proposals.
Historical experience offers few parallels for assessing the economic effects of a
taxation-and-spending program on the scale of Ms. Warren's ambitions. A 2002 study of wealth
taxes in rich countries found that those taxes, most of which have since been abandoned,
reduced economic growth slightly on an annual basis.
Conservative economists roundly disagree that large tax increases can spur faster growth,
even those who say government spending on paid leave and child care may get more Americans
into the labor force. They say a wealth tax on the scale of Ms. Warren's proposal would
greatly reduce savings and investment by the rich.
"What a wealth tax does is, it directly taxes savings," said Aparna Mathur, an economist
at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who favors a narrow paid leave program and
whose research finds benefits from reducing tax rates on business and investment. "If you're
taxing savings, you're implicitly taxing investment. So how can that possibly be
pro-growth?"
The supply-side economists' plans were similarly denounced -- George Bush called them
"voodoo economic policies" while running for president in 1980 -- but in time dominated
Republican proposals.
Some members of the new liberal revolt against tax orthodoxy welcome the comparison to the
supply-side uprising.
"While I think that the supply-siders were wrong, and were always wrong, they were
reacting to very real economic problems in the 1970s," said Michael Linden, the executive
director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal policy and advocacy group. "There was
something really wrong with the economy at the time. I think there is now."
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken
on Capitol Hill this week:
We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is.
And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in
power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony
about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure
that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but
it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.
This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat
called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.
Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the
often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.
And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants,
and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every
man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and
earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and
no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement
of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation
and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.
And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was
there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play
his part as a warmonger.
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq
On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S.
into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such
treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it
will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).
There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and
replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the
nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996
election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end
to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.
Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying
son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then
sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.
The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get
their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.
It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due
to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time,
but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.
Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy
with.
Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority
women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she
satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level
blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat
an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably)
going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.
An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask
because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then
I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they
overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.
I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.
...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given
the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes
hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred
if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable
cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as
legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.
You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting
millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our
election is 'personal gain'?
Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and
in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at
tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.
It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like
the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy
demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.
No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist
neoliberalism.
Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!
Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners.
Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive
your beloved democracy.
...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of
the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment
of our Ruling Class.
If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement
with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving
developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to
ensure success:
US vs Russia
US/UK vs EU
'pseudo-Christian' west vs islam
1st world vs multicutural diversity migration
Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers
looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant
class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of
the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.
Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for
any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms
in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia,
and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary
of State he trusts heavily.
... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters
is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world
on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).
What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're
guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after
this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political
mistake in the history of our Republic.
The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death
-- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.
The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in
the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on,
and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must
be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.
The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else).
To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the
East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped
at any cost.
My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir
is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union
lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your
19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely,
a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for
starters.
I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $)
for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the
coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary
President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in
2014).
NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for
no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).
I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business
in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The
Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence.
The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the
USSR.
As the Chicago revolution took hold, Bork's views crept into the judiciary. Eventually in a
fit of activism, the courts did away with the prohibition on predatory pricing. In its 1993
decision in Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation , the United
States Supreme Court completely re-imagined the Robinson-Patman Act.
The case originally involved the tobacco oligopoly controlled by six firms. Liggett had
introduced a cheap generic cigarette and gained market share. When Brown & Williamson saw
that generics were undercutting their shares, it undercut Liggett and sold cigarettes at a
loss. Liggett sued, alleging that the predatory behavior was designed to pressure it to raise
prices on its generics, thus enabling Brown & Williamson to maintain high profits on
branded cigarettes.
In its decision, the Court held that in order for there to be a violation of the Clayton Act
and the Robinson-Patman Act, a plaintiff must show not only that the alleged predator priced
the product below the cost of its production but also that the predator would be likely to
recoup the losses in the future. The recoupment test dealt a death blow to predatory pricing
lawsuits because it is, of course, impossible to prove a future event.
The Supreme Court parroted Bork, noting that "predatory pricing
schemes are rarely tried, and even more rarely successful ." The Court also argued that it was
best not to pursue predatory pricing cases because doing so would "chill the very conduct the
antitrust laws are designed to protect."
The result has been severe. After 1993, no plaintiff alleging predatory pricing has
prevailed at the federal level, and most cases are thrown out in summary judgement. The DOJ and
FTC have completely ignored the law and ceased enforcing it.
Through judicial activism and executive neglect, the laws regarding antitrust and predatory
pricing have become odd relics, like those on greased pigs and cannibalism.
Predatory pricing is symptomatic of the broader problems when it comes to antitrust. Today,
except in extreme circumstances such as outright monopoly, courts are unlikely to block mergers
over an increase in market concentration. The Supreme Court has now tilted so far the other way
that it prefers to allow too much concentration rather than too little. It made this clear in
its Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko LLP decision, where
it stated its preference for minimizing incorrect merger challenges rather than preventing
excessive concentration.
In the Trinko case, for example, Justice Scalia suggested that those who enforce
antitrust laws ought to be deferential to firms with monopoly power, which are "an important
element of a free market system."
Scalia continued: "Against the slight benefits of antitrust intervention here, we must weigh
a realistic assessment of its costs ." The opportunity to acquire monopoly power and charge
monopoly prices is "what attracts 'business acumen' in the first place," he said, and "induces
risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth." He wrote that the "mere possession
of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful;
it is an important element of the free-market system."
The result of all this has been an increase of monopolies. Professor John Kwoka reviewed
decades of merger cases and concluded that "recent merger control has not been sufficiently
aggressive in challenging mergers." The overall effect has been "approval of significantly more
mergers that prove to be anticompetitive."
The Sherman Act and the Robinson-Patman Act may be deeply misguided; perhaps they should
even be repealed. But they haven't been. Passing new legislation is the proper way to change
laws one disagrees with. Getting rid of them in practice via judicial activism or an an
unwilling executive is not democratic.
The death of antitrust and predatory pricing reflects not only a failure of jurisprudence
but of economics. For all the claims of up-to-the-minute economic sophistication that activist
judges have used in the field of antitrust, the scholarship on predatory pricing is wildly out
of date. Brooke made Robinson-Patman irrelevant by citing "modern" economic
scholarship, yet the research the Supreme Court relied on goes back to studies by John McGee
and Roland Koller, published in 1958 and 1969 respectively.
Predatory pricing has only become more rational in a world where winner-take-all platforms
are happy to sustain short-term losses for the sake of long-term market share gains. What they
lose on one side with free shipping or below cost products, they make up for in other parts of
their business.
The rationality of predatory pricing is not some new economic finding. Almost 20 years ago,
Patrick
Bolton , a professor at Columbia Business School, wrote that "several sophisticated
empirical case studies have confirmed the use of predatory pricing strategies. But the courts
have failed to incorporate the modern writing into judicial decisions, relying instead on
earlier theory no longer generally accepted."
According to Bork, predatory pricing didn't work in theory, but does it work in practice?
Antitrust experts remember the Brooke case, but none seem to recall what actually
happened to the companies involved in the lawsuit.
After the Supreme Court decision left it without any legal remedy, Liggett succumbed to
pressure from Brown & Williamson and raised its prices. The entire industry raised prices
too. In the end, Liggett was not able to attract enough market share and ended up selling most
of its brands to Phillip Morris a few years later. Ever since, the tobacco oligopoly has raised
prices in lockstep twice a year with no competition. No company is foolish enough to lower
prices for fear of predatory pricing.
The losers from the judicial activism of Brooke are consumers and the rule of law.
The winners are the oligopolies and monopolies who protect their markets.
When it comes to enforcing antitrust, it's worth remembering the words of Robert Bork. As he
wrote in 1971 in his seminal piece " Neutral
Principles and Some First Amendment Problems ," "If the judiciary really is supreme, able
to rule when and as it sees fit, the society is not democratic."
The Supremes have been the Federal legislature since 1803. Recommending restraint is the
same thing as ordering one party in a legislature to surrender to the opposite party
regardless of majorities.
Monopolization is the core of Free Market economics. Free, literally, means free to become
a monopoly, free to practice vulture capitalism, free to use superior capitalization to
destroy competition, free to move your factory to China.
Free Market is a buzz phrase among bankers and other well-to-do to increase their income
at your expense instead of through superior production, design, and advertising methods. If
you want to know why we live in such a dysfunctional economy, its because we've abandoned
competitive capitalism for a free market economy.
Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) noted in Wealth of Nations that if you put
two competing businessmen in a room together, not only do they get along just fine, their
conversation quickly turns to the subject of how they can work work together to rig markets
and screw the consumer for moar profitt.
Adam Smith was a much more interesting and sophisticated thinker than the B-school
Cliffs Notes version.
I think we could us more purist views of capitalism in conversations about capitalism. The
kinds of behaviors engaged designed to put others out of business described in the article
is not exemplary of capitalism.
The purpose of capitalism is not explicated with models of destroying competition. And
it certainly does not have mechanisms in which the government acts as an arm of business.
The notion that the business of "America" (the US) is business is misleading. Because when
it comes the government of the US her role is to ensure fair play. And power dynamics used
to destroy the ability of another to tap into the available market share is not a
capitalist principle. When one reads about the level and kinds of antics that corporate
boards and CEO's play to damage competition, to include the use of campaign funds to "buy"
or influence unique favors at cost to consumers - then we are talking about kind of faux
"law of the jungle". Bailing out business but not the defrauded customers of those same
businesses -- mercantilism not capitalism.
And it is these types of behaviors guised as capitalism, that fuels liberal demands for
a system of governance that is more akin to communism and socialism. They note the abuses,
but apply the wrong remedy.
I would agree that predatory pricing actually undercuts better pricing, improved
products or innovation (product creativity).
Conservatives are outraged, still, that Democrats refused to confirm Bork to the Supreme
Court.
Never mind the fact the Democrats were fully within their rights not to confirm, advise
and consent does not mean rubber stamp, Bork was the guy who actually carried out Nixon's
Saturday Night Massacre. Why would conservatives want a corrupt and unethical person like
this in the Supreme Court in the first place?
Conservatives' outraged is very ironic considering Reagan still got to nominate another
candidate, which the Dems confirmed. Meanwhile in a completely unprecedented and vindictive
move, Republicans denied a Democratic president outright his right to a Supreme Court
appointment. There is no comparison between these two episodes.
Said it before and I'll say it again, Warren's personal ambition is often what
manifests her poor political instincts. Why did she claim Native American Heritage? Why did
she endorse HRC in 2016? Why did she ambiguously support, then unambiguously back away from,
M4A?
This trend leads me to suspect that she will not easily back out of the race, and
cannot be trusted finally to endorse Sanders in 2020 any more than she could be in 2016. I
suspect, in any case, that many of her voters would not default to Sanders but to Buttigieg
in any case. They seem to be mostly white professionals between 30-60yrs old who make
$120,000/year.
Wow, Sanders has really been pulling ahead of Warren if the polls over the past few days
are to be believed. I am hoping that this trend continues. Warren's overly-complicated
healthcare proposal which she decided to backpedal on at the last moment seems like it has
really cost her.
I kind of wonder at this point why Warren decided to run for president in the first place.
She seems like the type of person who would rather follow than lead, and would be ill-suited
to be president as she would be forced to take a position on something. Warren would have
been better served to be clear about what her actual positions are instead of trying to have
it both ways. Her constant mind-changing and backpedaling in response to whomever has the
political upper-hand at the moment has angered both the DNC establishment as well as the
progressive left.
Or, as Abraham Lincoln put it in a letter to "Mr FJ Hooker" as he was contemplating a push
across the Rappahannock in the wake of Lee's move westward in June 1863,
"like a bull stuck across a fence that cannot gore to the front or kick to the rear"
I think it was you, Lambert, who drew my attention to "Rich and Tracey's Civil War
podcast", and I am grateful.
I think Warren is running for treasury secretary in a Biden administration. The theory
being that that will be her reward for stopping Sanders. Everybody has an angle. Except
Bernie. Can someone show me his angle?
Republicans are afraid to raise this key question. Democrats are afraid of even mentioning CrowdStrike in Ukrainegate hearings.
The Deep State wants to suppress this matter entirely.
Alperovisch connections to Ukraine and his Russophobia are well known. Did Alperovich people played the role of "Fancy Bear"? Or
Ukrainian SBU was engaged? George Eliason clams that
"I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators." ... "Since there is so much crap surrounding
the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks
have been a cover-up?"
Notable quotes:
"... So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility. ..."
"... What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation. ..."
"... On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .) ..."
"... And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net ) ..."
"... The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed? ..."
"... Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers. ..."
"... What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion. ..."
"... Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link ..."
"... Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth ..."
"... Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike. ..."
"... In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives. ..."
"... His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed. ..."
"... Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time. ..."
The favor was for Ukraine to investigate Crowdstrike and the 2016 DNC computer breach.
Reliance on Crowdstrike to investigate the DNC computer, and not an independent FBI investigation, was tied very closely to
the years long anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and waste of US taxpayer time and money.
Why is this issue ignored by both the media and the Democrats. The ladies doth protest far too much.
what exactly, to the extend I recall, could the Ukraine contribute the the DNC's server/"fake malware" troubles? Beyond, that
I seem to vaguely recall, the supposed malware was distributed via an Ukrainan address.
On the other hand, there seems to be the (consensus here?) argument there was no malware breach at all, simply an insider copying
files on a USB stick.
If people discovered there had been a leak, it would perfectly natural that in order to give 'resilience' to their cover-up
strategies, they could have organised a planting of evidence on the servers, in conjunction with elements in Ukraine.
So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible
calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious
questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility.
The issues involved become all the more important, in the light of the progress of Ty Clevenger's attempts to exploit the clear
contradiction between the claims by the FBI, in response to FOIA requests, to have no evidence relating to Seth Rich, and the
remarks by Ms. Deborah Sines quoted by Michael Isikoff.
What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of
a 'false flag' operation.
On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against
the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short,
and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining
the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/
.)
It is eminently possible that Ms. Hines has simply made an 'unforced error.'
However, I do not – yet – feel able totally to discount the possibility that what is actually at issue is a 'ruse', produced
as a contingency plan to ensure that if it becomes impossible to maintain the cover-up over Rich's involvement in its original
form, his laptop shows 'evidence' compatible with the 'Russiagate' narrative.
And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the
level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance
is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See
http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net )
Looking at it from the perspective of an old television current affairs hack, I do think that, while it is very helpful to
have some key material available in a single place, it would useful if more attention was paid to presentation.
In particular, it would be a most helpful 'teaching aid', if a full and accurate transcript was made of the conversation with
Seymour Hersh which Ed Butowsky covertly recorded. What seems clear is that both these figures ended up in very difficult positions,
and that the latter clearly engaged in 'sleight of hand' in relation to his dealings with the former. That said, the fact that
Butowsky's claims about his grounds for believing that Hersh's FBI informant was Andrew McCabe are clearly disingenuous does not
justify the conclusion that he is wrong.
It is absolutely clear to me – despite what 'TTG', following that 'Grub Street' hack Folkenflik, claimed – that when Hersh
talked to Butowsky, he believed he had been given accurate information. Indeed, I have difficulty seeing how anyone whose eyes
were not hopelessly blinded by prejudice, a\nd possibly fear of where a quest for the truth might lead, could not see that, in
this conversation, both men were telling the truth, as they saw it.
However, all of us, including the finest and most honourable of journalists can, from time to time, fall for disinformation.
(If anyone says they can always spot when they are being played, all I can say is, if you're right, you're clearly Superman, but
it is more likely that you are a fool or knave, if not both.)
The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise
the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak
before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.'
1. Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What
was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed?
2. Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to
help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
3. What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian
conclusion.
4. Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how
exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian
link .
5. Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are
any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question
when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth .
Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently
put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted
to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.
Alperovich is really a very suspicious figure. Rumors are that he was involved in compromising PGP while in MacAfee( June 2nd,
2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams - YouTube ):
Investigative Journalist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small,
Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the
public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order
to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would
go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted
communications for covert action operatives.
His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a
false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services,
is very suspicious indeed.
Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After
all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time.
While all this DNC hack saga is completely unclear due to lack of facts and the access to the evidence, there are some stories
on Internet that indirectly somewhat strengthen your hypothesis:
"... Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc. ..."
"... In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma. ..."
"... Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race. ..."
"... Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. ..."
"... Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed." ..."
There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the
so-called whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and CrowdStrike, the outside
firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers
since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.
One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million
funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of
CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of
Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor
to the Democratic Party.
CrowdStrike was mentioned by Trump in his call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign,
reportedly helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC's allegedly hacked server.
On behalf of the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial
Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by
former British spy Christopher Steele.
CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by Dmitri
Alperovitch.
Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the
Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward
Russia. The Council in turn is financed
by Google Inc.
In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council
funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe
Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with
Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's
role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when
Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma.
Besides Google and Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by billionaire activist
George Soros's Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and
the U.S. State Department.
Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State
Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization
repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint
alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign
country" in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower's document and released
by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's
own claims, as Breitbart News
documented .
One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S.
officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of
other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the
Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the
"cases" mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The
complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden
corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials
told me" – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on
22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met
with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three
more occasions. It does so to:
Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko
"also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these
matters." Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former
Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr.
Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called
whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I do not know whether these associates of
Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced
above."
The OCCRP
report repeatedly referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and
business records in the United States and Ukraine."
BuzzFeed infamously also first
published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's
presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and
the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt
outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed
publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use
connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political rivals.
The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP
and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia
collusion claims.
Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal
billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also
funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International
Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are
"disputed."
Like OCCRP, the Poynter Institute's so-called news fact-checking project is openly
funded by not only Soros' Open Society Foundations but also Google and the National
Endowment for Democracy.
CrowdStrike and DNC servers
CrowdStrike, meanwhile, was brought up by Trump in his phone call with Zelensky. According to the transcript, Trump told Zelensky, "I would like you to find out what
happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike I guess you have one of
your wealthy people The server, they say Ukraine has it."
In his extensive
report , Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not
"obtain or examine" the servers of the DNC in determining whether those servers were hacked
by Russia.
The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation
that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC
reached an arrangement with the FBI in which CrowdStrike conducted forensics on the server
and shared details with the FBI.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director
James Comey
confirmed that the FBI registered "multiple requests at different levels," to review the
DNC's hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a "highly
respected private company" -- a reference to CrowdStrike -- would carry out forensics on the
servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.
A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access
to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.
"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to
servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been
mitigated," the official was quoted by the news media as saying.
"This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions
caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier," the
official continued.
... ... ...
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, "
Aaron Klein Investigative
Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker
and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has
turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the
attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation. Only one "super-hero cyber-warrior" seems
to "have the codes" to figure out "if" a system was hacked and by "whom."
Dmitri's company, CrowdStrike has been called in by Obama to solve mysterious attacks on
many high level government agencies and American corporations, including: German Bundestag,
Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the White
House, the State Department, SONY, and many others.
CrowdStrike's philosophy is: "You don't have a malware problem; you have an adversary
problem."
CrowdStrike has played a critical role in the development of America's cyber-defense policy.
Dmitri Alperovitch and George Kurtz, a former head of the FBI cyberwarfare unit founded
CrowdStrike. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director at the FBI is now CrowdStrike's
president of services. The company is crawling with former U.S. intelligence agents.
Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike in 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief
threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee, owned by Intel (a DARPA company). During
that time, he "discovered" the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and
organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the
International Olympic Committee. He was the only person to notice the biggest cyberattack in
history! Nothing suspicious about that.
Alperovitch and the DNC
After CrowdStrike was hired as an independent "vendor" by the DNC to investigate a possible
cyberattack on their system, Alperovitch sent the DNC a proprietary software package called
Falcon that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. According to Alperovitch,
Falcon "lit up," within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC. Alperovitch had his
"proof" in TEN SECONDS that Russia was in the network. This "alleged" evidence of Russian
hacking has yet to be shared with anyone.
As Donald Trump has pointed out, the FBI, the agency that should have been immediately
involved in hacking that effects "National Security," has yet to even examine the DNC system to
begin an investigation. Instead, the FBI and 16 other U.S. "intelligence" agencies simply
"agree" with Obama's most trusted "cyberwarfare" expert Dmitri Alperovitch's "TEN SECOND"
assessment that produced no evidence to support the claim.
Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence
that it was Russian hackers . In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the
system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD).
It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.
Alperovitch failed to mention in his conclusive "TEN SECOND" assessment that Guccifer 2.0
had already hacked the DNC and made available to the public the documents he hacked –
before Alperovitch did his ten second assessment. Alperovitch reported that no other hackers
were found, ignoring the fact that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked and released DNC documents
to the public. Alperovitch's assessment also goes directly against Julian Assange's repeated
statements that the DNC leaks did not come from the Russians.
The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike
naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the
DNC documents. Julian Assange implied in an interview that the murdered Democratic
National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of a trove of damaging emails the website
posted just days before the party's convention. Seth was on his way to testify about the DNC
leaks to the FBI when he was shot dead in the street.
It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had
been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no
harm was done to the system by this "false-flag cyber-attack" on the DNC – or at least,
Alperovitch "reported" there was an attack. The second hacker, the supposed Russian military
(GRU – like the U.S. DoD) hacker, had just entered the system two weeks before and also
had done "nothing" but observe.
It is only Alperovitch's word that reports that the Russian FSB was "looking for files on
Donald Trump."
It is only this false claim that spuriously ties Trump to the "alleged"
attack. It is also only Alperovitch who believes that this hack that was supposedly "looking
for Trump files" was an attempt to "influence" the election. No files were found about Trump by
the second hacker, as we know from Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0's leaks. To confabulate that
"Russian's hacked the DNC to influence the elections" is the claim of one well-known Russian
spy. Then, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously confirm that Alperovitch is correct
– even though there is no evidence and no investigation was ever conducted .
How does Dmitri Alperovitch have such power? Why did Obama again and again use Alperovitch's
company, CrowdStrike, when they have miserably failed to stop further cyber-attacks on the
systems they were hired to protect? Why should anyone believe CrowdStrikes false-flag
report?
After documents from the DNC continued to leak, and Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks made
CrowdStrike's report look foolish, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than he had
reported. He single-handedly concluded that the Russians were conducting an "influence
operation" to help win the election for Trump . This false assertion had absolutely no
evidence to back it up.
On July 22, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped a
massive cache of emails that had been "stolen" (not hacked) from the DNC. Reporters soon found
emails suggesting that the DNC leadership had favored Hillary Clinton in her primary race
against Bernie Sanders, which led Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, along with three
other officials, to resign.
Just days later, it was discovered that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
(DCCC) had been hacked. CrowdStrike was called in again and once again, Alperovitch immediately
"believed" that Russia was responsible. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to
confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author. Two weeks later, files from the
DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time Guccifer released information about
Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois,
and Pennsylvania. On August 12, Guccifer went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included
the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of
Congress.
Once again, Guccifer 2.0 proved Alperovitch and CrowdStrike's claims to be grossly incorrect
about the hack originating from Russia, with Putin masterminding it all. Nancy Pelosi offered
members of Congress Alperovitch's suggestion of installing Falcon , the system that
failed to stop cyberattacks at the DNC, on all congressional laptops.
Key Point: Once Falcon was installed on the computers of members of the U.S.
Congress, CrowdStrike had even further full access into U.S. government accounts.
Alperovitch's "Unbelievable" History
Dmitri was born in 1980 in Moscow where his father, Michael, was a nuclear physicist, (so
Dmitri claims). Dmitri's father was supposedly involved at the highest levels of Russian
nuclear science. He also claims that his father taught him to write code as a child.
In 1990, his father was sent to Maryland as part of a nuclear-safety training program for
scientists. In 1994, Michael Alperovitch was granted a visa to Canada, and a year later the
family moved to Chattanooga, where Michael took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While Dmitri Alperovitch was still in high school, he and his father started an
encryption-technology business. Dmitri studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to
work at an antispam software firm. It was at this time that he realized that cyber-defense was
more about psychology than it was about technology. A very odd thing to conclude.
Dmitri Alperovitch posed as a "Russian gangster" on spam discussion forums which brought his
illegal activity to the attention of the FBI – as a criminal. In 2005, Dmitri flew to
Pittsburgh to meet an FBI agent named Keith Mularski, who had been asked to lead an undercover
operation against a vast Russian credit-card-theft syndicate. Alperovitch worked closely with
Mularski's sting operation which took two years, but it ultimately brought about fifty-six
arrests. Dmitri Alperovitch then became a pawn of the FBI and CIA.
In 2010, while he was at McAfee, the head of cybersecurity at Google told Dmitri that Gmail
accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the
Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected
more than a dozen of McAfee's clients and involved the Chinese government. Three days after his
supposed discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington where he had been asked to vet a
paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
2014, Sony called in CrowdStrike to investigate a breach of its network. Alperovitch needed
just "two hours" to identify North Korea as the adversary. Executives at Sony asked Alperovitch
to go public with the information immediately, but it took the FBI another three weeks before
it confirmed the attribution.
Alperovitch then developed a list of "usual suspects" who were well-known hackers who had
identifiable malware that they commonly used. Many people use the same malware and
Alperovitch's obsession with believing he has the only accurate list of hackers in the world is
plain idiocy exacerbated by the U.S. government's belief in his nonsense. Alperovitch even
speaks like a "nut-case" in his personal Twitters, which generally have absolutely no
references to the technology he is supposedly the best at in the entire world.
Dmitri – Front Man for His Father's Russian Espionage Mission
After taking a close look at the disinformation around Dmitri and his father, it is clear to
see that Michael Alperovitch became a CIA operative during his first visit to America.
Upon his return to Russia, he stole the best Russian encryption codes that were used to protect
the top-secret work of nuclear physics in which his father is alleged to have been a major
player. Upon surrendering the codes to the CIA when he returned to Canada, the CIA made it
possible for a Russian nuclear scientist to become an American citizen overnight and gain a
top-secret security clearance to work at the Oakridge plant, one of the most secure and
protected nuclear facilities in America . Only the CIA can transform a Russian into an
American with a top-secret clearance overnight.
We can see on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page that he went from one fantastically
top-secret job to the next without a break from the time he entered America. He seemed to be on
a career path to work in every major U.S. agency in America. In every job he was hired as the
top expert in the field and the leader of the company. All of these jobs after the first one
were in cryptology, not nuclear physics. As a matter of fact, Michael became the top expert in
America overnight and has stayed the top expert to this day.
Most of the work of cyber-security is creating secure interactions on a non-secure system
like the Internet. The cryptologist who assigns the encryption codes controls the system
from that point on .
Key Point: Cryptologists are well known for leaving a "back-door" in the base-code so
that they can always have over-riding control.
Michael Alperovitch essentially has the "codes" for all Department of Defense sites, the
Treasury, the State Department, cell-phones, satellites, and public media . There is hardly
any powerful agency or company that he has not written the "codes" for. One might ask, why do
American companies and the U.S. government use his particular codes? What are so special about
Michael's codes?
Stolen Russian Codes
In December, Obama ordered the U.S. military to conduct cyberattacks against Russia in
retaliation for the alleged DNC hacks. All of the attempts to attack Russia's military and
intelligence agencies failed miserably. Russia laughed at Obama's attempts to hack their
systems. Even the Russian companies targeted by the attacks were not harmed by Obama's
cyber-attacks. Hardly any news of these massive and embarrassing failed cyber-attacks were
reported by the Main Stream Media. The internet has been scrubbed clean of the reports that
said Russia's cyber-defenses were impenetrable due to the sophistication of their encryption
codes.
Michael Alperovitch was in possession of those impenetrable codes when he was a top
scientist in Russia. It was these very codes that he shared with the CIA on his first trip
to America . These codes got him spirited into America and "turned into" the best
cryptologist in the world. Michael is simply using the effective codes of Russia to design
his codes for the many systems he has created in America for the CIA .
KEY POINT: It is crucial to understand at this junction that the CIA is not solely working
for America . The CIA works for itself and there are three branches to the CIA – two of
which are hostile to American national interests and support globalism.
Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch work for the CIA (and international intelligence
corporations) who support globalism . They, and the globalists for whom they work, are
not friends of America or Russia. It is highly likely that the criminal activities of Dmitri,
which were supported and sponsored by the FBI, created the very hackers who he often claims are
responsible for cyberattacks. None of these supposed "attackers" have ever been found or
arrested; they simply exist in the files of CrowdStrike and are used as the "usual culprits"
when the FBI or CIA calls in Dmitri to give the one and only opinion that counts. Only Dmitri's
"suspicions" are offered as evidence and yet 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stand behind the
CrowdStrike report and Dmitri's suspicions.
Michael Alperovitch – Russian Spy with the Crypto-Keys
Essentially, Michael Alperovitch flies under the false-flag of being a cryptologist who
works with PKI. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for the creation, storage, and
distribution of digital certificates which are used to
verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital
certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central
repository and revokes them if needed. Public key cryptography is a
cryptographic
technique that enables entities to securely communicate on an insecure
public network (the Internet), and reliably verify the identity of an entity via digital signatures .
Digital signatures use Certificate Authorities to digitally sign and publish the public key
bound to a given user. This is done using the CIA's own private key, so that trust in the user
key relies on one's trust in the validity of the CIA's key. Michael Alperovitch is
considered to be the number one expert in America on PKI and essentially controls the
market .
Michael's past is clouded in confusion and lies. Dmitri states that his father was a nuclear
physicist and that he came to America the first time in a nuclear based shared program between
America and Russia. But if we look at his current personal Linked In page, Michael claims he
has a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics from Gorky State University. From 1932 to 1956, its
name was State University of Gorky. Now it is known as Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni
Novgorod – National Research University (UNN), also known as Lobachevsky University. Does
Michael not even know the name of the University he graduated from? And when does a person with
a Master's Degree become a leading nuclear physicist who comes to "visit" America. In Michael's
Linked In page there is a long list of his skills and there is no mention of nuclear
physics.
Also on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page we find some of his illustrious history that
paints a picture of either the most brilliant mind in computer security, encryption, and
cyberwarfare, or a CIA/FBI backed Russian spy. Imagine that out of all the people in the world
to put in charge of the encryption keys for the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, U.S.
military satellites, the flow of network news, cell phone encryption, the Pathfire (media control)
Program, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Global Information Grid, and TriCipher
Armored Credential System among many others, the government hires a Russian spy . Go
figure.
Michael Alperovitch's Linked In Page
Education:
Gorky State University, Russia, MS in Applied Mathematics
VT
IDirect -2014 – Designing security architecture for satellite communications
including cryptographic protocols, authentication.
Principal SME (Contractor)
DISA
-Defense Information Systems Agency (Manager of the Global Information Grid) – 2012-2014
– Worked on PKI and identity management projects for DISA utilizing Elliptic Curve
Cryptography. Performed application security and penetration testing.
Technical Lead (Contractor)
U.S.
Department of the Treasury – 2011 – Designed enterprise validation service
architecture for PKI certificate credentials with Single Sign On authentication.
Comtech Mobile
Datacom – 2007-2010 – Subject matter expert on latest information security
practices, including authentication, encryption and key management.
BellSouth – 2003-2006 – Designed and built server-side Jabber-based messaging
platform with Single Sign On authentication.
Principal Software Research Engineer
Pathfire – 2001-2002
– Designed and developed Digital Rights Management Server for Video on Demand and content
distribution applications. Pathfire provides digital media distribution and management
solutions to the television, media, and entertainment industries. The company offers Digital
Media Gateway, a digital IP store-and-forward platform, delivering news stories, syndicated
programming, advertising spots, and video news releases to broadcasters. It provides solutions
for content providers and broadcasters, as well as station solutions.
Obama – No Friend of America
Obama is no friend of America in the war against cyber-attacks. The very agencies and
departments being defended by Michael Alperovitch's "singular and most brilliant" ability to
write encryption codes have all been successfully attacked and compromised since Michael set up
the codes. But we shouldn't worry, because if there is a cyberattack in the Obama
administration, Michael's son Dmitri is called in to "prove" that it isn't the fault of his
father's codes. It was the "damn Russians", or even "Putin himself" who attacked American
networks.
Not one of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies is capable of figuring out a successful
cyberattack against America without Michael and Dmitri's help. Those same 17 U.S. intelligence
agencies were not able to effectively launch a successful cyberattack against Russia. It seems
like the Russian's have strong codes and America has weak codes. We can thank Michael and
Dmitri Alperovitch for that.
It is clear that there was no DNC hack beyond Guccifer 2.0. Dmitri Alperovitch is a
"frontman" for his father's encryption espionage mission.
Is it any wonder that Trump says that he has "his own people" to deliver his intelligence
to him that is outside of the infiltrated U.S. government intelligence agencies and the Obama
administration ? Isn't any wonder that citizens have to go anywhere BUT the MSM to find
real news or that the new administration has to go to independent news to get good intel?
It is hard to say anything more damnable than to again quote Dmitri on these very
issues: "If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the
algorithms are." Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike
"... And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever. ..."
"... That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway). ..."
"... The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters: ..."
"... An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities? ..."
"... And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2 ..."
"... DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2 ..."
"... Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1 ..."
"... George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17: ..."
"... Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensics Lab ..."
Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the
"Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian intelligence linked to the Atlantic
Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at one of his recent essays:
Since I am not very computer savvy and don't know much about the world of hackers - added
to the fact that Eliason's writing is too cute and convoluted - I have difficulty navigating Eliason's thought. Nonetheless,
here is what I can make of Eliasons' claims, as supported by independent literature:
Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky, in Moscow court filings, has claimed that he did the
DNC hack and can prove it, because he left some specific code on the DNC server.
Kozlovsky states that he did so by order of Dimitry Dokuchaev (formerly of the FSB, and
currently in prison in Russia on treason charges) who works with the Russian traitor hacker group Shaltai Boltai.
According to Eliason, Shaltai Boltai works in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group
RUH8, a group of neo-Nazis (Privat Sektor) who are affiliated with Ukrainian intelligence.
And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike.
Cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has stated that RUH8 has the X-Agent malware which our
intelligence community has erroneously claimed is possessed only by Russian intelligence, and used by "Fancy Bear".
This might help explain why Adam Carter has determined that some of the malware found on
the DNC server was compiled AFTER Crowdstrike was working on the DNC server Crowdstrike was in collusion with Fancy Bear
(RUH8).
In other words, Crowdstrike likely arranged for a
hack by Ukrainian intelligence that they could then attribute to Russia.
As far as I can tell, none of this is pertinent to how Wikileaks obtained their DNC emails,
which most likely were leaked.
How curious that our Deep State and the recent Mueller indictment have had nothing to say
about Kozlovsky's confession - whom I tend to take seriously because he offers a simple way to confirm his claim. Also
interesting that the FBI has shown no interest in looking at the DNC server to check whether Kozlovsky's code is there.
Its worth noting that Dimitri Alperovich's (Crowdstrike) hatred of Putin is
second only to Hillary's hatred for taking responsibility for her actions.
level 1
Thanks - I'll continue to follow Eliason's work. The thesis that Ukrainian
intelligence is hacking a number of targets so that Russia gets blamed for it has intuitive appeal.
level 1
and have to cringe.
Any hacks weren't related to Wikileaks, who got their info from leakers, but
that is not the same thing as no hack. Leaks and hacks aren't mutually exclusive. They actually occur together
pretty commonly.
DNC's security was utter shit. Systems with shit security and obviously
valuable info usually get hacked by multiple groups. In the case of the DNC, Hillary's email servers, etc.,
it's basically impossible they weren't hacked by dozens of intruders. A plastic bag of 100s will not sit
untouched on a NYC street corner for 4 weeks. Not. fucking. happening.
Interestingly, Russia was probably not
one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia
not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also,
government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do
wholesale dumps, like, ever.
That's
what the DNC is lying about.
Not that hacks
happened
(they undoubtedly did), but about
who
did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered
(they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway).
The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing
the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters:
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools
Yes, but that spoofed 'evidence' is not the direct opposite of the truth,
like I see people assuming. Bad assumption, and the establishment plays on that to make critic look bad. The
spoofed evidence is just mud.
An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got
hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups
did
hack the
DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities?
And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with
the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who
supposedly harmed them.
level 2
What's hilarious about the 2 down-votes is I can't tell if their from
pro-Russiagate trolls, or from people who who can't get past binary thinking.
level 1
DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the
server.
Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about
from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done
with all this Russia shit.
level 2
Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this
has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for
the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed.
Continue this thread
level 1
George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing
relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing
Information War material as evidence for MH17:
Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital
Forensics Lab
Fancy Bear worked with Crowdstrike and Dimitri Alperovich Fancy Bear is
Ukrainian Intelligence
How Fancy Bear tried to sway the US election for Team Hillary
Fancy Bear worked against US Intel gathering by providing consistently
fraudulent data
Fancy Bear contributed to James Clapper's January 2017 ODNI Report on Fancy
Bear and Russian Influence. [You really can't make this shit up.]
Fancy Bear had access to US government secure servers while working as
foreign spies.*
level 1
Fancy Bear (also know as Strontium Group, or APT28) is a Ukrainian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike incorrectly has said
with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence
agency GRU . CrowdStrike
founder,
Dmitri Alperovitch , has colluded with Fancy Bear. American journalist
George Eliason has written extensively on the subject.
There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when identifying the Fancy Bear hackers.
The first is the identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years
ago. This group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until
October 2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and
possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up
Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.
Eliason lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT,
the BBC , and Press-TV. His
articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews,
the Saker, RT, Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been
cited and republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson,
SWEDHR, Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.
Fancy Bear is Ukrainian IntelligenceShaltai Boltai
The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the
DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their
job.
According to Politico ,
"In an interview this month, at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing
ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely
presidential campaign. Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev
and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private
intelligence operatives. While her consulting work began surging in late 2015, she began
focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well."
[1]
The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence
operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine
Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.
All of these hacking and information operation groups work for Andrea
Chalupa with EuroMaidanPR and Irena
Chalupa at the Atlantic Council. Both Chalupa sisters work directly with the Ukrainian
government's intelligence and propaganda arms.
Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage , terrorist , counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda , and info war channels
officially recognized and directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American
colleagues, they populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against
Ukraine's criminal activities.
The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc. call themselves volunteers to keep safe
from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers motivated
by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.
They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the
threshold of military action. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a lot of latitude for
making the attribution Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intelligence. Based
on how the rules of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber are
written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in
nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of retribution.
The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for damages caused to
the State which in this case is Russia.
How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they
have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.
This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States and
of course Russia. After 2013, Shaltay Boltay was no longer physically available to work for
Russia. The Russian hackers were in Ukraine working for the Ukrainian government's Information
Ministry which is in charge of the cyber war. They were in Ukraine until October 2016 when they
were tricked to return to Moscow and promptly arrested for treason.
From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai
Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance
which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian
Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We know
their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above work
directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.
In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to
very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged
data from the Surkov leak.
But during 2014, 2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta
went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers .
The
First Time Shaltai Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers
The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and
Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers
happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.
In August 2009 Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department Huma Abedin
sent the passwords to her Government laptop to her Yahoo mail account. On August 16, 2010,
Abedin received an email titled "Re: Your yahoo account. We can see where this is going, can't
we?
"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a
billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence
agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's
associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."
Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo
hack.
The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts
continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai
Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.
So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with looking
at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.
Alexandra
Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and
Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for
the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the
state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your
Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime.
It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.
Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured
servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid
Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife
Huma Abedin using
Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed
herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to
do opposition research hacked her.
Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email
server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and
afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most
likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate
passwords.
Dobrovolska
Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former
staff from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. [2][3] Alexandra Chalupa was
running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives,
hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.
Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in
2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to Washington
to meet with Chalupa.
Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to
please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the
Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the US
secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn over
sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?
According to the Politico article, Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy
in June of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time
she was meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.
Four Verkhovna Rada [parlaiment] deputies there for the event included: Viktoriia Y.
Ptashnyk, Anna A. Romanova, Alyona I. Shkrum, and Taras T. Pastukh. [4]
According to CNN ,
[5] DNC sources said Chalupa
told DNC operatives the Ukrainian government would be willing to deliver damaging information
against Trump's campaign. Later, Chalupa would lead the charge to try to unseat president-elect
Trump starting on Nov 10, 2016.
Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison
and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and
Washington.
Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers.
[6] She took the Rada
[parliament] members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous Information
Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took them to meet the
Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the surviving nephew to the
infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.
Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top
Secret Passwords From Team Clinton
One very successful method of hacking is called
social engineering . You gain access to the office space and any related properties and
physically locate the passwords or clues to get you into the hardware you want to hack. This
includes something as simple as looking over the shoulder of the person typing in
passwords.
The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC opposition research.
On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled to the US to meet the
Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea Chalupa, US Dept of State
personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich. Alperovich was working with the
hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have Fancy Bear's signature tools called
X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta,
Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does explain a few things.
Alleged DNC
hack
There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB
stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks . All are separate events.
The group I previously identified as Fancy Bear was given access to request password
privileges at the DNC. And it looks like the DNC provided them with it.
the Podesta email hack looks like a revenge hack.
The reason Republican opposition research files were stolen can be put into context now
because we know who the hackers are and what motivates them.
At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It
is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to
State Department
servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian
Intelligence Operators.
If the leak came through Seth Rich , it may have been because he saw
foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential
election . The leaker may
have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information Wikileaks might
have.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear
George Eliason, Washingtonsblog: Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell
Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear. investigated. [7]
In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing
the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing
substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security
firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on
par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is"
statement showing this.
The difference bet enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of
specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors
that need to be investigated for real crimes. For instance, the malware used was an
out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the
Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine. How did Crowdstrike miss this when
it is their business to know?
The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words
like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution. The bar Dimitri
Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking
America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of
Russian involvement?
information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or
unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be
free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's
that every private actor in the information game was radically political.
Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with
McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John
McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that
Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's
emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like
the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."
How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is
probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "Intelligence agencies do not have
specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified
individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks." The public evidence never goes
beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike
insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses.
NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant
for NBC. According to NBC the story reads like this."The company, Crowdstrike, was hired
by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian
intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry , a former senior FBI
official who consults for NBC News.
In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian
intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers
call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other,
known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called
the GRU." The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to
be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post
adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in
the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to
WikiLeaks."
The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that
Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment. Although subtitles aren't on it, the former
Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine
would have been in deep trouble. How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this
wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention?
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary
Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in
Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing
intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If
it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be
investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side
isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia
influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose
conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a
hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason
are exposed.
According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "After
Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a
meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns
within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the
Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal
probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her
to stop her research."" July 25, 2016
If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her
sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news.
The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by
Russian actors based on the work done byAlexandra Chalupa? That is the
conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the
Russian government connection.
How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he
should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a
presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has
vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of
his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the
measures taken were directly because of his work.
Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian
propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When
it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to
influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard
to start a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the
Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other
statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in
Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for" What is
OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform that was developed
in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera . When these
people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating
both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed.[8] There is no
getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an
authoritarian
fascism .
Alexandra Chalupa- According to the Ukrainian Weekly , [9]
"The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms.
Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko
and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the
Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi,
Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan
and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper Massacre" on the
Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed
evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the
"heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas
is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached
to it because it ended in a coup.
Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa
described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young
activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say
is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after
Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy
Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.
In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He
became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni
Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet
Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found
out.
At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense
of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen
either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to
reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an
appointment with Yurash.
Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with
Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.
Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice
is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the
Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent
at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than
twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council,
where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor
for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.
According to Robert Parry's article [10] At the forefront
of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and
especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council . Their main
goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central
and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia.
Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you
willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support
throughout the campaign.
What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the
Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship
status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite
conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground
and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or
Homeland Security?
When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that
could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked
heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it
opens up criminal conspiracy.
If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants
a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic
Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of
his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri
Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a
crime.
Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence
groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and
Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the
CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and
its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for
the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be
investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is
also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely
resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon
Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service
Crowdstrike offers?
In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA.
[11] They consider the
CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance
is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity,
Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the
Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he
writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This
image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker
network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for
Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence.
The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates
journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could
be on the list.
Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of
Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his
"Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the
past.
Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA
Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the
Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single
tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information
Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and
Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or
shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be
shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it
to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.
These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through
the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded
and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and
with to promote the story of Russian hacking.
When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article,
one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor
members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor
admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let's
understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very
powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of
the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means
for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp
movements in international politics."
What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it
out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored,
Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack
they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are
also laughing at US intel efforts.
The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting
a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt
Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by
Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.
According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought
the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of
the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate
the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any
other way," he told me. "I have."
While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism
is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering
a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't
serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to
Ukraine.
The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for
conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these
hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in
international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment
of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of
rumor.
Obama, Brazile, Comey, and CrowdStrike
According to Obama the
hacks continued until September 2016. According to ABC, Donna Brazile says the hacks didn't stop
until after the elections in 2016. According to Crowdstrike the hacks continued into
November.
Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying
to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election --
contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned
Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC
This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and
still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to
Bill
Binney , the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off
the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does
not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking
ridiculous and impossible at best.
The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would have
taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel agency ever
did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of investigating.
That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller has proving law
enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.
It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a
purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was
prosecutable.
Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge in
federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC gets the
spotlight but there are Republicans involved.
Investigative Jouralist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the
CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to
Silicon Valley.
MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate
to reduce NSA spying on the public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was
sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door
for law enforcement.
Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named
Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking
scandal - Crowdstrike.
In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry
platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.
After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a "national
security threat" and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as
"terrorists" and refused to rule out military intervention.
One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it
seems.
Washington dubbed Nicaragua a threat to US national security, and announced that it will be
expanding its suffocating sanctions on the tiny Central American nation.
Trump is also turning up the heat on Mexico, baselessly linking the country to terrorism and
even hinting at potential military intervention. The moves come as the country's left-leaning
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warns of right-wing attempts at a coup.
As Washington's rightist allies in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador are desperately
beating back massive grassroots uprisings against neoliberal austerity policies and yawning
inequality gaps, the United States is ramping up its aggression against the region's few
remaining progressive governments.
These moves have led left-wing forces in Latin America to warn of a 21st-century revival of
Operation Condor, the Cold War era campaign of violent subterfuge and US support for right-wing
dictatorships across the region.
Trump admin declares Nicaragua a 'national security
threat'
A day after the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia, the White House released a statement
applauding the military putsch and making it clear that two countries were next on Washington's
target list: "These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in
Venezuela and Nicaragua ," Trump declared.
On November 25, the Trump White House then quietly issued a statement characterizing
Nicaragua as an "unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
This prolonged for an additional year an executive order Trump had signed in 2018 declaring
a state of "national emergency" on the Central American country.
Trump's 2018 declaration came after a failed violent right-wing
coup attempt in Nicaragua . The US government has funded and supported many of
the opposition groups that sought to topple elected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and
cheered them on as they sought to overthrow him.
The 2018 national security threat designation was quickly followed by economic warfare. In
December the US Congress approved
the NICA Act without any opposition. This legislation gave Trump the authority to impose
sanctions on Nicaragua, and prevents international financial institutions from doing business
with Managua.
Trump's new 2019 statement spewed outlandish propaganda against Nicaragua, referring to its
democratically elected government -- which for decades has been targeted for overthrow by
Washington -- as a supposedly violent and corrupt "regime."
This executive order is similar to one made by President Barack Obama in 2015, which
designated Venezuela as a threat to US national security.
Both orders were used to justify the unilateral imposition of suffocating economic
sanctions. And Trump's renewal of the order paves the way for an escalated economic attack on
Nicaragua.
The extension received negligible coverage in mainstream English-language corporate media,
but right-wing Spanish-language outlets in Latin America heavily amplified it.
And opposition activists are gleefully cheering on the intensification of Washington's
hybrid warfare against Managua.
More aggressive US sanctions against Nicaragua
Voice of America (VOA), the US government's main foreign broadcasting service, noted that
the extension of the executive order will be followed with more economic attacks.
Washington's ambassador to the Organization
of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo, told VOA, "The pressure against Nicaragua is
going to continue."
The OAS representative added that Trump will be announcing new sanctions against the
Nicaraguan government in the coming weeks.
VOA stated clearly that "Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, is one of the Latin
American countries whose government Trump has made a priority to put diplomatic and economic
pressure on to bring about regime change."
This is not just rhetoric. The US Department of the Treasury updated the Nicaragua-related
sanctions section of its website as recently as November 8.
And in September, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a " more
comprehensive set of regulations ," strengthening the existing sanctions on Nicaragua.
Voice of America's report quoted several right-wing Nicaraguans who openly called for more
US pressure against their country.
Bianca Jagger, a celebrity opposition activist formerly married to Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger, called on the US to impose sanctions on Nicaragua's military in particular.
"The Nicaraguan military has not been touched because they [US officials] are hoping that
the military will like act the military in Bolivia," Jagger said, referring to the military
officials who violently overthrew Bolivia's democratically elected president.
Many of these military leaders had been
trained at the US government's School of the Americas , a notorious base of subversion
dating back to Operation Condor. Latin American media has been filled in recent days with
reports that Bolivian soldiers were paid $50,000 and generals were paid up to $1 million to
carry out the putsch.
VOA added that "in the case of the Central American government [of Nicaragua], the effect
that sanctions can have can be greater because it is a more economically vulnerable
country."
VOA quoted Roberto Courtney, a prominent exiled right-wing activist and executive director
of the opposition group Ethics and Transparency, which monitors elections in Nicaragua and is
supported by the US
government's
regime-change arm , the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Courtney, who claims to be a human rights activist, salivated over the prospects of US
economic war on his country, telling VOA, "There is a bit of a difference [between Nicaragua
and Bolivia] the economic vulnerability makes it more likely that the sanctions will have an
effect."
Courtney, who was described by VOA as an "expert on the electoral process," added, "If there
is a stick, there must also be a carrot." He said the OAS could help apply diplomatic and
political pressure against Nicaragua's government.
These unilateral American sanctions are illegal under international law, and considered an
act of war. Iran's foreign minister,
Javad Zarif , has characterized US economic warfare "financial terrorism," explaining that
it disproportionately targets civilians in order to turn them against their government.
Top right-wing Nicaraguan opposition groups applauded Trump for extending the executive
order and for pledging new sanctions against their country.
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an opposition front group that
brings together numerous opposition groups , several of which are
also
funded by the US government's NED , welcomed the order.
Trump dubs drug cartels in
Mexico "terrorists," refuses to rule out drone strikes
While the US targeting of Nicaragua and Venezuela's governments is nothing new, Donald Trump
is setting his sights on a longtime US ally in Mexico.
In 2018, Mexican voters made history when they elected Andrés Manuel López
Obrador as president in a landslide. López Obrador, who is often referred to by his
initials AMLO, is Mexico's first left-wing president in more than five decades. He ran on a
progressive campaign pledging to boost social spending, cut poverty, combat corruption, and
even decriminalize drugs.
AMLO is wildly popular in Mexico. In February, he had a record-breaking
86 percent approval rating . And he has earned this widespread support by pledging to
combat neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
"The neoliberal economic model has
been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country," AMLO has declared. "The child
of neoliberalism is corruption."
When he unveiled his multibillion-dollar National Development Plan, López Obrador
announced the end to "the long night of neoliberalism."
AMLO's left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on
neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a
reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 -- a day after declaring Nicaragua a "national security threat" -- Trump
announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as "
terrorist organizations ."
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
Trump revealed this new policy in an interview with right-wing Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.
"Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them
with drones and things like that?" O'Reilly asked.
The US president refused to rule out drone strikes or other military action against drug
cartels in Mexico.
Trump's announcement seemed to surprise the Mexican government, which immediately called for
a meeting with the US State Department.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico
have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the
Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in
counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing
death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The
CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central
America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed,
trained, and funded far-right Islamist
extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same
US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander
Omar al-Shishani
, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from
Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunne r
and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to
cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration's designation
of cartels as terrorists, "They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their
national security ."
"Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in
Mexico?" Duarte asked.
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She noted that the US corporate media has embarked on an increasingly ferocious campaign to
demonize
AMLO , portraying the democratically elected president as a power-hungry aspiring dictator
who is supposedly wrecking Mexico's economy.
Duarte discussed the issue of US interference in Mexican politics in an interview with The
Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, on their podcast Moderate
Rebels:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7OJyCHjxCEs
Now, a whisper campaign over fears that the right-wing opposition may try to overthrow
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spreading across Mexico.
AMLO himself has publicly addressed the rumors, making it clear that he will not tolerate
any discussion of coups.
"How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are," López Obrador tweeted on November
2. Referencing the 1913 assassination of progressive President Francisco Madero, who had been a
leader of the Mexican Revolution, AMLO wrote, "Now is different."
"Another coup d'état will now be allowed," he declared.
In recent months, as fears of a coup intensify, López Obrador has swung even further
to the left, directly challenging the US government and asserting an independent foreign policy
that contrasts starkly to the subservience of his predecessors.
AMLO's government has rejected US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela's leftist government,
throwing a wrench in Washington's efforts to impose right-wing activist
Juan Guaidó as coup leader.
AMLO has welcomed Ecuador's ousted socialist leader Rafael Correa and hosted Argentina's
left-leaning Alberto Fernández for his first foreign trip after winning the
presidency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D4T0zbASfbA
In October, López Obrador even welcomed Cuban President Díaz-Canel to Mexico
for a historic visit.
Trump's Operation Condor 2.0
For Washington, an independent and left-wing Mexico is intolerable.
In a speech for right-wing, MAGA hat-wearing
Venezuelans in Miami , Florida in February, Trump ranted against socialism for nearly an
hour, threatened the remaining leftist countries in Latin America with regime change.
"The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua
and in Cuba as well," he declared, adding that socialism would never be allowed to take root in
heart of capitalism in the United States.
While Trump has claimed he seeks to withdraw from wars in the Middle East (when he is not
occupying its oil fields
), he has ramped up aggressive US intervention in Latin America.
During the height of the Cold War, Operation Condor thousands of dissidents were murdered,
and hundreds of thousands more were disappeared, tortured, or imprisoned with the assistance of
the US intelligence apparatus.
Today, as Latin America is increasingly viewed through the lens of a new Cold War, Operation
Condor is being reignited with new mechanisms of sabotage and subversion in play. The mayhem
has only begun.
The poll graph without three day averaging is a great visual illustration of the margin of
error concept. It's even clear in the averaged version. I guarantee people are NOT changing
their minds that fast, and I'm sure all the issues Lambert highlighted are contributing to
the inaccuracies.
That said, a few trends are clear. Biden is trending steadily (but very slowly) downward.
Sanders and Buttigieg are trending up, Sanders slowly and Buttigieg somewhat faster, while
Warren is settling back to her long term average after a bump in October. Harris' decision to
withdraw looks like a good one. Undecided numbers are all over the place, and tend to spike
up when other lines spike down, so I'm guessing that's down to differing polling
methodologies and how hard people are pushed to make a call.
Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone? Or is the polled asked to
name a candidate? I can't get my head around how to manage a list of this many candidates by
voice without 'Name Recognition' being the first choice.
> Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone?
That's a very good question. Is the list of names so long -- I don't think we've ever had
one so long -- that it enables pollsters to game the polls in new ways? Could be such a
simple and obvious mode of rigging that we did not see it.
Morning Consult (B/C)
Nov 25 – Dec 1
Mon – Sun
15,773 Likely
National
16 candidate names, plus "Someone else" (not present in data source, derived in app)
Details here: https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/
The differences are Joe Sestak and Steve Bullock in HarrisX but not MC, going to guess
that MC decided not to list them because they dropped, and if they asked the names during the
survey their report them in the conveniently names "Someone else" category.
Regarding ChrisPacific's point about Undecideds, yes, this is affected by methodology and
whose polls came out on a particular day.
And more generally, we should expect to see noise in this data. These are minuscule
samples compared to the actual voting universe of over 65 million. The "Margin of Error" /
"Confidence Interval" claims are based on the assumption that all polls are distributed as a
uniform bell curve. Arguably useful for getting the noise out of stats for physical
observations of mechanical models, but absurd for human polling. Pollsters (who work mostly
in marketing) use MoE/CI to convince clients spend money on small polls and then spin out
reassuring MoE or CI (which scale to each other, bigger MoE = narrower CI). (Tangentially, on
political campaigns, the tactical advantages to be found in population data come from looking
into what's happening in the noise, not from smoothing it out and then assessing the
distorted surface).
And as in most viscous media, quick changes tend to snap back to origin, slow ones push
though. Consider also that a) these candidates are introducing themselves, impressions
develop over time, and engagement is still low. Also, the context of US society may be
gradually changing, but it would take a sudden shock (like 9/11 at the time) to change the
background context and be reflected in a suddenly shift in Dem Primary polls.
I participated in the last Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa poll. The pollster was required to
read all of the names, even when I could name one immediately.
The call came on my cell phone from a restricted number. I asked for what company or
candidate the poll was being conducted; the interviewer said that she was not given that
information, but at the very end I was asked whether I would be willing to talk to a reporter
from CNN or the DMR (I declined). She did tell me the research firm for which she worked,
which I later saw was the name of the firm that had conducted the poll. When I saw the
original release, I wondered whether I was correct that this was the poll, since I remembered
a question about my preference for a health care system that wasn't in the original release.
That result was released at a later date.
The M4A option for that question was simply M4A, without additional information or
qualifiers. I, as is usual for me, couldn't simply answer a multiple choice question, but
explained that I supported improved M4A, and that current Medicare is still expensive. The
interviewer told me that she herself has trouble affording Medicare, and that she
particularly has trouble paying for her medication. (We got a little chatty.)
The research firm was also contacting Republicans. She said that I had been the first
Democrat that she had reached that day, and that Republicans got different questions. She did
not know whom she was calling and, at the end, asked my first name so that her company could
verify that she had reached the right individual.
I'll check back here in case there are any other questions about the poll that I might be
able to answer. If anyone is interested in the questions themselves, those are already
available online.
Why did I agree to participate? To have my support for Bernie counted, of course!
"... That person then will land on a special list of "agents" and will be obliged to register as a company so that his or her funding is transparent to the state. A Russian journalist working for Voice of America also becomes a foreign agent under the law. ..."
"... Butina was charged under a different though similar statute , which also requires foreign agents to register with the U.S. government. Even U.S. officials sometimes confuse the regulations, and it's not easy for a layman to understand what actions make one a foreign agent under them. ..."
"... Butina, for example, was sentenced to 18 months for trying to establish contacts with Republican operatives and National Rifle Association members ..."
"... Putin was annoyed by the Butina case. "They grabbed the girl, put her behind bars, and they had nothing to show for it," he commented after her sentencing. ..."
"... Now comes the retaliation -- and as usual under Putin, mainly against Russians he sees as a Western fifth column ..."
The new law makes it possible to
apply the foreign agent label to individuals, specifically to those who spread content from
media or other organizations determined to be foreign agents and who receive any kind of
funding from a foreign or foreign-financed source...
That person then will land on a special list of "agents" and will be obliged to
register as a company so that his or her funding is transparent to the state. A Russian
journalist working for Voice of America also becomes a foreign agent under the law.
... ... ...
Failure to register, open a company or mark one's stories or posts as coming from a foreign
agent will be punishable by a yet-undetermined fine.
Andrei Klimov, one of the drafters of the law, recently told
the government-owned daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
Unlike our foreign counterparts, we envisage no criminal liability. We don't grab people,
we don't toss them into torture chambers, like some other countries that do it for five or
fifteen years. We are capable of getting results with administrative measures.
It's clear from his comment that the Russian law is a response to the sudden
prominence of foreign-agent registration, a previously obscure requirement best known to
professional lobbyists, in the Donald Trump-Russia investigations of special counsel Robert
Mueller. He had political operatives Paul Manafort and Rick Gates indicted for violating the
Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938, previously a laxly enforced law.
Butina was charged under a different
though similar statute , which also requires foreign
agents to register with the U.S. government. Even U.S. officials sometimes confuse the regulations, and it's not
easy for a layman to understand what actions make one a foreign agent under them.
Butina, for example, was sentenced to 18 months for trying to establish contacts with
Republican operatives and National Rifle Association members on behalf of a Russian
Central Bank official who may have wanted to set up a back channel between the Kremlin and the
Republican elite in the U.S.
Putin was annoyed by the Butina case. "They grabbed the girl, put her behind bars, and
they had nothing to show for it," he commented after her sentencing.
Now comes the retaliation -- and as usual under Putin, mainly against Russians he sees
as a Western fifth column rather than against the U.S. as such. Also as usual under Putin,
the response is asymmetrical.
Clinton curse sill is hanging over Democratic Party candidates like Damocles sword. 25 year
of betrayal of their core constituency and their alliance with Wall Street has consequences,
which they now feel. Obama now is openly despised by Democratic voters as the person who betrayed
his electorate and then enriched himself in classing "revolving door" corruption scheme. The
phrase "change is can believe in" became a curse. Bill Clinton is mired in Epstein scandal. You
can't get worse cheerleaders for the party and it does not have anybody else.
Notable quotes:
"... Obama was directly addressing Silicon Valley's wealthiest Democratic donors, telling them to "chill" in their debate over the party's candidates, and seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and -- most surprisingly -- Elizabeth Warren ..."
"... Gallup released a poll last week that had some troubling news for Democrats, as only 66% of the party faithful said they're enthusiastic about the upcoming election. ..."
While there are still 15 candidates running for the Democratic nomination (after the
withdrawal of Kamala Harris earlier today), only four are polling in double digits, with most
either at 1% or 0%. But Obama said whoever gets the nod should get the vote.
"There will be differences" between the candidates, Obama said, "but I want us to make sure
that we keep in mind that, relative to the ultimate goal, which is to defeat a president and a
party that has taken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and
institutional commitments that built this country," those differences are "relatively
minor."
"The field will narrow and there's going to be one person, and if that is not your perfect
candidate and there are certain aspects of what they say that you don't agree with and you
don't find them completely inspiring the way you'd like, I don't care," he said. "Because the
choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this
race."
Obama was directly addressing Silicon Valley's wealthiest Democratic donors, telling
them to "chill" in their debate over the party's candidates, and seeking to ease the tensions
among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden,
and -- most surprisingly -- Elizabeth Warren , according to recode.
Obama may have his job cut out for him: with many Democratic voters confused or merely bored
silly by the current roster of candidates, two newcomers, Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval
Patrick and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entered the race adding further to
the confusion. Last month, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, drew fewer than
100 people to a South Carolina "Environmental Justice" forum. And she's a frontrunner!
Meanwhile, Gallup released a poll last week that had some troubling news for Democrats,
as only 66% of the party faithful said they're enthusiastic about the upcoming election.
And while for Republicans the number is 65%, "this differed from the typical pattern Gallup has
seen over the years, whereby those who identify with the political party of the incumbent
president have been less enthusiastic about voting than members of the opposing party," Gallup
wrote.
Ironically, Obama isn't alone in saying Democrats need to hold their nose when they vote for
the eventual nominee. Joe Biden's wife, Jill, said in August that her husband might not be the
best candidate, but told voters "maybe you have to swallow a little bit" and vote for him
anyway.
"Your candidate might be better on, I don't know, health care, than Joe is," Jill Biden said
on MSNBC, "but you've got to look at who's going to win this election, and maybe you have to
swallow a little bit and say, 'OK, I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line
has to be that we have to beat Trump."
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, she repeated the point. "I know that not all of you
are committed to my husband, and I respect that. But I want you to think about your candidate,
his or her electability, and who's going to win this race. So I think if your goal -- I know my
goal -- is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him," she said.
Ukrainegate has definite signs of Soros funded operation
Notable quotes:
"... America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers. ..."
"... Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team. ..."
"... There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions. ..."
"... Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit them to infest his administration. ..."
"... PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle. ..."
"... HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED... ..."
"... Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil. ..."
"... Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly... ..."
"... We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... ..."
"... JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world. ..."
"... If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him) ..."
"... Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen. ..."
"... AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge in her own country! ..."
"... Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money ..."
Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to "go quietly into that good night". On the morning
after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband,
former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned
in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent
the coming together of Democratic "Blue America" and Republican "Red America" into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete
ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon
George Soros.
The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros,
were, in fact, helping to launch Soros's "Purple Revolution" in America. The Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump
administration to push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution
will also seek to make the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street protests and political disruption.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of
Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation
faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the
Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide
Huma Abedin
. President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national
security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because
there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers.
Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being
mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary
of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team.
There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries
of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump
supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic,
and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions.
Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit
them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have
read as follows:
"Based on the militarism and foreign adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill Clinton's two terms
as president, the world is in store for major American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world. President-elect
Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the Middle
East, on Russia's very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted
off the long-discredited 'containment' policy ushered into effect by Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War.
Mrs. Clinton's administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors of the Barack Obama administration, including
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal favorite of Clinton".
President-elect Trump cannot afford to permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and others to join his
administration where they would metastasize like an aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump's policies
but seek to continue to damage America's relations with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations.
Not only must Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into his administration, but he must deal with
the attempt by Soros to disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution
No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities
to disrupt Trump during Obama's lame-duck period and thereafter. The swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed
at which protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and
the other, ten years later, in 2014.
As the Clintons were embracing purple in New York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the Soros-funded Moveon.org
and "Black Lives Matter", broke out in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington, Austin, Seattle,
Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.
The Soros-financed Russian singing group "Pussy Riot" released on YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled "Make America Great
Again". The video went "viral" on the Internet. The video, which is profane and filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump
presidency. Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans
to turn their anger into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street
protests and anti-Trump music and art were the first phase of Soros's Purple Revolution in America.
President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including former
Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign
policy, and defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the
Obama aggressiveness and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. The second front arrayed against
Trump is from Soros-funded political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump
newspapers, web sites, and broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump administration from its outset.
One of Trump's political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair
Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of "a global power structure that is responsible
for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets
of a handful of large corporations and political entities". Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as
"anti-Semitic". President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros's
son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros's tactics
not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George
Soros, including his Purple Revolution.
"It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care."
None of those "pressing issues" involve the DOJ or the FBI.
Investigate, prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton and her crew.
Trump is going to need a hostage or two to deal with these fucks.
News for the Clintons, The R's and D's already united to vote against Hillary.
I do not understand why they think street protests will bring down a POTUS? And that would be acceptable in a major nation.
Why isn't the government cracking down the separatists in Oregon, California, and elsewhere? They are not accepting the legal
outcome of an election. They are calling for illegal secession. (Funny in 1861 this was a cause for the federal government to
attack the joint and seveal states of the union.) If a group of whites had protested Obama's election in 2008?
The people living in Kalispell are reviled and ridiculed for their separatist views. Randy Weaver and family for not accepting
politically correct views. And so on.
This is getting out of hand. There will be no walking this back.
"Yes. And who are the neocons really? Progressives. Neocon is a label successfully used by criminal progressives to shield their
brand."
Well let's go a little bit deeper in examing the 'who' thing:
"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in
reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary , a media arm of the American
Jewish Committee , which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward , the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote
in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: " If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can
lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.... "
The idea of arresting the Clinton Crime, Fraud and Crime Family would be welcomed. BUT, who is going to arrest them? Loretta Lynch,
James Comey, WHO? The problem here is that our so called "authorities" are all in the same bed. The tentacles of the Eastern Elite
Establishment are everywhere in high office, academia, the media, Big Business, etc. The swamp is thoroughly infested with this
elite scum of those in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, Club of Rome,
Committee of 300, Jason Society and numerous other private clubs of the rich, powerful and influential. The Illuminati has been
exposed, however they aren't going down lightly. They still have massive amounts of money, they own the media and the banking
houses. Some have described it as MIMAC, the Military Industrial Media Academic Complex. A few months ago here at Zero Hedge,
there was an article which showed a massive flow chart of the elites and their organization
They could IF and WHEN Trump gets to Washington after 20 Jan 2017, simply implode the economy and blame t it on Trump. Sort
of what happened to Herbert Hoover in the late 1920's. Unfortunately the situation in the US will continue to deteriorate. George
Soros, a major financial backer of Hillary will see to that. Soros is a Globalist and advocate of one world government. People
comment that Soros should be arrested. I agree, BUT who is going to do that?
Agree. I think Trump will yank all the "aid" to Israel as well as "aid" to the Islamic murderers of the Palitrashian human garbage
infesting the area. This "aid" money is simply a bribe to keep both from killing each other. F**k all of them. None of our business
what they do.
We got progressives ( lots and lots of Jews in that group) who are the enemy of mankind and then we got Islam who are also
the enemy of mankind. Why help either of them? Makes no sense.
Soros is hated in Israel and has never set foot there but his foundations have done such harm that a bill was recently passed
to ban foreign funding of non profit political organizations
The fact that we all have to worry about the CIA killing a President Elect simply because the man puts America first, really says
it all.
The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question
about the CIA's future in the US.
Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long,
that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes
Against The American People.
There are entirely way too many Intelligence Agencies. Plus the Contractors, some of who shouldn't have high level clearance to
begin with which the US sub contracts the Intel / work out to.
For Fucks sake, Government is so incompetent it can't even handle it own Intel.
Something along the lines of Eurpoe's Five Eyes would be highly effective.
Fuck those Pure Evil Psychopaths at the CIA They're nothing more than a bunch of Scum Fuck murdering, drug running, money laundering
Global Crime Syndicate.
The FBI is still investigating the Clinton Foundation, Trump needs to encourage that through backdoor channels. Soro's needs to
be investigated, he has been tied to a conspiracy to incite violence, this needs to be documented and dealt with. Trump can not
ignore this guy. If any of these investigations come back with a recommendation to indict then that process needs to be started.
Take the fight to them, they are vulnerable!
Make a National APB Warrent for the apprehension & arrest of George Sooros for inciting violence, endsrgerimg the public & calling
for the murder of our Nations Police through funding of the BLM Group.
Have every Law Informent Agency in the Nation on alert. Also, issue a Bounty in the Sum of $5,000,000 for his immediate apprehension.
Trump needs to replace FBI chickenshits & sellouts with loyal people then get the FBI counter-terrorism to investigate and shut
down Soros & the various agencies instigating the riots. It's really simple when you quit over-thinking a problem. It's domestic
terrorism. It's the FBI's job to stop it.
I read what Paul said this morning and thought, despite Paul's hostility to Trump during the primaries most likely due to his
son, Rand's loss, that Paul gave good advice to Trump.
Let's face it Donald Trump is a STOP GAP measure. And demographic change over the next 4 years makes his re-election very, very
UNLIKELY. If he keeps his campaign promises he will be a GREAT president. However as ZH reported earlier he appears to be balking
from repealing Obamacare, I stress the word APPEARS.
Let us give him a chance. This is all speculation. His enemies are DEADLY as they were once they got total control in Russia,
they killed according to Solzhenitsyn SIXTY-SIX MILLION Russian Christians. The descendants of those Bolsheviks are VERY powerful
in the USSA. They control the Fed, Hollyweird, Wall Street, the universities...
Much of the media and advertising exist by pushing buttons that trigger appropriate financially lucrative reflexes in their
audiences, from pornography to romantic movies to team sports. Media profits are driven by competition over how best to push
those buttons. But the effort to produce politically and racially cuckolded Whites adds a layer of complexity: What buttons
do you push to make Whites complicit in their own racial and cultural demise?
Actually, there are a whole lot of them, which shouldn't be surprising. This is a very sophisticated onslaught, enabled
by control over all the moral, intellectual, and political high ground by the left. With all that high ground, there are a
lot of buttons you can push.
Our enemies see this as a pathetic last gasp of a moribund civilization and it is quite true for our civilization is dying.
Identity Christians describe this phase as Jacob's Troubles and what the secular Guillaume Faye would, I think, describe as the
catastrophe required to get people motivated. The future has yet to be written, however I cannot help but think that God's people,
the White people, are stirring from their slumber.
"PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William
Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle.
JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "explaining the link between U.S. national security and Israel's
security" Served on JINSA's Advisory Board: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Perle."
If Trump has probable cause on the Soros crimes, have his DoJ request a warrant for all of Soros's communications via the NSA,
empanel a grand jury, indict the bastard, and throw his raggedy ass in prison. It would be hard for him to run his retarded purple
revolution when he's getting ass-raped by his cell mate.
I agree. Thing is, I think as president he can simply order the NSA to cough up whatever they have, just like Obama could have
done at any point. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, right? What am I missing here?
But in respect to Soro's money and the Dalas shooting or other incited events, there should be a grand jury empanelled and
then charges brought against him. I think nothing short of him hiding in an embassy with all his money blocked by Swift is justice
for the violence that he funded.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin. President Trump should not allow himself to be
distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
And so it begins; I really hope that this is just some misinformation/disinformation, because HE PROMISED he would appoint
a special prosecutor, PROMISED...
The likes of Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg get to catch up on their Torah for the forseeable future but the likes
of Lloyd Blankfein will probably get to entertain the court since they have probably crossed paths doing business in NYC. The
"real conservative" deeply introspective, examine-my-conscience crowd screwed themselves to the wall, god love them.
Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because
that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through
501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a
massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil.
We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an
advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... (just in case you confused him with Mother Theresa)..
But then again JFK took office with a set of initiatives that were far more bellicose and provocative (like putting huge Jupiter
missile launchers on the USSR border in Turkey)... once he saw he light and fired the pro Nazi Dulles Gang , JFK was gunned
down in front of the whole world.
If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will
unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him)
I'm guessing though that deep down Trump is quite comfortable with a neoCon cabinet... hell he already offered Jamie Diamon
the office of Treasry Secretary... no doubt a calculated gesture to signal compliance with the Deep State.
The Clintons do not do things by accident. Coordination of colors at the concession speech was meant for something. Perhaps the
purple revolution or maybe they want to be seen as royals. It doesn't really matter why they did it; the fact is they are up to
something. They will not agree to go away and even if they offered to just disappear with their wealth we know they are dishonest.
They will come back... that is what they do.
They must be stripped of power and wealth. This act must be performed publicly.
In order to succeed Mr. Trump I suggest you task a group to accomplish this result. Your efforts to make America great again
may disintegrate just like Obamacare if you allow the Clintons and Co. to languish in the background.
The protestors are groups of individuals who may seek association for any number of reasons. One major reason might be the loss
of hope for a meaningful and prosperous life. We should seek out and listen to the individuals within these groups. If they are
truly desirous of being heard they will communicate what they want without use of violence. Perhaps individuals join these protest
groups because they do not have a voice.
Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction
and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen.
The articles reporting that Mr. Trump has changed his response to the protestors is a good effort to discover the protestors'
complaints and channel their energy into beneficial political activity. Something must be done quickly though, before the protests
get out of hand, for if that happens the protestors will be criminals and no one will want to work with them.
In order to make America great again we need input from all of America. Mr. Trump you can harness the energy of these protestors
and let them know they are a part of your movement.
Classical economists are experts on today's capitalism, it is 18th and 19th Century capitalism, it's how it all started.
Adam Smith would think we are on the road to ruin.
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society.
On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalizing itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services.
Got that wrong as well.
Adam Smith wouldn't like today's lobbyists.
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great
precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous,
but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of
the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions,
both deceived and oppressed it."
First five minutes of Alex Jones' video today is clips of people saying "Donald Trump will never be president". Full Show - Soros-Funded Goons Deployed to Overthrow America - 11/11/2016
AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge
in her own country!
lakecity55 -> CoCosAB Nov 12, 2016 7:53 AM
Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money. Trump will have to do some rough stuff,
but he needs to, it's what we hired him for.
"... Authored by Peter Hitchens via The Mail On Sunday blog, ..."
"... I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure. ..."
"... In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks ..."
"... But I've never seen one like this. It scared me. ..."
"... If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be started by a falsehood. ..."
I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot
identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure.
I had travelled a long distance by train to an address I had been given over an encrypted email.
I was nervous that the meeting might be some sort of trap.
Leaks from inside arms
verification organisations are very sensitive matters. Powerful people mind about them.
I wasn't sure whether to be afraid of being followed, or to be worried about who might be waiting behind
the anonymous door on a dark afternoon, far from home. I took all the amateurish precautions that I could
think of.
As it happened, it was not a trap. Now, on carefully selected neutral ground, I was to meet a person
who would confirm suspicions that had been growing in my mind over several years that there is something
rotten in the way that chemical weapons inspections are being conducted and reported. And that the world
could be hurried into war on the basis of such inspections.
Inside the safe house, I was greeted by a serious, patient expert, a non-political scientist
whose priority had until now always been to do the hard, gritty work of verification
travelling
to the scenes of alleged horrors, sifting and searching for hard evidence of what had really happened.
But this entirely honourable occupation had slowly turned sour.
The whiff of political interference had begun as a faint unpleasant smell in the air and grown
until it was an intolerable stench.
Formerly easy-going superiors had turned into tricky bureaucrats.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had become so important that it could
no longer be allowed to do its job properly.
Too many of the big powers that sponsor and finance it were breathing down its neck, wanting certain
results, whether the facts justified them or not.
My source calmly showed me various pieces of evidence that they were who they said they were,
and knew what they claimed to know, making it clear that they worked for the OPCW and knew its inner workings.
They then revealed a document to me.
This was the email of protest, sent to senior OPCW officials, saying that a report on the alleged Syrian
poison gas attack in Douma, in April 2018, had been savagely censored so as to alter its meaning.
In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks
:
leaks
over luxurious, expensive lunches with Cabinet Ministers, anonymous leaks that just turned up in envelopes,
leaks from union officials and employers, diplomats and academics.
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But I've never seen one like this. It scared me.
If it was true, then
something hugely dishonest and dangerous was going on, in a place where absolute integrity was vital.
If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be
started by a falsehood.
Last week I reported on the first episode in this story. Within days the OPCW had confirmed that the
email I leaked was authentic.
Nobody followed me home or threatened me. A few silly people on social media told blatant lies about
me, insinuating that I was somehow a Russian patsy or a defender of the disgusting Syrian regime that
I have been attacking in print for nearly 20 years. That was what I had expected.
But there is much more to come.
And, as it grows harder for everyone to ignore this
enormous, dangerous story,
I suspect I shall be looking over my shoulder rather more than usual.
US Empire's Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell gets irked that more nations are joining the INSTEX mechanism for commerce with Iran as
shown by his Tweet:
"cc: @TreasurySpox @USTreasury sounds to me like all these people and groups should be added
to the US Sanctions list. We should ensure that they don't get to work in the US market.
Iran or the US -- they decide. But not both ." [My Emphasis]
The nations saying we're not with you are Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway,
and Sweden--what might be termed the more enlightened Europeans.
And here we have Germany's CDU acting in a manner reflecting the Bush Doctrine as it debated
Germany's 5G
rollout :
"The moderates, represented by Merkel, believe that Germany should not rule out any company
over political issues, but focus more on objective factors such as whether its technological
security and standards meet German requirements. However, some hard-liners make it an
ideological issue and believe Huawei should be excluded. The reason they provided is ' no
Chinese company is an independent company,' adding that Huawei's involvement is principally "an
imminent question of national security .
"After decades of following the US, Germany has somewhat lost the ability to independently
decide its development and destiny. But in recent years, the US has been pursuing
unilateralism. The export-oriented German economy is affected by not only China-US trade
conflicts, but also US threat of imposing tariffs on German products. Thus, it is time for
Berlin to stop its fear of threats from Washington and make choices that are in line with its
own interests." [My Emphasis]
Every Evil Outlaw US Empire chartered corporation in the tech realm is not an "independent
company" since they work hand in glove with CIA, NSA, FBI, other government organizations, and
are also funded by the government. The same is likely true of every Western tech company. A
double standard excuse in service of continuing the Bush Doctrine.
To paraphrase Grenell, Now is most certainly the time to declare your independence and
reclaim your sovereignty and cease acting in the service of another nation.
The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism By Larry Romanoff Global Research,
November 30, 2019 Region: USA Theme: History
Fascism is a political ideology fundamentally authoritarian in character, with a strong
nationalism and an essentially belligerent militaristic outlook. Fascism carries primarily a
corporate perspective as opposed to a socialist view, directed to satisfying the needs, values
and objectives of finance and corporations, organising both the economy and the political
system according to this agenda.
A fascist government actively suppresses any objection to its ideology and typically will
crush any movement which opposes it. In keeping with their belligerent nature, fascist
governments generally view violence and war as stimulants to national spirit and
vitality.
Being politically Right-Wing, they maintain their position through firm control
or compliance of the media, and most often engage in a vast array of lies and deception. These
governments tend to be bigoted, if not racist, invariably require "enemies" to achieve public
solidarity, and are often supremacist or at least 'exceptional' in their self-assessment. They
either believe, or pretend to believe, that they have a license on truth. Large military
budgets, the creation and demonisation of fictitious enemies to propagate fear and maintain
population control, are all typical characteristics of a fascist regime, as is massive public
surveillance.
In 1995 the Italian Scholar Umberto Eco produced a paper titled 'Eternal Fascism' (1) in
which he examined the characteristics of fascist regimes. In 2003, Laurence W. Britt did an
excellent and scholarly work in dissecting and categorising past fascist regimes (2), in which
he revealed common threads that linked all of them in "patterns of national behavior and abuse
of power". He wrote that "Even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes
reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi, (which is) not a
revelation but useful to shed needed light on current circumstances." I am including here a
composite of edited extracts from these two papers with additional commentary of my own.
Significant statements by these two authors are in quotation marks. This is a list of the
characteristics of fascist states, taken from Britt's original article:
Early Warning Signs of Fascism
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Supremacy of the military
Obsession with national security
Obsession with crime and punishment
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
Disdain for human rights
Corporate power is protected while labor power is suppressed
Controlled mass media
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Intertwined religion and government
Fraudulent elections
Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
Rampant Sexism
If we examine the US on these categories, we find an almost perfect match. Certainly the US
has the most strident nationalism of all nations today, with the hysteria of patriotism and
flag-worship unabated and even increasing, with the delusional theory of American
Exceptionalism as virulent as ever.
There is no question about military supremacy , with the US spending almost twice as much on
its military as the rest of the world combined and being by an order of magnitude the world's
largest arms manufacturer and dealer. Obama once stated flatly that for the US to remain
'peaceful and prosperous' it needed the world's largest and most powerful military to maintain
an overwhelming military supremacy. Obsession with issues of national security is so common in
the US today they have become objects of ridicule. Every manner of information is withheld,
every manner of lie is told, every manner of crime is committed, all with the excuse of
'national security'. Britt noted that a national security apparatus was usually an instrument
of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints, with its actions always
justified under the rubric of protecting "national security", and that questioning these
oppressive activities is now often portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
All the fascist regimes have an obsession with crime and punishment, Britt stating that most
"maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations" – a
perfect description of America today, including the 'unchecked power and rampant abuse' by the
police. He also noted that in all these fascist states, 'normal' crime and political crime were
almost interchangeable, "often merged into trumped-up criminal charges used against political
opponents of the regime". These characteristics of crime, punishment and incarceration are all
fields in which America leads the world by a wide margin today as we have already seen.
In terms of enemies being needed for solidarity and to maintain "a unifying cause", the US
is also the outstanding world leader, creating real and fictitious enemies not only for itself,
but doing a rather good job in creating animosities throughout the world. In fact, a signature
feature of the US is its worldwide propagation of regional unrest, as we see in Asia today, and
with interference in the Ukraine, Russia, China, and dozens of other countries. Creating
political chaos and large military risks is a common fascist trait, which is partly why
military supremacy is necessary, black and white America attempting to partition the world into
ideological factions, often in preparation for war.
For some decades, the US milked the Cold War for all it was worth, casting the Soviet Union
as a bitter enemy and creating animosity where none would have existed. With the fall of the
USSR, the US turned immediately to other nations, never really forgetting Russia, and then
created its 9-11 'Pearl Harbor Moment' that would permit it to have a permanent enemy in the
person of 'terrorism', a war that will never be won since the US creates all the terrorist
events to prolong it. It has the added advantage of demonising all the world's Muslims while
equating all Arabs with terrorists. Enough enemies here for a lifetime of fascism.
A fundamental practice of a fascist or pre-fascist government is demonisation of 'the
others', outsiders who are the enemy.
For the people, these (usually imaginary) enemies provide not only an essential
cornerstone of the fascist state but an essential adhesive for their fabricated national
identity. Being thus united against a common other, fascism becomes deeply racist by definition
and in practice. This demonisation of selected enemies is so intense that pacifism or a lack of
belligerence equate to treason, due to sympathising with the enemy or, in today's US lexicon,
"giving aid and comfort to the enemy". In the world of fascism, disagreement is treason. George
Bush and Dick Cheney: "If you aren't with us, you're against us". US Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles: "There are only two kinds of people in the world: Christians who believe in
capitalism, and the other kind."
In his study of these regimes, Britt wrote that "the most significant common thread" among
them was this demonisation of other peoples as enemies of the state, "to divert attention, to
shift blame, and to channel frustration into controlled directions". He claimed that their
methods of choice – propaganda and misinformation – were usually effective. Britt
noted that "Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt
with accordingly", which is precisely what happens today in the US, where increasingly it
occurs that challengers of the system are labeled as terrorists, even to the extent of those
operating food banks being classified as 'food terrorists'.
No reasonable person can claim today that the US has any concern for human rights, certainly
not any outside the continental US, and increasingly less within its borders. Except for
Israel, the US has by far the worst record of human rights violations during the past several
hundred years, far outstripping anything attributed to people like Stalin or Hitler, or even
the Japanese. It is, after all, the US that built and still maintains the largest network of
torture prisons and ships in the history of the world, even though the US media have removed
this topic from the publishing list.
In terms of media control, the US government covers this not by ownership or direct
censorship but by a cabal of closely-interwoven interests working on the same precise agenda,
almost totally eliminating any necessity for overt acts.
Corruption and cronyism are as alive and virulent in American government today as they have
ever been in any society at any time in recent history. The lobbies alone, working with the
secret government, are more than sufficient evidence of this, with corruption increasing
noticeably each year. Americans may quarrel with the point of an integration of religion and
government but, while religion is theoretically separated from the state, it is joined at the
hip in practice.
We have George Bush telling us God told him to invade and destroy Iraq, Obama telling us
Christ's redemption of him provides him with solace on a daily basis, and a long list of other
nonsense indicating that evangelical hysteria is never far removed from the government, even if
only to mislead an ignorant population. Britt noted that religion and the ruling elite were
tied together in some way .
"The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the
religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling
elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the 'godless'."
Fraudulent elections are more overtly creeping into the American electoral system every
year. We had George Bush's brother removing more than 50,000 persons from the voter lists in
Florida, all of whom were legitimate voters, and sufficient to provide an election victory.
Even then, when votes were finally counted accurately, Bush was proven to have lost the
election, but the consequences could not be reversed. As well, the new digital voting machines
have been condemned even by those who designed them, as wide open to electoral fraud and
manipulation to the extent of changing the outcome of every vote. Moreover, it is openly
admitted that even without manipulation, an accurate count is not physically possible. But the
government continues to roll out these systems, one would have to assume for their manipulation
potential.
It is widely recognised the US has been dumbing-down education for decades, starving the
educational systems of funds, using increasingly unqualified part-time and adjunct teachers and
professors, increasing tuition costs to the point where education will soon be unaffordable. We
don't need an education to see that the only possible result is an increasingly uneducated and
ignorant population. In his study, Britt noted that "intellectual and academic freedom were
considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly
controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or
expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed." This forms a perfect
description of the situation today in the US, certainly on the crushing of dissent. I have no
observation to make on the arts, but the US appears to qualify solidly on every point in the
above list, and I see no reason for Americans or indeed anyone else to take comfort in this. Is
the US a fascist state? How do we avoid answering in the affirmative?
To people of a country like the US, who are deprived of a clear national identity, fascism
creates one by stoking the fires of a false nationalism though propagandising the
pathologically false conviction that "the world's greatest privilege is to be born or to live
in this country", that every citizen "belongs to the best people in the world", all of whom
are, by definition, "good". US President Calvin Coolidge:
"To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever
accorded to the human race".
Michael Hirsh used the same jingoistic nonsense to justify American cannibalisation of the
world by stating that American global domination was "the greatest gift the world has received
in possibly all of recorded history." Britt noted the powerful propagation and displays of
nationalistic expression,
"From the prominent displays of flags and ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show
patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its
frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were
common themes in expressing this nationalism."
To underscore the above, Global Research published an article in March of 2015 titled "The
End of Canada in Ten Steps: A Conversation with Naomi Wolf" (3), in which it was noted that she
studied "the way open societies were crushed from within by authoritarian elements", such as
those existing in all Right-Wing countries today, and claimed there was "a 'blueprint' followed
by all dictatorial rulers composed of ten steps" as follows:
Invoke an external and internal threat
Establish secret prisons
Develop a paramilitary force
Surveil ordinary citizens
Infiltrate citizen groups
Arbitrarily detain and release citizens
Target key individuals
Restrict the press
Cast criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
Subvert the rule of law
Global Research finally noted that "In her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning
to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf not only described this formula for fascism, she outlined how
these repressive measures are in evidence in modern day America."
There is one other item pertaining to fascism in America that contains elements
of all characteristics we've discussed, one which Hollywood and the media have taken great
pains to develop though the ground was already very fertile indeed, and this category is heroes
and super-heroes. The US has always glorified war and war heroes, describing American
cannon-fodder as "sons of freedom giving their lives for democracy", when they were simply
massacring impoverished civilians to enrich the bankers. Eco noted that "In every mythology the
hero is an exceptional being, but in Fascist ideology heroism is the norm", with the fascist
hero impatient to die, but who, in his impatience, "more frequently sends other people to
death".
This black and white religious proto-fascism which has perhaps always existed in America was
the seedbed for the worship of heroes and winners. Americans, in their desperate jingoistic
desire to be "good" and to "win", and in a bid to prove their overwhelming moral superiority,
turned from reality to fiction and gave us Superman, Batman, Spiderman and Captain America. All
are Christian proto-fascists engaged in fictional battles of good against evil, with the
Americans living vicariously through these imaginary beings, sharing in their awesome power and
moral righteousness, and whose costumes inevitably bear labels saying "Made in America". And
indeed we cannot watch an American movie without encountering this irritating white supremacist
ideology. Think of movies like Avatar or Independence Day; their entire purpose is to fuel this
ideological jingoism and make all viewers "proud to be American". But it's all a fiction. The
real American heroes are not Superman or Spiderman but Curtis LeMay, Henry Kissinger, Ronald
Reagan and Madeline Albright, all criminally-insane psychopathic killers.
It is interesting that a fascist government, with its instinctive hatred of socialism,
propagates "fascist socialism" which nurtures and feeds corporations while normal socialism
nurtures the general population. What we might call "corporate socialism", which is what exists
today in the US, is a fairly precise definition of fascism.
Tax benefits that favor the rich either primarily or exclusively, a high income inequality,
the dismantling of any social safety net, different laws for the rich and powerful than for the
poor, corporate immunity for crimes, a lack of corporate regulation and oversight, are all
typical characteristics. Britt noted that "Since organized labor was seen as the one power
center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate
allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The US government and elites, except for
one brief historical period, have always strived to destroy labor to protect the profits of big
business. In Britt's study, "the poor formed an underclass, (and) being poor was considered
akin to a vice." And in which nation today have color and poverty been criminalised? The
world's largest fascist state – America.
He also noted rampant cronyism and corruption between the political and corporate elites and
stated that "With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this
corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population."
Corruption and cronyism are as alive and virulent in American government today as they have
ever been in any society at any time in recent history. The lobbies alone, working with the
secret government, are more than sufficient evidence of this, with corruption increasing
noticeably each year. Similarly, no reasonable person can question any longer the suppression
of labor and the protection and enhancement of corporate power in America. We have already
covered in detail the trashing of the social contract, the destruction of labor protections and
the evisceration of the middle class. No further evidence is necessary.
There is another alarming category that evidences even more strongly the threats to civil
society from the authoritarian and fascist police-state mentality that is increasingly
permeating all of the US, this involving trivial civil disputes that should in no case involve
the police. In July of 2014, a Minneapolis man was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight
with his two children for questioning why he was qualified for priority boarding but his two
children were not. He posted a Tweet that said, "Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate
C39, not happy". Southwest Airlines' gate attendants saw the tweet, ejected Watson and his
children from the flight, informing him he now qualified as a "safety threat", threatening to
have him arrested unless he immediately deleted his post.
In the US today, kindergarten teachers regularly call the police to arrest children who
misbehave. A Chinese woman tourist in New Hampshire was tasered and assaulted by police when a
clerk at an Apple store complained she wanted to buy two phones. In another case, a father in
New Hampshire attended a parent-school meeting to protest the classroom use of
sexually-explicit reading material provided to his teen-age daughter. When the man exceeded the
arbitrary maximum of two minutes speaking time, the principal called the police and had the man
arrested. In each case, no 'law' was violated so the police used generic charges of "causing a
public disturbance" or some other such nuisance charge.
These false charges may well be dismissed by a court but still present a serious violation
of civil rights and a gross exaggeration of the ability of individuals to create their own laws
and of the police to enforce them. In the Southwest Airlines case above, had the man refused to
delete his negative post, the agent would certainly have called the police who, cast from the
same authoritarian mold, would have automatically arrested and charged him, probably with
'Twitter Terrorism'. The man would likely have escaped in the end, but it would have been a
long and expensive climb out from the bottom of that hole. In the case of the Apple store, the
female customer was physically knocked to the ground and tasered by police immediately on their
arrival. In neither case did the police make even minimal attempts to ascertain the facts. In
fact, the only salient "fact" was that of a civilian challenging any kind of authority, even
the kind that is so weak as to be invisible. No civilian has any practical defense against an
airline agent or shop clerk who testifies that he "caused a public disturbance", nor against
police charges for having done so. The only immunity comes from wealth or political power.
There are countless similar cases which all have in common an implicit assumption that
anyone, even in a position of minimal authority such as a KFC clerk, has the power to dictate
imaginary rules that obtain the force of law with the police and which, if challenged, will
result in arrest. Individual private citizens, as least those lacking obvious wealth or power,
are increasingly relegated to the social trash bin. Incidents such as these may appear
individually trivial and unconnected, but they are not trivial in bulk and are indications of a
frightening authoritarianism infecting all of America, part of the widespread rush to fascism
occurring in all politically Right-Wing nations, especially in the US. That this should be such
a common experience is a frightening and almost terrifying development, where one now fears to
enter any dispute with even the most minor employee or clerk, in almost any context, and
regardless of the justification.
When common citizens are afraid to challenge the most trivial injustices in civil society,
when the people as individuals have been moved to the bottom of the priority list, when even
store clerks have effective arrest authority, this is authoritarian fascism – a classic
definition of a de facto fascist police state. In the US today there are so many similar
examples where this, the most fundamental of civil rights – the right to voice complaint
– has been converted to a criminal act. Those instances involved mostly the police badly
exceeding their authority, but this category involves mere civilians with no actual invested
civil authority of any kind, and yet in each case legal authority being presumed and exercised
entirely at the whim of these same persons. While Americans please themselves by accusing China
of being authoritarian, it is in fact the US that is both authoritarian and fascist. China is
today a very human civil society compared to Transformed America.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior
executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case
studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is
currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be
contacted at: [email protected]
"... "The next president will, for example, have to deal with the enormous loss of U.S. credibility during the past three years, which has stemmedin large part from Trump's reneging on or withdrawing from agreements such as the Paris accord on climate change, arms control accords withRussia, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which restricted Iran's nuclear program." ..."
"... What is the PURPOSE of US Foreign Policy? To protect the US homeland and US interests abroad (freedom of navigation, freedom of commerce and trade, and the protection of US citizens travelling abroad to name a few). ..."
"... Unfortunately, US Policy really refers to US interventionism across the globe. Covert activities are presumably necessary to protect US interests so as to thwart the covert activities of our enemies. In practice, what the US really does is protect the interests of friendly countries and US-based multi-national corporations...and the whole thing is smoke and mirrors (hidden from the American people). Thus, we really have NO IDEA what US Foreign Policy is, or what we are doing behind the scenes. That's on both Democrats and Republicans. ..."
This is still a race for a party nomination, and it is well known how political battles at this stage typically focus narrowly
on what are perceived to be the parochial concerns of the party's base and take on a different character in the general election.
But positions taken now can impose constraints later on. Moreover, Democratic primary voters ought to be learning about what difference
the various contenders would make in executing the powers of the presidency, not just in who has the most attractive ideas about
policies that cannot be imposed by fiat.
Foreign policy is where more attention and debate are most required, and not just because foreign policy nearly always gets inadequate
attention in political campaigns. It also is where a president has the most power to make a difference even without getting Congress
to go along with the president's program. This fact is reflected in how many presidents late in their presidencies, especially in
second terms, have turned more of their attention to foreign relations as an area where they can make a difference after experiencing
frustration in trying to get their domestic programs through Congress.
Many issues in foreign policy could profitably be discussed more than they are now, but priority should be given to those subjects
on which Trump has caused the most damage. Candidates should explain how they intend to repair that damage, not just what their policies
would be if they somehow could be written on a clean slate. The slate on which the next administration's foreign policy will be written
starts out very dirty. Coming after Trump will be a major, task-defining fact about the next administration's foreign policy challenges.
The heavy damage to U.S. relations with the European allies represents another especially dirty part of the slate that the next
administration will have to tend to. Brexit will be an added complication in addressing this problem and in a sense is another part
of Trump's legacy given the way he has cheered on the Brexiteers,
contrary to U.S. interests.
Issues examined by the current impeachment proceeding represent more damage-repair needs. Ukraine is a large and important country
and constructing a U.S. policy that adequately reflects Ukraine's delicate situation between East and West would be a challenge in
any event. Now it has been made more difficult by Trump and Rudy Giuliani's
setting back of Ukraine's efforts to stamp out corruption and subordinating an aid relationship to dirt-digging for domestic
political reasons. What are the Democratic candidates' specific ideas for repairing this damage, and for fitting the repairs into
a sensible policy toward not just Ukraine but also Russia?
To emphasize these foreign policy challenges is not to diminish the amount of Trump-inflicted damage that extends to domestic
matters as well, and the need for the next administration to repair that damage as well. Perhaps the greatest over-arching damage,
spanning both the domestic and foreign sides, is that the nation seems to have become inured to wrongdoing because of the sheer volume
of it, with attention to each offense quickly fading as it is succeeded by a new offense or attention-hogging presidential outburst.
What will the next president do to restore a sense of national outrage over wrongdoing whenever it occurs, be it blatant self-dealing,
corruption of U.S. foreign relations, or something else?
Such problems may not have as much resonance in Iowa caucuses as the cost of health care, but they have a lot more to do with
who will make the best president.
Paul R. Pillar is Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and Nonresident
Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is a contributing editor to The National Interest, where he writes
a blog.
"The next president will, for example, have to deal with the enormous loss of U.S. credibility during the past three years,
which has stemmedin large part from Trump's reneging on or withdrawing from agreements such as the Paris accord on climate change,
arms control accords withRussia, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which restricted Iran's nuclear program."
What a load of hooey this article is. U.S. credibility with whom? Failed Merkel? Failed Macron?...
Failure of the past three years but no mention of the failures of Obama? Sending an aging hippie James Taylor to console islamic terrorist victims in Paris apparently counts as a major foreign policy
success and that mean Trump refuses to perpetuate. And then there's the cross the red line in Syria and we'll do nothing.
Or maybe ship weapons secretly to Islamic terrorists calling them freedom fighters and surprise surprise, the weapons from
Obama are used to murder American diplomats in Benghazi. Then cover that up by blaming it on a video from a guy in Los Angeles
and sending out a team to blatantly lie about the event.
Now there's real foreign policy you can depend on - from the Democrats.
What is the PURPOSE of US Foreign Policy? To protect the US homeland and US interests abroad (freedom of navigation, freedom
of commerce and trade, and the protection of US citizens travelling abroad to name a few).
Unfortunately, US Policy really refers
to US interventionism across the globe. Covert activities are presumably necessary to protect US interests so as to thwart the
covert activities of our enemies. In practice, what the US really does is protect the interests of friendly countries and US-based
multi-national corporations...and the whole thing is smoke and mirrors (hidden from the American people). Thus, we really have
NO IDEA what US Foreign Policy is, or what we are doing behind the scenes. That's on both Democrats and Republicans.
Warren's New Proposal for Prescription Drugs Is Flying Under the Radar
By Dean Baker
Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren put out a set of steps that she would put
forward as president as part of a transition to Medicare for All. The items that got the most
attention were including everyone over age 50 and under age 18 in Medicare, and providing
people of all ages with the option to buy into the program. This buy-in would include large
subsidies, and people with incomes of less than 200 percent of the poverty level would be
able to enter the Medicare program at no cost.
These measures would be enormous steps toward Medicare for All, bringing tens of millions
of people into the program, including most of those (people over age 50) with serious medical
issues. It would certainly be more than halfway to a universal Medicare program.
While these measures captured most of the attention given to Warren's transition plan,
another part of the plan is probably at least as important. Warren proposed to use the
government's authority to compel the licensing of drug patents so that multiple companies can
produce a patented drug.
The government can do this both because it has general authority to compel licensing of
patents (with reasonable compensation) and because it has explicit authority under the 1980
Bayh-Dole Act to require licensing of any drug developed in part with government-funded
research. The overwhelming majority of drugs required some amount of government-supported
research in their development.
These measures are noteworthy because they can be done on the president's own authority.
While the pharmaceutical industry will surely contest a president's use of the government's
authority to weaken their patent rights, those actions would not require congressional
approval.
The other reason that these steps would be so important is that there is a huge amount of
money involved. The United States is projected to spend over $6.6 trillion on prescription
drugs over the next decade, more than 2.5 percent of GDP.
The government has explicit authority under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act to require licensing of
any drug developed in part with government-funded research.
This is an enormous amount of money. We spend more than twice as much per person on drugs
as people in other wealthy countries.
This is not an accident. The grant of a patent monopoly allows drug companies to charge as
much as they want for drugs that are necessary for people's health or even their life.
While other countries also grant patent monopolies, they limit the ability of drug
companies to exploit these monopolies with negotiations or price controls. This is why prices
in these countries are so much lower than in the United States.
But even these negotiated prices are far above what drug prices would be in a free market.
The price of drugs in a free market, without patent monopolies or related protections, will
typically be less than 10 percent of the U.S. price and in some cases, less than 1
percent.
This is because drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. They are
expensive because government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive.
The rationale for patent monopolies is to give companies an incentive to research and
develop drugs. This process is expensive, and if newly developed drugs were sold in a free
market, companies would not be able to recover these expenses.
To make up for the loss of research funding supported by patent monopolies, Warren
proposes an increase in public funding for research.
To make up for the loss of research funding supported by patent monopolies, Warren
proposes an increase in public funding for research. This would be an important move toward
an increased reliance on publicly funded biomedical research.
There are enormous advantages to publicly funded research over patent monopoly-supported
research. First, the government is funding the research. It can require that all results be
fully public as soon as possible so that all researchers can quickly benefit from them.
By contrast, under the patent system, drug companies have an incentive to keep results
secret. They have no desire to share results that could benefit competitors.
Public funding would also radically reduce the incentive to develop copycat drugs. Under
the current system, drug companies will often devote substantial sums to developing drugs
that are intended to duplicate the function of drugs already on the market. While there is
generally an advantage to having more options to treat a specific condition, most often,
research dollars would be better spent trying to develop drugs for conditions where no
effective treatment currently exists.
Ending patent monopoly pricing would also take away the incentive for drug companies to
conceal evidence that their drugs may not be as safe or effective as claimed. Patent
monopolies give drug companies an incentive to push their drugs as widely as possible.
The opioid crisis provides a dramatic example of the dangers of this system. Opioid
manufacturers would not have had the same incentive to push their drugs, concealing evidence
of their addictive properties, if they were not making huge profits on them.
In short, Senator Warren's plans on drugs are a really huge deal. How far and how quickly
she will be able to get to Medicare for All will depend on what she can get through Congress.
But her proposal for prescription drugs is something she would be able to do if elected
president, and it would make an enormous difference in both the cost and the quality of our
health care.
"... The list of those who might have some knowledge of Epstein's criminal enterprise includes a sitting president, ex-presidents, ex-prime ministers, Justice Department officials, State Department officials, FBI agents, employees of domestic and international intelligence agencies, state prosecutors, local law enforcement, politicians, ex-politicians, lobbyists, titans of industry and finance, CEOs, attorneys, accountants, banks and bankers, celebrities, academics, scientists, political operatives and executives within the Fourth Estate. ..."
"... For example, how is it possible that Ghislaine Maxwell - the "Bonnie" to Epstein's "Clyde" - has yet to be charged with any crimes? Or, as far as the public knows, even been questioned by authorities. ..."
"... Public skepticism about the "investigation" spiked when, five weeks after his arrest, the FBI finally raided Epstein's "Lolita" Island. Epstein's "ranch" in New Mexico has still not been searched. ..."
"... Every person named in court documents or press reports as allegedly or possibly having sex with an underaged girl or young woman at Epstein's bequest has denied the allegations. Which begs the question: Who's telling the truth and who's lying? ..."
"... True or not, many Americans believe the Department of "Justice" will not prosecute (perhaps even question) scores of individuals who may have broken U.S. laws and who may have been victims of a disturbing blackmail operation. ..."
"... At its core, the Epstein case will reveal whether government prosecutors and investigators possess the courage and integrity to expose sordid truths about some of the wealthiest, most-connected, powerful people in the world, and perhaps reveal embarrassing truths about our government. ..."
"... Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance writer in Troy, Alabama. He can be reached by email at [email protected] ..."
More than four months after Jeffrey Epstein's arrest - and three months after his alleged suicide - it requires no opinion poll
to know that few Americans believe the story of the international sex trafficking ring orchestrated by Epstein and his alleged "co-accomplices"
will ever be fully told.
More specifically, many Americans believe that most (if not all) of the key questions regarding the case will remain unanswered.
For example
How many Epstein "associates" actually received sexual "services" from underage girls? Will all ( or even any
) of these people be identified, exposed and perhaps prosecuted? Were any of these individuals blackmailed, extorted or in any
way compromised?
Did employees within agencies of the U.S. government turn a blind eye to Epstein's activities? Was Epstein, in fact, "intelligence"
and, if so, on whose orders was Alex Acosta allegedly told to
leave Epstein
alone ?
Did Epstein continue his sex-trafficking operation even after being released from jail in 2009? If so, how was this possible?
Where did Epstein receive the money to fund his operation , including the acquisition of the largest private residence in
Manhattan, two secluded private islands in the Virgin Islands, a secluded "ranch" in New Mexico, two large jets and a helicopter?
Why, for years, did the "watchdog" press display no interest in a scandal that, if fully told, could qualify as the "story
of the century," a story that might implicate many more powerful people and government agencies than Watergate?
Pertinent facts surrounding Epstein's death, ruled a
suicide , have also yet to be
disclosed. One unanswered question: How was it possible an inmate who may have possessed "dirt" on the most powerful people in
the world could be left alone in his cell?
In short, at least in the opinion of many, the public will never learn how massively corrupt our system of justice may be, and
if a privileged class is in fact held to a different standard of justice, and/or is protected by the powers that be. Nor will the
public learn how prurient, immoral and brazen a cross-section of the world's elite may be.
Of course, authorities may, in fact, do their jobs and ultimately disclose the entire scale of Epstein's operation. Prosecutions
and plea deals to come could include a "Who's Who" of the world, and expose any government agencies that may have "looked the other
way."
At least theoretically, our government could expose a decades-long criminal operation, a revelation that very possibly would change
the way millions of people view the U.S. government; not to mention how the public views many powerful VIPs who navigate in the orbit
of politicians and policy-makers.
Once upon a time, the number Americans who believed justice would ultimately prevail in a case like Epstein's would probably have
filled a good-sized nation. Today, the number who posses this conviction might fill a medium-sized city.
Citizens who doubt the full story of the Epstein saga will ever be revealed have little trouble citing stories that explain their
metastasizing skepticism.
For example, plenty of people did notice when Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman suffered
no
adverse consequences following the gruesome murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi , a murder many people believe the prince ordered.
Others remain befuddled as UK authorities continue to insist that the government of Russia commissioned a hit team that used nerve
agents in the assassination attempt of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, this despite the copious
number of holes that pockmark the "official" story.
Similarly, the narrative that Syria President Bashar al - Assad "gassed his own people" - a highly
questionable proposition to many - has nonetheless been widely accepted as truth, at least by intelligence agencies and a press
corps that increasingly accepts official pronouncements as incontrovertible.
[ editor's note: see
Caitlin Johnstone's latest on two OPCW whistleblowers whose claims effectively dubunk the narrative]
The
aggressive prosecution (persecution) of Julian Assange is another story that disturbs at least some citizens. The fact so few
members of the mainstream press have rallied to Assange's defense has only deepened the depression of one-time idealists.
And these examples do not include the most dubious government narrative of them all, the assertion Saddam Hussein possessed weapons
of mass destruction , a false predicate that ultimately caused the death and suffering of millions of people.
Cynics could also point to an investigation that, unlike several of the above examples, did receive incessant press coverage -
the story that Russia somehow "rigged" or "hacked" a U.S. presidential election, a conclusion accepted as gospel by most in the mainstream
press, but viewed as preposterous by millions of Americans.
In these and other cases, a growing number of citizens have come to believe that official "investigations" and "official findings"
are either a sham or intentionally omit details which do not support the desired meme.
It's within this context that millions of Americans have latched onto the Epstein story and the growing conviction that our government
(and press corp ) have become more interested in concealing
truths than exposing them.
The Epstein story is not just the latest scandal of the week. The number of individuals who could have been involved,
or who might have worked to cover-up its existence, almost certainly dwarfs the number implicated in Watergate.
The list of those who might have some knowledge of Epstein's criminal enterprise includes a sitting president, ex-presidents,
ex-prime ministers, Justice Department officials, State Department officials, FBI agents, employees of domestic and international
intelligence agencies, state prosecutors, local law enforcement, politicians, ex-politicians, lobbyists, titans of industry and finance,
CEOs, attorneys, accountants, banks and bankers, celebrities, academics, scientists, political operatives and executives within the
Fourth Estate.
Almost five months after Epstein's arrest, one is struck by curious events that have already occurred and by developments yet
to occur.
For example, how is it possible that Ghislaine Maxwell - the "Bonnie" to Epstein's "Clyde" - has yet to be charged with any crimes?
Or, as far as the public knows, even been questioned by authorities.
Public skepticism about the "investigation" spiked when, five weeks after his arrest, the FBI finally raided Epstein's "Lolita"
Island. Epstein's "ranch" in New Mexico has still not been searched.
The public has also received no indication that authorities are, in fact, questioning any of Epstein's many "associates," especially
those who may have had sexual contact with girls recruited and groomed by Epstein and Maxwell.
Every person named in court documents or press reports as allegedly or possibly having sex with an underaged girl or young woman
at Epstein's bequest has denied the allegations. Which begs the question: Who's telling the truth and who's lying? To form an opinion
on this central question, authorities would presumably need to interview anyone with possible knowledge of alleged sexual or criminal
acts. Investigators could then seek information that either corroborates or impeaches each person's account. However, evidence is
growing that the protocol in a typical "he-said, she-said" investigation is
not being followed in the Epstein case. Instead, authorities may have simply accepted as truth the
statements of denial issued by powerful
public figures .
True or not, many Americans believe the Department of "Justice" will not prosecute (perhaps even question) scores of
individuals who may have broken U.S. laws and who may have been victims of a disturbing blackmail operation.
Perhaps authorities have
concluded it's better
to not know . Perhaps they realize if they interview one suspected "John," they'll have to interview every potential
"John." if this number ends up being massive, and includes a Who's Who of our society, important illusions about society's leaders
and our system of justice could be shattered.
At its core, the Epstein case will reveal whether government prosecutors and investigators possess the courage and integrity
to expose sordid truths about some of the wealthiest, most-connected, powerful people in the world, and perhaps reveal embarrassing
truths about our government.
Americans might soon learn what objective is more important to Justice Department officials:
Protecting the
rich and powerful from the consequences of their behavior, or confirming that a system of justice grounded in trust can still
be trusted.
Sadly, many Americans are convinced authorities will not do the right thing.
However, in proving skeptics wrong, authorities would accomplish at least four objectives, all noble. They would punish the guilty.
They would provide justice to victims too long ignored. They would deter future Epsteins and future "Johns," especially those unaccustomed
to being held accountable for their actions. And, perhaps most importantly, they would allow a ray of sunshine to pierce the shadow
of cynicism that's spread across our country.
While such a development might not restore all trust in government, it would be an eye-opening start. For those who believe the
moral character of a nation is important, it would send a message that all hope is not lost .
****
Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance writer in Troy, Alabama. He can be reached by email at
[email protected]
"... However, Morris contends that Clinton believes that she has to "wait until Biden drops out because he's obviously next in line for it, and if he goes away, there's an opening for her." According to Morris' scenario, Clinton would become the moderate candidate opposed to the leading progressive, Elizabeth Warren. ..."
In November, Barack Obama, who had avoided commenting on the Democratic presidential
primary, came out forcefully in opposition to the extreme positions taken by some leading
progressive contenders, positions that could cause the Democrats to be beaten by Trump in the
2020 election. Obama was a very popular president among Democrats, and what he has to say
carries considerable weight with them. While this may not be his intent, Obama's position could
open the field for Hillary Clinton to enter the fray and quite possibly become the Democrats'
nominee, given the lackluster performance of leading "moderate" Joe Biden, whose weaknesses
have been brought out by the mainstream media, despite their animosity toward Trump.
Now many in the Democratic Party leadership, as well as wealthy Democratic donors, have been
concerned for some time about the radical nature of some of the economic policies advocated by
the leading progressive Democratic contenders. They fear that instead of the 2020 election
revolving around Trump with his low approval ratings, and very likely his impeachment, which
would seem to be a slam-dunk victory for Democrats, it would focus on those radical economic
proposals. Many voters are skeptical about how free college for all, free health care for all,
high-paying jobs in "green energy" -- after greatly reducing the use of fossil fuels, free
childcare for all, just to name some of the "free" things that have been promised, would really
work. Instead of raising taxes on the middle class, most of these free things would purportedly
be paid for by the super-wealthy, which would exclude mere millionaires such as Bernie Sanders
(estimated wealth $2 million) and Elizabeth Warren (estimated wealth $12 million) who are the
leading progressive contenders.
Obama began stressing his concern about the danger of radicalism in an October speech at the
Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. And he did this not by dealing with presidential candidates
but with youth who think they can immediately change society. "This
idea of purity and you're never compromised, and you're always politically woke and all
that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Obama lectured. "The world is messy. There are
ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."
It was at a gathering of Democratic donors in Washington, D.C., in November that Obama
cautioned Democratic candidates not to go too far to the left since that would antagonize many
voters who would otherwise support the Democratic candidate. "Even as we push the envelope and
we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in
reality ," Obama asserted. "The average American doesn't think we have to completely tear
down the system and remake it." Although Obama did not specify particular Democratic
candidates, his warning was widely interpreted as being directed at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie
Sanders.
Currently, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, according to national polls,
is Joe Biden, who is considered a moderate. But Biden has a number of problems. He continues to
make gaffes while speaking, and during his long career in the Senate took positions that are
antithetical to the Democratic Party of today. Moreover, he lacks the charisma to attract large
crowds to his events. Thus, it is questionable that he has the capability to attract large
numbers of Democratic voters to the polls in November 2020.
According to Politico Magazine , Obama was recently discussing election tactics with
an unnamed current candidate and "pointed out that during his own 2008 campaign, he had an
intimate bond with the electorate" and he is quoted as adding, "And you know who really
doesn't have it ? Joe Biden."
Biden's appeal already seems to be waning. For example, in November, a Marquette Law School
poll, which is considered the gold-standard survey in swing state Wisconsin, which the
Democrats need to win the 2020 election, shows
Trump leading Biden 47 percent to 44 percent. In October, Trump had trailed Biden by 6
points (44 percent to 50 percent), and in August, Trump trailed Biden by 9 points (42 percent
to 51 percent). In short, Biden is losing support. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by a slender
margin of 0.77 percent, with 47.22 percent of the total votes over the 46.45 percent for
Hillary Clinton.
Another problem Biden faces is the corrupt activities of his son Hunter and brother James,
who have taken advantage of their connection with him. The mainstream media has so far largely
kept this mostly under wraps, but this tactic won't be successful as the election approaches.
In fact, the progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders are likely to bring this up in a
desperate effort to be nominated. And already these issues are being mentioned by the
alternative media. For instance, there is an article in the non-partisan, anti-government
Intercept
titled, "Joe Biden's Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to
Acknowledge That," and comparable articles in the conservative Washington Examiner such
as, "Hunter Biden-linked company r
eceived $130M in special federal loans while Joe Biden was vice president," and "Hunter
Biden has
99 problems , and Burisma is only one."
David Axelrod, Democratic strategist and longtime aide to Barack Obama, said concerns about
Biden's electability clearly influenced multi-billionaire (estimated $53 billion) and
former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's entrance into the contest for the Democratic
nominee for president. "There's no question that Bloomberg's calculus was that Biden was
occupying a space, and the fact that he's getting in is a clear indication that he's not
convinced Biden has the wherewithal to carry that torch," Axelrod said. "So yeah, I don't think
this is a positive development for Joe Biden."
Similarly, Democratic strategist Brad Bannon contended that "centrist Democrats and wealthy
donors have
lost confidence in Biden's ability to stop Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders from winning
the nomination." Bannon added that with Bloomberg entering the Democratic presidential race,
"Biden's fundraising will get even shakier than it already is. There's only room for one
moderate in this race and Bloomberg threatens Biden's status as the centrist
standard-bearer."
Bloomberg's "stop and frisk"
policy as mayor , which largely targeted blacks and Hispanics, should make it virtually
impossible that he could be the Democratic nominee, despite his recent apology. Unless he has
become senile in his late 70s, Bloomberg should well understand this since he did not make his
billions by being stupid. It could be that he intends to serve as a stalking horse to draw
Hillary Clinton into the contest by showing the weakness of Biden. Then like Superwoman,
Hillary can enter the fray, appearing not to act for her own sake but to save the country from
a likely second term for President Trump.
Similarly, Mark Penn, who was chief strategist for Clinton's unsuccessful 2008 presidential
campaign, said Bloomberg's entrance
could cause Clinton to consider to run and decide there's "still a political logic there for
her."
As Biden's support slips away, Clinton's should rise. Clinton has been recently promoting a
book she co-wrote with her daughter, Chelsea, in Britain. In an interview with BBC Radio 5
Live , Clinton said "many, many, many people" are
pressuring her to jump into the 2020 presidential race and that she thinks about this "all
the time." Clinton told the host that she is under "enormous pressure" but said it is not in
her plans, though she cryptically added that she would "never say never."
Dick Morris, who was once a close confidant of the Clintons during Bill Clinton's time as
Arkansas governor and U.S. president recently said in a radio interview that Hillary Clinton
likely wants to run for the presidency in 2020. "My feeling is that
she wants to ," Morris said. "She feels entitled to do it. She feels compelled to do it.
She feels that God put her on the Earth to do it. But she's hesitant because she realizes the
timing is bad."
However, Morris contends that Clinton believes that she has to "wait until Biden drops out
because he's obviously next in line for it, and if he goes away, there's an opening for her."
According to Morris' scenario, Clinton would become the moderate candidate opposed to the
leading progressive, Elizabeth Warren.
Morris has not been in touch with the Clintons for many years, and has become strongly
critical of them, so his claim might be questionable. Nonetheless, his portrayal of Hillary's
current thinking seems quite reasonable.
A Fox News poll included Clinton along with the active Democratic candidates in a
hypothetical election with Trump, and Hillary came out ahead of him by two percentage
points. While some actual candidates did somewhat better than Hillary, she did quite well for
someone who is not currently running for office.
Furthermore, a Harris Harvard poll in late October asked the question, "Suppose Hillary
Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, and John Kerry decides [sic] to enter the race, who would you
support as a candidate for President?" Joe Biden received the support of 19 percent of Democrat
respondents while Clinton was a
close second with 18 percent. Elizabeth Warren came in third at 13 percent, John Kerry was
at 8 percent, and Bloomberg was at 6. Again, Clinton does quite well for someone who is not
actually running for president.
One might think that if references to family members' corruption damaged Biden, then Clinton
would be subject to worse damage in that area, since she and her husband Bill were connected
with far more corrupt activities -- Whitewater, Travelgate, the Lewinsky affair, the Paula
Jones affair, t the death of Vince Foster, the Clinton Foundation, her private server, and so
on. But these issues are already known and are presumably already taken into account by the
voters, whereas the Biden family's corrupt activities are so far largely unknown.
It should be pointed out that Clinton has a number of positives as a presidential candidate.
Although losing in the Electoral College in 2016, Clinton had garnered 3 million more votes
more than Trump. The election was decided by a total of 80,000 votes in three states. It is
highly unlikely that such a fluke could be duplicated.
Clinton's staff had been overconfident assuming victory, which was based on their polling of
various states, and as a result began to focus on competing in states well beyond those Clinton
needed for victory.
Moreover, one key event outside the control of Clinton's staff was FBI Director James
Comey's investigation of Clinton's use of a personal email server during her tenure as
secretary of state. Most crucial were his July 2016 public statement terminating the
investigation, with a lengthy comment about what Clinton did wrong, and his October 28
reopening the inquiry into newly discovered emails and then closing it two days before the
election, stating that the emails had not provided any new information. The October 28 letter,
however, probably played a key role in the outcome of the election. As statistician Nate Silver
maintains: "Hillary Clinton would probably be president
if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which
said the FBI had 'learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the
investigation into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended
the news cycle and soon halved Clinton's lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the
Electoral College.'"
[Silver's organization FiveThirtyEight had projected a much higher chance (29
percent) of Donald Trump winning the presidency than most other pollsters]
Clinton has also helped to convince many Democrats and members of the mainstream media that
the 2016 election was stolen from her by Russian agents If this were really true – which
is very doubtful – then Hillary should be the Democrats' candidate for 2020 since Russian
intervention should not be as successful as it allegedly was in 2016.
In endorsing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, Obama stated. "I don't think that
there's ever been someone
so qualified to hold this office." He has yet to make such an endorsement for Biden and
privately, as mentioned earlier, said he is a poor choice for a nominee. He might ultimately
endorse Biden, but he certainly would not renege on what he said four years ago about Clinton
if she became the Democrats' standard-bearer.
Should Clinton opt to run, she would have no trouble raising money since she set a record in
2016 of $1.4 billion
and wealthy donors want a moderate to be the Democratic nominee. It would seem likely that she
would enter the contest if Biden has serious trouble. She would miss some state primaries since
it would be too late to register in them but given the crowded field of candidates, there is a
likelihood that there will be a brokered convention, that is, the convention will go past the
first ballot. Since the superdelegates would be allowed to vote in all rounds after the first,
they could determine the winner, which would probably mean the selection of a candidate who
would be seen to have the greatest chance of winning, and that would likely be Hillary Clinton,
if she has entered the fray.
I discussed the merits of Pete Buttigieg in a previous article in
Unz Review, and what I write here might seem to conflict with that. However, while Buttigieg is
doing quite well
in the polls, he still does not get much support
from blacks and Latinos, which is essential to become the Democrats nominee for president.
Buttigieg could, however, be nominated for vice president or, more likely, given an important
cabinet position since the vice-presidential slot would probably be reserved for a black or
Latino if a white person were picked as the presidential nominee, which currently seems
likely.
But because of Buttigieg's relatively hardline foreign policy
, which largely meshes with that of Clinton's, and his wide knowledge and language ability,
Buttigieg would fit well in the all-important position of secretary of state in a Clinton
administration. Moreover, Buttigieg, whose tenure as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will end in
January 2020, would almost certainly be willing to take such a position, which could serve as a
jumping-off point for the presidency in the future.
"... Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies. ..."
"... No informed American can afford to not know the names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. > ..."
"... Hersh hoped that future historians would document the fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved the takeover. ..."
"... The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket. ..."
"... In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent. ..."
"... That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book. Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters. ..."
"... Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state. However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and often place American interests second to that of the lobby. ..."
Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war
in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy,
but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement
has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the
discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United
States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote
the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives,
including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the
American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as
ready after 9/11 for retaliation
Every American should read this superb book about the intimate connection between the
state of Israel and the Americans who planned and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003
(and who still influence U.S. policy in the Middle East). This very well-researched and
well-argued book will enlighten Americans who want to understand how the Jewish State of
Israel powerfully shapes U.S. Middle East policy.
Stephen Sniegowski provides a detailed look at the network of die-hard pro-Israel
Neoconservatives who have worked in the U.S. government, in think tanks, and in the news
media to shape American foreign policy to serve the needs of Israel at the expense of the
U.S. From media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose 175 newspapers around the world ALL editorialized
in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to
Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and later Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, to
Vice President Dick Cheney, to the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, the
neoconservatives successfully persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq to promote
Israel's foreign policy interests.
Sniegowski describes how the Neocons promoted lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed Weapons
of Mass Destruction and his supposed ties to al-Qaeda terrorists from a network of think
tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute,
Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy, and the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
He also traces the influence of Israeli Zionist Oded Yinon on the American
Neoconservatives. Yinon wrote an article in 1982 entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the
1980s" that called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and
their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. This is basically what
is happening to Iraq and Syria today. He also called for Israelis to accelerate the
emigration of Palestinians from Israel, whose border he believed should extend to the Jordan
River and beyond it.
Yinon's article influenced a paper written for the Israeli Likud government of Benjamin
Netanyahu in 1996 by American neoconservatives Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wurmser entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". This paper stated
that Netanyahu should "make a clean break" with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's
claim to the West Bank and Gaza. Like Yinon's article, it also called for the removal of
Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the weakening of Syria to promote Israel's interests. It was
written five years BEFORE the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These same three
men - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser - who advised Netanyahu's Israeli
government on issues of national security would later advise President George W. Bush to
pursue virtually the same policies regarding the Middle East.
If you want to understand how and why powerful pro-Israel neoconservatives in the U.S.
misled Americans and convinced President George W. Bush to order the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
2003, and how they persuaded the U.S. Congress to give Bush the authority to order the
invasion, read this outstanding book.
Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper
entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think
tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to
foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies.
The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and
around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and were handed a golden opportunity after the 9/11 attack on
the World Trade Centre. Iraq was falsely presented as an Al Qaeda base and the media planted
with stories about an imminent attack on the United States using WMD. Despite the CIA knowing
all along that the WMD didn't exist, the US still invaded Iraq and the story was quietly and
unbelievably changed to "building democracy".
As Sniegoski points out, the war has exceeded the cost of Vietnam and the same activists,
now working through Hillary Clinton are looking for "incidents" in Iraq to trigger the next
phase of the plan which is a US attack on Iran.
UPDATE October 2014:
And it gets worse: The 911 story itself keeps morphing. Google "Building 7", YouTube "911
Missing Links" or check the article at http://911speakout.org/7TOCPJ.pdf. >
Important book for those trying understand the chaos that
is currently reigning in the Middle East. From the lies based NEOCON attack on Iraq trumpeted
by the mainstream USA media as a fight to save Western Civilization, to the rise of ISIL.
This books will make those connections clear. No informed American can afford to not know the
names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. >
On January 27, 2005, [...] posted the remarks of Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker
contributor) at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York that a neoconservative cult had
taken over the American government.
Hersh hoped that future historians would document the
fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to
overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The
Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved
the takeover.
Other books have stressed how the neoconservative ideology is contrary to traditional
American values: Reclaiming the American Right (Justin Raimondo), America the Virtuous (Claes
Ryn), Where the Right Went Wrong (Patrick Buchanan).
"Memoirs of a Trotskyist" in Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Irving Kristol)
provided a neoconservative account of the origins of neo-conservatism. Sniegoski noted
correctly that the term neoconservative originated with leftists critical of their former
comrades for attempting to infiltrate the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to
leftists who call neoconservatives the ultra-right and to conservative dupes who think that
anyone using a conservative label is a conservative, the neoconservative cancer has spread
through the fragile American political body.
The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group
attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a
detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to
overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket.
Unlike earlier secret plots to take over the American government, Sniegoski explained how it
was possible for the neoconservatives to operate as a relatively transparent cabal. However,
he observed that the neoconservatives used a Trojan horse technique to take over the American
conservative movement. The goal of the neoconservatives is to promote endless wars regardless
of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power.
The neoconservatives do not represent a popular mass movement in America. Instead, the
neoconservatives rely upon the co-operation of other groups. Sniegoski provided extensive
documentation of which groups enabled the neoconservatives. For example, the Christian
Zionists duped their followers into sacrificing money and soldiers. Zionism originated with
the writings of Moses Hess (who helped Karl Marx write The Communist Manifesto, was nicknamed
the Communist Rabbi, and who is buried in Israel). In 1862, Moses Hess published Rome and
Jerusalem. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (Shlomo Avineri) provided a detailed
explanation of the relationship between Communism and Zionism.
The reason for the fragility of American democracy is the failure of many Americans to
understand the most basic aspects of the American political system and of their
religions.
The Transparent Cabal is an important starting point for understanding how a neoconservative
cult opposed to traditional American political and religious values is able to destroy
America with endless wars.
_The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, And the
National Interest of Israel_, published in 2008 by Enigma Editions of IHS Press, by scholar
Stephen J. Sniegoski is a thorough examination of the role of the neoconservatives in pushing
for war in the Middle East (beginning with the war in Iraq and pushing onwards towards Iran)
in order to protect the national interests of Israel. Sniegoski makes the claim that the
neoconservatives have been the fundamental force behind the war efforts of the United States
and have played a particularly prominent role in the Bush administration. While these claims
have now become common knowledge, Sniegoski makes an important contribution by tracing the
history of the neoconservative movement and its links to prominent pro-Jewish and pro-Israel
groups. In particular, Sniegoski claims that neoconservativism is a tool of Zionism and the
Likudniks of Israel. Sniegoski traces out how following the attacks of September 11, the
neoconservative war hawks had a profound influence on the thinking of President Bush and
offered him a ready made solution to his foreign policy agenda. In this book, Sniegoski also
considers and refutes other theories as to the root causes behind America's intervention in
Iraq (such as the role of oil and war profiteering) but explains how these theories lack the
validity of that which lays the blame on the neoconservatives and their goals for Israeli
dominance in the Middle East.
In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at
the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked
charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the
United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book
echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the
small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains
that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a
tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent.
This book begins with a Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley (famous author of _They Dare
to Speak Out_ and longtime opponent of the Israeli Lobby) in which he explains the importance
of Sniegoski's book and deflects the spurious charge of anti-Semitism. Following this,
appears an Introduction by noted paleoconservative Paul Gottfried who explains his admiration
for Sniegoski's book, offers some comparisons between Sniegoski's claims and those of other
individuals, and contrasts the old non-interventionist limited government form of
conservativism with that of the neoconservatives.
The first chapter of Sniegoski's book is entitled "The Transparent Cabal" and notes the
disastrous consequences that have followed upon the Iraq war spurred on by the
neoconservatives. The author explains what he means in calling the neoconservatives a
"transparent cabal" and notes the importance of their Middle East, pro-Israeli agenda. The
author explains how following the events of September 11, they came to take on a prominent
role in influencing the thinking of the president (who had previously shown little interest
in the Middle East).
The second chapter is entitled "The "Neocon-Israel" Claim: Bits and
Pieces" and exposes the role of Israel's Likudnik party behind the neoconservatives. The
author deflects claims of "anti-Semitism" which are frequently hurled at those who make these
charges by showing that even many prominent Jews agree with this. Following this appears a
chapter entitled "Who are the Neocons?" which shows how the neocons emigrated from their
original home in the Democratic party of the McGovernite left into the Republican party as
the New Left began to voice criticisms of Israel. The author shows that many of the neocons
are actually socialists and Trotskyites parading under the label of "conservative". Further,
the author shows the role of various intellectuals centering around New York City in creating
the neoconservative movement.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "The Israeli Origins of the
Middle East War Agenda" which shows how the goal of Middle East war to further the interests
of Israel has been supported extensively by hawkish groups in Israel. The author explains how
these groups came to have such a prominent role in influencing the policy of the United
States and in suppressing the native population of Palestinians in Israel. Following, appears
a chapter entitled "Stability and the Gulf War of 1991: Prefigurement and Prelude to the 2003
Iraq War" in which the author explains the importance of the first Gulf War of Bush I in
prefiguring the Iraq War of Bush II. After this, appears a chapter entitled "During the
Clinton Years" in which the author shows the continuing role of the neocons during the
Clinton years.
Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Serbian Interlude and the 2000
Elections" in which the author explains how the war in Yugoslavia paved the way for the
coming Iraq War of President Bush. This also explains the split that occurred among
conservatives between those traditional conservatives who opposed the war and the neocons who
firmly supported it. Following this appears a chapter entitled "George W. Bush
Administration: The Beginning" in which the author explains the role that the neocons came to
take in the Bush administration mentioning in particular the role of such figures as
Wolfowitz and Cheney and the role of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Following
this appears a chapter entitled "September 11", showing how the events of Sept. 11 allowed
the neocon agenda to gain prominence in the mind of President Bush.
Next, appears a chapter
entitled "Move to War" explaining how the neocons pushed for war against Sadaam Hussein
presenting their case to the American people by claiming that Hussein was in possession of
WMDs which could be used against America. Following this appears a chapter entitled "World
War IV" explaining how the conflict in the Middle East came to be dubbed World War IV by
certain intellectuals among the neocons.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "Democracy for the
Middle East" showing the role of the neocons in foisting "democracy" onto various nations and
their goal of global democratic revolution. The author also explains the role of the thinking
of political philosopher Leo Strauss behind many of the neocons and his profoundly
anti-democratic philosophy. Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Neocons'
Post-Invasion Difficulties" showing how the invasion of Iraq turned out to be more serious
and difficult than originally anticipated by the neocons. Next, appears a chapter entitled
"Beginning of the Second Administration" showing the continuing role of the neocons under the
second Bush administration.
Then, appears a chapter entitled "Israel, Lebanon, and the 2006
Election" showing the role of Lebanon and Syria in relationship to Israel and that of the
2006 election.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "2007: On to Iran" showing how the neocons
continued to press for further wars in particular against Iran by alleging among other things
that Ahmedinejad was a mad man with possible access to nuclear weapons. Following, appears a
chapter entitled "The Supporting Cast for War" noting the role of Christian Zionists (which
includes the beliefs of President Bush, although not his father), former Cold Warriors, and
even prominent establishment liberals in supporting the Iraq war. The author notes however
that the traditional foreign policy establishment elites and many in the intelligence
agencies did not support the war, but were disregarded to further the neocon agenda. The
author also contrasts the difference between the liberal elites who frequently were pro-war
and the popular anti-war movement which had very little power.
Following this, the author
turns to a chapter entitled "Oil and Other Arguments" in which the author considers the
claims that the war was fought to obtain access to oil or for the interests of war profiteers
and shows that while both groups certainly benefited they are not the real reason for the
war. The book ends with a "Conclusion" in which the author expounds upon the continuing role
of the neocons in influencing American foreign policy and a "Postscript" in which the author
notes that no matter who wins the 2008 election that the neocon agenda will likely continue
and is not likely to go away anytime soon.
This book offers a fascinating history and account of the role of the neoconservatives in
pushing the United States into war. The author makes clear the influence of the Israeli
Likudnik party behind the neocons and their goal of strengthening the position of Israel in
the Middle East. It is important to understand the fundamental nature of the foreign policy
elites who have been pushing us into war against Iraq and now with eyes towards Iran.
That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book.
Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed
by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters.
Let's put aside these negative and nasty characterizations and look at the facts.
Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state.
However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and
often place American interests second to that of the lobby.
To suggest that there is such a
lobby and that it is powerful is hardly anti-semitic. Nor is the author. He is simply stating
verifible facts which any student of politics is free to do. He may be mistaken in his
conclusions but that hardly makes him anti-semitic. And he may not be mistaken at all. He is
not the first to suggest that our leaders are fearful of the Israeli lobby and do its bidding
and often to the detriment of American interests .
Stephen Sniegoski, a diplomatic historian, is uniquely qualified to write about the
neoconservatives' involvement in the prolonged Iraq War originating in 2003. He accurately
predicted their activities and allegiance in this entanglement in 1998, three years before
the acts of 9-11 and two additional years before a traumatized nation yielded to a nescient,
misdirected President, his Vice President/administration, and an ostensibly compliant
bi-partisan House and Senate.
The author presents a tight outline which he cogently expands in intelligible detail,
maintaining that the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the adoption of a war
agenda whose basic structure was conceived in Israel to advance Israel's interests. The
pro-Israel neoconservatives and a powerful Israel lobby in the United States fervently pushed
its agenda. Ironically, he extracts his most persuasive evidence from an extensive
neoconservative paper trail that's been clearly recognized by a discreet cadre of vigilant
Americans for years. Thus the title, "The Transparent Cabal."
Dr. Sniegoski asks the appropriate question: "Who are the neoconservatives?" He provides
insightful answers on their pertinent activities since 1972, those who shaped and mentored
them, their immediate family/interconnected family networks, their prominent periodical
publications, their past and present leadership, non-Jewish minority members, their
persistent rise to positions of political influence and authority, their embrace of Christian
Zionists, and their close ties to the extremely conservative Likud Party in Israel. He
reveals their tactical affiliations with key, heavily endowed influential think tanks, and a
vast number of powerful Israel-centric lobbying organizations that reactively finance and
nurture their continued success.
Many readers will recognize his references to writers of previous books, articles and
columns -- many of Jewish heritage -- who bravely fight against well financed, mainstream
media-dominant opponents and their psychological surrogates active on the Internet. These
opponents perniciously engage in personal attacks and retribution, indiscriminately applying
irrelevant anti-semitic labels. They persist at attempting to sway public discourse by
spreading misinformation, disinformation, and mostly NO RELEVANT INFORMATION to the
public.
In various places throughout the book, the author notes curious relationships with current
and former elected and appointed officials. He writes about the ongoing 2008 presidential
campaign in a postscript, citing past and existing direct influences on specific candidates
by the neoconservatives, the Israel Lobby and its supporters.
The book concludes with a summary of the paucity of benefits compared to the predictable
losses of the American people over recent years. These are the real consequences of the
Israel-inspired plan to "drain the swamp" (a euphemism for destabilizing perceived enemies
then establishing precarious nominal democracies) that began with our misadventure in Iraq
and was to proceed with subsequent U.S. military interventions in Iran and Syria. The few
meager benefits and the enormous losses to the United States are compared to the strategic
advantages that the State of Israel derives directly from our five-year induced military
involvement in Iraq and our concomitant departure from past, longstanding policies of
diplomacy and stability in the Middle East.
Sniegoski counsels, "it is hardly controversial to propose that elites, rather than the
people as a whole, determine government policies, even in democracies."
Yet this war has a supporting cast of middle Americans. Many of them were traumatized by
the events of 9-11 and reactively saw an act of patriotism in supporting retaliation against
a falsely perceived enemy in Iraq. It's time to reconsider false arguments preceding the Iraq
War that have only been cosmetically modified until the present day. It's time to dismiss
incongruous ideas formed in the cauldron of confusion after 9-11.
Given today's realities, it DOES take patriotism and courage to insist on formally
normalizing an entangled, unreciprocated military alliance with an Israeli government that
burdens the taxpayers of the United States, promotes angst among its people, and imperils its
military forces worldwide.
Know and embrace Thomas Jefferson's ideal of 'eternal vigilance' as citizens of the United
States.
.
.
Facts in this book are reinforced in adjacent paragraphs and referenced in nearly 50 pages of
notes. Readers are encouraged to read:
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global
Instability by Amy Chua -- "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects
in the September 11 Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a
Public Inquiry" **a 166 PAGE LEAKED REPORT** documenting foreign espionage activities
surrounding 9-11, available on the Internet (although rarely in COMPLETE UNEDITED FORM **WITH
5 EXHIBITS AND 4 MAPS**). .
Stephen J. Sniegoski has a doctorate from the University of Maryland and studied American
diplomatic history. My review here will refer to him as "S," for short.
This book is about the American neoconservative movement. S goes from its founding through
its influential role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq War, then he discusses the War's
aftermath. S's argument is that the neoconservative agenda regarding the Middle East is
designed to serve the interests of the state of Israel, as those interests are articulated by
the right-wing Likud party there. This agenda supports weakening Arab nations surrounding
Israel so that they cannot pose a threat to her. According to S, the neoconservatives
supported such an agenda since their beginning as a movement, but 9/11 created an opportunity
for this agenda to become the foreign policy of the United States during much of the
Presidency of George W. Bush.
Here are some thoughts:
A. Looking broadly at the book itself, it is a standard narration of the events
surrounding and including the Iraq War. Like a lot of people, I lived through that, so the
sweeping narrative of the book was not particularly new to me. The story is essentially that
the U.S. went into Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, bombed the
country and found that were no WMDs, and traveled the difficult road of trying to rebuild the
country, amidst ethnic division, turmoil, and opposition from Iraqis.
B. That said, there were some things that I learned from this book. First, while
neoconservatism is said to believe in spreading democracy in the Middle East, it is not
necessarily committed to democracy, per se. Initially, it supported a new government of Iraq
that would be led by the traditional, pre-Saddam tribal authorities, who were not democratic.
Second, S seems to imply that even the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was
unnecessary, since the Taliban initially appeared cooperative in offering to help the U.S. to
bring al-Qaeda to justice. Third, there are neoconservatives who have supported undermining
even America's allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. The different groups in Saudi
Arabia was also interesting, for, as S notes, Shiites hold a significant amount of control
over Saudi oil, even though the political establishment is Sunni. Fourth, S argues rigorously
against the idea that the U.S. launched the Iraq War to get more oil. Saddam was offering
U.S. oil companies opportunities to drill in Iraq, plus oil companies did not want the oil
infrastructure of the country to be disrupted or shattered by war.
C. There were also things in the book that I was interested to learn more about, even
though I had a rudimentary understanding of them before. For one, S chronicles George W.
Bush's changing views on foreign policy, as he went from rejecting nation-building, while
retaining a tough stance, to embracing nation building. In the early days of the Bush II
Administration, long before the Iraq War, Condi Rice even explained on news shows why regime
change in Iraq would be a mistake at that point. Second, S discusses the coalition that
emerged to support the war in Iraq. The neocons wanted to protect Israel, but Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraq War as a way to showcase the effectiveness of a
lean military. Meanwhile, many Americans, frightened after 9/11, supported the Iraq War as a
way to keep the U.S. safe. And Christian conservatives embraced the good vs. evil, pro-Israel
stance of neoconservative policy. Third, S strategically evaluates moves that the U.S. made;
for S, for example, the surge did not actually work, but more stability emerged in Iraq as
different ethnic factions became separated from each other.
D. According to S, the Iraq War was a disaster. It stretched America's military, taking
away resources that could have been used to find Osama bin-Laden. Yet, Israel got something
that it wanted as a result: disarray among her Arab neighbors. An argument that S did not
really engage, as far as I can recall, is that the Iraq War placed Israel even more in peril,
since it increased the power of Iran by allowing Iraq to serve as a proxy for Iranian
interests.
E. For S, neoconservatism is concerned about the security of Israel. Even its staunch Cold
War policy is rooted in that concern, since the U.S.S.R. tended to support Arabs over the
Israelis. S acknowledges, though, that there is more to neoconservatism that that.
Neoconservatives supported a strong U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia
during the Clinton Administration, and neoconservatism also maintains stances on domestic
issues, such as welfare.
F. S is sensitive to any charges of anti-Semitism that may be launched against his book.
He emphatically denies that he is saying there was a Jewish conspiracy to get the U.S. into
Iraq, for he observes that many Jews opposed the Iraq War. Moreover, S does not exactly
present the U.S. government as a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), for the neoconservatives
were long on the margins prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush. Even under Bush II, the
traditional national security and intelligence apparatus was critical of the Iraq War,
preferring more multilateralism and a focus on stability in the Middle East. The Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), long a bogeyman of right-wing conspiracy theorists, also had
reservations about the Iraq War.
G. S largely depicts the Likud party in Israel, and neoconservatives, as supporting
Israel's security as a nation, her protection, if you will. At the same time, S argues that
Israel in 2006 was acting aggressively rather than defensively in its invasion of Lebanon,
for Lebanon had coveted water-supplies.
H. Near the end of the Iraq War, S demonstrates, neoconservatives were calling on the U.S.
to take an aggressive stance against Iran, going so far as to bomb the country. That, of
course, is an issue that remains relevant today. S probably regards such a move as a mistake.
At the same time, he can understand why Israel would be apprehensive about a nuclear-armed
Iran. He thinks that Ahmadinejad has been incorrectly understood to say that Israel should be
wiped off the map, but S still acknowledges that a powerful Iran could provide more support
to the Palestinians, which would trouble Israel. Although S understands this, he seems to
scorn the idea that Israel should get everything she wants and have hegemony.
I. S is open to the possibility that neoconservatives believe that their support for
Israel is perfectly consistent with America's well-being. As S observes, the U.S. government
since its founding has had people who believe that partisanship towards a certain nation --
-Britain or France -- -is not only good for its own sake but serves the interests of the
United States. S disputes, however, that neoconservative policy is the only way to help the
U.S. Could not one argue, after all, that the U.S. would want to be on the Arabs' good side,
with all the oil the Arabs have? This analysis may be a little dated, since the U.S. now has
some alternative sources of energy (fracking), but S makes this point in evaluating the
historical stance of neoconservatism.
I was interested to see the reviews of this book. Usually if any book suggests that Israel
is less than perfect a group of Zionist fanatics surface with several reviews telling us that
there nothing wrong Israel or American support of it.
Remarkably there is only one negative review of this book which has to be seen to be
believed. This reviewer "yoda" from Israel charges in all seriousness that Sniegoski does not
provide evidence that the neoconservatives are "predominantly Jewish " and are " strongly
aligned with Israel". Asking the author to provide evidence for such
assertions is like asking him to give evidence that the sun will
rise in the east tomorrow .
This is I believe the real reason that that there are relatively few attacks on this book.The
author does not engage in shrill denunciations of Israel or of the neoconservatives . What he
does do is quote at length what neocoservstives say and provide careful documentation for any
factual claims. For the most part the reader is allowed to
draw his own conclusions. Should the US continue to finance
Israeli repression of Palestinians and perhaps go to war against Iran or anyone else who
might object to Israeli policie?
Instead of denouncing Sniegoski "Yoda" should consider
the sane Israelis in his own country . For example former
Mossad chief Meir Dagan who said that a war with Iran was
the "stupidest idea he had ever heard of." Also moviemaker
Emmanuel Dror who interviewed virtually all the former directors of the Shin Bett ( Israel's
internal security service )
who all called for disengaging from the occupied territories .
perhaps we all would be better off listening to these Isaelis rather than follow the
neoconservatives into another disastrous war on the other side of the world.
This is going to be a very strange review coming from me. You see, I wrote a novel called
"Other Nations" and well, people that liked it a lot, liked it, but then those that really
disliked it disliked it because my "aliens among humans" were nice people, likeable people,
even charismatic people, everyday suburban types even, living that kind of life. Among us.
Next door, in the next city over. They wanted instead to see the aliens among us portrayed as
well, pick your favorite genocidal maniac or mind-controlling dictator or creature so
dementedly alien that no sense can be made of it. Well!
There are many types of true horror. The kind that passes itself off as my aliens among us
are portrayed, well, I guess some people GET IT - and they liked it.
But I'm not here to push my book. I'm here to push THIS BOOK - because my god, this is
REAL, not fantasy, it's REAL, not science fiction. And yes, they are among us with well -
BUY THIS BOOK. If you are too broke to buy it, get it from the library - and by all means
- READ IT.
Just hope to whatever god you choose that neocons are removed from governmental influence
and that their Amen corner is ignored. Hope to god, because if they suceed in doing the
INSANITY they want to do - America will be FINISHED - if it's not finished already due to
what these Fifth Columnists have done during the 8 years of Twilight Zone (GWB Rule).
And for those Jewish critics on here that might want to compare these neocon FACTS and the
other FACTS openly available to all (which is WHY the book is called the TRANSPARENT cabal) -
compare it to the Protocols - they better think twice about that. Becauase, you see, what's
in here is real, real facts, provably real facts - and if Jews themselves compare this to the
Procols? Some folks might get the idea that maybe that is real too. Perhaps George Soros (who
is Jewish) needs to speak LOUDER against the neocons. They are, indeed, crazies, as Colin
Powell called them. Crazies.
If you want to have an eye opener then read and see who were those Jewish players working
and influencing everything in the Bush Admin.promoting war with Iraq, then this is your book
of truth. The cabal of Jewish players come out of the woodwork in Stephen Sniegoski's great
work. When step by step the plan was a clear war map laid out for the U.S. in detail and
after you realize just who was working for whom in this criminal cabal of the American
government.
When you have Jewish control of the main stream media and Jewish control in Washington, D.C.,
don't wonder why the facts were omitted to make all the right connections for the public to
see in this lead up to a war from lies.
"... November in Ukraine has been marked by the adoption of the so called 'land reform', in accordance of the demands made by the IMF amongst other international financial organizations. The reform opens the way for the mass privatization of Ukraine's agricultural lands. The IMF has been making these demands for many years but assorted Ukrainian presidents have tried to postpone such an unpopular decision. Recent polls show that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of all political persuasions are opposed to land privatization, from far-right to far-left. ..."
"... After an intensive period of deindustrialization, which has taken place in recent years, agricultural land remain the only asset with any value in Ukraine but even so, it may be bought for very little. A remarkable fact is that one of the deputies from the ruling party 'Servant of the people,' Nikita Poturayev , while pressing his colleagues at the Parliament to vote for the bill on land reform, claimed [1] that this would be 'settling scores with maniac V. Lenin', i.e. the purpose of the bill was to abolish the land nationalization carried out following the October revolution. ..."
"... Ukrainian political expert Ruslan Bortnik says that the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and his team came to power under an obligation to sell out the agricultural land of Ukraine to foreign companies. Those who buy these lands, according to Bortnik, will only be thinking about making the quickest possible buck. "Foreign companies are already operating on Ukrainian soil [renting land]," said Bortnik, ..."
"... "But they are competing with large Ukrainian agricultural holdings. They do not dominate. If the adopted land market model is launched, then only large foreign companies will remain in our market Let's be honest – we are not a sovereign country. At least our government is under external control. And this is a part of the obligations of this government. This is the condition under which they came to power. They are paying the debts through privatization." [2] ..."
"... Ukrainian farmers who still are landowners, formally at least – they just can't sell it – are the same people who are unable to pay their gas and electricity bills, especially after the recent raising of energy prices – another IMF demand. ..."
"... For the most part, it was in the region of $7.4 billion of stolen Ukraine's public money, from which only a "small share" was used to bribe Western politicians, like Hunter Biden. The deputies have stressed that, according to the investigation of Ukraine's general prosecution, the withdrawn and laundered money was then invested back into Ukraine. In particular through the Franklin Templeton Investments, the money was used to buy domestic government bonds (DGB), issued by Kiev at high interest rate. ..."
"... Ukrainian prosecutor Konstantin Kulik recently stated [4] in an interview that Ukraine takes IMF loans to pay out on these debt obligations (DGB). As deputy Aleksandr Dubinsky stressed at the press conference, 40% of the current public budget goes towards the payment of the public debt of Ukraine, including the repayment of DGB at inflated interest rates. ..."
November in Ukraine has been marked by the adoption of the so called 'land reform', in accordance of the demands made by the
IMF amongst other international financial organizations. The reform opens the way for the mass privatization of Ukraine's agricultural
lands. The IMF has been making these demands for many years but assorted Ukrainian presidents have tried to postpone such an unpopular
decision. Recent polls show that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of all political persuasions are opposed to land privatization,
from far-right to far-left.
After an intensive period of deindustrialization, which has taken place in recent years, agricultural land remain the only
asset with any value in Ukraine but even so, it may be bought for very little. A remarkable fact is that one of the deputies from
the ruling party 'Servant of the people,' Nikita Poturayev , while pressing his colleagues at the Parliament to vote for the bill
on land reform, claimed [1] that this would be 'settling scores with maniac V. Lenin', i.e. the purpose of the bill was to abolish
the land nationalization carried out following the October revolution.
Ukraine's fertile soil up for grabs
It has long been known that Ukraine's soil is very fertile. Indeed, during WW2 the invading Nazis made a point of appropriating
quantities of it; forcing POWs to collect the top soil and load it onto trains en route to Germany. Now these same lands could fall
into the hands of international agro-holdings.
Ukrainian political expert Ruslan Bortnik says that the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and his team came to power
under an obligation to sell out the agricultural land of Ukraine to foreign companies. Those who buy these lands, according to Bortnik,
will only be thinking about making the quickest possible buck. "Foreign companies are already operating on Ukrainian soil [renting
land]," said Bortnik,
"But they are competing with large Ukrainian agricultural holdings. They do not dominate. If the adopted land market model
is launched, then only large foreign companies will remain in our market Let's be honest – we are not a sovereign country. At
least our government is under external control. And this is a part of the obligations of this government. This is the condition
under which they came to power. They are paying the debts through privatization." [2]
Ukrainian farmers who still are landowners, formally at least – they just can't sell it – are the same people who are unable
to pay their gas and electricity bills, especially after the recent raising of energy prices – another IMF demand. Obviously,
their financial desperation will mean that many will have to sell their land at a low price, certainly well below the market value.
Meanwhile, Ukraine remains the poorest country on the continent of Europe and Ukrainian agricultural land remains the cheapest. Moreover,
the lands may be bought up as repaying large loans collected by the Kiev government following the Euromaidan coup in 2014.
This scheme of buying up Ukraine's land is connected with the ongoing corruption scandal in the US: the one related to Joe Biden
and the gas company 'Burisma'. At the end of November, Ukrainian MPs (non-factional people's deputy Andrey Derkach; a deputy from
the Batkivshchyna Party Aleksey Kucherenko; and a deputy from the ruling Servant of the People party, Aleksandr Dubinsky) revealed
it at the press-conference [3].
The point here is that the former Minister of Ecology of Ukraine Nikolay Zlochevsky , an owner of "Burisma" gas company, in 2014
introduced a number of Western politicians to the board of directors of his company, which helped him to avoid accusations of corruption.
Hunter Biden , son of former US Vice President Joe Biden , received monthly large payments for his "consultancy services". As a result
Ukraine's General prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the corruption schemes of the company, was forced – under
pressure – to resign by Joe Biden, who even boasted about it in the US media.
Ukrainian MPs have now claimed at a press-conference that the money used to bribe the son of the former Vice President of the
United States was in fact stolen. "Biden received money, the source of which is not the successful activity of Burisma, brilliant
business moves, or recommendations. It is the money of the citizens of Ukraine. It was obtained by criminal means," said the MP Andrey
Derkach. The ultimate goal of all this fraud, in which the Bidens were deeply involved, will be the bankruptcy of Ukraine in 2020-2021,
through the formation of a pyramid of public debt.
Laundering scheme to withdraw money from Ukraine
According to Ukrainian deputies, this was a part of a bigger laundering scheme to withdraw money from Ukraine via Latvian banks
and the fund 'Franklin Templeton Investments,' which is close to the United States Democratic Party. The founder of the foundation,
John Templeton Jr., was one of the main sponsors of the campaign of former US President Barack Obama.
For the most part, it was in the region of $7.4 billion of stolen Ukraine's public money, from which only a "small share"
was used to bribe Western politicians, like Hunter Biden. The deputies have stressed that, according to the investigation of Ukraine's
general prosecution, the withdrawn and laundered money was then invested back into Ukraine. In particular through the Franklin Templeton
Investments, the money was used to buy domestic government bonds (DGB), issued by Kiev at high interest rate.
The principle of this scheme is that with the assistance of American funds, the laundered money was legalised and invested in
government bonds at 6-8% in dollars and 15-17% in Ukrainian currency (hryvnia). This is leading to enormous growth in the Ukrainian
public debt and eventually the bankruptcy of the country's economy.
Eventual bankruptcy of the economy
Ukrainian prosecutor Konstantin Kulik recently stated [4] in an interview that Ukraine takes IMF loans to pay out on these
debt obligations (DGB). As deputy Aleksandr Dubinsky stressed at the press conference, 40% of the current public budget goes towards
the payment of the public debt of Ukraine, including the repayment of DGB at inflated interest rates.
According to him, bankruptcy on the debts could happen by the end of 2020 or 2021.
And this scheme is connected with land privatization, as adopted by Kiev in November in accordance with the IMF demand. "DGBs
are a financial instrument by which the state owes all its property when paying off the DGB. And if the land market is opened, the
state will have no other valuable property, with the exception of land," said Dubinsky, demanding the suspension of debt payments
to international creditors.
As a result of this unpopular land reform and the widespread violations of labour rights, Ukraine's trade-unions called a general
strike [5] for November 14 and began preparations. For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, a strike committee was
formed at the all-national level. This committee was joined by trade unions, individual entrepreneurs, small businesses, agricultural
producers and farmers.
Management fires workers, pays themselves millions in bonuses
On November 14, Ukrainian railroad workers protested [6] in front of the Presidential office in Kiev against the announced plans
to fire some 50% of railroad personnel. The workers demanded the railroad management should resign instead. The deputy head of the
railroad trade-union, Alexander Mushenok, recently said [7] that currently "only 20 workers are employed where 60 workers are needed."
At the same time the workers claim that the top-level management of the company are paying themselves millions in bonuses. One of
the IMF demands requires that the Kiev authorities privatize the railroad system as well. In practice, this means that the few profitable
routes will be privatized by western companies, while the majority of non-profitable routes – to poorly developed provinces – will
remain state-owned, making the railway transport even less profitable.
The entire course of privatization, as promoted by the IMF, can be summarized by the principle 'privatization of profits, nationalization
of losses." And the new Kiev government is far too dependent to protest against the imposition of this policy; however, this will
effectively mean that this government will lose its credibility and trustworthiness among the people.
*
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"... The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria. ..."
Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S.
missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The
OPCW is an accessory , both before and after the fact to the crime of
mass murder.
It should now be clear to everyone that Syrian "rebels" gassed thousands of hostages in
cellars, most likely with chlorine gas, and then paraded the victims in White Helmets
snuff videos. OPCW conspired in this crime in both encouraging the terrorists to more murder
and by protecting them afterward by assigning blame to Assad and the Syrian government.
The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August
2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their
pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate
evidence to assign blame to Syria.
We have been documenting
these crimes and hoaxes at A Closer Look On Syria from December 2012. OPCW was used
from the beginning to manufacture consent for war. See for example:
Of course, the OPCW is already there! I highly suggest Caitlin Johnstone's article b
linked be read, which can be
found here .
We should expand on Petri's number of people involved in this crime to include all the
paid disinformation artists noted in Caitlin's essay at minimum. What becomes very clear in
all this is the total collusion with OPCW upper level management--those whom the
whistleblowers and their allies within OPCW petitioned--in these crimes as Petri contends.
Until they are visibly replaced, nothing issued by OPCW has any credence.
OPCW has shown to be a pure political entity, used at will by few regimes in the UN to
promote their agenda, b has done a tremendous job to humanity to bring the truth to the
public worldwide. Syrians have paid the price for UN leaders support to global terrorism for
too long. It must stop now.
"... In other words, the ruling class dictatorship can no longer rule by popular democratic ways. The principal contradiction in U.S. society remains in the alienation between labor and capital. Fascism is simply the only way to maintain capitalist rule, according to scientific socialism. ..."
"... Fascist movements are historically composed of their leaders, small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats or petty-bourgeois, farmers, and the declassed lumpenproletariat. Big capital sponsors and funds the movement. Big time capitalists, along with the top-tier leaders they create, then make up Fascism's ruling nobility. ..."
"... Among the characteristics of fascists: They are fiercely nationalistic and patriotic. Criticisms are unpatriotic or treasonous. Fascists are opposed to Marxism and any left politics, from moderate to progressive. Fascism infuses suspicion about foreigners, thuggery, and exudes an adversarial mentality, ..."
"... "Big capital sponsors and funds the movement." ..."
"... Fascism is always on war footing. All levels of government need to be in the line of march. Imprisonment and execution await any person that opposes the new norm. ..."
"... Fascism raises its ugly head without a revolution taking place. Their rule comes from the top of the anointed aristocracy. Corporate power reigns supreme. No workers' rights exist. Wars are made mainly to create markets. Fascism is supposed to liberate survivors of these wars in foreign lands – a justification for imperialism. Art, where it does not conform to Fascist culture, is destroyed. When Fascism does appear, Antifa will not save us. ..."
"... Dr. Ken Morgan is an activist scholar and internationalist. He can be reached at ..."
Often a demagogic politician such as Trump is called fascist because he won the election
through bourgeois-democratic methods and his rightist policies. Trump won the election. He now
leads through bourgeois-democratic practices. President Trump continues to exploit the
prejudice and ignorance of the white working-class. The Donald overturned political norms; he
used double meaning slogans such as "Make America great again," and "lock her up" that sounded
like political rhetoric but appealed to racists as well.
Trump's win in 2016 remained predicated on Hillary Clinton's deficits and her asides about
the "deplorable," white working-class, and her relationship to Barack Obama, who did nothing
for white and black workers. Obama chose to rescue capitalist corporations at the expense of
the working class and other lower-middle-income forces – many blacks that lost their
houses.
Huey Long was a demagogue. Senator Joseph McCarthy provides an example of a demagogue, as do
many of the Dixiecrats that Malcolm X so rightly railed against through his speeches and
activism. George Wallace fits the criteria. When all said and done, they all are capitalists.
They work on behalf of capitalists to perpetuate capitalism and spread worldwide
imperialism.
"They all are capitalists."
Yes, both Mussolini and Hitler were demagogues, but their countries' underlying dire
economic conditions made them and their administrations Fascists.
Trump is just another one of the forty-four U.S. presidents that held reign over capitalism
and, after the beginning of the twentieth century, the advent of U.S. imperialism – the
highest order of capitalism. They presided over state terrorism and genocide against world
peoples.
Capitalism in the U.S. produces gross economic deprivations and inequalities, racism,
sexism, and homophobia. Look at what Harry Truman did when he nuclear bombed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki Japan. Like puppeteers, the capitalist ruling classes will, for as long as capitalism
still exists, control politicians' strings. Yes, capitalism is in crisis and rotten to the
core, but not yet failed.
You will not get rid of any of these things by impeaching Trump.
What Is Fascism?
Yes, Adolph Hitler and Mussolini were both demagogic and fascist. Fascism, according to
Marxist precepts, observation and study, stems from a mass movement rooted in the capitalist
ruling classes, that not able to survive without it. Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler are two
historical examples of such fascists.
In other words, the ruling class dictatorship can no longer rule by popular democratic
ways. The principal contradiction in U.S. society remains in the alienation between labor and
capital. Fascism is simply the only way to maintain capitalist rule, according to scientific
socialism.
Fascist movements are historically composed of their leaders, small capitalists,
low-level bureaucrats or petty-bourgeois, farmers, and the declassed lumpenproletariat. Big
capital sponsors and funds the movement. Big time capitalists, along with the top-tier leaders
they create, then make up Fascism's ruling nobility.
Among the characteristics of fascists: They are fiercely nationalistic and patriotic.
Criticisms are unpatriotic or treasonous. Fascists are opposed to Marxism and any left
politics, from moderate to progressive. Fascism infuses suspicion about foreigners, thuggery,
and exudes an adversarial mentality,
"Big capital sponsors and funds the movement."
Organizationally, there exists an iconic leader and secretive and selective capitalists.
They scrutinize your every move at the job, and at schools. Fascism is always on war
footing. All levels of government need to be in the line of march. Imprisonment and execution
await any person that opposes the new norm.
Economic equality is a no-no. Immigrants obtain lower status than actual citizens. Equality
in gender, religion, sex, and minority rights are forbidden. Backward religious beliefs often
prevail. If you are not a Christian or an affiliated Catholic, you are out of the circle.
Violence creates racial inferiority and the destiny of history.
Fascism raises its ugly head without a revolution taking place. Their rule comes from
the top of the anointed aristocracy. Corporate power reigns supreme. No workers' rights exist.
Wars are made mainly to create markets. Fascism is supposed to liberate survivors of these wars
in foreign lands – a justification for imperialism. Art, where it does not conform to
Fascist culture, is destroyed. When Fascism does appear, Antifa will not save us.
Summary
So yes, Trump is a demagogic leader with disdainful characteristics, but capitalism has not
reached the point where actual fascism is the only way capitalists can rule. For now,
understand that imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia are characteristics of capitalism.
The rule of capitalist law and the capitalist form of democracy continues to exist. We, as
black people, do not want to be disoriented into thinking that the U.S. and Trump are
Fascist.
Dr. Ken Morgan is an activist scholar and internationalist. He can be reached at[email protected].
On the need to purge the "5th Column"...as the illustrative case of Bolivia so clearly
exposes....
The GDR historian Kurt Gossweiler (1917-2017) is probably the greatest Marxist-Leninist
thinker not only of the GDR but of Germany. In the IIGM he participated since 1939 as a
soldier in the Wehrmacht and in 1943 he joined the Red Army. In 1947 he joined the SED of
the GDR.
Between 1958 and 1970, Gossweiler worked at the Humboldt University of the GDR as a
research assistant, receiving in 1973 the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze. Gossweiler
emphasized the central role of large banks in German monopolistic financial capital.
In a speech delivered at the International Seminar of communist and workers' parties in
Brussels in 1994, Gossweiler declared that "anti-Stalinism" was the "main obstacle to the
unity of all anti-imperialist forces and the communist movement."
Kurt Gossweiler, at the 1994 Brussels Seminar, defended Stalin and the "purges" carried
out in the 1930s, stating that those "purges" saved the Soviet Union from a "fifth column"
and secured the victory of the USSR in World War II.
"... it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are weaponised ..."
"... That's a good analogy. But this only means that the financial oligarchy can be a privileged social group crossing racial lines. The term "Jews" as used by fascists was, at least initially, directly at financial oligarchy, where this ethnic group was overrepresented. In general, anti-Semitism can be viewed as a scapegoating, a primitive and misguided protest against the excesses of capitalism. In this sense, "economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community" has the real meaning "economic crises happen because banks are run by the financial oligarchy, which is evil or not part of the community." ..."
"... I see Brexit more of a spontaneous protest against neoliberal globalization, which is not that much connected with "conservative cultural values" but with more prosaic things like displacement of workers by foreigners, disappearance of good job due to relentless outsourcing/offshoring, automation and cost-cutting, reduction of national sovereignty (including inability to regulate labor flows) due to EU neoliberal policies, brazen betrayal by the New Labour of working and lower middle class economic and social interests, growth in inequality and gradual slide of the standard of living of working and lower middle class due to the redistribution of wealth up immanent under neoliberalism etc. ..."
"... The same set of reasons which in the USA led to the election of Trump and decimation of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (Hillary fiasco). After almost 30 years, US workers managed to understand that Clinton's democrats are essentially "wolfs in sheep's clothing" and decided to show them the middle finger, which as a side effect of the two-party system led to the election of Trump. ..."
"... And this process is irreversible, unless Democratic Party changes, and Clinton democrats brass is excluded from the party and sent to the dustbin of history, where they belong. That's why I am skeptical about Dem Party chances in 2020, unless one of the trio Warren/Sanders/Tulsi (who promote some level of changes) is the nominee. The train of history has left the station for the Corporate Democrats, and they are still standing on the old platform, hoping that it returns. ..."
"... And I view the resurgence of the far-right nationalism as a primitive form of social protest, which of course is hijacked, exploited and misdirected by sleek demagogy from the second branch of oligarchy that does not like the results of globalization, and resent FIRE and Silicon Valley branch, in full accordance with the dialectical view on Oligarchy, where with time neoliberal oligarchy inevitably splits and factions start fighting with each other tooth and nail. ..."
So in the end the problem is, are "loyalty, authority, sanctity" actually fascist
values? In my opinion largely yes,
That's a bridge too far. FYI fascism is an ideology of national socialism, or socialism
for one privileged and racially defined group (eclectic, but still an ideology), not a system
of badly defined personal traits, or values.
Moreover, loyalty (and a certain level of groupthink and conformism) can be legitimately
viewed as a precondition of survival of any organized group. Look at religious group that
adopt all those three values. Are all of them (or even most of them) fascist?
But one of the observable differences between Republican and Democratic Parties in the USA
is the difference in the level of authoritarism of the average member of the party. That's an
interesting difference that has certain social implications as for policies that each of the
parties favor most when in power (I abstract here from the sad fact that the USA Corporate
Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love intelligence
agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th. )
I disagree. Fascism is not an ideology in the way we understand the term, it's just too
muddled, and certainly is not socialism for a single ethnic group : Hitler and Mussolini even
more used a lot of socialist buzzwords because at the time socialism polled well, but in
reality many if not most of their policies were in direct opposition to that of the socialist
parties of the time, and they came to power by beating and literally killing socialists.
At best we could say that fascism is closer to ordoliberalism, as they never put in question
the role of property, but they saw some behaviors as a form of excessive capitalism. But even
there they put it in moral terms, economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are
evil or not part of the community, or because of a Bolshevik Jewish American Masonic conspiracy
(Mussolini).
What happens IMO is that currently right leaning parties would lose big time if they fought
elections on economics, so they have to fight elections on cultural values. If they fight on
cultural values they can get the support of many people of the working class who would
otherwise give them the middle finger.
At some point the conservative cultural values may become prevalent even on the economic
interests, as we see in the case of brexit, but this happens because conservative parties bet
on conservative cultural values early on.
When we get to conservative cultural values, these are not really a specific set of values,
or actually every society has its own traditional values. The point is that the right wing
populists bet on the values that are perceived as traditional in that point of time, because
such values have an appeal that goes beyond social class.
The values of "loyalty, authorithy and sacred" are certainly part of the human psyche,
because everyone is loyal to something, respects some authority and holds this or that thing as
sacred, but if you take them in the abstract they just mean "I'm part of a group and I will
follow it", so in the way Haidt seems to discuss them they refer just to the perception of
being part of a community and fighting off the outsiders, that dovetails with the weaponisation
of traditional cultural values by the right.
So it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally
right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are weaponised
.
This is a good comment that clarifies your views considerably. And with this
clarification, I believe we are generally on the same page. Thank you.
At best, we could say that fascism is closer to ordoliberalism, as they never put in
question the role of property, but they saw some behaviors as a form of excessive
capitalism. But even there they put it in moral terms; economic crises happen because banks
are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community, or because of a Bolshevik
Jewish American Masonic conspiracy (Mussolini).
That's a good analogy. But this only means that the financial oligarchy can be a
privileged social group crossing racial lines. The term "Jews" as used by fascists was, at
least initially, directly at financial oligarchy, where this ethnic group was
overrepresented. In general, anti-Semitism can be viewed as a scapegoating, a primitive and
misguided protest against the excesses of capitalism. In this sense, "economic crises happen
because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community" has the real
meaning "economic crises happen because banks are run by the financial oligarchy, which is
evil or not part of the community."
What happens IMO is that, currently, right-leaning parties would lose big time if they
fought elections on economics, so they have to fight elections on cultural values. If they
fight on cultural values, they can get the support of many people of the working class who
would otherwise give them the middle finger.
Not only right-leaning parties. All neoliberal parties. That's why identity politics is as
important under neoliberalism as it was under classic national socialism. That's a classic
application of "Divide and Conquer" principle in politics, which, in turn, is the Corollary
of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, the way the oligarchic elite weakens threats to its rule by
distracting population from actual issues, and imposing strict limits on what constitutes an
'acceptable' and 'respectable' political position. Neo-McCarthyism serves the same
purpose.
At some point, the conservative cultural values may become prevalent even on the
economic interests, as we see in the case of Brexit, but this happens because conservative
parties bet on conservative cultural values early on.
I respectfully disagree. I see Brexit more of a spontaneous protest against neoliberal
globalization, which is not that much connected with "conservative cultural values" but with
more prosaic things like displacement of workers by foreigners, disappearance of good job due
to relentless outsourcing/offshoring, automation and cost-cutting, reduction of national
sovereignty (including inability to regulate labor flows) due to EU neoliberal policies,
brazen betrayal by the New Labour of working and lower middle class economic and social
interests, growth in inequality and gradual slide of the standard of living of working and
lower middle class due to the redistribution of wealth up immanent under neoliberalism
etc.
The same set of reasons which in the USA led to the election of Trump and decimation
of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (Hillary fiasco). After almost 30 years, US
workers managed to understand that Clinton's democrats are essentially "wolfs in sheep's
clothing" and decided to show them the middle finger, which as a side effect of the two-party
system led to the election of Trump.
And this process is irreversible, unless Democratic Party changes, and Clinton
democrats brass is excluded from the party and sent to the dustbin of history, where they
belong. That's why I am skeptical about Dem Party chances in 2020, unless one of the trio
Warren/Sanders/Tulsi (who promote some level of changes) is the nominee. The train of history
has left the station for the Corporate Democrats, and they are still standing on the old
platform, hoping that it returns.
And I view the resurgence of the far-right nationalism as a primitive form of social
protest, which of course is hijacked, exploited and misdirected by sleek demagogy from the
second branch of oligarchy that does not like the results of globalization, and resent FIRE
and Silicon Valley branch, in full accordance with the dialectical view on Oligarchy, where
with time neoliberal oligarchy inevitably splits and factions start fighting with each other
tooth and nail.
Russiagate and Ukrainegate (which is essentially Russiagate 2.0) are just two reflections
of this internal political struggle within the USA oligarchy. Struggle that in some forms
gradually became closer and closer to the civil war (or, at least, The War between Antony and
Octavian) for political dominance as views on the ways to overcome the current crisis of
neoliberalism in the USA of those two factions became more and more incompatible.
Historically national socialism emerged as a way to overcome the crisis of capitalism at the
beginning of the XX century.
it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally
right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are
weaponised.
I agree. That's an interesting angle to view the current resurgence of the far right. But
it does not explain the fact why in the USA many members of trade unions voted for Trump.
Also, please take a look at the phenomenon of Tucker Carson.
Thank you again for your insights into this complex social phenomenon.
The list contains some (but not all) of the key participants of the 2014 coup d'état
against President Yanukovich. There are 13 names in the list: MPs Serhiy Leshchenko, Mustafa
Nayem, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Serhiy Berezenko, Serhiy Pashynsky; ex-Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk; ex-Head of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeriya Hontareva; ex-First Deputy of the
National Security and Defense Council Oleg Hladkovsky; judge of the Constitutional Court of
Ukraine Makar Pasenyuk; candidate for presidency Anatoly Hrytsenko; singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk;
journalist Dmytro Hordon and ex-Head of the Presidential Administration Borys Lozhkin.
Pashynsky was involved in Snipergate. Yatsenyuk was the marionette chosen by Nuland to head
the Provisional government after Yanukovich will be overthrown.
Almost all of these people from the list were involved in various sort of scandals during
the last five years. Particularly, Oleg Hladkovsky was recently dismissed from his post due to
the corruption scandal in the defense sphere. Serhiy Leshchenko became known for the purchase
of the flat for $275,253 and the number of information attacks at well-known politicians and
businessmen. Serhy Pashynsky was tied to the hostile takeover of a confectionary factory in
Zhytomyr.
In its turn, the U.S. Department of State stated that the
words of Lutsenko are not true and aims to tarnish the reputation of Ambassador
Yovanovitch. Thus, there are certain concerns that the actual list might be fake.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The House is holding its second public hearing with former US envoy
to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch centring around her ouster which, according to her, is pertinent
to the impeachment probe against Trump. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch
flatly denied allegations that she circulated a list of potential corruption targets in Ukraine
that the United States did not want prosecuted, according to testimony at the opening of
hearings in the House impeachment probe of President Donald Trump on Friday.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a do not prosecute list
was a fabrication", Yovanovitch said. "Mr Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general
who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I did not tell Mr
Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not prosecute. Instead I
advocated the US position that rule of law should prevail."
US President Donald Trump in a series of tweets on Friday
criticised former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch's performance while she was
testifying in the impeachment hearing against him. He defended his decision to replace
Yovanovitch - appointed by his predecessor Barak Obama - as the US ambassador to Ukraine, where
she served from August 2016 until May 2019.
....They call it "serving at the pleasure of the President." The U.S. now has a very
strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is
called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for
Ukraine than O.
During Friday's Democrat-led impeachment inquiry hearing, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Marie Yovanovitch testified under oath that she did not give former Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Yuriy Lutsenko a "do not prosecute list" in 2017. Yovanovitch also doubled-down on
left-wing disinformation saying that Lutsenko "acknowledged that the list never existed" in
April.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a "Do Not Prosecute" list
was a fabrication,"
Yovanovitch told the House Intelligence Committee . "Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian
prosecutor general who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I
did not tell Mr. Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not
prosecute."
"That is such a lie," Glenn Beck said on Friday's show. "She should be held for
perjury."
During a three-part BlazeTV exposé on the Democrats' corruption in Ukraine, Glenn
debunked what he called "the most misleading fabrication I've ever seen by the mainstream
media."
Earlier this year, award-winning investigative journalist John
Solomon reported Lutsenko's claim that then-Ambassador Yovanovitch gave him a list of
"people whom we should not prosecute" during a meeting in 2016. Shortly after Solomon's article
was released, several news sources, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal,
reported that Lutsenko retracted his statement.
When Lutsenko said Yovanovitch "gave" him a list, he did not mean she actually handed him
anything in writing, but verbally conveyed the names of people he shouldn't prosecute.
"They never mentioned the fact that it was verbally dictated and he wrote the list down
himself -- are you kidding me?" Glenn exclaimed. "This is how the media is fact-checking and
debunking. They are playing with our republic and Ukraine's republic. They are planting
dynamite all around everything that we hold dear. How do they sleep at night? Everyone that
reads their stories actually thinks that there was a retraction of one of the most damning
parts of this entire case."
If you like what you see, use promo code GB20OFF to get $20 off a full year of BlazeTV . With a BlazeTV subscription, you're not just paying to watch
great pro-free speech, pro-America TV. Your subscription funds the intensive investigations
that let BlazeTV tell the stories
the liberal media wants to keep in the dark, giving you the unvarnished truth, showing you what
the media doesn't want you to see.
Read More
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that
aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute
list during their first meeting.
"Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, [Yovanovitch] gave
me a list of people whom we should not prosecute," Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told
Hill.TV last week.
"My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president
nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime,"
he continued.
The State Department called Lutsenko's claim of receiving a do not prosecute list, "an
outright fabrication."
"We have seen reports of the allegations," a department spokesperson told Hill.TV. "The
United States is not currently providing any assistance to the Prosecutor General's Office
(PGO), but did previously attempt to support fundamental justice sector reform, including in
the PGO, in the aftermath of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. When the political will for
genuine reform by successive Prosecutors General proved lacking, we exercised our fiduciary
responsibility to the American taxpayer and redirected assistance to more productive
projects."
Hill.TV has reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine for comment.
Lutsenko also said that he has not received funds amounting to nearly $4 million that the
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine was supposed to allocate to his office, saying that "the situation was
actually rather strange" and pointing to the fact that the funds were designated, but "never
received."
"At that time we had a case for the embezzlement of the U.S. government technical assistance
worth 4 million U.S. dollars, and in that regard, we had this dialogue," he said. " At that
time, [Yovanovitch] thought that our interviews of Ukrainian citizens, of Ukrainian civil
servants, who were frequent visitors of the U.S. Embassy put a shadow on that anti-corruption
policy."
"Actually, we got the letter from the U.S. Embassy, from the ambassador, that the money that
we are speaking about [was] under full control of the U.S. Embassy, and that the U.S. Embassy
did not require our legal assessment of these facts," he said. "The situation was actually
rather strange because the funds we are talking about were designated for the prosecutor
general's office also and we told [them] we have never seen those, and the U.S. Embassy replied
there was no problem."
"The portion of the funds namely 4.4 million U.S. dollars were designated and were foreseen
for the recipient Prosecutor General's office. But we have never received it," he said.
Yovanovitch previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Armenia under former presidents
Obama and George W. Bush, as well as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan under Bush. She also served as
ambassador to Ukraine under Obama.
"... Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. ..."
"... Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics ..."
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins.
Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable -- those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to
boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort.
Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR
and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a
free ride.
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't
remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it
had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the
list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.
"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration.
It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose
to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe"
to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth
called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant
but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy
agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."
Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the
respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the
crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside
observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.
Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been
hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.
Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious.
And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.
It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many
Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes
with neighbors.
That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is
a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American
foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions
inherited from Old Europe.
In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there
was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a
most destructive freight.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.
When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television
colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my
editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.
As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow
members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which
of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.
Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial
Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'
Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those
years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment -- to use Victoria Nuland's term -- it would finally 'knuckle under', and become
a quiescent satellite of the West.
An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site -- which
actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language -- headlined
'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series -- Part I -- Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'
Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website,
clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.
There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument
can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.
It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years -- doubly interesting, because
his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant
section of the Russian foreign policy ιlite -- may be illuminated in this way.
So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be
put as follows:
'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people"
means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"
'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes"
running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski
clearly always wanted us to be.
'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian":
a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.
'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very
real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one
path along which all of humanity must -- and can -- go.'
At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:
'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European -- simply that we cannot simply come to
Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.
'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie
in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".
'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" -- and, in relation to some of the SJC
and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" -- which Putin criticized in his interview with the "Financial Times"
back in June.
An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition
of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalized, and indeed, on
the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.
Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.
But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office,
back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally
present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact
screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost"
(quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia
Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East
European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and
Russia had it with the West.
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.
Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as
I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)
Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They
were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out
of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess
one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?
Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress
Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.
What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?
And, if they do, what are these?
I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.
But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?
It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire
he was creating.
Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles -- as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg
-- could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.
I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies "
-- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security
positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.
Since its creation in 1948, the modern state of Israel has steadily stolen Palestinian land
and driven Palestinians from their homes, cities and villages.
Nothing has been done to halt Israel's steady march to tighten its absolute control of the
Palestinian people with the obvious goal of ethnic cleansing, an historic fact well documented
by Israeli scholar
Ilan Pappe .
Under the protection of a security-obsessed military occupation, fully supported and
underwritten by U.S. tax payers, Israel denies it has broken any laws. Israel makes its own
self-preservation laws. It listens to no higher authority.
Israel has destroyed olive tree orchards and smothered stolen farmlands and pastures with
modern malls where U.S. firms like Ace Hardware and Burger King enrich stock holders who don't
know, or don't care, that they are taking part in the ugly crime of ethnic cleansing.
(The first time I saw an Ace Hardware store in a Ma'ale Adumim mall, I started my own
personal boycott of Ace, an action unfair to employees of my local Ace outlet, but one that has
increased the receipts of my small neighborhood hardware store.)
The narrative of Israeli governments heeding no call but their own, has been with us all
along, but U.S. media readers/viewers have avoided having to think about it, or do anything
about it.
They live comfortably within their bubble of ignorance which is created and sustained for
them by their newspapers, news magazines, television outlets, radio broadcasts, government
leaders and, alas, their religious leaders.
It does not have to be this way. During the last decade, the narrative of settlements like
Ma'ale Adumim has been available on the internet in reports like this one from Electronic Intafada , which begins
:
It is only a fifteen minute bus ride from Jerusalem to the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. After
entering through guarded gates, one's first impression is of a Miami-style suburb. The town
at noon seems almost abandoned because the major part of Ma'ale Adumim residents head off to
work in Jerusalem during the day. . . .
As soon as Barack Obama demanded from Israel the simple act of "freezing" its settlement expansion , Israel trotted out Public
Relations Plan A for distribution to the media: Have a heart, settlement residents need room
for their families to grow.
Israel operates on the logic of the man found guilty of killing his parents. The guilty man
begged for mercy on the grounds that he was now an orphan.
To tell you about the Israeli settlers' plea for mercy, the Los Angeles Times (July 6) delivered its version of the
orphan story: "Israel's settlements in West Bank present a major hurdle."
The opening paragraphs of the Times story set the tone for the plea with weasel words
(Lobby talking points) used by writer Edmund Sanders:
Reporting from Ma'ale Adumim, West Bank -- This sprawling, well-manicured Israeli
settlement -- with its rows of red-tile roofs, palm trees and air-conditioned shopping mall
-- could almost pass for Orange County. Except the guards in this gated community sometimes
pack automatic weapons.
Settlements such as the city-sized Ma'ale Adumim, about four miles east of Jerusalem in
the West Bank, are viewed by much of the world as illegal because they are built on land
seized by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War. Many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country.
Now let us review the weasel words.
The reference to the illegality of Ma'ale Adumim is softened by the qualifying rhetorical
device, "viewed by much of the world as illegal". The phase "viewed by" suggests that the issue
at hand is open to debate among reasonable people.
Reasonable, as, for example, as a story that might have appeared in a Birmingham, Alabama,
newspaper, circa 1939, reporting that "segregation is viewed by many in the South as as a way
to maintain harmony between the races and preserve our Southern Way of Life."
Should such an analysis have been open to debate? No, certainly not in the minds of a small
number of courageous Southern liberals, and an increasingly impatient black population.
It required two more decades of U.S. racial oppression for that "debate"–for and
against segregation–to reach a definitive conclusion with "all deliberate speed".
Now we have a 21st century debate. The Times' Monday story includes the phrase: "many
Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of their country." Do they, indeed? How many Israelis?
Most polls suggest that sentiment is largely confined to the pro-settler community, while
"security-minded" government leaders continue to demand the inclusion of Ma'ale Adumimin a
future Israeli state
To other more fair-minded Israelis the phrase "many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country", unpleasantly evokes the case of the parent-killer who begs for mercy because he
is an orphan.
The Time s story continues:
Now the long-simmering dispute over this and other fast-growing settlements has become a
major obstacle to restarting peace talks.
Settlement building is not a long-simmering dispute. It is part of decades of immoral and
illegal actions by Israel and is much more than a "major obstacle" to peace talks. It is an
indisputable violation of international law, which, if allowed to stand, will block any
successful peace talks.
The parent-killer should mourn his Mom and Dad from his jail cell, not while sitting in the
sun in his well-watered grass covered private backyard, shaded from the hot summer sun by a
picnic umbrella purchased from a nearby Ace Hardware.
The LA Times reserves most of its early sympathy for the illegal settlers of an
illegal city with these touching "facts":
"Why is President Obama interfering with our lives, telling us how many children we can
have and whether we can get married?" asked Benny Kashriel, longtime mayor of Ma'ale Adumim.
. . .
Talk about a possible freeze has many here worried.
"You can't freeze a city," Kashriel said. "If you freeze, you go backwards. Every month we
are not building and people are not coming, it affects the economic situation of the city. .
. . It's punishing."
A freeze, officials say, would threaten the opening of four new synagogues and seven
sorely needed schools. Class sizes are already near the legal limit of 40 students per
room.
An additional 400 units of housing in various stages of construction might also be shut
down, leaving homeowners -- many of whom have already taken out mortgages up to $300,000 --
with monthly payments and no place to live.
The Times knew American readers would identify with those folks holding mortgages of
up to $300,000 with monthly payments and no place to live. And those same readers can also
identify with parents whose children are in schools "near the legal limit of 40 students per
room".
Further down in the story, the Times reports on the Arab village of Aziriyeh, (in
biblical times, the village of Bethany), where Lazarus was called from his grave by Jesus. (Or
as the Times writes, carefully avoiding any validation of a religious belief, "where the
biblical Lazarus is said to have risen from the dead").
The comparison of Aziriyeh (Bethany) with Ma'ale Adumim is fact-filled. The comparison also
strains for a "balance" that is impossible to achieve between occupiers and the occupied.
Since 1967, the story reports, the village of Aziriyeh has had three-fourths of its land
stolen to enlarge Ma'ale Adumim. Its mayor, Issam Faroun, makes a comparison between his
citizens and those of the illegal citizens of Ma'ale Adumim. The facts are presented fairly.
The comparative use of water is an example.
Mayor Faroun said:
. . . that as Ma'ale Adumim frets about the fate of its landscaped grounds or swimming
pools, Azariyah residents receive water only once a week. The town gateway has turned into a
junkyard of trash, scrap metal and old appliances. Schools have 45 students per class and
unemployment is 50%, in part because the barrier prevents workers from reaching
Jerusalem.
With no room to expand horizontally, families are adding second and third stories to their
homes as children grow up and marry. Bassem abu Roomy, 31, still lives in his parents' house,
sharing two rooms with his pregnant wife and two children. His younger brothers are not so
lucky.
"We can't add any more stories because the foundation of the house can't support it," he
said. "So they can't get married."
When did the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis in Aziriyeh (Bethany) and Ma'ale
Adumim go wrong? When that first brick was laid in Maale Adumim soon after 1967? When Ma'ale
Adumim gobbled up three fourths of Aziriyeh's farmland for its own use? Name your own moment in
recent memory.
The LA Times wants us to look back no further than two decades when the biblical
village of Lazarus and the modern Israeli city of Ma'ale Adumim had, as the Times
describes it, their harmonious relations "strained".
A decade ago, the two communities lived somewhat harmoniously. Israelis shopped in
Azariyah [Bethany] and Palestinians worked on housing projects in the settlement. But during
the last Palestinian uprising, in 2000, two settlers were shot in the village and relations
have been strained since.
The competing needs of these two communities have become part of the international
debate.
So there you have it. Everything was fine until two Israeli settlers were shot. This is a
case study on why the Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Congress are so grateful for news stories like
this one that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
For Sanders and the Times , the Arab village of Azariyah and the modern illegal city
of Maale Adumim are merely playing a role in an "international debate".
No wonder that parent-killer failed to get any respect with his request for mercy because he
was now an orphan. He did not have the support of his own personal lobby making a case for
orphans who have killed their parents.
The picture above is of a barrier in the Arab village of Azariyah (Bethany). The break
in the barrier has been covered by barbed wire. The wire is removed and replaced on a regular
basis by Israeli authorities, who built the barrier in the first place. This photo is from
the website of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and
Israel.
"The difficulty here is that Trump thinks he's defending the military, when he's not"
No, this is not about Trump defending the military. What this is about is how Trump thinks war should be fought, "tough" in
his words. What he means by this is troops should be utterly ruthless. They should murder and kill civilians, as this strikes
fear into the enemy and shows them how "tough" we are. Plus of course Trump likes vengeance. No one should be surprised by this
as Trump has voiced strong support for war crimes, he wants "strong" torture, he wants the families of terrorists, women, children,
elderly murdered to punish the terrorists. Sad thing is, I've heard lots of support for this kind of warfighting among conservatives.
Trump has the mentality of an authoritarian dictator, thankfully he's not that smart.
Army Col. Keven Benson suggests Trump may have overplayed his hand, considering all the wreckage he wrought playing to his base
at the possible cost of his legitimacy among those in uniform. Benson charges, too, that the president's decision to reverse the
directives of senior Navy officers in disciplining one of their own might lose him support not only among senior officers, but
among the rank and file -- a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to put him in the White House.
"You know, these guys, these three knuckleheads -- Lorance, Golsteyn and Gallagher -- might be welcome on Fox News," Benson
says, "but they wouldn't be welcome in my platoon."
Damn.
If it is all the same to everyone, I think we shouldn't indulge in the kind of permissiveness that makes incidents like the
My Lai Massacre or the Abu Graib prisoner abuse scandal possible.
I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 - 31 May 1968). That is to be blunt, I served as an enlisted man which
is equivalent to a working class peon in civilian life or an Indentured servant who didn't have the money to pay his passage to
the American colony but promised to serve an extended period of apprenticeship to pay it off. In American society at that time
an indentured servant was one rung above being a slave. So I am no fan of the brass. And I have never been a big fan of our Commander-in-Chief
"Bone Spurs" given what I saw during my tour of duty in Vietnam.
But on his decision to deny the brass javing their way and giving them the fickle finger of fate, i.e. the middle finger if
you don't get my drift, I support President Trump wholeheartedly. Anyone who can piss off the brass and make them whine like melting
snowflakes must be doing something right. Also does Mr. Perry remember when President Richard Nixon pardoned Lt. William Calley
after being convicted for the infamous My Lai Massacre?
The American people overwhelmingly supported Nixon's pardon.They will again support President Trump's decision. They do not
read the TAC. Nor do they read any other high-falutin' journal of political opinion. But they are still patriots in their minds.
But being populists they are not necessarily patriots when it comes to the brass who in their thinking are the equivalent of the
1% in civilian life.
It's historical class warfare that fuels populism even though these populists have probably never read Karl Marx. So the brass
can disagree vehemently with Trump, They can also resign like Richard Spencer did and join the private sector. But they may be
in for a rude awakening when they try to give an order to average civilians and are instead given fickle fingers of fate. And
besides, let's be real about this latest crisis du jour, there are plenty more brass where these whiners came from. I bet you
at the Pentagon the brass are literally bumping into each other just walking down the halls.
But they swore allegiance to our Constitution. The president gives orders to them as commander-in-chief. Not the other way
around. Mr. Perry doesn't get how our country has changed since Trump won the election. I assume reading this essay, and if I
am wrong I apologize here, he probably has never broken bread with the great unwashed given how he identifies with military authority.
Trump was elected president surfing on a wave of populism. He played his populist cards in this tempest in a teapot. He gets it.
He is playing to his base. He wants to get re-elected.
But I have one question for Mr. Perry. Why didn't the brass resign en masse against the Iraq War or all these useless Forever
Wars we have been fighting?
These same people stood by and watched our military be socially engineered and gender normed to the point of incompetence. These
are Obama sycophants pure and simple.
A "crisis" in Special Ops is good. Anything that weakens Deepstate is good. Trump didn't make his decision on this basis; he only
needed to assuage his ego; but nevertheless he accidentally did the right thing.
I don't much care about this since I consider most all US military to be war criminals. I suppose I just note the cosmic justice
which punishes many of them with PTSD, drug addiction, and suicide. Now... let's get on with privatizing the VA.
The desk jockey keyboard warrior officers in the Pentagon want to make examples even if they have to use prosecutorial misconduct
to do it and that will help morale and discipline?
Trump should get rid of all the swamp Generals and Admirals. I'm sure they
will enjoy retirement making millions at Lockheed and Raytheon. Trump supports the Troops, not the Bureaucrats.
One gets the impression that the "Rules of Engagement" seem to have been the issue in the case discussed here but they were forgotten
in the bureaucratic squabble between the military and the White House.
People like Pete Hegseth call Chief Gallagher's service exemplary and repeat that he was acquitted of 'alleged war crimes'.
He was acquitted because a medic testified that after he and Gallagher stabilized a wounded, sedated prisoner after 20 minutes,
Gallagher inexplicably stabbed him (non-fatally) below the collar bone, stormed off, and then the medic suffocated him before
Iraqi security forces could torture him. Later Gallagher posed with his corpse.
This is not the sign of a well man or one who was making a snap, life or death decision. I'm not interested in punishing Gallagher
but this hero worship of our military and failure to acknowledge that these long deployments are breaking down our military is
self-deception. But I won't be surprised if I see a trifecta of Trump, Hegseth, and Gallagher at a campaign stop.
If we are being honest, I bet the IRGC has a better reputation than us in the M.E.
Julius Caesar was able to march on Rome because the soldiers gave their fealty to him over Rome. I find Trump's pardoning of soldiers
accused of war crimes deeply disturbing.
The first and foremost principle that must be maintained is that the President has complete authority over the military. Its one
of the central constructs of our republic. The most egregious offence was for Spencer to defy Trump's order. Regardless of what
one's opinion on the state of the special forces is, we can't go down that road. To say that Trump is destroying the commanders
authorities is bass ackwards. The US military, like it or not, MUST have civilians over and above them.
Having said that, I completely agree that there is something very bad wrong with the special forces and especially the Navy
Seals. My experience with Green Berets in the Vietnam era is that they were very effective in working with indigenous populations,
to include recruiting fighters to our side, spoke their language, were highly competent, tough as nails, and very humble. Out
of uniform, one would not even know they were Green Berets. Likewise almost all Army Rangers are equally humble. Green Berets
are recruited from the Rangers.
I never had any personal experiences with Navy Seals, but over the last decade or so at least, its obvious that a large percent
of them are a bunch of braggadocios chest thumpers. There is something seriously wrong with the Navy Seal recruitment program
or training or both. They have a very bad reputation of making their missions public, making jokes out of their security clearances
and never seem to be held accountable for such violations.
The regular military has always distrusted the SOF for the very reasons cited in this article. The Pentagon forbade the beret
until JFK overruled the brass in 1963.
The Founding CO of that vaunted Tier 1 unit Seal team 6 was convicted of federal crimes and spent time in prison in the 1980s.
The Green Beret affair in 1965 resulted in the murder of a allied civilian in Vietnam. The military grew these units beyond
reasonable levels and has misused and overused them since 9/11,
One is left to wonder whether the president has really overplayed his hand or these naval officers are simply Trump-haters as
is all too often the case these days. I'd have to go with let the Navy be the Navy and handle it's own business. But one has to
question whether these officers would've objected as strongly had it been Obama giving the orders?
What a disgrace... I'm a dovish, pacifist peacenik, but even I understand maintaining organizational order, respect for authority,
chain-of-command... (and have respect for many in the military for their desire and attempts to play by international rules and
by-the-book procedures.)
Trump & Gallagher (who strikes me as a sadist) are a disgrace and Fox News is especially beyond the pale, giving Gallagher
a platform to impugn his commanding officer! in public! Where has anyone ever gotten away with that before?... unbelievable.
I guess you could hope for some silver lining that this might undermine the DoD's global empire tendencies... but I'm not sure
this is a good way to get that done (ie leaving or promoting arrogant, cruel men like Gallagher, with the stench of by-gone barbarism
clinging to him, in the services:)
If I were one of this president's advisers, I would make one thing clear.
Don't tweet instructs to any department or department member because it is neither a proper channel for official communique's
nor is it conducive to to effectively, management and more times than not creates more trouble that it solves.
After listing the reasons why "twitter" is an inappropriate forum. i would of course be fired. But I am deeply concerned that
the president is conducting official business in open forums such as twitter.
The official in question was certainly being reasonable to request the order either direct communique or in riding. Given the
nature of twitter, it was a reasonable expectation.
Laugh: I think there are plenty of issues with the military justice system. But that is another matter best left out of twitter
feeds.
Why didn't anyone mention what the effect of these democracy wars are having on our soldiers considering they aren't actually
protecting the country but helping the Muslims move over to it, not just here but to Europe as well.
Most of the terrorist fighters are coming and going from other countries and travel freely oh and besides in Syria we're really
not fighting terrorists but over-throwing a government.
To top it all off these actions are helping to bankrupt our nation. I wonder how this plays for morale of our soldiers? I'm
sure many don't care, the majority of people indluding those just coming in ro the country seem to hate the country anyway so
why would anyone want to fight for them and then maybe there is another side who sees it all and cares, cares that they are losing
their nation. What about the "fight them over there but love them and bow down to their diverstity"? What happens when you realize
that you're not the savior you thought you would be and no one is greatful to have you around, they are fighting you endlessly
and ruthlessly while you're ttying to be a gentle invader, not fighting to win but to install democracy and can't figure out why
no one wants your gift of gentrification.
I'm not so sure I could take his rank from him either, maybe just give him a break from the war on the ground and the two sides
of the war in his head.
On the other hand we increasingly see an unwillingness by the military and Deep State to be ruled over by civilian government,
and instead of a commander in chief, to make of elected Presidents mere puppets for their consensus.
I disagree with Lt.Col Milburns (Ret.) The UCMJ is military law and military law is part of federal law. The president has the
right to pardon anyone convicted under the UCMJ but his authority stops where the law is concerned. The president isn't above
the law, he can countermand the conviction but he can't force the military to withdraw the A@D given by the individual services.
That remains the prerogative of the commanders. Discipline must be maintained and the commanders are responsible and accountable
for that discipline.
CIC is a title conferred on a civilian president, he states that they are responsible for the strategic decisions used to justify
the use of our military forces, the Presidents actions with regard to anything other than the pardon does not meet the criteria
of a strategic decision.
And if water isn't involved in the mission then there really isn't need for SEALS to be there. Mission creep on the part of
the Navy to increase Spec Ops budgets.
Rank has their privilege and as far as I know, PDJT is the CiC. So either you - the un-elected bureaucrat, shut up and follow
the order or put up and resign your commission.
"... 38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another 31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night. Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to scale back U.S. involvement overall. ..."
"... The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more support for negotiations and non-intervention: ..."
"... With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons ..."
"... There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they want. It is long past time that Washington started listening. ..."
he Eurasia Group Foundation's new survey of public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy finds that support for greater restraint continues to rise:
Americans favor a less aggressive foreign policy. The findings are consistent across a
number of foreign policy issues, and across generations and party lines.
The 2019 survey results show that most Americans support a more restrained foreign policy,
and it also shows an increase in that support since last year. There is very little support for
continuing the war in Afghanistan indefinitely, there is virtually no appetite for war with
Iran, and there is a decline in support for a hawkish sort of American exceptionalism. There is
still very little support for unilateral U.S. intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons,
and support for non-intervention has increased slightly:
In 2018, 45 percent of Americans chose restraint as their first choice. In 2019, that has
increased to 47 percent. Only 19 percent opt for a U.S.-led military response and 34 percent
favor a multilateral, UN-led approach to stop humanitarian abuses overseas.
38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another
31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of
Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that
there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night.
Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to
scale back U.S. involvement overall.
The report's working definition of American exceptionalism is a useful one: "American
exceptionalism is the belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be
unconstrained by the parochial interests or international rules which govern other countries."
This is not the only definition one might use, but it gets at the heart of what a lot of hawks
really mean when they use this phrase. While most Americans still say they subscribe to
American exceptionalism either because of what the U.S. represents or what it has done, there
is less support for these views than before. Among the youngest respondents (age 18-29), there
is now a clear majority that rejects this idea.
The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with
its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran
has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been
nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to
elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this
year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more
support for negotiations and non-intervention:
A strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats continue to seek a diplomatic
resolution involving either sanctions or the resumption of nuclear negotiations. This year,
there was an increase in the number of respondents across party lines who would want
negotiations to resume even if Iran is a nuclear power in the short term, and a bipartisan
increase in those who believe outright that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to
defend itself. So while Republicans might be more likely than Democrats to believe Iran
threatens peace in the Middle East, voters in neither party are eager to take a belligerent
stand against it.
With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against
Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons, and it
isn't doing that. It may be that the failure of the "maximum pressure" campaign has also
weakened support for sanctions. Support for the sanctions option dropped by almost 10 points
overall and plunged by more than 20 points among Republicans. In 2018, respondents were evenly
split between war and sanctions on one side or negotiations and non-intervention on the other.
This year, support for diplomacy and non-intervention in response to this imaginary nuclear
weapons program has grown to make up almost 60% of the total. If most Americans favor diplomacy
and non-intervention in this improbable scenario, it is safe to assume that there is even more
support for those options with the real Iranian government that isn't pursuing nuclear
weapons.
There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and
avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant
constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right
now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they
want. It is long past time that Washington started listening.
In 2001 and in 2002 Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war,
these mandates, each titled an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided the
legal framework for attacks against al-Qaeda in 2001 and in 2002 for the Iraq War. Both AUMFs
are still in effect today. As Congress considers its annual authorization to fund the Pentagon
our current members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate, are in positions of
responsibility and ability to repeal these AUMFs.
The effect of the AUMFs :
Based on FBI and
journalist
investigations, al Qaeda had between 200-400 members worldwide in September of 2001. Al Qaeda
now has affiliates in every corner of the world, their
strength measures in the tens of thousands of members, and they control territory in Yemen,
Syria and parts of Africa. In Afghanistan, the Taliban now control as much as 60 percent of the
territory and, with regards to international terrorism, where there was one international
terror group in Afghanistan in 2001, the Pentagon now
reports twenty such groups .
ISIS was formerly al Qaeda in Iraq, an organization that came into existence solely due to
the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States. US military
,
intelligence agencies, journalists
and other
international organizations continually report that the reason people join such groups is
not out of ideology or religious devotion, but out of resistance to invasion and occupation,
and in response to the killing of family, friends and neighbors by foreign and government
forces. It is clear the AUMFs have worsened terrorism, not defeated it.
The cost of the AUMFs :
More
than 7,000 US service members have been killed and more than 50,000 wounded in the wars
since 9/11. Of the 2.5 million troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as many as 20% percent are
afflicted with PTSD, while 20 percent
more may have traumatic brain injury. The Veterans Administration reports Afghan and Iraq
veterans have rates of suicide
4-10 times higher than their civilian peers. This means almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans
are die by suicide every day. Do the math and it is clear more Afghan and Iraq veterans are
dying by suicide than by combat. The cost to the people overseas to whom we have brought these
wars is hard to grasp.
Between one and four million people have been killed, directly and indirectly, by these
wars, while tens of millions more have been wounded or psychologically traumatized, and tens of
millions more made homeless – the cause of the worst refugee crisis since WWII.
Financially, the cost of these wars is immense, at least $6 trillion. Of a vast many statistics that
compose this incomprehensible figure of $6 trillion, is that nearly $1 trillion of it is simply
just interest and debt payments. For any American, Democrat, Republican or independent, these
interest and debt payments alone should cause them to reconsider these wars.
The AUMFs have allowed for wars to be waged without end by the executive branch, wars the
American people, including veterans, say
have not been worth fighting . Congress has the ability and responsibility to help bring
about an end to these wars by ensuring the repeal of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs. Join the debate
on Facebook More articles by: Matthew Hoh
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and
World Beyond War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in
protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been
in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the
Center for International Policy.
"... America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted. ..."
"... Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it. ..."
"... America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened. ..."
"... Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington. ..."
"... Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so. ..."
The motives for so many Western spies serving the Soviet Union – and in the 1940s and
1950s the Soviets had the best "humint" on earth – were rather idealistic. This was
largely true for the Cambridge Circle in Britain. They were concerned that America was going
to "lord it over" the Russians and everyone else.
America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the
1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted.
Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined
towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of
major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent,
sensitive type would be concerned by it.
You certainly did not have to be a communist to feel that way, but being one assisted with
access to important Soviet contacts. They sought you out.
America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable
position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over"
as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened.
It made little secret of its desire to keep such a monopoly, so brilliant people like
Oppenheimer would be well aware of something they might well regard as ominous.
Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the
Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there
were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington.
A hugely important general like MacArthur was unblinkingly ready in 1950 to use atomic
weapons in the Korean War to destroy North Korea's connections with China.
I read several major biographies of Oppenheimer, and there is little to nothing concerning
Soviet intelligence work. When I came across the Sudoplatov book with its straightforward
declaration of Oppenheimer's assistance, it was difficult to know how to weigh the claim.
Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even
insist they do so.
Judging by what is suggested here, if Oppenheimer did help, it was in subtle ways like
letting Klaus Fuchs, a fellow scientist and a rather distinguished one (but a Soviet spy),
look at certain papers. But the scientific community always has some considerable tendency to
share information, a tendency having nothing to do with spying.
In general, it should be understood, that Oppenheimer, despite all his brilliance, was a
rather disturbed man all his life. Quite early on, as just one example, he attempted to
poison someone he did not like. Only pure luck prevented the man's eating a lethally-laced
apple. There were other disturbing behaviors too.
Later they believed that equality of superpower status for the Soviet Union would
contribute to world peace.
How dumb were these "scientists". Everyone knows that once Soviet Union fell, peace and
freedom and democracy are flowering all over the world and United States are not waging any
wars anymore.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi
Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the
Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal
activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to
out-hawk Republicans at every turn.
"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I
normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported
the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, "
were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of
their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.
In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight
fighting against the neocons."
"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy
establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount
of influence over both parties."
She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors
have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have
people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical
decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so
serious about what's at stake here."
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The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night
in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue
candidate'.
However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?
We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all
alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics
And again, if we do win despite all the structural injustices in the system the Rs inherited and seek to expand, well, those
injustices don't really absolutely need to be corrected, because we will still have gotten the right result from the system
as is.
This is a pretty apt description of the mindset of Corporate Democrats. Thank you !
May I recommend you to listen to Chris Hedge 2011 talk
On Death of the Liberal Class At least to the first
part of it.
Corporate Dems definitely lack courage, and as such are probably doomed in 2020.
Of course, the impeachment process will weight on Trump, but the Senate hold all trump cards, and might reverse those effects
very quickly and destroy, or at lease greatly diminish, any chances for Corporate Demorats even complete on equal footing in 2020
elections. IMHO Pelosi gambit is a really dangerous gambit, a desperate move, a kind of "Heil Mary" pass.
Despair is a very powerful factor in the resurgence of far right forces. And that's what happening right now and that's why
I suspect that far right populism probably will be the decisive factor in 2020 elections.
IMHO Chris explains what the most probable result on 2020 elections with be with amazing clarity.
"... Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"? She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Aρez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic? Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich. ..."
"... I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine. ..."
"... I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption. ..."
"... She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose. People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique. ..."
"... This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency consensus" was formed without them. ..."
"... The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.) ..."
"... That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run. Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs. ..."
"... if Warren becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate will be perfectever. ..."
"... Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%. Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected? ..."
Reiterates Her Neoconservative Policies Against Venezuela
Elizabeth Warren repeated her support for regime change in Venezuela in an interview in September with the
Council on Foreign Relations , a central gear in the machinery
of the military-industrial complex. "Maduro is a dictator and a crook who has wrecked his country's economy, dismantled its democratic
institutions, and profited while his people suffer," Warren declared. She referred to Maduro's elected government as a "regime" and
called for "supporting regional efforts to negotiate a political transition." Echoing the rhetoric of neoconservatives in Washington,
Warren called for "contain[ing]" the supposedly "damaging and destabilizing actions" of China, Russia, and Cuba. The only point where
Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela."
Soft-Pedals Far-Right Coup in Bolivia
While Warren endorsed Trump's hybrid war on Venezuela, she more recently whitewashed the U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia.
Warren refused to comment on the putsch for more than a week, even as the far-right military junta massacred dozens of protesters
and systematically purged and detained elected left-wing politicians from MAS.
Finally, eight days after the coup, Warren broke her silence. In a short tweet, the putative progressive presidential candidate
tepidly requested "free and fair elections" and calling on the "interim leadership" to prepare an "early, legitimate election."
What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian
fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president"
Jeanine Aρez. Aρez has referred
to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's progressive constitution,
which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic mandate in a 2009 referendum.
Aρez's ally in this coup regime's interim leadership is
Luis Fernando
Camacho , a multi-millionaire who emerged out of neo-fascist groups and courted support from the United States and the far-right
governments of Brazil and Colombia. By granting legitimacy to Bolilvia's ultra-conservative, unelected leadership, Warren rubber-stamped
the far-right coup and the military junta's attempt to stamp out Bolivia's progressive democracy. In other words, as The Grayzone
editor Max Blumenthal put it, Liz's
Big Structural Bailey compliantly rolled over for
Big IMF Structural Adjustment Program
.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone , and the producer of the "
Moderate Rebels " podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His
website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @
BenjaminNorton .
A vote for evil is never a good choice, and choosing a candidate you perceive as a lesser evil still condones evil. Allowing
the Oligarchy to limit your choice gives them the power to continue advancing evil policies. They control both major parties.
You may succeed in getting non-gender specific restrooms in your Starbucks, but the murdering war machine will continue unabated.
Now, we are seeing the true colors of candidates, who have professed to be progressive. Sanders went on a "tirade" against
Maduro during the last "debate" I saw. Tulsi Gabbard has stayed against US Imperialism, but, I'm sure the Democratic policy controllers
will never nominate her. I foresee I'll be voting for the Socialist next year.
Raymond M. , November 22, 2019 at 18:09
""""On Nov. 10, the U.S. government backed a far-right military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo
Morales bla blla bla".
And the 3 right wing candidates spent more time slinging mud at at each other than at Morales. Had the CIAs top front man Ortez stepped aside, the vote would not have split and allowed Morales to claim a first round victory and avoid
a run-off that he would have lost. And the right wing Christian fundamentalist for sure was a CIA plant who manged to split the
vote further.
Under the Trump administration, the CIA can even run a coup right.
If only those anti-Western rulers seen the light and joined RBWO (rule* based world order, * rules decided in DC, preferably
by bipartisan consensus), then the economy would run smoothly and the population would be happy. Every week gives another example:
By The Associated Press, Nov. 21, 2019, BOGOTA, Colombia
Colombians angry with President Ivαn Duque and hoping to channel Latin America's wave of discontent took the streets by the tens
of thousands on Thursday in one of the biggest protests in the nation's recent history. [ ] Police estimated 207,000 people took
part. [ ] government deployed 170,000 officers, closed border crossings and deported 24 Venezuelans accused of entering the country
to instigate unrest.
So if only Ivαn did not start unnecessary conflict with Maduro, these 24 scoundrels would stay home and the trouble would be
avoided. Oh wait, I got confused
CitizenOne , November 21, 2019 at 22:10
You must imagine that when candidtes suddenly become mind control puppets what is going on. The scariest thing in American
Politics is how supposedly independent and liberal progressives somehow swallow the red pill and are transported into the world
of make believe. Once inside the bubble of fiction far removed from human suffering which is after all what politicians are supposed
to be about fixing they can say crazy things. Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump are the only souls to retain their independent (yet
opposite) minds and both of them got the boot for being different.
Hide Behind , November 21, 2019 at 20:44
The puppet masters are experts, on the one hand there is A Republican, and on the other is a Democrat, but even they mess up
now and then get the different strings tangled.
Some come back on stage on the different hand so to save time they give a puppet two faces.
Watching same puppets gets old so every so often 2-4-6 they restring an old one that was used as props in past, change their makeup
a bit to give them new faces.
We do not actually elect the puppet, we instead legitimize the Puppeteers who own' s the only stage in town.
Those who choreograph the movements and change the backgrouds, media outlets and permanent bureaucrats know the plays before they
are introduced, and they know best how to get adults to leave reality behind and bring back their childhood fantacies.
Days of sugar plums, candy canes, socks filled with goodies and not coal, tooth fairys, and kind generous Fairy God Mothers.
Toy Nutcracker soldiers that turn into Angelic heros, Yellow brick roads, Bunnies with pocket watches, and and magic shoes of
red, or of glass in hand of handsome Princes and beautiful Princesses, all available if we vote.
So who votes, only those who control the voting puppets know that reality does not exist, they twitch we react, and at end of
voting counts one of hand's puppets will slump and cry, while others will leap and dance in joy, only for all to end up in one
pile until the puppeteers need them for next act.
Frederike , November 21, 2019 at 17:30
"What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian
fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president" Jeanine Aρez.
Aρez has referred to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's
progressive constitution, which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic
mandate in a 2009 referendum."
Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"?
She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Aρez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic?
Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich.
Everything she agreed to in the interview listed above is pathetic. I had no idea that she is such a worthless individual.
arggo , November 22, 2019 at 19:57
"neocon" explains this. She seems to have the support of very foundational structures that enabled Hillary Clinton Democrats to attack
and destroy Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Warren has not lost my vote for the simple reason she never had it in the first place. None of this, sickening as it is, comes
as any surprise. Warren is an unapologetic capitalist. She's like Robert Reich in that regard. They both believe capitalismif
reformed, tweaked a bit here and therecan work. To give her credit, she's always been very honest about that. And of course our
doctrine of regime change is all in the service of capitalism. Unless I'm simply confused and mistaken.
Sherwood Forrest , November 22, 2019 at 09:38
Yes, Capitalist First! That makes it so difficult for any aware person to believe she sincerely supports a wealth tax, Universal
Healthcare, Green New Deal, College loan forgiveness, family leave or anything else the 1% oppose. Because promising like Santa
is part of Capitalist politics, and then saying," Nah, we can't afford it."
I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition
and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine.
So Warren's imperialist positions are evil and unnecessary to preserve capitalism, how that projects at her as a person it
is hard to tell. A Polish poet has those words spoken by a character in his drama "On that, I know only what I heard, but I am
afraid to investigate because it poisons my mind about " (Znam to tylko z opowiada?, ale strzeg? si? tych bada?, bo mi truj? my?l
o ) As typical of hearsay, her concept of events in Venezuela, Bolivia etc. is quite garbled, she has no time (but perhaps some
fear) to investigate herself (easy in the era of internet). A serious politician has to think a lot about electability (and less
about the folks under the steam roller of the Empire), so she has to "pick her fights".
It is rather clear that American do not care if people south of the border are governed democratically or competently, which
led Hillary Clinton to make this emphatic statement in a debate with Trump "You will not see me singing praises of dictators or
strongmen who do not love America". One can deconstruct it "if you do not love America you are a strongman or worse, but if you
love America, we will be nice to you". I would love to have the original and deconstructed statement polled, but Warren is not
the only one afraid of such investigations. So "electability" connection to green light to Bolivian fascist and red light to Bolivarians
of Venezuela is a bit indirect. Part of it is funding, part, bad press.
brett , November 21, 2019 at 15:15
I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting
Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison
Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption.
She is a fraud and a liar. One trained in psychology can see, in her every
movement and utterance, the operation that is going on behind the facade. Everything Warren says is a lie to someone. She only
states truth in order to later dis-inform. Classic deception. She (her billionaires) has latched on to the populism of the DSA
etc. in order to sabotage any progressive momentum and drive a stake in it.
Rob Roy , November 22, 2019 at 00:40
She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches
brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose.
People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique.
This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good
grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency
consensus" was formed without them.
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 14:53
The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the
first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly
to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.)
That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run.
Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to
espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats
who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their
target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs.
Absolutely nothing in Warren's background supports her new calculatedly progressive primary persona. She was a Reagan
Republican. When the Republican Party moved right to become the party of batshit crazy and the Democratic Party shifted right
to become the party of Reagan Republicans, she became a Democrat. She's not a good actress, and it takes willing suspension of
disbelief to buy into her performance as a savvier, wonkier alternative to Bernie. And when she's pressed for details (Medicare
for All) and responses to crises (Venezuela and Bolivia), the cracks in her progressive faηade become patently obvious. She's
a sleeper agent for Democratic-leaning plutocrats, like Obama was in 2008, and she would never get my vote.
PS: Impressed by Warren's progressive wealth-tax plan? Don't be. Our country's billionaires know she won't fight for it, and
that if she did, Congress would never pass it. (They know who owns Congress.) Besides, do you really think Pocahontas would
beat Trump? Do you think Sleepy Joe would? The billionaires wouldn't bet on it. And they're fine with that. Sure, they'd like
someone who's more thoroughly corporatist on trade and more committed to hot rιgime-change wars than Trump is, but they can live
just fine with low-tax, low-regulation Trump. It's the prospect of a Bernie presidency that keeps them up at night
and their proxies in the Democratic Party and allied media are doing everything they can to neutralize that threat.
mbob , November 21, 2019 at 18:13
@Peter
Thanks for this beautiful post. I agree with it 100%. I've been trying to figure out why Democrats are so consistently unable
to see through rhetoric and fall for what candidates pretend to be. Part of it is wishful thinking. A lot of it is, as you wrote,
misplaced trust in "respectable" sources. I have no idea how to fix that: how does one engender the proper skepticism of the MSM?
I haven't been able to open the eyes of any of my friends. (Fortunately my wife and daughter opened their own eyes.)
Warren is, if you look clearly, driven by her enormous ambition. She's the same as every other candidate in that regard, save
Bernie.
Bernie is driven by the same outrage that we feel. We need him.
In the last Israeli massacre on Gaza she was all for the IDF killing Palistinians. Americans like to look at the CCP and cry
about China being a one party state. Well is the US not a one party state?= Are the views of the Democrats and Republicans not
the same when it comes to slaughtering people in the third world? There is not a razor`s edge between them. Biden, Warren, Sanders,
Trump, Cruz and Pense they are all war criminals, or if elected will soon become war criminals.
From someone who at the beginning showed promise and humanity, she has turned into Albright and Clinton. How f**king sad is
that?
Dan Kuhn , November 21, 2019 at 14:33
Better to see her for what she really is now then after the election if she were to win. She is disgusting in her inhumanity.
Rob , November 21, 2019 at 13:43
This Is, indeed, disturbing and disappointing. Warren seems so genuinely right on domestic economic and social issues, so how
could she be so wrong on foreign policy issues? The same principles apply in bothjustice, fairness, equity, etc. That said, she
is no worse than any of the other Democratic candidates in that regard, with the exceptions of Sanders and Gabbard, so if Warren
becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate
will be perfectever.
Far better to stick to your principles and write in " None of the above." believe me with this article we can easily see that
Trump is no worse nor better than Warren is. They are both pretty poor excuses as human beings.
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 16:04
@Rob:
If you'll allow me to fix that for you, "What Warren tactically claims to support, in the primaries, seems so genuinely
right on domestic economic and social issues ." I'm convinced Warren is an Obama 2.0 in the making. I don't think anyone
can match Obama's near-180° turnabout from his 2008 primary platform and that if Warren is elected, she will try to make Wall
Street a little more honest and stable, maybe advocate for a $12 minimum wage, and maybe try to shave a few thousand dollars off
student-loan debts. I suppose that technically qualifies as less evil than Trump. But I fully expect her to jettison 90% of her
primary platform, including a progressive tax on wealth and Medicare for All. And when you factor in her recently confirmed approval
of US military and financial imperialism -- economic subversion and rιgime-change operations that cost tens of thousands of innocent
foreign lives, and other peoples their sovereignty -- at what point does "less evil" become too evil to vote for?
John Drake , November 21, 2019 at 13:13
" presidential candidate tepidly requested "free and fair elections". Such a statement ignores the fact that Evo Morales term
was not up; therefore elections are not called for. This means she supports the coup. Restoration of his position which was illegally
and violently stolen from him are in order not elections until his term is up.
Her position on Venezuela is nauseating; as the article states classic neo-conservative. Maybe Robert Kagan will welcome her into
their club as he did with Hillary.
Warren used to be a Republican, she has not been cured of that disease; and is showing her true colors. Maybe it's best as she
is differentiating herself from Bernie. I was concerned before she started down this latest path that she would do an Obama; progressive
rhetoric followed by neo-liberal-or worse- behavior once in office. Maybe she is more honest than Obama.
Guy , November 21, 2019 at 12:40
Warren can't be very informed about what democracy actually means .Democracy is not the same as capitalism .
Not a US citizen but am very disappointed with her stated platform .
Short of divine intervention Tulsi will never make it but Sanders for president and Tulsi as VP would do just fine to re-direct
the US foreign policy and maybe ,just maybe make the US more respectable among the rest of the nations of the world.
It would make a lot of sense from actuarial point of view. The chances that at least one person on the ticket would live healthily
for 8 years would be very good, without Tulsi
Punkyboy , November 21, 2019 at 12:02
I was pretty sure Warren was a Hillary clone; now I'm absolutely sure of it. Another election between worse and worser. I may
just stay home this time, if the world holds together that long.
Socratic Truth , November 21, 2019 at 11:42
Warren is just another puppet of the NWO.
Ma Laoshi , November 21, 2019 at 11:12
I remember years and years ago, I guess about when Lizzie first entered Congress, that she went on the standard pandering tour
to the Motherland and an astute mind commented: Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once
they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%.
Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected?
Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 15:32
@Ma Laoshi:
Speaking of Harvard, having contemplated the abysmal track record compiled by our "best and brightest" -- in Congress,
in the White House, and on the federal bench -- I am now almost as suspicious of the Ivy League as I am of the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security (WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas). The mission of both is to train capable,
reliable, well-compensated servants to the US plutocracy. (And the only reason I say "almost" is because a non-negligible number
of black sheep have come out of the Ivy League and I'm not aware of any that have come out of WHINSEC.)
Sam F , November 23, 2019 at 18:59
Harvard admissions are apparently largely bought, and doubtless those of Yale and others.
MIT was strictly militarist warmongers in the 1970s, and one compete with 80% cheaters.
Dfnslblty , November 21, 2019 at 11:12
" The only point where Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela."
"
Hell, one doesn't need a military option after immoral, illegal and crippling sanctions.
This essay is the most disturbing piece all year-2019.
Vote anti-military vote nonviolence.
Don't give these murderers anything but exposure to humane sensibilities.
I didn't think Trump supported a military solution in Venezuela. That was John Bolton's baby and Trump fired him as one would
hope he would soon fire Pompeo as has been hinted at. Trump campaigned on ending wars of choice but has given in to the MIC at
almost every turn. Maybe he will resign in leiu of being impeached. We might then see a Rand Paul vs. Bernie Sanders. I could
live with either one
Skip Scott , November 21, 2019 at 09:12
Once again the Democratic Party is pushing to have our choice for 2020 be between corporate sponsored war monger from column
A or B.
I wish Tulsi would "see the light" and run as an Independent in 2020. There is absolutely no way that she gets the nod from
the utterly corrupt DNC. She is abandoning her largest base (Independents) by sticking with the Democratic Party. Considering
the number of disgruntled non-voters, she could easily win the general election; but she will never win the Democratic primary.
The field is purposely flooded to ensure the "superdelegates" get the final say on a second ballot.
AnneR , November 21, 2019 at 08:50
Warren is as inhumane, amoral and imperialist as anyone in the WH and the US Congress, and she is certainly kindred in spirit,
thought and would be in deed, as Madeline Albright, the cheerful slaughterer of some 500,000 Iraqi children because the "price
was worth it." Of course, these utterly racist, amoral people do not have to pay "that price" nor do any of their families. (And
let us not forget that Albright and Killary are good friends Warren is totally kindred with the pair, totally.)
And clearly Warren like all of the Demrat contenders is full on for any kind of warfare that will bring a "recalcitrant"
country into line with US demands (on its resources, lands etc.). She is grotesque.
She and those of her ilk all in Congress, pretty much, and their financial backers refuse to accept that Maduro and Morales
*both* were legally, legitimately and cleanly re-elected to their positions as presidents of their respective countries. But to
do that would be to go against her (commonly held) fundamental belief that the US has the right to decide who is and is not the
legitimate national leader of any given country. And what policies they institute.
Anyone who supports economic sanctions is supporting siege warfare, is happily supporting the starvation and deprivation of
potentially millions of people. And shrugging off the blame for the effects of the sanctions onto the government of the sanctioned
country is heinous, is immoral and unethical. WE are the ones who are killing, not the government under extreme pressure. If you
can't, won't accept the responsibility as Warren and the rest of the US government clearly will not for those deaths you are
causing, then stay out of the bloody kitchen: stop committing these crimes against humanity.
Cara , November 21, 2019 at 15:25
Please provide documentation that Sanders is, as you claim, a "full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian."
Sanders has been quite consistent in his criticism of Israel and the treatment of Palestinians: timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-posts-video-citing-apartheid-like-conditions-for-palestinians;
and; jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-israel-palestine-bds
"Sanders is less so, but not wholly because he is a full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian"
Sanders is definitely not "full-on zionist supporter", not only he does not deny that "Palestinians exist" (to died-in-the-wool
Zionists, Palestinians are a malicious fiction created to smear Israel etc., google "Fakestinians"), but he claims that they have
rights, and using Hamas as a pretext for Gaza blockade is inhumane (a recent headline). One can pull his other positions and statements
to argue in the other direction, but in my opinion, he is at the extreme humane end of "zionist spectrum" (I mean, so humane that
almost not a Zionist).
"... Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but many of us will never know... ..."
"... They certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for "the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism. ..."
In my July 25th article " Zelenskii's dilemma " I pointed
out the fundamental asymmetry of the Ukrainian power configuration following Zelenskii's crushing victory over Poroshenko: while
a vast majority of the Ukrainian people clearly voted to stop the war and restore some kind of peace to the Ukraine, the real levers
of power in the post-Maidan Banderastan are all held by all sorts of very powerful, if also small, minority groups including:
The various "oligarchs" (Kolomoiskii, Akhmetov, etc.) and/or mobsters Arsen Avakov's internal security forces including some "legalized"
Nazi death squads The various non-official Nazi deathsquads (Parubii) The various western intelligence agencies who run various groups
inside the Ukraine The various western financial/political sponsors who run various groups inside the Ukraine The so-called "Sorosites"
(соросята) i.e. Soros and Soros-like sponsored political figures The many folks who want to milk the Ukraine down to the last drop
of Ukrainian blood and then run
These various groups all acted in unison, at least originally, during and after the Euromaidan. This has now dramatically changed
and these groups are now all fighting each other. This is what always happens when things begin to turn south and the remaining loot
shrinks with every passing day,
Whether Zelenskii ever had a chance to use the strong mandate he received from the people to take the real power back from these
groups or not is now a moot point: It did not happen and the first weeks of Zelenskii's presidency clearly showed that Zelenskii
was, indeed, in " free fall ": instead of becoming
a "Ukrainian Putin" Zelenskii became a "Ukrainian Trump" – a weak and, frankly, clueless leader, completely outside his normal element,
whose only "policy" towards all the various extremist minorities was to try to appease them, then appease them some more, and then
even more than that. As a result, a lot of Ukrainians are already speaking about "Ze" being little more than a "Poroshenko 2.0".
More importantly, pretty much everybody is frustrated and even angry at Zelenskii whose popularity is steadily declining.
... ... ...
Another major problem for Zelenskii are two competing narratives: the Ukronazi one and, shall we say, the "Russian" one. I have
outlined the Ukronazi one just above and now I will mention the competing Russian one which goes something like this:
The Euromaidan was a completely illegal violent coup against the democratically elected President of the Ukraine, whose legitimacy
nobody contested, least of all the countries which served as mediators between Poroshenko and the rioters and who betrayed their
word in less than 24 hours (a kind of a record for western politicians and promises of support!).
... ... ...
Some of the threats made by these Ukronazis are dead serious and the only person who, as of now, kinda can keep the Ukrainian
version of the Rwandan " Interahamwe " under control would probably be Arsen Avakov, but since he himself is a hardcore
Nazi nutcase, his attitude is ambiguous and unpredictable. He probably has more firepower than anybody else, but he was a pure "
Porokhobot " (Poroshenko-robot) who, in many ways, controlled Poroshenko more than Poroshenko controlled him. The best move
for Zelenskii would be to arrest the whole lot of them overnight (Poroshenko himself, but also Avakov, Parubii, Iarosh, Farion, Liashko,
Tiagnibok, etc.) and place a man he totally trusts as Minister of the Interior. Next, Zelenskii should either travel to Donetsk or,
at least, meet with the leaders of the LDNR and work with them to implement the Minsk Agreements. That would alienate the Ukronazis
for sure, but it would give Zelenskii a lot of popular support.
Needless to say, that is not going to happen. While Zelenskii's puppet master Kolomoiskii would love to stick this entire gang
in jail and replace them with his own men, it is an open secret that powerful interest groups in the US have told Zelenskii "don't
you dare touch them". Which is fine, except that this also means "don't you dare change their political course either".
...are going through the famous Kübler-Ross stages of griefs: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance: currently,
most of them are zig-zagging between bargaining and depression; acceptance is still far beyond their – very near – horizon. Except
that Zelenskii has nothing left to bargain with.
Thank you for a rational article about Ukraine. The sad thing is that it might take years to reach the "acceptance" phase.
It would take someone like Hitler to clean out the stables. Arrest is not a viable option as they will bribe their way out.
These people need to be put down like rabid dogs. That is the only way to put an end to their mischief and it would be a deterrent
to their replacements.
Personally, I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel. Another
country that is still in the "denial" phase. Its military and political leaders know full-well that their strategic aims have
all failed. The boot is now firmly on the other foot.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous it has all become, the UK no longer accepts medical degrees awarded by universities in Crimea.
Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but
many of us will never know...
I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel.
You got that right – what it's all about is building a New Khazaria. But they're neither giving up on their Greater Israel
project between the two rivers, and hence more wars, conflict and chaos to drive out the native Arabs from the Middle East.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
@AWMThey certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for
"the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part
of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism.
@bob sykes Kolomoiskii is the real hidden owner/controller of the company that bribed the Bidens. He has a finger in lots
of pies. His pretense to leaning towards Russia is his way to try to get the Americans to stop attempts to get at the many millions
that he stole from his own Ukrainians bank – fake loans to his companies.
Of course, the Russians understand all of that. This theater is aimed at the Americans – not at the Russians.
For the Ukrainian state to break up, there need to be some forces interested in a break-up. You won't find such forces inside
the Ukraine.
What is Ukrainian South-East? In pure political terms, "South-East" is a bunch of oligarchs, who are all integrated into Ukrainian
system, and have no reason to seek independence from Kiev, especially if it means getting slapped with Western sanctions.
Even the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
It's worth pointing out that the so-called "Novorossia movement" started out as Akhmetov's project to win concessions from
new Kiev regime. It was then quickly hijacked by Strelkov, a man who actually wanted to break up the Ukraine, and it is because
of Strelkov, that Donetsk and Lugansk are now de-facto independent. Without similar figures to lead secessionist movements elsewhere
in the Ukraine, this break-up that Saker keeps talking about will never happen.
His ratings must be sky-high, because otherwise I cannot imagine why Fox would allow him to continue to use their network as
a medium to broadcast common sense.
Of course the Dems are making it so easy.
Schiff, Kent, Taylor, Yanovitch -- what a pathetic, nauseating crew.
The opposing positions of Warren and her primary opponent Bernie Sanders on Bolivia
highlight an increasingly clear policy gap between the two Democratic frontrunners.
11-20-19
Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential nomination frontrunner Elizabeth Warren
endorsed the recent U.S. backed military coup d'état in Bolivia Monday. Warren's
statement carefully avoided using the word "coup," and instead referred to the new government
of Jeanine Añez as an "interim leadership," effectively validating the new
administration.
She stated that the Bolivian people "deserve free and fair elections, as soon as
possible," implying that the October 20 vote, won convincingly by President Evo Morales, was
not clean, thus taking essentially the same position as the Trump administration, who made no
secret of their relief that Morales was ousted.
The opposing positions of Warren and her primary opponent Bernie Sanders on Bolivia
highlight an increasingly clear policy gap between the two Democratic frontrunners.
11-20-19
Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential nomination frontrunner Elizabeth Warren
endorsed the recent U.S. backed military coup d'état in Bolivia Monday. Warren's
statement carefully avoided using the word "coup," and instead referred to the new government
of Jeanine Añez as an "interim leadership," effectively validating the new
administration.
She stated that the Bolivian people "deserve free and fair elections, as soon as
possible," implying that the October 20 vote, won convincingly by President Evo Morales, was
not clean, thus taking essentially the same position as the Trump administration, who made no
secret of their relief that Morales was ousted.
@Alfred I had the same thoughts. Zelenskii should show a similar coffin with the text
"This one is still empty" and then start rounding up the terrorists. He finally has a good
excuse.
Thank you Saker and Unz for the very interesting article .
I wonder what has been the role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster . ...I have the
feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the ucranian disaster out of their
genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ?
Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany
which was gifted with the german reunification , is less and less trusted spetially in south
Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU .
Most of the people in the EU would like to keep collaborating with the US , of course ,
but also with Russia and with the rest of the world . Most of the people in the UE are scared
of the dark forces operating in Ukraine trying to provoke a war with Russia .
The stupid name-calling like the term "ukronazi" makes this article look like a rant like
North Korean communiques or the ravings of some Arab despot's propagandist. It is not better
than calling "The Saker" a "Moskal", "Sovok" or "Putler's stooge" etc. He should keep this
lingo to directly "debating" "Ukronazis" on twitter or youtube commentst etc. not for an
article that is supposed to be a serious analysis.
I understand that it is hard for a Russian nationalist to accept that the majority of
Ukrainians don't want to belong to their dream Russkiy Mir, they were seduced by the West,
which is more attractive with all its failings, because mostly of simple materialistic
reasons. Ukrainians happily go to EU countries that now allow them in as guest workers. The
fact, like it or not that majority of them chose the West over Russkiy Mir despite being very
close to Russians in culture, language, history etc. He is still in the first stage of grief
it seems.
All in all, Ukrainians are probably way above average in most human characteristics. The
area of Ukraine is by planetary standards one of the best available: arable land, great
rivers, Black see, pleasant and liveable.
But it is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago,
population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live
abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent
attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to
become someone else.
Now why is that? A normal society would have enough introspection to discuss this, to look
for answers. Throwing a temper-tantrum on a big square in Kiev every few years is not looking
for a solution. That is escapism, Orange-this, Maidan-that, 'Russians bad', 'we are going
West', 'golden toilets', and always 'Stalin did it'.
I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates
throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much
longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general
prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova,
good for them.)
Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on
external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting
that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that
they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant
well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will
never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that
game, it is just entertainment for them.
Or alternatively you can pray that Russia collapses – good luck waiting for
that.
There is not much 'drang' left in Germany, so I think this is mostly fingers on the map
post dinner empty talk.
in 1945 the jewery asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused
Crimea is a jewel, but has one big problem: not enough water. But that's also true about
Izrael, maybe there is a deep genetic memory of coming out of a desert environment.
During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is
a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start
sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it.
And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts.
The mexicans are able to make fun of themselves , that`s a good thing . They have a joke
which aplies also to Ukraina ( and other countries )
The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains ,
plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then
God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something
bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure
pendejos ,( idiots ) .
@AWM "Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references?
If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker
provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology.
The world won't miss a thing if Curmudgeon or AWM goes off in a huff, to sit on his toilet
and read the "one joke per dump" volume lodged on the tank and stops reading The Saker's very
thorough analysis as a protest action!
@Anon My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos .
But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly
somehow fails.)
Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this
is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland.
When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the
crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking
about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car
in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia.
Another good article – thanks – Yep, the US/EU NWO is not going to let their
"West Ukraine Isis" battalions and intel gang lose their funding , arms trafficking ops, or
terrorist reputation. This is a no win situation in Ukraine and the West knows it –
Even if NovoRossiya gets some independence, the Ukraine Isis will/can reek havoc and murder
for a long time along the border. The modern Cheka { Ukraine Isis } has been modified for the
security of the new Farmland owners – Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont and the rest of the
Globalist Corporations and their ports close to Odessa.
One point of contention since it wasn't made clear in this article – Novorussia
consists of Luhansk and Donetsk, but not Kharkov. While Kharkov has more Russians than most
other provinces of Ukraine do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
All of Ukraine's doomsayers have been crying about Ukraine's demise for the lat 25
years, yet the fact is that it' s getting stronger and stronger every year,
USA diaspora keeps on delivering.
Shoutout to quarter/half Poles USA citizens LARPing as Ukrainian patriots in the
comments.
@Felix KeverichEven the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the
Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
Follow the money my friend!
Some provinces send much more money to Kiev then they get back in "services". So long as
more loans from the EU, The USA and the IMF were forthcoming, that situation was not too bad.
Now, the spigot is being closed. Hence the sad face of Mr Z when he met Trump in
Washington.
This means that the provinces that are losing most from this internal transfer are going
to be strongly motivated to stop sending money to Kiev. Kiev will lose control and that will
fragment the country.
The Donbass was a big contributor to Kiev and got little in return – that was a
major reason for their dissatisfaction. Everyone there could see that Kiev sent the money
west and kept much for itself.
If the French provinces were to stop sending money to Paris, the Yellow movement would be
totally unnecessary.
@awry About 2.5 million Ukrainians have "emigrated" (you could also say "fled") to the RF
since 2014.
Per Bloomberg most of the outflow not to Russia has been to countries of Eastern Europe, esp.
Poland.
@AP "Ukraine was historically a marsh of Poland for centuries before it was a historical
marsh of Russia"
That was mostly Galicia and Volhynia. It is a tiny part of today's the Ukraine. In these
areas, the Poles were landowners, the Jews their rent/tax collectors and the peasants were
Ukrainian-speaking Slavs. Now, they are planning to sell the best farmland to "foreigners"
(i.e. Jews) and the Slavs will become serfs once again.
@Mr. Hack The problem with your argument is that the 'war' in the east was entirely
predicable. So was Crimea leaving and joining Russia. The people in charge in Kiev –
presumably with 3-digit IQ – would think about it, plan for it, etc They obviously
didn't. Instead they provided a needed catalyst to make it worse by voting in February 2014
to ban Russian language in official use, and the idiotic attacks on Russian speakers like in
Odessa, that were neither prevented nor punished. The other side – in this case Russia
and Russian speakers living in Donbas and Crimea – rationally took care of their own
interests. Post-Maidan Kiev handed them all they could on a silver platter while busying
themselves with silly slogans and videos of golden saunas.
Russia is actually one of the least susceptible countries to an economic collapse in the
world – it is largely self-sufficient, has enormous resources that others will always
buy, and has a very minimal percentage of its economy that deals with foreign trade. What
they are susceptible to is the loss of value for their currency – and that has already
largely happened since 2014. When it comes to energy, the countries that are low-cost
producers are least impacted – who you should worry about are the numerous higher-cost
producers like US shale, coal miners, or LNG gas that have huge upfront fixed costs and
built-in high transportation costs. Russia and Saudis will be fine.
Back to the drawing board, what exactly is the plan in Kiev? If they know that having a
war costs them investments, how do they end that war? It is highly unlikely that it would end
with a victorious Kiev army conquering Donetsk (or Crimea). So what's the plan?
It's amazing how spectacularly inept all these interventions over the last decades have been.
Iraq, Lybia, Syria, Yemen, the coup in Turkey but also Ukraine.
And I know that in the ME, the Isrseli policy, as iterated by Michael Orin is to let all
sides bleed each other to death, and that part has been relatively successful until
recently.
But in Ukraine, they were going to consolidate their control over the country from Kiev
and force-march the Russians out of Sevastopol. And that part didn't work at all, except as
leverage to impose sanctions on Russia; but the long term goal of using Ukraine to overthrow
Putin is now stuck in the Donbas.
My point being that it is the great fortune of the world that these criminal nitwits and
fools in the State (War) Department and their helpers in the "intelligence" community are so
arrogant and incompetent.
@Anon Merkel (who herself was studying in Donetsk for few months) definitely has a hand
in ze EuroUkrainian mess.
Afterall she met with Right Sector representatives one dayt before the final, bloody part
of the coup started. And that meeting of "reporting on delivering at our commitments and
asking Merkel about her delivery of her commitments" both with the next day start of "offence
at the government" was announced by Right Sector yet another day before, 16 February
2014.
However i have reservations about Merkel representing German peoples, especially some
alleged "genetical" trend of them to invade eastwards.
It was public, that Merkel's everything including public phone is spied upon by USA
"intelligence community", and Merkel considered it normal and proper.
So it is clearly stated what she considers her allegiance and whom she considers her
employees. Not citizens of Germany.
"Each of these countries is as inorganic and disunited as Ukraine, or worse, made up as they
are of various racial and ethnic groups who don't identify with each other."
I am dubious about this suggestion. But more importantly, Ukraine or the Ukraine has had a
violent revolution about every ten years. You simply cannot develop a stable government,
economy or safe social system if you you overturn the the government via violence every ten
tears.
That is the key differences and essential to any successful government, and more so for a
democracy that holds as innate belief, a tolerance for difference even competing ideas held
by its population. It is as if the only the only we are exporting is revolution as solution
to differences.
@Mr. Hack > Russia has never been able to lead with a carrot, but only with a stick.
Russia offered dozen billions of loans and years ahead orders for Ukrainian industries.
Those that Yatzenyuk begged to be re-started when he destroyed democratic government of
Ukraine.
EuroMaidan tried to stole the carrot from Ukraine, and while it succeeded in stealing what
Ukraine already picked, about 10%, the rest was kept safe of usurpers' reach, and so they
started looting Ukrainian economy instead. Hrivna fallen 3-fold – more than ruble.
> Positive outside influence into Ukraine's internal development in the form of
investments and economic development
EuroMaidan usurpers stopped real and ongoing investments from China and Russia by looting
what investments arrived into Ukraine already. But at least they got $5 billions of
investments from Nulland.
I like how "economic development" is listed as "outside influence". I thought that any
state or nation would claim being capable of their own economic development, but for
EuroMaidania it is quoted as some miracle that can only be given from outside.
> foreign investments being delayed until the war in the east is resolved
And that was why EuroMaidan usurpers invaded Donbass and started the war. To preclude
investments from the West after they stopped investments form China and Russia.
> create a chaotic situations
EuroMaidan proponent blaming chaotic situations. Precious. "Bees against honey"
movement.
> Since the West changed the dynamics of the energy game around the world
Did it? how exactly? By making Ukrainian pipelines liability no one wants to touch with a
pole?
> It's learned to better feed itself, and that's about it
But that is exactly what Ukraine knew how to do, and what EuroMaidania can not do.
While Russia is gaining this experience – EuroMaidania was and is destroying it, for
the sake of being "not like Russia". Way to go!
> One more jolt like in 2014
You mean the one when rouble fallen two-fold and hrivna three-fold?
Guess if the West could do it again – they would. But they can't.
> where are Russia's automobiles, televisions, medical equipment, computers,
pharmaceuticals etc; within the world markeplace?
Russia is not packaging consumer goods. Russia is sending technologies, which others pack
as consumer goods.
Ukraine could become one of those salesmen, packing Russian technologies into pretty wraps
and selling around.
EuroMaidan usurpers feared that and prevented that.
EuroMaidan even destroyed Antonov company, which was one of just 4 companies in the world
capable of building large airframes. Ensuring AirBus+Boeing+Tupolev/Ilyushin would have one
competitor less. And as Antonov was el-cheapo vendor with strategy based on dumping –
it was especially dangerous for Russian company, of the three. Thank you, guys, for removing
this riddance out of Russian pathway. You did great service!
@Hapalong Cassidy Beckow> the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about
to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving.
You do not need to "have a feeling"
The promise of "visa-less living and working in EU" was exactly what EuroMaidan crowd
paraded as their aim and treasure, somehow magically warranted by the "Deep Association" that
Yatzenyuk and Poroshenko later dragged feet for months, trying to delay signing of this
economy suicide pact.
They were very public and honest about it. They claimed Yanukovich was somehow putting
ball and chain on them all by giving the second thought to orders from Brussels. Aid in
leaving Ukraine was the price they sold Ukrainian economy for. Ther were never shy in 2014 to
speak about it.
Hapalong Cassidy> While Kharkov has more Russians than most other provinces of Ukraine
do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
There is a point. Kharkov in North-East and Odessa in South-West were trading cities,
routing the official and smuggled goods streams and hosting the largest foreign goods
markets. This clearly had impact upon mindsets of citizens and even more of cities
elites.
People in Kharkov went to the streets right after the coup commited and without support
they were at least equally numerous to all-Ukraine sponsored gathering of EuroMaidan #2.
But their leaders did not seek for independence, Kharkov city mayor Kernes openly shook hands
with Andrey "White Fuhrer" Byletsky and expressed his care about his (not Kharkov citizens)
safety in the night of Rymarskaya street murders, 2014 March 14th AFAIR.
People in Kharkov went against nazi from westernmost Ukraine regions (and even policemen)
and stormed those out of their district government building. Who else did then?
They had a huge impulse, but they also focused the most efforts from usurpers to deflect
and dissipate it. And little free resources the usurpers had back then.
Month later, in April, Kharkov was exhausted and pacified. But other regions of Ukraine were
overlooked those two months.
However, it was that first month which gave people in Donetsk and Lugansk both time and
examples to understand what is really going on (it was almost unbelievable that something
like that can actually happen in XXI century in Europe, wasn't it?) and learn their Ukrainian
elites are prostituting them, and then find some other leaders which would have enough skin
in the game to not sell them out.
You may rightly say Kharkov citizens did not resist for long. But have to admit the
resistance of Donbass and Lugansk was in significant part based upon time Kharkov bought them
in March and April 2014, and upon self-exposing that Kharkov's fleeting but furious
resistance forced EuroMaidan usurpers into.
"All, repeat, ALL the steps taken to sever crucial economic and cultural links between Russia
and the Ukraine were decided upon by Ukrainian leaders, never by Russia who only replied
symmetrically when needed.
Even with international sanctions directed at her, Russia successfully survived both the
severance of ties with the Ukraine and the AngloZionist attempts at hurting the Russian
economy. In contrast, severing economic ties with Russia was a death-sentence for the
Ukrainian economy which has now become completely deindustrialized."
No wonder saker deletes posts to his website containing info like these:
The top trade partner of *the* Ukraine is Russia. So his thesis is a little 'shoddy math'
ish. The links have not been severed as he pretends.
" the severance of ties with Russia " The Ukraine is more tied to Russia than any other
country, by recent trade volumes (as well as in traditional culture). Saker doesn't like
these facts to muddy up his thesis.
This means that the provinces that are losing most from this internal transfer are going
to be strongly motivated to stop sending money to Kiev.
You don't get it. Ukraine's South-Eastern provinces are inanimate objects . They
have no consciousness, no self-interest or free will. They don't decide anything.
Donbass never decided to break away from the Ukraine. That choice was made for it by
Strelkov, when he and his men occupied Slovyansk and began an armed confrontation.
@Anon The Ukraine used to export something like $20 billion worth of goods to Russia
annually. It's now closer to $5 billion, and Ukrainians are a lot poorer as a result.
@Felix Keverich The point is saker maintains it is completely de-industrialized. It is
'dead'. Total trade of >40 B all partners, isn't dead by a long shot. See what he says?
'Death sentence'. Far from it. A decrease isn't death. No doubt there has been a plunge. But
saker is over stating it. Russia is still a center of gravity for the Ukraine.
I am so sick and tired of hearing the term nazi this and nazi that when referring to the
situation in the Ukraine. The term nazi died in 1945 and should be left dead and buried. It
was a stupid word created by the British during the war because of their inability to
pronounce the German name for the NSDAP. The British and American media have a fetish for the
word and will call any "right-wing" movement "nazi" if given any opportunity. This shows
their total lack of creativity to come up with anything new and their deep obsession with
anything to do with Hitler which borders on religious worship. I say get rid of the usage of
the word on this site unless one is referring to the actual NSDAP party that existed until
1945.
@AWM You are an absurd cretin. Of course referring to current Ukraine as being controlled
by Nazi's is 100% accurate.
Ukronazis and Hitler Nazi's have many alignments with eachother:
1. Bizarre, fundamentally paganist usage of ahistoric/religious images from a millenia ago
as national symbols that should have had no connection to national identity of either state
in the 1930's or now ( swastika and Tryzub) even the UPA flag has more sense about it to any
"Ukrainian " state
2. Mass arrests and persecution of political opponents I'm fairly sure that Ukronazi's
have arrested ( and maybe even killed) far more people in their first 5 years, that the
Nazi's ever did in their 6 year, pre-war time in charge
3. Mass killing and torture of the people of the Donbass- now take on board this is with
Russia fighting the war of fighting the war that they are not even there and Russia/DNR/LNR
basically conducting huge talks with west/Banderastan and making huge concessions every time
they have been in a a hugely advantageous position or made a big breakthrough in the war.
Even Nazi's wouldn't have used such a lousy pretext for instigating war against the people of
Donbass – although at least the Nazi's could govern their state ukrops can't govern f
** k all without it descending into farce
4. Above average representation of freaks and/or highly camp idiots Goebbels, Goering and
Ribbentrop versus Avakov, "Yats" the yid, Poroshenko, Turchynov and many more – a
lamentable contest
5. Neither would have got off the ground without Anglo-American funding
Just because the Nazi's in the 30's and 40's were more competent does not take away the
similarities
Structural bottlenecks and slow reform progress lead to anemic growth in Ukraine
The rate of economic growth in Ukraine remains too low to reduce poverty and reach income
levels of neighboring European countries. Following the 16 percent cumulative contraction of
the economy in 2014-15, economic growth has recovered to 2.4 percent in 2016-17 and 3.3
percent in 2018. Faster economic growth for a sustained period of time is needed to reduce
poverty which remains above pre-crisis levels. More needs to be done if Ukraine's aspiration
is to become a high-income country and to close the income gap with advanced economies. Today
Ukraine is far from that goal. In terms of GDP-per-capita, Ukraine remains one of the poorest
countries in the region -- at levels of Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. Ukraine's GDP per
capita in purchasing power parity terms is about three times lower than in Poland, despite
having similar income levels in 1990.
At the growth rate of recent years, it will take Ukraine more than 50 years to reach income
levels of today's Poland. If Ukraine's productivity growth and investment rate remains at the
low levels observed in recent years, overt the medium-term the growth rate will converge to
almost zero per annum -- productivity growth is offset by declining contribution of labor as
Ukraine undergoes the demographic transition. Boosting total factor productivity growth to 3
percent per year and investment to 30 percent of GDP would result in sustained growth of
about 4 percent per year over the medium- to long-term. Given declining total population this
translates to GDP per capita growth of about 4.5 percent per year. These trends will not
improve on their own, they can happen only through the implementation of appropriate policies
that boost productivity and increase the returns on factors of production.
1. It does not split trade to industries. Hi-tech big added value and lo-tech slim added
value – falls into the same "total"
2. It only shows one snapshot, not YoY dynamics.
3. The column "Export Product" shows exactly the same value – literally, 100% –
for ALL the countries, all the rows. I wonder what we should deduce from it
2012 – $19,8B
2013 – $17,6B – the start of the coup
2014 – $15B – the coup won power but did not entrenched yet and did not had time
yet to enforce its ideals
2015 – $9.8B – the work started
2016 – $4.8B – 80% of 2012 exports are cut off, EuroMaidan means business
2017 – $3.6B – 82% of 2013 exports are cut off, coming to plateau ?
2018 – $3,9B – a slight rebound, plateau reached
@bob sykes I'd dismiss this, as Putin is apparently doing. Kolomoisky is looking who else
would provide money that he can steal. He, Porky, and others of their ilk stole Western loans
so blatantly, that even US-controlled IMF is balking at giving Ukraine more money. So,
Kolomoisky hopes that Russia will, so that he has more to steal. I hope that his hopes are in
vain.
The entire Ukraine farce can be explained as a simple project
Khazaria 2.0.
I met a Jew (American) in Ukraine over 20 years ago.
He told me the plan Jews were returning to historically Jewish cities in Ukraine by the
hundreds buying up for kopecki on the Gryvnia anything they could.
Media outlets, banks, factories, beachfront land, farmland, apartments, etc.
The idea? Make Ukraine the next EU Country, and benefit from the huge potential of
Ukraine.
I agreed with him at the time, that Ukraine had huge potential, I was there as an engineer
working for German companies but his lust for what could be 'looted' disgusted me.
This is a standard CIA scenario, used in Sarajevo and Deraa before Kiev. So, Ukrainians
bought an old stale show, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
But the Georgian snipers brought in 2014 to Kiev by Saakashvili started dying in
suspicious circumstances, so those who are still alive rushed to Belarus and started deposing
their testimony. They implicated a lot of Ukies, including former speaker Parubii, former MP
Pashinsky, etc. It was well known (to those who did not keep their eyes wide shut for
political reasons) that the sniper fire in 2014 on Maidan was from the building controlled by
the coup leaders, who later tried to blame Yanuk for it. That's why post-coup Ukrainian
authorities got rid of the trees on Maidan: bullet holes in those trees indicated where the
fire was coming from. But this recent testimony implicated particular people, who (surprise,
surprise!) happened to be among the coup leaders.
@Truth3 The truth is that you are absolutely right. 'Ukrainians' boasted that they are
the 'Khazars' since Mazeppa and Orlyk of the 'Constitution of Bendery' fame, while parading a
distaste for 'the adherents of deceitful Judaism' and noisy adherence to Orthodoxy.
Look at this entry of the http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com and see if
anything changed:
"After Mazepa's death, on 16 April 1710, Orlyk was elected hetman, with the backing of
Charles XII of Sweden, in Bendery. The chief author of the Constitution of Bendery, he
pursued policies aimed at liberating Ukraine from Russian rule. He gained the support of the
Zaporozhian Host, concluded a treaty with Charles XII* in May 1710, and sought to make the
Ukrainian question a matter of international concern by continuing Mazepa's attempts at
establishing an anti-Russian coalition ** . Orlyk signed a treaty with the Crimean khan
Devlet-Girei in February 1711, negotiated with the Ottoman Porte, which formally recognized
his authority over Right-Bank Ukraine and the Zaporizhia in 1712, conducted talks with the
Don Cossack participants in Kondratii Bulavin's revolt who had fled to the Kuban, and even
contacted the Kazan Tatars and the Bashkirs. In 1711–14 he led Cossack campaigns
against the Russians in Right-Bank Ukraine. Despite initial victories they ultimately failed,
because of Turkish vacillation and because the pillaging, raping, and taking of many civilian
captives by Orlyk's Crimean Tatar allies resulted in the loss of public and military support
on the Right Bank".
Nowhere does the 'first "European" constitution' speak about 'ukrainians', but of 'Exercitu
Zaporoviensi genteque Rossiaca" (Zaporozhian Host and the Ruthenian people) living in
"Parva Rossia"/Little Russia.
* putting Ukraine under the protection of the King of Sweden.
** an plot of 'European' and Islamic powers with an intense 'Masonic-Kabbalistic' coloring
(and Jewish financial support) against Russian 'Tsardom' and 'Patriarchal' Church. 'Ukraine'
was an anti-Russian project from the get go. Brzezinski's quip: "Ukraine, a new and important
space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an
independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a
Eurasian empire" reflects only the revival of the old plan in new circumstances.
@Seraphim " Brzezinski's quip: "Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian
chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot "
Old Zbieg was as lunatic as Pole can be and as cunning as Jew can be (was he?).
The Poles were so desiring to became Slavic superpower, and on the height of their might
in 15th century – they could become. They occupied Russian lands – oh, that
mythical Kievan Rus oppressed by Moscow for centuries. And they even occupied Moscow for few
months – more than unified Europe managed to do under both Napoleon and Hitler
combined! Polska was really stronk then.
.well, they ate themselves from inside and sold their statehood to all the foreign bidders
while boasting about Polish pride. Like ukropeans do today. They lost their strength, they
lost their eastern colony, and for a while they even lost Poland itself.
They could never move over it.
Zbieg – coming from Galicia, the last shrink of Poland-occupied lands – had
this specifically Polish resentment burning in him. And he managed to make USA fight Polish
fights. Managed to use American incompetence in history and geography to sell them that idea
that the Ukraine – the borderlands between Poland and Russia have "geopolitical"
importance. For USA, no less. Wow!
Okay, USA invested at very least $5B into buying Ukrainian warchiefs, and we don't know
how much more was added by EU and Germany. They now have this "geopolitical asset" as Zbieg
urged them to do. What are they gonna do with it now? How do they gonna make Ukrainians pay
back the money they spent? Old Zbieg preached about the world "paid by Russia to fight
against Russia". This is that very "Russia, occupy the Ukraine finally, we are tired of
fruitless waiting!" whining they repeat again and again. But if this won't work, just like it
did not work yet, how do they think to make Ukrainians pay for it? Or whom else? I wonder
@Arioch "> My point is the ukraine isn't dead. It isn't dying.
In which quality? As a swath of land inhabited by few peasants here and there – it
surely will remain.
As an economically vibrant country, one of UN founders, with economy larger than German and
closing on France – what it used to be – it is dead.
As a laws-bound polity it is dead since 2014, though was dying even before.
As STEM engineering and education stronghold it was in USSR – it is dead.
As one in just four in the whole world producers of really large airplanes – it is
dead.
As one of the few ICBM producers – it is dead, know-how sold to Saudi.
As one of the few turbojet engines producers – it is dead, know-how sold to China.
As one of the reliable and well known tanks and APCs producer – it is dead, even
USA-occupied Iraq does not buy this trash.
As the country, living from the geographic rent, just providing roads and hotels for cargo
traffic, it is almost dead. Bridges are collapsing, roads – neither for cars nor
railways – are not maintained."
Bravado, anyone can see.
Dead countries don't produce electricity. Real economists look at things like this. Not
just at industrial reorganization. That is the only point you have. Industrial
reorganization. Not death of industry.
@Anon BTW, most *live* countries of the world do not produce ICBMs, nor jet engines, nor
APCs etc, nor super heavy aircraft. The military industrial complex remnants from the SU are
not industries that most of the planet's countries have. Specialties. Those can not be
measures of whether a country is living or dead. Use some real measures.
@Anon Actually a good point. Mass cargo logistics and energy generation. Indeed.
The thing here is, that as of now the Ukraine is enjoying its privileged position from
times Ukrainians ruled USSR (IOW, after Stalin died in 1953 and of few coup leaders Khruschev
became top dog in 1956). The Ukraine is reeking with then top-tech nuclear power plants, that
very few of other USSR republics had (one in Ignalina in Baltics, one in Armenia, and dozen
in Russia, that is all. Ukraine was #2 with huge gap).
There is a switch, though. What do you do with electricity you produced?
And, what kind of electricity you produce?
The second question is tangential to "green energy" fad.
The generation is split to "base" generation, which covers required minimum and should be
steadily generating around the clock, and "maneuvering" generation which can be turned on and
off in a matter of few minutes, to accommodate with daytime traits, like "people awoke in
between 7-8am, took shower, cooked breakfast and departed to school/work".
In general, base generation is predictable, thus does not need big reserves, can use economy
of scales and cut costs. Maneuvering one has to increase costs, dealing with unpredictable
mode changes and extra wearing it puts on the equipment and employees.
The first question, as you can not pour electricity into a tank and keep it for months
there, can be roughly split to
1) use at home, for things like washing, cleaning, entertaining (TV, computers), air
conditioning in summer and heating in winter.
2) use in industries, this is perhaps what "real economists" look for. Those should had less
daily spikes, they might even have near constant consumption around the clock.
3) export to the countries, who need it, but does not want to build their own power
plants
The export is significant thing. There is so called Byrshtyn Island, a constellation of
power plants in Western Ukraine, that was cut off from Ukrainian grid and plugged to Polish
grid, to act as maneuvering damper for Polish citizens' daylight cycles.
You chart shows that between 2014 and 2015 there was strong (about 2000 GWH) decrease in
production, which remained more or less stable after that. It also shows huge seasonal
variation.
It probably means Ukrainian industries and households enjoy a lot of winter-time heating, but
very little of summer-time AC. Just like it was built during USSR times.
Ukrainian electricity export seems rising. Were there new power plants put to service? I
did not heard. Then it means that domestic consumption shrunk.
There was also a streak of Nuclear Power Plants accidents in the news of 2017-2019.
This can stem from two factors:
1) increased reliance on NPP as other power plants go belly-up, especially forcing those
giant NPPs into maneuvering modes, which they were not designed for. You can find news
sources that Ukrainian NPPs were being tested to 105% of normative capacity and to
maneuvering modes, the modes that just do not make sense when together.
2) decreased maintenance
Anyway, those NPPs are of old Soviet design of 1980-s, they are closing to end of life.
We'll see if new ones will be built. Or if they will just be used regardless of aging until
some hard failure, "run to the ground". And what will come after.
Of course, as long as they operate – no mater how harmful to locals – EU will
buy cheap energy.
And since EuroMaidan government is living on debts, it will have no choice than to sell. Even
if domestic power consumption will get zero, the EU will buy the power.
But I do not think EU would invest into building new power plants there when Soviet ones
finally crack.
@Anon Indeed, only Airbus and Boeing can produce super-heavy aircrafts.
China and Russia are contenders. Ukraine used to be, but stepped out.
Does it mean, USA and France are hell-bent over their military industrial complex?
Maybe.
Does it make them run worse?
Bombardier and EmBraer factories are bought by Airbus and Boeing, not vice versa.
Avro of Canada once used to be a pillar, now is memory.
And all the other countries have to kiss up to political powers that allow them purchasing
Boeing and Airbus jets and maintenance as a privilege for their lapdogging.
Iran wanted to buy Airbus badly, how did it work out?
So, yeah, specialties. Those specialties that can not be replaced – for master
races.
And those that can easily – for lapdogs.
New Zealand can produce good beef. But so can Brazil and Argentina. And Ukraine too.
But Brazil can not produce irreplaceable large cargo aircrafts. And even mid-size they can
not produce independently.
All nations are completely artificial along with the gods, ideologies, fiat money & all
the rest if the human fictions. If humans went extinct overnight would the US, Russia et al
still exist? No, nor would their thousands of gods.
That little trick with the maps can be done with many countries. The US is a fine example.
1st map = 13 colonies – keep adding new maps for every new state they added after
France paid for & won US independence & include the theft/conquest of Mexican
territory & Hawaii.
The Ukraine is a huge basket case made much worse by the US, but your (Orlov too) Rabid
Russian nationalism blinds you. IOW, like the empires propagandists, you too are spinning a
narrative, albeit more truthful than empires, but a narrative (emotional) nonetheless.
@Dr Scanlon Maybe we just compare real Ukraine with what it was promised to become?
Michael Saakashvili, 2014-08-26, "Exactly one year from today Ukraine would send
humanitarian aid to Russia. Mark my words.". I am still trying to find that aid around me, no
luck
There also was a much more extended timetable, year by year, how Ukraine would rocket to
the future and how Russia would fall down to middle ages. Wanted to re-read it but could not
find.
@Anon Or yea, sure. Even Ukrainian statistics (which in terms of reliability might be
somewhat better than Nostradamus, at least sometimes) report 53 births for 100 deaths, with
the population shrinking due to this differential alone by more than 200,000 per year. If you
count in emigration, the picture becomes very bleak. Millions work in Russia, Poland, and
elsewhere. Mind you, temporary emigration for work easily becomes permanent. For example, I
have a cousin who used to live in Lvov. He worked in Russia for 20+ years, and since 2014
never visited Ukraine. I guess he is still counted, as he remains a Ukrainian citizen.
@Mr. Hack OK, let's go to the original of the constitution 'ratified' by "His Majesty the
King of Sweden" (cum consensu S-ae R-ae Maiestatis Sueciae, Protectoris Nostri/with the
consent of His Majesty the King of Sweden, our protector):
"It is no secret that Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky of glorious memory, with the
Zaporozhian Host, took up arms and began a just war against the Polish Commonwealth for no
other reason (apart from rights and liberties) except their Orthodox faith, which had been
forced as a result of various encumbrances placed on it by the Polish authorities into union
with the Roman church. Similarly, after the alien new Roman religion had been eradicated
from our fatherland, he with the said Zaporozhian Host and Ruthenian [Rossiaca] people,
sought and submitted himself to the protection of the Muscovite tsardom for no other
reason than "that it shared the same Orthodox religion". Therefore, if God our Lord, strong
and mighty in battle, should assist the victorious armies of His Royal Majesty the King of
Sweden to liberate our fatherland from the Muscovite yoke of slavery, the present newly
elected Hetman will be bound by duty and put under obligation to take special care that no
alien religion is introduced into our Ruthenian [Rossiacam] fatherland. Should one, however,
appear anywhere, either secretly or openly, he will be bound to extirpate it through his
authority, not allow it to be preached or disseminated, and not permit any dissenters,
MOST OF ALL THE ADHERENTS OF DECEITFUL JUDAISM, to live in Ukraine, and will be bound to make
every possible effort that only the Orthodox faith of the Eastern confession, under
obedience to the Holy Apostolic See of Constantinople, be established firmly for ever
and be allowed to expand and to flourish, like a rose among thorns, among the neighbouring
countries following alien religions, for the greater glory of God, the building of churches,
and the instruction of Ruthenian [Rossiacis] sons in the liberal arts. And for the greater
authority of the Kievan metropolitan see, which is foremost in Little Russia [Parva Rossia],
and for a more efficient administration of spiritual matters, His Grace the Hetman should,
after the liberation of our fatherland from the Muscovite yoke, obtain from the Apostolic See
of Constantinople the original power of an exarch in order thereby to renew relationship with
and filial obedience to the aforementioned Apostolic See of Constantinople, from which
it , was privileged to have been enlightened in the holy Catholic faith by the preaching of
the Gospel".
"neque ignotum est, gloriosae memoriae Ducem Theodatum Chmielniccium cum Exercitu
Zaporoviensi non ob aliam causam praeter iura libertatis commotum fuisse iustaque contra
Rempublicam Polonam arma arripuisse, solum pro Fide sua Orthodoxa, quae variorum
gravaminum compulsu a potestate Polonorum coacta fuerat ad unionem cum Ecclesia Romana;
post extirpatam quoque e patria Neoromanam exoticam Religionem, non alio motivo cum eodem
Exercitu Zaporoviensi genteque Rossiaca protectione Imperii Moscovitici dedisse et libere se
subdidisse, solum ob Religionis Orthodoxae unionem. Igitur modernus neoelectus lllustrissimus
Dux, quando Dominus Deus fortis et potens in praeliis iuvabit felicia sacrae S-ae R-ae
Maiestatis Sueciae arma ad vindicandam patriam nostram de servitutis iugo Moscovitico
tenebitur et debito iure obstringetur singularem volvere curam fortiterque obstare, ut nulla
exotica Religio in patriam nostram Rossiacam introducatur, quae si alicubi clamve , palamve
apparuerit, tune activitatem suam extirpandae ipsi debebit, praedicari ampliarique non
permittet, asseclis eiusdem, PRAESERTIM VERO PRAESTIGIOSO IUDAISMO cohabitationem in Ucraina
non concedet et omni virium conatu sollicitam impendet curam, ut sola et una Orthodoxa Fides
Orientalis Confessionis sub obedienta S-tae Apostoiicae sedis Constantinopolitanae in
perpetuum sit firmanda, atque cum amplianda gloria Divina, erigendis ecclesiis exercendisque
in artibus liberalibus filiis Rossiacis dilatetur, ac tanquam rosa inter spinas, inter vicina
exoticae Religionis Dominia virescat et florescat. Propter vero majorem authoritatem
primariae in Parva Rossia sedis Metropolitanae Kiiovensis faciliorique in Spiritualibus
regimine, impositam sibi idem Illustrissimus Dux vindicata patria nostra de iugo Moscovitico
geret provinciam circa procurandam et impertiendam a sede Apostolica Constantinopolitana
Exarchicam primitivam potestatem, ut hoc actu renovetur relatio et filialis patriae nostrae
obedientia ad praefatam Apostolicam sedem Constantinopolitanam, cuius praedicatione Evangelii
in Fide Sancta Catholica illuminari firmarique dignata est".
ТHЕ PYLYP ORLYK CONSTITUTION,
1710@http://www.lucorg.com/block.php/block_id/26
@Anon > Also, check construction spending – click on 10 year
.now how can i account there for the fact, that UAH in 2013 costed three times more than
UAH in 2015 ?
> Farming is an industry.
Grain industry – is low added value one, it is highly competitive market because
grain from any country on Earth is just grain.
USSR used to buy grain, as it sponsored bread production and peasants all around were
buying bead to feed their hens, goats, pigs, etc. Official meat production was large too.
It is definitely better to export at least something than nothing. But it also is better
to export high added value goods.
Before WW1 a minister of Russian Empire said "Let our peasants starve but we will export
all the grains we contracted" – few years later Russian Empire ceased to exist.
In 1931 and 1932 Stalin tenfold decreased then banned grains export breaking the
contracts. 15 years later USSR won WW2.
Franlky, it is just weird that Ukraine and Russia together produce most world's traded
grain, like there is no other fertile soil on Earth. Also Russia and Ukraine are both to the
north from USA, so USA should be able to produce more grains in its warmer climate. Why isn't
USA world #1 grains exporter?
and EU just whimsically bans Ukrainian meat beyond some arbitrary quota.
EU will easily find where to buy meet.
Can Ukraine reciprocate by banning Airbus or Boeing purchases? I wonder
EU can pressure Ukrainian government, and Ukraine can do little in defense.
"
Lang cites numerous examples of "incompetence and malfeasance in the leadership of the 17
agencies of the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation," to include the
examples cited above plus the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the
domestic front, he cites his personal observation of efforts by the Department of Justice and
the FBI to corruptly "frame" people tried in federal courts on national security issues as well
as the intelligence/law enforcement community conspiracy to "get Trump."
Colonel Lang asks "Tell me, pilgrims, why should we put up with such nonsense? Why should we
pay the leaders of these agencies for the privilege of having them abuse us? We are free men
and women. Let us send these swine to their just deserts in a world where they have to work
hard for whatever money they earn." He then recommends stripping CIA of its responsibility for
being the lead agency in spying as well as in covert action, which is a legacy of the Cold War
and the area in which it has demonstrated a particular incompetence. As for the FBI, it was
created by J. Edgar Hoover to maintain dossiers on politicians and it is time that it be
replaced by a body that operates in a fashion "more reflective of our collective nation[al]
values."" Giraldi
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Semyon Vindman (né Aleksandr Semyonovich Vindman) and his
identical twin brother, Yevgeny, were born to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. After the death of their mother, the three-year-old twins
and their older brother, Leonid, were brought to New York in December 1979 by their father,
Semyon (Simon). They grew up in Brooklyn's 'Little-Odessa' neighborhood. The twins appear
briefly with their maternal grandmother in the Ken Burns documentary The Statue of Liberty.
Vindman speaks fluent Russian, Ukrainian (& probably Hebrew).
I will posit that Vindman holds citizenship in: Ukraine, USA, & Israel. Dual-Citizens
violate US Law, to wit the 1940s Nationality Act. I will NOT delve into the tangled
loyalties, ambitions and/or 'greatness' expectations of Colonel Vindman in this post.
Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this
capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kiev, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to
Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman served on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from
September 2015 to July 2018.
The Honorable Gordon David Sondland, United States Ambassador to the European Union, is
probably ending his stint, today.
Ambassador Sondland was born to a Jewish family in Seattle, Washington, the son of Frieda
(Piepsch) and Gunther Sondland. His mother fled Europe before the Second World War to
Uruguay, where after the war she reunited with his father, who had served in the French
Foreign Legion. In 1953, the Sondlands relocated to Seattle where they opened a dry-cleaning
business. Sondland has a sister 18 years his senior. He attended the University of Washington
but dropped out and became a commercial real estate salesman.
Does Ambassador Sondland hold dual-citizenship? Dual citizenship violates the 1940
Nationalities Act.
@Arioch Germans will likely be fleeing Germany in fairly large numbers as the Islamic /
African takeover picks up steam. Same for Swedes from Sweden (soonest), French from France,
English from England.
Ukraine is emptying out and has cheap land and space for new housing to be built, or old
houses to be replaced or thoroughly renovated. The Western Europeans need somewhere safer and
more civilized to run now that they have invited hostile invaders into their countries. It
could be a match made in heaven.
Ukraine could offer only permanent residency, not citizenship, and it could require that
white euro refugees pay in advance for a year or two years of good private medical and dental
insurance so that they don't burden the already-broke Ukrainian treasury.
Let the Germans and other euro reinvigorate the Ukrainian economy -- possibly for a steady
two decades or more -- by buying supplies and hiring workers and machinery to build or
renovate several million houses. They have savings and pensions and can afford a lot in
Ukraine. The Ukrainian treasury would take in massive receipts in VAT and other taxes paid by
the euro permanent residents and by newly employed Ukrainians working on the refugees' new
homes.
Ukrainian hospitals and dental offices could upgrade their equipment, staff, training, and
capabilities enormously with the ongoing infusion of western euro refugee funds.
The euro refugees needn't change the demographic and cultural composition of Ukraine much
longer-term, because they will, at least at first, mostly be people age 55-60 and up who can
afford to retire and give up their careers in their home countries to flee East. They'll be
beyond their childbearing/raising years. And, if the Ukrainians are wise, the western euros
will never be eligible for citizenship (I.e. they will never be able to vote the same suicide
for Ukraine as many of them allowed in their home countries).
Far, far better for Ukrainians to (1) have their own children and (2) stop antagonizing
russia and work out favorable energy and other trade deals. But since neither of those is
happening or seems likely in the near future, Ukraine should seek a steady infusion of
peaceful, reasonably intelligent, culturally compatible white Europeans to help occupy the
territory (instead of hostile aliens, the alternative) and spend billions of Euros from
Ukrainian businesses and shops.
Odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is when a country's government
misappropriates money it has borrowed from another country. A nation's debt is considered
odious debt when government leaders use borrowed funds in ways that do not benefit its
citizens, and to the contrary, often oppress them. Many believe individuals or countries
doing the lending must have known, or should have known, of the oppressive conditions upon
offering the credit.
@RadicalCenter Putin would be too old in ten years. What Russia needs is a decent
successor, as intelligent and far-sighted as Putin, who would be interested in the country
more than in his pocket, like Putin. While traitorous scum like Gorby or Yeltsin has no
chance, the greatest danger is that someone nationalistic but not particularly smart rises to
the top.
Putin understands the key thing: Russia does not need to do anything about the Empire or
its EU vassals, they are their own worst enemy. As the saying goes, when you see your enemy
committing suicide, do not interfere.
As far as Baltic vaudeville states are concerned, to the best of my knowledge (which might
be faulty: I only visited Russia three times in the last 28 years, spending less than two
months total there), most Russian residents are not interested in the Baltics.
Now that the port at Ust-Luga works at almost full capacity, Baltics aren't even useful
economically: Russian exports mostly bypass them. Besides, placing NATO troops into these
"countries" creates a significant financial and military burden on NATO, which is in the best
Russian interests.
So, from Russian perspective, the same rule applies to Baltics and Ukraine (whatever
remains of it in 5-10 years): "you broke it – you own it". So, the West would have to
do something about those territories. Considering current policies of the EU, they will be
populated by Muslims and Africans. Russian attitudes changed a lot in the last decades
regarding Baltics and in the last five years regarding Ukraine: a lot of Russians believe
that even Muslims and Africans are smarter than aborigines of those wannabe countries, so
would make more sensible neighbors.
@Malacaay "Ukrainian Republic" in 1914 ??? With presidents, parliaments, elections, sure,
sure.
And having western borders in 1914 exactly by the line draw by Georgian dictator
Jugashvili-Stalin 25 years later?
With Lwow being in 1914 city not of Poland (independent Poland in 1914 is yet another gem)
but of the said Ukrainian Republic? And Transcarpatian Ruthenia too?
Wow, so in 1939 Jugashvili-Stalin just restored well known internationally borderlines of
the glorious 1914 Ukrainian Republic, right?
@Arioch You consider Ukraine to be irrelevant, so why spend so much time on it??? Odd
isn't it. Methinks you protesteth too much. You haven't proven Ukrainians can't do science,
that they don't have a technical culture, and you haven't shown that grain production is
irrelevant. You're just insulting farmers, and basic industry. Insult your own stomach. Don't
eat bread. Food is power. All industrial economies are based on agriculture. You dismissing
it is just sour grapes.
Pretend the Ukraine is dead. That's your business. Ukraine hasn't lost the ability to do
science, engineering, etc. What do you think they do in universities there? Is there no
higher education there? I'm not going to believe that. You're just spinning. Spin away. It's
obvious you're just dismissing real activity there.
The finality with which you dismiss the logistics possibilities of the Ukraine is odd. It
is a valuable resource. The country can take up the logistics possibilities in the future.
They haven't disappeared. And that is what your argument is based on. Pretending that
something can never ever be operational again ever, for any reason, even when the
possibilities are obviously still there. Germany bounced back after the war. Russia bounced
back after the 90s. But Ukraine? According to you, Ukrainians can't ever have any future
possibilities. You dismiss the real activity that is there, and you dismiss future
possibilities. So you can read the future? Do you also pretend to have super human ability to
know the future? You don't like facts, just theatrics. Lots of arm waving and shouting and
gesticulating. No proofs. If it is dead in your books, why are you wasting so much effort to
prove it, without actually giving any proof? You really do protest too much.
@Mr. Hack Why would I be disappointed in seeing your puppet master Kolomoisky, the
'Zhidobandera', and his puppet playing the presidents, Zelenski admitting (grudgingly) that
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations"?
K: "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you [the U.S.] are
forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it."
And begging for money from Russia?
@Anon First, participation or results of International Mathematical Olympiad that both of
your links deal with do not necessarily reflect the state of science in the country. First,
math is only one of the real sciences (others include physics, chemistry, biology, etc.).
Second, the results of kids reflect the potential of young people, not the state of
scientific research in the country. Remaining scientists in Ukraine (there aren't many of
them left, unless you count bullshitters like Vyatrovich as scientists) bitterly complain
that the government does not fund science at the level that can help it survive.
BTW, many branches of Russian science (e.g., biochemistry and cell biology that I know
best) do not perform at the level that would put them on the map. There are very few
world-class biochemical or cell biological labs in Russia today, even fewer than in Soviet
times. In Ukraine today there are none, zero, zilch, nada. There used to be some decent labs
in Ukraine before 1991, but they either died out or the quality of their research went way
down. Those who awarded PhD to the girl I mentioned above are not scientists, at least not
the honest ones. They are qualified to sweep floors in college, at best.
@AnonFromTN More protesteth too much. More slurs, insults, hearsay, flailing away with no
data of any kind.
Those kids have real capabilities. Not simply 'potential of young people'. dismissing them
won't make them go away. 'Out damn'd spot'. Too bad the facts won't go away. To have kids
with strong math ability means you have to have institutions and teachers with strong
education capability. They don't learn to cut it in math by playing in the streets. Obviously
they will have no difficulty doing engineering calculations, and doing computer science and
physical sciences.
Making comparisons to the former SU is not valid for me. Comparison to other similar sized
economies makes more sense. Ukraine population is similar to Colombia, Spain, Argentina,
Uganda, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq. Looking at those countries, the capabilities of Ukraine don't
look too bad. Certainly not looking like Ukraine is dead.
Why would any one think that Ukraine must be compared to much larger economies??? The
other guy was doing that too. saker is way off to make such comparisons.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a valid
comparison. The economics are too different.
It's obvious what is going on is simply a political, prejudicial smear and dismissal of the
Ukraine and Ukrainians rather than any kind of balanced assessment of capabilities and
reality
@Anon Yes, those kids certainly had good teachers. It is quite likely that their math
teachers were educated in the Ukrainian SSR. I hear from a lot of people in Russia that the
quality of the teachers who graduated in Soviet times tends to be better than of those who
graduated later. I got my school education in Ukrainian SSR and can't complain about it.
Today Lugansk, where I went to school, is in Lugansk People's Republic, and judging by recent
polling of the population, its chances or returning to Ukraine are about as great as my
chances of living 500 years. Ukrainian bomb hit the school I went to, and Ukrainian shell hit
the library where I used to borrow books when I went to school. Luckily, a few years ago
Ukrainian troops were pushed by freedom fighters far enough from Lugansk, so they can't shell
it any more.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a
valid comparison.
Sorry, but Ukraine started by Ukrainian SSR becoming independent. It had what it had, and
lost what it lost, including a big chunk of the population and economy.
You are welcome to believe anything you want. People have a long history of believing the
most preposterous things. However, even fervent beliefs don't change the reality. That's why
all societies have lunatic asylums.
WGruff, dirtyMarxist , Nov 15 2019 16:29 utc |
165
Of course, fascists are always just trying to do what's best for their tribe. Does anyone
imagine that the Japanese and Germans and Italians of almost a century ago just woke up one
morning and decided "Hey, let's be evil! Let's commit the most inhuman acts imaginable
against our fellow humans because why not? That would be a great way to spend a few
years!" ? Of course not. They were just as convinced as our NemesisOfHumanity that they
stood for good and were just standing up for their tribe. They were convinced of their own
exceptionality, and were horrified by the flapper decadence of prior years, seeking something
more divine and purified for their respective exceptional cultures.
It would always be best if people (and whole cultures!) could accept themselves for what
they really are rather than building elaborate fantasies in which they play the starring
roles. Fascists could achieve peace of mind if they could see themselves for what they truly
are, but then with their delusions discarded they couldn't really be fascists anymore, could
they? Without their delusions the sinister threats from the scheming Soviets and the
inscrutable Chicoms would dissipate from the fascists' minds like the morning fog before the
sun. The vast gulf of differences between themselves and those "primitive others" whom
the fascists feel obligated to bring enlightenment to, by force if necessary, would dwindle
to insignificance without the delusions that the fascists rely upon to view themselves as
superheroes.
Finally, without the delusions the fascists would be able to see fascism for the pack
psychology that it is, with the fascists just being the beta dogs serving the elite alpha
dogs in the hopes for a pat on the head. The "It is also in the best interests of elites
to take care of their people" assertion would become apparent to them as a plaintive plea
to the alpha dogs of their pack/tribe for security against the imaginary threats their
delusions generate.
As an aside, real socialists never say "The elites should take care of the
little guy!" On the contrary, real socialists say "The working class should organize
itself and seize control of the productive forces of society." The first is begging from
one's master, while the second is working towards a society without masters. The first
cultivates in the believer's mind the notion that if they better serve their master that they
may be rewarded with scraps off that master's dinner table, while the second cultivates the
idea that everyone should sit at that dinner table. It is that drive to better serve the
elites that powers the viciousness of fascism, while it is the delusion that beta dog status
in the exceptional pack is an exalted position that conceals from the fascist their
own rabid viciousness.
The problem is - the Soviet Union showed that even "working class" socialist governments
still can be corrupted by power.
That the power is held by bureaucrats as opposed to oligarchs is a distinction without
meaning.
From my view, the main problem isn't that the oligarchs are taking more and more control - it
is that the balance has shifted too far. So I actually agree with what you're advocating, but
only in the short term.
Ultimately, my personal view is that a government that randomly shifts, en mass, every
generation is the only type that would work because this is the only way to ensure that
smart, motivated people within any system won't be able to long term game/modify the system
to benefit themselves.
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
Sputnik is reporting that the US has spent $6.4 Trillion fighting wars that have killed
800,000 since Sept 11/01, that number is unbelievable, at least 1,500,000 dead in Iraq,
250,000 in Afghanistan, 750,000 in Syria.
The US military budget alone has averaged about 650 billion since then, plus the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan were funded separately (around 200 million a year), plus CIA/ blackbook
projects - 7 or 8 trillion is a more likely number.
When things get blown up, no one really knows what was actually bought and existed and
what was just a phantom piece of equipment War has always been the ideal cover for
corruption
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
[... Opus Dei ...] Neo-cons at it again.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Nov 14 2019 13:24 utc | 98
Opus Dei was created in 1928 is Spain, where Catholics were opposing emerging hordes of
godless Communists, Anarchists and Socialists. Since ca. 1960 Opus Dei is active in Bolivia
where they continue Work of God, with fruits that he have just witnessed. Sadly, in Bolivia
the error of Marxism is compounded by native superstition and paganism under flags of
Pachamama. Perhaps Opus Dei is neo-Saint Inquisition, but as conservatists, they have
decently long pedigree.
The problem with import substitution is that the factories that used to make these goods were
largely moved to China. China isn't going to give them back.
So in order to attempt to substitute US made for the China imports, the factories have to
be built first.
Secondly, China heavily subsidizes the early parts of the supply chains: raw materials and
what not. This wouldn't hold true to American factories.
So while the goal and the theory are good, the problem is the execution.
Russia is doing it because they're forced to: sanctions actually accelerates the process
because Russian internal investors know there will be a reasonably long term market for
Russian goods so long as the sanctions hold true, and the sanctions also lock in Russian
capital (that which was repatriated) to some extent.
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
Often I expect these stories in the media to get important technical details wrong...but
here we see that this writer did his homework...
I have said this many times before, but the MCAS system is NOT an anti-stall system...it
is there solely for the purpose of providing the right kind of stick feel to the pilot...
"On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel it," a veteran pilot for a U.S.
commercial carrier told me.
Instead of the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were used
to feeling -- and that F.A.A. guidelines required -- the new engines caused a loosening
sensation.
This is exactly it...and this is why I have to wonder how exactly is MCAS going to be
cleared to fly again...since the original, much less authoritative version was found
inadequate in providing the stick force required...and the rejigged production version proved
to be a surefire killer if it kicked in at low altitudes such as takeoff...
We recall that Captain Sullenberger called the MAX a 'death trap'...
So clearly the system's authority has to be dialed back...in which case the airplane
handling qualities do not meet established requirements...
The story here tells of the struggle that the family of Ralph Nader's grand-niece, who
perished in the Ethiopian flight, is waging to 'axe the max'...
Hopefully they will succeed, but I doubt it..the MAX can never be a good airplane...full
stop...
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
@Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
Just found your query. Quick and dead-on response is a major EMP event, but that is not
what I had in mind.
Let me see if I can work up another, but necessarily lengthier response.
As I noted on the Bolivia thread, BRICS is having its Summit today & tomorrow in
Brasilia, and will likely be the most important of its brief life. So far, just this report :
"The heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will discuss issues related to
economic, financial and cultural cooperation as well as arms control and joint efforts to
counter terrorism.
"The leaders of the five member-states are to attend the BRICS Business Forum, and meet
with the BRICS Business Council and the heads of the New Development Bank.
"In addition, Vladimir Putin will hold a number of bilateral meetings with the heads of
state and government taking part in the summit."
No! But there will be a new "civil war" in the US around the mid of the next decade. Split
occuring not south to north, but west to east; chaos further increased by immigrants from the
middle & south Americas with their own agenda.
Forces (land & air), militia & DHS people of the eastern party may seek secure
backing near frontier to Canada (area of Great Lakes therefore save). Some of the 'big
capitalists' who feel more international than patriot will flee to outer South America
(Argentinia, Chile).
Eventually a dead president (for that and for the civil war please look into cycles of
US-history). Peace will come with the first female president. Keep watch on Tulsi Gabbard
(but may be also another lady - as I am in Europe I am not familiar with all probable coming
female candidates).
Why no permanent split of the States? There are internal benefits (common traffic, markets
etc.) but more it is the outside pressure: to be able to compete with China it is a necessity
for the States to remain united. Also the coming chaos in Europe and Russia demands
unification of the US.
Now a very strange remark: some elites in the US have already accepted, even promote the
tendency toward "civil war" to enable a 'reset' of the political, economical and social
structure of the country. Furthermore, a seemingly weak US with a split in the military may
lead Russia in temptation to make some mistake (towards Ukraine and Europe). And now a very,
very strange remark: while some forces in the homeland are caught in civil disorder some
other forces in the overseas may be involved in a foreign war. Extremely pointed out: the
coming civil war in a very specific manner is a fake (to deceive and trap Russia - of course
not Putin but his followers).
Today I had a look into George Friedman's book about the next hundred years. For the first
view there is a lot of nonsense (disintegration of China etc.). But I agree that the power of
the US will be restored during the century. And if not the same power as it was in the 1990s,
then in every case the internal stability of the USA is completely guaranteed.
With greetings from Germany and with thanks to Bernhard for his valuable work, Gerhard
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Karlof1 @ 9 --
"I expect the atmosphere to be tense..."
I do, as well. Though I imagine certain leaders might feel a temptation to suspend
Brazil's membership, doing so would illustrate a structural weakness to be overcome by any
legitimate multipolar body. That is, if the Empire is able to turn just one member (in this
case Brazil), it may be used to weaken the organization as a whole.
Having just a limited exposure to Putin's approach to multipolarity, my understanding is
that it is to be accepted that sovereign countries evolve along their own trajectories (as
opposed to being subjected to "universal" "liberal" principles). If Brazil or Turkey decide
that this means playing both sides off each other, it will be interesting to see whether
there are any principled (as opposed to realpolitical or pragmatic) objections that Russia
might offer.
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
The reason I ask is because I have heard a load of bull about Russia's plans to Russianize
the world and that Trump is his pawn since day -167 of his inauguration. I have heard this
from coworkers, from friends, from family, seen it on Reddit, read it on neolib outlets like
slate and the like. I'm wondering if you live in Trump country and just don't hear or see the
Russophobia being played out in the beltway and on the elitest coastlines.
Trust me when I say that the dems played the right card, albeit a desperate one, when they
started with the whole Russiagate nonsense. To you and I, b and others, Russiagate is
nonsense. But tell that to the average dem or moron yuppie in their towers along our shining
seas.
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next willing to surrender?
**What are those limits?**
The Resistance, Democrats, no longer respects democratic rights -
no thought to the millions of voters that they would disenfranchise if
the nullification of Trump's election were successful via a coup (impeachment).
Five years ago would you have imagined that Democratic voters would be so cavalier
about democratic rights? So willing to accept the vacuous accusation that our
President is a Russian agent. Would resurrect the CIA - the torturing, kidnapping,
assassinating, war promoting, false flag creating, disinformation spewing CIA, - and
ravenously swallow endless streams of McCarthyist propaganda.
How fast,how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power too far down the
spiral
to imagine? Five years ago would you have imagined the current decent of Democrats we have
witnessed?
If the pretext, the myth, of the necessity of seizing power, were echoed by the mouthpiece
MSM
would Democrats go along? Americans have surrendered rights in our near lifetime.
Americans
worship militarism and their military heroes more than ever before. Americans have
swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the new-McCathyism and "Putin is an evil man".
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots. To answer your question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their criminal limit or capability.
Paul Damascene @13: I generally share your view, about Putin's view, but I don't think Putin
minds Erdogan playing both sides, Bolsonaro, yeah, but not Erdogan, he can play games with us
all he wants. Keeps us distracted, and Erdogan doesn't like us "taking the oil", and we can't
get in a shooting war with him, he's NATO. He's the military counter-balance to the Pentagon
in Syria that Russia cannot be. So I think he will be thrashing around in N. Syria with
Putin's consent until we leave (as long as he doesn't pick a fight with Assad.)
Bolsonaro he may see as something to wait for the end of.
It will be interesting and possibly informative to see what comes out of this meeting.
Thanks for your reply! Note that the main event is the Business Forum, which is an arena
where genuine national interests usually reign. As you're likely aware, BRICS was formulated
as an instrument to facilitate development via commerce and mutual investment and that its
first major joint accomplishment was the formulation of the BRICS Development Bank to bypass
the IMF, World Bank and the dollar dominated international trade regime. I found it curious
that Global Times had zero articles on its main page related to the Summit, while
Xinhuanet ran this
short commentary overview which amounts to a short recap and cheerleading. We'll need to
await the presser this evening to get a better feel.
You make an interesting point librul... It reminds me of the whole continuity of government
scheme. 'In case of _____, break glass an impose martial law or whatever the manufactured
disaster calls for. The fact that the north woods 911 bit worked is a testament to just how
far the ptb are willing to go. You know, in regard to the USA perspective I can tell you from
first hand experience that a steady diet of agitation propaganda as well loads of distraction
have rendered a majority of the population easily lead no matter what stripes they might be
wearing. Selling Russia as the bad bad guy was easy. Look if a large group of people buy the
Bin Laden hit then the sky is the limit.
The 5 mile asteroid would pose a serious problem to most mammals, but given the amount of
species self loathing being pedaled about.... My point about the executive branch and the
question of 'is he the last' hinges on the fact that the president does nothing which is not
somewhat scripted. We know what happens when they go "off the Rez"...
Below is a ZH quote about the meeting with Trump and Erdogan today
"
"It's a great honor to be with President Erdogan... the ceasefire is holding very well, we've
been speaking to the Kurds and they seem to be very satisfied, as you know we pulled back our
troops quite a while ago..."
"I want to thank the President for the job they've [Turkey] done in Syria," Trump said of
Erdogan.
And on that note, he already addressed the rationale for continued US troop presence in
Syria, saying with Erdogan sitting next to him: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The
oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."
"
To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in
with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?
'Deep State' is just a convenient way of labeling something we can also call 'the
illuminati', or 'the globalists', or 'the one percent', or 'Big Brother', etc.. We know that
there are hidden powers. Some call them reptilians. Who knows? We can tell that they are
there, though we cannot say exactly who they are and how they constitute their coherence, how
they organize themselves. We can see pieces of the deeper pattern, but we cannot see the
whole thing. So we use these vague and sometimes fanciful labels.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle. Humanity is
maybe in its final throes, there and in so many other places. Or maybe its the birth pains of
who we were really meant to be. God help us.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
The 'Orwellian Globalists' may have overstepped, hubristically, when they chose an
out-and-out racist, an outspoken racist, to be their puppet to head the new government in
Bolivia. This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of
Bolivia ...
Librul@16 responds to the statement by start, Chevrus @ 3. "Please
illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA
would be suddenly discontinued..." Chevrus @ 3, end
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next
willing to surrender? **What are those limits?**
How fast, how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power
too far down the spiral to imagine? Five years ago would you have
imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?
Is media capable to determine who shall have the power? Can
media make Americans surrender their rights?
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots. To answer your
question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their
criminal limit or capability. by: librul @ 16
Snake says look at and carefully read the statements by Assad in Syria.. they
are very telling about circumstances here in the states. Assad distinguishes
top down ideology from bottom up cause a very interesting distinguishment.. ..
So to answer your question how far are Americans willing to allow the Oligarchs to
retract human rights in America: are their any limits to the willing surrender?
I think it is as Assad said in the above citation.. outside investors
instigated the unrest in Syria and used it as pretense to get their governments
to invade Syria so that the investors could privatize all of
Syria.. That is exactly what is happening in USA governed America.
karlof1 @4
Your scenario doesn't reach its logical conclusion:
1) Asteroid strike is automatically blamed on "those damn rooskies".
2) Nuclear war ensues.
3) Far West, South, TransMissisippi and New England all secede with each claiming to be the
rightful 'United State of America'.
4) Voila.
IIRC the Clintons rode into the Whitehouse on the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC).
The DLC has quietly morphed into the DNC (or stolen their ID). Proof might be found on
identifying the faction controlling the Democratic Party's finance committee under the
assumption whoever controls the finance also controls the party. Memory is a perfidious and
ephemeral thing and goes down Alice's rabbit hole in nothing flat.
@14 jackrabbit.. i am sorry, but it is too simplistic for me... your examples are fine, but
as i see it, they random and not some orchestrated plot from up above... that is where we
differ here... in fact, your overview is much too simplistic..you can make it simple for me,
but the whole concept of deep state orchestrating everything here is much too simplistic..
@ 16 librul... good overview that is kind of how i see the democratic party here, although
@ 24 karlof1 disagrees, it looks like that to this outsider / canuck.. here is the line from
karlof1 that gives it away for me - "Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they
won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates" which begs the question, why? my answer - they are
useful shills for this same agenda..
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
I see a civil war in the USA as highly unlikely. The upper class has too much common
interest and purpose. The lower classes are divided and powerless and in the near future only
seem to be becoming more so. When the third-worldization reaches a critical point, a staged
and managed revolution may be in the cards. Before a real revolution has any chance, the
elites will have flooded the USA with immigrants from the south, ensuring further division of
the lower classes and postponing any real challenge.
Overall, the societal foundation of the USA looks to have been crumbling for maybe five
decades already and for the next few decades an acceleration of that process is more likely
than a reversal. Don't be on the lookout for leaders or movements to change any of that. Only
when the american people clean up their act, ie. their addiction to numbing drugs, empty
consumerism and false jingoisms, will anything there ever change for good. Until that
happens, the place will be withering more and more.
Not until the American elites start to fail to safeguard their own priviliges at the cost
of the rest of the population will change happen.
I don't see the Russian aggression that you propose to be realistic or likely to happen.
Russia does not need to reach abroad for energy, resources or food. Their main challenge is
to manage the riches of the huge country with the people they have. Already the resurgence
after the post-1990 crash (and the preceding stagnation) is an accomplishment worthy of
admiration.
The Russian interest clearly is consolidation and defence, which is exactly what their
policies have been showing on the international stage. Suggestions of aggression are pure
projection by Atlanticists theselves. Instead of Washington trying to provoke Russian
mistakes, the real game is about Moscow trying to contain NATO's erratic trashing and
carefully preventing any catastrophic escalation.
To wit, what country did recently "update" its nuclear doctrine, suggesting the
possibility of 'limited' use of nuclear weapons? Was it Russia, or ehhm... perhaps the
USA?
The only uncertain factor between Russia and the USA is Europe. I expect a lot more
American craziness towards Europe, as its effective leverage crumbles. Europe has not yet
devolved as badly as the USA and the American implosion is a major risk factor for the
Europeans.
psychohistoiran @22 asks "To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the
keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?"
As someone who voted for Trump I can tell you I do not agree with this decision nor will I
defend it. I hold the same sentiment pre 2016 that I do now - bring these endless wars to an
end. Period. Am I disappointed in his walking back the decision to leave Syria entirely? You
betcha.
Weeks ago when barflies were discussing Trump's withdrawal, someone corrected my
understanding regarding the Kurds who took control of the oil fields, so to speak, and were
selling the oil to SAA. My understanding of this newest policy is the Kurds will continue to
manage and benefit from the sale of the oil. I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if I
am. But if my understanding of the arrangement is correct, the Kurds maintaining their role,
then they are likely still selling the oil to the SAA. Then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't
be surprised if they were.
So, management or control of the oil fields has changed, but it looks like everything else
remains as it was before when the oil fields were managed/controlled by the Kurds.
What I do respect in the President's decision to leave NE Syria is removing troops from
theater. The CIA's proxy war appears to have been shutdown. This w/o question I applaud,
LOUDLY.
BTW, all this talk about asteroids and false flags makes me remind the brilliant nineties
movie "Starship Troopers", in which Paul Verhoeven not only sort of presages 911 and the
ensuing war on the bugs, but also smuggled into it the ephemeral phrase "Are you psychic?". I
sometimes wonder how many people got that...
This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...
I doubt it, without massive quantities of weapons similar to those received by the Syrian
takfiris, the indigenous people don't stand a chance once the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation (formerly SOA) trained Washington-supported death squads get to
work. It's going to be a massacre that'll be barely reported in MSM, because after the
"election" they'll be anti-democratic. Bolivia is not Syria.
The issue with the Americans is a hyper-partisan mindset has been instilled, akin to duelling
sports teams, so one cheers for their team facts or context be damned. This used to be a Fox
News-Republican phenomenon, but now has infected Dem supporters as well.
Break up of US would mean break up of Canada too. Look to the moves made by province of
Alberta in response to fed election - a sort of firewall is being proposed where Alberta will
take on fed gov responsibilities pension, health care, etc. Alberta is a Koch Bros oil
republic, and any N American melt-down will result in formation of private fiefdoms - i.e.
Alberta-Montana-Wyoming-South Dakota become Kochland.
Then you must be a shut-in or unemployed to not see the dual-benefit of the deep state in
that it stymies trump and resurrects Russia as a boogeyman. Nay! Thrice-benefit in that it
also allows for an excuse to be horrifically status quo and gamble on everything returning to
normal after the trump phenomenon runs its course and the duopoly reassert its grip.
I wonder how in the Earth can anyone have cultural cooperation and join efforts against
terrorism with a goon like Bolsonaro who has posted Twitters celebrating Bolivia´s coup
and is known misses Pinochet ´s "expeditive measures" against communists...How this, so
called group BRICS, can continue following its path, as if nothing had happened, especially
since the coup in Bolivia...
Just today read the statements by Kremlin spokeman, Peshkov, and what to say, seemed to me
quite soft his stance, throwing balons out...Sometimes I feel like to trust John Helmer on
his assesment on the existence of two blocks in the Russian Federation, the stavka ,
and these people of the Kremlin office...
To this you add the Russian ambassador to the US, today visiting Kissinger ( the builder
of the Condor Plan...) a man always like begging for better relations to this bully of a
country, and this is one of the times when I wonder if i would not be supporting all this
time just the people who wants to crush me...( meaning my now almost 6 years long support for
the RF and concretely this adminsitration...)
I found quite different the unambiguous and strong statements by the Russian FM and
Kremlin itself when Venezuela was about to suffer a coup, and now when the legitimate
government of Bolivia has been sent into exile and his indigenous population on the verge of
extermination by nazi thugs...
You can not be against nazis in the Ukraine and then support ( or be way too soft in your
lack of condemnation...) nazis in Brasil or Bolivia (... or the EU...) or you are for
international law and human rights, always, or not, but not only when business opportunities
are in prospect....
Yes, today is one of those days when my consideration of the RF and Putin´s
administration as a referent in keeping international order in the face of a lawless US just
wobbles...
No se puede estar en misa y repicando al mismo tiempo
Waiting for the final statement of the meeting for to possibly take a determination on
this issue...
@ 36 jayc... kenney is a divisive politician.. i always think of alberta like the 'texas
wannabe' of canada... they think highly of themselves and their oil, even when they can't get
it out to the coast due the fact the people on the coast view all this very differently.. and
now they are resorting to a type of quebec referendum option to use as leverage over the rest
of canada.. it didn't work with quebec, and it definitely won't work with alberta.. at least
quebec could legitimately claim itself a different type of culture... as for dividing up
canada and the usa - it makes more sense to go along north south lines - cascadia being a
good example of this.. koch republic would be a good name for that zone!!
You'd probably do well to study the history of China after the downfall of the Manchu Qing
dynasty up to the 1930s at least (when Japan began invading the country and bringing its own
forms of chaos, violence and enslavement) to get an idea of where the US might be heading if
and when the Federal government falls. From the 1910s onwards, China was governed by warlords
looking out for No 1, with their own armies.
Not so very different from the situation prevailing in Afghanistan and Libya. Talk about
the chickens coming home to roost.
The other alternative is if the 50 states decide to be self-governing statelets or form
their own federations among themselves or with neighbouring provinces and states in Canada
and Mexico, or even abroad. Alaska may petition Moscow to be accepted back into the Russian
Federation and Hawaii may seek another large patron to attach itself for security reasons.
Washington and Oregon
states may finally form a federation with British Columbia and call it Cascadia.
Yeah, like Formerly T-Bear intoned about memory. I concede, but still note Gabbard hasn't
faltered in her zeal. I finally finished my series of thoughts on the Bolivian thread
regarding the Big Picture. IMO, Evil's sly enough to get elected even if it campaigned
showing its attributes as in
this image . If I were 20 years younger, I'd emigrate to Russia or China, but I'm not and
doubt I've 20 years remaining on this orb. But I do think I've got the struggle properly
diagnosed, although no cure's readily available.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle.
@Posted by: Paul | Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23
Indeed ,the same way I see it, and it seems that, in this one, Russian will not be with
us...After all there is neither oil, nor weapons to sale in Bolivia, nor to the working poor
people.....
Just today I was hearing Trump stating that he would like very much assisting to the next
Vicotry Day parade in Moscow...Well, how to say ( wait for me while I go throwing up a
bit...) Just here again, a bit back in myself...
Thus, this thug, who just has unleashed those rabid nazi death squads over the poor
indigenous people of Bolivia is going to sit along the veterans who really fought the nazis
in WWII, the few who still are alive to remember the 25 millions of their own who died in the
battle fields, moreover taking into account that Trump´s father really was a nazi
himself and supported Nazi Germany as if there was no tomorrow...If you though that of
Netanyahu last year was way too much...to see how yo take this...
Seeing these things, no wonder that fascism advance without obstacles...Voting in the UN
or passing all day energically protestingthe demolition of monuments to Soviet heros of WWII
is not enough...It is neede to eergically protest when today´s nazis are salughterin
currently lving people...
As happened during WWII, I fear, it will be us the people who will have to organize
ourselves to fight this scourge...Putin, simply, will not be there....May be the Red Army
will...
Gerhard @10;
I agree the US will split up. As a poli sci initiate, i was forced to consider the role of
institutions acting in support of the polis. I wasn't impressed at the time. my disdain for
the rot of leadership in most if not all institutions in the west, it was mostly for the
greed....but i realize the cumulative effect is the fraying of those 'supports' of the nation
itself. Consider:
The 16 intelligence agencies each have their own agendas, the regulatory agencies are
revolving doors for industry placements, the FBI was crooked since the days of Hoover, the
governments agencies are rife with oligarchy quislings .....and in the end the greed of those
in power will be not be held back by any moral force. The police are militarized, murdering
and robbing their own citizens.
Meanwhile, the MSM are owned by the oligarch, so there is no national forum where the
corruption can be addressed on a national level. This leaves the blog sites such as MOA to
lead the fight against the PTB. The problem is in the nature of the internet, which has no
'locus' as in a national voice. The internet has no center. As example, i am not a US
citizen. When the polis finally hit the point where the Rentier economy has driven them to
extreme reaction, they will not be thinking of reclaiming the vast American experiment,
rather they will seek to at least control their little part of the world. I believe you will
see blocs of similar states rising up to control whet they think is in their own best
interests: The mid-west, the west coast and mountain states, the deep south, the eastern
states will find common issues to crytalize around.
That's my read.
As a Canadian, my thoughts are how Canada will negotiate with these remainder blocs of former
US states.
James @ 39
I general concur with your brief reading of Jayson Kenney and Alberta talk of separatism. But
on that score the comparison would not so much be to Texas as perhaps to Boris Johnson /
Nigel Farage, in their moves to break away from the EU. I don't know that either of them (or
Kenney) is all that passionate about separation itself, but the divisiveness -- and surfing
various waves of polarization -- are what this new nihilist political wave seems to be about.
I support the Cascadia concept. There's a wonderful work of speculative fiction called
Ecotopia that is set in a Cascadia - although it was written before the digital hi-tech era
and so could not predict that such an entity, short of a true revolution, would be run by
Microsoft - Google - Apple etc.
A high speed rail link from Vancouver to Portland has been proposed, which is a
forward-thinking policy initiative, but they are going to take a few years to think about it,
and then another fifteen to twenty years to build it, and that itself will only happen if the
"no new taxes" retrograde types don't stop it in its "tracks" (which they intend to do).
off topic: I've just realized how vexing the idea of a non-citizen army.
Imagine: The tax payer funds the majority of tax dollars to a bureau that funds its own
production of weapons, recruitment, training personnel, maintenance of 800 or so bases across
the world and, finally, deploying these recruits wherever it deems worthy, based on the
directions of it's head, potus. its just so sweet: hire mercenaries, and do whatever you want
across the planet....there are no draftees ....no one to criticize when the body bags return
stateside. Some otherwise brain-dead fuck in the pentagon is enjoying lieutenant generalship,
just for figuring out the army didn't need a draft...there were plenty of poor people, who
could be had with a few bucks......
I'm in Montana and working on a piece of fiction that anticipates the breakup of the
States in the not-so-distant future. I did a little research on Cascadia and found that
there's elements of white supremacism wanting to co-opt the idea of Cascadia for their own
ethno-state fever
dreams :
The far right is known to appropriate pop culture imagery, particularly for recruitment and
to mitigate their viewpoints. But Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State
University, explained that Cascadia, "a really important movement in the Pacific
Northwest," is targeted specifically for its link to bioregionalism. "It implies a
territorial imperative but doesn't necessarily involve anti-racism, according to the far
right, so fascists appropriate it," he told me of Cascadia.
The appropriation began at least as far back as 2004, when a flag suspiciously similar
to the Cascadian flag appeared on the cover of Harold Armstead Covington's book, A Distant
Thunder. In 2008, Covington founded the white nationalist group Northwest Front, which
calls for an "independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest." The group
later penned a disturbing rhyme on its website about this flag, the Tricolor flag, using
language similar to Baretich's:
The sky is blue, and the land is green. The white is for the people, in
between.
Cascadia appropriation has snowballed since then. In 2016, a man adopting the moniker
Herrenvolk, a German word for "master race" used by the Nazis, helped form Cascadia, the
"foremost" alt-right group in the Pacific Northwest. According to its website, its mission
is to "regain our sovereignty and prevent foreign influence on our people." That goal
correlates with the narrative of Cascadia as quintessential, and it echoes the groaning
around Portland about newcomers spoiling the city.
in the narrative I'm working on, New Cascadia does become a white supremacist
stronghold.
I was somewhat puzzled by your Good and Evil post in the last thread, karlof1. Were you just
being facetious or did I misread you to say that all would depend on the outcome of the 2020
election?.
I followed you on the course of 'the rest of the world' under leadership from Russia and
China into multipolarity rather than one hegemon; I'd tend to agree with you on that concept,
though maybe we'd have disagreements on the course of history up to that point. I have a
literary turn of mind myself, and to me "good" literature (with a small g) always comes out
on top - as with goodness in most other aspects of life learning as well.
All the same, it's hard for me to think the coming US election will really decide
anything. That is, I don't see any of the candidates preparing his or herself to join 'the
rest of the world'. That would be the good outcome for me and I just can't see it
happening.
I'll be literary and say that maybe for nations 'the way up is the way down.' And while
the disparity and struggle between wealthy and not in the US is starkly apparent, we are
nowhere near bottoming out here yet. And I think we have to be; I think we will be - but
when? I'll be literary again and say that for Tigger it was when he got all his bounce taken
out of him. All of it. Not 'make America great' but rather 'help America survive
yadayadayada...'
I'm kinda doubting I'll be around to see it. It's sort of that 'not with a bang but a
wimper' sort of scenario - and we're a long way from wimpering yet.
Still, I feel very positive. I think 'the rest of the world' is going to be kinder than we
deserve when it all boils down to the dregs. What a day that will be!
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus
during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the
80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It
accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the
Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on.
Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.
As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried
to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save
it.
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
Occupied Palestine continues killing people as documented in the report below from Reuters
"
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed six members of a
Palestinian family on Thursday, all of them civilians, medical officials and residents said,
bringing the death toll in the territory from a 48-hour surge in fighting to 32.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the pre-dawn incident in Deir al-Balah,
which came as cross-border shelling exchanges continued despite a ceasefire offer by the
Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Israel killed an Islamic Jihad field commander on Tuesday, sparking cross-border rocket
salvoes by the militant group and further Israeli strikes. Medics said 32 Palestinians have
been killed, at least a third of them civilians.
Those killed in Thursday's attack on a home in Deir al-Balah included a woman and a child,
medical officials said. Another 12 people were wounded, they said.
"
Sad to see this continue to go on and no resolution in sight, only escalation
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
TASS and Sputnik have both published short reports on events from the BRICS Summit in
Brasilia. As I noted earlier, it revolved around the Business Forum, so most everything
focused on economics, global trade, and the hindrances in the normal conduct of commerce:
"'Undoubtedly, the global economy was affected by the fact that methods of unfair
competition, unilateral sanctions - including politically motivated ones are being used on a
wider scale in the global trade, [and] protectionism is flourishing. Under those
circumstances, BRICS nations have to take serious effort to ensure the development of their
economies, to prevent the deterioration of the social situation and the fall of living
standards, of our citizens' welfare,' Putin said at the closing ceremony of the BRICS
business forum."
Hopefully, there'll be a full transcript of Putin's remarks and further reporting to
digest tomorrow.
Re: trustworthy people, I meant that my eyes have seen first hand the effects of this
whole Russiagate brainwashing. As a result, I don't talk politics with my family, and it is
tenuous with my coworkers. Can you imagine a guy working in a west-coast city and actually
has something positive to say about DJT?
I still say that DJT deserves an ENORMOURS!...ENORMOUS! amount of credit for awakening
such terminology into the public lexicon as "Globalism," "nationalism," "fake news," and the
like. How he was able to do this was very simple but absolutely revolutionary for any
bonafide presidential candidate that I can remember or know. For myself, I view the issue as
globalism as paramount and far more world-shattering than US imperialism.
Here
is an interesting Frontline interview with Ann Coulter a week or so ago. It shines a light on
how a guy like Trump was able to capture the public imagination. Hint: it wasn't because the
Deep State was grooming him.
For any of you who use protonmail. They seem to be touting their links to clearly compromised
media sources such as Bellingcat quite strongly these days, and are pushing the empire's
message on MH17, Ukraine, Scripals, Russiagate etc etc. I was an early adopter but they now
seem compromised or simply deluded. Too bad, another one bites the dust.
Got it, Nemesiscalling, sorry to be obtuse. But I'm afraid I do disagree. This whole phobia
against Russia and anti-Trump scenario turned off huge numbers of their voters - some didn't
vote but some actually held their noses and voted for Trump. To me (and I sure could be
wrong) Dems just dug themselves a deeper hole with all of this. Save some sort of coup, I
can't see them winning a year from now. If anything more US voters have wised up than were
wised up before - you don't go back once eyes are opened.
I agree with your premise about this being kayfabe. From where I sit, there is no other
explanation for any political party to make these endless attacks based on absolutely nothing
over and over again. Attacks which can only maintain the charade from 2016 of Trump the
Victim. Does anyone think that somehow the Dems suddenly stopped being to calculating
psycho/sociopaths that they and the other side of the aisle are? Why would such shrewd
players not verify what people like Vindeman had to say before putting them on the stand?
They keep undermining their own case over and over again.
I find it impossible that they would continue to stick their hands in the fire after being
burned every single time before this, and with easily verifiable information. Especially when
the attacks are ALWAYS over stupid shit and never go after anything he actually could be
attacked for doing. What I keep seeing is like watching kindergarten kids try to kill a grown
man with foam rocks.
We keep seeing this complex, convoluted, evil shit come out of DC and yet we
simultaneously think these same players are morons? No freaking way. These attacks are the
only thing that keeps Trump's base on his side as he keeps betraying them and the opposition
keeps trying to outdo its last performance of stupid. I have seen a LOT of Trump supporters
throw in the towel on him for things he has done in the last 3 years, yet they come back to
his side after the newest stupid thing the left wing of the uni-party comes up with.
Shit, it isn't like Trump is even really shaking things up to cause such a ruckus!
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus
during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the
80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It
accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the
Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on.
Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.
As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried
to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save
it.
"In 2019, the bottom 99% of families will pay 7.2% of their wealth in taxes, while the top
0.1% of households will pay just 3.2%."
~~Elizabeth Warren~
do you see how EW has finally opened our eyes?
sure! poor people think about wealth as being income. they think about Wealth as being
their salary. from the perspective of a wealthy senator wealth is a function of assets. EW
had the guts to share this perspective with us, to open our eyes to reality.
we should not be taxing the payroll we should not be taxing the capital gains and other
income. we should be taxing non productive assets, assets which cannot be hidden which cannot
be taken off shore.
the Swiss have such a tax. all of their real estate is taxed at a rate of 0.3% per annum.
it would be easy for us to stop all local taxes All County taxes all state taxes and all
federal tax then initiate a 1% tax on all real property unimproved and on all improved real
property. we should continue this tax until our federal debt is completely discharged. such a
taxation shift would revv up our productive activity and increase our per capita GDP. as
usual there would be winners and there would be losers. the losers would be those who want
more inequality and the winners would be
"... Cliff Asness, another money manager, would fly into a rage at Warren adviser Gabriel Zucman for using the term "revenue maximizing" -- a standard piece of economic jargon -- describing it as "disgustingly immoral." ..."
"... Objectively, Obama treated Wall Street with kid gloves. In the aftermath of a devastating financial crisis, his administration bailed out collapsing institutions on favorable terms. He and Democrats in Congress did impose some new regulations, but they were very mild compared with the regulations put in place after the banking crisis of the 1930s. He did, however, refer on a few occasions to "fat cat" bankers and suggested that financial-industry excesses were responsible for the 2008 crisis because, well, they were. And the result, quite early in his administration, was that Wall Street became consumed with " Obama rage ," and the financial industry went all in for Mitt Romney in 2012. ..."
No, the really intense backlash against Warren and progressive Democrats in general is
coming from
Wall Street . And while that opposition partly reflects self-interest, Wall Street's Warren
hatred has a level of virulence, sometimes crossing into hysteria, that goes beyond normal
political calculation.
What's behind that virulence?
First, let's talk about the rational reasons Wall Street is worried about Warren. She is, of
course, calling for major tax increases on the very wealthy, those with wealth exceeding $50
million, and the financial industry is strongly represented in that elite club. And since
raising taxes on the wealthy is highly popular , it's an
idea a progressive president might actually be able to turn into real policy.
Warren is also a big believer in stricter financial regulation; the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, which was highly effective until the Trump administration set about gutting
it, was her brainchild.
So if you are a Wall Street billionaire, rational self-interest might well induce you to
oppose Warren. Neoliberal_rationality/ does not, however, explain why a money manager like Leon Cooperman
-- who just two years ago
settled a suit over insider trading for $5 million, although without admitting wrongdoing
-- would circulate an embarrassing, self-pitying open letter
denouncing Warren for her failure to appreciate all the wonderful things billionaires like
him do for society.
Nor does it explain why Cliff Asness, another money manager, would fly into a rage at Warren
adviser Gabriel Zucman for using the term "revenue maximizing" -- a standard piece of
economic jargon -- describing it as "disgustingly immoral."
The real tell here, I think, is that much of the Wall Street vitriol now being directed at
Warren was previously directed at, of all people, President Barack Obama.
Objectively, Obama treated Wall Street with kid gloves. In the aftermath of a devastating
financial crisis, his administration bailed out collapsing institutions on favorable terms. He
and Democrats in Congress did impose some new regulations, but they were very mild compared
with the regulations put in place after the banking crisis of the 1930s. He did, however, refer on a few occasions to "fat cat" bankers and suggested that
financial-industry excesses were responsible for the 2008 crisis because, well, they were. And
the result, quite early in his administration, was that Wall Street became consumed with "
Obama
rage ," and the financial industry went all in for Mitt Romney in 2012.
I wonder, by the way, if this history helps explain an odd aspect of fund-raising in the
current primary campaign. It's not surprising that Warren is getting very little money from the
financial sector. It is, however, surprising that the top recipient isn't Joe Biden but
Pete
Buttigieg , who's running a fairly distant
fourth in the polls. Is Biden suffering from the lingering effects of that old-time Obama
rage?
In any case, the point is that Wall Street billionaires, even more than billionaires in
general, seem to be snowflakes, emotionally unable to handle criticism.
I'm not sure why that should be the case, but it may be that in their hearts they suspect
that the critics have a point.
What, after all, does modern finance actually do for the economy? Unlike the robber barons
of yore, today's Wall Street tycoons don't build anything tangible. They don't even direct
money to the people who actually are building the industries of the future. The vast expansion
of credit in America after around 1980 basically involved a surge in
consumer debt rather than new money for business investment.
Moreover, there is growing evidence that when the financial sector gets too big it actually
acts as a drag on the economy -- and America is well past that point .
Now, human nature being what it is, people who secretly wonder whether they really deserve
their wealth get especially angry when others express these doubts publicly. So it's not
surprising that people who couldn't handle Obama's mild, polite criticism are completely losing
it over Warren.
What this means is that you should beware of Wall Street claims that progressive policies
would have dire effects. Such claims don't reflect deep economic wisdom; to a large extent
they're coming from people with vast wealth but fragile egos, whose rants should be discounted
appropriately. The Times is committed to publishing
a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of
our articles. Here are some tips
. And here's our email: [email protected]
.
"... So the Ukrainians traded their corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with it). ..."
"... Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down (American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"). ..."
"to a one they are turf-conscious careerists who think they set U.S. foreign policy and
resent the president for intruding upon them. It is increasingly evident that Trump's true
offense is proposing to renovate a foreign policy framework that has been more or less
untouched for 75 years (and is in dire need of renovation)."
This may be even worse than Lawrence depicts. It is clear that Vindman in his opening
remarks made it clear that the consensus policy of experts (like John Bolton) had been
following an agenda from the Obama administration (or before, but implemented under Obama,
Biden and Nuland) and it is verboten to change anything, despite constitutionally these
people at best only having advisory roles to the President (and constitutionally the
President can ask for their opinions in writing; CYA even back then!) The Ukrainian Americans
involved in the coup (national security from Vindman's perspective) are deeply committed
since 2014, and they expect to reap the benefits with no interference from Trump. And the
Democrats/ Ukraine-Americans "running the show" are probably much more corrupt than
Ukrainians governing their country before 2014.
I have started Oliver Bullough's "Money Land" and was aghast at the luxury items
Yanukovich had stolen through corruption and accumulated at his many properties. Surely with
so much money going to corrupt Yanukovich and his henchmen, the coup would have been a
blessing for the Ukrainian people! Right? I was shocked to find that after the overthrow of
Yanukovich in 2014, the median per capita household income in Ukraine, which had risen
steadily from $2032 in 2010 to $2601 in 2013, had dropped over 50% to $1110 to $1135 in 2015
and 2016, and has only risen to $1694 in 2018 (ceicdata.com).
So the Ukrainians traded their
corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt
neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their
pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with
it).
Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such
bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in
loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in
skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down
(American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman").
We Americans are less obvious, if also less subtle: we quickly transform our common story
into uncommon glory -- of a Continental Army standing unbowed before well-drilled Redcoats, of
a war against slavery that, within a generation, became a War for Southern Independence, or in
extolling the sacrifice of 58,000 Americans in a divisive intervention that became, less than a
half a decade later, a "noble cause." Not surprisingly, the truth is far more interesting than
any myth. The Continental Army at Valley Forge was not only ill-clothed, underpaid, and
desertion-riddled, its finest day had come not against British regulars but mercenary Hessians;
the War for Southern Independence was waged to eliminate a racial blight that, when the war
began, had already seen its best (or, rather, worst), days, while the "noble cause" of Vietnam
featured a
military that , by 1971, was "in a state approaching collapse, with individual units
avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where
not near-mutinous."
The substitution of myth for fact, however, has its uses -- as one of our greatest soldiers,
General George Patton, certainly knew. While Patton was an indifferent student (he flunked
mathematics at West Point), he was an avid reader with a prodigious memory and a finely tuned
sense of history. Which makes his speech to the Third Army on June 5 of 1944 (as celebrated in
Hollywood's epic 1970 paean), all the more remarkable, as it extols a history we wish we had --
but don't: "Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this
war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit," Patton announced. "Americans love to fight,
traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle."
But Patton was just getting started. "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a
loser," he went on to say. "Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all the time. I
wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never
lost nor will ever lose a war; for the idea of losing is hateful to America."
Of course, very little of this was actually true -- even in 1944, two decades before
Vietnam. All Americans love the sting and clash of battle? Not really. In January of 1781, in
the midst of the American Revolution, 1500 soldiers of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines of
the Continental Army mutinied, murdered their officers, and threatened to march on
Philadelphia.
When the mutiny spread, Washington had the mutineers rounded up, arrested, and their
ringleaders shot by a firing squad made up of their
fellow soldiers . On July 10 of 1863, one week after the Battle of Gettysburg, the New York
draft riots protesting conscription set fire to 50 buildings, lynched 11 black bystanders, and
left 120 civilians dead. The insurrection (as it was called by city officials), was finally
quelled by the New York State Militia. And in late 1944, while commanding in Europe, Dwight
Eisenhower was so angered by the reports of teeming throngs of American deserters raping and
looting their way through France that he considered "lining them up and mowing them down."
Americans have never lost a war? It doesn't take a trained historian to point out that the
American military botched the War of 1812 (the White House was burned and Washington occupied),
performed poorly (and genocidally) in the Indian Wars of the late 19th century (in which one of
its most famous units, the 7th Cavalry, was erased from existence), and mishandled the brutal
1899 Philippine Insurrection -- during which Mark Twain described American soldiers as
"uniformed assassins." Patton was no dummy and might have recited all of this himself. But his
speech made for good copy (and, as it turned out, great cinema) and undoubtedly boosted morale,
particularly for those who, within a short time, would be facing off against the best light
infantry in the history of the world.
But while historical myths have their place in creating a national story, France, China, and
Russia have, in turn (and over time), chosen truth over triumph -- exhuming the greatness of
Napoleon, Mao, and Lenin,
while burying forever the policies they followed . This is true also for the United States.
For while we Americans readily adopt the regalia of our past, we expect that our institutions
will not follow suit; that in the midst of failure, our policymakers will discard myths and
choose reality.
This is what happened, famously, on March 25, 1968 when President Lyndon
Johnson met with a group he called "the wise men" -- a wizened crew of 14 Washington
policymakers to help him decide what to do about the worsening situation in Vietnam. Included
in the group was former secretary of state Dean Acheson, former White House counsel Clark
Clifford, former ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and former JCS chairman
General Omar Bradley.
These officials had traditionally supported Johnson's Vietnam policies but now, in the wake
of the disastrous Tet Offensive, they had second thoughts. Stunned by the ferocity of the
Vietnamese attack, only two of the 14 (Maxwell Taylor and Abe Fortas) recommended that Johnson
"stay the course." The shift was symbolized by Omar Bradley, a military icon. Victory? "Maybe
we ought to lower our sights," he told Johnson.
Of course, while the March 1968 meeting of the wise men was crucial to America's adventure
in Vietnam (and Lyndon Johnson's political future), it did little to dampen the controversy
surrounding the war -- which has been refought, since, in the pages of the war's histories.
Indeed, it seems axiomatic that what cannot be won on a battlefield is often alchemized in
later accounts.
These bloodless campaigns, fought with pen rather than sword, turn defeats into victories,
burnish reputations, assess blame, but also blight understanding and blemish history. This is
particularly true when it comes to America's most controversial conflicts. In 1869, Confederate
Major General Dabney Herndon Maury founded the Southern Historical Society. Its papers, later
collected in 52 volumes, rewrote much of Civil War history, a tendentious rendering whose goal
was to argue the justness of the Lost Cause. Many of the society's papers remain troubling,
rehabilitating the image of the most famous and otherwise failed rebel leaders, while laying
the blame for the Confederate loss at the feet of southerners who, in later years, conceded the
Union victory. The papers also remain controversial because their most important claims (that Lee lost at
Gettysburg because his orders were disobeyed, that soldier-for-soldier, the southern armies
were simply better fighters than their northern counterparts) resulted from barely veiled
pro-southern and racially tinged political agendas. You'd have thought the South had won the
war.
The same holds true for Vietnam. In that war's aftermath, while much of America was trying
to forget the conflict, a small group of respected historians continued to pick at its scab,
leaving a blood trail of if-onlys in their wake. The most prominent of these historians was
Lewis "Bob" Sorley, a respected former officer and celebrated biographer (of Creighton Abrams
and William Westmoreland, among others), whose book on Vietnam, A Better War , has been
the subject of controversy since its publication in 1999.
In A Better War , Sorley argued that the U.S. might have won in Vietnam, if only that
nation's top commander in the conflict had discarded his costly and morale-sapping
search-and-destroy strategy in favor of maintaining the security of South Vietnam's population,
substituted clear-and-hold tactics for massive sweep operations, improved the training and
equipping of South Vietnam's military, decreased the destruction of U.S. firepower -- and
supported the South Vietnamese, instead of abandoning them.
The conclusions ignited a bonfire of criticism, particularly from some of the Army's more
respected thinkers. Writing in the pages of The National Interest in 2012, retired
Colonel Gian Gentile took on Sorley in a pointed critique that proposed that America should
have never been in Vietnam in the first place.
"In war, political and societal will are calculations of strategy, and strategists in
Vietnam should have discerned early on that the war was simply unwinnable based on what the
American people were willing to pay," Gentile wrote .
"Once the war started and it became clear that to prevail meant staying for an unacceptable
amount of time, American strategy should have moved to withdraw much earlier than it did.
Ending wars fought under botched strategy and policy can be every bit as damaging as the wars
themselves."
Put simply, Sorley argues that the Vietnam War could have been won, if only the U.S. had the
will to prevail, while Gentile responds that because the American people did not have the will
to prevail, the war should have never been fought.
The spat over the Civil War and Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean that history repeats
itself, but it does get rewritten -- and rethought. The same is now true for the war in Iraq.
The Army War College's weighty two-volume study of the 2003 Iraq conflict ( The U.S. Army in
the Iraq War ), has sparked a divisive mini-controversy among the uniformed services, whose
senior officers regularly debate its major conclusions (as I noted in The American
Conservative , online,
back in February ): that U.S. commanders didn't understand the country they invaded, made
assumptions about an enemy that proved to be wrong, didn't have enough soldiers to win the
fight, who bungled the military's detention policies, and who failed in their mission to train
and equip the Iraqi armed forces.
But any praise for these conclusions has been muted by the study's other (Sorley-like)
judgment: that, as in Vietnam -- where the villains were the antiwar movement and the Congress,
the villains in Iraq are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the former blamed for too quickly
getting us in, the latter for too quickly getting us out.
Into this affray has now jumped a much shorter (at 292 pages), offering, written by a team
of nine experts and researchers at the Rand Corporation. The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad , gives us what
the Army War College didn't -- an unvarnished and precise accounting of what went wrong and
why, and without the tendentious political overtones of the tome-like AWC study. This shouldn't
come as a surprise. Among the study's authors are two of the Army's leading thinkers: retired
Colonels David E. Johnson and Gian Gentile, the latter the outspoken Sorley critic known in the
military for his often-scathing ability to say what he means.
Johnson, on the other hand, is known for his counter-intuitive and often uncomfortable
question of given premises, which has made him a valued interlocutor in the upper echelons of
the Army. The likely result of the study (much talked about in the military prior to its
release earlier this year), is that it has had a far greater impact than its 1200-plus page
predecessor. The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad is not a page-turner, unless of course
you're an Army officer, but it lays out in precise detail the eight lessons the military can,
and should learn, from Operation Iraqi Freedom. But most readers will find the study's
understated third chapter, on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, among the most compelling written on
the war.
At the center of this presentation is the unshifting, unalterable truth of the war -- -that
the dysfunction obvious at the upper levels of the U.S. military following the fall of Baghdad
mirrored a deeper civilian-military chasm in Washington. The result of the dysfunction was that
the initial Battle for Baghdad was simply a prelude to a continuing battle for Baghdad, that
the war, once ended, simply continued.
The study's authors issue this crisp judgment, which is starkly at odds with the AWC
study:
"While much of the blame for the shortcomings of postwar planning rightly falls on senior
rungs of the Bush administration, the truth of the matter is that there is more than enough
blame to go around, up and down the chains of command in military and civilian planning."
Military officers speak candidly of the problem: "I don't think that any of us either could
have or did anticipate the total collapse of this regime," Lt. General William Wallace told the
authors, "and the psychological impact it had on the entire nation."
In military history, this is "the Henry Wentz problem." Henry Wentz was born in York County
in Pennsylvania in 1827, but moved with his family to nearby Gettysburg when he was nine. He
spent his most formative years on his family farm, which was just south of the town and off the
Emmitsburg Road.
As a young adult Henry went to Martinsburg (then in Virginia), married a local girl and
became a carriage maker. When the Civil War came he joined the Confederate Army, serving as an
ordnance sergeant in Taylor's Virginia Battery. On July 2, 1863, Wentz found himself manning
his rebel guns in his family's front yard, at Gettysburg, as a part of Longstreet's bloody
assault on the Union Army's III Corps. Lee had attacked with Longstreet that day to unhinge the
Union line, planning to take the high ground around the Wentz farm at a peach orchard, which
Lee thought was a dominating position.The orchard, owned by the Sherfy family (and hence
referred to as the Sherfy Peach Orchard in battle histories) seemed to rise out of the ground
and command the fields beyond. The problem was that Sherfy's orchard didn't dominate anything.
It was not on a rise, it did not control the land beyond. The orchard's height, if you stand on
it, is an optical illusion. A short discussion with Henry Wentz might have shown this, if only
Lee had known that Wentz was there.
He didn't.
For military officers commanding thousands or hundreds of thousands of young men and women,
for military experts whose job it is to study these operations -- -and not just for hobbyists
or aficionados -- the Henry Wentz problem is a tolling bell, a heart stopping
wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night realization that not knowing , particularly when
lives are at stake, is an unforgivable blunder. Reading about Gettysburg many years later,
generations of Civil War historians, reclining by their firesides, want to scream at Lee: "What
do you mean you didn't know ?" And that is the value of The U.S. Army and the Battle
of Baghdad -- -and the effect of William Wallace's seemingly mundane, if stunning,
observation. The U.S. military did not anticipate that the drive for Baghdad would be
difficult, did not anticipate that the Iraq Army would transform itself into an insurgency, did
not anticipate "the total collapse of the regime" -- and so did not anticipate the tragedy that
followed. To which we too want to scream: what do you mean you didn't anticipate? It was
your job to anticipate."
It is long past time that the senior military leadership with Iraq invasion (not to
ignore the Afghan debacle) and since be held accountable for multitude of blunders and poor
performance overall.
The fawning adulation from the press serves no good purpose and simply perpetuates the
waste and fraud that gives us more blunders and weapons systems and "strategies" that do
not and could not work to specs and plans.
But as the article states, there is plenty of blame to go around, I am referring to the
"political Leadership" of bush, obama, and now trump, and of course, congress. Leadership
may be too kind a term for what passes for leadership.
no issues holding the military mistakes to account. But these choices were politically
made and the political leadership should not be permitted to scapegoat the military for the
leaderships choices to engage in regime change which included purging military
dissenters.
Full agreement here. In fact, it's rather silly to strike at the military leaders, people
trained in war, for supporting war. It's like complaining about a scientist who decides to
solve every crisis with attaching it to the Internet.
The generals look at ways to fight a war. It's the political leaders that determine if
war is the right idea. That's why it's the elected leaders, not the military, that hold the
keys. All of the manipulations of the DoD end once we have a Congress and White House that
wants it to end.
Honestly I respect the idea of going after the past leaderships that sent us here, but
really I'd be content with just finding a leadership that stops the train now and leave the
old guard to their retirements. That's going to be difficult as it is without us turning on
a revenge campaign that might turn ugly.
It's a relatively minor point in the article, but I would agree with those who claim that
man-for-man the Confederates were better soldiers than the Yankees. They held out for 4
years against the US, whose forces were numerically superior and far better equipped and
supplied, while managing to inflict more military casualties on their foes than they
suffered. In the same way, I'd also agree with the many historians and WWII veterans who
claim that the Germans were man-for-man better soldiers than any of their enemies. Both the
American Civil War and WWII were essentially wars of attrition. Losing such a war is no
military disgrace but it also doesn't mean that the losing side had a noble cause. In most
wars, there are no good guys.
in what way were the confederate soldiers better "man for man"?
US soldiers got slaughtered wholesale throughout the war - yet they had the spirit to
keep coming. They got slaughtered wholesale because they used tactics developed for the
previous generation of small arms. The tactic of marching at the enemy packed together.
As James McPherson describes in "Battle Cry of Freedom" they got slaughtered because
they 1) had to fight on offense and 2) they were using tactics designed for the previous
generation of small arms. They used tactics designed for weak-firing in accurate muskets
rather than the current generation of rifles - accurate and deadly from long ranges.
They used the tactic of massing men together and marching at the enemy. This worked for
muskets. For rifles loaded with minie balls, it made them sitting ducks when they marched
towards dug in Confederates.
This article's author, Mr. Perry, mentions the slaughter of the Confederate soldiers at
the peach orchard. A slaughter that resulted from the Confederates having to walk across a
long rise of land before they could engage with the enemy. The slaughter that was said to
have begun the defeat the Confederates. An awful slaughter.
The US soldiers didn't have just one peach orchard, they had many. They had "cold
harbor", they had "the bloody angle", they had "Marye's heights". Dug in confederates armed
with rifles mangled US soldiers horribly. Mangled them as they marched, out in the open,
well within rifle range, towards dug in and hidden Confederates.
Yet the Union soldiers had the spirit to keep on coming. It's like "Butch Cassidy and
The Sundance Kid". As Perry points out, post Civil War Southern supporting writers
romanticized the poor, starving, southern infantryman. He was handsome, stoic, and a
fighter. But it was the northern guys who kept on coming. Kept on coming despite seeing so
many of their friends torn to pieces.
Northern soldiers who had the stuff to get the job done.
So the more numerous side that has the spirit to keep coming despite enormous casualties
and because of bad tactics are by definition better soldiers than the less numerous side
which using good tactics has the spirit to keep fighting until they finally run out of
effective fighters? By this standard the more numerous are always better soldiers as long
as they win in the end, which they usually will in a war of attrition. By this standard,
the Russians were far better soldiers than the Germans in WWII. Hint - the term man-for-man
indicates I am measuring quality rather than just quantity and quality in soldiers includes
tactical proficiency, not just bravery.
War is an obsolete idea. 1000 years ago, the only way to increase your wealth was to take
over someone else's land and enthrall the local population to farm it for you. 200 years
ago it was necessary to capture a population in order to force them to only purchase your
manufactured goods, so your capitalists didn't have to compete with those of other
countries.
In a information/service economy, war and control over other populations serve no
purpose. The DOD, like all grand bureaucracies, survives only through the corruption of
Congress.
It is time to disband the military. Get rid of the Navy, but leave the Coast Guard. Then
turn the Coast Guard over to the States. Disband the Army and Marine Corps. Let the State's
maintain their National Guards if they want. Disband the Air Force. The federal government
should just maintain a nuclear deterrent force and set up a coastal missile defense that
can destroy any Navy attempting to sail to attack us.
Have the federal government manufacture everything it needs itself instead of handing
over tax payer dollars which are then used to corrupt Congress. It's time.
I look forward to further articles on the military's culture of not knowing. I've spent
my whole adult life around Army personnel. (mostly retired). Going off to do things
half-cocked is a point of pride with them. It's a macho trait that they love about
themselves. Being willing to take action even though they haven't spent much time assessing
the forces in their way.- being willing to wade into unknown danger.
Pondering things seriously is weakness - in their view.
further, at least one of these unlikely seeming new proponents of traditional
masculinity - Jordan Peters - celebrates this macho trait. The macho trait of taking action
without considering all knowable facts.
"the War for Southern Independence was waged to eliminate a racial blight that, when the
war began, had already seen its best (or, rather, worst)"
The comforting notion that slavery was destined to "fade away" was frequently indulged
in during the 250 plus years that it lasted in the U.S., but it never did. As for the Wentz
anecdote, if Lee had talked with Wentz, the outcome of the war would not have changed.
There is an interesting "sabermetric" study of generals you can find online that gives a
particularly interesting picture of Lee. He was one of the most aggressive generals in
history, fighting more battles than anyone except Napoleon. But he was also--wait for
it--BELOW AVERAGE. (Please don't spill your mint julip.) Grant, on the other hand, was one
of the 10 best ever.
Slavery was on the way out and in another generation was gone throughout the western world,
including the African colonies, and surviving only in Arabia. Only in the US and Haiti was
slavery ended by wars and horrific bloodshed. In all other countries, including the vast
slave empire of Brazil, slavery was abolished with minimal to no casualties. A bit of
patience on the part of the abolitionists and unionists would have led to a somewhat later
but peaceful end of slavery in the southern US. The union of all the states may not have
been preserved, but in my estimation that would have been a good thing, if achieved
peacefully.
The military planners knew what was needed to pacify Iraq in the invasion and occupation.
750,000 troops and 25B+ dollars. Darth Cheney knew the US public wouldn't accept that, so
they went in on the cheap, ignored the vast stores of conventional weapons, and Viceroy
Bremmer back-stabbed the Iraqi army, thus creating the insurgency. Why? Because Planned
Chaos is the most profitable, and taking Iraq oil off the market greatly enriched our
"Saudi friends" and lots of other producers in the region. Inflation-adjusted oil prices
more than doubled from 2003 to 2007.
As of early 2009, the surge had worked, were holding territory on turf Islamic savages
considered their own and were killing hoards of jihadi scum who were flocking there, pretty
much at will, who were being induced to do so at the behest of Bin Laden. Iraq was part of
a long term strategic regional strategy (kill them on their own turf) which was working
quite well as far as it got. 4000 dead US soldiers is a travesty under any circumstances,
but considering what we had accomplished it pales in comparison with Vietnam. Keep in mind
we stayed in Germany and Japan for decades after WWII to ensure our efforts were not
wasted.
Iraq was not a debacle until 0bama refused to negotiate an updated SOFA, effectively
surrendered (against military and other expert advice) and rendered every single US
military death to have been in vain.
"... So the Ukrainians traded their corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with it). ..."
"... Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down (American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"). ..."
"to a one they are turf-conscious careerists who think they set U.S. foreign policy and
resent the president for intruding upon them. It is increasingly evident that Trump's true
offense is proposing to renovate a foreign policy framework that has been more or less
untouched for 75 years (and is in dire need of renovation)."
This may be even worse than Lawrence depicts. It is clear that Vindman in his opening
remarks made it clear that the consensus policy of experts (like John Bolton) had been
following an agenda from the Obama administration (or before, but implemented under Obama,
Biden and Nuland) and it is verboten to change anything, despite constitutionally these
people at best only having advisory roles to the President (and constitutionally the
President can ask for their opinions in writing; CYA even back then!) The Ukrainian Americans
involved in the coup (national security from Vindman's perspective) are deeply committed
since 2014, and they expect to reap the benefits with no interference from Trump. And the
Democrats/ Ukraine-Americans "running the show" are probably much more corrupt than
Ukrainians governing their country before 2014.
I have started Oliver Bullough's "Money Land" and was aghast at the luxury items
Yanukovich had stolen through corruption and accumulated at his many properties. Surely with
so much money going to corrupt Yanukovich and his henchmen, the coup would have been a
blessing for the Ukrainian people! Right? I was shocked to find that after the overthrow of
Yanukovich in 2014, the median per capita household income in Ukraine, which had risen
steadily from $2032 in 2010 to $2601 in 2013, had dropped over 50% to $1110 to $1135 in 2015
and 2016, and has only risen to $1694 in 2018 (ceicdata.com).
So the Ukrainians traded their
corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt
neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their
pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with
it).
Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such
bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in
loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in
skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down
(American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman").
@Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 11 2019 21:30 utc | 152
But, with that explanation, it is like you are whithewashing fascism as a merely opposing political view, which is precisley
the position and pretension of the Trumpers, when it is not. Fascism is incompatible with democracy and human rights...as the
recent ( just overnight the coup...) declarations by The Donald on the events in Bolivia come to confirm...
You forget a main characteristic of fascists, that is that they aspire ( and when the circumstances allow it, always try...)
to wipe out their political adversaries from the face of Earth, as the case in Bolivia is so flagrantry illustrating. Along with
their political adversaries, who are always those who position themselves in the side or as representives of the people, they
always try to wipe out also all those subgroups of human beings they consider utermenschen ...In this cathegory they will
include many, slavs, latinos, jews, gypsies, black people...
Then, once in power, they will use terror to keep the citizenry ( who otherwise will rebel once the real "program" of the nazis
unveiled ) in control...
That the US system is as a whole fascist falls plainly in the faces of all its deluded and anestesized citizens when you see today
that neither Pelosi, nor Schumaker, nor Clinton, nor Biden have said a word agsint what happened yesterday in Bolivia or against
the words of the POTUS who "allegedly" they try to overthrow...a representation described by Trump himself, in the heights of
stone face, as coup d´etat...
I stated that fascism has no ideology. It cannot be a "political view" .
The fascists in Rwanda are Black. The fascists in Israel are Jewish. The fascists in Ukraine are Slavs. The fascists in Colombia
are Latinos.
Fascism isn't about one ethnicity or another. Ethnic prejudice is just one (of many) handle that the capitalists elites use
to get some parts of society to attack other parts. The people who fall under that control by the capitalist elites are fascists.
"... The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along. ..."
Recent class history of US is quite simple: the elite class first tried to shift the burden
of supporting the lower classes on the middle class with taxation. But as the lower class
became demographically distinct, partially via mass immigration, the elites decided to ally
with the ' underpriviledged ' via identity posturing and squeeze no longer needed
middle class out of existence.
What's left are government employees, a few corporate sinecures, NGO parasitic sector, and
old people. The rest will be melded into a few mutually antagonistic tribal groups providing
ever cheaper service labor. With an occasional lottery winner to showcase mobility. Actually
very similar to what happened in Latin America in the past few centuries.
The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are
'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of
corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing
along.
Unlike the USA (under Neocon stewardship) China has not squandered twenty trillion dollars
of its national solvency bombing countries which never attacked it post 9-11.
China's leaders (unlike our own) never LIED its people into launching obscenely expensive,
illegal wars of aggression across the middle east. (WMD's, Mushroom clouds, Yellow Cake,
etc.)
China has used its wealth and resources to build up its infrastructure, build out its
capital markets, and turbo charge its high tech sectors. As a consequence, it has lifted
nearly half a billion people out of poverty. There has been an explosion in the growth of the
"middle class" in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now living comfortable "upwardly
mobile" lives.
The USA, on the other hand, having been defrauded by its "ruling elites" into launching
and fighting endless illegal wars, is now 23 trillion dollars in catastrophic debt.
NOT ONE PENNY of this heinous "overspending" has been dedicated to building up OUR
infrastructure, or BUILDING OUT our middle class.
It has all gone into BLOWING UP countries which never (even) attacked us on 9-11.
As a consequence , the USA is fast becoming a failed nation, a nation where all its wealth
is being siphoned into the hands of its one percent "war pilfer-teers".
It is so sad to have grown up in such an amazing country , with such immense resources and
possibilities, and having to bear witness to it going down the tubes.
To watch all our sovereign wealth being vaporized by our "lie us into endless illegal war"
ruling elites is truly heartbreaking.
The white middle class is the only group that might effectively resist Globohomo's designs on
total power.
Blacks? Too dumb. Will be disposed of once Globohomo is finished the job.
Hispanics? Used to corrupt one party systems. Give them cerveza and Netflix and they're
good.
East Asians? Perfectly fine with living like bug people.
South Asians? Cowardly; will go with the flow.
The middle class is almost completely unique to white people.
Racial aliens cannot wrap their minds around being middle class. They think I'm crazy for
appreciating my 2009 Honda Accord. They literally cannot understand why somebody would want
to live a frugal and mundane life. They are desperate to be like Drake but most end up broke.
It will be very easy for GloboHomo to control a bucket of poor brown slop.
There IS a black middle class, but a big chunk of that works for governments of all
shapes and sizes.
Strictly speaking, there is no more "middle class" in the sense of the classical
economists: a person with just enough capital to live off the income if he works the capital
himself or herself. By this definition professionals (lawyers, dentists, physicians, small
store owners, even spinsters [1] and hand loom operators in a sense) were middle class. Upper
class had enough property to turn it over to managers, lower class had little or no property
and worked for others (servants and farm workers, for example). Paupers didn't earn enough
income per year to feed themselves and didn't live all that long, usually.
What we have is "middle income" people, almost all of whom work as an employee of some
organization -- people who would be considered "lower class" by the classical economists
because they don't have freedom of action and make no independent decisions about how the
capital of their organizations is spent. Today they are considered "intelligentsia", educated
government workers, or, by analogy, educated corporate workers. IMHO, intelligentsia is a
suicide job, and is responsible for the depressed fertility rate, but that's just me.
Back in the AD 1800s and pre-AD 1930 there were many black middle class people. usually
concentrating on selling to black clientele. Now there are effectively none outside of
criminal activities, usually petty criminal. And so it goes.
Of course, back then there were many white middle class people also, usually concentrating
on selling to white clientele. Now there are effectively none, except in some rural areas.
And so it goes.
Counterinsurgency
1] Cottagers who made their living spinning wool skeins into wool threads.
@unit472 A
lot of the middle class are Democrats but not particularly liberal. Many of them vote
Democrat only when they personally benefit. For example, my parents were suburban public
school teachers. They voted for Democrats at the state level because the Democrats supported
better pay and benefits for teachers but voted for Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan at
the national level because Republicans would keep their federal taxes lower. They had no
political philosophy. It was all about what left them financially better off. My parents also
got on well with their suburban neighbors. Suburbanites generally like their local school
system and its teachers and the suburban school systems are usually careful not to engage in
teaching anything controversial. A lot of the government employed white middle class would be
like my parents. Except in situations where specific Republicans talk about major cuts to
their pay and pensions they are perfectly willing to consider voting Republican. They are
generally social moderates, like the status quo, are fairly traditionalist and don't want any
radical changes. Since the Democrats seem be trending in a radical direction, this would put
off a lot of them. Trump would be more appealing as the status quo candidate. When running
the last time, he carefully avoided talking about any major cuts in government spending and
he's governed that way too. At the same time, his talk of cutting immigration, his lack of
enthusiasm for nonwhite affirmative action, and his more traditional views on social issues
is appealing to the white middle class.
The term middle class is used in the U.S. to mean middle income. It has nothing to do with
class. Why not just say what you mean? Most of the middle class that we say is disappearing
is really that rarest of phenomenons. A prosperous working class. The prosperous American
working class is no longer prosperous due to the Neoliberal agenda. Free trade, open borders
and the financialization of everything.
Americans know nothing of class dynamics. Not even the so called socialists. They don't
even see the economy. All they see is people with infinite need and government with infinite
wealth. In their world all of Central America can come to the U.S. and the government (if it
only wants to) can give them all homes, health care and education.
Lets stop saying class when we mean income. Not using the word class would be better than
abusing it.
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If
the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the
Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
Are we to the point where we've collectively resigned ourselves to the death of the
middle class?
In the neoliberal worldview, the middle class is illegitimate, existing only as a
consequence of artificial trade and immigration barriers. Anytime Americans are spied out
making a good living, there is a "shortage" that must be addressed with more visas. Or else
there is an "inefficiency" where other countries could provide said service or produce said
product for less because they have a "comparative advantage."
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists.
If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with
the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
I don't know about that anymore. Increasingly, "middle class" means Asian, with Whiteness
being associated with the lower middle class (or perhaps "working class"). Sometimes the
media uses the term " noncollege Whites," which I think is actually very apt. They are the
ones who identify with Whiteness the most.
NemesisCalling @127: "I see that you never question the implication of what calling one a
fascist really means"
What is fascism? It usually has a religious component, be it Protestant, Catholic, Hindu,
Shinto, and yes, Muslim, Buddhist and even Jewish.
OK, so defining fascism by religion isn't going to get you anywhere as it runs the
gamut.
There are certainly white fascists, but there are also Black fascists, Japanese fascists,
Indian fascists, Chinese fascists, Latino fascists... I guess ethnicity won't get you
anywhere with explaining what fascism is either.
Nationalism? No, there are fascists of pretty much every nationality, so that hardly gets
us anywhere closer to understanding what it is.
A fetish for crisp uniforms? No, fascists are just as likely to wear filthy rancid goat
scented rags.
Fascist ideology is malleable. It morphs to be whatever it needs to be at the moment. So
the what is the one common aspect that fascism always possesses? Answer: In the class
war between labor and capital, fascists always back capital and oppose labor.
When it comes down to a street fight big business doesn't have the numbers to counter
labor from within their own class, and the capitalist elites don't want to get their hands
dirty anyway. As a consequence they must recruit goons and societal support for those goons
from the small business class, the sub-working-class, and from the working class itself to
defeat the working class. To accomplish this recruiting the capitalist elites use their
control over mass media to make appeals to every prejudice that exists in society to turn
those influenced by those prejudices against the working class. Every form of tribalism is
exploited, and since the precise characteristics of the major tribalist divisions in society
differ from region to region, and even neighborhood to neighborhood, the composition of the
fascist forces recruited to attack the working class tends to vary from place to place.
If fascism is so variable in all of its characteristics, how then can anyone say who is
and who isn't a fascist?
The answer to that is actually fairly easy. When the class war breaks out into the open,
as is the case in Bolivia right now, the people who are not lords of capital but still throw
their lot in with capital are fascists.
In other words, in North America and Europe, fascism is far more prevalent than most
people are willing to face.
Doesn't it make you feel better to know that fascism is just the proper name for
anti-socialist?
Thank you, @BlackWomxnFor ! Black trans and
cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy and I
don't take this endorsement lightly. I'm committed to fighting alongside you for the big,
structural change our country needs. https://t.co/KqWsVoRYMb
People need to remember that we literally didn't even have democracy until the trans
movement started and finally brought us to The Right Side of History.
Thank you, @BlackWomxnFor ! Black trans and
cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy and I
don't take this endorsement lightly. I'm committed to fighting alongside you for the big,
structural change our country needs. https://t.co/KqWsVoRYMb
People need to remember that we literally didn't even have democracy until the trans
movement started and finally brought us to The Right Side of History.
We Americans are less obvious, if also less subtle: we quickly transform our common story
into uncommon glory -- of a Continental Army standing unbowed before well-drilled Redcoats, of
a war against slavery that, within a generation, became a War for Southern Independence, or in
extolling the sacrifice of 58,000 Americans in a divisive intervention that became, less than a
half a decade later, a "noble cause." Not surprisingly, the truth is far more interesting than
any myth. The Continental Army at Valley Forge was not only ill-clothed, underpaid, and
desertion-riddled, its finest day had come not against British regulars but mercenary Hessians;
the War for Southern Independence was waged to eliminate a racial blight that, when the war
began, had already seen its best (or, rather, worst), days, while the "noble cause" of Vietnam
featured a
military that , by 1971, was "in a state approaching collapse, with individual units
avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where
not near-mutinous."
The substitution of myth for fact, however, has its uses -- as one of our greatest soldiers,
General George Patton, certainly knew. While Patton was an indifferent student (he flunked
mathematics at West Point), he was an avid reader with a prodigious memory and a finely tuned
sense of history. Which makes his speech to the Third Army on June 5 of 1944 (as celebrated in
Hollywood's epic 1970 paean), all the more remarkable, as it extols a history we wish we had --
but don't: "Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this
war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit," Patton announced. "Americans love to fight,
traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle."
But Patton was just getting started. "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a
loser," he went on to say. "Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all the time. I
wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never
lost nor will ever lose a war; for the idea of losing is hateful to America."
Of course, very little of this was actually true -- even in 1944, two decades before
Vietnam. All Americans love the sting and clash of battle? Not really. In January of 1781, in
the midst of the American Revolution, 1500 soldiers of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines of
the Continental Army mutinied, murdered their officers, and threatened to march on
Philadelphia.
When the mutiny spread, Washington had the mutineers rounded up, arrested, and their
ringleaders shot by a firing squad made up of their
fellow soldiers . On July 10 of 1863, one week after the Battle of Gettysburg, the New York
draft riots protesting conscription set fire to 50 buildings, lynched 11 black bystanders, and
left 120 civilians dead. The insurrection (as it was called by city officials), was finally
quelled by the New York State Militia. And in late 1944, while commanding in Europe, Dwight
Eisenhower was so angered by the reports of teeming throngs of American deserters raping and
looting their way through France that he considered "lining them up and mowing them down."
Americans have never lost a war? It doesn't take a trained historian to point out that the
American military botched the War of 1812 (the White House was burned and Washington occupied),
performed poorly (and genocidally) in the Indian Wars of the late 19th century (in which one of
its most famous units, the 7th Cavalry, was erased from existence), and mishandled the brutal
1899 Philippine Insurrection -- during which Mark Twain described American soldiers as
"uniformed assassins." Patton was no dummy and might have recited all of this himself. But his
speech made for good copy (and, as it turned out, great cinema) and undoubtedly boosted morale,
particularly for those who, within a short time, would be facing off against the best light
infantry in the history of the world.
But while historical myths have their place in creating a national story, France, China, and
Russia have, in turn (and over time), chosen truth over triumph -- exhuming the greatness of
Napoleon, Mao, and Lenin,
while burying forever the policies they followed . This is true also for the United States.
For while we Americans readily adopt the regalia of our past, we expect that our institutions
will not follow suit; that in the midst of failure, our policymakers will discard myths and
choose reality.
This is what happened, famously, on March 25, 1968 when President Lyndon
Johnson met with a group he called "the wise men" -- a wizened crew of 14 Washington
policymakers to help him decide what to do about the worsening situation in Vietnam. Included
in the group was former secretary of state Dean Acheson, former White House counsel Clark
Clifford, former ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and former JCS chairman
General Omar Bradley.
These officials had traditionally supported Johnson's Vietnam policies but now, in the wake
of the disastrous Tet Offensive, they had second thoughts. Stunned by the ferocity of the
Vietnamese attack, only two of the 14 (Maxwell Taylor and Abe Fortas) recommended that Johnson
"stay the course." The shift was symbolized by Omar Bradley, a military icon. Victory? "Maybe
we ought to lower our sights," he told Johnson.
Of course, while the March 1968 meeting of the wise men was crucial to America's adventure
in Vietnam (and Lyndon Johnson's political future), it did little to dampen the controversy
surrounding the war -- which has been refought, since, in the pages of the war's histories.
Indeed, it seems axiomatic that what cannot be won on a battlefield is often alchemized in
later accounts.
These bloodless campaigns, fought with pen rather than sword, turn defeats into victories,
burnish reputations, assess blame, but also blight understanding and blemish history. This is
particularly true when it comes to America's most controversial conflicts. In 1869, Confederate
Major General Dabney Herndon Maury founded the Southern Historical Society. Its papers, later
collected in 52 volumes, rewrote much of Civil War history, a tendentious rendering whose goal
was to argue the justness of the Lost Cause. Many of the society's papers remain troubling,
rehabilitating the image of the most famous and otherwise failed rebel leaders, while laying
the blame for the Confederate loss at the feet of southerners who, in later years, conceded the
Union victory. The papers also remain controversial because their most important claims (that Lee lost at
Gettysburg because his orders were disobeyed, that soldier-for-soldier, the southern armies
were simply better fighters than their northern counterparts) resulted from barely veiled
pro-southern and racially tinged political agendas. You'd have thought the South had won the
war.
The same holds true for Vietnam. In that war's aftermath, while much of America was trying
to forget the conflict, a small group of respected historians continued to pick at its scab,
leaving a blood trail of if-onlys in their wake. The most prominent of these historians was
Lewis "Bob" Sorley, a respected former officer and celebrated biographer (of Creighton Abrams
and William Westmoreland, among others), whose book on Vietnam, A Better War , has been
the subject of controversy since its publication in 1999.
In A Better War , Sorley argued that the U.S. might have won in Vietnam, if only that
nation's top commander in the conflict had discarded his costly and morale-sapping
search-and-destroy strategy in favor of maintaining the security of South Vietnam's population,
substituted clear-and-hold tactics for massive sweep operations, improved the training and
equipping of South Vietnam's military, decreased the destruction of U.S. firepower -- and
supported the South Vietnamese, instead of abandoning them.
The conclusions ignited a bonfire of criticism, particularly from some of the Army's more
respected thinkers. Writing in the pages of The National Interest in 2012, retired
Colonel Gian Gentile took on Sorley in a pointed critique that proposed that America should
have never been in Vietnam in the first place.
"In war, political and societal will are calculations of strategy, and strategists in
Vietnam should have discerned early on that the war was simply unwinnable based on what the
American people were willing to pay," Gentile wrote .
"Once the war started and it became clear that to prevail meant staying for an unacceptable
amount of time, American strategy should have moved to withdraw much earlier than it did.
Ending wars fought under botched strategy and policy can be every bit as damaging as the wars
themselves."
Put simply, Sorley argues that the Vietnam War could have been won, if only the U.S. had the
will to prevail, while Gentile responds that because the American people did not have the will
to prevail, the war should have never been fought.
The spat over the Civil War and Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean that history repeats
itself, but it does get rewritten -- and rethought. The same is now true for the war in Iraq.
The Army War College's weighty two-volume study of the 2003 Iraq conflict ( The U.S. Army in
the Iraq War ), has sparked a divisive mini-controversy among the uniformed services, whose
senior officers regularly debate its major conclusions (as I noted in The American
Conservative , online,
back in February ): that U.S. commanders didn't understand the country they invaded, made
assumptions about an enemy that proved to be wrong, didn't have enough soldiers to win the
fight, who bungled the military's detention policies, and who failed in their mission to train
and equip the Iraqi armed forces.
But any praise for these conclusions has been muted by the study's other (Sorley-like)
judgment: that, as in Vietnam -- where the villains were the antiwar movement and the Congress,
the villains in Iraq are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the former blamed for too quickly
getting us in, the latter for too quickly getting us out.
Into this affray has now jumped a much shorter (at 292 pages), offering, written by a team
of nine experts and researchers at the Rand Corporation. The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad , gives us what
the Army War College didn't -- an unvarnished and precise accounting of what went wrong and
why, and without the tendentious political overtones of the tome-like AWC study. This shouldn't
come as a surprise. Among the study's authors are two of the Army's leading thinkers: retired
Colonels David E. Johnson and Gian Gentile, the latter the outspoken Sorley critic known in the
military for his often-scathing ability to say what he means.
Johnson, on the other hand, is known for his counter-intuitive and often uncomfortable
question of given premises, which has made him a valued interlocutor in the upper echelons of
the Army. The likely result of the study (much talked about in the military prior to its
release earlier this year), is that it has had a far greater impact than its 1200-plus page
predecessor. The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad is not a page-turner, unless of course
you're an Army officer, but it lays out in precise detail the eight lessons the military can,
and should learn, from Operation Iraqi Freedom. But most readers will find the study's
understated third chapter, on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, among the most compelling written on
the war.
At the center of this presentation is the unshifting, unalterable truth of the war -- -that
the dysfunction obvious at the upper levels of the U.S. military following the fall of Baghdad
mirrored a deeper civilian-military chasm in Washington. The result of the dysfunction was that
the initial Battle for Baghdad was simply a prelude to a continuing battle for Baghdad, that
the war, once ended, simply continued.
The study's authors issue this crisp judgment, which is starkly at odds with the AWC
study:
"While much of the blame for the shortcomings of postwar planning rightly falls on senior
rungs of the Bush administration, the truth of the matter is that there is more than enough
blame to go around, up and down the chains of command in military and civilian planning."
Military officers speak candidly of the problem: "I don't think that any of us either could
have or did anticipate the total collapse of this regime," Lt. General William Wallace told the
authors, "and the psychological impact it had on the entire nation."
In military history, this is "the Henry Wentz problem." Henry Wentz was born in York County
in Pennsylvania in 1827, but moved with his family to nearby Gettysburg when he was nine. He
spent his most formative years on his family farm, which was just south of the town and off the
Emmitsburg Road.
As a young adult Henry went to Martinsburg (then in Virginia), married a local girl and
became a carriage maker. When the Civil War came he joined the Confederate Army, serving as an
ordnance sergeant in Taylor's Virginia Battery. On July 2, 1863, Wentz found himself manning
his rebel guns in his family's front yard, at Gettysburg, as a part of Longstreet's bloody
assault on the Union Army's III Corps. Lee had attacked with Longstreet that day to unhinge the
Union line, planning to take the high ground around the Wentz farm at a peach orchard, which
Lee thought was a dominating position.The orchard, owned by the Sherfy family (and hence
referred to as the Sherfy Peach Orchard in battle histories) seemed to rise out of the ground
and command the fields beyond. The problem was that Sherfy's orchard didn't dominate anything.
It was not on a rise, it did not control the land beyond. The orchard's height, if you stand on
it, is an optical illusion. A short discussion with Henry Wentz might have shown this, if only
Lee had known that Wentz was there.
He didn't.
For military officers commanding thousands or hundreds of thousands of young men and women,
for military experts whose job it is to study these operations -- -and not just for hobbyists
or aficionados -- the Henry Wentz problem is a tolling bell, a heart stopping
wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night realization that not knowing , particularly when
lives are at stake, is an unforgivable blunder. Reading about Gettysburg many years later,
generations of Civil War historians, reclining by their firesides, want to scream at Lee: "What
do you mean you didn't know ?" And that is the value of The U.S. Army and the Battle
of Baghdad -- -and the effect of William Wallace's seemingly mundane, if stunning,
observation. The U.S. military did not anticipate that the drive for Baghdad would be
difficult, did not anticipate that the Iraq Army would transform itself into an insurgency, did
not anticipate "the total collapse of the regime" -- and so did not anticipate the tragedy that
followed. To which we too want to scream: what do you mean you didn't anticipate? It was
your job to anticipate."
It is long past time that the senior military leadership with Iraq invasion (not to
ignore the Afghan debacle) and since be held accountable for multitude of blunders and poor
performance overall.
The fawning adulation from the press serves no good purpose and simply perpetuates the
waste and fraud that gives us more blunders and weapons systems and "strategies" that do
not and could not work to specs and plans.
But as the article states, there is plenty of blame to go around, I am referring to the
"political Leadership" of bush, obama, and now trump, and of course, congress. Leadership
may be too kind a term for what passes for leadership.
no issues holding the military mistakes to account. But these choices were politically
made and the political leadership should not be permitted to scapegoat the military for the
leaderships choices to engage in regime change which included purging military
dissenters.
Full agreement here. In fact, it's rather silly to strike at the military leaders, people
trained in war, for supporting war. It's like complaining about a scientist who decides to
solve every crisis with attaching it to the Internet.
The generals look at ways to fight a war. It's the political leaders that determine if
war is the right idea. That's why it's the elected leaders, not the military, that hold the
keys. All of the manipulations of the DoD end once we have a Congress and White House that
wants it to end.
Honestly I respect the idea of going after the past leaderships that sent us here, but
really I'd be content with just finding a leadership that stops the train now and leave the
old guard to their retirements. That's going to be difficult as it is without us turning on
a revenge campaign that might turn ugly.
It's a relatively minor point in the article, but I would agree with those who claim that
man-for-man the Confederates were better soldiers than the Yankees. They held out for 4
years against the US, whose forces were numerically superior and far better equipped and
supplied, while managing to inflict more military casualties on their foes than they
suffered. In the same way, I'd also agree with the many historians and WWII veterans who
claim that the Germans were man-for-man better soldiers than any of their enemies. Both the
American Civil War and WWII were essentially wars of attrition. Losing such a war is no
military disgrace but it also doesn't mean that the losing side had a noble cause. In most
wars, there are no good guys.
in what way were the confederate soldiers better "man for man"?
US soldiers got slaughtered wholesale throughout the war - yet they had the spirit to
keep coming. They got slaughtered wholesale because they used tactics developed for the
previous generation of small arms. The tactic of marching at the enemy packed together.
As James McPherson describes in "Battle Cry of Freedom" they got slaughtered because
they 1) had to fight on offense and 2) they were using tactics designed for the previous
generation of small arms. They used tactics designed for weak-firing in accurate muskets
rather than the current generation of rifles - accurate and deadly from long ranges.
They used the tactic of massing men together and marching at the enemy. This worked for
muskets. For rifles loaded with minie balls, it made them sitting ducks when they marched
towards dug in Confederates.
This article's author, Mr. Perry, mentions the slaughter of the Confederate soldiers at
the peach orchard. A slaughter that resulted from the Confederates having to walk across a
long rise of land before they could engage with the enemy. The slaughter that was said to
have begun the defeat the Confederates. An awful slaughter.
The US soldiers didn't have just one peach orchard, they had many. They had "cold
harbor", they had "the bloody angle", they had "Marye's heights". Dug in confederates armed
with rifles mangled US soldiers horribly. Mangled them as they marched, out in the open,
well within rifle range, towards dug in and hidden Confederates.
Yet the Union soldiers had the spirit to keep on coming. It's like "Butch Cassidy and
The Sundance Kid". As Perry points out, post Civil War Southern supporting writers
romanticized the poor, starving, southern infantryman. He was handsome, stoic, and a
fighter. But it was the northern guys who kept on coming. Kept on coming despite seeing so
many of their friends torn to pieces.
Northern soldiers who had the stuff to get the job done.
So the more numerous side that has the spirit to keep coming despite enormous casualties
and because of bad tactics are by definition better soldiers than the less numerous side
which using good tactics has the spirit to keep fighting until they finally run out of
effective fighters? By this standard the more numerous are always better soldiers as long
as they win in the end, which they usually will in a war of attrition. By this standard,
the Russians were far better soldiers than the Germans in WWII. Hint - the term man-for-man
indicates I am measuring quality rather than just quantity and quality in soldiers includes
tactical proficiency, not just bravery.
War is an obsolete idea. 1000 years ago, the only way to increase your wealth was to take
over someone else's land and enthrall the local population to farm it for you. 200 years
ago it was necessary to capture a population in order to force them to only purchase your
manufactured goods, so your capitalists didn't have to compete with those of other
countries.
In a information/service economy, war and control over other populations serve no
purpose. The DOD, like all grand bureaucracies, survives only through the corruption of
Congress.
It is time to disband the military. Get rid of the Navy, but leave the Coast Guard. Then
turn the Coast Guard over to the States. Disband the Army and Marine Corps. Let the State's
maintain their National Guards if they want. Disband the Air Force. The federal government
should just maintain a nuclear deterrent force and set up a coastal missile defense that
can destroy any Navy attempting to sail to attack us.
Have the federal government manufacture everything it needs itself instead of handing
over tax payer dollars which are then used to corrupt Congress. It's time.
I look forward to further articles on the military's culture of not knowing. I've spent
my whole adult life around Army personnel. (mostly retired). Going off to do things
half-cocked is a point of pride with them. It's a macho trait that they love about
themselves. Being willing to take action even though they haven't spent much time assessing
the forces in their way.- being willing to wade into unknown danger.
Pondering things seriously is weakness - in their view.
further, at least one of these unlikely seeming new proponents of traditional
masculinity - Jordan Peters - celebrates this macho trait. The macho trait of taking action
without considering all knowable facts.
"the War for Southern Independence was waged to eliminate a racial blight that, when the
war began, had already seen its best (or, rather, worst)"
The comforting notion that slavery was destined to "fade away" was frequently indulged
in during the 250 plus years that it lasted in the U.S., but it never did. As for the Wentz
anecdote, if Lee had talked with Wentz, the outcome of the war would not have changed.
There is an interesting "sabermetric" study of generals you can find online that gives a
particularly interesting picture of Lee. He was one of the most aggressive generals in
history, fighting more battles than anyone except Napoleon. But he was also--wait for
it--BELOW AVERAGE. (Please don't spill your mint julip.) Grant, on the other hand, was one
of the 10 best ever.
Slavery was on the way out and in another generation was gone throughout the western world,
including the African colonies, and surviving only in Arabia. Only in the US and Haiti was
slavery ended by wars and horrific bloodshed. In all other countries, including the vast
slave empire of Brazil, slavery was abolished with minimal to no casualties. A bit of
patience on the part of the abolitionists and unionists would have led to a somewhat later
but peaceful end of slavery in the southern US. The union of all the states may not have
been preserved, but in my estimation that would have been a good thing, if achieved
peacefully.
The military planners knew what was needed to pacify Iraq in the invasion and occupation.
750,000 troops and 25B+ dollars. Darth Cheney knew the US public wouldn't accept that, so
they went in on the cheap, ignored the vast stores of conventional weapons, and Viceroy
Bremmer back-stabbed the Iraqi army, thus creating the insurgency. Why? Because Planned
Chaos is the most profitable, and taking Iraq oil off the market greatly enriched our
"Saudi friends" and lots of other producers in the region. Inflation-adjusted oil prices
more than doubled from 2003 to 2007.
As of early 2009, the surge had worked, were holding territory on turf Islamic savages
considered their own and were killing hoards of jihadi scum who were flocking there, pretty
much at will, who were being induced to do so at the behest of Bin Laden. Iraq was part of
a long term strategic regional strategy (kill them on their own turf) which was working
quite well as far as it got. 4000 dead US soldiers is a travesty under any circumstances,
but considering what we had accomplished it pales in comparison with Vietnam. Keep in mind
we stayed in Germany and Japan for decades after WWII to ensure our efforts were not
wasted.
Iraq was not a debacle until 0bama refused to negotiate an updated SOFA, effectively
surrendered (against military and other expert advice) and rendered every single US
military death to have been in vain.
"... Until now, Iran has restrained itself despite constant aggression from Israel, but this could easily change. "The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel's air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv's equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin " ..."
In my 2011 book,
The Wandering Who
, I elaborated on the possible disastrous scenario in which Israel is the nucleus of a
global escalation over Iran's emerging nuclear capabilities. I concluded that Israel's PRE Traumatic Stress
Syndrome (PRE-TSS) would be central to such a development. "The Jewish state and the Jewish discourse in
general are completely foreign to the notion of temporality. Israel is blinded to the consequences of its
actions, it only thinks of its actions in terms of short-term pragmatism. Instead of temporality, Israel
thinks in terms of an extended present."
In 2011 Israel was still confident in
its military might, certain that with the help of America or at least its support, it could deliver a mortal
military blow to Iran. But this confidence has diminished, replaced by an existential anxiety that might
well be warranted. For the last few months, Israeli military analysts have had to come to terms with Iran's
spectacular strategic and technological abilities. The recent attack on a Saudi oil facility delivered a
clear message to the world, and in particular to Israel, that Iran is far ahead of Israel and the West. The
sanctions were counter effective: Iran independently developed its own technology.
Former Israeli ambassador to the US, and
prolific historian, Michael Oren, repeated my 2011 predictions this week in the
Atlantic
and described a horrific scenario for the next, and likely last, Israeli conflict.
Oren understands that a minor Israeli
miscalculation could lead to total war, one in which missiles and drones of all types would rain down on
Israel, overwhelm its defences and leave Israeli cities, its economy and its security in ruins.
Oren gives a detailed account of how a
conflict between Israel and Iran could rapidly descend into a massive "conflagration" that would devastate
Israel as well as its neighbours.
In Israel, the term
"The War Between the Wars
," refers to the targeted covert inter-war campaign waged by the Jewish State
with the purpose of postponing, while still preparing for, the next confrontation, presumably with Iran. In
the last few years Israel has carried out hundreds of 'war between the wars' strikes against Iran-linked
targets in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Oren speculates that a single miscalculation could easily lead to
retaliation by Iran. "Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting could break
out at any time. And it's not hard to imagine how it might arrive. The conflagration, like so many in the
Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark."
Until now, Iran has restrained itself
despite constant aggression from Israel, but this could easily change. "The result could be a counterstrike
by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel's air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah,
Tel Aviv's equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah's headquarters in
Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale
exchanges, the real war would begin "
Oren predicts that rockets would "rain on
Israel" at a rate as high as 4,000 a day. The Iron Dome system would be overwhelmed by the vast simultaneous
attacks against civilian and military targets throughout the country. And, as if this weren't devastating
enough, Israel is totally unprepared to deal with precision-guided missiles that can accurately hit targets
all across Israel from 1000 miles away.
Ben Gurion International Airport would be
shut down and air traffic over Israel closed. The same could happen to Israel's ports. Israelis that would
seek refuge in far away lands would have to swim to safety
.
In this scenario, Palestinians and
Lebanese militias might join the conflagration and attack Jewish border communities on the ground while
long-range missiles from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran land. Before long, Israel's economy would cease to
function, electrical grids severed and damaged factories and refineries would spew toxic chemicals into the
air.
In the Shoah scenario Oren describes,
"Millions of Israelis would huddle in bomb shelters. Hundreds of thousands would be evacuated from the
border areas as terrorists attempt to infiltrate them. Restaurants and hotels would empty, along with the
offices of the high-tech companies of the start-up nation. The hospitals, many of them resorting to
underground facilities, would quickly be overwhelmed, even before the skies darken with the toxic fumes of
blazing chemical factories and oil refineries."
Oren predicts that Israel's harsh
response to attack, including a violent put down of likely West Bank and Gaza protests, would result in
large scale civilian casualties and draw charges of war crimes.
As Oren states, he did not invent this
prediction, it is one of the similar scenarios anticipated by Israeli military and government officials.
If such events occur, the US will be
vital to the survival of the Jewish State by providing munitions, diplomatic, political, and legal support,
and after the war, in negotiating truces, withdrawals, prisoner exchanges and presumably 'peace agreements.'
However, the US under the Trump administration is somewhat unpredictable, especially in light of the current
impeachment proceedings against Trump.
In 1973 the US helped save Israel by
providing its military with the necessary munitions. Will the US do so again? Do the Americans have the
weapons capability to counter Iran's ballistics, precision missiles and drones? More crucially, what kind of
support could America provide that would lift the spirits of humiliated and exhausted Israelis after they
emerge from underground shelters having enduring four weeks without electricity or food and see their cities
completely shattered?
This leads us to the essential issue.
Zionism vowed to emancipate the Jews from their destiny by liberating the Jews from themselves. It vowed to
bring an end to Jewish self-destruction by creating a Jewish safe haven. How is it that just seven decades
after the founding of the Jewish state, the people who have suffered throughout their history have once
again managed to create the potential for their own disaster?
ORDER IT NOW
In The Wandering Who I provide a
possible answer: "Grasping the notion of temporality is the ability to accept that the past is shaped and
revised in the light of a search for meaning. History, and historical thinking, are the capacity to rethink
the past and the future." Accordingly,
revisionism
is the true essence of historical thinking. It
turns the past into a moral message, it turns the moral into an ethical act. Sadly this is exactly where the
Jewish State is severely lacking. Despite the Zionist promise to introduce introspection, morality and
universal thinking to the emerging Hebrew culture, the Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish
past because it doesn't really grasp the notion of the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
Everyone understands that a minor Iranian miscalculation could lead to total war. One in which nuclear bombs
would rain down on Iran leaving its cities, economy, and security in ruins.
The sociopath, Ayatollah
Khameni is detached from reality and may be willing to take such risks. However, there is no reason to
believe that The Iranian military or civilian population will embrace certain suicide. It is quite likely
that the IRGC would decide that it is time for another revolution and end the theocracy, rather than die
following the dubious commands of a deranged Ayatollah.
____
The whole theory about a prolonged conflict falls apart once accurate facts are applied to the situation.
Iranian al'Hezbollah has large numbers of Katyusha pattern rockets, but very few precision weapons. And to
provide human shields for these weapons, almost all of them are in a limited number of urban centers.
The facts are clear, even if Gilad chooses to ignore them in favor of his personal fantasies. Iranian
al'Hezbollah would lose badly in a total forces engagement. The nuclear incineration of their rear echelons
would leave forward forces totally defenseless against overwhelming Israeli air superiority.
-- Would there be Israeli civilian casulities? Certainly.
-- Would Lebanon become uninhabitable? Yes.
-- Would Ayatollah Khameni perish when Israeli nukes Tehran? Absolutely.
______
There is no possible scenario where Iran "wins" if they launch a substantial first strike. And, the
Iranian military understands this as fact.
@A123
It is really fun when Gilad gets off Epstein and rape stuff and ventures into wars and Israeli security. The
generals have kept Gilad up to date on the latest and the greatest.
He is so out to lunch in his desire to see Israel panic and loose the next war facing horrible casualties
because it makes his point about how the Jews are doomed unless they cease being Jews.
He really believes
that he can solve the problem and change our destiny if we all read "Wondering
Who"
In The Wandering Who I provide a possible answer: "Grasping the notion of temporality is the ability
to accept that the past is shaped and revised in the light of a search for meaning. History, and
historical thinking, are the capacity to rethink the past and the future." Accordingly, revisionism is
the true essence of historical thinking. It turns the past into a moral message, it turns the moral into
an ethical act. Sadly this is exactly where the Jewish State is severely lacking. Despite the Zionist
promise to introduce introspection, morality and universal thinking to the emerging Hebrew culture, the
Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish past because it doesn't really grasp the notion of
the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
I wonder what it is like to wish death and destruction on a people and a country to prove your point and
call yourself an unemotional Athenian.
@A123
As you may have noticed, in the Israeli apocalyptic scenarios the Jewish state doesn't put into play the
Samson option.. it is slightly less genocidal than yourself .. you may want to ask yourself why
Israel is making a terrible mistake. The oft touted "Sampson Option" is a bogus option as Bibi, Benny Gatz
and/or any other Israeli leader knows it will be suicide if they use this option. Because even if they
emerge from the bunkers days later after using nuclear bombs against Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other European
capitals (
Samson option targets Europe
) they will be greeted with hostility and will have no
sanctuary.
Three times in world history the Jews were rescued by the Persians.
Believe it or not.
However, the US under the Trump administration is somewhat unpredictable, especially in light of the
current impeachment proceedings against Trump.
Not at all unpredictable with regards to Israel. Trump and Congress would use the last cent of US
taxpayer's money and the last drop of Anglo blood to save the place. Trump is Israel's US Viceroy and
Congress is its Colonial Parliament.
Israel's real nightmare starts when US nationalists toss out the colonialists, and Israel has to find a
way live on its own resources.
I have to think that considering the failure of military intelligence agencies in the past that no one has
any real idea how close Iran is to getting the bomb. But even if they get numbers of them and have a means
to deliver them on target it simply would mean that Iran and Israel are in a standoff. I can understand how
Israel would not want Iran to have the bomb but in reality how much difference would it make? It would only
be relevant if the two countries had already blundered into war and things were entering a final disastrous
stage. Then it would simply mean both countries would be destroyed instead of just one.
Also, not being a military man am I naive in thinking Iran might be able to buy nuclear weapons on the black
market? From North Korea, perhaps? I have got to suspect Israel will be faced with two options. Either fight
Iran sooner, before they get nukes. Or they will simply have to accept that Iran is going to be a nuclear
power. It's pretty obvious that Israel has been trying to get America to fight their war for them. But Trump
has been reluctant to do so. No wonder the Jews are chomping at the bit to find some way to get rid of him.
2020 should prove to be an interesting year.
This analysis leaves out two very significant historic military facts:
1) The 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon aka the "33 Day War" where in:
"Hezbollah inflicted more Israeli casualties per Arab fighter in 2006 than did any of Israel's state
opponents in the 1956, 1967, 1973, or 1982 Arab-Israeli interstate wars, and is generally acknowledge that
Israel flat out lost that war and de facto sued for a cease fire.
(see: "U.S. Department of Defense. The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for
Army and Defense Policy." Kindle Edition.)
2) The Syrian army is currently the only army in the world that has multi-front, contiguous multi-year
'combined arms' (i.e. army, armor, artillery and air force) combat experience .
Further, the leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah in a recent interview pointed out that Hezbollah
fighting along side of the Syrian Army these past five years, now has experience in offensive warfare. In
2006 they fought strictly defensively.
In short, if an Israeli war comes again, given the experience of the Syrian and Hezbollah armies and
Syria acquiring state of the art air defense system (S 300, etc), Iranian missiles may very well be the
least of Israel's worries.
Indeed, before Iran launches missiles, Hezbollah and Syria may move to take back Shebaa Farms and Golan
Heights.
To my mind: Israel and American militaries are "paper Tigers". Israel has never fought a combined arms
war for a sustained period of time against an equally matched military. And the US not since Korea. Their
victories have always been overwhelming an inferior force.
@AaronB
For me the fact that the Jewish state indulges itself in apocalyptic and genocidal fantasies is really a
glimpse into to tribal mind.. as far as I can tell this pre traumatic stress points at severe form of
projection .. Israeli politicians and commentators attribute their own symptoms to their neighbours ..
@Rev. Spooner
' Three times in world history the Jews were rescued by the Persians.
Believe it or not.'
The Persians more or less created 'the Jews.' At any rate, a religion recognizable
as Judaism first appeared in the wake of the Persian conquests.
However, when did the Persians 'rescue' the Jews?
They allowed the creation of an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine when they overran that place around
the beginning of the seventh century AD -- but that only lasted for about twenty years anyway.
@A123
If I may: I don't know for sure what G Atzmon meant by the Samson Option; but, I have come across this
express before and I took it to mean that Israel will go to nuclear war even if means the destruction of the
Jewish State. That is, like Samson who destroyed his enemies by killing himself; Israel nuec's Iran and Iran
nuce's Israel (kills enemies and itself).
This should not be taken lightly. While it would be totally irrational for most states to take the Samson
Option, it is to my mind a plausible option for Israel. For even if the Jewish State is destroyed, the
Jewish Nation i.e. the Jewish people around the world will survive and continue on as they have these
thousands of years. But, they will be free of what they perceive as their arch enemy i.e. Iran and other
Moslems. They survived the metaphoric Holocaust and they will survive a literal one. The Jewish State may be
destroyed but not the Jewish People.
This is something not enough people comment on. Israel's military is not a mini US military, it has serious
problems and takes losses and casualties in contexts that would be shocking for another Western country that
spends as much per capita for it's military.
This is why Israel having nuclear weapons irks me so much, the more it can't rely on it's conventional
military, the more they'll lean into their nuclear deterrent, increasing the probability of it's use. (Not
dissimilar to the situation with Pakistan vis-a-vis India, though in that case, India has nukes too)
@Tom Verso
The Samson Option
The Samson Option.jpg
Author Seymour Hersh
Country United States
Language English
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Random House
Publication date
1991
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 362 pp
ISBN 0-394-57006-5
OCLC 24609770
Dewey Decimal
355.8/25119/095694 20
LC Class UA853.I8 H47 1991
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy is a 1991 book by Seymour Hersh. It
details the history of Israel's nuclear weapons program and its effects on Israel-American relations. The
"Samson Option" of the book's title refers to the nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive
nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson is said
to have pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and
thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated.
According to The New York Times, Hersh
relied on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who says he worked for Israeli intelligence,
for much of his information on the state of the Israeli nuclear program. However, Hersh confirmed all of
this information with at least one other source.[1] Hersh did not travel to Israel to conduct interviews for
the book, believing that he might have been subject to the Israeli Military Censor. Nevertheless, he did
interview Israelis in the United States and Europe during his three years of research.[1]
@Fran Taubman
' If you study it, can be pretty scary. It is not just Israel. Also who wants another North Korea
blackmail game?'
You mean something like the Samson option?
Anyway, the whole discussion is silly.
No nation
-- and that included Imperial Japan in 1945, when
the chips were down -- chooses self-immolation. They always give way. Iran isn't a threat to Israel because
Iran's not going to commit national suicide, and 'the Samson Option' is bullshit as well, because six
million Jews aren't going to commit national suicide either.
Zionists such as yourself only choose to think otherwise about Iran -- in spite of the absence of any
historical evidence at all -- because it justifies your own pathological aggression towards a nation that is
(a) a thousand miles away, and (b) poses no serious threat to Israel whatsoever.
Try not attacking literally everyone you can think of. That might help. I mean, fuck -- Israel is the only
state in modern history that has attacked literally
every single one
of her neighbors, and several
more besides. Since 1948, she's attacked Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, and even the
United States. What's up?
Despite the Zionist promise to introduce introspection, morality and universal thinking to the
emerging Hebrew culture, the Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish past because it
doesn't really grasp the notion of the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
The Jews are always long-term losers because they teach their children that they have always been and
will forever be victims of humanity. Jew children are traumatized at an immature young age they are
mentally damaged by the thought that humanity wants to kill them and do them harm. This notion is inculcated
deep in the Jew child's psyche. These poor children can never escape what has been implanted. (For three
thousand years, generation after generation, Jew culture has been abusing their children with dreadful
thoughts.)
Nine out of ten adult Jews are triggered into thoughts of doom by any criticism of Israel their
reactions are visceral, and a pure reflex coming out of their brainstem.
Jews cannot be introspective because of what elder Jews have implanted in them in their youth. Their
rational emotional systems have been short-circuited.
I have seen intelligent Jews on this forum flirt with empathy for Palestinians only to fall back into
mindless reflexive support of whatever Israel does.
Jews Are Feeling Guilty: They Should Be. Their Influence Has Been Cancerous to America
Gilad Atzmon Wed, Nov 6, 2019
It has become an institutional Jewish habit to examine how much Jews are hated by their host nations
and how fearful Jews are of their neighbours. Jewish press outlets reported yesterday that "9 out of 10
US Jews worry about anti-Semitism."
. . .
As Haartez writer Ari Shavit wrote back in 2003: "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative
intellectuals, most of them Jewish " Maybe some Jews now understand that the Zionist shift from a
'promised land' to the Neocon 'promised planet' doesn't reflect well on the Jews as a group.
Any separation of one group from another is a tribe. Any identity whatsoever is a tribe because
identity sets you apart. The moment you define yourself you are tribal, because definitions distinguish
one thing from another.
The issue is that some people are not particularly tribal (i.e. Westerners) and they are open to
multiculturalism i.e. proposition nations. However, proposition nations are very much non-tribalist places
and need non-tribalism to survive.
If tribalists talk multiculturalism and proposition nations (i.e. use deception) while practicing
tribalism, they quickly overwhelm these societies which is where the US is today with regards to Jewish
tribalists.
What does a Jewish tribalist elite do next? And what does a (subjected) majority do next?
Michael Oren, repeated my 2011 predictions this week in the Atlantic and described a horrific scenario
for the next, and likely last, Israeli conflict.
The purpose of Oren's Atlantic article was to create alarm in the DC political corridors .."warning' that
if the US doesnt 'soon help Israel' with its Iran enemy there will be chaos and dead bodies galore .
Its propaganda but 'true' propaganda 'if' Israel were to attack Iran on their own but they wont .they aren't
capable of it alone.
They are running this same propaganda articles/warnings in Europe, saying Europe needs to 'do something'
about Iran Now!
Its basically a blackmail and scare ploy because they don't think Trump will do it for them .and of course
if Israel starts a war it will be because Trump/US deserted them like he/we did the Kurds and they were
'forced' to try and defend the world against Iran 'all alone' and Israel isn't to blame for the mess lol.
What Israel will do is try to start a war on Hezbollah 'first, as Hezbollah would be their most immediate
and dangerous threat , severely crippling Israel right at the onset of any war with Iran.
They will claim that Iran directed attacks on Israel and so the US should step in because its an attack by
Iran.
If we had anyone in DC that wasn't bought off by Jewish 'benjamin's ' they would be laughing their asses
off at this typical Jewish tactic.
Everyone understands that a minor Iranian miscalculation could lead to total war. One in which nuclear
bombs would rain down on Iran leaving its cities, economy, and security in ruins.
The sociopath, Ayatollah Khameni is detached from reality and may be willing to take such risks.
However, there is no reason to believe that The Iranian military or civilian population will embrace
certain suicide. It is quite likely that the IRGC would decide that it is time for another revolution and
end the theocracy, rather than die following the dubious commands of a deranged Ayatollah.
Kristol, you're drunk. Turn off the computer and go to bed, you shmuck.
That was the goal.
Remember the Zios in Rumsfeld's pentagon stressing how the US must dump 'old Europe"?
Even a non genius like me could figure that out .old Europe might be too much of a 'restraining ' influence
on the US.
The Jews hate Europe anyway ..just like they hate Russia.
Some interesting things popped up this week .Vindman , main testifier against Trump on Ukraine is a
Ukraine Jew, Solderman,Trump's main man on Ukraine is a Jew, also has now testified against Trump, their
attorney is also a Jew ..they all have issued statements about how the plucky "little Ukraine is fighting
against Russia for the US and world" and needs our aid and so on. Exactly the same wording and bullshit spin
the Jews use about Israel "fighting Iran to protect the US and world interest".
Plain to me the Uber Jews are trying to set up the Ukraine as a Israel satellite and weight on Russia's
flank.
I read Vindman's testimony to congress ..something is very off about the guy. he sounded numerous times
like he lost his script. He's, in his own words, a fanatical supporter of Ukraine . I don't like Trump but I
think the Ukraine deal to impeach him is a set up ..and its not coming mainly from the CIA ,its coming from
the Nat Sec Council that Vindman works for.
It is terrifying to think that in the event Israel be run by psychopaths, they might sacrifice another "6
million", while securing themselves a new Zion.
On the other hand, a peaceful transfer of the occupation of Palestine to Patagonia (and elsewhere),
without the trigger of war, would be a possible path to peace in the Middle East (not so ideal for Patagonia
though).
What would it take for either outcome to pass? I fear the former is far more likely than the latter.
I don't like Trump but I think the Ukraine deal to impeach him is a set up ..and its not coming mainly
from the CIA ,its coming from the Nat Sec Council .
stephen t johnson #77: "Whatever military assistance Russia gives the rebels is
about making sure they don't go too the left in fighting the fascists and making sure there are
no embarrassing wave of Russian-speaking refugees from Ukrainian fascism."
Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the "embarrassment" of an
exodus into Russia? Your whole paragraph stirs propagandistic bits of excuse-mongering into an
illogical mash. Look, Ukraine is a long complicated discussion but a simple overview is that
most of the country wants to ally with the EU and the eastern portion wants to ally with
Russia. Yes, there is a lot of corruption. Yes, Euromaidan (pro-EU) was probably 1/3 far right.
Yes, there are fascist parties. But the majority of the people want democracy and not fascism.
Instead these poor people got Zelensky being extorted by yet another thug.
(Vindman is correct, this is another disaster by Trump with longterm consequences for US
foreign policy. While the US Republicans have also gone thug, saying it's no big deal.)
If the Steinmeier formula holds and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority
votes for kicking out Putin, do you think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars?
Accompanying the annexation of Crimea was Putin's long letter to the international community
justifying his action because there were "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and
anti-Semites" who are committing "pogroms and terror". This now appears to be mostly fiction
(perhaps enhanced by Putin's agent provocateurs).
stephen
t johnson #77: "Whatever military assistance Russia gives the rebels is about making sure they
don't go too the left in fighting the fascists and making sure there are no embarrassing wave
of Russian-speaking refugees from Ukrainian fascism."
Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the "embarrassment" of an
exodus into Russia? Your whole paragraph stirs propagandistic bits of excuse-mongering into an
illogical mash. Look, Ukraine is a long complicated discussion but a simple overview is that
most of the country wants to ally with the EU and the eastern portion wants to ally with
Russia.
Yes, there is a lot of corruption. Yes, Euromaidan (pro-EU) was probably 1/3 far right.
Yes, there are fascist parties. But the majority of the people want democracy and not fascism.
Instead these poor people got Zelensky being extorted by yet another thug. (Vindman is correct,
this is another disaster by Trump with long term consequences for US foreign policy.
While the
US Republicans have also gone thug, saying it's no big deal.) If the Steinmeier formula holds
and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority votes for kicking out Putin, do you
think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars? Accompanying the annexation of Crimea
was Putin's long letter to the international community justifying his action because there were
"nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites" who are committing "pogroms and
terror".
Lee Arnold@80 "Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the
"embarrassment" of an exodus into Russia? "
Yes, Putin does not want wholesale expropriation of oligarchs, as he does not stand for
that in Russia (selective prosecution sufficient to appear to be a defender of the people and
serve as a stick -- accompanied by carrots -- to negotiate oligarch support. Also, Putin
doesn't even want to pay pensions, he certainly doesn't want the embarrassment of refugees
neglected, or worse, costing.
This point rests on the premise Putin isn't a right-winger, which is absurd.
"If the Steinmeier formula holds and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority
votes for kicking out Putin, do you think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars?"
https://www.rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html
This source may not be right-wing enough for your tastes, of course. But for the rest of us,
it suggests that an if centered on the Steinmeier formula is disingenuous in itself.
It's not even clear that Zelensky hasn't rejected the Steinmeier formula! The problem with
re-unifying the country is the fascist regime is quite hostile to what it sees as unUkrainian
elements, namely Russian speakers. National purity are favorite fascist principles but none
of the rest of us are required to accept them. Your belief that an election supervised by the
fascist regime is free and fair is wrong, no matter what you imply. And frankly, the notion
the OSCE is surely neutral is dubious too.
There was never any reliable evidence of any significant numbers of regulars moving into
Donetsk and Lugansk, because no, media reports are not reliable when addressing official
enemies. It is almost certain there are advisors and mercenaries, copying the US model, but
they are not what is generally meant by an invasion. They have not stakes out a separate
territory as the US territory did in Syria. There are military reasons for setting up a
perimeter, for mission security if nothing else. In short, there is in fact quite simple
reasons for thinking, yes, Putin would stop spending money on Donetsk and Lugansk, and save
on weapons and withdraw his advisers.
Further, the casualties in the Russian Army's officer corps by the way would end up being
known to the Russian Army, and eventually everyone else concerned. But they're not. Equally,
the large numbers of regulars alleged would have been in the recent prisoner exchange, but
they weren't. Some of those as I recall had been arrested merely for subversion, not taken
prisoner of war. Casualties of course are not the only costs to Putin, there also being the
money and weapons. The thing is of course, these are all excellent reasons for Putin to
withdraw. You are tacitly presuming the conclusion, that Putin is a crazed warmonger unable
even to calculate self-interest. Substituting scorn for analysis is not becoming.
"Yes, there are fascist parties." This is entirely misleading. There are fascist armed
formations incorporated into the Ukrainian army, financed privately.
I can't actually read the article as it's paywalled but it's conservative enough to carry
weight here.
There's the bit about Haaretz, which is like the anti-socialists ginning up anti-semitism
smears against Corbyn. I say the stylized swastika on the stage with the PM of Ukraine shows
us more than an old letter. I have no idea how you can say the people murdered when a
building was set on fire and democratic mob drove people back in, don't somehow count as
"pogroms and terror."
But you missed a trick in pointing out "Jewish" opposition to "Putin." (The people in
Donestsk and Lugansk are no one? Except maybe pre-corpses?) Ihor Kolomoyskiy, the primary
funder/founder of the Azov battalion, definitely wants no part of "Putin."
Most of this discussion is rarely about the left, but here arises a major marker
distinguishing the left, which is anti-fascism. You're pro-fascist.
nastywoman@79 was so stung the comment was actually intelligible. Unfortunately, asserting
something which isn't nonsense -- unlike nastywoman's usual incoherence -- without a shred of
argument is naked hostility, not an argument. The gored ox bellows loud!
"... There is no strong evidence of a positive impact of TSR plans on firm performance ..."
"... "Despite the fact that just under 50% of S&P 500 firms have this pay metric as part of their executive compensation plans and that this pay metric is designed to align the interest of shareholders and executives," Enayati told Yahoo Finance, "we find that there's no relationship between the pay metric and top-line business outcomes like 1-, 3-, or 5-year total shareholder return, return on equity, earnings per share growth, or revenue growth." ..."
The analysis, done in conjunction with consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners, examined a decade's
worth of data from every company in the S&P 500 (^GSPC). It compared companies that offer their
top brass a total shareholder return (TSR) plan to those that don't and found the increasingly
popular pay plans haven't significantly boosted any of a number of key metrics.
Total shareholder return is how well an investment in a company has done over a given period.
It's a combination of the stock's price change and dividends paid. With TSR plans, managers are
rewarded with shares, options, or even cash to give them a stake in how well the stock does.
For a growing number of corporate heads, big bonuses based on stock performance is a large
part of their pay.
In 2004, just 17% of S&P 500 companies gave CEOs and top executives some form of a TSR plan. A
decade later, nearly half of the companies in the index offered it.
As for those S&P 500 CEOs that have TSR plans, it represents on average some 29% of their
total direct compensation, though that percentage is a decline from 38% a decade ago. That's
because as more companies adopt TSR plans, they are doing so with less weight than companies who
took on these kinds of bonuses earlier.
The average CEO of an S&P 500 company made $13.8 million or 204 times their average employee
in 2014, according to job website Glassdoor.com.
Get the Latest Market Data and News with the Yahoo Finance App
Nonetheless, giving CEOs more for total shareholder return doesn't make a difference,
according to the Cornell study.
"There is no strong evidence of a positive impact of TSR plans on firm performance,"
wrote Hassan Enayati, Kevin Hallock, and Linda Barrington of Cornell University's Institute for
Compensation Studies.
"Despite the fact that just under 50% of S&P 500 firms have this pay metric as part of
their executive compensation plans and that this pay metric is designed to align the interest of
shareholders and executives," Enayati told Yahoo Finance, "we find that there's no relationship
between the pay metric and top-line business outcomes like 1-, 3-, or 5-year total shareholder
return, return on equity, earnings per share growth, or revenue growth."
Interestingly, the researchers discovered that while the number of companies paying top
executives for shareholder return incentives is increasing, the size of those bonuses relative to
total compensation is on the decline.
According to Enayati, part of that has to do with companies decreasing the weight of total
shareholder return compensation plans. "But then also the new adopters are coming in at lower
weights, perhaps just to test the water," he explained.
But Enayati doesn't rule out other performance bonuses. "While there's no evidence that this tool
hits the mark, that isn't to say that other metrics shouldn't be pursued as a solid way to align
those incentives," he said.
The analysis, done in conjunction with consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners, examined a decade's
worth of data from every company in the S&P 500. It compared companies that offer their top brass
a total shareholder return (TSR) plan to those that don't and found the increasingly popular pay
plans haven't significantly boosted any of a number of key metrics. ...
likbez said...
Looks to me like a generic problem of any neoliberal regime that became more acute as secular
stagnation of economics became a "new normal".
High compensation (which is just a part of generic redistribution of wealth up -- the goal
on neoliberalism) drives up ruthless sociopaths making short term stock performance the priority
and displaces engineers who are capable drive the firm into the future.
Short termism and financial machinations to boost the stock price are probably among key reasons
of decline of IBM and HP.
Paradoxically Icahn recently provided us with some interesting insights into bizarre world
of stock buybacks. See video on http://carlicahn.com/
FILE PHOTO: Judges at the UN's highest court are seen during a hearing in a case launched
by Ukraine which alleges Moscow is funding pro-Russian separatist groups in Ukraine, in
The Hague, Netherlands June 3, 2019. REUTERS/Eva Plevier
Reading a summary of the ruling, Presiding Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf said conditions had been met
for the case to be heard in full, with the 16-judge panel rejecting Russian objections by a large
majority.
The International Court of Justice found that on the basis of anti-terrorism and
anti-discrimination treaties signed by both countries it has jurisdiction to hear the case over
Russia's alleged support for separatists in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
At a hearing in June, Moscow had asked judges to dismiss the suit, saying Kiev was using it as
pretext for a ruling on the legality of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Addressing that point, Yusuf said Ukraine had not asked the court to rule "on the status of
Crimea or on violations of the rules of international law" other than those contained in the United
Nations anti-discrimination and anti-terrorism treaties.
Kiev says Russia's support for separatist forces violated a U.N. convention banning the
funding of terrorist groups.
Deval Patrick served on the board at subprime mortgage giant Ameriquest. Melody Barnes
is on the board at bigwig defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Textbook cases of the
revolving door corruption Warren frequently attacks. https://t.co/KU3Ct3j9eC
If she really cared about the policies she is running on she would have endorsed Bernie.
Period. It was during the primary that Hillary said, "single payer will never ever happen
here."
Bernie was running on it and yet Warren did not endorse him for it. If she actually wants to
help us she would drop out and tell people to vote for Bernie. Sure everyone has the right to
run for president, but we know or believe that she is only running to keep Bernie from becoming
president.
She is lying to us about not taking money from rich people and corporations because she
took their money for her senate campaign and transferred it to her presidential campaign. If
she isn't up front about this then how can we trust her on anything else?
Elites eliting about elites while elitseplaining to working Americans about how they are
going to vote for some elites and beat the Republicans elite. https://t.co/l0W8QPUT0E
"Who is to the left of Bloomberg on guns and climate change?" Hmm let me think...of course
it's not Biden. Nor Harris...Kilobits.... Buttigieg or even Warren. Doh!
Warren did that(what Alex Thompson tweeted about) at her town hall here. Called herself a
teacher, really pushed her teacher history, and asked "Are there any teachers in the crowd",
etc etc. It was so fake and pandering. I wanted to barf. Do people really fall for this
stuff? The folksy garbage was poured on mighty thick. I was sitting there thinking "Come on,
lady-you've been a professor at the highest profile law school in the country for how long
now?"
Yep.
It's funny-I spent 10 years at Harvard, and I lived near The Yard and the law school. I knew
a lot of faculty at H, and was privy to a lot of the politics that went on. My bs detector
was honed there. At the town hall, I could see right through her. It was all so familiar.
Don't underestimate the cunning and doublespeak. What is that quote-"When someone shows you
who they are, believe them"?
Why didn't she proclaim her great groundbreaking achievement of being Harvard's "first
woman of color" professorial appointment? Isn't she proud of that any more?
Dog, that woman seems to be in a race to seem the least authentic. Can't her staff tell
her to act natural?
After I post this comment, I'm gonna get me a beer.
Why assume that what we see isn't her natural self, such as it is? Or, rather, that
there's anything more genuinely human underneath the pandering, opportunistic surface? As
Petal cited above, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."
From the Medium article "John Bolton's Old Rivals Say Trump Should Be Very, Very
Worried"
"I don't think dirt-digging would offend Bolton. What would offend Bolton is interrupting
military supplies to a country in a deadly battle with Russia. Doing something that for
whatever reason appeases Putin," Thielmann said."
The country referred to is Ukraine. I guess I've missed all the msm articles detailing all
those deadly clashes between Russian & Ukrainian military units along with casualty
figures and all that. I suppose I need to pay closer attention (or something).
UN says 12,800–13,000 killed since April 2014. So Congress bought a pile of Javelin
AT munitions, the ones with a top attack flight profile that will place a high explosive
shape-charge of molten copper through tops of young Russian tank commanders' heads, who are
sons of Putin's base, if there was a mechanized push further into Ukraine. [The political
tolerance window for which is narrowing.]
Our benevolent leader said, "Hold-on. You gotta first get your FBI to clear my campaign
and come up with some trumped-up charges against my political opponent. My FBI won't do it."
Congressional impoundment, solicitation of a bribe for personal gain, and abuse of power. In
any case, Ukraine's getting a smaller pile of missiles until next year, so, gross incompetent
moves, both domestic and abroad.
You recall that the Obama administration opposed giving Ukraine any lethal assistance?
Congress has just come up with an excellent method of giving the Russians a lot of free
Javelins if there were a serious fight. Which there continues to be no sign of.
The great bulk of (pro-government) Ukrainian casualties occurred in the course of
ill-advised and poorly conducted offensives against the breakaway republics. When it only
defends, the Ukrainian side doesn't suffer casualties. Because nobody attacks it.
Andrew Bacevich
describes how the U.S. learned all the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the end of the Cold War:
You won't hear it from any of the candidates vying to succeed Trump, but we are still
haunted by our false conception of the Cold War. On the stump, politicians get away with
reciting comforting clichés about the imperative of American global leadership. Yet
the time for believing such malarkey is long gone.
An essential first step toward recoupling national security policy and reason is to see
the Cold War for what it was: not a "long, twilight struggle" ending in victory, but a vast
and costly tragedy that inflicted needless suffering, brought humankind absurdly close to
extinction, and from which U.S. policymakers have drawn all the wrong lessons.
The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall offers an occasion not for celebration but
for somber and long overdue reflection.
One of the wrong lessons that U.S. policymakers drew from the events of 1989-1991 was that
the U.S. was chiefly responsible for ending and "winning" the Cold War, which inevitably
overestimated our government's capabilities and effectiveness in affecting the political
fortunes of other parts of the world. The far more critical and important role of the peoples
of central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself in overthrowing the system that had
oppressed them was pushed into the background as much as possible. The U.S. took credit for
their success and policymakers frequently attributed the outcome to the policies of the late
Cold War rather than to the deficiencies and failings of the other system. After waging
stalemated and failed wars in the name of anticommunism, U.S. policymakers wanted to be able to
claim that they had "won" something, and so they declared victory for something that they
hadn't caused.
The period that followed the dissolution of the USSR was one of triumphalism, expansion, and
overreach. The U.S. not only congratulated itself for achieving something that was accomplished
by others, but it also assumed that it could achieve similar results in other parts of the
world. If NATO had been a great success as a defensive alliance, the "thinking" went, why
shouldn't it continue and expand to include many more countries? If the U.S. was supposedly
able to bring down the Soviet Union, why shouldn't it do the same to authoritarian regimes
elsewhere? Absent the check on ambition and hubris that a superpower rival provided, the U.S.
was free to run amok and do whatever it liked without regard for the consequences. That
triumphalism sowed the seeds for many of the more significant post-Cold War failures that we
have witnessed since then. Even today, that same overconfidence encourages U.S. policymakers to
flirt with the idea of engaging in another Cold War-style rivalry with a more formidable state
in China.
George Kennan presciently warned
against the triumphalism that he saw around him as early as 1992. At that time, he was
responding directly to the claims from Republicans that Reagan and his policies had "won" the
Cold War:
The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the
course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side
of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
Kennan went on to say that the militarization of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was
a boon to Soviet hard-liners and in that way helped prolong it:
The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line
circles over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the
Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate
military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the
tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the
braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold
war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union
at the end of the 1980's.
Whenever hawks talk about "winning" the Cold War, they invariably mean that it was the
militarized policies they favored that carried the day, but Kennan reminded us that this was
not so. In fact, a militarized foreign policy perpetuated the struggle by providing Soviet
hard-liners with a plausible foreign threat that they could use to justify their own policies
and to clamp down on internal dissent. We have seen the same thing repeated several times in
the last thirty years on a smaller scale with other governments. The most aggressive and
confrontational policies unwittingly aid authoritarian regimes by giving them an external enemy
that they can use to deflect attention from their own failings and as a pretext for the
consolidation of power at home.
Kennan was already telling us shortly after the Cold War ended that no one had "won" it:
Nobody -- no country, no party, no person -- "won" the cold war. It was a long and costly
political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions
and strength of the other party [bold mine-DL]. It greatly overstrained the economic
resources of both countries, leaving both, by the end of the 1980's, confronted with heavy
financial, social and, in the case of the Russians, political problems that neither had
anticipated and for which neither was fully prepared.
We can all be grateful that the Cold War ended, but we shouldn't delude ourselves with talk
of victory. Not only is it inaccurate, but it encourages the worst kinds of overreach and
arrogance that has led to several serious foreign policy failures in the decades that have
followed. Kennan warned us almost thirty years ago not to go down this path of triumphalism,
and as so often happened Americans ignored Kennan's wisdom.
Kennan concluded with the same idea that Bacevich stated at the end of his op-ed:
That the conflict should now be formally ended is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also
for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a
fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and
particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal
credit.
American policymakers are not known for sober re-examination and acknowledgment of error,
but these are exactly the things that are needed if we are to stop making the same blunders and
learning the wrong lessons from the past. Kennan and Bacevich's advice is just as timely and
important today as it was twenty-seven years ago. Perhaps this time we should pay attention and
listen to it.
"... This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia. ..."
"... Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail. ..."
"... Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished. ..."
You are 100% correct that trust is the number one point in coming to any agreement and
currently there is very little trust on either side for varying reasons. One important fact
that is overlooked by most people is the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and PM
Margaret Thatcher during the transition from the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact to independent
sovereign nations. The Bush was a WW II pilot and Thatcher earned the name Iron Lady for her
decisive action in the Falklands War, both understood the world as it was in 1990. This
statement highlights the view that prevailed from Bush at the time: "Not once, but three
times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9,
1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO
expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President nor I intend
to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that the
Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as
well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in
Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction
will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6)"
These were complicated issues that involved a multitude of parties being negotiated by
just a few i.e. US, UK, France and West Germany a holdover from the WW II model. The Poles,
Czechs and others were not consulted and IMHO had they been the situation would have become
untenable. It must be remembered that Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered heavily due to
"large important nations" giving them away pre and post WW II. There was no written agreement
nor official treaty between the west and the Soviet Union soon to be Russian Federation and I
believe that was intentional for the reason I give above. George H. W. Bush was not reelected
in 1992 and Bill Clinton became POTUS and he pursued a foreign policy that was entirely
different. Some of his ideas used Thatchers earlier idea of a more political NATO with less
emphasis on the original military mission which brought in the Partnerships for Peace
program. That program was IMHO quite good as it stabilized countries that were wobbly in the
1990's after the breakup occurred. The Clinton White House had Madeline Albright an immigrant
from Czechoslovakia as secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski a former secretary of State
and an academic that influenced his policies which were pro eastern European anti Russian. It
was during this time that NATO expanded. The US is a country of immigrants and there is a
large Polish population as well as other eastern Europeans and political considerations are
always come into play.
This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly
defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia.
G.W. Bush basically continued the trend with regard to NATO but was preoccupied with 9/11
more than anything else. Bush thought that he understood Putin and even invited him to his
ranch in Crawford, Texas which Putin accepted and they did seem to get along.
However 2008
and the Georgia War began the slide in relations between the two countries. Then good old
Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign
policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current
POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and
nail.
Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by
sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that
need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and
Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from
Kaliningrad could be accomplished.
Many have tried, usually ended up in those infamous endless Russian fields, in long boxes.
See Pushkin, for the exact quote. But historical trivialities aside, there should be a way to
satisfy Imperial hubris without 'salting the grounds'. Hannibal's elephants did not carry
nukes in their trunks. Trying for the sixth time in the last 4 centuries to get Moscow
grounds salted might end badly for the entire planet.
Trust was not breached by Russia, military buildup, hostile threatening military, NATO
expansion and refusal to negotiate on these issues did not originate from Russia. Russia has
tried to negotiate, concede and de-escalate before. The West did not respond to those moves.
Even US sanctions placed on Soviet Union were not removed from Russia, despite there being no
reason for them to remain in place. This and other recent events (libya, iran deal etc) tells
Russia and other global players that de-escalating with the West doesn't work.
Even now, West seems to be interested to trade with Russia at least in some areas. And
Europe is increasingly frustrated with the United States. There is reportedly a number of EU
initiatives aimed at gradually limiting US economic levers created during the Cold War.
Rising economies will gradually offer more opportunities outside of the Western world.
Multipolar wolrd was a slogan in the 00s, in the 2040es it might be a reality.
We know NATO will not maintain ABM and CFE, and it is apparently not interested in INF and
Open Skies, and even START is in question now. NATO will withdraw troops if only Russia does
something? Please, you don't really believe that. With INF gone, Iskander is outdated, it was
a treaty-limited weapon. Moving it a few hundred klicks will not make NATO concede anything
now.
A huge trust maker would be for all NATO members to publically admit on their web page
that pledges to Russia were broken and at least some NATO officials feel responsibility for
that. They've spent 27 years denying any verbal assurances, now that those assurances are
declassified, they build other narratives about how those pledges did not matter. For there
to be trust, there needs to be an admission that trust was there, and was broken, and not by
Russia. No troop movements necessary even.
Biden isn't going to win the next election Trump will be reelected in 2020. The current
strain in relations with Russia has been inherited by Trump and even before he was elected
the DNC and Hillary Clinton cooked up the "Russia colusion" story which after $46 million and
2 1/2 years no Russia collision. Of course now we have the Dems trying to impeach Trump which
will not go anywhere in the Senate more waste of time and money. However there is the Justice
Department I.G. report soon to be released and many of the people who brought you the Russia
colusion hoax will be named. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation
into the key players and will undoubtedly result in indictments and prosecutions.
The real reason all of this is going on is because the establishment both Dem's & Repub's
along with the deep state look at Trump as an outsider who is tipping over their apple cart
i.e. he is changing the foreign policy direction and they don't like it one bit so they
create fake issues to try and stop him.
After his reelection I predict that more normal relations with Russia will resume.
Nowadays the actual attacks are manifested as 'hybrid warfare'. Of course Russia took the
US intervention and financing of Chechen rebels as an attack back in the 2000 ties. She took
fermenting and financing of the Georgian rose revolution as a hybrid attack, same as promises
made to pres. Saakashvili to support him militarily and politically after his attack on
Tskhinvali were taken as a hybrid attack. Same goes for both of the first color revolution in
Ukraine, and then the Revolution of dignity of 2014 that pushed ultra-right government to
power in Ukraine. In fact the NATO promise to both Georgia and Ukraine to take them in as
members in 2008 right after Putin's warning in 2007 was the first move in the 'hybrid war'.
The West had been warned, yet it decided to bulldoze its way across Eurasia and triggered the
confrontation. The placings of Aegises ashore in Poland and Romania was the cherry on top.
There can be be no meaningful compromise until the West backs off on the NATO enlargement.
That 2008 conference was what had reanimated the image of the collective West as adversary
for Russia.
What both sides should strive for though is at the very least to diminish the degree of
danger to the planet. Russia would not back off because she finds it easy enough to corner
individual EU states into minimal economic cooperation - Germany is already in recession and
there is no way they are going to continue damaging their economy for the sake of US
politics. And then there is China. When the Russians cannot buy goods from Germans they go
for made in China, which in turn gets China secure oil and gas from Russia. Which make the
repeat of pre-WW II situation with blockade on Japan pretty much impossible. Get realistic,
the West is loosing this one and should count her chickens already.
Well, then the sanctions will continue, as will the policy of keeping Russian in check in
the EU gas market.
What's interesting is that NATO never attacked Russia or threatened to attack Russia. Seems
to me that Putin is simply using the expansion as a pretext for military aggression against
the neighboring states. It's what the USSR did in 1939 against Finland. According the Soviet
side, the war started after Finland attacked the Soviet Union...
Russia *needs* the sanctions for at least another 5 years. Her milk and beef production is
still lagging compared to the deceased USSR and the only way her greedy oligarchs will
heavily invest in cow herd rearing is to continue to block the Eastern European milk products
to enter Russia. Chicken, eggs, pork and veggies are already up to speed, wheat production is
exploding, the salmon breeding programme have started so the Norway is not getting her market
back, bu the cow herds take longer to rear.
The Power of Siberia pipeline is being certified and filled right now - China would receive
her first delivery of piped Russian gas in 2020, so it is good that EU is prepping or the
squeeze - they are not going to continue getting unlimited cheap Russian gas, because Power
of Siberia II is in the works.
Every individual NATO member had attacked Russia in the past 4 centuries ( including small
but meaningful US contingent in the 1918), and some non-member allies had stomped those
fields as well. So the Russians are not taking any chances with the buffer zone. All of
Russia expansions to the West have always started with West invading first - then being
rolled back league by league. But seriously - ? Russians can live with Europe staying where
she is - if in turn Europe can learn to respect her civilization borders. The move on Ukraine
and Georgia was not a wise one.
"... There is a collection of Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on policy details. ..."
"... They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes. ..."
"... He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside Syria. ..."
"... Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence ..."
" In a sense, the current NeoMcCartyism (Russophobia, Sinophobia) epidemic in the USA can
partially be viewed as a yet another sign of the crisis of neoliberalism: a desperate attempt
to patch the cracks in the neoliberal façade using scapegoating -- creation of an
external enemy to project the problems of the neoliberal society.
I would add another, pretty subjective measure of failure: the degradation of the elite.
When you look at Hillary, Trump, Biden, Warren, Harris, etc, you instantly understand what I
am talking about. They all look like the second-rate, if not the third rate politicians.
Also, the Epstein case was pretty symbolic."
I had decided to stay on the sidelines for the most part after making a few earlier
comments, but I liked this summary, except I would give Warren more credit. She is flawed like
most politicians, but she has made some of the right enemies within the Democratic Party.
On Trump and " the Deep State", there is no unified Deep State. There is a collection of
Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and
governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but
also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on
policy details.
They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is
antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes.
He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose
him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is
incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game
right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say
he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside
Syria.
But yes, scapegoating is a big thing with liberals now. It's pathetic. Our policies are
influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go
to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence .
For the most part, if we have a horrible political culture nearly all the blame for that is
homegrown.
Donald 11.07.19 at 4:40 am (no link)
Sigh. Various typos above. Here is one --
Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but
would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about
Russian influence.
--
I meant to say I would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from
liberals talking about Russian influence.
The US openly occupies parts of Syria, boasts of taking it resources and supported the
attempts of the Kurds to set up their own little state, until the Turks blew a hissy fit.
And
yet it has the gall to call out what Russia does in the Ukraine as a breach of international
law.
"... On a more constructive & positive note, regarding Assange & Flynn, i thought the X22 Report was not bad yesterday: at least he sees how the Deep State specifically operating within GCHQ & the CIA, desperately need Julian Assange entirely 'unavailable' for comment. ..."
JFK, 9/11, the Fed, rigged elections, suppressed cancer cures and the greatest conspiracies of our time Editor
In today's world, the phrase "conspiracy theory" is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory
is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.
History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would
be naοve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don't sometimes cooperate in covert,
secretive ways. Following are five instances when it's been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.
THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION
On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering
mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at
his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.
Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked.
On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence
war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War -- which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand
Americans and two million Asians -- was underway.
Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful
when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,
once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear
that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in
the Vietnam War."
In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction
with the CIA's Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and
through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when
McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara
lied and said no.
Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to
the White House and Pentagon that "in all likelihood" an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images
that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox's own propellers.
Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested "complete reevaluation
before any action is taken."
McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though
this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that
North Vietnam had engaged in "unprovoked aggression" and, so, the US military was retaliating.
A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, "Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying
fish."
Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian
for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately "distorted intelligence" andand "altered documents"
to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.
When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship,
and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the
CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had
been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly
that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion
of Cuba.
The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed
by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.
Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own
country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring
war on that country.
The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30,
2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.
The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According
to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on
Castro to "create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility" and "put the United States in the apparent position
of suffering defensible grievances."
One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian
airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID's; an exact duplicate plane -- an empty military drone
aircraft -- would take off at the same exact time.
The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean,
supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. "Casualty lists in US newspapers" and conducting "fake funerals for mock-victims"
would cause "a helpful wave of national indignation" in America.
The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: "We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba." Whether the ship was to be empty or
full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: "Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged."
Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American
civilians. The plan suggests:
We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated)."
And:
We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to
be widely publicized We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots."
Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval
Base in Cuba. The plans were:
"Start riots near the entrance to the base" "lob mortar shells from outside the base to inside the base" "blow up ammunition inside
the base; start fires" "burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)" "sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napalm."
When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself
or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint
Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods "right away, within a few months."
Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking
military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens,
knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then
use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.
FBI AND THE MAFIA
In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters,
Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan's
blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.
Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those
men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward
Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza's testimony,
Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau
began using members of the mafia -- criminals and murderers -- to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of
these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn't want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him
to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.
The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a
man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.
The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected
under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness
Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.
On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza's trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza
to get a light sentence.
Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers
for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati's innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.
Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati's innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted
Salvati's release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the
FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the
crime.
Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government.
(Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men -- men who were
also not guilty -- had participated in Deegan's murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)
Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati
was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.
Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation.
The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was
the chairman.
When asked by CBS's 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace "Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this? " Burton replied:
"Yes . . . It's one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent.
He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building."
Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in
the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House
refused to release them.
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they
let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that
up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that
the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed
a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.
In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US
Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.
The program existed from 19421946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000
workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the "Greatest Secret Ever Kept."
The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America's other enemies found out about it and built
-- more quickly -- a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear
fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was
kept quiet.
In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed
United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing "atom smashing, atomic energy,
atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials" or anything else that could expose the project.
The press kept mum. The government didn't talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn't report on it, and the public knew nothing
about it.
Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.
In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, "probably no more than a few dozen men in
the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on
atoms was involved."
The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren't told what the job was, and didn't understand
the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project's secrets was
punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.
Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn't know
they were helping to build nuclear bombs.
The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America
had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.
When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America's enemies,
from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION
In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA
and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named
after the Committee's chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.
The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available
to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had
been engaging in "unlawful or improper conduct" and "intelligence excesses, at home and abroad" since the administration of President
Franklin Roosevelt.
The report added that "intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens" and "checks and
balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied."
One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA's so-called "Family Jewels," a report that detailed the CIA's
misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA's SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under
these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.
The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the bureau's program to covertly destroy and disrupt
any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to
discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.
The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed
that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene
Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.
The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting
heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William
Colby presented to the Committee a special "heart attack gun" that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden
dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim's death from the poison would appear to be a heart
attack, so no foul play would be suspected.
In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees
of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.
In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the
committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.
Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper
ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate
suspected terrorists.
Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation
constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn't get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA
director were lying to the congressional committee.
Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert
and improper conduct.
When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations
and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate
and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that's a government conspiracy.
*
If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true -- and they have been -- isn't it logical
to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries
to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.
The phrase "conspiracy theory" shouldn't have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is
the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence
them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events
of American history.
A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said,
"I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, 'There is no conspiracy.'
I bet you would look up and say, 'So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.'"
Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don't act in secretive,
covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.
But when the evidence indicates otherwise .
Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if
somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.
But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about
"conspiracy realities" that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.
If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies
be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle
East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?
If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the
scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would
benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.
American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.
It is revelatory how the DS minions work here btl.
You are seen like rabbits in the lights you are.
Tim Jenkins
Yoyoyo, that's why they have names like 'Crispy', before we burn them to a crisp: and they just can't believe what they are seeing
& reading: left dumbfounded & speechless,
every darn time 🙂 LouisP. needs back up from NormP. , coz' LouisP. has lost the plot & will to contest anything constructively
& factually, simply because the DS suckers are ALL out of Ammo. It's great fun when all yer' ducks are in a row and all you have
to do is pull the trigger. 😉
On a more constructive & positive note, regarding Assange & Flynn, i thought the X22 Report was not bad yesterday: at least
he sees how the Deep State specifically operating within GCHQ & the CIA, desperately need Julian Assange entirely 'unavailable'
for comment.
Now, all we have to do is re-educate Legally, the minds of the masses, who got wholly suckered by the Deep state controlled
& censored MSM: because in courts of Law, we cannot lose in the longterm ! Just be patient and always remember to ridicule the
sheeple that relied upon the WAPO & NYT, (like LouisP. did) and of course, do have extra good fun ridiculing The Guardian readers,
above all else 🙂 We must change Media & Communications Law, more urgently than any thing else, FIRST ! But, High Tide has been
and left 'hasbeens' exposed & lying on the beeches, naked, like driftwood, ready to burn 😉
' the purpose of this book is to talk about "conspiracy realities" that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding
of politics.'
Frankly, I don't want "a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics".
I want the criminal conspiracy realities to stop and for those guilty of carrying them out to be brought to justice.
US love all around
Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.
"Encouraged?
Tha's lovely! and more lovely, this "Operations Northwoods" was planned by highest ranking military officials of the US government.
Martin Usher
I recently re-read a biography called "A Man Called Intrepid" about the life and work of a relatively low key Canadian, William
Stephenson. This fellow pretty much wrote the book on the use of intelligence and dirty tricks in warfare. He worked closely with
Churchill and Roosevelt, acting as a private go-between back before the US was involved in WW2 (and was heavily non-interventionist).
He organized a huge black operation, an operation that was initially based in New York. The book is worth reading because once
read it takes little interpolation to get from where they were in the 1940s to where we are today.
Stephenson didn't invent dirty tricks, of course, but he understood their value and the role of propaganda. His role is very
much like Edison's in invention -- Thomas Edison didn't so much invent machines as invent industrial scale research and development,
he industrialized the process and so vastly increased its scope and power.
Antonym
Japan Mil. Inc. was pretty early in the false flag incident business: 1931 with their Mukden incident; their start of their invasion
of Manchuria, as North Eastern China was called than (wonder why?):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
Antonym
They didn't even damage their own railway track: more like the real deal compared to 9/11.
They lied about the terrorists, they lied about the planes (including 265 dead in plane crashes), they lied about the building
collapses and yet you believe they didn't lie about the 2,735 who allegedly died in the buildings when they could so easily fake
it as the evidence shows. Who's more a nutjob me or you?
George Mc
"So 9/11 is still too recent to call out as an inside conspiracy, is it? Only 18 years old so it can't be called out."
9/11 will never be called out as far as the mainstream media is concerned. Can you imagine the effect if they did? The entire
edifice of "The West" would collapse and the Islamic world would explode in deservedly righteous fury. The case is similar, though
on a much smaller scale, with that of Tony Blair. He was exposed as a liar and should have been tried as a war criminal. But there
was no way that was going to happen since it would necessarily lead to the Western governments throwing up their hands and admitting
that they were conscienceless manipulative bastards. In short, the game would be up. On the one hand, 9/11 and Blair's bullshit
serve the ruling class interests and, on the other hand and more importantly the abandonment of 9/11 and Blair would mean
the wrecking of the whole scam. (I am aware that Blair is much more expendable than the official narrative of 9/11 so it is feasible
that he will "go down" later but not until sufficient distance is established between him and the powers that be).
mark
When they can't do anything else, they'll offer up Shady Wahabia as a convenient whipping boy, to divert attention from Kosherstan.
This is their fall back position. Offer up the Shadies as the Lee Harvey Oswald of the operation.
Hugh O'Neill
BigB. Your naοvetι is almost touching: you claim archives as truth, despite all that we know about the CIA deliberately creating
false archives. Just as Orwell said: Who controls the present controls the past, controls the future. Watergate burglar Hunt admitted
under oath that he had altered records to show that JFK had ordered the assassination of Diem: he did so so as to tarnish his
reputation amongst Catholics. I also recall that your beloved scholar Zelikow was taken to task for doing much the same thing
in the JFK archives.
Your logic is bizarre: you think Lemnitzer was part of the assassination plot. But if that were so, then how did he get away with
it? Might it not require huge swathes of the military, CIA and State departments and the entire MSM to be complicit.
Iy would seem that you are flogging a dead horse on this website where we esteem the principled scholarship of decent men like
Douglass, Talbot, Curtin and many many more. Do yourself and the rest of us a favour. Try and think more logically/ Which part
of Eisenhower's Valedictory did you not understand?
BigB
I know I am flogging a dead horse: which is why I gave up. The DNSA archive revived my interest. You and I could have sorted this
years ago with a comparative reading of Stern and Douglass side by side. The offer is still open.
The CIA did not fabricate the ExComm tapes. Let us make that perfectly clear. That is a non-argument. They probably did not
even know about them. They were never meant to be made public. That RKF was the chief hawk for Cuban invasion is clear and negates
the narrative construction that they were against the Unspeakable. They were part of it. End of.
This allows me to reach exactly the same conclusion that Lemnitzer and Dulles were involved. Without the whole fabricated 'turning
to peace' constructivism and an overlay about the Unspeakable. There is hardly anything that distinguishes the Unspeakable in
my eyes. Apart from rhetorical speech-acts and narrative constructivism. The facts posted and Stern's books speak for themselves.
You do not even address the fact that Stern is selectively mis-presented. You cannot read about the ExComm version then come up
with another alternative version without critical scrutiny. Not without serious criticism of the narrative made. To repeat: if
RFK was the chief hawk and not the JCOS so who were the Unspeakable.
"The [ExComm] tapes, however, contradict the book [Thirteen Days] in several fundamental ways and tell a very different
story -- one that is much more complex, interesting, and subtle. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the tapes actually
expose Thirteen Days as not just selective or slanted history, which is the common affliction of personal diaries and memoirs,
but rather as the capstone of an effort to embellish, if not manipulate, the history of the missile crisis to Robert Kennedy's
perceived advantage."
"As noted earlier, Robert Kennedy was one of the most unwaveringly hawkish participants in the ExComm meetings. On October
16, the first day of the meetings, RFK suggested using the American naval base at Guantαnamo to stage an incident that would
justify military intervention: "You know, sink the Maine again or something."[14] He also suggested that "we should just get
into it [attack Cuba] and get it over with and take our losses." On the final day of crisis meetings, October 27, RFK strenuously
opposed any linkage between the Soviet missiles in Cuba and the U.S. missiles in Turkey"
" It's not just television "documentaries" that perpetuate this kind of fiction. Just this year, David Talbot, author of
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, declared that President Kennedy's "only key support [for a non-military
solution] in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara."[22]
Talbot claimed that RFK "matured from a knee-jerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat" during the ExComm meetings.[23] In
fact, Robert Kennedy, along with McNamara, consistently opposed any terms involving the U.S. missiles in Turkey well into the
final hours of "Black Saturday," so-called because if a deal failed to materialize, a superpower clash seemed imminent and
unavoidable. Talbot's account attempts to legitimize the myths in Thirteen Days."
"Of course, Kennedy never abandoned his commitment, even after the missile crisis, to undermine the Cuban regime and get
rid of Fidel Castro."
That is enough to substantiate my claim that Douglass and Talbot based their accounts on fabrication. Curtin merely repeats
these claims. But I am flogging a dead horse if people will not re-appraise their metaphysicla truth-claims in the light of hard
evidence. Believe what you want. Don't let facts get in the way.
Your take on events might be accurate but you rather miss the point; the original article simply contends that JFK was murdered
by the state in a coup d'etat, which is still denied to this day. Whether he deserved to die (presumably you think so) is immaterial.
By my simple logic, he couldn't have been all bad if the really really bad guys murdered him. Furthermore, such logic is also
consistent with JFK's political views before his Presidency e.g. his support for post colonial leaders like Lumumba, Sukarno etc.
and his views on peace e.g. "war will continue until that distant day when the conscientious objector is revered as the warrior
is today. Blessed are the peace makers. May you find some in your tortured illogical mind.
BigB
The original article claims Northwoods was never implemented: which is only partially true. It was rejected because it was overt.
Covert operations Operation Mongoose where carried out until 1963. They were run by the Kennedy regime as the highest priority.
As I have now provided several archives to back up.
We can easily establish the facts without resort to comments about my tortured illogical mind. The actual Kennedy's have nothing
to do with this. It is the invented Kennedy's that are constructions of the imagination in comtemporary minds. That is illogical,
Hugh. For everything anyone contends about the imaginary Kennedy's there is a primary historic record that prevents the invention.
It still needs contextualising: but out and out fabrications such as Douglass and Talbot put forward are easily refuted.
Or not. The legend lives on and the facts do not. Not on this site anyway.
Antonym
Quite an effort to blame the Kennedy brothers over the other power brothers, not even mentioned: John Foster Dulles US
secretary of State and Allan Dulles boss and co-creator of the CIA. They had already organized coups in Iran and Guatemala, so
the intent and experience were there: no need for newbie JFK. This "Cuban project" was commissioned in March 1960; JFK only became
president in January 1961.
Steven Rattner's Rant Against Warren
By Dean Baker
The New York Times gives Steven Rattner * the opportunity to push stale economic bromides in
columns on a regular basis. His column ** today goes after Senator Elizabeth Warren.
He begins by telling us that Warren's plan for financing a Medicare for All program is "yet
more evidence that a Warren presidency a terrifying prospect." He goes on to warn us:
"She would turn America's uniquely successful public-private relationship into a dirigiste,
*** European-style system. If you want to live in France (economically), Elizabeth Warren
should be your candidate."
It's not worth going into every complaint in Rattner's piece, and to be clear, there are
very reasonable grounds for questioning many of Warren's proposals. However, he deserves some
serious ridicule for raising the bogeyman of France and later Germany.
In spite of its "dirigiste" system France actually has a higher employment rate for prime
age workers (ages 25 to 54) than the United States. (Germany has a much higher employment
rate.) France has a lower overall employment rate because young people generally don't work and
people in their sixties are less likely to work.
In both cases, this is the result of deliberate policy choices. In the case of young people,
the French are less likely to work because college is free and students get small living
stipends. For older workers, France has a system that is more generous to early retirees. One
can disagree with both of these policies, but they are not obvious failures. Large segments of
the French population benefit from them.
France and Germany both have lower per capita GDP than the United States, but the biggest
reason for the gap is that workers in both countries put in many fewer hours annually than in
the United States. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an
average worker in France puts in 1520 hours a year, in Germany just 1360. That compares to 1780
hours a year in the United States. In both countries five or six weeks a year of vacation are
standard, as are paid family leave and paid sick days. Again, one can argue that it is better
to have more money, but it is not obviously a bad choice to have more leisure time as do
workers in these countries.
Anyhow, the point is that Rattner's bogeymen here are not the horror stories that he wants
us to imagine for ordinary workers, even if they may not be as appealing to rich people like
himself. Perhaps the biggest tell in this piece is when Rattner warns us that under Warren's
proposals "private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be
effectively eliminated."
Okay, the prospect of eliminating private equity, now we're all really scared!
Dirigisme is an economic doctrine in which the state plays a strong directive role, as
opposed to a merely regulatory role, over a capitalist market economy.
Maybe this is the wake-up call that Democrats need.
My old colleagues at The Upshot published a poll yesterday (*) that rightly terrified a
lot of Democrats (as well as Republicans and independents who believe President Trump is
damaging the country). The poll showed Trump with a good chance to win re-election, given his
standing in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida.
This was the sentence, by Nate Cohn, that stood out to me: "Nearly two-thirds of the Trump
voters who said they voted for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 say that they'll
back the president" in hypothetical match-ups against Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth
Warren.
Democrats won in 2018 by running a smartly populist campaign, focused on reducing health
care costs and helping ordinary families. The candidates avoided supporting progressive
policy dreams that are obviously unpopular, like mandatory Medicare and border
decriminalization.
The 2020 presidential candidates are making a grave mistake by ignoring the lessons of
2018. I'm not saying they should run to the mythical center and support widespread
deregulation or corporate tax cuts (which are also unpopular). They can still support all
kinds of ambitious progressive ideas -- a wealth tax, universal Medicare buy-in and more --
without running afoul of popular opinion. They can even decide that there are a couple of
issues on which they are going to fly in the face of public opinion.
But if they're going to do that, they also need to signal in other ways that they care
about winning the votes of people who don't consider themselves very liberal. Democrats, in
short, need to start treating the 2020 campaign with the urgency it deserves, because a
second Trump term would be terrible for the country.
What would more urgency look like? Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders would find some way
to acknowledge and appeal to swing voters. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would offer more of a
vision than either has to date. Pete Buttigieg, arguably the best positioned to take
advantage of this moment, would reassure Democrats who are understandably nervous about his
lack of experience. And perhaps Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar can finally appeal to more of
Biden's uninspired supporters. ...
* One Year From Election, Trump Trails Biden but
Leads Warren in Battlegrounds https://nyti.ms/2NDDeNb
NYT - Nate Cohn - November 4 - Updated
Obama Bin Biden and the crooked clan need to get back in the game somehow so they can rip
off another 3 billion in US tax payer loans. What were they up to 44 Billion in fraudulent
loans to Ukraine?
Interesting how they want to Impeach Trump over Ukraine, don't you think?
Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem
politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his
partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the
US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised
transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of
the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit
of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its
dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas,
sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low;
and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to
produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and
cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma)
had very high profits and very little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to
European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went
sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating;
and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering
prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his
projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a
partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually
its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners
into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He
had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it
didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney
General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin
immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand
dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the
Ukrainian tax code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six
hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US
taxpayers' funds won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner,
paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars,
according to different sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and
installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma,
but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep
his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself.
Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and
now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another
case, Firtash case.
US military commanders overseeing Syria operations are still waiting for precise
battlefield orders from the White House and Pentagon on their exact mission to protect
oilfields in eastern Syria, according to a defense official directly familiar with the
matter.
Nearly three weeks after President Donald Trump ordered troops out of northern Syria,
publicly declaring he was taking "control" of the oil and sending troops and armored carriers
to protect it from ISIS, US commanders lack clarity on the most basic aspects of their
mission, including how and when troops can fire their weapons and what, exactly, that mission
is.
The lack of precise orders means troops are on the ground while critical details are still
being worked out -- exactly where they will go, when and how they will stay on small bases in
the area, and when they go on patrol.
Perhaps most crucially, there is no clarity about exactly who they are operating against
in the oilfields.
Everything the Trump administration has done in Syria has been horribly confused, so it
makes sense that the latest version of the policy would be baffling to our own troops. U.S.
commanders lack clarity about the mission because it was cooked up to appeal to the president's
desire for plundering other countries' resources. It was thrown together on the spur of the
moment as an excuse to keep U.S. troops in Syria no matter what, and now those troops are stuck
there with no instructions and no idea what they are expected to do. This is the worst kind of
unnecessary military mission, because it is being carried out simply to keep a U.S. foothold in
Syria for its own sake. The "critical details" aren't being worked out so much as a plausible
justification after the fact is being conjured out of thin air. There is no reason for these
troops to be there, and there is nothing that they can do there legally, but the administration
will come up with some bad argument to keep them there anyway.
Meanwhile, Trump is very proud of his clownish, illegal Syria policy:
Trump labors under the delusion that the oil is ours to "distribute." which everyone else
knows to be false. The oil belongs to the Syrian government, and that oil can't be sold and
revenues from those sales cannot be used without the permission of the government that owns it.
Syria's oil resources are not that great, and the infrastructure of many of the fields has been
damaged or destroyed, so if it were legal to loot the spoils there wouldn't be very much to
loot. The president thinks that seizing Syrian oil is worth boasting about, but in reality it
is one of the most absurd and indefensible reasons for deploying troops abroad. In addition to
damaging the country's international standing with allied and friendly governments with this
open thievery, Trump's "take the oil" fixation is a propaganda coup for hostile governments and
groups. As Paul Pillar pointed out last week, it plays into the
hands of jihadist groups and aids them in their recruitment:
Trump's Sunday appearance before the press played right into this theme. Referring back to
the Iraq War, Trump described as his own view at the time that if the United States was going
into Iraq, it should "keep the oil." As for Syria's oil, he said it can help the Kurds but
"it can help us because we should be able to take some also. And what I intend to do,
perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and
do it properly." A propagandist for ISIS or al-Qaeda would hardly have written the script
differently.
Keeping troops in Syria to "take the oil" is divorced from genuine American security
interests just like any other unnecessary military intervention. The president is exposing U.S.
military personnel to unnecessary risk, and he is also putting them in legal jeopardy by
ordering them to commit what is essentially the war crime of pillaging. The president has
managed to take a Syria policy that was already incoherent and chaotic and he has made it even
worse.
"... As for the rest of Ukraine, even though they lost something, they get something valuable in return: it's called neutral status between east and west. A subdued, federalized Ukraine led by Zelensky, in many ways, makes Ukraine "Finlandized." That is good for the Ukrainian people. It means they retain their independence, but peacefully accept that Russia controls their foreign policy. That position benefited Finland between 1945 and 1991. Finland is now a peaceful and prosperous country, and it is no longer living under influence of Russia or the Soviets. If "Finlandization" led to happiness for the Finns, it can do the same for Ukraine. ..."
"... Finland did not fight against Swedish language and peacefully uses it, while it is "legacy of Swedish occupation" and less than 10% of Finnish people can speak it. Ukrainian Nazis are deprived of wisdom, they are fighting with Russian language and own people. So, if you haven't brain, nothing will help you. ..."
"... after Maidan, Nuland directly stated that the United States spent 5 billion on "building democracy in Ukraine." The United States invested 5 billion in a coup, but is Poland to blame? why? if Poland had really done that, then western Ukraine would have become part of Poland immediately after the Maidan, but this did not happen. After the Maidan, Biden was photographed in a pride chair, but not the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland;) ..."
When Russia is led by truly capable leaders, it can beat any foreign power in war or geostrategic conflict. Today Russia is
led by a great man who is starting to look more and more like another Suvorov.
And everyone knows who Suvorov was.
Just read today's headlines concerning Syria. Russia ordered Turkey to stand down its offensive. Russian troops are now functioning
as peacekeepers in-between the Turkish and Syrian armies. The Kurds have signed allied themselves with Russia and Assad.
..while Americans of all stripes scratch their heads wondering what went wrong, and then check CNN and their FB feeds in a
hopeless bid to understand what's going down. Just.... hilarious....
What disturbs me the most is that Americans are being misled into believing that they "lost" something in Syria. In reality,
America "lost" nothing in Syria. That's because the US was never established in Syria to begin with. America has long been established
in Syria's neighbors, Israel, SA, Turkey, and to a lesser degree Iraq. But not Syria.
Basically, America got involved in Syria for aggressive, illegitimate, and unnecessary reasons. We were there to further the
over-ambitious geopolitical ambitions of our ME allies. That's why America launched a minor invasion of eastern Syria, and armed
and funded rebels, jihadis to try to violently overthrow Assad. And when that didn't work, the US POTUS justifiably pulled out
US troops and stopped supporting the rebels.
So, America didn't ever have anything to gain or to lose in Syria. Nothing at all.
Meanwhile, all the hawkish American newspapers -- which includes much of MSM -- are now complaining that Trump allowed Russia
to "take" Syria, and to "humiliate" and "drive out" America from that country. What hogwash! What propaganda and lies!
Russia has been in Syria for nearly 50 years. That means Russia's the chief ally of Syria, and as such, is a guarantor peace
and stability in the country. Also, Russia definitely has something to lose in Syria if Assad gets overthrown. So, in the end,
Russia wasn't trying to "take over Syria," as lying US media suggests. Russia was just protecting itself, protecting Assad, and
trying to impose peace on the region.
Check out Newsweek's totally dishonest story on this is subject. The article was published today. It's a shame so many
naive Americans believe these lies about America's alleged "role" in Syria.
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people. If you're talking about Butinterests in
terms of money, no -- we don't have any. But in terms of principles, yes, we were justified in entering that area of the country.
And we made a difference. Or else the Russians wouldn't be rushing in to take the place we left. We were getting a lot out
of very little engagement.
Russia has never been a guarantee for peace and stability anywhere; it has always been a guarantee of more support for Russia.
Whenever necessary, instabillity was sown, and inconvenient parties, whether or not former allies, were abandoned.
Plus, there is the nagging issue of the Kurds having helped us in the fight against ISIS. Letting this out of the picture is
as dishonest as you try to make parts of the MSM be.
But hey -- have your own opinions. Write a book about them while you're at it.
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people. If you're talking about Butinterests in
terms of money, no -- we don't have any. But in terms of principles, yes, we were justified in entering that area of the country.
sorry what???
In fact, Assad is the legitimate, democratically elected president of Syria. have you decided in the USA that you have the
right to decide who is bad and who is good?
The United States has worked hard to overthrow legitimate power in Syria. for 7 years of NATO's joint operation in Syria, ISIS
captured 70% of the territory of this country. Of course, with the active support of the United States, it supplied weapons to
everyone who was ready to fight against the Syrian army. but the "evil" Russia came and ruined everything. for 5 years of military
operations in Syria, ISIS were defeated and switched to guerrilla warfare. solved the problem between the Kurds, Turks and Syrians.
US plans have completely collapsed. or not?
Congress is currently making a decision to bring tanks into Syria to protect oil fields from terrorists. Really??? it looks
like American democracy is black and actually called oil! all these hundreds of thousands of murdered women and children in Syria
just so that the United States could continue to steal oil from Syria!
"the greatest power in the world" turns out to be an ordinary thief! do not you disgust?
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people.
Define what you mean by "monster to his own people." And explain to me why 30% of Syrians -- a huge chunk of whole -- have
always been solidly behind Assad.
If you're talking about the Assad regime's barrel bombing, yes, that's monstrous. But Assad didn't start doing that until the
civil war was fulling raging. That war, mind you, didn't broaden and deepen until America stepped in to fund and arm Assad's enemies.
Had America had stayed out of Syria and allowed Assad to stamp out the initial protests and acts of rebellion, then there would
have been no civil war. Therefore, America's involved escalated Syria's civil disorder all the way up to the level of a full fledged
war, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I really don't understand how American Triumphalists and messianic spreaders of American democracy can justify what they did
in Syria. Essentially, America consciously took a chance in Syria, choosing to support the rebels on the off chance that they
might topple Assad. America knew that the price of failure in this reckless gambit would be the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Syrians.
Why did America do this? America's action in Syria were driven by the desire to turn the country into a strategic asset. America
chose to pursue this goal on behalf of its regional allies (all Syrian enemies), Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. That's
all. Never mind "principles." We're talking geopolitical ambitions here. Blind ambitions.
It's a mysterious to me as to why you blame the war on Russia. After all, Russia's been in Syria for nearly 50 years. During
that time, Syria was stable, and experienced no civil war. But as soon as America began meddling in Syria, war broke out. Russia
worked with Assad to try to stomp out that war. America worked with the rebels to expand it.
Ukraine power captured it's country in own trap. They can't stop civil war in Donbass because then they will need to explain
somehow why they killed Donbass people (Ukraine Nazis power hate Donbassians, but at the same time pretends to call them their
own citizens) for so many years. Admit truth means acknowledge own crimes. So, the only way they have is continuing lying about
"liberation" (means genociding) of Donbass.
But rest assured: Ukraine is beaten and the Ukrainians know it. They can feel it. That's why they elected Zelensky, who
may be a sensible guy.
Implementation of the peace plan in Donbass will turn the region into a virtually independent part of Ukraine. Russia will
be able to influence Ukrainian politics through its connections in Donbass. That means Russia will have gained exactly what it
fought for: veto power over Ukraine's attempts to join the EU and NATO.
As for the rest of Ukraine, even though they lost something, they get something valuable in return: it's called neutral
status between east and west. A subdued, federalized Ukraine led by Zelensky, in many ways, makes Ukraine "Finlandized." That
is good for the Ukrainian people. It means they retain their independence, but peacefully accept that Russia controls their foreign
policy. That position benefited Finland between 1945 and 1991. Finland is now a peaceful and prosperous country, and it is no
longer living under influence of Russia or the Soviets. If "Finlandization" led to happiness for the Finns, it can do the same
for Ukraine.
Finland did not fight against Swedish language and peacefully uses it, while it is "legacy of Swedish occupation" and less
than 10% of Finnish people can speak it. Ukrainian Nazis are deprived of wisdom, they are fighting with Russian language and own
people. So, if you haven't brain, nothing will help you.
But rest assured: Ukraine is beaten and the Ukrainians know it. They can feel it. That's why they elected Zelensky, who may
be a sensible guy.
your optimism is due to ignorance of the peculiarities of Ukrainian political life;) Let's start with a short introduction
to Ukrainian political life. Who is Zelensky? this is a representative of the oligarch Kolomoisky. exactly the same oligarch as
Parashenko has ruled Ukraine for the past 5 years. For 5 years, Parashenko has robbed banks and enterprises of other oligarchs
in Ukraine, now Kolomoisky will do the same through his representative Zelensky.
Now about the peace process in the Donbas ... The armed coup in 2014 was carried out by the forces of Ukrainian Nazis and over
the past 5 years, the Ukrainian Nazis have firmly established themselves in the Verkhovna Rada and, most importantly, in the army
and law enforcement agencies. these structures are controlled by Avakov, not Zelensky. Zelensky cannot withdraw troops, and even
more so "Ukrainian volunteers" from punitive battalions Aidar, Azov, etc. Zelensky does not control these formations and has no
leverage over them. all he can do is put forward an additional requirement of 7 days without shelling. Naturally, the shelling
is not embellished and no one withdraws the troops. Even if Zelensky really wanted to end the war, there simply isn't any opportunity
for this. all that he can do is populism and tell that he will return Crimea :))))
Mr Gvosdev sounds like one of those Eastern European svidomites . They combine this unwavering faith in the power of
Washington on top of a deep, irrational hostility to Russia.
How is "collapse of Russian economy" going to happen exactly? Judging by the casual manner in which Gvosdev talks about it,
I think he imagines president Biden flipping some switch in his cabinet, and the economy of vast country shutting down in an instant.
How does a Western economic war on Russia can help its proxies seize power? It didn't work like this in Iran or Venezuela,
it's even less likely to happen in Russia. If anything the opposite is likely to happen: pro-Western 5th column in Russia will
be eradicated.
You know that the Ukraine is doomed when your "optimistic scenario" requires Russia to drop dead essentially.
Russia's economy is functioning very close to autarky. That means Russia could survive expulsion from SWIFT.
As for for your reference to China, your point is anything but clear. China is forming a strategic alliance with Russia pointed
directly at the US. If you don't realize this, you haven't been reading the news. It would behoove you to know that China and
the US have long been drifting in the direction of a conflict for supremacy in Pan-Pacific affairs. The US has lots of weapons
systems set up in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Beijing is determined to make the US withdraw those military assets from China's
borders. China is also wary of the US's messianic impulse to spread democracy anywhere it can. China blames America for the Hong
Kong disturbances, which Beijing thinks of as America's latest attempt at a "color revolution."
Meanwhile, Russia poses no such threat to China. If anything, Russia makes an ideal junior ally for China in the latter's growing
tendency to constantly subvert the US as the world's superpower. So, I am confused as to what kind of threat you think China poses
to Russia?
Perhaps you believe that China wants to take Siberia from Russia. Do you really believe China has the ability to do so? If
that's what you're thinking, you are willfully blind to the fact that Russia remains a nuclear weapons superpower. If war broke
out between China and Russia (which is very unlikely), which country would do more damage to the other? Think about it: Russia
is a massive open land mass that is not densely populated, and it is full of nuclear missile launch sites. China is a population
dense nation consisting of far less territory than Russia. Who would suffer more in an exchange of nuclear missiles? I think the
answer is clear. For this reason, Beijing is not thinking about war with Russia, or making Russia "collapse," as you say.
Wow, I can write comments here. I am russian, so I can tell the Mordor's version. The article is generally objective, but the
author was cunning in a few points
1) The principal reason why Yanukovich refused to sign the agreement with Europe was the duty free zone with Russia. Russians
sad: ok, You will sign the agreement with Europe, but we have high customs duties with europeneans, so we will break our free
trade zone agreement. Russia was the biggest export market for Ukraine and ukranians understood that they will lose a lot of money.
But Maidan decided differently.
2) Today the Russian primary strategy for Ukraine is do nothing and wait, we have no any influence in this country. We understand
that Europe and USA will not feed this country a lot of time. Internal contradictions will ruin this country before our intervention
3) But we support new government of Zelensky because he has an opportunity to implement Minsk agreements (may be). It will
be enough to close this deal and move on
But we support new goverment of Zelensky because he has an oportunity to implement Minsk aggreements (may be). It will be enough
to close this deal and move on
I do not agree with this. how Zelensky can end the war when the security forces and the army are controlled by Avakov and the
punitive battalions do not even know who controls?
the support of any government in Ukraine is due to the fact that our countries still have a fairly large turnover. while we trade
with ukraine will cooperate ..
But now Poland and other Central European states were similarly interested in changing their position -- from being Euro-Atlantic
frontline states to shifting that line further east
I believe that this is a big reason why Maidan occured. It is also a big reason for the war in Ukraine today. The Poles have
had a hand in this issue from the very beginning. Poland is literally an aggressor state at this point, stoking trouble in Ukraine.
America's greatest sin in all of this has been to allow itself to be influenced by Poland and the Baltic states. Just like
America allowed itself to be led by the nose by its "allies" in the Syrian War. We're talking about two conflicts that have very
little to do with America's best interests, and which could result in disaster (nuclear exchange with Russia) if something goes
wrong.
It's absolutely nuts for anyone to think that nuclear equipped Russia would allow Poland and America to have their way in Ukraine,
which is virtually Russia's front porch. By supporting our Polish "ally," the US has come close to creating a Cuban Missile Crisis
in reverse. In 1963 the Russians provoked America. Since 2014, America has been provoking Russia. It could get much worse.
I believe that this is a big reason why Maidan occured. It is also a big reason for the war in Ukraine today. The Poles have
had a hand in this issue from the very beginning. Poland is literally an aggressor state at this point, stoking trouble in
Ukraine.
but after Maidan, Nuland directly stated that the United States spent 5 billion on "building democracy in Ukraine." The
United States invested 5 billion in a coup, but is Poland to blame? why? if Poland had really done that, then western Ukraine
would have become part of Poland immediately after the Maidan, but this did not happen. After the Maidan, Biden was photographed
in a pride chair, but not the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland;)
Okay, I can see where you're coming from. But still, the Russians were readying to station missiles in Cuba, just miles from
America's borders. That means the Russians must have known -- or should have known -- that they were risking war with the US.
That's my point.
Now America's doing the same thing as the USSR did in 1963. America is setting the stage to establish bases, radars, and missiles
in Ukraine. That's what preparing Ukraine for NATO membership is all about. Therefore, America must know -- or should know --
that it is risking war with Russia. In a major way.
Agree with the thrust of your agrument. The US knows it is stoking conflict with their actions (ie Donbass), but since they
are not directly in the firing line (barring major escalations) they simply don't care. They want to discomfort and undermine
Russia, drive a wedge between Russia and Germany/France, and force the Eurotrash into compliance with US diktat as a demonstration
of US power over its minions.
Re the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the balance it wasn't really a climb-down by the Soviets, but it is usually interpreted that
way, especially as anti-Krushchev factions in the USSR were succesful in portraying it that way as part of their palace coup.
The US remoived its misiles from Turkey, promised not to update them with new ones, and undertook not to repeat any more "Bay
of Pigs" attempts at overthrowing Castro by force of arms. All the Soviets needed to do was halt their mobilisation and similarly
agree not to base missiles. On the balance, the Soviets played brinkmanship well and won real concessions in exchange for very
little. Krushchevs problem was really that he marketted the ploy very poorly and was able to be portrayed as a loser by his political
enemies, and Westeners have happily repeated the narratives ever since.
And what? US placed their missiles in every corner of the Globe, including Soviet/Russian borders. Why USSR can't place it's
missiles in Cuba?
BTW, what Gary Powers did in his U-2 in the sky above Ekaterinburg 01.05.1960?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
My point is that each power is expected to respect the other's buffer zones. That's how the powers have gotten along historically.
If and when one side disrespects the other's buffer zone, major trouble is right around the corner.
Generally, in these confrontations between the nuclear superpowers, the side with the less to lose is the first to back down.
That side is always the one that has overreached. In 1963 it was the Soviets who overreached. It's looking increasingly clear
that since 2014, it's the US that's overreached.
The US will find a graceful way to end the Ukraine-NATO expansion issue, something amounting to a face-saving American retreat
from the region. Putin will likely make it easy for America to pull out without loss of prestige.
In general, you are right, but in 60's it was not Soviets, who overreached. It was US planes intervened in Soviet airspace,
not vice versa. It was US, who firstly placed missiles in Turkey in 1961, not USSR in Cuba in 1963.
Ukraine is not going anywhere, because of 115 Mrd. outstanding Debt. Ukraine lost 85% of their Industrial Base in the last
5 Years. Most of them working for Russian Companies. Those Companies get Advanced Payments from Russia till 2014 worth about 10
Mrd. for Material and Salaries. That Money is not coming again. Russian Companies replace 90% of all Ukraine deliveries during
the last 5 Years - more modern and especially with far better time frames. Ukraine has a minor Cash Reserve of 7 Billion USD.
Whatever happens to Ukraine we can be sure of one thing, through our contributions via the World Bank, the IMF and Obama's
loan guarantees, the one million dollars a day paid by U.S taxpayers directly into the pockets of Ukrainian Oligarchs will continue
in perpetuity.
I doubt Putin is in any hurry to relieve us of that 'honor' the man is a master of playing the U.S for a sucker.
You are correct on most counts. However, I think that Putin wants the US to scale down its Ukraine involvement ASAP. That's
because Russia's nightmare is NATO expansion into Ukraine. Therefore, the sooner the US backs away, the less likely Russia will
have to fight a future war in order to keep NATO off of its front yard. Nobody, including Putin, wants war.
Ukraine needs internal stability, this means peace treaty with rebels and some kind of minimal agreement with Russia. Country
needs to buy time, it is too much to expect to fight war, to do reforms and fight corruption and to develop all at the same time.
NATO expansion to East proved to be big destabilizing factor for Ukraine, its geopolitical situation is difficult. It will
always need to balance and make concessions between Eastern and Western interests.
New president looks very promising, hopefully he will be able to bring country back to stability and push it more toward faster
economical development and national reconciliation.
You make some good points regarding stability within the country. The amount now spent on fighting the war in Donbas will not
go down as Ukraine will need to continue to rebuild their military to include new fighters and new ships for the navy however
the killing will stop. Any agreement made with Putin should be made with eyes wide open as Russia has no honor so agreements are
worthless only a potent enough military will guarantee Ukraine's peace.
Peace at any cost is not acceptable and any plan that allows complete autonomy should be a no go, it would be better to just
build a wall along the existing line and rid the country of a fifth columnist element. If the plan allows for local elections,
local use of Russian, local police forces not military but police that is acceptable. These elections must allow for all residents
who resided in the area prior to the war to vote and for all Ukrainian political parties to participate.
Zelenskiy has made corruption a key to his election and it is imperative that he takes some bold action(s) soon to set the
tone. I am a little concerned that he has selected some less than pure individuals to be part of his presidential team, apparently
he hasn't picked up on how bad the optics are by having a lawyer that worked for Kolomosky as your chief of staff?
Cracking down on the oligarchs would allow Ukraine to have a standard of living like Poland within a very few years and many of
the Ukrainians that now work in Poland could come home an make as much money.
The presidential vote proved that at least 73% of Ukrainians agreed that a new beginning was needed hence Zelnskiy being elected.
The reason IMHO that "national reconciliation" hasn't been achieved is the continued Russian interference/influence in Ukraine.
It hasn't been long enough for Ukraine as an independent nation to come to terms with the past history. This part of the world
has seen millions killed over the past 100+ years, the country hasn't come to grips with that there is still finger pointing and
until that is dealt with the reconciliation will be difficult.
The desire to join NATO is all on Russia and it's continuous interference in Ukraine. In all reality NATO is a long way off
as Ukraine needs to do a lot to bring the country up to NATO standards including in the corruption realm.
This part of the world has seen millions killed over the past 100+ years
Ukraine has been used an invasion route by Western aggressors who want to conquer Russia. That's resulted in Russia suffering
millions killed in the 20th century, and hundreds of thousands more killed in earlier wars.
You keep failing to see matters from Russia's perspective. You only think about Ukraine's most selfish national interests.
You've got to understand that any security arrangement in that part of the world will have to be a shared security plan. It will
have to consider and respect Russia's concerns. NATO is not the answer here. Militarization of a Ukraine led by far-right wing
nationalists is not the answer either.
Ukraine's only path to peace and security is to accept the status of Finlandization.
If the plan allows for local elections, local use of Russian, local police forces not military but police that
is acceptable.
It's too late for that. Remember, the Ukrainian ATO invaded Donbass and killed many thousands of innocent local people. For
this reason, Donbass will never allow the Ukrainian military onto its soil.
Yes, I read what you said. That's why I highlighted "military" in my quote. You are saying that Donbass Russians are expected
to allow themselves to be occupied by the Ukrainian military, as if they are conquered, humiliated people. I am saying that Russia
and Donbass will never let that happen.
Let's not overlook that it appears very much like the war is ending now, with Ukraine submitting to the terms set by Donbass
and Russia. That means Zelensky will have to drink his poison soup and allow the Donbass militia to have exclusive and unrestricted
military rights within Donbass, and along the region's borders. That's unavoidable.
Even if you go by Minsk II which plainly does not allow for a Separatist Military there is zero chance that Ukraine will agree
to anything resembling a "military". This territory will be under Ukrainian sovereignty and the border will be under Ukrainian
sovereignty. The autonomy will be for language, education, elections of local councils, cultural endeavors etc...
It is the thugs in charge who are supported by the Kremlin are the ones that envision some quasi country within Ukraine. If
you were to go out into the villages the average person wants the war to end and life to go back to as close to what it was before
this all started. The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections are to
be held without Russian and mercenary gun toting thugs walking the streets. They are the ones that are worried as their world
will come to an end if real peace comes to past.
If you were to go out into the villages the average person wants the war to end and life to go back to as close to what
it was before this all started. The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections
are to be held...
You are in denial of the facts. Respected international polling agencies have taken polls inside the rebel held portion of
Donbass. The results confirm that the people there want nothing to do with the Ukrainian government, and that they identify themselves
as an extension of Russia.
The only open question among the Donbass people is whether they want to be annexed by Russia (many do), or whether they want
to remain in Ukraine as a completely autonomous region, running all of their own affairs (many like this idea too).
But under no circumstances do the Donbass people want the Ukrainian army to enter their territory, establish bases or outposts,
and then garrison the border with Russia. Why would the Donbass people have fought for five hard, victorious years only to accept
this ignominious outcome? It makes no sense. Donbass and Russia won. Ukraine lost. The winners will not let the losers take military
control of their homeland. No possible way.
From the way your posts read, it's obvious you are way, way oversold on anti-Russian propaganda.
Who says that the Ukrainian Army is going to go into this area of Donbas? Th border will be secured by Ukrainian Border personnel
as it is on every other part of the border. Ukraine is currently decentralizing services and responsibility in the rest of the
country withheld control coming from Kyiv. A modified version of that for occupied Donbas to include local elections, language,
education and local law enforcement is what they should expect. In exchange Kyiv promises to rebuild destroyed infrastructure
and provide economic assistance to the area.
If that isn't good enough then as I said build a wall and cut them lose and let Putin take on the burden which he doesn't want.
Money coming form Russia to rebuild will be a long time in coming and what they have now is pretty much what they can expect for
the future. Of course the educate and most of the young have left the area an only the poor pensioners who had no where to go
are left.
Even if you go by Minsk II which plainly does not allow for a Separatist Military there is zero chance that Ukraine will
agree to anything resembling a "military"
You're living in a dream world if you think this. The reality is that Ukraine has lost the war. Zelensky wouldn't dare to implement
Minsk II unless he were leading a defeated nation, a nation that was throwing in the towel. We're talking about a complete capitulation.
That's what Minsk II means.
I am certain that Zelensky fully expects that once Minsk II is implemented, Ukraine will be somehow be maneuvered into accepting
that the Donbass military is in charge of Donbass and the abutting section of the Russian-Ukraine frontier.
Most likely, after Donbass holds internationally ratified elections per Minsk II, the newly elected officials will claim that
they are officially part of Ukraine's government. From there, they will claim that the Donbass rebel militia, therefore, is officially
an extension of Ukraine's national army. Then, finally, the Donbass leaders and Russia will say that "returning control of the
border to Ukraine" means, in reality, putting the border under the control of the Donbass militia.
Possibly the Donbass militia will wear Ukrainian army uniforms, just for show. But believe me: there's no way the victors in
this war are going to settle for surrendering military control of their territory to a despised, alien military force (i.e., the
Ukrainian army).
There's no possible way that Putin, Russia, or the Donbass rebels would have pushed the Minsk II Accords on Ukraine unless
it one of the treaty's unstated implications is that the Ukrainian military is ejected from the region permanently. That's what
Russia and Donbass fought to achieve. It's unthinkable that they would settle for anything less.
I'm certain that Zelensky and everyone else understands this.
It will not happen Minsk II will not be implemented. Th eUkrainian foreign minister already stated what will be the approach
in the Normandy talks an edit isn't Minsk II.
"The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections are to be held without
Russian and mercenary gun toting thugs walking the streets."
What nonsense. You really think that voters in Donetsk & Lugansk would to reward Kiev authorities with their support in light
of the atrocities the "volunteer" battalions have dished out to civilians over the last 5 years???
You can cry about "thugs" or "mercenaries" all you like (in a futile attempt to de-legitimise the views of the seperatists)
but your bias is clear when you whitewash the crimes of Banderites and Neo-Nazis. Or maybe you would prefer to adopt the US MSM
ploy and simply pretend that these factions don't exist, or that no warcrimes have been committed?
You really think that voters in Donetsk & Lugansk would to reward Kiev authorities...
You make a valid point. I'd add also that the rebel controlled areas are the parts of Donetsk and Lugansk where the ethnic
Russian demographic majorities are heaviest. That means there's virtually zero chance that any elections held in that zone will
favor Kiev.
...as Ukraine will need to continue to rebuild their military to include new fighters and new ships for the navy...
Impossible. That's because there aren't enough Ukrainians who feel nationalistic enough to be willing to lay down their lives
in war for Ukraine. The reason for this problem is that a huge minority of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians
who won't fight Russia. Many other Ukrainian people are ambivalent about national identity, and will not honor their military
obligations.
In some ways, Ukraine's military problem today is akin to that suffered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WW1. The Austro-Hungarian
state was multi-national, and much of its population did not share the political and national values of the rulers in Vienna and
Budapest.
Multi-national countries always have trouble fielding political reliable militaries. Even the Soviet Union, a superpower, had
a bottom one-third of military recruits (most from Cental Asia) that simply weren't politically reliable.
Ukraine's military future looks very grim. Only if Kiev grants independence to the non-Ukrainian regions will the country finally
have a population of people who share the same national and political values. That will have to precede Ukraine building any kind
of competent army.
The presidential vote proved that at least 73% of Ukrainians agreed that a new beginning was needed hence Zelnskiy being
elected.
That Ukrainian majority is exhausted and demoralized by the Donbass War. They want peace at any cost, even if that means granting
virtual independence to Donbass. Even if that means allowing Russia to use Donbass as an agent through which it can influence
Ukraine's domestic political situation. That's the "new beginning" that Ukrainians have in mind.
There's no way Zelensky can be in power while simultaneously continuing the Donbass War. Ukrainians elected him to get the
country out of that agony.
My wife is Ukrainian and they will not accept Russia running things through a Fifth column in Donbas. They might as well just
wall it off and be done with it makes zero sense to allow your rendition.
Gosh, the Taliban wiped out poppy production in 2000. The Twin Towers were destroyed in 2001.
Bush (son of CIA Bush) invaded Afghanistan to... well, to do what? To defeat the Taliban?
Why? To restore poppy production? To find bin Laden? Didn't really do that. After all he was
in Pakistan. And what has happened to poppy farming since we invaded? Booming. For 17 years.
Those farming families are doing really well under the protection of U.S. troops. Just like
the oil families in Syria that are protected by U.S. troops. Now, Trump seems to be throwing
a spanner in all this. Of course, "We came, we saw, he died [giggle, giggle]" Clinton would
have never committed Trump's crimes. Trump's just a loose cannon.
Angleton, quoting Jesus, said "In my Father's house are many mansions."
I guess we know which mansion Brennan inhabits.
May 20, 2001
The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded
that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's
largest crop in less than a year, officials said today.
The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program
that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the
heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.
But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, [A
TERRIBLE COST TO FARMING FAMILIES, OH, THOSE POOR FARMING FAMILIES]and experts say it will
not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to
enforce it.
''It appears that the ban has taken effect,'' said Steven Casteel, assistant administrator
for intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington.
The findings came in part from a Pakistan-based agent of the administration who was one of
the two Americans on the team just returned from eight days in the poppy-growing areas of
Afghanistan.
Tue 11 Sep 2001: 9/11
Tue 25 Sep 2001:
In a dramatic and little-noticed reversal of policy, the Taliban have told farmers in
Afghanistan that they are free to start planting poppy seeds again if the Americans decide to
launch a military attack.
Drug enforcement agencies last night confirmed that they expect to see a massive resumption
of opium cultivation inside Afghanistan, previously the world's biggest supplier of heroin,
in the next few weeks.
The Taliban virtually eradicated Afghanistan's opium crop last season after an edict by
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader.
In July last year he said that growing opium was "un-Islamic" and warned that anyone
caught planting seeds would be severely punished.
Taliban soldiers enforced the ruling two summers ago and made thousands of villagers
across Afghanistan plough up their fields. Earlier this year UN observers agreed that
Afghanistan's opium crop had been completely wiped out.
"... Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus. ..."
Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern
Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria.
After the drawdown of US
troops at Erdogan's insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria,
the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and
at al-Tanf military base.
Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria,
Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which
serves as a lifeline for Damascus.
Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around
al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.
It's worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence
of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel's concerns regarding the expansion of
Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it's worth pointing out
that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war roughly 400,000
barrels per day, which isn't much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the
Gulf states.
Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of
1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where
there was oil,
the purpose of exercising control over Syria's oil is neither to smuggle oil
out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.
There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in
Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on
the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion
of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State
strongholds in eastern Syria.
Much like the "scorched earth" battle strategy of medieval warlords as in the case of the Islamic
State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds
in eastern Syria
Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and
natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other
main rival in the region, Damascus.
After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need
of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington
hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over
Syria's own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.
Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria's oil wealth, it bears mentioning
that "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep
state.
President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment.
Regarding Washington's interest in propping up the Gulf's autocrats and fighting their wars in regional
conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister
threatened
that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other
assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the
United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack though the bill was eventually
passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were
Saudi nationals.
Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment
in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total
would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf's investments in North America and Western Europe.
Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf's oil in the energy-starved
industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data:
Saudi Arabia has the world's
largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million
barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million
barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3
million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788
billion barrels, more than half of world's 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military
bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of
1980, which states: "Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United
States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force."
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry's sales of arms to the Gulf Arab
States,
a report
authored
by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration
had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during
its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump's agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were:
firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to counter Iran's influence
in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package
included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.
Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind,
during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is
not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms
to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive
policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its
attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term
security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.
Similarly, when King Abdullah's successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the
dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not
only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars'
worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab
states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf's petro-sheikhs contribute substantial
investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order,
according to a January 2017
infographic
by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world,
including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.
Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops,
particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second
World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is
already shared between Washington and host countries.
Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe
whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost
for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in
South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.
Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar pay
two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of
world's proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the
politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
I am always amazed (and amused) at
how much smarter "journalists" are
than POTUS. If ONLY Mr. Trump would
read more and listen to those who
OBVIOUSLY are sooo much smarter!!!!
Maybe then he wouldn't be cowed and
bullied by Erdogan, Xi, Jung-on,
Trudeau (OK so maybe that one was
too far fetched) to name a few.
Please note the sarcasm. Do I really
need to go in to the success after
success Mr. Trump's foreign policy
has enjoyed? Come on Man.
What a load of BOLOCKS...The ONLY, I
mean The Real and True Reason for
American Armored presence is one
thing,,,,,,,Ready for IT ? ? ? To
Steal as much OIL as Possible, AND
convert the Booty into Currency,
Diamonds or some other intrinsically
valuable commodity, Millions of
Dollars at a Time......17 Years of
Shadows and Ghost Trucks and Tankers
Loading and Off-Loading the Black
Gold...this is what its all
about......M-O-N-E-Y....... Say It
With Me.... Mon-nee, Money Money
Mo_on_ne_e_ey, ......
From the sale of US oil in Syria
receive 30 million. dollars per
month. Image losses are immeasurably
greater. The United States put the
United States as a robbery bandit.
This is American democracy. The
longer the troops are in Syria, the
more countries will switch to
settlements in national currencies.
"Our interests", "strategic
interests" is always about money,
just a euphemism so it doesn't
look as greedy as it is. Another
euphemism is "security' ,meaning
war preparations.
...The military power of the USA
put directly in the service of "the
original TM" PIRATE STATE.
U are
the man Norm! But wait... now things
get a little hazy... in the
classic... 'alt0media fake
storyline' fashion!
"President Trump is known to be a
businessman and at least ostensibly
follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the
craft of international diplomacy,
however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and
Washington's national security
establishment."
Awww! Poor "DUmb as Rocks
Donnie" done been fooled agin!
...In the USA... the military men
are stirring at last... having been
made all too aware that their
putative 'boss' has been operating
on behalf of foreign powers ever
since being [s]elected, that the
State Dept of the once Great
Republic has been in active cahoots
with the jihadis ...
and that those who were sent over
there to fight against the
headchoppers discovered that the
only straight shooters in the whole
mess turned out to be the Kurds who
AGENT FRIMpf THREW UNDER THE BUS
ON INSTRUCTIONS FROM JIHADI HQ!
Elizabeth Warren Releases $20.5 Trillion Plan to Pay
for 'Medicare for All' https://nyti.ms/2N9lI4F
NYT - Thomas Kaplan, Abby Goodnough
and Margot Sanger-Katz - November 1
WASHINGTON -- Senator Elizabeth Warren on Friday proposed $20.5 trillion in new spending
through huge tax increases on businesses and wealthy Americans to pay for "Medicare for all,"
laying out details for a landmark government expansion that will pose political risks for her
presidential candidacy while also allowing her to say she is not raising taxes on the middle
class to pay for her health care plan.
Ms. Warren, who has risen steadily in the polls with strong support from liberals excited
about her ambitious policy plans, has been under pressure from top rivals like former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to release details about paying for her biggest plan, "Medicare
for all." Her new proposal marks a turning point for her campaign, in which she will have to
sell voters on a tax-and-spending plan that rivals the ambitions of the New Deal and the
Great Society while also defending it against both Democratic and Republican criticism.
Under Ms. Warren's plan, employer-sponsored health insurance -- which more than half of
Americans now receive -- would be eliminated and replaced by free government health coverage
for all Americans, a fundamental shift from a market-driven system that has defined health
care in the United States for decades but produced vast inequities in quality, service and
cost.
Ms. Warren would use a mix of sources to pay for the $20.5 trillion in new spending over a
decade, including by requiring employers to pay trillions of dollars to the government,
replacing much of what they currently spend to provide health coverage to workers. She would
create a tax on financial transactions like stock trades, change how investment gains are
taxed for the top 1 percent of households and ramp up her signature wealth tax proposal to be
steeper on billionaires. She also wants to cut $800 billion in military spending.
Ms. Warren's estimate for the cost of Medicare for all relies on an aggressive set of
assumptions about how to lower national health care costs while providing comprehensive
coverage to all Americans. Like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, she would essentially
eliminate medical costs for individuals, including premiums, deductibles and other
out-of-pocket expenses.
Critically, her new plan would not raise taxes on middle-class Americans, a question she
has been asked over and over but has not answered directly until now. When confronted on the
campaign trail and debate stage, she emphasized instead that her plan would result in higher
overall costs for wealthy people and big corporations but lower costs for middle-class
families. ...
"A key step in winning the public debate over Medicare for all will be explaining what
this plan costs -- and how to pay for it," Ms. Warren wrote in her plan. To do that, she
added, "We don't need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny."
The issue of health care helped Democrats win control of the House in last year's midterm
elections, after unsuccessful attempts by President Trump and Republicans in Congress to
repeal the Affordable Care Act. It has been a central issue again this year as Ms. Warren and
other Democrats have competed for their party's presidential nomination, highlighting a
divide on policy between the party's moderates and its liberal wing that favors
transformative change. ...
Ms. Warren's proposal shows just how large a reorganization of spending Medicare for all
represents. By eliminating private health insurance and bringing every American into a
federal system, trillions of dollars of spending by households, employers and state
governments would be transferred into the federal budget over the course of a decade.
Her financing plan is based on cost estimates that are on the low side, relative to those
from other serious economists who have assessed the program. Her estimate of $20.5 trillion
over 10 years is based on a recent cost model by the Urban Institute, but with several
different assumptions that lower the cost from Urban's estimate of $34 trillion over the same
period.
Ms. Warren attempts to minimize fiscal disruption by asking the big payers in the current
system to keep paying for health care through new taxes. She would create a new "employer
Medicare contribution" that would effectively redirect what employers are already paying to
health insurers, totaling $8.8 trillion over a decade. Small businesses would be exempt if
they are not currently paying for their employees' health care.
Ms. Warren has also proposed that states pay the federal government much of what they
currently spend to cover state workers and low-income residents under the Medicaid
program.
But she also describes new revenue streams to replace the other big chunk of health
spending: the money spent by households on premiums, deductibles and direct payments for
services like dental care that are not always covered by insurance.
Ms. Warren would raise $3 trillion in total from two proposals to tax the richest
Americans. She has previously said that her wealth tax proposal, another signature of her
campaign, would impose a 3 percent annual tax on net worth over $1 billion; she would now
raise that to 6 percent. She would also change how investment gains are taxed for the top 1
percent of households.
In addition to imposing a tax on financial transactions, she would also make changes to
corporate taxation. She is counting on stronger tax enforcement to bring in $2.3 trillion in
taxes that would otherwise go uncollected. And she is banking on passing an overhaul of
immigration laws -- which itself would be a huge political feat -- and gaining revenue from
taxes paid by newly legal residents.
Ms. Warren's plan would put substantial downward pressure on payments to hospitals,
doctors and pharmaceutical companies. She expects that an aggressive negotiation system could
lower spending on generic medications by 30 percent compared with what Medicare pays now, for
example, and spending on prescription drugs could fall by 70 percent. Payments to hospitals
would be 10 percent higher on average than what Medicare pays now, a rate that would make
some hospitals whole but would lead to big reductions for others. She would reduce doctors'
pay to the prices Medicare pays now, with additional reductions for specialists, and small
increases to doctors who provide primary care. ...
This seems almost uniformly great. I only have two quibbles.
One is that a 6% wealth tax is actually too high, confiscatory even. The reason is that if
expected ROI is about 6%, the tax takes all the expected return. In perpetuity that is
equivalent to taking the entire net worth. Property tax is a pretty good guide here, 1-1.5%
works, perhaps a bit more.
Two is that the slant shows up immediately with this reporter. One example: "Ms. Warren
would use a mix of sources to pay for the $20.5 trillion in new spending over a decade..."
Note the use of "new spending". This may make sense if the subject is limited to government
spending, but we all know the game is to distract from the good lowered-aggregate spending
and emphasize the component spent by the evil government. We may see much more of this
misdirection including by primary opponents.
She is basically proposing to municipalize the entire payment flows for healthcare, much
as proposals now exist for California to municipalize PG&E, both excellent ideas.
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Friday released her proposal to pay for Medicare for All, a
plan to move every American to government-run health insurance that would reshape the US
health care system.
Warren's plan, outlined in a 9,275-word Medium post, included complex ideas for paying for
health care costs after private insurance is ended . It's a lot to digest, so here are five
takeaways.
Much of it is based on the Medicare for All Act
The plan released by Warren on Friday is primarily aimed at answering the question of how to
pay for single-payer health care. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of how her health care
plan would work, Warren points to the existing Medicare for All Act, that "damn bill" Senator
Bernie Sanders colorfully reminded debate viewers that he wrote.
Under the Medicare for All Act, introduced by Sanders in April and cosponsored by Warren,
all US residents would be automatically enrolled in a national health care plan administered
by the federal government. In addition to traditional medical coverage, the Medicare for All
Act includes vision and dental, plus long-term care services.
It relies on a lot of assumptions
At the outset, Warren acknowledges that it's difficult to predict what health care costs
will be in the future, and she notes that current projections about how much Medicare for All
would cost vary widely. Because the Medicare for All Act leaves open questions about how the
single-payer system would work, including major ones like the amount that health care
providers would be compensated, Warren fills in the gaps to arrive at a total cost estimate.
Outside analysts, including two local experts, cited by Warren estimate her plan would result
in overall US health care costs that are slightly lower than what the nation currently
spends.
Arriving at a specific cost allows Warren to figure out how she will pay for it, and there
are some assumptions here, too.
To fund the plan without increasing taxes on the middle class, Warren relies on enacting
seemingly unrelated legislation, including immigration reform. The pathway to citizenship for
millions of people in her immigration proposal would add to the tax base. Warren also wants
to cut defense spending.
There aren't new middle class taxes, but there are hikes for businesses and the
wealthy
Warren announced her Medicare for All plan with a major promise not to increase taxes on
the middle class, but that doesn't mean some taxes won't go up. After accounting for existing
federal spending and health care spending by employers that would be redirected to the
government, there's still a big hole. Warren fills it by levying new taxes and closing
loopholes in ways that target financial firms and large corporations. She also increases her
previously proposed wealth tax.
Some businesses would be hit harder than others. As Vox points out, if Warren asks
businesses to send their existing employee health insurance payments to the government,
businesses that currently provide inadequate insurance, or no insurance at all, fare much
better than those that provide good insurance coverage. That sets up a kind of penalty for
businesses that offer health coverage: They're helping pick up the tab for Medicare for All,
but they no longer have an advantage in attracting top talent with generous benefits.
Under Warren's plan, that situation is temporary as businesses would eventually pay into
the system at the same rate. And Warren says employers ultimately will be better off because
they won't get hit with unpredictable changes in health care costs.
It would be difficult to implement
Moving every single American to a new health care plan is a massive endeavor, so much so
that Warren says she'll release an entirely separate plan that deals with how to handle the
transition.
The transition has become a sticking point in the Democratic primary, with moderates like
former vice president Joe Biden using the lengthy time period (Sanders' plan says it would
take four years) as a reason to oppose it altogether.
And then there's the problem of passing such legislation: During the debate around the
Affordable Care Act in 2010, a proposed public option to allow people to buy into a
government-run health care plan nearly sunk the entire bill, and was stripped out of the
landmark legislation. The episode underscored the difficulty of implementing a government-run
health care program, even one popular with voters.
Warren has a plan for that, though. She wants to get rid of the filibuster, meaning the
Senate would need a simple majority to pass legislation, rather than the 60 votes currently
required to stop debate.
Warren has been reluctant to go on the offensive, but that may be changing
As she rose in the polls, Warren resisted leveling direct attacks against her primary
opponents. Warren's style has been to rail against the concept of big money fueling a
campaign, rather than directly criticizing individual candidates who have taken cash from
high-dollar fund-raisers.
But there are hints that this could be changing. Warren's lengthy Medicare for All plan
includes rebuttals to the criticism she's gotten from the moderate wing of the primary field,
calling on candidates who oppose her plan to explain how they would cover everyone.
"Make no mistake -- any candidate who opposes my long-term goal of Medicare for All and
refuses to answer these questions directly should concede that they have no real strategy for
helping the American people address the crushing costs of health care in this country. We
need plans, not slogans," she wrote.
The corporate health sub system
Intimately involves
the entire corporate system
We are on course toward
20 % of our economic output
Flowing thru our domestic
health services and products sectors
Where is the cost control mechanism
Simply in part
Progressively resourcing
And rechanneling the inflow of funds
Addresses a result not a cause
We have to address costs
We need a cap and trade market system
With a cap sector to GDP ratio that
Slowly squeezes down
the relative costs of the health sector
Public option is the transition
That empowers
people themselves
To spontaneous determine
the timing and pattern of
Their own transitioning
Anything else is political folly
Liz has set a bold end state vision
Bravely out laying where we must go eventually
And drawing in
the major shift in the share of
The total social cost burden
to the wealthy classes
But that's an end a destination
not a path
Urge choice not mandates
as the better path
The present corporate cost
burden share
is a mess
That should self dissolve over time
Now we need an optional public system
And
A means to capture the
Present corporate pay ins
Piecemeal over time as employees opt out of corporate plans into publicnplans one by one
Liz Warren would double her proposed billionaire
wealth tax to help fund 'Medicare for All' https://cnb.cx/332evbX
... Warren's wealth tax proposal would also impose a 2% tax on net worth between $50
million and $1 billion. She has previously said that it would be used to fund her ambitious
climate agenda, a slate of investments in child care and reductions in student loan debt.
But Warren is refusing to tax the middle class. She released an analysis produced by
several respected economists on Friday that suggests she will not have to.
Former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson, former Labor Department Chief Economist Betsey
Stevenson, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, wrote that Warren could pay
for her program "without imposing any new taxes on middle-class families."
The economists cite a number of possible revenue and spending options that they found
could generate $20.5 trillion in additional funding. Much of that funding is expected to come
from reallocating employer spending on health care and taxing the increased take-home pay
that employees are expected to receive under her system.
But taxes on the wealthy form a substantial portion. Doubling the billionaire wealth tax
will raise $1 trillion over 10 years, the economists found. They note in their analysis that
the calculation assumes a 15% rate of tax avoidance. ...
http://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson/
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Introduction: I recently spoke to a
relative of mine who, due to her constant and voluntary exposure to the legacy AngloZionist media, sincerely
believed that the three Baltic states and Poland had undergone some kind of wonderful and quasi-miraculous
economic and cultural renaissance thanks to their resolute break with the putatively horrible Soviet past
and their total submission to the Empire since. Listening to her, I figured that this kind of delusion was
probably common amongst those who still pay attention and even believe the official propaganda. So I asked
Michael Hudson, whom I consider to be the best US economists and who studied the Baltics in great detail, to
reply to a few very basic questions, which he very kindly did in spite of being very pressed on time. Once
again, I want to sincerely thank him for his kind time, support and expertise.
* * *
The Saker:
The US
propaganda often claims that the three Baltic states are a true success, just like Poland is also supposed
to be. Does this notion have a factual basis? Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing
growth, but was that not mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies? Looking specifically at the three
Baltic states, and especially Latvia, these were the "showcase" Soviet republics, with a high standard of
living (at least compared to the other Soviet republics) and a lot of high-tech industries (including
defense contracts). Could you please outline for us what truly happened to these economies following
independence? How did they "reform" their economies going from an ex-Soviet one to the modern "liberal" one?
Michael Hudson:
This is
a trick question, because it all depends on what you mean by "success."
The post-Soviet neoliberalism has been a
great success for kleptocrats at the top. They gave themselves the public domain, from key industries to
prime real estate. But the Balts largely let their Soviet industries collapse, making no effort to salvage
or reorganize them.
Much of the problem, of course, was that all the linkages to Soviet-era
industry were torn apart as the Soviet Union was disbanded. With their supplier and final markets closed
down from Russia to Central Asia, the Baltic economies had to start afresh with a very right-wing tax
policy and no government help whatsoever, as the government itself had become privatized in the hands of
former officials and grabitizers.
Lithuania was marginally better in having some industrial policy. EU and
NATO accession in 2004, along with easy credit, kicked off property bubbles in the Baltics, largely inflated
by Swedish banks that made a bonanza off these countries that lacked their own banks or public credit
creation. The resulting 2008 crashes were the largest in the world as a percent of GDP, with Latvia
suffering the world's biggest contraction.
The neoliberal western advisors who took
control of these economies as if this was the only alternative to Soviet bureaucracy imposed crushing
austerity programs to restore macroeconomic "stability" meaning security of their land and infrastructure
grabs. This was applauded by Europe's bankers, who thought the Balts had discovered a workable recipe
allowing austerity governments to retain power in a seeming democracy. These policies would have collapsed
governments anywhere else, but the ability to emigrate, plus ethnic divisions against Russian speakers,
allowed these governments to survive.
It's a historically specific situation,
but Europe's bankers promote it as a generalized model. George Soros's INET and his associated front
institutions have been leaders in subsidizing this financialization-cum-grabitization. The result has been a
massive exodus of prime working age people from Lithuania and Latvia. (Estonians simply commute to Finland.)
Meanwhile, their economies are buoyed by foreign bank lending, which sends profits back to home countries
and can be reversed at any time.
Politically, the neoliberal revolution also has been a success for U.S.
Cold Warriors, who sent over native Balts from Georgetown and other universities to impose "free market"
doctrine that is, a market "free" of domestic regulation against theft of the public domain, against
monopolies, against land taxes and other income taxes. The Baltic states, like most of the rest of the
former Soviet Union, became the Wild East.
What was left to the Baltic countries
was land and real estate. Their forests are being cut down to sell wood abroad. I describe all this in my
book
Killing the Host
.
The Saker:
After
independence, the Baltic states had tried to cut as many ties with Russia as possible. This included
building (rather silly looking) fences, to forcing the Russians to develop their ports on the Baltic, to
shutting down large (or selling to foreign interests which then shut them down) and profitable factories
(including a large nuclear plant I believe), etc. What has been the impact of this policy of "economic
de-Sovietization" on the local economies?
Michael Hudson:
Dissolution of the Soviet Union meant
that Baltic countries lost their traditional markets, and had to shift their focus to Western Europe and, to
some extent, Asia.
Latvia and Estonia had been assigned computer and information technology,
and they have found this to be much in demand. When I was in Japan, for instance, CEOs told me that they
were looking to Latvia above all to outsource computer work.
Banking also was a surviving sector.
Gregory Lautchansky, former vice-rector at the University of Riga had been a major player already in the
1980s for moving out Russian oil and KGB money. (His company, Nordex, was sold to Mark Rich.) Many banks
continued to shepherd Russian flight capital via offshore banking centers into the United States, Britain
and other countries. Cyprus of course was another big player in this.
The Saker:
Russians are still considered "non-citizens"
in the Baltic republics; what has been the economic impact of this policy, if any, of anti-Russian
discrimination in the Baltic states?
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson:
Russian-speakers, who do not acquire citizenship (which requires passing local language and history tests),
are blocked from political office and administrative work. While most Russian speakers below retirement age
have now acquired that citizenship, the means by which citizenship must be acquired has caused divisions.
Early on in independence, many Russians
were blocked from government, and they went into business, which was avoided by many native Balts during the
Soviet era because it was not as remunerative as going into government and profiting from corruption. For
instance, real estate was a burden to administer. Russian-speakers, especially Jewish ones, have wisely
focused on real estate.
The largest political party is Harmony
Center, whose members and leadership are mainly Russian-speaking. But the various neoliberal and nationalist
parties have jointed to block its ability to influence law in Parliament.
Since Russian speakers are only able to
"vote with their feet," many have joined in the vast outflow of emigration, either back to Russia or to
other EU countries. Moreover, the poor quality of social benefits has led to few children being born.
The Saker:
I often hear that a huge number of locals
(including non-Russians) have emigrated from the Baltic states. What has caused this and what has been the
impact of this emigration for the Baltic states?
Michael Hudson:
The Baltic states, especially Latvia,
have lost about 30 percent of their population since the 1990s, especially those of working age. In Latvia,
about 10 percent of the loss were Russians who exited shortly after independence. The other 20 percent have
subsequently emigrated.
The European Commission forecasts that Latvia's working-age population
will decline by 1.6% annually for the next 20 years, while the birth rate remains as stagnant as it was in
the late 1980s. The retired population (over age 65) will rise to half a million people by 2030, more than a
quarter of today's population, and perhaps about a third of what remains. This is not a domestic market that
will attract foreign or local investment.
And in any case, the European Union has
viewed the post-Soviet economies simply as markets for their own industrial and agricultural exports, not as
economies to be built up by public subsidy as the European countries themselves, the U.S. and Chinee
economies have done. The European motto is, "Give a man a fish, and he will be fed all day with your surplus
fish and consumer goods but give him a fishing rod and we will lose a customer."
Readers who are interested might want to
look at the following books and articles. I think the leading work has been done by Jeffrey Sommers and
Charles Woolfson.
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Baltic Model
(London:
Routledge Press, 2014). Editors, J. Sommers & C. Woolfson. Foreword, J. Galbraith. ISBN:
978-0-415-82003-5.
Jeffrey Sommers, "No People, Big Problem': Democracy And Its Discontents In Latvia's National
Elections,"
Social Europe,
October 17, 2018.
Jeffrey Sommers, "Decline of the Demos: Latvia, the Face of New Europe and Austerity's Return," in F.
Jaitner, T. Olteanu and T. Spöri, eds.,
Crises in the Post-Soviet Space: From the dissolution of the
Soviet Union to the conflict in Ukraine
(Routledge Press, 2018) pp. 195-209. ISBN 9780815377245.
Jeffrey Sommers,
"
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal
Baltic experiment."
Economic & Labour Relations Review.
Keynote article, 25:3 (fall 2014) pp.
1-20. DOI 10.1177/1035304614544091. Co-authored with C. Woolfson and A. Juskaa.
The Saker:
Finally,
what do you believe is the most likely future for these states? Will the succeed in becoming a "tiny
anti-Russia" on Russia's doorstep? The Russians appear to have been very successful in their
import-substitution program, at least when trying to replace the Baltic states: does that mean that the
economic ties between Russia and these states is now gone forever? Is it now too late, or are there still
measures these countries could take to reverse the current trends?
Michael Hudson:
Trump's
trade sanctions against Russia hurt the Baltic countries especially. One of their strong sectors was
agriculture. Lithuania, for instance, was known for its cheese, even in Latvia. The sanctions led Russian
dairy farming to develop their own cheese-making, and agriculture has become one of Russia's strongest
performing sectors.
This is a market that looks like it will
be permanently lost to the Baltic states. In effect, Trump is helping Russia follow precisely the policy
that made American agriculture rich: agricultural isolation has forced domestic replacement for hitherto
foreign food. I expect that this will lead to consumer goods and other products as well.
I am in Tallinn, Estonia right now. Just how good an economy is performing is often hard to determine by
talking to people, because like economists, many people have different perceptions. I was just talking to a
Russian-Estonian who was telling me how much better Lithuanians and Latvians are then Estonians at doing
things and how much cheaper things are there. It is true that things are much cheaper in the other Baltic
countries because Estonia (a tiny country of just over 1 million people) has taken off. Since the 2008
econmic collapse housing prices have shot up and in Tallinn there is building going on all over the city.
But, my acquaintance is wrong about other things. Estonians do things very well and Tallinn is a very nice
city, with beautiful cafes, clean and well kept streets and crime is very low. It is a very good city,
except it is now very expensive, especially considering how much people make here. The weather is not nice,
except for in the summer and there are friendly Estonians but they don't have a reputation for being
particularly friendly, even among themselves. I have not been back to Latvia yet, but when I was in Riga
years ago, it was a gorgeous city, bigger than Tallinn too. I think they do things very well there too. The
Russians I speak to here are often friendly and based on what I have been told, relations between Russians
and Estonians are much better than when I was here in the early 2000's.
No offense is intended to
Russians, but the Baltic countries had large German populations that played a key role in the development of
the cultures and peoples of these countries. There were also many Jews here prior to WW II. By the time WW
II had begun the German populations were much smaller than they had been and at the end of the war the
Jewish populations were much smaller. Jews were targeted in Latvia and Lithuania and many Latvians,
Lithuanians and Estonians were shipped off to far off places in the USSR during the war. I believe the Jews
were largely pro communist and welcomed the Soviet takeover of these countries in 1940, while the Latvian
and Estonian peoples were pro German, thus explaining the hard feelings between Balts and Jews.. They wanted
independence and formed legions to fight alongside the German army during WW II.
These countries were very advanced before WW II, having engineering industries and the Russian Empire's
first auto company was formed in Riga before WW I. While engineering may have been restarted after WW II,
these countries populations were decimated and they never returned to their former heights. Perhaps they
still can.
I'm assuming that these 3 East European countries are being bombarded with the same propaganda as the Ukies
are, so Russian speakers and those intelligent enough to see the game being played will be belittled and
isolated. But the Russian folks living in Russia have a birds eye view of what is going on in the west and
their puppet countries. Russia TV and debate programs, just have to show the delinquencies that are daily
happenings in the States, and Europe, in order to make the Ru people say No Thanks to that way of life. As
far as the new Russian cheeses that are now in the markets -lol they make a lightly smoked gouda that is
really good and is about 120-140 roubles a kilo. And, they are making more cheddar that is a white medium
taste as well. No scarcity of good natural food in Russia and No POlice state. Spacibo Unz Rev.
The trade volume between Russia and the Baltic states has actually risen, despite the sanctions. The Baltics
send food products and booze to Russia (and another 150 countries, food exports to Russia actually grew in
2016-2018). As well as chemical products and pharmaceuticals. Meldonium, btw, is made in Latvia and is still
being sent to Russia (as well as 20 other countries), not for athletes, but for regular folks. Work is being
carried out on a new generation Meldonium pill (the biggest market will be Russia).
Growth in the Baltic states has been 3-4% in the last few years. GDP per capita, as well as HDI, is
higher than in Russia. Foreign investment, including from Russia, has been growing (Russia was the second
largest investor in Latvia in 2018). Savings rates are growing, too. After a relative quiet period after
2010, the number of Russian (and other tourists) has grown again.
Estonia's population stopped shrinking in 2016 and is now growing in fact. They've seen immigration from
Finland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as returning Estonians.
Emigration is a problem, of course, but this is partly because the Baltic states are the only former USSR
republics whose citizens were even given work permits in the West, imagine what would happen if these
permits were given to Russians from the regions.
Neo-liberal policies are of course bad and certain types of investment should be controlled, but to say
that there are no social services in the Baltic states is complete nonsense. Due to generous parental
payments, birthrates have risen significantly since the 1990s in fact, birthrates in the Baltics are now
slightly higher than the EU average. Life expectancy is also growing. Latvia covers IVF treatments in full.
There are free school lunches.
Yes, it is true that some of the Soviet era factories should've been salvaged but the problem was they
were not competitive globally at that time (and there was no capital to remodel them). The Soviet market was
a closed one. However, some businesses were salvaged. There is local manufacturing (electronics,
pharmaceuticals, etc).
Not everything is ideal, but it is also not the kind of gloom and doom as you paint.
Saker says:
"Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing growth, but was that not
mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies?"
"Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt":
"Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption And there are few
better examples than Ukraine just don't tell the House impeachment hearings. Counting on foreign aid to
reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism .If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would
have become a rule of law paradise long ago . The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid."
@onebornfree
The EU gives every year about 2,500 million euros to the 3 Baltic countries ( 6 million people the three of
them ) , and 9000 million euros to Poland ( 38 million people ) , plus more billions to other eastern
members .
Older members of the EU , spetially the UK which is going out , Greece witch was tortured ( again )
economically by Germany , and south Europe in general are not very happy about admitting so many ex-soviets
countries en the EU and subsidizing them .
Recovery and self-sufficiency since Yeltsin show the brilliance of the Russian people
It's not so much brilliance as sheer necessity to survive under sanctions. But some results were better
than anyone expected. Say, food before sanctions used to be so-so in the provinces and downright bad in
Moscow because of abundance of imported crap. Now the food is exclusively domestic, fresh and tasty. Russia
never had traditions of making fancy cheeses. Now, to bypass sanctions, quite a few Italian and French
cheese-makers started production in Russia, so in the last 2-3 years domestically made excellent fancy
cheeses appeared in supermarkets. Arguably, Russian agriculture benefited by sanctions more than any other
sector, but there are success stories virtually in every industry. Sanctions and Ukrainian stupidity served
as a timely wake up call for Russian elites, who earlier wanted to sell oil and natural gas and buy
everything else. Replacing imports after the sanctions were imposed had a significant cost in the short run,
but in the long run it made Russia much stronger, economically and militarily. Speak of unintended
consequences.
My mom is from Lithuania and I've been there several times. We have second cousins our age.
Her father was
a surveyor for the Republic in the 20s and 30s, charged with breaking up the manors and estates and the
state distributing the land to the peasantry. It was near-feudalism. There was very little
industrialization; that which existed were in a few urban centers. One interesting comment from her was that
the "Jews were communists". From what I've read they were the urban working class, but perhaps part of the
socialist/Jewish Bund?
There is no doubt that the Soviet period unleashed considerable industrialization and modernization.
Lithuania had some of the best infrastructure in the USSR. Its traditional culture was really celebrated.
When I first visited, not long after the fall of the USSR, there were enormous, vacant industrial plants.
The collective farms were in the process of being sold off the western European agribusiness firms. One
relative through marriage was from the Ukraine, with a PhD in Physics and had been employed in the military
industries -- she was cleaning houses thereafter.
Any usable industrial enterprises were quickly sold off. The utilities are all foreign owned. Part of EU
mandates are "open" electricity "markets", which resulting in DC interconnections costing hundreds of
millions with the west to import very high priced electricity. The EU has paid for "Via Baltica", a highway
running from Poland to Estonia; it is choked with trucks carrying imports and there are huge distribution
and fulfillment centers along the highway. Such progress, huh?
There had been good public transport in the earlier years of independence, but that has been replaced
with personal automobiles -- usually western European used cars that pollute a lot. Trakai is a commuter town
to Vilnius with a medieval castle (restored in Soviet times). First time I went it was very pleasant. Second
time in 2018 the place was choked with cars and not very nice at all.
The impact of emigration cannot be over-stated. College educated young people leave by the hundreds of
thousands. Those that remain are paid very low wages (e.g., 1000 euros for a veterinarian or dentist), but
pay west European prices for many essentials. Housing is cheaper than the west.
Last time in Kazlu Ruda there were huge NATO exercises in progress and even bigger ones planned for 2020.
German units were billeted at an airbase nearby, rumored to have been a CIA black site. How fitting, as the
Germans with the Lithuanian Riflemens Union exterminated a quarter of a million Jews in a matter of months
(see Jager Report on Wikipedia). There is a Red Army graveyard in the town that has the remains of perhaps
350 soldiers killed in the area driving out the Nazis. I was frankly surprised it was still there.
Lithuania hasn't been independent since the days of the Pagans and Vytautas. It surely isn't independent
today.
Anecdotal -- yes. But based on personal observation.
Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt
by
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/03/2019 - 07:00
0
SHARES
Authored by James Bovard at
jimbovard.com
,
Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption...
And there are few better examples than Ukraine - just don't tell the House impeachment
hearings.
Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev,
Ukraine.Sasha Maksymenko / cc
Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure
alcoholism.
After closed House of Representatives impeachment hearings heard testimony on
President Trump's role in delaying U.S. aid to Ukraine, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
declared:
"
Numbers
don't lie
. It's even more clear now that President Trump is not the anti-corruption crusader
he claims to be."
Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to
fighting corruption in Ukraine.
But that ignores foreign aid's toxic record and Ukraine's
post-Soviet history.
A
2002 American
Economic Review analysis
concluded that
"increases in [foreign] aid are associated
with contemporaneous increases in corruption,"
and that "corruption is positively
correlated with aid received from the United States."
That was the year President George W. Bush launched a new foreign aid program, the
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA).
Bush declared, "I
think
it makes no sense to give aid
, money, to countries that are corrupt." But the Bush
administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world's most
corrupt regimes. By 2004, the State Department had codified what amounted to backtracking: "
The
MCA is an incentive-based supplement to other U.S. aid programs."
The Bush team found excuses
to give MCA aid to some of the world's most corrupt governments as well, including Georgia.
In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that America was "
leading
a global effort to combat corruption
."
Obama's "aides said the United States in the
past has often seemed
to
just throw money at problems
," the
Los Angeles Times
reported. But the reform charade
was exposed the following year when the Obama administration fiercely resisted congressional
efforts to curb wasteful aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that restricting handouts
to nations that fail anti-corruption tests "has
the
potential to affect a staggering number
of needy aid recipients."
The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of American tax dollars into
sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was "one of
the
most
corrupt countries on earth
."
And the deluge of aid the Afghan government received only
worsened the corruption. As John Sopko, the heroic Special Inspector General for Afghan
Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, "
We
need to understand how
US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.
We must recognize the danger of dealing with characters or networks of unsavory repute, tolerating
contracting abuses, accepting shoddy performance and delivering unsustainable projects."
The closed House impeachment hearings last week heard from acting U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine
William B. Taylor Jr., who testified that he "
had
authority over the bulk
of the U.S. effort to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion and
to help it defeat corruption."
The
Washington Post
lauded Taylor as someone who "
spent
much of the 1990s telling
Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their
long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law
, in his
role as the head of U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries."
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that
corruption
surged in Ukraine during the late 1990s
and remains at obscene levels
(though recent
years have shown slight improvements). Taylor was ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, when
corruption sharply worsened despite
hundreds
of millions of dollars in U.S. aid
. Ukraine is now ranked as the
120th
least
corrupt
nation in the world
-- lower than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients. What
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is to the NFL, Taylor appears to be to the anti-corruption
cause.
Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as
distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence.
Rather than encouraging good governance
practices, foreign aid is more likely to produce kleptocracies, or governments of thieves. As a
Brookings Institution analysis observed, "The history of
U.S.
assistance is littered
with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own
pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects."
And both American
politicians and bureaucrats are want to continue the aid gravy train, regardless of how foreign
regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.
If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would have become a rule of law paradise long ago. The
country's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, may be sincere in his efforts to root out corruption.
But it is an insult to both him and his nation to pretend that Ukraine cannot clean up its act
without help from Donald Trump.
The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid.
"... The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or supply documents to them. ..."
"... Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. ..."
"... There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one of his top aides. ..."
"... General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat." ..."
"... Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in Syria. ..."
"... Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in Washington. ..."
By a near party-line vote of 232-196, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday for a
resolution laying out the procedures for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump
that was begun September 24. The resolution sets the stage for the holding of public, televised
hearings and the likely drawing up of articles of impeachment in the course of the next
month.
Only two Democrats out of 233 in the House voted against the resolution, Jeff Van Drew of
New Jersey and Colin Peterson of Minnesota. Only one member elected as a Republican, Justin
Amash of Michigan, voted for the resolution. He left the Republican Party in July because of
his support for impeachment, and he now sits as an independent.
The sharp divisions over the resolution were reflected in the hour-long debate, in which
Republican defenders of Trump denounced the impeachment inquiry with hysterical anticommunist
rhetoric, calling it "Soviet-style" and a "show trial." Democrats wrapped themselves in the
American flag -- or displayed it on a large placard as they spoke, in the case of Speaker Nancy
Pelosi -- and denounced Trump for endangering US "national security."
The procedure laid down in the eight-page resolution, drafted Wednesday by the House Rules
Committee, gives an outsized role to the House Intelligence Committee, which is to begin public
hearings sometime in November at which many of the witnesses who have testified behind closed
doors will be asked to do so again in front of television cameras.
The Intelligence Committee, along with four other committees conducting investigations into
various aspects of President Trump's personal, business and official conduct, will report its
findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would actually draw up any articles of impeachment,
vote on them, and send them to the full House for final action.
The overall procedures, including provisions for extended questioning of witnesses by
representatives of both the majority and minority parties, conform generally to similar
measures adopted during the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1974 and
President Bill Clinton in 1998.
The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend
and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his
order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or
supply documents to them.
In the event of continued presidential stonewalling of the House committees, the resolution
provides that the chair of the Judiciary Committee "shall have the discretion to impose
appropriate remedies, including by denying specific requests by the president or his counsel
under these procedures to call or question witnesses."
In other words, if Trump continues to block testimony and evidence, his attorneys will not
be allowed to cross-examine those witnesses who do appear despite the full-throated opposition
of the White House. Given that many officials and former officials of the Trump administration
have agreed to testify under subpoena, this could become a significant issue.
The special role of the House Intelligence Committee underscores the reactionary nature of
the Democrats' impeachment drive. Trump is being targeted, not for his real crimes as
president, attacking immigrants, undermining democratic rights, and asserting quasi-dictatorial
powers, but for his foreign policy actions that are opposed by a substantial section of the US
military-intelligence apparatus.
The witnesses testifying before the closed-door sessions of the Intelligence Committee are
not immigrant mothers, cruelly and in some cases permanently separated from their children, or
the victims of Trump-inspired fascist gunmen like the El Paso mass shooter. Instead, they are
an array of State Department and military officials at odds with Trump's efforts to browbeat
the government of Ukraine into supplying him with political dirt against former vice president
Joe Biden, viewed by Trump as a likely opponent in the 2020 election.
Particularly significant in that context is the announcement that the Intelligence Committee
has set a November 7 date for the testimony of John Bolton, Trump's former national security
advisor. It is not clear whether Bolton will testify, but the potential alignment of the
Democrats and one of the most notorious war criminals in the American government is a clear
demonstration of the reactionary motives of the Democrats, who are acting as front men for
rabid warmongers in the national-security state.
Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's
top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the
National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons
of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order
to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China
from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian
Oceans.
Morrison is the highest-ranking Trump aide to provide evidence to the Intelligence
Committee, and he announced his impending departure from the White House on Wednesday night,
hours before he was sworn in as a witness. According to leaks to the press from the closed-door
hearing, Morrison largely confirmed the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Lt. Col.
Alexander Vindman, that there was a direct quid pro quo involved in US policy towards Ukraine:
Trump demanded a public investigation into the Democratic Party and the Bidens, in return for
military aid and a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House.
There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the
gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade
Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to
restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that
benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that
Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would
not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the
Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one
of his top aides.
There were further indications of support for the impeachment drive -- or at least for the
national-security officials who have come forward to testify against Trump -- from the top
levels of the military and diplomatic establishment. General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired
only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday
defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling
him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary
contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat."
And in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected
to confirm his nomination to be US Ambassador to Russia, Deputy Secretary of State John
Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was
the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer
her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on
the Bidens.
Asked whether it was "ever appropriate for the president to use his office to solicit
investigations into his domestic political opponents," Sullivan replied, "I don't think that
would be in accord with our values." Given Trump's frequent declarations that his telephone
conversation with Zelensky, in which he made just such a request, was "perfect," Sullivan's
statement is extraordinary. It suggests an unprecedented degree of open revolt against Trump
within the national-security establishment.
The real motives of the impeachment drive were spelled out with particular frenzy in a
column by neoconservative Max Boot, who, like Bolton, has been an all-out supporter of US
military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and throughout the world. Writing in the
Washington Post , under the headline, "More Trump gifts to Russia," he declares,
"Trump is bringing the United States to its knees and making Russia great again."
Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department
axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against
pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in
Syria.
He writes: "Russian soldiers are entering U.S. bases and taking up the joint patrolling
duties with the Turkish army that U.S. troops had been performing until recently. The fate of
Syria was settled not in Washington but in Sochi -- Putin's favorite Black Sea resort. Trump
has given Russia what it has sought for decades: a leading role in the Middle East. This is the
biggest geopolitical shift in the region since 1972 when Egypt's Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet
advisers and aligned with Washington."
Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step
towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US
role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in
Washington.
by John Quiggin on October 13, 2019 On Facebook, my frined
Timothy Scriven pointed to an opinion piece by classics professor Ian Morris headlined
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer It's pushing a book with the clickbaity
title War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to
Robots .". Timothy correctly guessed that I wouldn't like it.
Based on the headline, I was expecting a claim along the lines "wars stimulate technological
progress" which I refuted (to my own satisfaction at any rate) in Economics in Two
Lessons" . But the argument is much stranger than this. The claim is that war, despite its
brutality created big states, like the Roman empire, which then delivered peace and
prosperity.
For the classical world at 100 CE or so, the era on which Morris is an expert, that argument
seemed pretty convincing. As the famous Life of Brian sketch suggests, Roman rule delivered a
lot of benefits to its conquered provinces.
The next 1900 years or so present a bit of a problem, though. There have been countless wars
in that time, and no trend towards bigger states. On the contrary two or three dozen states
(depending on how you count them) now occupy the territory of the former Roman Empire.
You could cut the number down a bit by treating the European Union as a new empire, but then
you have an even bigger problem. The EU was not formed through war, but through a determination
to avoid it. Whatever you think about the EU in other respects, this goal has been
achieved.
Morris avoids the problem by a "no true Scotsman" argument. He admits in passing that the
1000 years of war following the high point of Rome had the effect of breaking down larger,
safer societies into smaller, more dangerous ones, but returns with relief to the era of true
wars, in which big states always win. That story works, roughly, until 1914, when the empires
he admires destroyed themselves, killing millions in the process.
After that, the argument descends into Pinker-style nonsense. While repeating the usual
stats about the decline in violent deaths, Morris mentions in passing that a nuclear war could
cause billions of deaths. He doesn't consider the obvious anthropic fallacy problem – if
such a war had happened, there would not be any op-eds in the Washington Post discussing the
implications for life expectancy.
I haven't read the book, and don't intend to. If someone can't present a 700 word summary of
their argument without looking silly, they shouldn't write opinion pieces. But, for what its
worth, FB friends who have read it agree that it's not very good.
William Meyer 10.13.19 at 12:31 pm (no link)
I have not read the book in question, so I don't know if the author made this point: "Since
violence or implicit violence is how we overcome essentially all collective action problems
as humans, war probably does belong in the human toolkit." Obviously it would be better if we
could find more and better alternatives to war, and remove the obvious glitches in the
alternatives (e.g., representative democracy, single-party states, etc.) we have tried in the
past. So I find it odd as I get old that so little energy/research/academic effort is devoted
by the human race to finding better means of collective decision making. Clearly our current
abilities in this field are completely inadequate. I ponder if this is because we are
incapable of doing better by some inherent flaw in our makeup or if it is because, as in some
many areas of life, the wicked work tirelessly to maintain the systems that enrich and
empower them. I suspect I'll never find out.
Omega Centauri 10.13.19 at 4:33 pm (no link)
There might be a case to be made for empire building conquest advancing human society. I
think it was primarily by forcing the mixing of cultures which otherwise would have been
relatively isolated from each other. Also empires tended to create safe internal trade
routes, the Silk Road was made possible by the Mongol empire.
At least the authors of books about such empires like to state that over a timespan of
centuries that empire creation was a net positive.
Orange Watch 10.13.19 at 7:07 pm (no link)
Tim Worstall and Dipper's suggestion that the EU is borne of war is mostly just a failure to
take Morris's claim on its unsophisticated face and instead assume it contains subtle
complexity that is obviously missing if you read the article itself:
This happened because about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating
the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger
societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these
governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their
subjects.
For the EU to have been a result of war in the sense that Morris means, it would have to
have been forcibly formed in 1945 by the US/UK/Russia forcibly incorporating Europe into it.
When Morris states "wars make us stronger and richer" he very simply means wars of conquest
are long-term net positives. He doesn't mean something subtle about nations banding together
to forestall further war; he bluntly means conquerors gluing together their conquests into
empires and then liberally applying boot leather to necks.
Mark Brady 10.13.19 at 7:56 pm (no link)
John Quiggin is, of course, well aware of this quotation, but some of you may not.
"Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of
destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us
how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see "miracles of
production" which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a postwar world made certainly
prosperous by an enormous "accumulated" or "backed up" demand. In Europe they joyously count
the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that "will have to be
replaced." In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon
stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent
radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.
"It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat
beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It
confuses need with demand."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 3, "The Blessings of Destruction."
Alex SL 10.13.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)
On one side, AFAIK the last few centuries of war in Europe have indeed seen a reduction of
the number of states. Yes, the trend was partly reversed since 1914, but never to the degree
of splintering that existed in the middle ages.
On the other side, even the widely accepted cases of supposedly 'beneficial' empires such
as the Romans bringing the Pax Romana and the Mongols allowing far-reaching trade and travel
need to be seen against the devastation they caused to make their victories possible. The
Romans, for example, committed genocide in Gaul and Carthage, and they enslaved millions.
Best case argument in my eyes is that a very successful war is beneficial because it stops
continuous smaller wars, which is still not exactly the same as a general "war is
beneficial". Why not just create institutional arrangements that avoid wars between small
nations in the first place?
fran6 10.13.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Here's another personality who's also unfazed by the evils of war (although, she does wish
more folks were "kind" to each other):
Stephen @11 Say what? Are you suggesting that the Soviet bloc was part of the EU? As both
your comment and Tim Worstall's unwittingly illustrate, the fact that the EU has been
entirely peaceful since its creation (by contrast with non-EU Europe) is not because
Europeans suddenly became pacifists.
Sorry if I have a hard time getting Morris' argument, but: towards the end, be seems to be
saying the world requires a "Globocop" like the US to ensure its prosperity. But how does
that relate to his wider point about the benefits of war? Does Morris believe the hegemon
owes it to itself, and to the rest of the world, to wage permanent war?
Morris sold out. This was evident in his book comparing the progress of China and Europe,
though that book made excellent points in between the fluff and is well worth reading. But he
is well versed enough in Chinese history to be aware of the ultimate example of armies
conquering and bringing peace to a large area, which happens repeatedly in Chinese history.
Actually, Chinese history itself shows that the opposite argument has more support, that
instead of war being valuable because one powerful country will conquer a large area and
bring peace to it, its valuable because competition between states who are worried about
other states getting a jump on them turns out to be valuable to progress. Large continental
empires, including the Roman one as well, tended to stagnate in terms of culture and
technology and become correct.
MFB 10.15.19 at 7:18 am (no link)
Well, the opinion-piece was published on Jeff Bezos' blog. Oligarchs are naturally in favour
of centralised power and therefore of empires (so long as they are at the apex thereof, which
they usually are). The best way to build an empire is through war.
Of course, the author has to say "despite Hitler, Stalin and Mao", for ideological
reasons. Actually, Hitler built his empire largely through the threat of war rather than
through war itself; once he had actually started the war, he antagonised three more powerful
empires than his own and his empire was then crushed. As for Stalin, he actually did various
double-back-somersaults to avoid getting into wars, and the "empire" which he built in
Eastern Europe as a result of winning a war he didn't want did not sustain itself. And of
course Mao didn't start any wars at all -- his name just had to be thrown in for reactionary
reasons.
It is true that the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British empires were built upon war.
But where are they now? The United States fought a lot of wars against its indigenous people,
but frankly it would still have been a global superpower if it had simply sidestepped most of
them, at least from about 1865 onward.
An interesting question: can it be that a professor of Classics doesn't actually have to
understand the concept of evidence-based argument in any case, because everything has already
been said on the subject and all you have to do is cherry-pick other people's statements?
Because that seems to be how that silly article reads.
And yes, the whole thing reeks of the better angels propaganda. Let's not forget, by the
way, that various members of the EU -- Britain, France, Italy et al -- have launched brutally
murderous wars elsewhere, and the fact that they don't fight among themselves doesn't make
them peaceful or moral entities.
@TheSophist #25: that was mentioned as a joke rather than self-publicity, but if you're
really interested: The Roman Empire: roots of imperialism (Pluto Press, 2020). Obviously
books about the Roman Empire are ten a penny; my main claim for this one, besides its being
less apologetic and/or gung-ho than most, is that I try to integrate the historical reality
with its reception, i.e. how people have subsequently deployed Rome as an example or model.
Maybe the Roman Empire delivered on peace, but prosperity is a bit more complicated. Some
years ago David Hays wrote a book on the history of technology. One of the things he did was
make a back-of-the-envelope estimate of material welfare at different levels of development.
He concluded that, while civilization has always been a good deal for the elite, it's been
rather iffy for peasants and workers. It's only during the Industrial Evolution that the
standard of living at the lower end of society rose above that of hunter-gatherers. So, the
prosperity delivered by the Roman Empire went mostly to the elite, not the peasantry.
Peter Erwin@43 wanted the Nazis to roll right up to the eastern border of Poland, etc. etc.
So did Hitler. And although I'm quite reluctant to read minds, especially dead one, I will
nevertheless guarantee the move into the Baltics was seen as a blow to his plans, even if
accepted for temporary advantage. You must always see who hates Stalin for beating Hitler,
and those rare few who object to his real crimes.
And, Erwin thinks Chinese troops being in Korea with permission is an aggression, while US
troops closing on Chinese borders is not. The US still isn't out of Korea, but China is, but
he can't figure out who the aggressor is.
Really, Peter Erwin really says it all. The maddest ant-Communist propaganda is now
official.
MFB 10.17.19 at 9:02 am (no link)
I don't want to unnecessarily dump on Peter Erwin, because I don't believe in kicking
disadvantaged children, but if he reads the original post he will notice that it was talking
about international wars, not civil wars. I'll admit the invasion of Finland (and of the
Baltic states and Poland) but those were fairly obviously ways of strengthening the USSR's
position in order to discourage a German invasion, and all took place within the boundaries
of the former Russian Empire which Stalin undoubtedly saw as the default position.
As to Mao, he didn't start the Korean war (as Erwin unwillingly admits) and all the other
wars except for the invasion of Vietnam were civil wars since they entailed moving into
Chinese-controlled territory which had broken away during the main civil war. I'll admit that
Vietnam was a problem, but then, since Mao had been dead for some time by then, it's would be
hard for Erwin to blame him except for the fact that Erwin clearly lives on Planet
Bizarro.
@John Quiggin The claim is that war, despite its brutality created big states, like the
Roman empire, which then delivered peace and prosperity
I don't think this is an intellectually generous summary of the arguments, as presented in
the article.
The author himself summarizes it as "war made states, and states made peace", and if it is
indeed true that the author often speaks of "larger, more organized societies" there is a
strong implication that for a society to be "large" in the sense discussed in the article, it
is not really necessary that it be territorially very wide (the most clear cut indication of
that is that the author refers to the European states of the 1600s as "big, settled states"
while they all were geographically tiny at the time). So the point of the author, if
interpreted with intellectual honesty, seems to me to be twofold: 1) that war has been a
crucial factor in the formation of complex, organized states and societies and 2) that these
complex, organized states and societies brought with them so many positive things that the
wars required to form them were worth it.
The second point is pure Pinker. I consider it logically meaningless, myself (it
ultimately relies on the concept that History proceeds like an individual who is choosing a
pair of shoes) and morally repugnant (it is not hard to see who will be pleased to have a
rhetorical tool that can justify any atrocity by the long term gains it will provide humanity
– indeed, it is instructive in that respect to read SS internal papers on when and why
children should be executed with their parents, and how to select people for that task:
contrary to what could be guessed, the manual recommends the soldiers who appear to have a
strong sense of empathy and morality, with the idea that they will those who will most
strongly endorse the "by doing this abominable act, we are sacrificing ourselves on behalf of
future generations" thesis).
The first point, however, appears to me to be broadly correct descriptively. Extracting an
interesting thesis out of it requires much more work than is indicated by the article,
however (I consider Ertman's Birth of the Levianthan an example of that kind of extra
work done successfully).
@John Quiggin Lots of people predicted, along the lines of your post, that with the
external threat of the USSR gone, and the US pulling back, the old warlike Europe would
reassert itself.
I think what we may call the "wide military context thesis" runs rather like this: because
of the experience of WWII and the Cold War, modern industrial states have amassed enormous
military power while at the same time knowing that they can experience total destruction if
they enter into a military conflict with a state of comparable military might. As a
consequence, peace dominates between them. So France is not at war with the United Kingdom or
Germany, certainly in part because they are all (for now) members of the EU but also in part
for the same reason Japan is not at war with South Korea and Russia not at war with
China.
Personally, I think it would be absurd to claim that the EU has played no role in the
pacification of Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, but I think it
would be equally absurd to deny the role of other factors that plainly play a major role in
the equally remarkable pacification of other regional areas in the absence of an economical
and political unification process (rise in prosperity, rise in education, aging populations,
increased military power ).
@7, Omega
Not really wanting to get into the "do empires benefit civilization by promoting trade"
argument, but having just read Lost Enlightenment, nothing in that lengthy tome suggests the
Silk Road city states gain any special advantage from the Mongol invasion. In fact, quite the
opposite. After the Mongols (in part for reasons preceeding the conquest), Central Asia never
regained its pre-eminence (it had actually not just been a facilitator of trade but also a
center of manufacture, culture, scientific progress). Maybe the trade routes hobbled along as
trade routes but the civilization that was both built by and facilitated trade did not
rebound. Most empires seem to get that there is wealth to be had from involvement in trade,
they don't always know how to keep the gold goose alive.
LFC 10.20.19 at 9:10 pm (no link)
"War made states and states made peace" is a riff on Charles Tilly's line "war made the state
and the state made war."
"... In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted. ..."
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though,
is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended
up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being
reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture.
Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years
afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development
was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and
ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region.
Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached
in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia
failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from
their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political
division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged
Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists
have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine
cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents
reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia
and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment
of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere,
including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected
Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of
Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly
wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations
into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation
with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long
as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's
pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed
by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic
brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective
of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive
determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace;
now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily
protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with
them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian
Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without
Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However,
adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes
to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in
NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow
blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for
Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S.
has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration
defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing
to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally
backed Minsk accord.
Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia.
European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy
with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned
to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author
of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate
policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what
exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment of
dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.
Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination
and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture
sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal with
the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the Donbass
and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support for the region
would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?
As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the Ukrainian
military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev and Odessa,
what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word "hegemony" to
describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men (which they are)
in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign policy establishment
in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings
in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to
escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history
of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.
And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are
conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.
How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is
false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and
jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist
monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more
adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US
was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be
kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously,
as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.
This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border.
And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.
When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate, no
international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans should
look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops wherever
it fancies.
This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats
protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy for
its own elites benefit is being denied.
This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you, or
that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives for
a while?
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed only
mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The strategy
should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening. It may be slow
to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether they are using
fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will have China as a
greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take decades of building
trust on both sides.
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then spouse,
at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that
it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria
Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.
If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were born,
near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued in 1916
in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.
When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would not
extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and the US
broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.
The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs
of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our own
central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's
list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).
Despite
scant polling evidence, Joe Biden's continued
lead , and serious
concerns over her viability with the broader electorate, Elizabeth Warren's Democratic
presidential campaign has taken on an air of inevitability.
Just this fall, the emcee of the financial television circuit, Mad Money 's Jim
Cramer, has gone from wailing "She's got to be stopped" to insisting, "I don't think she's
nearly as anti-business" as commonly portrayed. Either way, Cramer continues, "I think there is
such a thing called Congress." The implication is even if the prairie populist by way of
Massachusetts goes the distance, Wall Street's network on Capitol Hill would make mincemeat of
her agenda.
In my interviews with members of Congress, especially Republicans, Warren's nomination is
generally treated as a fait accompli. Perhaps it's projection, Warren is who many partisan
Republicans think the Democrats are: female, lawyerly and anti-capitalist. The contest of
Warren vs. Donald Trump would provide, if nothing else, clarity.
The dynamic extends past Northeast Washington. Where people put their money where their
mouth is -- political gambling sites -- Warren's chances of winning the Democratic nomination
are assessed at nearing 40 percent. On PredicitIt.com, one can buy a Warren share an absurd
thirty-eight cents on the dollar.
Advertisement
The idea of Democrats nominating an aged, gaffe-prone white male popular with industry and
in the Rust Belt seems absurd on the face: "That's our nominee, right?" David Axelrod,
mastermind of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, earlier this month crowned Warren the
"front-runner."
There's just one problem with this line of thinking: it's not at all clear Warren is going
to be the Democratic nominee for president. Her principal rival, Biden, the former vice
president, still leads in some national polls. Biden is frequently compared to Jeb Bush, the
establishment favorite, paper tiger on the Republican side in the last round.
There are two problems with this analogy. Biden isn't nearly as "establishment" as the
former Florida governor. Bush was the cash-flush son and brother of two presidents, while Biden
is bleeding
dough and has failed to procure the endorsement of the president he served. Conversely,
unlike Bush, whose lead nationally evaporated by Labor Day, Biden has stubbornly stayed more or
less at the top of the heap through all of 2019.
It's Halloween and Democratic voters haven't been spooked enough by the former vice
president's at-times catastrophic performance to dump him. Unlike Bush, Biden has an ace in the
hole: the anchoring constituency of his party, African-American voters. If Bush had commanded
the acclaim of evangelical Christians he might have held on despite his other weaknesses as a
candidate. Biden is also relatively
popular , while the Bush clan is rightly still blamed for the destruction of American
prestige at home and abroad.
Biden frequently, even pathetically presents himself as an "Obama-Biden Democrat."
ButBiden's candidacy remains most similar to a non-Bush 2016 candidate: Donald Trump, the
front-runner the "smart set" claimed was doomed from the start. Like Trump, Biden is
famous . And as Biden has hit campaign troubles, the former veep's raison d'etre can
take on an air of the self-evident: I'm leading the race because I'm leading the race.
Like Trump, who would proudly spend literally hours of his campaign rallies reading off
primary poll results, Biden also seems content to run a campaign based on his own lead. After
weeks of purported political battering, Biden told 60 Minutes Sunday: "I know I'm the
frontrunner."
With almost Trump-like flare, Biden noted: "Find me a national poll with a notable a couple
exceptions." What was true of the last Democratic debate, earlier this month in Ohio, may be
true of the 2020 election as a whole. As Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National
Interest , said
: "It was a good night for the old codgers on stage."
Indeed, insistences from career progressives and conservatives that Warren is the true
Democratic standard-bearer can take on a mawkish tone. Surely, in a time of ubiquitous
partisanship, the victors will be most ideological. The Democrats are moving ever left, the
Republicans, ever right. Surely, it is time for a true believer.
But the logic is too clever by half. Templates are incomplete assessments of the world, but
play along: if Trump is Biden's proper analogue, then Warren's candidacy is perhaps most akin
to Ted Cruz's in 2016. Like Cruz, Warren is somewhat
unpopular with her colleagues, which doubles as a badge of honor with many, more
ideological activists.
But party activists perhaps understand the organization they serve less than they think they
do. Isn't it just as possible, indeed maybe even likely, that Warren, like Cruz, is waiting for
a day that will never come? Trump's "implosions" were never reflected at the ballot box. Maybe
so, it will also be with Biden.
Templates aren't perfect, however. While Cruz did well with evangelicals, Warren has failed
to make inroads among African Americans. And unlike Cruz, the establishment has warmed to
Warren's rise -- her campaign doubles as a Harvard satellite campus.
But perhaps Warren's greatest weakness as a candidate, as it was for Cruz, is that she is
not the real voice of her party's discontented. A well placed source told me that in 2012 he
advised Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, that the person who wins America's big elections
today is the most pessimistic of the two messengers.
Of the 2016 conservatives, Cruz was perhaps most polite to Trump, but in failing to ape the
future president's program, he never emerged as anything more than a poor imitation of the real
estate mogul. Immigration and ennui over America's international role were the orders of the
day, and for a core contingent, no substitutes for Trumpian nationalism would do.
Warren experiences this vulnerability, an intensity gap, not with Biden, but with Bernie
Sanders. Warren, perhaps sensing the establishment's warmth to her, takes pains to emphasize
that she is still a capitalist. Perhaps accordingly, socialist Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez, the
most powerful millennial politician, has thrown in with Sanders, the candidate she volunteered
for four years ago. For the under-forty set, which has been mired in a now-decade of low growth
and the vise-grip of rising housing, education and healthcare costs, Warrenism, like Cruzism,
may come too little, too late.
A well placed source told me that in 2012 he advised Mitt Romney, the Republican
nominee, that the person who wins America's big elections today is the most pessimistic of
the two messengers.
Ummmm... Romney LOST.
For the under-forty set, which has been mired in a now-decade of low growth and the
vice grip of rising housing, education and healthcare costs, Warrenism, like Cruzism, may
come too little, too late.
The article was nearly completely about Biden vs Warren then changed course near the end
by bring Sanders into it. So Warrenism may be "too little, too late" so Dems will go for
less with Biden? Sorry, it really seems incoherent to me.
Yeah, the analogy that makes more sense is Trump:Cruz as Bernie:Warren, except instead of
being a total fraud with no political experience, Bernie has 40 years of experience, with
lots of accomplishments, and is seen as far-and-away the most trustworthy and with the
highest favorability.
As competing right-wing and left-wing versions of the "cool nerd"? I guess so, though the
essence of the "cool nerd" is that most people don't think the "cool nerds" are cool.
Is Biden really less "Establishment" than Jeb Bush?. A lot depends on how you define
Establishment -- and the word is very slippery and hard to define. I'd say they were both
Establishment to something like the same degree. Bush has a waspy pedigree and two
presidents in his family, but 38 years in the Senate made Biden part of the Washington
Establishment to a high degree. Neither of them had much substance. Biden was sort of like
the ottoman in a Washington salon - something you might not notice until you tripped over
it - but still he was a Washington fixture. Jeb Bush had the connections, but so far as
Washington was concerned there was something provincial about him.
It doesn't really matter who wins the Democrat's party nomination or who wins the
Presidential election. The 'Deep State' runs the government and will continue to run the
government no matter which pony is the face on stage. Pick your puppet at the polls. That
is if you want to waste your time voting at all.
True of any candidate except Trump who is the only one not controlled by the Deep State.
Not that he hasn't had limited success so far in going up against them, given their control
of the FBI and CIA and ability to manufacture scandals at will such as the "Russia
Collusion" hoax.
I'll agree that Trump is somewhat outside the 'Deep State's' control. I'll state that I am
not a fan of most of his policies or the man himself and it is my firm opinion that even
though he is not an 'offspring' of the Deep State, his actions and interests are
self-focused just like those that are bred from within. None of them give a rat's behind
about Joe Public; it's the super-elites serving the interests of the super-elites.
The socalled Deep State swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. That oath comes before
their loyalty to Trump.
Trump is president, not dictator. He doesn't just get to do whatever he wants despite
the fact he thinks he can, he thinks he is above the Constitution.
"I have to the right to do whatever I want as president." - Trump
You no doubt nodded in agreement when he said that, but if a Democratic president ever
said that, you'd erupt in outrage completely forgetting how you felt when Trump said
it.
The previous Democratic president ruled largely through executive orders, if you haven't
noticed. Not a dictator, right. While those upholders of the Constitution which are so dear
to you, violated it left and right in everything foreign policy. Try better.
Actually, as Alex stated, rule by Executive Order has become more prevalent with each
successive President regardless of political party. Without going into a long explanation,
I'll just say that the Constitution has been eroded by all Branches of the government -
unfortunately, it's getting to the point where it will be completely ineffectual soon.
Warren (as well as Bernie Sanders) would have been a great candidate for the Democratic
Party to try to win back working-class whites in 2016, but nowadays it seems they are the
Republican base and big Trump supporters and aren't returning back to the fold.
Democrats would do better to find a more center-right figure to win over
neoconservatives, liberatarians, and suburban America, all alienated by Donald Trump and by
what the Republican Party has become, which could potentially get them states like Arizona,
Texas, North Carolina, and the like.
That describes most of the Democratic also-rans, and pretty much Biden, too. And Hilary
Clinton, of course, and look how inspiring she was to the Democratic electorate.
You're pretty much describing Andrew Yang. His base is currently small, but very
passionate, consisting of progressives, disaffected Trump voters, working class whites,
libertarians, etc., basically anyone on the political spectrum.
Warren is who many partisan Republicans think the Democrats are: female, lawyerly and
anti-capitalist.
A few paragraphs down, you said "Warren, perhaps sensing the establishment's warmth to
her, takes pains to emphasize that she is still a capitalist." Did you just assume your
readers would prefer the smear up front and the facts buried near the bottom?
" Franklin Foer : All the investment bankers who have voodoo dolls of you
might be a bit surprised that you recently described yourself as "capitalist to the bone."
What did you mean?
Elizabeth Warren : I believe in markets and the benefits they can produce when
they work. Markets with rules can produce enormous value. So much of the work I have done
-- the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, my hearing-aid bill -- are about making
markets work for people, not making markets work for a handful of companies that scrape all
the value off to themselves. I believe in competition."
Like Cruz, Warren is somewhat unpopular with her colleagues
Wake me up when something actually analogous to Ted Cruz happens, like if Warren calls
the eventual nominee a "narcissist" and "serial liar" for whom "morality doesn't exist" and
then goes on to phone bank for him in the general.
Well, looks like I already have to wake you up. Remember that story with her saying that it
ain't right when a veep's son serves on the board of a foreign company and then immediately
backtracking after having understood what she just said?
Sounds like Warren is thinking of "Capitalism, with fixes from outside capitalism"
I'll admit, even the criticisms make me more interested in her. Though I fear that it's
more of a 'too good to be true' concept. My time in customer service helped me to
understand that sometimes you have to give Hard Messages to people as you really can't have
Everything You Want. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing Warren as "OMG this is everything I
wanted." Which is one of the red flags I had over Trump.
It's hard though. I know that giving hard messages is basically a death sentence in
campaigns so people don't do that. But Bernie did and he's not dying. BLAH.
In any case, don't go too hard on TAC articles about democratic candidates. It's sort of
like when a US new organization puts an editorial on a foreign culture. It's not a bad
viewpoint to have, but it IS going ot be..well.. different.
It becomes more and more obvious with each day that nominating Biden is incomparably
greater priority to the Democratic Party as an institution than winning the election. Yes,
Warren is no orator (which is an extremely ill omen for a candidate when running against
someone like Trump), but neither Biden is. Warren, with all her faults, at least speaks
like a non-orator with both hemispheres functional. While Biden is simply babbling.
And that's not to mention the fact that Democrats (yet) have a candidate who would
reliably beat any opponent aside from Rand Paul - Tulsi Gabbard. But these... epitomes of
alternative genius keep on trying to drive her away from their party at all costs instead
of holding on to her for dear life.
Trump won because of the number of other Republican candidates who wanted to fight it out
to the bitter end, rather than throw in their lot with a better candidate like Cruz or even
Jeb! Had it come down to two Republican candidates, Trump and one holding more traditional
views, it is likely Trump would have lost the Republican nomination.
The Democrats look the same for 2020. Biden represents the Clinton, Republican-lite wing
of the party. He has the name recognition and the big money backing. Sanders is a true
leftist. And Warren is somewhere in-between. The question is whether or not Sanders and
Warren will fight it out to the bitter end, leaving Biden with just enough of a plurality
to win the nomination. I don't give any of the rest a chance.
I tend to think that Trump would beat Biden. For the same reasons he beat Clinton: he's
a neo-liberal, neo-conservative who could give a rat's a$$ about the pain of the working
and middle-classes. I think Warren could beat Trump. She's really not a leftist
economically, and a lot of independents would see her as a rational, thoughtful person, as
opposed to Trump's Trumpism.
My lawn chair and popcorn favorite would be a Trump/Sanders title fight. Maybe terrible
for the country, but definitely fun to watch.
I think she is probably to the right of either Nixon or Eisenhower. She's certainly not
proposing a 91% marginal income tax rate (Eisenhower) or a fully socialized health care
system (Nixon). The world has shifted so far to the right in modern times that I can
understand that some see her as far left.
The reason that Nominee Warren is unlikely to get black support is that she played a card
that was not hers to [play and doubled down on the matter and continues to play that card
inspite of the cold hard light of day that she wasn't, and is not native american.
There is a huge wave of under current simmering anger because I don't cleave to notions
of some incorrectly underpinnings of "conservatism", that are sacrosanct. I don't put much
stock in identity political machinations online. It is simply a nonfactor or less of a
factor than what is on the page as to some's ideas.
But the hijacking of someone's history that is not your own in any fashion and profiting
from the same -- for people whose history are hog to negative narratives, this simply will
not sit well.
----------------
Senator Cruz's attempts to rig the Colorado primaries violates the principles of fair
play. Making arguments about being pro-country and at the same time manipulating the
immigration arguments to favor undermining US citizens -- don't invite much enthusiasm for
his leadership.
"The reason that Nominee Warren is unlikely to get black support is that she played a card
that was not hers to [play and doubled down on the matter and continues to play that card
inspite of the cold hard light of day that she wasn't, and is not native american."
Why in the world would African Americans care one wilt about Warren claiming she was
Native American?
Af-Ams are big on identity..but the only time I've seen it brought as an issue is when
someone who's not Af-Am claims they are Af-Am.
Republicans have a big issue with her using the term. But it's similar to Democrats
hating Trump's attacks on Latinos: the ones that rage weren't considering her in the first
place.
Warren will win or lose the Black vote by whether she notes their issues and offers
options that will change their current situation, something Hillary failed to do in those
key states. Though first she'll need them win them over from Biden. Possible, though not
easily.
Not really sure why the author thinks warren is somehow outside the democratic norms, she
has worked consistently for the working voters that make up her district by trying to bring
some balance against the large corporations that pretty much control the economy. Even
conservatives, the champions of big business and the haters of unions and all social
programs seem to actually have second thoughts about crushing the life out of the common
man, or at least they write occasional comments that make nice to them while giving the
corporations massive tax cuts and cutting the social programs.
If I was a bit more cynical I would think that they are pretty nervous about an
articulate candidate with a solid slate of actual policy papers and positions that try to
lay out a way to make the economy work for the regular folks. Why they might actually be
trying to claim that she will take the side of the corporations that run conservative
politics..
I think Warren's big problem is how she talks and how she looks.
Ever since TV came into the political process, image has become incredibly important.
Look at Ted Cruz. He just looked...weird.
Warren is frenetic when she talks on the debate stage. Mute your TV during the next
debate and watch. She also talks like a school marm.
Lasty, history does not smile on wonks. People want easy-to-understand programs and
straight talk. Warren constantly dodges how she will pay for her programs. This will not
play well in 2020.
I still think it will be Sanders, with the 1980 and 2016 GOP primaries as the templates,
and the crisis in the Reagan/Thatcher/neo-liberal consensus being the bedrock of his, and
Trump's, appeal.
Trump was such a wild card in 2016 that it's hard to make connections or analogies to any
other presidential election. You don't have to see Joe Biden as some clone of Jeb Bush to
see that they both have real deficiencies as candidates. Cruz also was a lousy candidate
who wouldn't have won the nomination or the general election, but he was blindsided by
Trump, someone new from outside politics.
There's nobody in sight who could blindside Warren like that, and I get the feeling that
the Democratic Party base (the White half of it anyway) is more comfortable with Warren
than the Republican Party base was with Cruz. Even Evangelicals couldn't quite bring
themselves to love Ted. However unpopular Warren is with the electorate as a whole, party
loyalists and activists have no problem with her.
I don't see Buttigieg winning the nomination. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once said that
Tom Dewey looked like the little plastic man at the top of the wedding cake. Now that we
have gay marriage, voters are offered the a candidate who looks like the little plastic man
on top of a gay wedding cake. I suspect they won't go for him.
Had Cruz been the nominee he would have had the same advantage that Trump did: Hillary
Clinton herself. She was a deeply unlikable candidate and 2016 is best described as
"Hillary lost" as opposed to "Trump won." Pretty much any Republican, excepting maybe Bush
with his family baggage, would have bear Hillary, and with a more respectable showing.
Letting their foreign policy being hijacked (or, rather, joyridden) by neolib lunatics, the
twins of neocon wackos. That can hardly be called "competence" and "prudence".
Good historical rundown of
Uncle Sam's blatant theft of resources in Syria .. has historical precedent too I believe;
the wars in Southeast Asia (the golden triangle and the drug trade). Afghanistan (heroin and
the poppies); imagine, we come and destroy your country and then steal your resources in the
aftermath. Sickening
@joost #33 I like to think that Trump's saying that the US army are going to steal Syria's
oil is very much the same strategy. What better way to turn world opinion against US
occupation of Syria?
Good historical rundown of
Uncle Sam's blatant theft of resources in Syria .. has historical precedent too I believe;
the wars in southeast asia (the golden triangle and the drug trade). Afghanistan (heroin and
the poppies); imagine, we come and destroy your country and then steal your resources in the
aftermath. Sickening
@49 Tim Glover. Exactly, imagine Obama saying that. Trump seems to have a habit of using
reverse psychology on people. This strategy works very well when nobody likes you and you
have the power of Twitter at your disposal.
People tend to overestimate the power of the US president. Every one of them, being democrat
or republican, gets assimilated by the borg. Resistance is futile, unless you are perceived
to be an idiot and do just enough to please your overlords. The Borg likes what he says, "we
are there for the oil" and they are getting reckless, exposing themselves for what they are.
Group think distorts perception and that is their weak spot. The borg will get more open
about their crimes and their true intentions. This breaks global support for the petrodollar
and that will be the end of the "outlaw" US empire.
I am surprised that I've not seen any commentary regarding the US's announcement that they
will continue to steal Syria's oil, and more importantly what anyone - Syria, Russia or
anyone else - might do about this blatant crime.
Clearly this challenges Syria's sovereignty as well as Russia's declared aim to restore
Syrian territory in full.
Any thoughts how this situation might evolve? IMO Russia has to remain a facilitator
rather than an actor. A "no-fly zone" enforced by Syrians and SAA ground troops?
Stripes: Carolina Army Guard troops move into eastern Syria with Bradley Fighting Vehicles
WASHINGTON – National Guard members from North and South Carolina began moving into
eastern Syria with heavy armored vehicles on Thursday as part of the Pentagon's new mission
to secure oil fields wrestled from the Islamic State, a military spokesman said.
Soldiers with the North Carolina-based 4th Battalion, 118th Infantry Regiment and the
South Carolina-based 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade were deployed to Deir al-Zour to
protect American-held oil fields around that city, Army Col. Myles Caggins, the spokesmen
for the U.S.-led anti-ISIS mission known as Operation Inherent Resolve, tweeted Thursday.
Caggins' tweet included photos of soldiers loading M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles onto Air
Force C-17 Globemaster cargo jets to be used on the mission. . . .
For now, the new deployment will not include M1 Abrams tanks, the Pentagon official said
Thursday.
here
Why use regulars when we can call up the National Guard?
US hold on the oilfields depends mostly on Iraq. The oilfields of Deir Ezzor are in open
country with few towns and apart from the Euphrates flood plain is sparsely populated.
The only cover for guerrilla style attacks against US or its proxies on the oilfields will
be the occasional dust storm.
Apart from Iraq, syria setting up S-300 at deir Ezzor and taking control of the airspace
would also be a game changer but this may not happen.
Lebanon and Iraq are both undergoing US color revolutions at the moment so its a matter of
waiting for the dust to settle on both these moves to see where US is positioned in the
region.
Yet the US military is overwhelmingly the #1 most trusted US institution among Americans,
despite it forcibly wasting their hard earned money to kill tens of millions of innocents
abroad. At the same time the US is also filled to the brim with draft dodgers.
If anybody thinks Bolton and his chickenhawking buddies isn't representative of the whole
US, think again.
Don Bacon 73 "Really? I thought the protests were like many other protests around the world,
over economic issues."
As was the Syrian 'revolution'. Plenty of small US companies willing to go in. US already
has buyers as they have been shipping oil out of east Syria for some time. Turkey, Israel ect
plus many more willing to buy at a discount. And considering the oilfields are simply stolen,
oil can be sold at a discount.
WASHINGTON -- After realizing there were still judicial appointments that needed to be
filled during a meeting with the conservative think tank, Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell reportedly pointed to a valet in the Heritage Foundation parking lot Thursday and
asked him if he wanted to be a federal judge. "Hey, kid, how'd you like a lifetime appointment
on the Ninth Circuit, huh?" asked McConnell, interrupting the 19-year-old temp worker's
protests that he didn't know anything about the law to tell him that all he needed was "wipe
that dumb look off your face" and he could be delivering rulings by the end of the week.
"You over 18? You got an ID? That'll do. Now just hop in this car with me and we'll head
over to the Capitol right now.
Remember, abortion's bad, corporations are good, and as for everything else, you just
shut the fuck up and do as your told. Got it?"
At press time, after the valet nervously informed McConnell that he was hungover and had
illegal drugs in his system, the laughing Senate leader assured him that wouldn't be an
issue.
The only mistake Merry makes is his erroneous statement that Trump held up aid to Ukraine to
pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the Ukrainian firm that made $1,750,000
payments to the corrupt Biden and his corrupt son. The transcript of the telephone call between
Trump and the Ukrainian president shows no Quid Pro Quo, and the Ukrainian president says there
was none. The Quid Pro Quo was entirely on Biden's part when he told the president of Ukraine
to fire the prosecutor investigating the firm that was paying him and his son seven figures in
protection money or forfeit $1 billion in US aid. You can watch it here:
https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html
Moreover, even it Trump did threaten to withhold aid from a country that was covering up
corruption by a US vice president and his son, that is the US president's right. There is no
reason whatsoever that a president should permit US taxpayers' money to be given to a
government that covers up corruption by a vice president of the United States.
Biden's son has admitted that he used poor judgment taking money from a firm in order to
protect it from prosecution.
Even if Trump did what the Democrats allege, which he did not, there is nothing illegal or
unethical about it whatsoever. Compared to the tactics US prosecutors use to convict the
innocent, Trump's conversation with the president of Ukraine is far above the highest ethics
known to US prosecutors.
Why aren't the Democrats complaining about the criminally illegal treatment of Julian
Assange and Manning? The reason is that the Democrats, the most utterly corrupt political
organization on the face of the Earth, are bought and paid for by the Deep State. The Democrats
are dog excrement to the core. They are traitors to America and to our Constitutional order.
The entire party should be arrested and put on trial for sedition to overthrow the government
of the United States.
"... Monday, that same company which was saved by the United States government was thrown a birthday party in the halls of the United States Congress committee which dispersed those funds? It literally doesn't get more corrupt than that. These people are so shameless they bragged about this party. They allowed it to be reported in Politico because that's just business as usual in our capital city ..."
"... So many on the right lecture the millennial generation and the working class as lazy. They give no credence to why exactly these people are angry. They watched the middle class get decimated, money get sent to Wall Street while our student debt exploded and any surplus cash that happened to be laying around was spent trying to turn the Middle East into a democratic paradise. America voted twice for change-agent Barack Obama to try and clean up the system, but he mostly just lectured corporations with an upturned chin and wagging finger, while letting them continue shipping jobs to China and Mexico. ..."
"... Institutionalized corruption has yielded disastrous results. ..."
The House Ways and Means Committee threw a bipartisan "birthday bash" for insurance company
AIG, that was widely attended by staffers across the aisle. The chairman of the committee,
Richard Neal , who is a
Democrat, gave remarks at the party. It included snacks, and an open bar serving a "centennial
smash" signature cocktail, all while an acapella group serenaded the group to the tune of
Pharrell's "Happy."
This is Versailles 1790's level stuff. It is a repulsive illustration of the bipartisan
corruption that has seeped into our system. Don't forget this is the company received 190
billion dollars in bailout funds while the rest of the American middle class plummeted to
destruction. It's also the same company which paid out $165 million in bonuses to its
executives after receiving bailout money and facing zero repercussions from the Obama
administration.
Monday, that same company which was saved by the United States government was thrown a
birthday party in the halls of the United States Congress committee which dispersed those
funds? It literally doesn't get more corrupt than that. These people are so shameless they
bragged about this party. They allowed it to be reported in Politico because that's just
business as usual in our capital city
Corporatism does not know any party. It has wormed its way into the highest levels of the
United States government. It has ruled us to our detriment now for almost 40 years now. The
left has responded to this moment with democratic socialism. The right looking at this movement
is learning all of the wrong reasons; they're flying socialism sucks banners all across America
without responding to the underlying structure of the American system as extraordinarily
flawed
So many on the right lecture the millennial generation and the working class as lazy. They
give no credence to why exactly these people are angry. They watched the middle class get
decimated, money get sent to Wall Street while our student debt exploded and any surplus cash
that happened to be laying around was spent trying to turn the Middle East into a democratic
paradise. America voted twice for change-agent Barack Obama to try and clean up the system, but
he mostly just lectured corporations with an upturned chin and wagging finger, while letting
them continue shipping jobs to China and Mexico.
Institutionalized corruption has yielded disastrous results. A new survey from the Victims
of Communism Memorial Foundation finds that more than 70% of millennials say they are likely to
vote socialist, and that 1 in 5 think that America would be better off if private property was
abolished. This makes perfect sense to me, because this generation sees the AIG bailout and the
party 10 years later and goes, well if that's capitalism, then this crap is not for me
I know some of the people watching this probably are actual socialists. I don't think most
of you are though. You're just fed up and you've been told that if you're against our current
system then you're a socialist. So you shrug and go, sure, I guess. It is incumbent upon the
right to restore and equitable and fair playing field within our system if we, correctly in my
view, believe that capitalism is intrinsic to the strength of the United States
The libertarian streak of the Republican Party will be the electoral and moral death of it.
Libertarianism was founded upon the idea that the greatest threat to you and your life is
institutionalized power in the form of the government. It's time they understood that the
government isn't the only institution which can hold power in our society. It's time to reign
in that power wherever it reigns.
The winners write history. Surviving losers also rewrite history ('Gone with the Wind").
Or, past lives are never written about at all. The problem is that western government has
swirled down the drain into incompetent delusion. Corporations rule. Plutocrats are in combat
over the spoils. Protests won't work until police and mercenaries realized that they aren't
being paid enough to die or to subjugate their own families.
Right now, the problem is two million Californians forced out of their homes or waiting
with no electricity for evacuation orders. The American government is simply incapable
rebuilding Puerto Rico or Northern California . Or handling global plagues such as
African Swine Fever that has already killed a quarter of the global pig population. Simply
put, climate change, overpopulation, and rising inequality assure that revolutions cannot be
orderly.
The 10% Technocrats like Elizabeth Warren will try to keep things running until they can't
anymore.
This is not a scandal, this is color revolution, a putsch supported by a large part of the
USA intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics, a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on the left, vulnerable to similar investigations . ..."
"There is no doubt that Donald Trump would like to exact political revenge on those behind
the Russia probe, and it is fair to be skeptical of his Department of Justice. But it would be
a mistake to reflexively dismiss the inquiry, which is led by US Attorney John Durham and
overseen by Attorney General William Barr. The public deserves an accounting of what
occurred.
And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics,
a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on
the left, vulnerable to similar investigations .
And even with this all-consuming investigation now over, we still do not have a firm
understanding of how it began." • A lonely voice of reason.
In addition to the fired Shokin's claim that President Poroshenko warned him not to
investigate Burisma because it was not in the Bidens' interest, the notes say, the prosecutor
also said he "was warned to stop" by the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt .
The State Department declined to explain this assertion about Pyatt, who was ambassador to
Ukraine from 2013 to 2016 and now is Ambassador to Greece. The Biden presidential campaign did
not respond to a request for comment.
Recounting Shokin's version of events, the notes say he "was called into Mr. Poroshenko's
office and told that the investigation into Burisma and the Managing Director where Hunter
Biden is on the board, has caused Joe Biden to hold up one billion dollars in U.S. aid to
Ukraine." Poroshenko later told Shokin that "he had to be fired as the aid to the Ukraine was
being withheld by Joe Biden," the Giuliani interview notes say.
Trump has claimed that Vice
President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin because he was investigating
his son's employer.
"I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really
unfair," the president said, referring to Shokin in his July 25 phone call with Ukraine's
president, Volodymyr Zelensky. That call triggered the current impeachment crisis after a CIA
whistleblower alleged that Trump had pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate Biden in
return for military aid.
A Politico
investigation in 2017 found that officials in Poroshenko's government helped Hillary
Clinton allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, notably Paul Manafort,
who before joining the Trump campaign was a political consultant for ousted Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych.
Poroshenko's administration insisted at the time that Ukraine stayed neutral in the
race.
Following a short artillery and air engagement with Syria over raids by exiled Palestinian
guerillas, Egypt mobilized against her nemesis in 1967. President Nasser sent six divisions to
the Sinai, removed the UN peacekeeping force, and closed the Straits of Tiran south of Israel.
Israel struck first, fearing annihilation.
As Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld states in
The Transformation of War , "for six glorious days war was Israel and Israel was war."
The result was a smashing victory for the Israelis
, who lost around 800 soldiers, as opposed to 20,000 for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Sinai
peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights were added to
Israel's territory.
Compare this short war with another conflict that played out in 2006. For 34 days, Israel
battled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in response to the Shia terrorist group's killing and
capturing of several Israeli soldiers in cross-border raids. Israel launched a massive air and
artillery campaign, followed by a ground invasion in late July. When the ceasefire was signed
on August 14, both sides claimed victory, but as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted in
The Israel Lobbyand U.S. Foreign
Policy , "it was clear to most independent experts" that "Hezbollah had come out ahead
in the fight." The IDF chief of staff resigned, and an Israeli government investigation rebuked
the planning and handling of the campaign, stating that the military had "pursued goals that
were not clear and could not be achieved."
Worse still, the air, artillery, and naval campaign killed an estimated 1,183 Lebanese (a
third of them children) and devastated the country's infrastructure. These actions drew strong
condemnation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for causing "destruction on a
catastrophic scale." During the last three days of the war, the IDF fired over one million
cluster bombs into southern Lebanon, "saturating the area." The leader of an IDF rocket unit called these actions
"insane and monstrous."
War can still be won by being nasty and short, as shown in the first Gulf War, but time is
not on the side of the powerful. Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped
adversary almost always works to the advantage of the weaker side. Van Creveld compares this
situation to an adult who "administers a prolonged, violent beating to a child in a public
place." Observers will sympathize with the child and intervene, regardless of its prior
behavior.
With the Palestinians, the position of weakness is even more extreme. Israel dominates the
lives of 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, controlling air, land, and sea
access, in a situation that's been compared to "living in a cage" by Swedish foreign minister
Jan Eliasson. Despite numerous American attempts to secure Palestinian statehood and resolve
the conflict, the present situation seems worse than ever.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, has made it clear that Israel will be supported
through thick and thin. And the world has slowly but surely begun to take notice. The
BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), initially confined to college campuses and
Palestine, spilled into the national news when Democratic lawmakers Ilhan Omar and Rashida
Talib spearheaded a movement opposing bills aimed at criminalizing support of BDS. Some
Republicans, namely Senator Rand Paul, have opposed those bills, too, on
free speech grounds.
Recently, after the congresswomen were denied entry to Israel because of their support of
BDS, liberal Jewish journalist Peter Beinart defended their stance. Speaking on a CNN panel , he openly
sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, claiming their treatment by Israel constitutes
an "indefensible denial of basic human rights." Fellow panelists attempted to tie support for
Palestine to terrorism, a common tactic. But terrorism in that part of the world is nothing
new. Israel's defenders tend to forget or are ignorant of the fact that beginning in 1937, the
militant Zionist group Irgun
was responsible for placing bombs in buses and large crowds. One of its leaders during Israel's
war for independence, future prime minister Menachem Begin, was referred to by Prime Minister
Levi Eshkol simply as "the terrorist."
Modern Israel is no longer a weak state in danger of annihilation. The IDF is highly
motivated, trained, and funded. Emboldened by the financial and moral backing of the United
States and powerful lobbying groups, its treatment of Palestinians and other enemies has become
steadily more severe.
With recent
elections still contested , it remains to be seen whether these policies will continue. But
militarily, Israel's position is not tenable. You can win at the tactical level and rack up a
higher body count, but still lose the war. As frequent TAC contributor and military historian
William S. Lind notes, "in the 3,000 years that the story of David and Goliath has been told,
how many listeners have identified with Goliath?"
Israel will last as long as Wash. extorts money from our wages and supports it. Without the
US taxpayer, Israel wouldn't exist, both from its beginning to right now.
I think the lack of sympathy for Israel is not that it s the "Goliath" of this story but
that it is allowing settlers to live in the Occupied Territories.
So TAC is standing with the Palestinians now I see. Will it stand with those other Davids,
the intersectional allies of the BDS crowd too? namely Black Lives Matter, illegal Latino
migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and other assorted SJW types?
We are now in the end times; when it comes to Israel, all is in the hands of the Lord. As
the nations of the earth seek to attack and destroy Israel, they fall into ruin: look at
the entire Muslim world; look at what's happening to Europe. Most of all, look at the
astonishing rise and continued power of Donald Trump, the man who recognized Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. Pick your side and accept your fate accordingly.
"Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped adversary almost always
works to the advantage of the weaker side."
I don't always buy this. For me this only works if the powerful state is in the wrong.
And sadly, in this situation, Israel is deeply in the wrong.
But what does happen is over time, the weak becomes slowly stronger. Because they are
always studying their enemies. They are learning their tactics and how to defeat them. This
may take decades, but eventually the weak become the strong.
This is why it is always best to quickly offer a hand of friendship to a vanquished
enemy. If you don't, you'll eventually trade places.
"Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to
fighting corruption in Ukraine."
Then I must have missed most of the press coverage. First of all, most of the reporting
I've seen has been about Trump's attempts to convince Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump's
political opponents. The purpose of the aid package is a minor part of the story, but when it
has been discussed the reporting I've seen has indicated that the purpose of the aid package
that Trump held up was to help the Ukrainian military, not to fight corruption. So I can't
help wondering: where does James Bovard gets his news?
Then you've missed the point of this article. It's neither about the purpose of that aid.
It's about the aid as such leading to corruption. Do you really think Ukrainians will have
any troubles with selling those weapons out to some Middle Eastern or African caudillos? Or
maybe you think that a single penny from the sums obtained as a result of that sellout will
end up in the hands of their average citizens, and not in those of local mobsters and
oligarchs?
I believe I am reading this right: That providing foreign aid is always going to lead to
corruption. That what Trump did with Ukraine is basically drinking the same sauce others have
in the past and anyone else will do in the future. That then suggests that the solution is to
close the tap and end using foreign aid because, whatever the initial motive, it's too
corrupting an influence.
In that... honestly that's the best argument I've heard against foreign aid. Typically I
hear arguments from economic standpoints, which seemed silly when many of the targetted
examples are in the millions-pennies by US standards.
But putting it from a control standpoint: that leadership, present or future, will either
use foreign aid as a cover for corrupt means or take an active use of foreign aid as a wedge
against a foreign country.
I can hear a counterargument that "we are a superpower. We should be helping others." And
the response I hear in my head is "given our inability to truly help others without such
corruption and how we abuse the status, maybe we really do need to let that title go." It
means giving it up to Russia or China, but we aren't doing a good job holding them back, even
if we should be doing so.
Ignoring the world really isn't an option. But our priority should probably be to focus on
home as we can and better ourselves rather than ruining yourselves while ruining everyone who
brushes with us.
So yeah. I can see the idea behind pulling back from these foreign aid elements.
The "just don't tell the House impeachment hearings." did seem rather clickbaity. It
suggests this is an argument against the impeachment hearings as if their mistaken believe in
supporting foreign aid is a mark against the hearings themselves. The article itself doesn't
seem to go that route. "just don't tell congress" would've done far better. But that's a
nitpick combined with all of this impeachment discussion leaving me rather kneejerky.
Not only Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe, it's also the poorest on the
continent. It became such after all American aid and after all, much, much bigger IMF loans.
Which makes one kind of suggest that the known level of corruption there is only a tip of the
iceberg.
But, getting back home, I just love those "closed impeachment hearings". Paraphrasing the
famous quotation, why so closed? Afraid that, being it open, any half-literate first-year law
college student (not to mention Rudy and the DoJ) would tear the so-called "evidence"
asunder?
It became such after all American aid and after all, much, much bigger IMF loans
I feel like you're glossing over some other major events that have happened in the South
and East of the country which have contributed to the sluggish economic development and
hampered the corruption fight...
The open hearings will come, Alex. They're closed because those are the rules Republicans
abided by with the Benghazi hearings. However it's going to take a lot more than Rudy and the
DoJ to combat testimony from Trump-appointed ambassadors who've been plucked from retirement
to help with Ukraine and say that there was a quid pro quo.
So what's the point here, foreign aid to corrupt governments is standard American policy,
so Presidential corruption in distributing that aid is no big deal.
"The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end foreign aid."
This is a point that can and has been argued. I remember having just that debate in
relation to aid to Africia in the '80s.
However, the House is investigating Presidential coruption in the distribution of that aid
and that would seem to be a different matter.
If you think Trump cares about corruption in Ukraine, I have a Trump U course to sell
you.
Trump tried to extort a foreign leader to help him win an election, this is beyond dispute
to anyone who isn't ignoring the facts. He wanted the president of Ukraine to make a public
announcement that he was investigating Hunter Biden. Whether the investigation would turn up
anything was irrelevant, Trump knew an appearance of Biden corruption could work wonders for
him.
Oh yes... The purported presence of the "evidence" of the said "extortion" is precisely
why the House hearings are closed. And, of course, Trump's most vital necessity was kicking
the weakest of his opponents out of the race, so that Democrats could pick someone with
better chances, instead of the continuation of the DNC's idiotic course aimed at nominating
that one at all costs, which persists even now.
Just like the corrupt aid we have been giving to dictatorships since WW II ended. The
difference is the president in previous decades did not use the aid as a bribe to foreign
leaders to conduct nefarious investigations on US citizens. I can only imagine the columns
TAC would write if Obama called the Saudi Crown Prince in 2010 and told him that military aid
is contingent on information about their business dealings with the Bush family because Jeb
might run in 2012.
Then where's the evidence of that "bribe" having even happened? As of yet we have only a
clownery called "closed hearings" and the idea that Trump would be interested in getting rid
of the weakest of his possible opponents which defies the mere principles of logic.
Hogwash. Tell us how "Russian interference" has forced the Ukrainian junta to be as
corrupt, brutal and incompetent as it has been since it became a full-fledged US puppet?
A better use of our hard-earned tax dollars would be for the US government to put its own
house in order before addressing problems of "corruption" abroad.
Corruption is incidental to the political control that foreign aid provides to the US. In
other words, it's a feature and not a bug. The exception to this rule is Israel, where US
foreign aid is turned around to exert influence on American politicians. Again, a feature and
not a bug.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this situation to change.
Charitable (non-government) aid typically nurtures corruption, too
Arm's-length dealing is the cure and the preventive, and it's the only one.
I know - sounds cruel, doesn't it?
I usually do - just ask my children
U.S. Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt
Our 'democracy building' assistance to certain countries--including Ukraine--has produced kleptocracies, or
worse.
By
James Bovard
October 30, 2019
Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine.
Sasha
Maksymenko
/
cc
Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure
alcoholism. After closed House of Representatives impeachment hearings heard testimony on President Trump's role in
delaying U.S. aid to Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared: "
Numbers
don't lie
. It's even more clear now that President Trump is not the
anti-corruption crusader he claims to be."
Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to fighting corruption in Ukraine. But
that ignores foreign aid's toxic record and Ukraine's post-Soviet history.
A
2002 American Economic Review analysis
concluded that "increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption," and that
"corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States."
That was the year President George W. Bush launched a new foreign aid program, the
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Bush declared, "I
think it makes no sense to give aid
, money, to
countries that are corrupt." But the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of
the world's most corrupt regimes. By 2004, the State Department had codified what amounted to backtracking: "
The
MCA is an incentive-based supplement to other U.S. aid programs."
The Bush
team found excuses to give MCA aid to some of the world's most corrupt governments as well, including Georgia.
In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that America was "
leading
a global effort to combat corruption
." Obama's "aides said the United States
in the past has often seemed
to just throw money at problems
," the
Los Angeles Times
reported. But the reform
charade was exposed the following year when the Obama administration fiercely resisted congressional efforts to curb
wasteful aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption
tests "has
the potential to affect a staggering number
of
needy aid recipients."
The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of American tax dollars
into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was "one of the
most corrupt countries on earth
." And the
deluge of aid the Afghan government received only worsened the corruption. As John Sopko, the heroic Special Inspector
General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, "
We
need to understand how
US policies and practices unintentionally aided and
abetted corruption. We must recognize the danger of dealing with characters or networks of unsavory repute, tolerating
contracting abuses, accepting shoddy performance and delivering unsustainable projects."
The closed House impeachment hearings last week heard from acting U.S. ambassador to
the Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr., who testified that he "
had
authority over the bulk
of the U.S. effort to support Ukraine against the
Russian invasion and to help it defeat corruption." The
Washington Post
lauded Taylor as someone who "
spent
much of the 1990s telling
Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical
to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of
U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries."
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that
corruption surged in
Ukraine during the late 1990s
and remains at obscene levels (though recent
years have shown slight improvements). Taylor was ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, when corruption sharply
worsened despite
hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid
.
Ukraine is now ranked as the
120th
least
corrupt nation in the world
-- lower
than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients. What Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is to the NFL,
Taylor appears to be to the anti-corruption cause.
Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as
distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence. Rather than encouraging good governance practices, foreign aid is
more likely to produce kleptocracies, or governments of thieves. As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, "The
history of
U.S. assistance is littered
with tales of
corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects."
And both American politicians and bureaucrats are want to continue the aid gravy train, regardless of how foreign
regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.
If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would have become a rule of law paradise long ago. The country's new president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, may be sincere in his efforts to root out corruption. But it is an insult to both him and his nation
to pretend that Ukraine cannot clean up its act without help from Donald Trump. The surest way to reduce foreign
corruption is to end foreign aid.
If Democrats nominate Elizabeth Warren, there will a chorus of well-funded voices
declaring that her progressivism would destroy the economy. So it's not irrelevant to look at
how that sort of thinking is holding up abroad 1/
Pocketbook Woes Drive an Unlikely Comeback in Argentine Presidential Race
President Mauricio Macri rose to office with a promise that free markets would wrest
Argentina from its boom-and-bust cycle. But with the country in recession, voters may now
turn to an archrival.
5:55 AM - 27 Oct 2019
Macri was the business community's candidate; he was going to bring sound management in
after years of populism, and things were going to be great. But he screwed up the
macroeconomics, borrowing heavily in dollars (!), and presided over recession 2/
Chile has long, as Branko Milanovic says here, been the poster child for neoliberalism. I
remember very well when Bush & co tried to sell Chile's privatized pensions as a
replacement for Social Security. But rampant inequality is now causing mass unrest 3/
Obviously governments of both left and right can mess up. But the persistent belief that
big business and the wealthy know How Things Work and can run the economy best is completely
at odds with experience 4/
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... ,
a
Without the necessary due diligence in planning both the transition and the aftermath going
into the meme, then Medicare for All is a promise for some, a threat to many more, and a boat
anchor for the Democratic Party. It could be a great plan if adequately executed, but given
the haphazard approach to leaning on buzz words and memes instead of a explanatory framework,
then this plan will be an executioner's block next November, if not just Tuesday week. The
Democratic Party has screwed itself again unless just pure outrage and at Trump and
Republican politicians can rescue the Dembots from their own idiot angels.
"... The brother of the current Chilean president, scions of one of the richest families in Chile, became famous for introducing, as Minister of Labor and Social Security under Pinochet, a funded system of pensions where employees make compulsory contributions from their wages into one of several pension funds, and after retirement receive pensions based on investment performance of such funds. Old-age pensions thus became a part of roulette capitalism. But In the process, the pension funds, charging often exorbitant fees, and their managers became rich. ..."
"... José Piñera had tried to "sell" this model to Yeltsin's Russia and to George Bush's United States, but, despite the strong (and quite understandable) support of the financial communities in both countries, he failed. Nowadays, most Chilean pensioners receive $200-$300 per month in a country whose price level (according to International Comparison Project, a worldwide UN- and World Bank-led project to compare price levels around the world) is about 80% of that of the United States. ..."
"... the combined wealth of Chilean billionaires' (there were twelve of them) was equal to 25% of Chilean GDP. The next Latin American countries with highest wealth concentrations are Mexico and Peru where the wealth share of billionaires is about half (13 percent of GDP) of Chile's. But even better: Chile is the country where billionaires' share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world (if we exclude countries like Lebanon and Cyprus) where many foreign billionaires simply "park" their wealth for tax reasons. The wealth of Chile's billionaires, compared to their country's GDP, exceeds even that of Russians. [Graph] ..."
"... Such extraordinary inequality of wealth and income, combined with full marketization of many social services (water, electricity etc.), and pensions that depend on the vagaries of the stock market has long been "hidden" from foreign observers by Chile's success in raising its GDP per capita. ..."
"... if there Is no social justice and minimum of social cohesion, the effects of growth will dissolve in grief, demonstrations, and yes, in the shooting of people. ..."
Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace
It is not common for an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development county to
shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (Perhaps only Turkey, in
its unending wars against the Kurdish guerrilla, comes close to that level of violence.) This
is however what Chilean government, the poster child of neoliberalism and transition to
democracy, did last week in the beginning of protests that do not show the signs of subsiding
despite cosmetic reforms proposed by President Sebastian Piñera.
The fall from grace of Chile is symptomatic of worldwide trends that reveal the damages
causes by neoliberal policies over the past thirty years, from privatizations in Eastern
Europe and Russia to the global financial crisis to the Euro-related austerity. Chile was
held, not the least thanks to favorable press that it enjoyed, as a exemplar of success.
Harsh policies introduced after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, and the murderous
spree that ensued afterwards, have been softened by the transition to democracy but their
essential features were preserved. Chile indeed had a remarkably good record of growth, and
while in the 1960-70s it was in the middle of the Latin American league by GDP per capita, it
is now the richest Latin American country. It was of course helped too by high prices for its
main export commodity, copper, but the success in growth is incontestable. Chile was
"rewarded" by the membership in the OECD, a club of the rich nations, the first South
American country to accede to it.
Where the country failed is in its social policies which somewhat bizarrely were
considered by many to have been successful too. In the 1980s-90s, the World Bank hailed
Chilean "flexible" labor policies which consisted of breaking up the unions and imposing a
model of branch-level negotiations between employers and workers rather than allowing an
overall umbrella union organization to negotiate for all workers. It was even more bizarrely
used by the World Bank as a model of transparency and good governance, something that the
transition countries in Eastern Europe should have presumably copied from Chile. The
brother of the current Chilean president, scions of one of the richest families in Chile,
became famous for introducing, as Minister of Labor and Social Security under Pinochet, a
funded system of pensions where employees make compulsory contributions from their wages into
one of several pension funds, and after retirement receive pensions based on investment
performance of such funds. Old-age pensions thus became a part of roulette capitalism. But In
the process, the pension funds, charging often exorbitant fees, and their managers became
rich.
José Piñera had tried to "sell" this model to Yeltsin's Russia and to
George Bush's United States, but, despite the strong (and quite understandable) support of
the financial communities in both countries, he failed. Nowadays, most Chilean pensioners
receive $200-$300 per month in a country whose price level (according to International
Comparison Project, a worldwide UN- and World Bank-led project to compare price levels around
the world) is about 80% of that of the United States.
While Chile leads Latin America in GDP per capita, it also leads it terms of inequality.
In 2015, its level of income inequality was higher than in any other Latin American country
except for Colombia and Honduras. It exceeded even Brazil's proverbially high inequality. The
bottom 5% of the Chilean population have an income level that is about the same as that of
the bottom 5% in Mongolia. The top 2% enjoy the income level equivalent to that of the top 2%
in Germany. Dortmund and poor suburbs of Ulan Bataar were thus brought together.
Chilean income distribution is extremely unequal. But even more so is its wealth
distribution. There, Chile is an outlier even compared to the rest of Latin America.
According to the Forbes' 2014 data on world billionaires, the combined wealth of Chilean
billionaires' (there were twelve of them) was equal to 25% of Chilean GDP. The next Latin
American countries with highest wealth concentrations are Mexico and Peru where the wealth
share of billionaires is about half (13 percent of GDP) of Chile's. But even better: Chile is
the country where billionaires' share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world (if we
exclude countries like Lebanon and Cyprus) where many foreign billionaires simply "park"
their wealth for tax reasons. The wealth of Chile's billionaires, compared to their country's
GDP, exceeds even that of Russians.
[Graph]
Such extraordinary inequality of wealth and income, combined with full marketization of
many social services (water, electricity etc.), and pensions that depend on the vagaries of
the stock market has long been "hidden" from foreign observers by Chile's success in raising
its GDP per capita.
But the recent protests show that the latter is not enough. Growth is
indispensable for economic success and reduction in poverty. But it is not enough: if there
Is no social justice and minimum of social cohesion, the effects of growth will dissolve in
grief, demonstrations, and yes, in the shooting of people.
MOSCOW, October 26, 2019 – RIA Novosti – The Russian Ministry of Defense has
published satellite intelligence images , showing American oil smuggling from Syria.
Image 1: Situation in the Syrian Arab Republic as of October 26, 2019.
According to the ministry, the photos confirm that "Syrian oil, both before and after the
routing defeat of the Islamic State terrorists in land beyond the Euphrates river , under the
reliable protection by US military servicemen, oil was actively being extracted and then the
fuel trucks were massively being sent for processing outside of Syria."
Image 2: Daman oil gathering station, Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 42 km east of Deir
ez-Zor, August 23, 2019.
Here, in a picture of the Daman oil gathering station (42 kilometers east of the Deir-ez-Zor
province), taken on August 23, a large amount of trucks were spotted. "There were 90 automotive
vehicles, including 23 fuel trucks," the caption to the image said.
In addition, on September 5, there were 25 vehicles in the Al-Hasakah province, including 22
fuel trucks. Three days later, on September 8, in the vicinity of Der Ez-Zor, 36 more vehicles
were recorded (32 of them were fuel trucks). On the same day, 41 vehicles, including 34 fuel
trucks, were in the Mayadin onshore area.
Image 3: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Al-Hasakah province, 8 km west of Al-Shaddadi,
September 5, 2019.
As the official representative of the Defense Ministry Igor Konashenkov noted, the Americans
are extracting oil in Syria with the help of equipment, bypassing their own sanctions.
Igor Konashenkov:
"Under the protection of American military servicemen and employees of American PMCs, fuel
trucks from the oil fields of Eastern Syria are smuggling to other states. In the event of
any attack on such a caravan, special operations forces and US military aircraft are
immediately called in to protect it," he said.
According to Konashenkov, the US-controlled company Sadcab , established under the so-called
Autonomous Administration of Eastern Syria , is engaged in the export of oil, and the income of
smuggling goes to the personal accounts of US PMCs and special forces.
The Major General added that as of right now, a barrel of smuggled Syrian oil is valued at
$38, therefore the monthly revenue of US governmental agencies exceeds $30 million.
Image 4: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 10 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
"For such a continuous financial flow, free from control and taxes of the American
government, the leadership of the Pentagon and Langley will be ready to guard and defend oil
fields in Syria from the mythical 'hidden IS cells' endlessly," he said.
According to Konashenkov, Washington, by holding oil fields in eastern Syria, is engaged in
international state banditry.
Image 5: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 14 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
The reason for this activity, he believes, "lies far from the ideals of freedom proclaimed
by Washington and their slogans on the fight against terrorism."
Igor Konashenkov:
"Neither in international law, nor in American legislation itself – there is not and
cannot be a single legal task for the American troops to protect and defend the hydrocarbon
deposits of Syria from Syria itself and its own people, " the representative of the Defense
Ministry concluded.
A day earlier, the Pentagon's head, Mark Esper declared that the United States is studying
the situation in the Deir ez-Zor region and intends to strengthen its positions there in the
near future "to ensure the safety of oil fields."
The Ruskies are mad - Trump is stopping them from taking the oil, it belongs to the Kurds
for their revenue and if US wants to help them have it so what....US is staying to secure
those oilfields against ISIS taking it again!
If everyone listened to the President when he talks there wouldn't be any spin that anyone
could get away with.
The oil is on Kurdish land. This part of Syria is just a small sector of Kurdish territory
that has been stolen from them by dividing it between four "countries", each of which has
oil. This is why the territory was stolen and why the Kurds have become the world's best
fighters.
Putin brokered a deal to stop Turkey wiping the Kurds by having their fighting force
assimilate with the Syrian military and required Russian observers access to ensure the Turks
keep their word and not invade to wipe all the Kurd civilians in order to also take their
Syrian oil.
So the corrupt US generals get caught in the act. Their senators and reps on the payroll
are going to need some more of that fairy tale PR for POTUS to read to us at bedtime.
If we are to believe that this is to protect the oil fields then the oil revenue should be
going to Syria, even though the Kurds are on the land. Follow the money to find the truth
because there is no one you can trust on this stage.
MSM are simply not covering this story. Or the other story about the supposed gas attack
at Douma where evidence was adulterated and/or ignored completely under US pressure.
Expect the same from MH17.
WTF is going on with our leaders and corporate MSM....can no one in a leadership position
distinguish between lies and the truth? Or fantasy and reality? Where are the 'journalists'
who will stand up and tell the truth in MSM? They no longer exist.
18 wheel fuel trucks around here hold 10K gal. 50 truck loads 500K of un processed oil if
it's true? I though they just got there. but no telling who might steal under those
conditions.
That was August. this is now. The Russians must have really wanted that oil to finance
their occupation. Trump is preventing ISIS from using the oil as their piggy bank.
Wasn't Erdogan doing the same not too long ago? Shortly after Erdogan became close friends
with Putin. Does this mean Trump and Putin will become close friends as well? Or is this
simply a common practice between two people who undeservingly place relatives in government
positions? First Turkey hands over Al Baghdadi (he received medical treatment in Southern
Turkey in a private clinic owned by Erdogan's daughter guarded by MIT agents) so that they
can continue to commit genocide against Kurds in Turkey and Syria... and now the US is
stealing Syrian oil like how the Turks initially were doing. What a mess and a
disappointment. Hopefully Erdogan visits DC and unleashes his security guards beating any
person freely walking the streets while Trump smiles and describes him as a great leader.
Watch in coming weeks as the tanker convoys are proven to be rogue operations from an out
of control CIA / Cabal network. Trump removed the troops, and now Russia is shining a light
on it.
No coincidence another article on ZH brung attention to the Ukrainian wareehouse arsos..12
in 2 yrs..2017-2018 where stored munition were carted away...not to fight rebels n Donbass
but sold to Islamic groups in Syria..it was one of Bidens pals..one keeps the wars going
while the others steal siphon of resources..whatever isn't nailed down..I've never seen
anything like this..Democrats are truly CRIME INC
w/o that oil..Syria can never reconstruct itself..Usually in a War or ,after that is, the
victors help rebuild..what we see is pillaging and salting the earth and walk away.. as the
Romans did to enemies like Carthage..it will resemble Libya ...a shambles
So the smuggling is protected by air cover and special forces? Light up the fields using
some scud missiles. I'm sure Iran or Iraq have a few they could lend Syria. Can't sell it if
its burning.
Brits and Americans have pillaged, as any other empire, wherever they conquered.
After WW1 the 'Allies' robbed Germany of all foreign currency and its entire gold. This
triggering hyperinflation and mega crisis.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated' across
Europe.
In more recent history, the gold of Iraq, Ukraine and Libya was flown to Fort Knox.
All well documented.
This is common practice by empires. Just please stop pretending you were the good
guys , spreading freedom and democracy, because that's really a mockery and the
disgusting part of your invasions.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated'.
Exactly, that's where the US got its 8,000 tons of gold. Before WWII, the US had 2000 tons
of gold, after WWII it had 8,000 tons. Even today the US always steals the gold of the
countries it "liberates"
Help me understand why the USA would want to smuggle oil from Syria. When the USA has more
oil than all of the middleast.
Now I can see why Russia would blame the USA if smuggling Oil from Syria. Russia needs
that oil really bad. So to get the USA away from the Syrian oil fields they would of course
create a reason for the rest of the world that the USA is Dishonerable and must not be
trusted with Syrian oil. It is just too obvious to me, what Russia is trying to
accomplish.
Huh? The US is stealing the oil to deprive the Syrian people energy they need to rebuild
the country we destroyed. This is collective punishment of Syrians because they won't
overthrow Assad.
Collective punishment is a crime against humanity according to international law. There's
your impeachable offense. But don't worry, that kind of crime is ok with Shifty Schiff and
the rest of the Israel ***-kissers in Congress.
The US is NOT stealing the oil - the American Military have become PIRATES - no different
than Somali Red Sea Pirates or looters in Newark stealing diapers and TV's
This is nothing new. We've been stealing oil from dozens of countries for the past 75
years since WWII. The only difference is that Trump is being blatant about it which in a way
is weirdly refreshing.
"... Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic growth without end/crisis. ..."
"... I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent, rigid class system ..."
"... If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive. Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners. ..."
"... The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things (despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly likely to be manipulated like Trump. ..."
"... I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral values against socialism, no matter what voters say. ..."
The headline will become operative in December, if as expected, the Trump Administration
maintains its refusal to nominate new judges
to the WTO appellate panel . That will render the WTO unable to take on new cases, and
bring about an effective return to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which
preceded the WTO .
An interesting sidelight is that Brexit No-Dealers have been keen on the merits of trading
"on WTO terms", but those terms will probably be unenforceable by the time No Deal happens (if
it does).
likbez 10.27.19 at 11:22 pm
That's another manifestation of the ascendance of "national neoliberalism," which now is
displacing "classic neoliberalism."
Attempts to remove Trump via color revolution mechanisms (Russiagate, Ukrainegate) are
essentially connected with the desire of adherents of classic neoliberalism to return to the
old paradigm and kick the can down the road until the cliff. I think it is impossible because
the neoliberal elite lost popular support (aka support of deplorables) and now is hanging in
the air. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to
be very destructive.
That's why probably previous attempts to remove Trump were unsuccessful. And if corrupt
classic neoliberal Biden wins Neoliberal Dem Party nomination, the USA probably will get the
second term of Trump. Warren might have a chance as "Better Trump then Trump" although she
proved so far to be pretty inept politician, and like "original" Trump probably can be easily
coerced by the establishment, if she wins.
All this weeping and gnashing of teeth by "neoliberal Intelligentsia" does not change the
fact that neoliberalism entered the period of structural crisis demonstrated by "secular
stagnation," and, as such, its survival is far from certain. We probably can argue only about
how long it will take for the "national neoliberalism" to dismantle it and what shape or form
the new social order will take.
That does not mean that replacing the classic neoliberalism the new social order will be
better, or more just. Neoliberalism was actually two steps back in comparison with the New
Deal Capitalism that it replaced. It clearly was a social regress.
John, I am legitimate curious what you find "exactly right" in the comment above. Other than
the obvious bit in the last line about new deal vs neoliberalism, I would say it is
completely wrong, band presenting an amazingly distorted view of both the last few years and
recent history.
Neo-liberalism is not a unified thing. Right wing parties are not following the original
(the value of choice) paradigm of Milton Friedman that won the argument during the 1970s
inflation panic, but have implemented a deceitful bait and switch strategy, followed by
continually shifting the goalposts – claiming – it would of worked but we weren't
pure enough.
But parts of what Milton Friedman said (for instance the danger of bad micro-economic
design of welfare systems creating poverty traps, and the inherent problems of high tariff
rates) had a kernel of truth. (Unfortunately, Friedman's macro-economics was almost all wrong
and has done great damage.)
"In that context it felt free to override national governments on any issue that
might affect international trade, most notably environmental policies."
Not entirely sure about that. The one case where I was informed enough to really know
detail was the China and rare earths WTO case. China claimed that restrictions on exports of
separated but otherwise unprocessed rare earths were being made on environmental grounds.
Rare earth mining is a messy business, especially the way they do it.
Well, OK. And if such exports were being limited on environmental grounds then that would
be WTO compliant. Which is why the claim presumably.
It was gently or not pointed out that exports of things made from those same rare earths
were not limited in any sense. Therefore that environmental justification might not be quite
the real one. Possibly, it was an attempt to suck RE using industry into China by making rare
earths outside in short supply, but the availability for local processing being unrestricted?
Certainly, one customer of mine at the time seriously considered packing up the US factory
and moving it.
China lost the WTO case. Not because environmental reasons aren't a justification for
restrictions on trade but because no one believed that was the reason, rather than the
justification.
I don't know about other cases – shrimp, tuna – but there is at least the
possibility that it's the argument, not the environment, which wasn't sufficient
justification?
Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every political and
institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of the free market.
In the EU, East Asia, and North America, some of what has taken place is the
rationalization of bureaucratic practices and the weakening of archaic localisms. Some of
these developments have been positive.
In this respect, neoliberalism in the blanket sense used by Likbez and many others is like
what the the ancien regime was, a mix of regressive and progressive tendencies. In the
aftermath of the on-going upheaval, it is likely that it will be reassessed and some of its
features will be valued if they manage to persist.
I'm thinking of international trade agreements, transnational scientific organizations,
and confederations like the European Union.
steven t johnson 10.29.19 at 12:29 am
If I may venture to translate @1?
Right-wing populism like Orban, Salvini, the Brexiteers are sweeping the globe and this is
more of the same.
Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing
Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional
quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face
of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular
stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't
collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic
growth without end/crisis.
I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading
system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent,
rigid class system .
If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to
hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or
nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good"
mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive.
Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but
self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social
cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners.
The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is
probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be
shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years
of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will
probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things
(despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly
likely to be manipulated like Trump.
Again, despite the fury the old internationalism is collapsing under stagnation and
weeping about it is irrelevant. Without any real ideas, we can only react to events as
nationalist predatory capitals fight for their new world.
I'm not saying the new right wing populism is better. The New Deal/Great Society did more
for America than its political successors since Nixon et al. The years since 1968 I think
have been a regression and I see no reason–alas–that it can't get even worse.
I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way
likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem
being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral
values against socialism, no matter what voters say.
It is a particular mutation of the original concept similar to mutation of socialism into
national socialism, when domestic policies are mostly preserved (including rampant
deregulation) and supplemented by repressive measures (total surveillance) , but in foreign
policy "might make right" and unilateralism with the stress on strictly bilateral regulations
of trade (no WTO) somewhat modifies "Washington consensus". In other words, the foreign
financial oligarchy has a demoted status under the "national neoliberalism" regime, while the
national financial oligarchy and manufactures are elevated.
And the slogan of "financial oligarchy of all countries, unite" which is sine qua
non of classic neoliberalism is effectively dead and is replaced by protection racket of
the most political powerful players (look at Biden and Ukrainian oligarchs behavior here
;-)
> I think every sentence in that comment is either completely wrong or at least
debatable. And is likbez actually John Hewson, because that comment reads like one of John
Hewson's commentaries
> Most obviously, to define Warren and Trump as both being neoliberals drains the
term of any meaning
You are way too fast even for a political football forward ;-).
Warren capitalizes on the same discontent and the feeling of the crisis of neoliberalism
that allowed Trump to win. Yes, she is a much better candidate than Trump, and her policy
proposals are better (unless she is coerced by the Deep State like Trump in the first three
months of her Presidency).
Still, unlike Sanders in domestic policy and Tulsi in foreign policy, she is a neoliberal
reformist at heart and a neoliberal warmonger in foreign policy. Most of her policy proposals
are quite shallow, and are just a band-aid.
> Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every
political and institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of
the free market.
This is a typical stance of neoliberal MSM, a popular line of attack on critics of
neoliberalism.
Yes, of course, not everything political and institutional development of the last 40
years comes down to the worship of the "free market." But how can it be otherwise? Notions of
human agency, a complex interaction of politics and economics in human affairs, technological
progress since 1970th, etc., all play a role. But a historian needs to be able to somehow
integrate the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story.
And IMHO this story for the last several decades is the ascendance and now decline of
"classic neoliberalism" with its stress on the neoliberal globalization and opening of the
foreign markets for transnational corporations (often via direct or indirect (financial)
pressure, or subversive actions including color revolutions and military intervention) and
replacement of it by "national neoliberalism" -- domestic neoliberalism without (or with a
different type of) neoliberal globalization.
Defining features of national neoliberalism along with the rejection of neoliberal
globalization and, in particular, multiparty treaties like WTO is massive, overwhelming
propaganda including politicized witch hunts (via neoliberal MSM), total surveillance of
citizens by the national security state institutions (three-letter agencies which now
acquired a political role), as well as elements of classic nationalism built-in.
The dominant ideology of the last 30 years was definitely connected with "worshiping of
free markets," a secular religion that displaced alternative views and, for several decades
(say 1976 -2007), dominated the discourse. So worshiping (or pretense of worshiping) of "free
market" (as if such market exists, and is not a theological construct -- a deity of some
sort) is really defining feature here.
Read the transcript of Trump's announcement this morning. He explicitly says he is keeping
the oil, and might invite in Exxon to use it. Logistics are sketchy, because who will buy it?
The pipelines will go through Syrian controlled territory. But he also says that a deal might
be possible. It's ridiculous.
Revenue from Syria's oilfields is about a $million/day. That is a small fraction of what it
costs to maintain even one little US military base in Syria.
Try to hold tight to a sense of perspective, folks. Trump is a businessman. Not a very
good one, perhaps, but certainly not so stupid that he cannot see that as an incredibly bad
deal. This "keeping the oil" nonsense is empty posturing intended to appeal to shallow
thinkers who don't know the difference between Syria and Venezuela and who don't really care
what American foreign policy is so long as it is done with an arrogant swagger. Now that may
be the majority of the US population, but these kinds are not even going to remember the
tweet this time next week, much less even care.
"Keeping the oil" is not only tactically, strategically, and logistically
untenable, it is such a baldfaced violation of so many US and international laws, treaties,
and agreements that even America's fig leaf of last resort, Canada, would have to condemn it.
This is just childish posturing to throw the appearance of bravado on America's exit from the
theatre. People functioning at the level of many posters here need to stop taking it so
seriously.
Revenue from Syria's oilfields is about a $million/day. That is a small fraction of what it
costs to maintain even one little US military base in Syria.
Try to hold tight to a sense of perspective, folks.
Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 27 2019 18:18 utc | 45
The point of "keeping the oil" is not to profit from it, but to deny it to the Syrians.
That's what Bibi wants.
@ 53
"Keeping the oil" is also meant to send a political message that you-know-who is still in
charge here, a Carter Doctrine policy that has been in tatters recently.
On the Syrian oil, US apparently was raking in 30 million a month in an operation that was
small enough to be kept from the public. If they take over the oilfields publicly and boost
oil infrastructure, the monthly take will rise considerably.
The oil fields on the east bank of the Euphrates produced the bulk of Syrian oil. If
production there was only 50% of Syrian production, the figures in dollar terms would still
be high.
200,0000 BPD would be just over half Syria pre war oil production, so 200,000 X say $40
per barrel brings the take up to $8 million per day. Not bad when its money for nothing.
William Gruff
Trump has made no effort or even noises to pull out of Tanf. I think he wants to continue
holding the Syrian border where he can. Denying the oil to Syria is a plus for him and that
also has the bonus of partly paying the cost of stationing the US along that border.
Zionism, oil, getting returns on military expenditure seems to be Trump's foreign policy or
as foreign policy is termed in the US 'War Policy"
"Keeping the oil" is also meant to send a political message that you-know-who is still in
charge here, a Carter Doctrine policy that has been in tatters recently.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 27 2019 18:51 utc | 60
Sure, that's also true. The NeoCon warmongers only got convincing very late in the game,
when US Special Forces were already withdrawing from most of Rojava, and could not be
stopped, except for this massively mounted late defence of the oil-fields. As the NeoCons
were resisting from the beginning, what was it that changed Trump's mind? Bibi sounds like
the answer, but I'm open to others.
"So why did Trump state so emphatically that Russia and China love U.S. presence
there???"
Reverse psychology. If Trump can get that narrative to fly then the mindless Russophobic
and Sinophobic brainwash victims in the US will start screaming for the US to get out. After
all, jello-brained Americans believe they must do the opposite of whatever China and Russia
think is good. The USA certainly cannot do anything that China or Russia might approve of,
right? So if they want us to stay then we have to leave.
Russia loves the US stealing Syria's oil. Listen, Russia delivered a beat down to murican
regime change policy the likes of which the world has never seen before. It is epic
humiliation beyond all endurance! The Syrian state is saved and the prospects of a Libya just
a few hours from Russia's border are now gone! The US is scared shittless to attack Iran head
on, so the status quo is returning to this region faster than murica's tiny brain can
process. So what to do? Grab the oil! Be a thug and criminal! No more pretense, just sin
proudly like the evil turd you are! Lol! And Russia can point at that turd and condemn it on
the world stage for the whole world to see. No excuses...no sympathy. Of course that bravado
wont last long. When push comes to shove, murica will fold like the dodgy piece of toilet
paper it is and go home. Be patient and enjoy the Evil Empire's death agony a while
longer...make popcorn...
The Redirection, Mar 5, 2007
Is the Administration's new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
By Seymour M. Hersh
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in
effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has
cooperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are
intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has
also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of
these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant
vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. . . here
InsurgeIntel, May 22, 2015
Pentagon report predicted West's support for Islamist rebels would create ISIS
Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to 'isolate' Assad, rollback 'Shia
expansion'
by Nafeez Ahmed
The newly declassified DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency -- headed by General Flynn!] document
from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time
comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS.
Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and
their regional allies. . .
here
Some more history on how Russia's changed the US attitude toward Syria oil shipments to
foreign customers. Specifically, whereas until 2015 US air force pilots were not given
permission to fire on ISIS oil shipments, that policy changed when Russia entered the war.
In September 2015, the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament authorised
the Russian president to use armed forces in Syria.[9][10] Russia acknowledged that Russian
air and missile strikes targeted not only ISIL, but also rebel groups in the Army of Conquest
coalition like al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, and even FSA.
On 30 September 2015, Russia launched its first airstrikes against targets in Rastan,
Talbiseh, and Zafaraniya in Homs province of Syria. Moscow gave the United States a one-hour
advance notice of its operations. The Homs area is crucial to President Bashar al-Assad's
control of western Syria. -- wiki here
CBSNEWS, Nov 23, 2015
U.S. airstrikes against ISIS target oil tanker trucks
Two airstrikes, the most recent over the weekend, have destroyed almost 500 tanker trucks
ISIS uses to smuggle oil and sell it on the black market.
By one estimate, these attacks have destroyed roughly half the trucks ISIS uses to bring in
$1 million a day in revenues.
Until now, the U.S. has not gone after the tankers for fear of killing the civilian drivers.
. . here
That's the first time (and probably the last time) ever that the US military had any
consideration for civilian casualties. But they were ISIS employees so. . .cut 'em some
slack. Still, only half the trucks were destroyed at that time (more were destroyed much
later).
In her heart, Warren is more of Eisenhower (or Nixon, if you wish ) republican type then a
real fight against excesses of neoliberalism. that actually makes her chances to win 2020
elections much stronger and changes that she will bring radical chances much weaker.
First, as a general rule, politicians who propose meaningful change should get specific
enough about their idea so that voters can have a good look before they go to the polls. So
Warren is setting a good example on this front and likely raising the bar for other Democratic
party aspirants.
Second, I want to make sure I'm not falling prey to the cognitive bias called the halo
effect, which is a tendency to see people as all good or all bad. So I want to make sure my
reaction to the neoliberal frogs that sometimes hop out of Warren's mouth doesn't taint my
reading of her generally. For instance, her private equity plan is very strong, particularly
her sweeping ideas about how to make private equity firm principals liable when they bankrupt
companies. But as America's top bankruptcy scholar, the core of that plan falls in an area
where she has unparalleled expertise.
But generally, Warren's change programs have a frequent shortcoming: they do a great job of
assessing the challenge but then propose remedies that fall well short of remedying them.
As Matt Yglesias pointed out in January :
If Two-Income Trap were released today, I'd say it suffers from a striking mismatch
between the scale of the problem it identifies and the relatively modest solutions it
proposes. Tougher regulation of consumer lending would be welcome but obviously would not
fundamentally address the underlying stagnation of income.
On top of that, Warren's "I have a plan" mantra sounds an awful lot like a dog whistle to
Clinton voters. And even though I've only given a good look at two of her plans so far ex her
private equity plan, there's a lot not to like in both of them. We
covered her wealth plan earlier, and didn't treat Sanders' at the same time because hers
was sucking up all the media attention even though Sanders had proposed a wealth tax years
before she did. That was a mistake. Sanders' wealth tax plan is better than Warren's.
Even though Sanders plan has the same fundamental problem, that of not recognizing how the
IRS in recent decades has never won a large estate tax case where you have the same valuation
issues with a wealth tax, Sanders proposes a more aggressive beef up of the IRS than Warren
does, so he may have a sense of the severity of the enforcement problem and also provides for
some legal fallbacks regarding valuation. He also realistically does not depict his tax as a
global wealth tax, since there's no way to get the needed information or cooperation on foreign
holdings that aren't in bank or brokerage firms.
But even more important, both Warren and Sanders wealth tax schemes rely on the work of
economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in devising their taxes and estimating how much
they'd yield. The structure of Sanders' tax hews to their recommendations as to how to maximize
revenues and cut into inequality. Warren's does not. So contrary to popular perceptions,
Sanders' wealth tax plan
should get higher wonk points than Warren's .
So on to the next Warren plan.
Warren's Excess Lobbying Tax
Warren presented her Excessive Lobbying Tax
. The problem it is meant to solve is not just lobbying as currently defined, which is the
petitioning of member of Congress to influence legislation. Warren is out to tackle not just
that but also what she depicts as undue corporate influence in the regulatory process:
But corporate lobbyists don't just swarm Congress. They also target our federal
departments like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau .
Regulatory agencies are only empowered to implement public interest rules under authority
granted by legislation already passed by Congress. So how is it that lobbyists are able to
kill, weaken, or delay so many important efforts to implement the law?
Often they accomplish this goal by launching an all out assault on the process of writing
new rules -- informally meeting with federal agencies to push for favorable treatment,
burying those agencies in detailed industry comments during the notice-and-comment rulemaking
process, and pressuring members of Congress to join their efforts to lobby against the
rule.
If the rule moves forward anyway, they'll argue to an obscure federal agency tasked with
weighing the costs and benefits of agency rules that the rules are too costly, and if the
regulation somehow survives this onslaught, they'll hire fancy lawyers to challenge it in
court.
Before we get to Warren's remedies, there are some odd things about the problem statement.
One is that she fails to acknowledge that regulatory rulemaking devises more specific policies
in order to implement legislation. That reflects the fact that legislation often isn't detailed
enough to provide a definitive guide to agencies. And the public is entitled to weigh in on
rulemaking. So what she is objecting to is that corporate interests are able to overwhelm the
comment process. Second is that there is a significant abuse that she fails to mention, that
some proposed rule changes, such as regarding net neutrality, where ordinary citizens weighed
in heavily, saw comments on the other side that were submitted by bots, overwhelming the
agency. The bot abuse is specific and important, and it's odd to see Warren leave it by the
wayside.
Warren's plan has three main prongs. First, she would make pretty much anyone who as part of
their employment seeks to influence Federal legislation or regulation register as a lobbyist.
They would be require to make public who they'd been lobbying and what information they
provided (an interesting question here as to what gets reported from in person
discussions).
Second, she would require that "every corporation and trade organization" with over $500,000
per year in lobbying expenditures is subject to an "excess lobbying tax". Spending of $500,000
to $1 million would be taxed at a 35% rate, over $1 million, at a 60% rate, and over $5
million, 75%.
Warren states that her tax would have raised $10 billion in the last ten years and she
intends to use that for the third major leg of her programs, which is various anti-lobbyist
initiatives. She plans to spend the revenues on
A "Lobbying Defense Trust Fund" to bolster "Congressional independence from lobbyists" by
providing more money to Congressional support bodies like the CBO
Extra funding to agencies that are on the receiving of lobbying. When an entity in the
$500,000 or higher lobbying spending bracket, the agency gets a special allocation "to help
it fight back".
An Office of the Public Advocate to help ordinary citizens get better representation in
the lobbying process
She also asserts that her plan will also "shut the revolving door between government and K
Street" but she offers no mechanism to provide for that. So that is a handwave.
The Conceptual Flaws in Warren's Approach
It's hard to know how much of this Warren believes and how much of this was dreamed up by
her staffers (the document is signed "Team Warren).
Taxation is the wrong approach . Even though Warren discusses how much money her tax would
raise, her strident disapproval of lobbying and the punitive tax levels make clear that the
purpose of the tax is to discourage lobbying. But if lobbying is as bad as Warren believes it
is, she should instead be prohibiting abuses, like comments by bots. In the 1970s, economist
Martin Weitzman came up with an approach to determine when taxation was the right way to
discourage problematic behavior, as opposed to barring it.
A summary from the Bank of England's celebrated economist Andrew Haldane :
In making these choices, economists have often drawn on Martin Weitzman's classic public
goods framework from the early 1970s. Under this framework, the optimal amount of pollution
control is found by equating the marginal social benefits of pollution-control and the
marginal private costs of this control. With no uncertainty about either costs or benefits, a
policymaker would be indifferent between taxation and restrictions when striking this
cost/benefit balance.
In the real world, there is considerable uncertainty about both costs and benefits.
Weitzman's framework tells us how to choose between pollution-control instruments in this
setting. If the marginal social benefits foregone of the wrong choice are large, relative to
the private costs incurred, then quantitative restrictions are optimal. Why? Because fixing
quantities to achieve pollution control, while letting prices vary, does not have large
private costs. When the marginal social benefit curve is steeper than the marginal private
cost curve, restrictions dominate.
The results flip when the marginal cost/benefit trade-offs are reversed. If the private
costs of the wrong choice are high, relative to the social benefits foregone, fixing these
costs through taxation is likely to deliver the better welfare outcome. When the marginal
social benefit curve is flatter than the marginal private cost curve, taxation dominates. So
the choice of taxation versus prohibition in controlling pollution is ultimately an empirical
issue.
Moreover, the tax would hit all lobbyists. Who do you think has the better odds of raising
more money to offset the tax and carrying on as before: Public Citizen or the Chamber of
Commerce?
By contrast, one idea of ours that could have helpful chilling effects would be to go much
much further than merely requiring all lobbyists, broadly defined, to register and also require
them to provide reports on what government officials they contacted/met with and what
information they provided them.
We'd also make these lobbyists subject to FOIA and provide stringent standards that apply
only to lobbyists, such as:
Set strict and tight time limits for responses (California requires that an initial
determination be made in 10 days, for instance)
Require judges to award legal fees and costs to parties who successfully sue over FOIAs
where the records were withheld. Provide for awards in cases where the defendant coughs up
records as the result of a suit being filed. Set punitive damages for abuses (such as
excessive delay, bad faith responses). Strictly limit invocation of attorney/client privilege
to demonstrable litigation risks
Letting journalists and members of the public root around in the discussion between various
think tanks and their business allies would regularly unearth material that would be
embarrassing to the parties involved. It would go a long way toward denting the perceived
legitimacy of lobbying, which over time would strengthen the immune systems of the
recipients.
Warren assumes that most people in Congress and at regulators are anti-corporate but are
overwhelmed by lobbyists. First, the piece presents a Manichean world view of evil greedy
corporate interests versus noble underrepresented little people. And while this is very often
true, it's not as absolute as Warren suggests. The companies are often have conflicting
interests, which can allow for public-minded groups to ally with the corporate types who are on
their side on particular matters.
A second part of the Manichean take is the notion that the agencies aren't on board with the
corporate perspective. Unfortunately, reality is vastly more complicated. For instance, banking
regulators are concerned overall with the safety and soundness of the institutions they
oversee. They aren't in the business of consumer advocacy or consumer protection save as
required by legislation. The concern with safety and soundness perversely means that they want
the institutions they oversee to be profitable so as to help assure capital adequacy and to
attract "talent" to make sure the place is run adequately. (We've stated repeatedly we disagree
with this notion; banks are so heavily subsidized that they should not be seen as private
businesses and should be regulated as utilities). For instance, in the late 1980s, McKinsey was
heavily touting the idea of a coming bank profit squeeze. McKinsey partner Lowell Bryan in his
1992 book Bankrupt spoke with pride at how his message was being received, and in particular,
that regulators were embracing deregulation as a way to bolster bank incomes.
Another complicating factor is that in certain key posts, industry expertise and therefore
an insider status is seen as key to performing the job. For instance, it's accepted that the
Treasury Secretary should come from Wall Street so he can talk to Mr. Market. Of all people, GW
Bush defied that practice, appointing corporate CEOs as Treasury Secretary. The position wound
up being a revolving door in his Administration as his appointees flamed out. Finding a modern
Joe Kennedy, someone who knows sharp industry practices and decides to go against incumbents,
is a tall order.
Similarly, agencies have career staffers and political appointees at a senior level. That
included critical roles like the head of enforcement at the SEC. If Republicans or
pro-corporate Democrats control the Administration and the Senate, business-friendly appointees
will go into these critical posts. The optics may be better with the Democrats, but the outcome
isn't that much different. As Lambert likes to say, "Republicans tell you they will knife you
in the face. Democrats tell you they are so much nicer, they only want one kidney. What they
don't tell you is next year they are coming for your other kidney."
So Warren is also implicitly selling the idea of Team Dem as anti-corporate vigilantes, a
fact not in evidence.
And speaking of kidneys a letter from a departing SEC career employee and Goldman
whistleblower, James Kidney, shows how even staffers who want to do the right thing have their
perspective warped over time.
As we said about his missive, which you can read in full :
Two things struck me about Jim Kidney's article below. One is that he still wants to think
well of his former SEC colleagues
Number two, and related, are the class assumptions at work. The SEC does not want to see
securities professionals at anything other than bucket shops as bad people. At SEC
conferences, agency officials are virtually apologetic and regularly say, "We know you are
honest people who want to do the right thing." Please tell me where else in law enforcement
is that the underlying belief.
So it also seems unlikely that there is a cadre of vigorous regulators just waiting to be
unshackled by the likes of Warren and her anti-lobbyist funding. The way institutions change is
by changing the leadership and enough of the worker bees to send the message that the old way
of doing things isn't on any more. That does not happen quickly. And absent a system breakdown
like the Great Depression, staff incumbents know that talks of new sheriffs in town may not
last beyond the next election cycle.
And the experience of Warren's hand picks at her own pet agency shows that they were all too
willing to let corporations set the agenda. Recall that Warren recommended that Richard
Cordray, head of the CFPB when it became clear she would not get the job, and Raj Date, the
first deputy director of the CFPB, was also an ally of hers. From our 2012 post,
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Launches "Make Life Easier for Lobbyists" Tool :
There is more than a little bit of NewSpeak in this idea. "Streamlining regulations" is
generally right wing code for "eliminating/relaxing regulations." Admittedly, Elizabeth
Warren during her brief time as de facto head of the nascent CFPB, proposed and launched a
project to simplify mortgage disclosure forms to combine
two required forms into one and make them easier to understand .
However, this opening of the door by Cordray does not look as likely to produce such happy
outcomes. Maybe this is a means for the CFPB to force lobbyists to provide their input in a
format that makes it easier for CFPB to process. But I can't imagine that Cordray or Raj Date
would say to the American Bankers Association: "We are trying to create a level playing
field, so we won't meet with you. Put it in writing and we'll give it due consideration."
So if this portal is a supplemental channel, who exactly is it intended to serve? The
dropdown menu on the "Tell Us About Yourself" page tells us who it expects to comment: people
from organizations, specifically:
Financial services provider
Trade association
Government agency
Community organization
Other
In other words, it does not contemplate that consumers have the expertise or motivation to
provide input. Citizens are probably assumed to be represented via the CFPB itself or perhaps
also by consumer groups, but even then, they may have specific axes to grind (think the
AARP).
More generally, this is another example of attacking the problem at the wrong level. The
reason there is so much corruption in Washington is that the pay gap between what people can
make at senior levels at regulators versus what they can make in the private sector is so
enormous. And pay matters more than ever given the cost of housing, private schools, and
college. Singapore's approach was designed explicitly to prevent corruption in government: pay
top-level bureaucrats at the same level as top private sector professional (think law firm
partners) and have tough and independent internal audit. We are a long long way from embracing
any system like that, but it's important to recognize what the real issues are.
Lobbyist "tax" walks and quacks like an attack on free speech and the right to petition the
government . Even worse, she makes it easy to attack her program in court with this section and
similar observations in her piece:
In the first four months, the DOL received hundreds of comments on the proposed
[fiducairy] rule, including comments from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Morgan Stanley, Bank
of America, BlackRock, and other powerful financial interests. After a public hearing with
testimony from groups like Fidelity and J.P Morgan, the agency received over 100 more
comments -- including dozens from members of Congress, many of which were heavily slanted
toward industry talking points. Because the law requires agencies to respond to each concern
laid out in the public comments, when corporate interests flood agencies with comments, the
process often becomes so time-consuming and resource-intensive that it can kill or delay
final rules altogether -- and that's exactly what happened.
Warren is depicting the act of making public comments as an abuse. And her clear intent is
to reduce corporate input. This particular bit is very problematic: " .many of which were
heavily slanted toward industry talking points." Was she objecting to the fact that a lot of
the submissions were highly parallel, and therefore redundant, designed to choke the pipeline
or simply that they presented familiar pro-business tropes and were low value added? Not being
well crafted is not a basis for rejecting a public comment.
Warren sets herself for a legal challenge to her idea with this bit: "..if the regulation
somehow survives this onslaught, they'll hire fancy lawyers to challenge it in court," and she
later criticizes opponents of the fiduciary rule:
Today, the Department of Labor is led by Eugene Scalia, the very corporate lawyer and
ex-lobbyist who brought the lawsuit to kill off the proposal.
Was Warren missing in action in civics class when they presented the fact that Presidents
make appointments subject to the advice and consent of the Senate? And what would she do about
future Eugene Scalias? She is intimating that he shouldn't have been allowed to serve, but
that's the call of the Senate, not hers.
But more important, Warren makes it clear that she is so opposed to undue corporate
influence that she objects to judicial review. Help me. Philosophically, the US system allows
even the devil to have the benefit of law. But apparently not former law professor Elizabeth
Warren.
Again, the problem of ordinary people and pro-consumer organizations being outmatched in
court isn't going to be solved by treating use of the legal process as illegitimate. The idea
in her scheme that struck me as the most promising was the idea of an Office of the Public
Advocate. If I were in charge, I'd throw tons of money at it, including for litigation.
The Practical Flaws in Warren's Approach
Since this post is already long, we'll address these issues briefly. The IRS is a weak
agency that loses cases against corporate American all the time. A colleague recently confirmed
that take with an insider story on enforcement matters. The short version is that the IRS was
unable even to pursue issues only of moderate complexity. The problem isn't just expertise but
apparently also poor internal communication and coordination.
Tax avoidance is completely legal. If you don't think some of the targets of Warren's tax
would find ways to restructure their operations so as to greatly reduce their tax burdens, I
have a bridge I'd like to sell you. And they'd probably do it not so much to reduce taxes ("We
need more donations due to meanie Warren" would be a powerful fundraising cry and a lot of the
heavyweight groups and big corporations that lobby directly wouldn't miss a stride) as to avoid
funding her anti-lobbying initiatives.
And who would be least able to reorganize their lives to reduce the tax hit? The smaller
public advocates, natch.
* * *
It could be that I've simply hit upon two of Warren's weakest plans. But I have a sneaking
suspicion not. A contact who is an expert on political spending gave a big thumbs down to her
campaign reform proposal. The spectacle of Warren, whose Congressional staffers would regularly
turn out pointed, well-argued, very well supported requests for information from officials that
showed her to be operating way way above legislative norms, publishing plans that score high on
formatting and saber rattling and low on policy plumbing is a bad sign.
The most charitable interpretation is that Warren has weak people on this part of her
campaign and either doesn't know or doesn't care. But Warren historically has also show herself
to be an accomplished administrator. Is she more over her head than the press has figured
out?
Just an excellent critique. My view of Warren's plans was rather shallow and limited. I
could not find any flaws in your assessment. One might think that a senator would have a
better grasp of how DC works – or at least human nature.
Last week, Thierry Meyssan posted an excellent paper ( https://www.voltairenet.org/article208007.html),
in which he states that the recent events in Syria, in which 'a quarter of the country was
freed in a week' is not only a victory for Assad, but the defeat of the 'military strategy to
establish the supremacy of financial capitalism'. These events mark the overturning of the
world order that has been in place since the end of WWII.
What I find remarkable is how quickly the old order has been overturned. The old order was
initially a bi-polar world, which evolved, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into a
Uni-Polar World Order under the control of 'financial capitalism' (i.e. the 'Globalists',
also referred to as 'international financial elites', 'Anglo-Zionists', the 'Davos Crowd',
etc.). Arguably the Uni-Pole's power peaked in the early 2000s after the creation of the EU
and the eastern expansion of NATO. The first cracks in the Uni-Pole's hegemonic power
appeared in 2003 with the fiasco in Iraq, and in 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis. But
even as late as 2015, when Obama dismissed Russia's entry into Syria as nothing but Russia
stepping into a quagmire, the 'Globalists' could foresee no opposing force that would prevent
them from consolidating their Uni-Polar World Order into an enduring world-wide system of
'Global Governance' through a 'Rules-based International Order' under the 'Globalists'
control and enforced by the U.S. and NATO. But now, as Meyssan suggests, only four years
later, the Uni-Polar World Order has been toppled.
In its place a 'Multi-Polar World' order is emerging. I would like to suggest that the
outlines of this emerging order are as follows:
1. The dominant pole of this Multi-polar World is that led by the alliance of Russia and
China. Spanning Eurasia from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, this pole includes the
countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union, and
includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, and possibly, in the future, Turkey.
2. The second pole will be the remnants of the 'Globalist' empire, stripped, however, of
Europe (ex. U.K.) and any Asian representation, i.e. the U.S., U.K., Israel and likely
Canada.
3. A third group consists of countries that are currently either occupied militarily by
the U.S. or are part of NATO, but are either economically dependent on China or are in
economic competition with the U.S. This includes most of Europe, Japan, South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand, and the GCC countries (KSA, UAE, etc.). These countries cannot be
considered as poles by themselves, for while some of them may have the economic weight to be
considered a pole, such as Germany and Japan, they lack the geo-political weight. These
countries are likely to try to escape from their status as American ('Globalist') vassals and
become independent nations dealing equitably with all the poles of the new Multi-Polar World.
In my view, it is unlikely that the EU will survive the birth of this new-world order in its
current form. At best it is likely to revert back to a European free trade area, in which
each country will recapture its sovereignty and its own currency.
4. A fourth group consists of countries that, while not being a part of the Russia/China
pole will be under its wing, with Russia providing military, political and geo-political
support, and China providing economic support. This group includes countries which are
currently either under threat from the 'Globalists' (ie. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia,
etc.), are in turmoil due to exploitation by the 'Globalists' (ie. Chile, Argentina, Brazil,
etc.) or are outright failed states (most of Africa). Under the protection of Russia and
China, they will once again have a chance to overcome the anarchy of the past 20 or so years
and to return to peaceful development.
5. A fifth group consists of what will likely end up as secondary poles of the Multi-Polar
World. These are countries that today are both independent and have the geo-political and
economic weight to continue to function independently. This group includes the likes of India
and the ASEAN countries.
Uncertain is the time that it will take for this emerging order to stabilize. In my view,
this depends to a great extent on whether Trump survives impeachment and wins in 2020. If he
does then the emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order could be quite quick and painless, as
it is aligned with the policies that Trump has been espousing from the beginning of his
presidential campaign in 2015. To 'Make America Great Again' requires that the U.S. recover
its sovereignty and redevelop its industrial power. After all, a countries wealth, and thus
its power, is what it produces, and a country that doesn't produce as much as it consumes
will, in the end, consume itself. To redevelop its industrial power the U.S. needs to isolate
itself, as Trump is attempting to do behind a wall of tariff barriers and a devalued
currency. The Multi-Polar World Order will allow the U.S. the opportunity it needs isolate,
and then rebuild, itself. One must remember that it was the isolation of the U.S. in the 19th
and early 20th centuries that enabled the U.S. to become so powerful in the first place.
If, on the other hand, Trump is either overthrown by the 'Globalists' or defeated in 2020
then the emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order will be fraught with conflict. The
'Globalists' will fight it every step of the way, using all tools at their disposal, and
particularly the military muscle of the U.S. and NATO. For the 'Globalists' the Multi-Polar
World Order means the dispossession of their power and wealth. However, I believe that will
simply be a case of the losers continuing to fight long after the war has been lost. It is
only a question of how much time that it will take, and death and destruction that will
occur, before the U.S. and NATO are exhausted.
The emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order, once it stabilizes, is likely to usher in a
new era of peace and human development, similar to that which the world experienced in the
decades following WWII.
I agree with dh-mtl that we are entering a multi-polar world but that is happening because of
the deep corruption and divisions within the Washington Deep State. Still, the imperial
forces are formidable and should any faction get full control of them an expansion of current
wars is very possible. Trump is trying to fashion and has been trying to fashion a coalition
but he's failed and is failing. Media narratives, in the USA, always represent the interests
of the factions in power and they are all against Trump. This election is critical to world
history. Will we get a restoration with Biden (or Buttigieg) or Pence or will we start moving
in a new direction with Warren or Sanders? If the latter then the Deep State may move in a
new direction and begin to negotiated with Russia/China. If Trump then more chaos.
Sorry John, the quote that you posted was not taken from Thierry Meyssan, but is my
original work. I only quoted from Meyssan in the first paragraph.
The decades after WW2 may have spawned the CIA and their dirty tricks, but in spite of
this, the stand off between the U.S. and Russia, the bi-polar world, ensured a level of peace
and stability that lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union. These decades were undoubtedly
on of the greatest eras of human development that mankind has experienced.
I think those 5 categories are pretty much spot on. They also appear to be in sync with
Russia's envisioned relation with the main elements of those categories, as they develop in
practice. China's positioning looks more obscure though, but that must be due to lack of
information on my part more than anything else. What Russia initiates, China consolidates in
its broad strokes, but i am missing how coherent the details where the space of action
actually overlaps between the two.
The switch between the first and second category members from the previous status quo
appears to be settled along with tolerable levels of conflict. Circe won't like to hear it,
but in my opinion, we have Trump to thank for that, not because he intended for the switch,
but because he stresses on the US economical system the main effective capitalist
contradiction: productive vs financial capital. The tumultuous social and psychological state
of the US, attest to that contradiction despite emerging as very heated but apparently
distant themes (immigration, gender issues, the personality and conduct of the president,
etc..), Circe would have us believe it is all kabuki. I believe it is real, commonly
misanalysed but very very real.
What I have yet to see though is the multi-polar trend to take root. Obvious signs would
be Germany and Europe in general of course, but at best as a block of sovereigns, and for
that, Frankfurt will have to surrender before the remaining capitals. That may actually come
about as production takes the main stage, and this could be very sudden.
This is obvious positive thinking. An anecdote:
Once I super glued the tip of my finger. I had a box cutter nearby and I just thought - I
simply must use it as a razor blade to scrap the glue out, movements perpendicular to the
blade, and I'll be fine - whatever I do just don't move along the .... zaaaat - here's the
scar. The point being: as soon as the wrong thought crossed my mind, my hand simply ignored
the "don't do" part of the thinking and obeyed the rest.
"MSNBC names four renowned female journalists as moderators for November debate" [
NBC ]. "Moderating the Nov. 20 event, which is being co-hosted by MSNBC and The Washington
Post, will be Rachel Maddow, host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC; Andrea Mitchell, host
of "Andrea Mitchell Reports" on MSNBC and NBC News' chief foreign affairs correspondent;
Kristen Welker, NBC News' White House correspondent; and Ashley Parker, a White House reporter
for The Washington Post." • The count of journalists is off by at least one.
"... The below analysis is provided by " Ehsani " -- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical analysis blog, Syria Comment . ..."
"... An M1 Abrams tank at the Udairi Range Complex in Kuwait, via Army National Guard/Military Times. ..."
Here's
Why Trump's "Secure Syria's Oil" Plan Will Prove Practically Impossible
by
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/26/2019 - 23:30
0
SHARES
The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
" -- a Middle
East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes
for the influential geopolitical analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.
Much has been debated since President Trump tweeted that
"The U.S has secured the oil"
in Syria. Is this feasible? Does it make any sense? The below will
explain how and why
the answer is a resounding
NO
.
Al-Omar and Conoco fields are already secured by Kurdish-led SDF and U.S forces. Some of the oil
from these fields was being sold through third parties to Syria's government by giving it in crude
form and taking back half the quantity as refined product
(the government owns the
refineries).
Syria's government now has access to oil fields inside the 32km zone
(established
by the Turkish military incursion and subsequent withdrawal of Kurdish forces). Such fields can produce
up to 100K barrels a day and will already go a long way in terms of meeting the country's immediate
demand.
So the importance of accessing oil in SDF/U.S hands is not as pressing any longer.
SDF/U.S forces can of course decide to sell the oil to Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
but Syria's government now has control over the border area connecting Syria to KRG territory through
both Yaaroubia and Al-Mallkiya.
The Syrian government also now has control over supply of electricity. This was made possible by
taking control of the Tishreen and Furat dams.
Operating those fields needs electric power
supply and the state is now the provider.
Securing and operating these fields also entails paying salaries to those operating the fields.
International companies would be very reluctant to get involved without legal backing to operate
the fields.
"Securing the oil" therefore
can only mean preventing the Syrian state from accessing al-Omar/Conoco
only (not oil in the north)
. It's unlikely anything can be sold or transported.
And let's not forget "securing" this oil would need
ready air cover, and all for what?
SDF composition included Arab fighters and tribes who accepted Kurds in leadership since they had
American support and key cities in north. Many of those Arabs are already switching and joining the
Syrian Army.
"Securing" oil for benefit of the Kurds is likely to antagonize the Arab fighters
and tribes in the region.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more
than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
The psychopaths destroyed the last secular country in the ME. Same
with Lybia. Now all we get are extremists on all sides. Mossad doing
what it knows best, bringing chaos for the psychopaths.
By withdrawing from Northern Kurdistan and by making an exception
for the oil fields, Genius President Trump just told the world a number
of things:
To trust the U.S.A. as an ally is sheer stupidity
The "alternative media" theory that it is all about oil (and
possible gas) has been proven true
The U.S.A. is being ruled by a hobbyist who has no strategic
plans, replacing them with a "random walk" concept
Of course, the European allies (except Turkey) are still refusing
to learn from this experience. "Duck and cover until November 2020"
is their current tactics. Not sure if this is a good idea.
Turkey has learned to go their own ways, but I don't think it is
a good idea to create ever more enemies at one's borders. Greece,
Armenia, the Kurdish regions, Syria, Cyprus, not sure how their stance
is towards Iran. Reminds me of Germany before both World Wars. Won't
end well.
"America/The US", a label, is
actually just a location on a map and is not a reference to the actual
identities of those who start wars for profit.
Also it is hilarious to use that label as if an area of the planet
is or has attacked another area. Land can not attack itself, ever,
just as guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Trump is not claiming posession of oil in syria by leaving some
troops behind. Just as he did not declare war, nor start any EVER.
Every conflct on earth has it's roots with very specific individuals,
none of whom are even related to Trump.
Syria was a conflicting mess before he took office and he is dutifully
attempting to pull US soldiers out of a powder keg of nonsense he
wants no part of. Nor does any sane American want more conflict in
battles we can't afford, in countries we'll never even visit.
Like I said before, Trump can't just abruptly yank all our troops.
It's simply not that simple. And for those pretending he is doing
syria a disservice, I dare any one of you to go there yourselves and
see if you bunch of complete dipshits can do better. Who knows, maybe
you'll find the love of your life, ******* idiots.
First, the US invades Syria in violation of the Geneva Convention
on War making it an international criminal. Then it funds and equips
the most vile terrorists on the planet which leads to the killing
of thousands of innocent Syrians. And now it has decided to stay and
steal oil from Syria. The US is now the Evil American Empire owned
and run by crooks, gangsters and mass murderers. The Republic is dead
along with morality, justice and freedom.
Let's limit the culprits to: The Obama regime... and
not all the US. This is why these devils need to be brought
to trial and their wealth clawed out of their hiding places to
pay reparations to some of the victims.
The US has been an Evil American Empire for a long time, since
at least the Wilson administration, and Republican or Democrat...it
make little difference. World wars, the Fed, IRS, New Deal,
Korea, Vietnam, War OF Terror, assassinations, coups, sanctions,
Big Pharma, Seeds of Death and Big Agri...and the list goes
on and on. Please understand that America is not great and one
day all Americans will have to account for what their country
did in their name. If you believe in the Divine, then know that
their will be a reckoning.
The Obama regime was merely a continuation of the Chimpy Bush
regime, which was merely a continuation of the Clinton regime,
which was merely a continuation of the Pappy Bush regime, which
was merely a continuation... etc.
More chinks in the petrodollar armor will be the outcome of this. The credibility of murica is withering
away as every day passes. Iraqi pressure upon foreign troops there
to leave and/or drawdown further will also make this venture even
more difficult to manage.
The Kurds
may not be the smartest with regards to picking allies, but even they
may by now have learned that sticking to murica any longer will destroy
any semblance of hope for any autonomy status whatsoever once the
occupants have left. Likewise, the Sunni tribes around this area don't
want to become another Pariah group once things revert to normal.
Assad will eventually retake all his territory and
this is speeding up the process of eventual reconciliation in Syria.
They've spent far more on these wars than they've made back by stealing
other countries' resources. Trillions wasted in exchange for mere
billions in profit, to say nothing of the massive loss of life and
destruction incurred.
'The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
"
-- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst
who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical
analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.'
this quote was my first red flag.
so POTUS outsmarts Erdongan, takes out ISIS leader BAGHDADI along
with Erdongan MIT agents meeting with him. sorry, Ehsani, i think
your full of sh*t.
CIA & MOSSAD LLC
friends ISIS is just the excuse the american
an israeli terrorists used and use in order to keep trying to remove
Assad from the Government.
They just can't accept defeat and absolute failure. What's worse
than an american/israeli terrorist destroyed ego?!
All info needs verification. US sources are not trustworthy including
anyone where money originates from the usual fake info instigators/
players.
POTUS is so misled by the deep state MIC /CIA/ FBI et al and their
willing fake media cohorts that he agreed to give the White Helmets
more public money for more fake movies, as has been properly proven
and widely reported.
Either they have taken control of his mind with a chip insert or
they have got his balls to the knife.
The false flags have been discredited systematically and only a
very brainwashed or a very frightened person would believe anything
from the same source until after a thorough scourge is proven successfully
undertaken.
It is evident that even the last hope department has been got at
by the money-power.
If they can do 9/11 and get away with it, as they have, then they
will stop at nothing to remain entrenched.
90% of oil is traded in U.S. dollars if that stops living standards
will drop in the U.S.. We dropped from 97% look how bad its now
with 7% imagine going down to 50% life would be unlivable
here.
...meanwhile, both according to
russia today
as well as the
(otherwise lying rag of a newspaper)
guardian
, the russian
government seems to take a different position to the views expressed
here by "a middle east expert".
russian state media is reporting that US troops are in the process
of taking control of syrian oil fields in the deir el-zour region
and have described such actions as "banditry". the crux of the matter
is this: if the US were not actually illegally taking control of Syrian
oil, then Russia would not be reporting this. Contrary to western
mainstream media, Russian sources have repeatedly shown themselves
to be factual.
Shame the "withdrawl" from Syria is tainted with "securing the oil".
US doesnt need that oil at all. So Orwellian! Unless the Kurds somehow
get rights to it.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
Trump
is
securing
the
oil
not
for
the
Kurds
or
anything
in
the
middle
east-
his
doing
it
as
a response
to
the
media
backlash
he
received
when
he
announced
he's
abandoning
the
Kurds.
this is nonsense. thinking of the kurds and their interests is the absolutely last thing on trump`s mind: what counts for trump is how he is viewed by his voter base, no more, no less.
As is usually the case in theaters of combat, reality on the ground differs widely from the
sharp and clear lines that are presented to uninformed outside observers. Good case in point is
the state of Syrian oil. I am told by a well-informed source that the Syrian Democratic Forces
led by the Kurds have been selling much of the oil in northeast Syrian territory they
controlled until recently to the Syrian National Oil Company--the Assad government.
Some of that oil has also been sold to the Turks,,,
As we know, in the past, when ISIS controlled some of the Syrian oil, they were trucking it
across the border to Turkey and selling it to Erdogan's minions at a steep discount. The SDF
has continued doing that.
... Those tanker lines that Daesh was running into Turkey were done with the blessing of the
US. It was the resistance and in particular Russia that blew all that up.
What Harper meant to say is that some of the oil goes by tanker TRUCK from Turkey to Iran.
The oil thus trans-shipped to Iran is sold on as refined product to North Korea. The Turks
have been getting it at a very cheap prices from the SDF The Iranians add these products to
domestic production shipped east.
So, an oil-swap deal? Just like the currently defunct gas-swap deal that used to obtain
between Iran and Turkmenistan a few years back. Kurds and Turks acting like middlemen; how
very Middle-eastern!
The SDF/SNOC oil deal was negotiated by Russia 18 months ago. The SDF does NOT sell the oil
to the SNOC. Under the Russian deal, they get a share of the oil. The rest is turned over to
a broker from Raqqa who transports it in tanker trucks to Baniyas and Homs refineries.
If any oil is being diverted to Turkey, the it is the Raqqa brokers doing so. They are the
reportedly the brokers that used to deliver ISIS oil to Turkey via Erdogan's son-in-law.
... it was a deal negotiated by Russia with full agreement of Assad and his government and
the SNOC. My understanding is also that they did not choose the middleman from Raqqa.
Apparently he was the only one with tankers and with drivers who had no problem driving
through areas controlled by SDF, other areas controlled by SAA, and a few risky areas where
Daesh hijackings were a possibility.
"... Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him. ..."
"... Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure. ..."
"... These [neoliberal] politicians are the absolute dregs of our society. Human cesspits. They make the pirates of old look like kindergarten. And they mass murder to get the loot. ..."
"... Author does not mention approx 40 tons of gold transferred to US at night, covered lorries, darkened airfield. Coincidentally just a few hours before MH370 went missing ..."
"... Implementation of Western values and democracy cost Libia more than 134 ton of gold. Not including shares and valuable papers..How democracy working in Libya? ..."
"... Regarding the Ukraine, about 12 oligarch holding of 60% of the wealth.Today the Ukrainian oligarch have to pay USA democrats oligarch for protection. Whatever who is Ukraine President-they must to pay to USA.Ukraine today is like banana republic :Honduras or Guatemala with 60% of population living below poverty line. Just do the homework all of you readers. ..."
"... All Democrats and RINO's who are currently participating in the impeachment hoax in order to keep themselves from being indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for their parts in this corruption are automatically guilty of obstruction of justice, because that's exactly what they're doing. ..."
"... She was never supposed to lose. ..."
"... DNC types always show up at these poor countries to plunder them. Haiti: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Biden Family foundation. ..."
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one.
During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised
transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen,
and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and
Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural
gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay
pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for
heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and
very little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president
Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and
heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko
demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be
considered a partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai
Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's
appetites. He had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma
trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and
150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can't
be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son.
Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner,
paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko
was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could
not keep his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave
evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers
in connection with another case, Firtash case.
... ... ...
This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is
Amos J. Hochstein, a protege of former VP Joe Biden, who has served
in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine.
Together with an American citizen Andrew Favorov, the Deputy Director
of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by
Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go
via Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while the margin is collected
by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price
will be paid by the Ukrainians, while profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.
In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party.
A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta,
producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian
ore deposits.
One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with
Audrius Butkevicius, the former Minister of Defence (1996
to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now
is a member of the notorious Institute for Statecraft, a UK
deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations, subversion of the democratic process and promoting
Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war. In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed
to the Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of his troops from Lithuania.
Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In 1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000
USD from a senior executive of a troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings
concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested on receipt of the bribe, had been
sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.
In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated the feat in 2003 during the Rose
Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought
to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars' grant.
In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught fire; allegedly
thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind:
the previous one, equally huge, torched Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal
fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.
When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios
investigated the fires, he discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't destroyed
by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the
hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this
enormous operation was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the Minister of Defence
Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr Biden. (They say Mr Matios
was given $10 million for his silence).
The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably
just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians.
The Plundering Of Ukraine By Corrupt American Democrats. Whats new. The plundering of Syria - the Golan. Genie oil - Every
leading democrat name is on that Shareholder's list. Plundering of Serbia. Kosovo, its Gold mines and Minerals. Speciality per
Madeleine Albright . Wesley Clark and the Clintons. Sniff around where the Libyan gold went....not Fort Knox
These [neoliberal] politicians are the absolute dregs of our society. Human cesspits. They make the pirates of old look
like kindergarten. And they mass murder to get the loot.
Author does not mention approx 40 tons of gold transferred to US at night, covered lorries, darkened airfield. Coincidentally
just a few hours before MH370 went missing .
Implementation of Western values and democracy cost Libia more than 134 ton of gold. Not including shares and valuable
papers..How democracy working in Libya?
Fantastic article. Thanks for Israel. Thanks God, whatever you believe or not, majority of the World citizens are good and
friendly. Were did not nuke each other despite 1% of our corrupted elites. They hold about 90% of media, can give Hollywood Oscar
Price or Nobel Price to my lovely dog. If I paid them.
Regarding the Ukraine, about 12 oligarch holding of 60% of the wealth.Today
the Ukrainian oligarch have to pay USA democrats oligarch for protection. Whatever who is Ukraine President-they must to pay
to USA.Ukraine today is like banana republic :Honduras or Guatemala with 60% of population living below poverty line. Just do
the homework all of you readers.
You will NOT see once micron of this on the lame stream Media.....nor out of the mouths of Dems anywhere.....THIS info if true
should ensure the Dem corrupt Party is dissolved and a new one using pro-USA model is erected.
That we have seen little of this story in the Wall Street Journal nor Fox News shows just who controls those networks for sure.....This
story MUST become a part of the Congressional record....ASAP.....and ALL these folks no matter which Party MUST be held accountable
for lost US Funds...OUR TAX DOLLARS. Imagine what could be done with 3 BILLION for OUR Vets or the homeless......yet you see little
exposure of this corruption any where in US papers or even conservative outfits...????
All Democrats and RINO's who are currently participating in the impeachment hoax in order to keep themselves from being
indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for their parts in this corruption are automatically guilty of obstruction of justice, because
that's exactly what they're doing.
DNC types always show up at these poor countries to plunder them. Haiti: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Clinton Foundation.
Ukraine: Biden Family foundation.
Corrupt American Democrats AND Corrupt American Republicans . . . who gave Standing Ovations in Washington, District of Columbia,
United States Capitol for the Murders and Burning Humans Alive. United States President Trump never received 5 minute Standing
Ovations in Washington, District of Columbia, United States Capitol by the Capitalist Political Party composed of two factions:
Corrupt American Republicans AND Corrupt American Democrats.
So Shamir says that Tsarev is claiming Daniluk is the "whistleblower"? A foreigner can be a whistleblower?
And " Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was informed that there is an
order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev." ?? An order to arrest Daniluk in Washington, is that the claim? Why and who would
arrest him in Washington?
We would all be better off, including the Ukrainians, if they had stayed with Russia, where they were.
Warren (D)(1): "Warren cutting into Biden's lead in new SC 2020 Democratic poll" [
Post and Courier ]. "Biden's lead in South Carolina, which had hovered around 20 percentage
points since the summer, has shrunk Biden received 30 percent to Warren's 19 percent. Vermont
Sen. Bernie Sanders at 13 percent and California Sen. Kamala Harris at 11 percent are the only
two other candidates with double-digit results in South Carolina . The biggest gains in the
latest poll came from fifth- and sixth-place contenders, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg
and billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer." • Everybody loves a winner, but the gains
in the third tier show SC is still fluid (though perhaps not a firewall for Biden).
Yet another case where Warren's problem statement isn't commensurate with the proposed
solution .
Impeachment
"Republicans criticize House impeachment process -- while fully participating in probe" [
WaPo ]. "Then the questions begin to fly, largely from the expert staff hired by lawmakers
on the House Intelligence Committee and other panels participating in the probe. Each side gets
an equal amount of questions, as dictated by long-standing House rules guiding these
interviews. 'It starts one hour, one hour,' said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), explaining how the
questioning moves beyond one-hour blocks for each side. 'Then it goes 45, 45, 45, 45, with
breaks, occasionally, and breaks for lunch.' Meadows, one of Trump's staunchest allies, said
each side has been allowed an unlimited amount of questions they can ask of witnesses.' Those
participating in the closed-door depositions generally say that these interviews are very
professional and that both sides have operated under
rules that were approved in January ." • As I've said, I don't like the policy on
transcripts, and my litmus test for legitimacy is that there's no secret evidence at all. I
don't much like that Republicans can't subpeona witnesses, either.
"MSNBC names four renowned female journalists as moderators for November debate" [
NBC ]. "Moderating the Nov. 20 event, which is being co-hosted by MSNBC and The Washington
Post, will be Rachel Maddow, host of "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC; Andrea Mitchell, host
of "Andrea Mitchell Reports" on MSNBC and NBC News' chief foreign affairs correspondent;
Kristen Welker, NBC News' White House correspondent; and Ashley Parker, a White House reporter
for The Washington Post." • The count of journalists is off by at least one.
Money quote: “Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts."
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils. ..."
"... Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen. ..."
"... The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive. ..."
"... Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp. ..."
"... In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits. ..."
"... The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians. ..."
"... The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. ..."
"... If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh. ..."
A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"
Israel Shamir October
25, 2019 2,400 Words 6 Comments Reply
Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts.
The mysterious 'whistleblower' whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the
exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an
ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine's presidency, Oleg Tsarev.
Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a
leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after
President Yanukovych's flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had
to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life. During the failed attempt to secede, he was
elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in
Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters
in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.
Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem
politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his
partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US
proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer
of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine;
the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a
few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence
on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for
domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians
got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine
could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did.
Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very
little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to
European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high.
The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge
profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices,
President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said
that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its
founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the
company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in
Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney
General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin
immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar
per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax
code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours
to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds
won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for
this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different
sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed
Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also
could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut:
by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr
Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was
confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash
case.
What is Firtash Case?
The Democrats wanted to get another Ukrainian oligarch, Mr Firtash, to the US and make him
to confess that he illegally supported Trump's campaign for the sake of Russia. Firtash had
been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it
is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin's deposition to substantiate their claim. For
this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were
willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help
and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It
seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash's funds helped Trump to win elections, an
extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].
Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could
give or withhold?
It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for "support of democracy". First billion
dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for
Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the "acting President". The Ukrainian
constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, "the acting President" had no
right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed
by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, Biden countersigned the papers signed by
Turchynov and allocated money for Ukraine. And the money was stolen – by the Democrats
and their Ukrainian counterparts.
Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to
investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016;
one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the
money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment,
discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.
As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for
"Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers' money". Among the accused there are two
consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and
Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, and three US banks. The investigation caused the
USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. As Trump said, now the US does not give away
money and does not impose democracy.
The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk
assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a
substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without
documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by
the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.
Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of
Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have
many friends who are Sam's friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my
friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about
this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump
will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of
the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right
to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved.
Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once
the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent
the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally
allied with Clinton camp.
And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats' influence?
If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of
this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a
whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this
whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was
present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky's side. This man was (perhaps)
a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking
official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk . He is also the man
the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at
the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer's best
dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally,
and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all.
Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was
informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the
hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and
concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations
with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not
admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president's
administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan , who allegedly framed
Daniluk.)
This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is Amos J. Hochstein , a protege of former
VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of
State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen
Andrew Favorov
, the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into
Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine
with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via
Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while
the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from
the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while
profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.
In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the
Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of
Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian
titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq
war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits.
One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius , the former
Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet
Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for
Statecraft , a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations,
subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war.
In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed to the
Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of
his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In
1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a
troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings
concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested
on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such
qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.
In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated
the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers
killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who
called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars'
grant.
In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught
fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by
fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched
Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal
fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.
When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he
discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't
destroyed by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the
Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev
to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation
was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the
Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr
Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).
The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep
State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and
politicians.
The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're
bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured
incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal
murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein
himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's family only makes me more certain that they will get
away with this heist like they've done with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.
If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same
grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty
hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine
Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War
childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.
Who will hold then responsible? The country appears to have been entirely taken over by
crookish spooks and politicians.
The US is now confirmed as a cleptocracy.
Ukraine is corrupted by outsiders (those who are not Ukrainian/Russian). In past centuries
there was a simple but effective answer to foreigners corrupting their country. The Cossacks
would sharpen up their sabres. saddle up their horses and have a slaughter. It was effective
then and would be effective today. Get rid of those who are not Slavic.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defence which reveals the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND
TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A
DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS
IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN
REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was
circulated widely among various government agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS,
NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the
group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and
some of its coalition allies had actually facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria –
as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also that ISIS
members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency
at facilities in Jordan in 2012.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters
trained in Jordan became members of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan,
according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of
covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in
Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in
Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria
were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a
training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern
desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in
Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it
was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but
the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on
use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three
months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps
in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding
Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on
the German magazine's report. The French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense
ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
The USA is a real leader in technology and arm production. This is the country that created
PC, Internet and smartphones, which changed the world. So technical supremacy paves the way to
imperial behaviour.
CIA is one of the most powerful tools of the empire, the force that is instrumental in
peeking the USA on globalist path now (looks at Russiagate) .
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with
its direct and indirect extensions and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and
political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies and plans, one
after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability
to control the progress of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader
international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps to expose the
American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism,
the characteristics of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and
international stock markets, and by the confusion and powerlessness of the American economy.
This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell
the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic
order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its
hands, this project has witnessed great development of the means of control and unprecedented
subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments in
science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an
economic political plan that views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws
of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic
of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right
to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western, and especially
American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has
become a strategy of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow
discord, to destroy identities, and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic,
and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase, when it was transformed
into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest
manifestation of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to
Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The
Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all
levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would emerge as the most
hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples
politically, economically, and culturally, and to plunder their resources.
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters, both Syrian and foreign, were covertly evacuated by US,
UK and Kurdish forces from the besieged city of Raqqa last month and freed to "spread out far
and wide across Syria and beyond".
Although reports on the convoy surfaced at the time, BBC journalists Quentin Sommerville
and Riam Dalati have revealed the details in their documentary Raqqa's Dirty Secret.
Their investigation describes how the convoy carrying 250 fighters, 3,500 family members,
and lorry loads of arms and possessions, was arranged for October 12th by local officials in
meetings attended by a western officer.
During a visit to Syria in mid-October, The Irish Times was told not only about the
evacuation but also that senior Islamic State commanders and their families, 45 people in
all, had been airlifted out of Raqqa by a US helicopter and flown to the Kurdish region in
northern Iraq.
Fighters escaping Raqqa were said to have been given passage across the desert to join
comrades battling the Syrian army and its allies in Deir al-Zor.
Among the people the BBC team interviewed for the exposé were drivers paid by the
Islamic State to drive the buses and trucks carrying the evacuees. According to driver Abu
Fawzi, men, women and children wore suicide vests and the trucks had been booby-trapped in
case "something went wrong".
The convoy contained 50 trucks, 13 buses, and more than 100 of the fighters' own vehicles.
Although it had been agreed they would take only personal weapons, they filled 10 trucks with
arms and ammunition.
Three-day convoy
It had also been stipulated that no foreigners would leave, but drivers told the BBC that
French, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Pakistani, Yemeni, Saudi, Chinese, Tunisian and Egyptians had
joined the exodus. The only restriction observed was a ban against flags and banners.
Whenever it passed through a village or hamlet, fighters warned frightened bystanders they
would return, a villager called Muhanad told the BBC, "running a finger across their
throats".
Two Humvees led the convoy into the desert where the going was rough. Coalition aircraft
and drones hovered above, dropping flares after dark to light the way. When the motorcade
reached Islamic State-held territory, fighters and civilians departed with their arms and
possessions and drivers returned home.
The BBC investigation compelled Col Ryan Dillon, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve,
to admit to the deal. He told the team: "We didn't want anyone to leave. But this goes to the
heart of our strategy 'by, with and through' local leaders on the ground.
His statement on foreign fighters contradicted information given to the BBC by drivers and
people along the route as well as a statement about strategy made by US defence secretary
James Mattis in May.
@wendy
davis that takes them out. However, for the oligarchs and right wing politicians of
those countries, they pay off. Lots of income from corruption, privatization, etc.
they backfire, indeed. but just now in the global IMF austerity resets, the citizenries
are raising such a ruckus against them that some oligarchical leaders are having to rescind
the 'austeries' put on them. time will tell how it plays out even for ecuador, but for now
the indigenous seem to be winning. wish i had a link at hand.
but this is the brilliant bruce cockburn's ode to the IMF ; ):
"... All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world. ..."
"... That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security." ..."
"... The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap. ..."
"... There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land. ..."
The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.
Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump's actions in Syria have left a "power vacuum," one
that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have "influence" in the region. "Allies" will no longer be
able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump's actions have threatened "national security." It is now possible that
ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.
This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.
Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of
it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will
go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers,
or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.
Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will
continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that's not going to result in a conquest of
the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends
up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.
It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United
States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or
that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or
that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.
America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters.
That's not to say that bad things didn't happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships.
Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United
States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.
All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire,
pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.
That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners,"
and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security."
That's when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign
wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign
military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying
people in countries all over the world.
The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans.
That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and
dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck
to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.
The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That's
what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about -- to supposedly
protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom
and peace, both here and abroad.
There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial
complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism.
A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist
foreign policy to our land.
"... Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit. ..."
"... At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown. ..."
"... For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria. ..."
"... This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics. ..."
"... During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy. ..."
"... The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world. ..."
"... Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. ..."
"... Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc ..."
"... Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds? ..."
"... Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks. ..."
"... It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it. ..."
"... Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria. ..."
"... He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress. ..."
"... The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/ ..."
"... It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change. ..."
"... Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests. ..."
"... Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist. ..."
"... IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause ..."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
"... "This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth. ..."
"... On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/ ..."
"... TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them. ..."
"... ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously. ..."
"... That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds ..."
"... the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous. ..."
"... we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power. ..."
"... He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers. ..."
"Joltin" Jack Keane, General (ret.), Fox Business Senior Strategery Analyst, Chairman of the
Board of the Kagan run neocon "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) and Graduate
Extraordinaire of Fordham University, was on with Lou Dobbs last night. Dobbs appears to have
developed a deep suspicion of this paladin. He stood up to Keane remarkably well. This was
refreshing in light of the fawning deference paid to Keane by all the rest of the Fox crew.
In the course of this dialogue Keane let slip the slightly disguised truth that he and the
other warmongers want to keep something like 200 US soldiers and airmen in Syria east of the
Euphrates so that they can keep Iran or any other "Iranian proxy forces" from crossing the
Euphrates from SAG controlled territory to take control of Syrian sovereign territory and the
oil and gas deposits that are rightly the property of the Syrian people and their government
owned oil company. The map above shows how many of these resources are east of the Euphrates.
Pilgrims! It is not a lot of oil and gas judged by global needs and markets, but to Syria and
its prospects for reconstruction it is a hell of a lot!
Keane was clear that what he means by "Iranian proxy forces" is the Syrian Arab Army, the
national army of that country. If they dare cross the river, to rest in the shade of their own
palm trees, then in his opinion the air forces of FUKUS should attack them and any 3rd party
air forces (Russia) who support them
This morning, on said Fox Business News with Charles Payne, Keane was even clearer and
stated specifically that if "Syria" tries to cross the river they must be fought.
IMO he and Lindsey Graham are raving lunatics brainwashed for years with the Iran obsession
and they are a danger to us all. pl
If only General Keane was as willing to defend America and America's oil on the Texas-Mexico
border. Or hasn't anyone noticed that Mexico just a lost a battle with the Sinaloa drug
cartel?
I view them as selling their Soul for a dollar. Keane comes across as dense enough to believe
his bile but Graham comes across as an opportunist without any real ideology except power.
Its probably one step at a time for the Syrians, although the sudden move over the past
couple of weeks must have been a bit of a God given opportunity for them.
Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart.
After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I
can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their
exit.
As I posted in the other thread, the Syrian Government is the only real customer for their
oil and the Kurds already have a profit share agreement in place, so the US, if they allow
any oil out, will effectively be protecting the fields on behalf of Assad. Surely not what
Congress wants?
At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a
steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is
unknown.
I think this might be President Putin's next problem to solve. As far as I know, there is no
legal reason for us to be there, not humanitarian, not strategic not even tactical. We simply
are playing dog-in-the-manger.
My guess is that we will receive an offer to good to refuse from Putin.
For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny
relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the
SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore
social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to
the policy of FUKUSing Syria.
Why is the Champs Elise' Regime still committed to putting the F in UKUS?
(I can understand why UKUS would want to keep France involved. Without France, certain nasty
people might re-brand UKUS as USUK. And that would be very not nice.)
Because France wants to be on the good side of the United States, and as you indicate, the
United States is in Syria to turn that country into a failed state and for no other reason.
A good antidote for Joltin' Jack Keane's madness would be for Lou Dobbs and other mainstream
media (MSM) to have Col Pat Lang as the commentator for analysis of the Syrian situation.
Readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware that Col. Lang's knowledge of the peoples of the
region and their customs is a national treasure.
This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning
of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut
instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact --
saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane,
Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where
they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics.
In WWI millions of soldiers died fighting for imperial designs. They did not know it. They
thought they were fighting for democracy, or to stop the spread of evil, or save their
country. They were not. Secret treaties signed before the war started stated explicitly what
the war was about.
Now "representatives" of the military, up to and including the Commander in Chief say it's
about conquest, oil. The cards of the elite are on the table. How do you account for this?
During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when
asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy.
The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that
200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or
keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is
threaten to blow up the world.
Justin Trudeau was elected Monday in Canada with a minority in Parliament joining the
United Kingdom and Israel with governments without a majority's mandate. Donald Trump's
impeachment escalates. MbS is nearing a meat hook in Saudi Arabia. This is not a coincidence.
The Elites' flushing government down the drain succeeded.
Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer,
but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police
and the military to protect them. Already California electricity is being cut off for a
second time due to wildfires and PG&E's corporate looting. The Sinaloa shootout reminds
me of the firefight in the first season of "True Detectives" when the outgunned LA cops tried
to go after the Cartel. The writing is on the wall, California is next. Who will the lawmen
serve and protect? Their people or the rich? Without the law, justice and order, there is
chaos.
Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural
plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador,
Peru, etc
No doubt that Keane and his ilk want endless war and view Trump as a growing obstacle. Trump
is consistent: He wanted out of JCPOA, and after being stalled by his national security
advisors, he finally reached the boiling point and left. The advisors who counseled against
this are all gone. With Pompeo, Enders and O'Brien as the new key security advisors, I doubt
Trump got as much push back. He wanted out of Syria in December 2018 and was slow-walked.
Didn't anyone think he'd come back at some point and revive the order to pull out? The talk
with Erdogan, the continuing Trump view that Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia
should bear the burden of sorting out what is left of the Syria war, so long as ISIS does not
see a revival, all have been clear for a long time.
My concern is with Lindsey Graham, who is smarter and nastier than Jack Keane. He is also
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may hold some blackmail leverage over the
President. If the House votes up impeachment articles, Graham will be overseeing the Senate
trial. A break from Trump by Graham could lead to a GOP Senate stampede for conviction. No
one will say this openly, as I am, but it cannot be ignored as a factor for "controlling"
Trump and keeping as much of the permanent war machine running as possible.
Trump has committed the United States to a long war against the Shia Crescent. He has ceded
to Turkey on Syrian Kurds, but has continued with his operations against SAR. US needs
Turkey, Erdogan knows that. Likewise in regards to Russia, EU, and Iran. Turkey, as is said
in Persian, has grown a tail.
Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has
released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds?
Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE
pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success.
During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of
curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and
banks.
It was also reported in September that in Dubai that recent US Treasury sanctions were
beginning to have a devastating effect. Iranian businessmen were being squeezed out. Even
leaving the Emirates. Yet only a few days ago--a month later-- there are now reports that
Iranian exchange bureaus have suddenly reopened in Dubai after a long period of closure.
Also, billions of dollars in contracts were signed between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE
during Putin's recent visit to the region. It seems to me that this is real news. Something
big seems to be happening. It looks to me as if there could be a serious confrontation
between the Trump administration and MBZ in the offing.
Do you have an opinion on the Iranian situation in Dubai at the moment?
I have my doubt that Sen. Graham will lead any revolt, but if it starts to look like Trump
will lose big next year, there will be a stampede looking like the Nile getting through a
cataract.
They will not want to go down the tube with Trump. I still maintain that there is a good
reason for him to resign before he loses an election or an impeachment. It will come down to
the price.
Lose big to whom in the next election? Biden got 300 people to show up for his rally in his hometown of Scranton and he is
supposedly the front runner. Bernie got 20,000 to show up at his rally in NY when he was
endorsed by The Squad and Michael Moore. Do you think the Dem establishment will allow him to
be the nominee?
Trump in contrast routinely can fill up stadiums with 30,000 people. That was the
indicator in the last election, not the polls. Recall the NY Times forecasting Hillary with a
95% probability of winning the day before the election.
As Rep. Al Green noted , the only way the Democrats can stop him is for the Senate to
convict him in an impeachment trial. Who do you believe are the 20 Republican senators that
will vote to convict?
Trump barely won the last time and while he currently has wide support in the GOP, it is not
nearly as deep as his cultists believe. When half the country, and growing, want him removed,
there is trouble ahead. Republicans are largely herd animals and if spooked, will create a
stampede.
You can tell that there are problems when his congressional enablers are not defending him
on facts and just using gripes about processes that they themselves have used in the past. In
addition to circus acts.
I realize that many do not want to admit that they made a mistake by voting for him. I am
not so sure they want to repeat that mistake.
It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the
compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore..
representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it.
It's not a question if he barely won. The fact is he competed with many other Republican
candidates including governors and senators and even one with the name Bush. He was 1% in the
polls in the summer of 2016 and went on to win the Republican nomination despite the intense
opposition of the Republican establishment. He then goes on to win the general election
defeating a well funded Hillary with all her credentials and the full backing of the vast
majority of the media. That is an amazing achievement for someone running for public office
for the first time. Like him or hate him, you have to give credit where it's due. Winning an
election for the presidency is no small feat.
There only two ways to defeat him. First, the Senate convicts him in an impeachment trial
which will require at least 20 Republican senators. Who are they? Second, a Democrat in the
general election. Who? I can see Bernie with a possibility since he has enthusiastic
supporters. But will the Democrat establishment allow him to win the nomination?
We're no longer having to listen to Yosemite Sam Bolton. His BFF Graham is left to fight on
his own. I don't think Trump feels the need to pay that much attention to Graham. He didn't
worry about him during the primary when Graham always seemed to be on the verge of crying
when he was asked questions.
Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies
so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and
failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria.
He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he
simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress.
What the Colonel calls the Borg is akin to an aircraft carrier that has been steaming at near
flank speed for many years too long, gathering mass and momentum since the end of Cold War I.
With the exception of Gulf War I, none of our interventions have gone well, and even the
putative peace at the end of GUlf War I wasn't managed well because it eventuated in Gulf War
Ii which has been worst than a disaster because the disaster taught the Borg nothing and
became midwife to additional disasters.
It probably should come as no surprise to us that
Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many
deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive
to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a
platform of change.
Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen.
At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy--
turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the
dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard
against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual
interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying
degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests.
With that said, I doubt very much whether the Republicans in the Senate will abandon Trump in
an impeachment trial. Trump's argument that the process is a political coup is arguably
completely true, or certainly true enough that his political base in the electorate will not
tolerate his abandonment by Republican politicians inside the Beltway. I think there is even
some chance that Trump, were he to be removed from office by what could be credibly portrayed
as a political coup, would consider running in 2020 as an independent. The damage that would
cause to the Republican Party would be severe, pervasive, and possibly fatal to the Party as
such. I doubt Beltway pols would be willing to take that chance.
I don't think Keane or Trump are focused on the oil. Keane just used that as a lens to focus
Trump on Iran. That's the true sickness. Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity
towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see
beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia
Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This
administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist.
And in response, Russia killed and captured hundreds of US Special forces and PMC's alongside
SAS in East Ghouta . It is said that the abrupt russian op on East Ghouta was a response to
the Battle of Khasham.
The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media
is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the
MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them
distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of
affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking
points without understanding any of it.
While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support
America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for
eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these
wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to
it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to
contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from
under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.
No, they just have to sit there and be an excuse to fly Coalition CAPs that would effectively
prevent SAA from crossing the Euphrates in strength. Feasible until the SAA finishes with
Idlib and moves some of its new Russian anti-aircraft toys down to Deir Ezzor.
TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the
permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless
covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them.
Colonel Lang, I am well aware of the power seekers who gravitate towards Trump or whoever
holds power not out of loyalty, but because they covet access to power. The neocons and
Zionists flock to Trump because they can manipulate him to do their bidding. That fact
certainly doesn't make me feel any better about Trump as President. The man needs help.
you are an experienced clan case officer. You do not know that most people are more than a
little mad? Hillary is more than a little nuts. Obama was so desperately neurotically in need
of White approval that he let the WP COIN generals talk him into a COIN war in Afghanistan. I
was part of that discussion. All that mattered to him was their approval. FDR could not be
trusted with SIGINT product and so Marshall never gave him any, etc., George Bush 41 told me
that he deliberately mis-pronounced Saddam's name to hurt his feelings. Georgie Junior let
the lunatic neocons invade a country that had not attacked us. Trump is no worse than many of
our politicians, or politicians anywhere. Britain? The Brexit disaster speaks for itself, And
then there is the British monarchy in which a princeling devastated by the sure DNA proof
that he is illegitimate is acting like a fool. The list is endless.
CK, the people surrounding Trump are largely appointees. Keane doesn't have to be let into
the WH. His problem is that those who would appeal to his non-neocon tendencies are not
people he wants to have around him. Gabbard, for instance, would be perfect for helping Trump
get ourselves out of the ME, is a progressive. Non-interventionists are hard to come by.
Those who he does surround himself with are using him for their own ideologies, mostly neocon
and Zionist.
Bacevich interview:
> Andrew Bacevich, can you respond to President Trump pulling the U.S. troops away from
this area of northern Syria, though saying he will keep them to guard oil fields?
> ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at
any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that
you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are
going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens
back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is
a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that
seriously.
> That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again,
is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy
or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And
here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our
abandonment of the Kurds.
> Let's stipulate. U.S. abandonment of the Kurds was wrong, it was callous, it was
immoral. It was not the first betrayal by the United States in our history, but the fact that
there were others certainly doesn't excuse this one. But apart from those concerned about the
humanitarian aspect of this crisis -- and not for a second do I question the sincerity of
people who are worried about the Kurds -- it seems to me that the controversy has gotten as
big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are
concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of
U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of
bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism.
Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen
to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a
fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment
nervous.
> NERMEEN SHAIKH: As you mentioned, Professor Bacevich, Trump has come under bipartisan
criticism for this decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell was one of the many Republicans to criticize Trump for his decision. In an
opinion piece in The Washington Post McConnell writes, quote, "We saw humanitarian disaster
and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the
groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama's
retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners
and retreat from these conflicts before they are won." He also writes, quote, "As
neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more
talk of 'endless wars.' But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars
are won or lost." So Professor Bacevich, could you respond to that, and how accurate you
think an assessment of that is? Both what he says about Afghanistan and what is likely to
happen now with U.S. withdrawal.
> ANDREW BACEVICH: I think in any discussion of our wars, ongoing wars, it is important to
set them in some broader historical context than Senator McConnell will probably entertain. I
mean, to a very great extent -- not entirely, but to a very great extent -- we created the
problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power.
> People like McConnell, and I think other members of the political establishment, even
members of the mainstream media -- _The New York Times_, The Washington Post -- have yet to
reckon with the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And if
you focus your attention at that start point -- you could choose another start point, but if
you focus your attention at that start point, then it seems to me that leads you to a
different conclusion about the crisis that we are dealing with right now. That is to say,
people like McConnell want to stay the course. They want to maintain the U.S. presence in
Syria. U.S. military presence. But if we look at what the U.S. military presence in that
region, not simply Syria, has produced over the course of almost two decades, then you have
to ask yourself, how is it that we think that simply staying the course is going to produce
any more positive results?
> It is appalling what Turkey has done to Syrian Kurds and the casualties they have
inflicted and the number of people that have been displaced. But guess what? The casualties
that we inflicted and the number of people that we displaced far outnumbers what Turkey has
done over the last week or so. So I think that we need to push back against this tendency to
oversimplify the circumstance, because oversimplifying the circumstance doesn't help us fully
appreciate the causes of this mess that we're in.
In addition to oil from Iran, Assad also gets oil from the SDF and the Kurds. Supposedly a
profit sharing arrangement as commented on by JohninMK in a previous post.
This oil sharing deal was also mentioned by Global Research and Southfront back in June of
2018:
Colonel Lang, the only way to "overthrow" Trump is through impeachment in the House and
conviction in the Senate. That is a Constitutional process, not a coup. The process is
intentionally difficult. Was the impeachment of Clinton an attempted coup?
In the first place isn't the dissolution of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen
exactly what we have wished to achieve, and wouldn't an intelligent observer, such as
Vladimir Putin, want to do exactly the same thing to us, and hasn't he come very close to
witnessing the achievement of this aim whether he is personally involved or not? What goes
around comes around?
But that is relatively unimportant compared to the question whether dissolution of the
Union is a bad thing or a good thing. Preserving it cost 600,000 lives the first time. One
additional life would be one additional life too many. Ukraine is an excellent example.
Western Ukraine has a long history support for Nazi's. Eastern Ukraine is Russian. Must a war
be fought to bring them together? Or should they be permitted to go their separate ways?
As Hector said of Helen of Troy, "She is not worth what she doth cost the keeping."
After hanging up from a call to Putin, thanking him for Russia's help with the Turks, YPG
leader Mazloum Kobane returned to the Senate hearings in which he alternately reminded his
flecless American allies of their failure, not only to protect Rojava from the Turks, but
didn't even give them a heads up about what was about to happen and begged an already angry
[at Trump] Senate about their urgent need for a continued American presence in the territory.
It seems that some in the USG do not understand that all the land on the east bank of the
Euphrates is "Rojava" or somehow is the mandate of the Kurds to continue to control. For a
long time, now, the mainly Arab population of that region have been chafing under what is
actually Kurdish rule. This could be a a trigger for ISIS or some other jihadis to launch
another insurgency, or at the least, low level attacks, especially in Rojava to the
north.
To remind, the USG is not using military personnel, but also contracts, about 200 troops in
one field and 400 contractors in the other.
There is video of the SAA escorting the Americans to the Iraqi border. PM Abdel Hadi has
reiterated that the US cannot keep these troops in Iraq, as they go beyond the agreed upon
number. It is quite likely that the anti-Iranian aspect of the border region is NOT something
they wish to see.
"Iranian proxies" refers to Hezbollah, the various Shia militia groups from Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and of course, others, not the SAA.
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
With a great weeping, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and clutching of pearls, the Democrats have declared that the
decision to withdraw troops from Syria was a
mortal sin .
Joe Biden called it "the most shameful thing that any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy." Elizabeth
Warren said Trump "has cut and run on our allies," and "created a bigger-than-ever humanitarian crisis." Kamala Harris announced,
"Yet again Donald Trump [is] selling folks out."
However, it required Mayor Buttigieg to make it a personal
moral imperative .
Meanwhile, soldiers in the field are reporting that for the first time they feel ashamed -- ashamed -- of what their country
has done.
Democrats are totally honest and sincere here. It's not like they would have any
double-standards on this issue.
When Muir asked Buttigieg whether he would stick to his pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in his first year
despite warnings from top American commanders, Buttigieg ducked the question and insisted that "we have got to put an end to
endless war." Turning to Biden, Muir cited "concerns about any possible vacuum being created in Afghanistan." But Biden brushed
them off, declaring, "We don't need those troops there. I would bring them home."
What makes these statements so remarkable is that experts warn that if the United States withdraws its troops from Afghanistan
in the absence of a peace agreement, Afghanistan will suffer a fate remarkably similar to what is happening in northern Syria.
It's not like this issue is anything less than black or white.
It's not like we would eventually have
the
choice of supporting either a Kurdish/Arab militia tied however loosely to the PKK, a designated terror group perceived by
Turkey as an existential threat, or
Turkey , a NATO member.
We keep hearing how we "betrayed our allies," but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf? It's
a big jump from "Let's both fight ISIS" to "Take that, NATO ally." But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort
of hand wave away the fact that you can't "betray" someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable
person could ever expect you to do it.
Oh wait. It's exactly like that.
All this virtue-signaling amounts to "I want you to send your sons and daughters to kill and maybe die fighting a long-time ally
because otherwise 'Putin will win'!"
Yes, Putin will get more control over a war-torn country, a ruined economy, with bombed-out cities, and millions of refugees.
Why must we deny him of this again?
And then there is the
lack of an AUMF
for us being in Syria. Which makes our occupation of Syria illegal, both by domestic law, and
international law .
Syria is not our country and U.S. troops were never authorized by its sovereign government to be there. Whether or not Washington
likes Damascus is irrelevant, under international law U.S. troops have no right to be there. Even flights over Syrian airspace
by the U.S. coalition are a violation of international agreements.
Why doesn't Bernie or Gabbard mention that this is an illegal war? People might care.
Also, does anyone remember when putting troops in Syria was something to be avoided?
Does anyone else remember the
16 times Obama said there would be no boots on the ground in Syria?
Since 2013, President Obama has repeatedly vowed that there would be no "boots on the ground" in Syria.
But White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president's decision Friday to send up to 50 special forces troops
to Syria doesn't change the fundamental strategy: "This is an important thing for the American people to understand. These
forces do not have a combat mission."
We now have a stage full of presidential candidates that say they love Obama, yet ignore this part of his legacy (that he himself
violated).
Finally there is our legacy in Syria. Our legacy of
war crimes .
"The Commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that international coalition forces may not have directed
their attacks at a specific military objective, or failed to do so with the necessary precaution," it said.
"Launching indiscriminate attacks that result in death or injury to civilians amounts to a war crime in cases in which such
attacks are conducted recklessly," it added.
Engaging in an illegal war while committing war crimes is a "full stop" right there. No amount of virtue-signaling can justify
this.
And yet it still gets worse
.
In a now-famous secretly recorded conversation with Syrian opposition activists in New York, Former Secretary of State John
Kerry admitted that the United States was hoping to use ISIS to undermine the Syrian government. To put it bluntly, U.S. foreign
policy was duplicitous and used terrorism as a tool. This, of course, is a well-documented fact.
If we had a real media these candidates would all be crucified.
gjohnsit on Fri, 10/18/2019 - 5:38pm With a great weeping, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and clutching of pearls,
the Democrats have declared that the decision to withdraw troops from Syria was a
mortal sin .
Joe Biden called it "the most shameful thing that any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy." Elizabeth
Warren said Trump "has cut and run on our allies," and "created a bigger-than-ever humanitarian crisis." Kamala Harris announced,
"Yet again Donald Trump [is] selling folks out."
However, it required Mayor Buttigieg to make it a personal
moral imperative .
Meanwhile, soldiers in the field are reporting that for the first time they feel ashamed -- ashamed -- of what their country has
done.
Democrats are totally honest and sincere here. It's not like they would have any
double-standards on this issue.
When Muir asked Buttigieg whether he would stick to his pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in his first year
despite warnings from top American commanders, Buttigieg ducked the question and insisted that "we have got to put an end to endless
war." Turning to Biden, Muir cited "concerns about any possible vacuum being created in Afghanistan." But Biden brushed them off,
declaring, "We don't need those troops there. I would bring them home."
What makes these statements so remarkable is that experts warn that if the United States withdraws its troops from Afghanistan
in the absence of a peace agreement, Afghanistan will suffer a fate remarkably similar to what is happening in northern Syria.
It's not like this issue is anything less than black or white.
It's not like we would eventually have
the choice
of supporting either a Kurdish/Arab militia tied however loosely to the PKK, a designated terror group perceived by Turkey as an
existential threat, or
Turkey , a NATO member.
We keep hearing how we "betrayed our allies," but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf? It's a
big jump from "Let's both fight ISIS" to "Take that, NATO ally." But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort of hand
wave away the fact that you can't "betray" someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable person
could ever expect you to do it.
Oh wait. It's exactly like that.
All this virtue-signaling amounts to "I want you to send your sons and daughters to kill and maybe die fighting a long-time ally
because otherwise 'Putin will win'!"
Yes, Putin will get more control over a war-torn country, a ruined economy, with bombed-out cities, and millions of refugees. Why
must we deny him of this again?
And then there is the
lack of an AUMF
for us being in Syria. Which makes our occupation of Syria illegal, both by domestic law, and
international law .
Syria is not our country and U.S. troops were never authorized by its sovereign government to be there. Whether or not Washington
likes Damascus is irrelevant, under international law U.S. troops have no right to be there. Even flights over Syrian airspace
by the U.S. coalition are a violation of international agreements.
Why doesn't Bernie or Gabbard mention that this is an illegal war? People might care.
Also, does anyone remember when putting troops in Syria was something to be avoided?
Does anyone else remember the
16 times Obama said there would be no boots on the ground in Syria?
Since 2013, President Obama has repeatedly vowed that there would be no "boots on the ground" in Syria.
But White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president's decision Friday to send up to 50 special forces troops to
Syria doesn't change the fundamental strategy: "This is an important thing for the American people to understand. These forces
do not have a combat mission."
We now have a stage full of presidential candidates that say they love Obama, yet ignore this part of his legacy (that he himself
violated).
Finally there is our legacy in Syria. Our legacy of
war crimes .
"The Commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that international coalition forces may not have directed their
attacks at a specific military objective, or failed to do so with the necessary precaution," it said.
"Launching indiscriminate attacks that result in death or injury to civilians amounts to a war crime in cases in which such
attacks are conducted recklessly," it added.
Engaging in an illegal war while committing war crimes is a "full stop" right there. No amount of virtue-signaling can justify
this.
And yet it still gets worse
.
In a now-famous secretly recorded conversation with Syrian opposition activists in New York, Former Secretary of State John Kerry
admitted that the United States was hoping to use ISIS to undermine the Syrian government. To put it bluntly, U.S. foreign policy
was duplicitous and used terrorism as a tool. This, of course, is a well-documented fact.
If we had a real media these candidates would all be crucified.
The UAE is pumping millions of dollars into "vast and influential" lobbying efforts in the US, using a range of public relations
companies to help shape foreign policy issues, a report by a Washington-based non-profit alleged this week.
The report published by the Center for International Policy (CIP) claims that 20 US companies were paid around $20 million
to lobby politicians and other influential institutions on foreign policy issues.
"Though the Emirati's influence operation differs notably from the Saudi's in many ways, both rely heavily on their FARA
registered lobbying and public relations firms to brandish their image in the US, and to keep their transgressions out of the
public consciousness as much as possible," the report reads.
The report is part of CIP's Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, which aims to elucidate the "half-billion-dollar
foreign influence industry working to shape US foreign policy every single day".
The report added Emirati influence operation targeted legislators, non-profits, media outlets and think-tanks in an attempt
to portray the UAE to the world in a positive light.
The New Arab article quote "public relations firms to brandish their image in the US" has a word usage problem. The correct
word would be burnish, not brandish. You brandish your weapon. You burnish your image.
The UAE is pumping millions of dollars into "vast and influential" lobbying efforts in the US, using a range of public
relations companies to help shape foreign policy issues, a report by a Washington-based non-profit alleged this week.
The report published by the Center for International Policy (CIP) claims that 20 US companies were paid around $20 million
to lobby politicians and other influential institutions on foreign policy issues.
"Though the Emirati's influence operation differs notably from the Saudi's in many ways, both rely heavily on their FARA
registered lobbying and public relations firms to brandish their image in the US, and to keep their transgressions out of
the public consciousness as much as possible," the report reads.
The report is part of CIP's Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, which aims to elucidate the "half-billion-dollar
foreign influence industry working to shape US foreign policy every single day".
The report added Emirati influence operation targeted legislators, non-profits, media outlets and think-tanks in an attempt
to portray the UAE to the world in a positive light.
a lot of people think it is actually kind of *staged* by an agreement with Russia and Turkey, and if so, it'll force the United
States out of northern Syria, make the US look stupid, but actually give everybody what they want. Check it out:
--Turkey makes some initial attacks in northern Syria, tells the US to get out of the way and abandon the Kurds
--The Kurds are forced to ally with Syrian forces, and they are swept into the Syrian Army ranks (negating their ability to
go independent)
--The Syrian Army moves to the border and starts manning border crossings (already happening in many places), providing a long-term
buffer between Kurds and Turkey
--The Turkish-backed terrorist forces are expended in border confrontations (Turkey really does not want them long-term)
--Once things settle down, Syrian refugees move back into Syria, out of Turkey
--US forces are forced to move out of northeastern Syria and out of the oil fields (or be surrounded and starved out by Syrian/Russian/Kurdish
forces)
--Kurds are not wholesale slaughtered, and Democratic presidential candidates are revealed for their foolishness in the whole
thing
--Trump gets more of what he wants--more US troops out of Syria (against the wishes of the deep state)
--Turkey has a protected border and the incesant attacks from Kurds drops to manageable levels due to the Syrian army border
and the Kurds becoming integrated into Syrian forces.
I give this a 50% of how it will play out. Sure, there are current battles ongoing, but so far, Turkey is not attacking Syrian
forces, who are moving up into place on the border in many areas. The central area is still fluid, but let's see where it dies
down in a couple weeks.
"Democratic presidential candidates are revealed for their foolishness" won't happen. The MSM won't allow it.
a lot of people think it is actually kind of *staged* by an agreement with Russia and Turkey, and if so, it'll force the
United States out of northern Syria, make the US look stupid, but actually give everybody what they want. Check it out:
--Turkey makes some initial attacks in northern Syria, tells the US to get out of the way and abandon the Kurds
--The Kurds are forced to ally with Syrian forces, and they are swept into the Syrian Army ranks (negating their ability
to go independent)
--The Syrian Army moves to the border and starts manning border crossings (already happening in many places), providing
a long-term buffer between Kurds and Turkey
--The Turkish-backed terrorist forces are expended in border confrontations (Turkey really does not want them long-term)
--Once things settle down, Syrian refugees move back into Syria, out of Turkey
--US forces are forced to move out of northeastern Syria and out of the oil fields (or be surrounded and starved out by
Syrian/Russian/Kurdish forces)
--Kurds are not wholesale slaughtered, and Democratic presidential candidates are revealed for their foolishness in the
whole thing
--Trump gets more of what he wants--more US troops out of Syria (against the wishes of the deep state)
--Turkey has a protected border and the incesant attacks from Kurds drops to manageable levels due to the Syrian army border
and the Kurds becoming integrated into Syrian forces.
I give this a 50% of how it will play out. Sure, there are current battles ongoing, but so far, Turkey is not attacking
Syrian forces, who are moving up into place on the border in many areas. The central area is still fluid, but let's see where
it dies down in a couple weeks.
(as Kurdish Syria is sometimes called) is that one
of the Kurd leaders became a follower of Murray Bookchin after spending a bunch of time as a Marxist-Leninist, and so portions
of Kurdish society are an experiment in Bookchinism. Here is a
piece by Bookchin's daughter on the correspondence between him and the Kurds. Hopefully the Kurds will find some protection
in the new Putin-brokered Syria.
Otherwise, yeah, the Kurds are an ally of convenience for the Democratic Party and its apologists on that most disgusting of
propaganda instruments, National Public Radio.
but it should have also been illegal for us to arm the same people that we had declared terrorists. Now those people are killing
the people who fought on our side against the ones now doing the killing.. my head is spinning with all the insane talking points
coming from people who have never met a war they didn't support.
This is a good read.
Former and current US officials have slammed the Turkish mercenary force of "Arab militias" for executing and beheading Kurds
in northern Syria. New data from Turkey reveals that almost all of these militias were armed and trained in the past by the CIA
and Pentagon.
By Max Blumenthal
Left: John McCain with then-FSA chief Salim Idriss (right) in 2013; Right: Salim Idriss (center) in October, announcing the establishment
of the National Front for Liberation, the Turkish mercenary army that has invaded northern Syria.
Hmm..kinda hard to explain that huh? The article talks about Idriss in detail. As well as Obama and Hillary's roles in the
'no boots on the ground' war.
This should embarrass every person who is moaning over Trump's actions in Syria. Turkey was coming in one way or another and
the only way to stop them was for our troops to stand in their way. But what really ticks me off is all of that equipment they
left behind on their bug out. Not just tents , TVs and air conditioners and everything in between, but they left weapons and bombs
there and they just blew them up. This will make the defense companies very happy!
After the ceasefire, US backed
#Kurds are deciding to hand over the north of
#Syria to Turkey rather than the
Syrian army. All trump had to promise them was a stake in
#Syria 's oil fields.
https://t.co/euat8DvIa4
Syrian Girl lives in Syria and has been a good source of information, but I'm not sure if what she is reporting is true. But
wouldn't that shut lots of people up?
Obama kept troops out of Syria until the last minute. Then he took a force small enough to justify his successor's escalation.
So when the Turks tried to genocide the Kurds - like they were certain to do - Trump gets the blame. But it was supposed to be
Hillary. What was in it for her? The joy of another country seeing genocide?
The Kurds were promised land and valuable oil fields in North Eastern Syria by... the US. What's wrong with this picture? Damascus
has I invited the Kurds to be part of the multi-ethnic Syria. The Kurds refused and took America's deal. We armed them to the
teeth with 10s of billions of dollars of weapons. What could go wrong? Well just about everything as the US offer was highly illegal,
they are stealing Syrian oil, and Turkey will not accept any Kurdish permanent enclave on her border. Syria, Russia, Iran, China,
Hezbollah, Iraq and more support the reunification of all of Syria. Why were the Kurds so stupid? Go it? Blind belief in the all
powerful US!
I do not think that Ukraine demand are all that bad if other conditions such as grating the region special status and the level
of autonomy similar to Crimea in the past are fulfilled. With Russian language restored in status as a regional language. Plus total
unconditional amnesty. All three are prerequisite for successful reintegration and in those condition t make sense: (1) the
LNR/DNR dissolve themselves, (2) that they have to leave the Ruble zone and switch back to the Grivna, (3) that the local military
forces have to be disbanded and, finally, (4) that Kiev wants the total control of the LDNR/Russian border. But also should be
a strict prohibition of any member of paramilitary battalions to enter the autonomous region under the penalty to prison
sentence for several years to prevent revenge killings.
The problems with Ukrainian economy are structural and the absence of economic detente with Russia alone can be undoing of
Zelensky government. Further accumulation of IMF credits is the only way forward. Add to this almost total breakdown of economic
ties with Russia because of EuroMaydan and subsequent Western Ukraine nationalist coup d'ιtat, and you have Catch 22 situation for
him. Add to the pressure from the USA and the impression is the there is no way of this situation . BTW Poroshenko despite all
his rhetoric somehow managed to preserve his chocolate factory in Russia ;-)
...First, Trump, Macron and Merkel apparently told Zelenskii that he had to sign the so-called Steinmeier formula, which
basically spells out the sequence of confidence-building and de-escalation measures foreseen by the Minsk Agreements.
Now, you would be excused for thinking that this is a no-brainer. After all, the Minsk Agreements were ratified by the
UNSC (which makes them mandatory, no "if" or "buts" about this!) and it was Poroshenko who agreed to the Steinmeier
formula.
Heck, in 2016 he sure did not have a problem with it, but in 2019 he now calls the self-same formula a Russian
invention and that there is no such thing as a Steinmeier formula, see for yourself (in Ukrainian only):
Zelenskii's problem can be summed up in a simple sentence: the non-existing Nazis. Well, at least in the past all the
Neo-Nazis
cum
Jew-haters were constantly trying to convince us that there are no Nazis in the Ukraine;
apparently, my use of the term Ukronazi really set them off. Then came the election in which an absolute majority of
Ukrainians rejected Poroshenko's drive for war and voted for Zelenskii. If the Ukrainian people voted en masse to elect
an anti-war/pro-peace Jew, surely the Ukronazis were just a small minority of fringe individuals, right?
Wrong! Very very wrong!
And if those who were whitewashing the Ukrainian Nazis (obviously to obfuscate their real ideology and power) had
paid closer attention they would have seen signs of real Nazi power all over this election.
First, there was the remarkable change in tone in Zelenskii's rhetoric. Just like so many politicians (including
Trump!), he radically changed his tune and clearly tried to say one thing when speaking to the general Ukrainian public
and quite another when meeting with the Nazis or nationalist exiles in the USA.
You could say that there is a "Nazi deep state" in the Ukraine which, just like the other deep states out there,
can weather any elected president and quickly reassert its control over whomever the people elected.
You don't believe me when I say that he actually hosted the Ukronazis "fringe minority"? Fine, see for yourself:
In the photo above, Zelenskii is sitting with your typical gang of Ukronazi skinheads, including members of the infamous
Azov death-squad, and he is trying really hard to charm them while they, very publicly, have threatened him with a new
Maidan.
And this is not an isolated case or a fluke.
Zelenskii's prime minister went to a concert for an openly Nazi "Scream" music group called Sekira Peruna and thanked
the crowd of veterans of the "anti terrorist operation" (i.e. thugs from the Ukronazi deathsquads) for being there and
for saving the Ukraine. I did not find any English language translation of the typical lyrics of Sekira Peruna, but I
assure you that they contain all the obligatory nonsense which the Nazi ideology is built upon (see
here
for a
very good article with more details on this event and the Nazis involved).
Check out what their concert posters look like (shown here on the right) or, even better, check out the website of
this group:
http://sokyraperuna.com/
'Nuff said, I think.
So what is going on here?
Basically, exactly what I predicted as soon as Zelenskii was elected in my article "
Zelenskii's
dilemma
" in which I wrote: (emphasis added)
The Nazi-occupied Ukraine is not a democracy, but a plutocracy combined with an ochlocracy
.
The oligarchs are still there, as are the neo-Nazis mobs and death squads. And that creates an immense problem for
Zelenskii: this new Rada might well represent the views of a majority of the Ukrainian people, but
the real
power in the country is not concentrated in the Rada at all: it is in the streets
( ) The people of the
Ukraine desperately want peace. For the time being, the Rada reflects this overwhelmingly important fact. I say "for
the time being" because what will happen next is that the various forces and individuals who currently support
Zelenskii have done so just to gain power. They do not, however, have a common ideological platform or even a common
program. As soon as things go south (which they will inevitably do) many (most?) of these folks will turn against
Zelenskii and side with whoever can muster the biggest crowds and mete out the most violence. Now that he got
elected, Zelenskii quasi-instantly switched to the exact same rhetoric as what got Poroshenko so severely defeated.
Why? Because Zelenskiii is afraid that the neo-Nazi mobs and death squads will be unleashed against him at the very
first opportunity. In fact, the neo-Nazis have already begun promising a new Maidan. The truth is that
Zelenskii has to choose between acting on the will of the people and face the wrath of the neo-Nazis or do the will
of the neo-Nazis and face the wrath of the people
: tertium non datur! So far, Zelenskii has apparently
decided that talking is all he is going to do simply because his triumphant electoral victories have landed him in
the middle of an immense minefield, and
any steps he takes from now on could cost him very dearly
.
Right now, in the short term, the neo-Nazi mobs represent a much bigger danger to Zelenskii than the (disorganized,
demoralized and generally apathetic) people. But this will inevitably change as the economic and political situation
gets worse
.
We see exactly that scenario unfolding before our eyes. Zelenskii took not one, but three very real, if small, steps.
First, he ordered a pullback of some regular Ukrainian armed forces from a few important segments of the line of
contact, then he agreed to a relatively minor prisoner exchange and, finally, he ordered the Ukrainian delegation to
sign the Steinmeier formula. The prisoner exchange went okay for both sides. The Ukronazis soon categorically rejected
any withdrawal and they publicly promised to immediately re-occupy any village vacated by the regular army and they
rejected what they call the "Russian" or "Putin" formula. So far there were a few attempts to block the thugs of the
Azov battalion, but after a few minor clashes, the Azov people passed the police line. And now, the Nazi organized mass
protests in 300 Ukrainian cities. I could post lots of videos here, but that would take a lot of space. If you want to
get a feel for what took place today, go to YouTube and copy-paste the following search query "протесты в украине" into
the search bar, and then use the filter option and chose "this week": you will easily get many hours of video and you
don't even need to understand a word of Ukrainian to immediately get it.
There is another very important factor which you will almost never see on these videos or on any public statements
and that is that there are a number of civil and even criminal cases currently being brought to trial in the Ukraine
against a host of officials of the
ancient rιgime
including even against Poroshenko (11-14 separate
investigations just for him already!) These men (Poroshenko, Parubii, Turchinov, etc.) now have absolutely no choice but
to try to overthrow Zelenskii.
Just like the US Dems need a coup against Trump (in the form of an impeachment or something else) because the
Clinton-Biden gang now risks real, hard, jail time, so do the former Ukronazi leaders now need a coup against Zelenskii
or they go to jail.
Initially, it appeared that Trump had given Poroshenko some personal security guarantees, but everybody knows how
much the US President's security "guarantees" are worth (just ask the Kurds!). So Poroshenko did not flee the country.
It now appears that some of the people behind Zelenskii (aka Kolomoiskii) are out to get the "Poroshenko clan &
Associates" Poroshenko has to either topple Zelenskii or run away abroad. There are also rumors that the US "deep
state" (as opposed to the Trump Administration) is now putting pressure on Zelenskii to stop these investigations. Thus,
the current battle between Trump and the Neocons and their "deep state" has now spilled over into the Ukraine and it
appears that various US interest groups are now creating local Ukrainian surrogates whom they will use in their struggle
against each other.
Furthermore, a real possibility opened up now that all sorts of previously buried issues will be investigated by
the Ukrainian prosecutors including:
An official and true investigation to find out who opened fired on the police and demonstrators during the
Euromaidan
MH-17
Ukronazi atrocities in the Donbass
Human rights violations in the Ukraine (where over 1000 political prisoners are still being held) starting with
innumerable cases of horrible torture of detainees (in secret torture camps,
ΰ la
CIA, including an
especially infamous one in Mariupol).
Poroshenko's role in the "Crimea Bridge provocation"
All the many murders of journalists and opponents to the Nazis beginning with the murder of Oles Buzina
A quasi infinite list of war profiteering, corruption, fraud, etc. etc. etc.
Simply put: there is no way that the Ukronazis will just stand by and let those investigations proceed. And while
it is true that numerically the Ukronazis are a small minority in the Ukraine, there is plenty enough of them to terrify
Zelenskii and his handlers, especially considering that they are 1) well armed 2) many have frontline combat experience
and 3) that they are willing not only to engage in "regular" violence, but also to commit atrocities and engage in
terrorism (they did plenty of both in the Donbass).
Zelenskii does have a number of things going for him: first, the mandate of the people (though his popularity is
already down from 73% to 66% which is still very big), his legal prerogatives as the President and Commander in Chief
and the support of Kolomoiskii's strong network of international connections, especially in Israel.
But that is all rather theoretical so far.
All Zelenskii has done, besides hosting the skinheads in his office, was to make a 14 hour long interview with a
group of reporters. Yes, fourteen hours. Alas, all he achieved was to show that he is a much better actor than
politician. In fact, most experts seem to agree that in his role as President Zelenskii is a total failure who speaks a
lot, says a lot of silly things when he does, and seems to be absolutely unable to take any real action.
At the time of writing (Wed 16th) the leader of the Ukronazis has given Zelenskii 10 days to yield to all the
demands of the opposition. If not, he has promised to trigger a new Maidan and bring millions of people to the streets.
Yup. The "tiny" "fringe" and otherwise "non-existing" Nazis have now given Zelenskii an ultimatum.
Zelenskii is in free fall: Trump, Macron and Merkel are demanding that he abide by the decisions of the UNSC, the
Minsk Agreements and the Steinmeier formula. The Russians have clearly indicated that unless tangible and real progress
is made in the implementation of this formula, there will be nothing else to discuss. The Ukraine is basically bankrupt
and desperately needs both Novorussian coal and Russian gas
. Furthermore, only a removal of the self-defeating
barriers and boycotts imposed by the former regime against any trade or even communications with Russia could begin to
kick-start the economy of what is now clearly a failed state.
Yet the Nazis will oppose any and all such measures, with violence if needed. As for Zelenskii, he appears to be in a
no win situation: no matter what he does next, things will only get worse. Thus the most likely outcome of all these
processes will be, in the short term, further futile attempts by Zelenskii to appease the Nazis (thereby alienating the
general population), in the middle term a violent confrontation, followed in the long term by (the probably inevitable)
break-up of the Ukraine into separately much more viable parts.
UPDATE
: I just heard that the Ukraine is now demanding that 1) the LNR/DNR dissolve themselves,
2) that they have to leave the Ruble zone and switch back to the Hrivna, 3) that the local military forces have to be
disbanded and, finally, 4) that Kiev wants the total control of the LDNR/Russian border.
Well, good luck with that, folks! I hope they are not holding their breath (they aren't they are just trying to
find a pretext to renege on their legal and political obligations )
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by
last week's media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous.
Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and
killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues
to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever
means are necessary. The
op-ed entitled "Our Republic is Under Attack by the President" with the subtitle "If
President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a
new person in the Oval Office" was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray
Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as
a call for a military coup.
McRaven's exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds
in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because "The America
that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within."
McRaven then elaborated that "These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen
the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State
Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen,
preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have
heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort
Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, 'I don't like the
Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!'"
It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension
and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be
recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas,
might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America's role in the world over
the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out
punishment. He wrote ""We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the
good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom
and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the
protectors of the less fortunate."
Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue
nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction. If McRaven truly believes
what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying
with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding
than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no
good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically
stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. "Good guys" and "champions of justice"
indeed!
And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an
interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's
dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including
nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party. She said, clearly suggesting that it
would be Tulsi Gabbard, that "They're also going to do third-party again. I'm not making any
predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic
primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the
Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."
Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran
for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, "And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it
up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I
mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate. So I don't know who
it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in
the key states that they most needed."
Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers,
embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party
for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my
candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was
behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies
in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this
primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race
directly."
Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she
would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic
candidate debate the New York Times ran an
article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was
an apologist for Syria's Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to
confront America's warfare-national security state.
The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a
certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed
in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home
server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and
the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than
her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference,
Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton
Foundation has taken
tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos
, much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was
enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from
President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a
powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and
ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi's
last words before departing were "All roads lead to Putin." I will leave it up to the
reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.
McRaven didn't command anything that 'captured' British asset Osama bin Laden (living in
London until 2 months before 9/11) because he was already dead. My sources from within
special forces and intelligence verified that he was dead long before he was alleged to have
been captured. McRaven is merely a shill who sold his soul to the highest bidder. Another
globalist scumbag who is willing to tote the company line for a few crumbs. And now, once
again, he's screaming from the rooftops what the company has told him to repeat.
All of the globalists are standing there, pumping lies. This is their endgame in the US.
Total destruction of the institution of the presidency, the Declaration of Independence, Bill
of Rights, and Constitution to leave the US in a state that resembles something like Nazi
Germany; with the hope that the US will launch an assault on the arch enemy of those who wish
to control Mackinder's Inner Crescent, Russia, just as they did with Hitler.
So let's try to put things into perspective. The United States broke free from the chains
of imperialism. The imperial forces fought to take it back, first by a second invasion, then
by staging a color revolution known as the Civil War, then politically with the assassination
of McKinley and installation of their puppet - Teddy Roosevelt.
Afterwards, subsequent
globalist shills begin to infiltrate our system of politics. Swallowing control of the
banking system and creating Wall Street. Then further tightening the noose by controlling
mass-media, de-industrializing our nation, creating a backwards "feel-good" counter culture,
and making people fear technological progress. Along the way murdering any leader that posed
a threat to their system.
Today, after creating the public perception that snow is actually black in a dumbed-down,
ill-equipped populace, they're ready to tighten that noose. McRaven, Clinton, Pelosi and the
rest of the globalist shills, who believe that you and I are animals, are attempting to bring
about that end.
It's happening right here, right now. What are you gonna do about it?
Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for
starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump
and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
I suppose Mattis is too old for that though, he seems to think he can nominate and also
define what a US 'ally' is (I thought that was a function of elected chambers and the Dept of
State), and to concoct his own personal version of 'US foreign policy' in the ME! What a
foolish thing to do at the end of his career, unfortunately he's stayed well beyond his
shelf-life.
They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their
government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the
shouts of betrayal from the battlefield...
All this was promised by Trump at the last elections and half of Americans still voted for
him.
So what is this Admiral trying to say? That Trump is destroying the Republic ( as he
claims) or he's not a warmongering POTUS and puts the Admiral's violence-based livelihood at
risk?
This admiral, wow. Like anyone believes the bogus OBL story anyway. Sounds like some kind
of satanic flag-waver to me.
Oh and the *** York Times ran his coup piece? I'm no huge fan of
Rump--very suspicious--but this stuff is simply overboard warmongering and sedition. One of
the big reasons Rump won is his anti-war posturing. Calling that "Russian" is kind of like
the Johnson and Nixon toadies calling the war protesters communists or traitors. Same stuff,
different millennia.
Warren (D)(1): "Elizabeth Warren to put out plan on how to pay for 'Medicare for All'" [
CNN ]. • "Pay for" being both delusional and a question nobody, including Warren,
ever asks about war, and "taxes on the middle class" being, shall we say, a well-worn,
content-free trope.
Warren (D)(2): "Why Criticize Warren?" [Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs ]. "What
will the right's main line of attack against Warren be? I think you can see it already,
actually: They will attempt to portray her as inauthentic and untrustworthy. She will be
painted as a Harvard egghead who has suddenly discovered populism for self-serving reasons, a
slippery elite who isn't telling you the truth about her agenda . What worries me about
Elizabeth Warren is that the criticisms of her as untrustworthy are not easy to wave away.
Warren began her 2020 campaign with a video claiming to be a Native American, even though she
isn't one. She
has now tried to bury the evidence that she did this, by deleting the video and all
accompanying social media posts .
I have tried, so far, to avoid lapsing into the usual discussions of "Bernie Sanders
versus Elizabeth Warren," but here I should note that one reason I think Bernie Sanders is
such a powerful potential candidate against Trump is that he doesn't have these kind of messy
problems of authenticity and honesty.
The thing almost nobody denies about Bernie is that you know where he stands."
As The Big Picture says above. This is a massive takedown, and I've focused on a single,
tactical issue, but this post is a must-read in full. If it's correct, the Warren campaign is
a train-wreck waiting to happen.
(Adding, the Cherokee issue really matters to me, because the Penobscots were enormously
powerful allies in the fight against the landfill (and cf. Standing Rock). It just drives me
bananas that Warren didn't check in with the Cherokees before declaring herself one of them.
I think it's an outrage, and I don't care if I get eye-rolls for it.)
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
But its not just the US that is a war machine. Bourne's statement equally applies to _all_
states everywhere, past present and future.
If any state appears to not be making war on other countries at any particular time,
its only because it is too busy making war on its own citizens [ eg taxes, drug laws,
weapons/gun laws, religion laws, speech laws, environmental laws etc.etc. etc.], and has not
yet created enough fake money via its central bank to enable it to debt-fund consistent
overseas aggressions against others.
Wars by the US will never end because arms manufactures own Trump. Almost one half of the
US budget goes for the security of the state, domestic and abroad. New weapon development
would come to a halt if the US was not threatened. Fake news about China and Russia planning
to attack the US keeps the arms industry humming. Over a million national security workers
and their families would be devastated if Trump stopped fighting fake wars. God bless
imagined threat of wars.
This has strengthened the possibility of the revival of the Islamic State in Iraq and
the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There are around 10,000 such ISIS fighters currently lodged in
prisons run by the SDF.
And with this, "the war on terror" is guaranteed to go on, and on, and on..
Just in case you hadn't heard the good news, the last man from the president's foreign
policy "team" still standing, Trump whisperer Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left
National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust.
June 27, 2018 Harvard Research Scholar Explains How America Created Al-Qaeda & The
ISIS Terror Group
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past 5
years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
What Trump wants to do and what he can do are two very different things. The MIC/Zionist rot
in DC is way too deep and entrenched for any one man to tackle.
Trump could make all his Schiffty problems go away by bombing Iran. Overnight, the man
would be lauded as the president we need and that aging hack Pelosi would suddenly drop that
phony impeachment hearing.
Trump is finding out that when making foreign policy, the safest route to take is to first
ask, "Is this good for Israel?"
I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego. Let's
inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he hasn't
vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego will
opt for the former
@DESERT
FOX Exactly, with thousands of ISIS,ISIL(American/Israeli proxy forces)types now being
freed due to Turkey's incursions into Syria, these "rebels" will be free to re-group and
fight another day. Hence the need for American forces to STAY deployed in the Area. This is
nothing more than a distraction move by Trump, which will result in the opposite "intended"
actions of American forces being withdrawn from Syria. This will also guarantee the "need"
for a strong Soviet presence in Syria.
America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria, the only point of
contention between America/Israel and Russia was whether Assad was to be forced from power or
would be allowed to remain President as a puppet of Putin and the Russians. Syria was to
never remain a sovereign nation.
The US still hasn't acknowledged the Armenian Massacre by the Turks. Why should it care
about Kurds. US is the nation that said killing 500,000 kids in Iraq was worth it.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace.
Not really. All are still standing and not under US control. Iraq now leans even more
toward Iran and Syria toward Russia ..and that outcome in these countries has made Israel's
goal of destroying Iran much harder and less likely .
The curtailment of the Kurds, Israel's long time friends and proxy , is another blow to
Israel's plot.
It appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
@WJ
Right. But as Giraldi always points out, Trump almost attacked Venezuela. He said mean
words and rattled sabres! As opposed to Obama, who said no mean words ('cause he upheld the
"dignity of the office") but sent the fighter jets into Libya and turned that country from a
stable, secular regime into a human trafficking warzone. And also got an ambassador killed.
Here are some of Giraldi's gems from April 2011:
Libya is a humanitarian mission
it [the invasion] has no clearly stated objective except to protect Libyan
civilians
it is now clear that the rebels do not have any military organization to speak of and
Gaddafi has the whip hand
Nice analysis there, Mr. CIA lifer and Obama lickspittle. I can only assume Giraldi was
part of the crack CIA team of Sovietologists who were utterly blindsided when the Soviet
Union broke up. It's amazing how much slack he's given around here for his anti-Israel stuff.
It's like Teflon for him.
@Priss
Factor Agree, and the ZUS has killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and
Syria, for their zionist masters, the only lives the ZUS cares about is zionists.
@NoseytheDuke
The only question you failed to address is what was the true motives of Putin's intervention
into the whole mess. A few good points:
As in Ukraine, Putin will stay in Syria until it no longer suits him. He has no
long-term strategic goals beyond creating chaos and weakening the alliances of the free
world wherever possible. This allows him to play the big man on the international stage, an
essential element of his domestic appeal. 24/7 propaganda and Soviet nostalgia have turned
Putin's invasion into a domestic hit in Russia. In contrast, Russians have no interest in
Syria or Assad, but who cares what they want? Unlike the leaders of Europe, the U.S., and
other democratic countries, Putin doesn't have to worry about how popular his foreign
adventures are at home. There are no checks and balances in the Russian government, no free
media to criticize him, and no popularity polls that matter more than ranks of well-armed
riot police.
Licks for Giraldi: Giraldi has been careless but not where he lists Trumps lies about ending
'silly' wars. from what Trump has actually done compared to what he says about ending
America's wars he is a liar of clear and complete proportions
"the military the only real source of pride the only thing Americans feel they excel at"
An insightful point. Politicians support the military and its deployments for economic
reasons, but the support of the public might derive from "what else is there?" Examples of
institutional and private-sector failure abound in the news over recent years, and every day.
The Boeing Max. The hotel collapse. 250,000 deaths per year from medical negligence. Power
shutoffs. Useless college. The dive boat. A relaxed performance standard. The demise of
meritocracy and rationality. During Katrina, every agency except the Coast Guard went into
gridlock. There are remaining islands of expertise, but the unraveling is contagious.
The dirty, filthy hand of the Jew is all over America's Mideast policy. Israel backs ISIS in
Syria with weapons. The Israeli-Occupied Government in Washington D.C. has even protected
ISIS in Syria at times. The Jew-owned media gives no credit to Iran and Russia for defeating
Jew and American-supported terrorists inside Syria. Now the Jew-owned government is aching
for war with Iran, which is not a threat to Gentile America.
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime
are still there. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Replacing Assad was an Globalist goal, heavily pushed by Erdogan. We also remember the
failed presidency of Barak Hussein that never represented the citizens of the U.S. So it
would be more precise to say that:
-- George Soros, Erdogan, Obama, Wahhabism, and the Globalists are losing.
-- Putin, Trump, Assad, and Populism are winning.
The real test will be Putin getting all other foreign troops & proxies to leave. The
Globalist agenda is to keep the fight between Iran (Shia) and Turkey (Sunni) going, when they
both leave combatants in Syria. Hopefully, Putin will be able to fully rout the Globalists
and move out both Turkish and Iranian agitators.
@Johnny
Walker Read Maybe you don't know who the author of that article is .Garry Kasparov
Kasparov might be great at chess but in Russia he was big fail as a politician .couldn't
get any votes on his campaign to make Russia like America. He went into a self-imposed exile
in the West. claiming Putin ruined his political campaigning.
Now everything Putin does infuses all Kasparov's punditry
Kasparow's love for Bolton should clue you to what he is about.
Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) · Twitter
As I said about Bolton entering the Trump admin nearly 3 years ago, you may not agree with
his views as much as I generally do, but he puts US interests first, not Trump's. Can't say
same about Pompeo & the rest.
31 mins ago
The short story on Syria, Turkey, USAISRAEL, Russia –
Turkey-Syria offensive: Russia vows to prevent clashes with Assad forces
BBC
Takeaways
THEN .
"When the US decided to equip and train Syrian Kurds, as well as some Arabs, to fight IS,
they were aware of a potential problem, that their would-be Kurdish allies were regarded as
terrorists by their Nato ally, Turkey. Washington turned a blind eye to a problem that could
be kicked into the future. Now the future is here, and it has blown up."
NOW .
"On Sunday the Kurds announced a deal with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
agreeing that its troops could advance into the zone that had not been controlled by Damascus
since 2012, right up to the border with Turkey. That is a big victory for the regime. The
troops moved quickly out of bases they maintained in the north-east. Assad loyalists dug out
regime flags.
It was a disastrous day for American Middle East policy. The alliance with the Kurds, and the
security guarantee safeguarding their self-governing slice of Syria, gave the Americans a
stake in the war's endgame. It was also a way of pushing against the backers of the Assad
regime: Russia and Iran. The departure of the Americans, and the advance of the Syrian army,
are victories for them too.
European governments, rattled in the way that happens when the problems of the Middle East
come knocking at their doors, are calling on Turkey to stop the offensive. Some Nato members
can see a nightmare scenario unfolding, with Syria, backed by Russian power, potentially
facing off against Turkey, a fellow Nato member. The Russians say they are in regular contact
with Turkey. But in a fluid, violent theatre of war. the chances for misperception, mistakes
and escalation are always present.
Perhaps what has happened in the last week simplifies the endgame of the Syrian war. Two
major players, the Americans and the Kurds, look to be out of the picture. And President
Assad, along with his allies from Russia and Iran, continue to solidify their victory in
Syria's catastrophic war."
WHAT IS BEING LEFT OUT OF THE CURRENT COMBING THRU THE ASHES OF THE SYRIAN WAR IS THE FACT
SAUDI STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR.
The discussion, if one might even call it that, regarding the apparent President Donald
Trump decision to withdraw at least some American soldiers from Syria has predictably
developed along partisan, ideologically fueled lines.
Not too sure where this partisan line is, Dr. G.
It looks like they're screeching from both sides of the isle.
Both powerful Republican Liz Cheney and Hillary called the pull out "sickening".
While Republican Senator Rand Paul applauds the decision, Tulsi Gabbard condemns it.
As for 'ideological', we all know that ideologically, the vast majority of all
congress-critters (99+%) from both sides of the isle, are motivated by the ideology of
doing "what's good for the Jew$"
NATO agreement stipulates that if an alliance member is threatened, other members must
support it in its defense. Turkey has not made that claim, but it is completely
plausible that it should do so .
Are you joking, Dr. G?
Hasn't Turkey been engaged in waging an aggressive war on Syria these last few years?
Wouldn't Turkey demanding military aid from NATO, (for a "threat" from the Kurds or
Syria), amount to the US demanding NATO aid for a "threat" from Iran?
IOW, it's Turkey that has been the murderous aggressor, and the Kurds and Syrians their
victims. Not to mention that Turkey's military could make mince-meat out of the Kurdish
"threat" in a New York minute.
So it seems to me that the only thing holding Turkey back, is orders from the ZUSA and
Russia. Russia is certainly a large part of this equation, IMHO.
did not understand the Turkish mindset regarding the Kurdish threat, which they regard
as existential.
'Existential'?
Would a limited autonomy Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border, perhaps incorporating
a small swath of Turkey, be the end of Turkey's existence?
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the world demanded that Germany sacrifice some of its
territory as recompense for its aggressive military imperialism.
If I were in a position to do so, I'd hand Syria a slice of Israel's and Saudi Arabia's
and Turkey's territory – as a punishment for their depraved attacks on an innocent and
unthreatening Syria.
Definitely the Hatay province, which arguably belongs to Syria anyways.
I'm sure Turkey would call that an existential! calamity, but I'd tell them 'karma's a
bitch'.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's
actual record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more
soldiers to no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special
ops forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in
Venezuela, continues to support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors
and has exited to from treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed
conflict less likely. And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in
Iraq, a country that the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity
and which is now experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump
is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting than
all of his predecessors. These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to
end wars
I remain you most loyal fan, Dr. G. But I confess this sounds to me like you think the
situation above started on the day of Trump's inauguration.
He inherited those things by the former ZUS regimes.
He has tried over and over again to disengage, only to be dragged back by the screeching
from the members of his own party. Not to mention the ((media)).
There are a lot of reasons to condemn the actions of Trump. The Golan Heights, for
instance. But it seem glaringly obvious to me at least, that Trump is not ideologically
committed to Eternal Wars.
As you put it, he threatened regime change in Venezuela.
He wanted to have talks with the Taliban, (and the whole deepstate and their ((media))
screeched)
He "continues to support Saudi Arabia" but as Pat Buchannan points out.. "The Saudis
got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or
Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh's oil production, did
nothing.
Said Washington, this is between Saudi Arabia and Iran."
And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that
the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now
experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds
You really do make it sound like all that is his fault.
I love your work Dr. G. And consider you one of the very best, most honorable and most
courageous writers out there.
But I confess, (like so many others!), it seems like to me that you have an irrational,
personal hatred for Donald Trump that colors your perspective.
IMHO.
I didn't have time to write this response well, have to go. Hope it's not too off
base..
@animalogicMore information on Trump & drone attacks would be useful & welcome.
There is a gigantic problem in America. It makes us dysfunctional. Certain news cannot get
to the American people.
Everyone in the know gets it – do not go to the NY Times with anti-Israel news. Do
NOT buck the AIPAC agenda – period. The darkest element of the ADL will be at your door
within minutes. The US government will soon follow.
It is obvious – when it comes to Jew matters, US government employees fear for their
jobs, if not their lives. Same for the MSM.
US President Donald Trump has lambasted American broadcaster ABC News for airing a video from
Knob Creek Gun Range in the town of West Point, Kentucky, claiming that the network used
footage from the facility to depict a Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians in northern Syria.
Trump called the mistake "a big scandal" and "a real disgrace".
"A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the
Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace", the president wrote on Twitter early Tuesday
morning.
@renfro
The Crimean Peninsula was annexed by the Russian Federation in February–March 2014.
Despite all the protests about Crimea, the Donbass invasion using asymmetric tactics with
Putin out outright denying responsability, Ukraine is a vital interest for Putin, and he
would have been willing to confront America and Nato there because it is his home ground and
advantage. But Russia is powerful enough to; Putin only went into Syria after Obama decided
not to overthrow Assad. No one particularly cares about Syria and neither do they care about
the Kurds (despite them having as good a case as the Palestinians to be given a state) and
that is why jumped up Turkey can get away with invading Syria and attacking Kurds, just like
they INVADED Cyprus.
This whole thing is probably a a storm in a teacup, but if Turkey gets into trouble they
know, because they were already told very clearly over Cyprus, that if they play Lone Ranger,
Nato does not have their back. Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey
threatening to get their own nuclear weapons because Israel has them is not very good
diplomacy from Turkey's point of view. It is begining to experience delusions of its own
importance.
@renfroIt appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
Here is a very good video – Putin being interviewed. They asked him hard questions.
He came across as being very rational.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
People! The internet is there for you to verify/debunk any statement you question. Running a
website is a lot of work, why don't you guys collect the information you demand from Mr. Unz,
and share with us?
Or are you looking at others to supply you with ready-made opinions?
@onebornfree
Thanks for the link about Mr.Bourne and you correct about his statement applying to ALL
states.
They are more like progressive, merciful and humanitarian slave owners.
Be free
I wonder why the "high IQ" westerners have never deemed it fit to study their undeniable mass
psychopathy.
If they were indeed as smart as claimed, they would begin to admit it, and given the claim
to their innate highly civilised humanitarian inclinations *cough* , they would come to the
conclusion that this world needs less of their cursed kind.
Since that is not going to happen, I guess nature has its way
@Rev.
Spooner The point he makes is extremely vague. No specificity. None. Yet 10's of
thousands are dead. Ok, how about some evidence.
Why don't you go back to kindergarten, Rev?
@SafeNow
The support of the public for the military derives from constant and pervasive propaganda
particularly through movies and TV shows , David Sirota calls it the "Military
Entertainment
Complex".
Zero Hedge : " Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon , CIA
& NSA ".
@Johnny
Walker Read I was making a rhetorical point. I don't think the U.S. can decouple from the
Middle East.
I do, however, think that Trump wants value for blood and treasure.
Long-term, America simply lacks the financial strength to continue to project power. The
MIC costs the U.S. a tremendous amount of money. Budget to the MIC will continue to be
slashed over time. The Deep State in the U.S. will contract simply due to financial
realities.
Israel will be less and less of a priority.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio relative to
the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
@Whitewolf
Yes, lack of talent and totall inane radical left wing proposals whiped up by the AOC wing
and swallowed by all the candidates 'hook, line and stinker '.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
After JFK's assassination, every successive president is/was shown a film clip of JFK's head
exploding from an angle nobody's ever seen.
It doesn't matter what party they're from; they'll tow TPTB's line. All of them.
US Foreign Policy = Occupied Palestine Foreign Policy.
That's all that's wrong with US foreign policies in a nutshell.
@Bragadocious
Whether he or his father served is irrelevant. Carter was in the Naval Academy, Reagan and
Bush 43 were in the reserves. Clinton had none and neither did Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge,
Harding, or Wilson.
What is telling, is the "alleged bone spurs", and "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf".
An allegation is an unproven accusation. What Giraldi is stating, is that Trump's physician
falsified records. You think old man Trump sent Donnie for a megadollar military academy
education so he could avoid the military?
As for Drumpf, I was acquainted with a couple of Schmidts who became Smith, a Bryjolfson who
became Byron, a Pachkowski who became Berry and, no one says Roosevelt's name was changed
from Rosenfeld. The snide commentary doesn't help.
I have said all along, that there is a lot not to like about Trump, but let's keep it in the
realm of reality. Whether he wants to end the stupid wars or not, he will never be allowed
to, as long as Giraldi's old employer is in business and making up non-existent bullshit
"threats to American interests", whatever they are.
@Sean
"Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey threatening to get their own nuclear
weapons because Israel has them is not very good diplomacy from Turkey's point of view"
Israel is known to puff and bluff . It is grandiose polemic or rabid canine barking. It
was not exposed by the west . But the west now knows it ,thanks to Hizbullah
@anon
Getting women to work had nothing to do with their 'liberation.'
Even though my mom had her own [private] school, my dad's salary was enough to provide for
all 5 of us, go on annual holidays abroad and put three kids through college, loan-free.
To TPTB, it's better to tax 2 people instead of 1.
To them it's just a number game, like the 'Torches of Freedom' gambit, all spiel, smoke
and mirrors, to fool us gullible idiots into believing we do have a say
We should really start to use our guns and rifles to free the country and rid it of the
rot that's smothering it.
Oh, look, another Cartra$$hian selfie butt shot on Instagram!!!!!!
It's very old habit.Very much ingrained . It is also generational . Increasingly and suddenly
religious also as the feckless toothless Evangelicals are rooting for 1 second fame .
But here is a short chronology–
1 Plans for mayhem in Syria have been on the imperial table since the 1950s (Operation
Straggle).
2 US general Wesley Clark gave the game away years ago when he revealed US intentions in
the Middle East after 9/11: seven countries were to be invaded
3 Seymour Hersh gave the game away too in his 2007 New Yorker article: "The Redirection".
In this piece he revealed how the US were hooking up once again with the Saudi/Sunni
fundamentalists in and around Syria.
4 France's ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas also gave the game away when he revealed that the
British State (a definite CIA asset) was preparing for a war on Syria two years before the
start of the Syrian Holocaust in 2011.
"This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June,
"goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."
As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that
time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help
of "rebels"' (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)
Between 2006 to 2010, the US spent 12 million dollars in order to support and instigate
demonstrations and propaganda against the Syrian government. 6,3 million dollars was funneled
to the Movement for Justice and Development, a Syrian dissident organization based in London.
The Movement operated the Barada satellite channel
@Johnny
Walker Read Quote: "America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Reply: Kindly allow me to correct your statement.
"America/Israel have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Russia has a wet entrance into the Med via Syria.
Perhaps you've dozed off a bit over the past few years, but Russia has been destroying and
killing the FUKZUIS 'war' machine goons in Syria [aka the takfiri terrorist].
They're assisting in getting the country back [on its feet] as a whole again.
@anon
I'll keep it short. You can find the beginnings back in the 2012 coverage.
In 2012 Saudi sent Saudi Prince Bandar to Syria to be in charge of helping Syrian rebels
bring down Assad, an ally of Riyadh's biggest regional rival Iran.
They were originally created, set up and armed and financed by Saudi.
The Saudis were then joined by Israel and Qatari and finally by the US under Obama.
A new twist appeared in the Saudi rebels war with Assad when ISI appeared and joined the
fight.
This scared Saudi shitless as they thought this ISI version of ALQ might be a threat to them
and lead to an invasion of Saudi as ALQ always saw it as a' westernerized' Saudi.
Everyone doubled down on both fighting Assad and fighting ISI ..which was a FUBAR if there
ever was one.
Then enter the proxies, the Kurds, the PPK terrorist group all fighting for their own
agendas within and under cover of the original war on Assad.
What could possibility go wrong in all this? LOL
Then enter Russia. Which gave some pause to the US in how far they wanted to go to throw
Assad out for Saudi and Israel and open a gateway to get Iran.
So now we are headed to the ending of the Saud and others Syrian adventure which is probably
best expressed by the fable of the fox and his shadow.
"A fox arose in the morning and saw his large shadow cast in the morning sun and said " I
will have a camel for lunch today'. The fox hunted all day for the camel without success. As
he paused in the afternoon setting sun he saw his shadow was much smaller and said "A mouse
will do after all."
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during
the Holocaust. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
[Alexandra said:] "Anne Frank's diary was the first diary that was published. And her
voice was so powerful that it captured the voices of all the children and all the people
who had been killed. That's the way it's framed. And that by reading her diary and sort of
taking her into our hearts, we could redeem her life. . . ." [US Holocaust Memorial Museum
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/alexandra-zapruder
]
Alexandra Zapruder is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the
Zapruder Film.
Her grandfather was Abraham Zapruder, who took a twenty-six second home movie of President
John F. Kennedy's assassination[1] -- now known as the Zapruder film.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Zapruder
]
From a strategic point of view it is very noteworthy to observe that Kurdish troops are
fully positioned east of the Euphrates River. The Kurds are allies of Israel and a vital
proxy implemented to fracture Syria along the lines envisioned for Greater Israel (Oded Yinon
Plan).
It is perceived that Russia is an ally of Syria. However, Putin has not prevented Kurdish
troops from establishing themselves firmly within Syrian territory.
Israel along with their diaspora will never relent until their abomination of "Eretz
Yisrael" is achieved. It's not an accident that the ISIS flag is marked "All Jew."
@NoseytheDuke
Washingtonsblog : " Balkanizing the Middle East – The real goal of America and Israel :
shatter Iraq and Syria into many small pieces "
Thomas Harrington : " One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine
conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet "
Sanchez : " Plan B is to Balkanize Israel is endorsing its plan B for Syria just when its
enemies are making it clear that its plan A (Assad must go) is not happening anytime soon ."
Pro-Israel America launched Tuesday endorsing 27 candidates -- 14 Democrats and 13
Republicans. All have long histories of working with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee to advance the brand of pro-Israel legislation it favors. Its endorsements on its
website praise the named lawmakers for their actions favoring the legislative agenda closely
identified with the lobby: funding for Israel's defense, sanctions on Iran and its regional
proxies, and bills that seek to counter the boycott Israel movement.
They include Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Coons, D-Del.; Rep. Steny Hoyer,
D-Md., the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy,
R-Calif., the minority leader; Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, that committee's ranking Republican.
here are all of them listed .make sure you don't vote for one:
@barr
Blaming Saudi or Turkey or UAE has possibly some validity but as far as far the effect of the
independent move by any of them is concerned , it has less than zero effect on Syria on its
own.
It is like a hypothetical scenario where Florida and Alabama are independent countries .
Rest of America is splintered into 50 different states and Canada is trying to get rid of
Cuban regime for 50 years and only in last 5 years Florida and Alabama have joined the scheme
under dubious circumstances of pressure bribery and blackmail.
@NoseytheDuke
Israel was more powerful and also more favorite of the west across ideological drive until
2003
It is not a normal country . Somewhere that guilt and remorse of stealing and killing have
left a mark on its psyche . It doesn't know how to settle and be normal
It doesn't know the meaning of the power, advantage or gain . The paranoia drives to more
dangerous world of fear and insecurity . It can't rest . Even if it is left alone, he talks
to itself and bangs it head against wall . Recent election is the manifestation of more
madness . It's begging jaunt to Russia and screaming through US media show how badly weakened
the country is.
The countries that bow to Israel – UK, USA, Egypt, Saudi are finding themselves also
badly weakened ,
A seed was planted in 2006 in Lebanon . That tree is growing taller and establishing roots
, Israel will be a shrub hiding in the shadow of that tree in a few years time.
Soviet and Russia were both almost destroyed by Jews . Now they look for the Russian shadow
to hide .
@renfro
A pack of lions can bring down an adult elephant at night when they have the advantage, but
they are careful not to choose a really big strong one. Russia is fighting in the Ukraine its
traditional heartland and what H. Mackinder called the Heartland of the World Island. A
victory in Syria that only came because Obama chose to not crush Assad with a couple of days
of air raids is hardly evidence of the Empire falling.
The real meaning of Trump is the facing of the threat from China, and if the neocons want
to play games in the Middle East so what? There is a fight coming with China and it is a
match for the West led by giant Bull Elephant America, Backward ME shitholes all together
could not take down America in a thousand years.
And what were the Kurds in Iraq called?
Didn't Saddam use some type of gas on them and that's why we were siding with them? Who told
about the incubator babies, maybe some other terrorist group?
@renfro
Mmmm, okay, you must have meant something like 'organized shooting' when you said, "SAUDI
STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR." Sorry I bit on false advertising.
As you see from 'barr' at #119 above, your starting point is months, years, even decades
too late. For a fact (I've met some of the Syrians who met with Robert Ford in Damascus, now
here and still lobbying for regime-change), the US was meddling, encouraging, prompting the
anti-Assadists well before the 2011 demonstrations.
@Daniel
Rich Putin is not the nice guy we have been told he is. He is in Syria for a reason, and
that is not simply because he wants Syria returned to al-Assad. Syria is only one cog in the
wheel. World wide Communism marches on, if you hadn't noticed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=4sKxkY0Tz5s
LOL. My favourite rapid US evacuation was the CIA flying off the roof of the Saigon
Embassy while the Viet Kong were busting in through the door and running up the stairs.
who benefits from these wars – isn't it just one small but powerful segment of
America – AIPAC. Isn't it time to call these wars by the honest truthful term –
"AIPAC Wars?"
Except the main beneficiary of these wars is George Soros and his anti-Semitic Globalist
movement.
Soros intentionally orchestrated the ultra-weak, time limited JCPOA treaty to create a
nuclear arms race among Iran, SA, Turkey, and possibly other MENA nations. That way he and
his buddies with MIC investments could profit by selling weapons to all sides.
So let's put in everyone's face with a factual term
Trump confuses tweeting with taking action. How many times has he mentioned 'birthright
citizenship' and then done nothing about it?
A: Every time.
If Trump drives too hard, too early and the case arrives at the Supreme Court while it is
split 5-4 in favor of 'birthright citizenship' Is that a win? Or, a loss?
There is a huge difference between 'failed action' and 'successful action'.
Given the proven hostility of the deep state establishment, it makes a great deal of sense
to lay groundwork now (via tweets), but only launch the correct constitutional action once
the courts are prepared to support it.
With class, Philip Giraldi amused me by his article's mere title, "Trump wants to end the
"Stupid Wars?"
Oh yea! Thanks, Phil , & please continue with offering dashes of intelligent,
dissident, & unflappable humor. Haha. For example, "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs at Normandy, they were undoubtedly on
the German side."
(Zigh) The insatiable global tag team, M.I.C. and The Land of Bilk & Money , want "Big
Time" and more stupidly unnecessary & immoral wars. (Zigh) One sure path to a 2nd term
for President Bonespur is for him to get off the "low energy" Turkey/Syria skirmish, &
get on with real war against Iran , for Israel.
Thanks, Phil! Fyi, I think Senator Lindsey Graham wants to get Bolton back in The Blue
& White House, and sanction Camp Mar a Lago.
P.S.: For all commenters assembled here, linked below is Stephen Colbert's satiric
covering of President Drumpf's having followed Israel's yonder (fallen) , and establishing a
US Space Force Command! To that, Colbert quipped, "Trump can not join it because of his
galactic bonespur."
@9/11
Inside job Seven Nations to Destroy for the nine eleven false flag. Wesley Clark
mentioned the seven – Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.
Seven Nations to Destroy for Yahweh's Israel – Deut. 7:1-2 –
Tanakh/OT.
Iraq 2003 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
Libya 2011 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
How four other nations on the list that were destroyed.
Somalia –
Since 2006 it has been a mess with Israel/US Al-Qaeda running the show.
Bizarre article about US/Israel terrorists "worried" about the environment.
Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabab has reportedly announced a ban on the use of
single-use plastic bags in territories under its control.
The Al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, which has been blamed for thousands of deaths
since its inception in 2006, dubbed plastic a "serious threat to the well-being of both
humans and animals," the BBC reported, citing Al-Shabab's radio station Radio Andalus.
It even mentions that Osama Bin Laden, the puppet of Israel/US, was "worried" about the
environment too. It makes one wonder if this Climate Change thing and Imperialism terror are
connected.
Bin Laden wrote that Americans needed to save Obama from corporate and other nefarious
influences to empower him to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its
destiny."
He added that the world would be better off fighting climate change than waging what he
claimed was a war against Islam.
Sudan
Divided in two in 2011. Israel/US is pushing for more divisions.
Asked about his demand for protection during his meeting with Putin, al-Bashir said we
wanted to highlight "the big U.S. pressure and conspiracy" on Sudan in Darfur crisis and
the huge pressure exerted on his government to separate the South Sudan.
"Now we have information that the American quest is to divide the Sudan into five
countries If we do not find protection and security. America took the world leadership and
devastated the Arab world. (See) what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Iraq, what
happened in Syria, what happened in Yemen and what happened in Sudan," said al-Bashir.
Lebanon
Invaded by Israel in the summer of 2006. It made a mess out of Lebanon. Israel had a lot
of trouble fighting off Hezbollah. This is the reason that Israel fears going into Lebanon
again. After this adventure, Golems like US and its friends are the go to for Israel's war
adventures.
Initially, both Israel and Hezbollah claimed victory in the war, with Nasrallah
declaring that Hezbollah had achieved a "divine, historic and strategic victory". Some
international observers saw the fact that Hezbollah had survived the Israeli assault,
despite the asymmetrical power balance, as a PR victory for the group. According to
Reuters, the Lebanese government estimated direct war damage at $2.8 billion, and lost
output and income for 2006 at $2.2 billion. The economy also shrank five per cent, with
tourism effectively halted.
Six of the seven were messed up, destroyed. It leaves only Iran left. Iran is in the
"news" everyday for this reason.
Trump is flawed, ok then, but we had Clinton as the alternative. She would have been ten
times worse so what choice did the American people have? He's rolling up the Obama-Clinton
project in Syria which was a huge atrocity. Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have
ensued had the US backed jihadi cannon fodder actually succeeded in overthrowing Assad? It's
not a one man show and Trump has to go along with much of what has been taking place. Much of
this has been imposed upon the American people as well as on Trump.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish PKK. Why
so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have been resisting
for so long. But yet the mighty Turks are going to defeat the Kurds of Syria even as they
can't defeat the ones living in their own country? Perhaps they'll take on the inferior
Syrian army at the same time. After all, they're a big NATO ally with lots of weapons to dump
on lightly armed foes. Reality is they haven't fought anyone in a hundred years so who knows
how well they'd do.
Quit calling Afghanistan a "war". It's an occupation with anti-guerilla operations going on.
Apparently they don't like being occupied so they fight on.
Trump's name is Trump, not Drumpf. Or do we now refer to people by the family name used a
hundred years ago, or why not five hundred years ago?
Excerpt from
"Trump Mistake: Allowing Turkish Invasion of Northern Syria"
by Joel Skousen (there is no direct link to it but it is/was on his website World Affairs Brief ):
This week in a telephone conversation with Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan he [President
Trump] assented to Erdogan's demand from over a year ago to let them enter Turkey and
establish a buffer zone where Turkey can resettle the hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees that have burdened Turkey since the beginning of the US-created terror attacks on
Syria. But as part of that strategy, and without emphasizing that to Trump, Erdogan intends
to drive out or destroy the Syrian Kurds which occupy northern Syria. Erdogan calls them
terrorists because the US-backed YPG Kurds are affiliated with the homegrown Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) which represents about 20% of the Turkish population, and which has
been fighting for independence from Turkey. So while the Turkish Foreign Minister plays lip
service to Syrian sovereignty, Turkey has already begun the invasion and occupation of
northern Syria. While Trump claims he is fulfilling a campaign promise to remove troops
from Syria, this isn't really a pullout at all since only two observation posts in the path
of the Turkish invasion are pulling out. There are thousands of other US troops elsewhere
in Syria protecting US-backed terrorist rebels.
@Johnny
Walker Read H.E. Mr. Putin has clearly stated it's up to the Syrian population to choose
who leads them, not him.
Tartus has a port Russia needs and uses.
Khmeimim Air Base is also needed and used by the Russian AF.
These are military strategic assets and used to counter balance the FUKZUS 'war' machine's
bases dotted around the ME region. Of course, those you don't mention.
No president actually controls the government, least of all Trump. The Deep State controls
the government. Trump is a an interloper. Why does one have to remind the author of this
elementary fact? The threat to destroy the economy of Turkey was made by Stephen Israel
Mnuchin. Trump had to make noises as if it was his "decision" when in fact he had nothing to
do with it. What Trump wants to do, and what he can do, are entirely different things. And
anyone who has anything to do with Americans knows what happened to all the previous allies.
Mnuchin has clued in those Turks who may have had illusions.
@renfro
very bad US is indeed . It continues to sabotage ,cast evil eye,try to strangle ,and continue
to punish Cuba . That long history is really long punctuated by half hearted Obama attempt
.
Once empire decided a project,it becomes , NASA , Present Danger , PNAC or NED . The project
goes on losing the aim . The project goes on because the vested interest
,employees,pensioner,glory seeking men, arm merchant, politicians and expatriate find means
to rake up profit and launder dishonest living into honest lifestyle . Name is changed when
it suits the project . Aim is not lost. It becomes the final destination . It never stops
energegizing the dishonest, looter,profit seekers, and opportunists . Often the brains that
gather under the flag are not that intelligent or ideologically certain.
Money and corruption drive them.
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past
5 years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
Going broke happens slowly at first, then quickly. The Western cities are going broke, as
are those in the Third World. Nothing else changes peoples minds like having their basic
income reduced or eliminated.
All the promises (including self-governmement and freedom and equality) have turned out to
be lies, smoke. Computers, which were supposed to be a seamless adjunct to human existence, a
source of education and information, and a liberation from the bad parts of part of reality,
have turned into (poor but cheap) entertainment, gossip, a drug substitute, and a propaganda
source. The result is shock and horror, sometimes followed by violent psychosis [1] (e.g.
antifa).
Once again, I recommend "Marat/Sade"
(1967). It gives you a feel for what a revolution is like once the revolution gets going.
Note the movie's final scene, which almost breaks the "fourth wall" convention. It was made
during our last revolution, and the director wanted to record the spirit of what he had
seen.
@Art I
like it, very catchy, original, Art said: "AIPAC Wars."
Oh yea, Art, thanks, and a "spade is a spade" when one manages to get the hell out of the
AIPAC shade.
Unfortunately tonight, millions of process estranged Amerikan Democrat & GOP voters
are now "beamed up" to an AIPAC-approved strange & hostile telescreen's DebateLand.
(Zigh) Across aisle, including a possible Beaming Bloomberg entry, , "winnable" 2020
presidential nomination contestants shall pick & choose, finagle & sell, an either/or
USrael foreign policy posture, as regrettably follows:
1.) The Zio-Democrat War to end the deplorable Trump's stupid call to end all Amerika's
endless Wars just for the paltry good of gradually achieving Greater Israel's unending
endgame. or,
2.) The Zio-GOP's War to end all Democrat Party hopefuls' stupid call to end all US endless
wars just because a lefty AIPAC-Branch put an Israel Labor Party "bug in their ear" about
having lowly dead-ender 'Merikan workers fucking pay for it.
Thanks again, Art, and "Good night America."*
* Phil Giraldi inhabits Sinatra's City That Never Sleeps.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio
relative to the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
Agree.
And the financial debt must be augmented by degradation of physical infrastructure
(especially in cities and city support infrastructure) and the degradation of human capital
by importation of low IQ populations and effective destruction of education. And the capital
misallocation that continues today.
The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as global
trade will end with it.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish
PKK. Why so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have
been resisting for so long.
Turkish birth rate low (lower in cities than in hinterlands), Kurdish birth rate high.
Kurds replace Turks in a few decades. Kurds don't follow Turkish cultural norms, nor Turks
follow Kurdish. Kurds don't want to wait a few decades, want power _now_ (c.f. Black Power
and Whiteness in USA). Kurds use destructive commando raides ("terrorism") to get power now.
Turks don't like that, respond with same.
Long term: demography wins barring very large change.
Please correct parts of this that are wrong. I'm not following this conflict closely.
Latest TruNews godcast, E. Michael Jones: The Deception Facing the Church by Christian
Zionism
YT Description:
Today on TruNews, Dr. E. Michael Jones joins us to talk about the influence of modern
Christian Zionism upon the American Church, and how that has led to a dramatic
radicalization of US foreign policy in favor of one nation, Israel.
Prof. Jones takes the deluded xian Zionists to task, calling them "useful idiots." My
favourite passage starts @ 18:58:
.. which means you got a lot of Christians who don't understand the gospel. Because
there are plenty of Christians out there who are Christian Zionists. It's a simple fact of
life. I think it can be traced to Jewish influence in our culture Jewish influence over the
publishing industry, for example. How did the Scofield Bible end up being published by
Oxford University Press? Because it's a great scholarly work? No! Because of people like
Mr. Untermeyer pulled strings. This is the way this happened. It's the biggest issue facing
American politics, right now. The role that Zionism is playing right now, in corrupting the
government of the United States, in diverting American resources into a quagmire in the
Middle East, which doesn't serve the interests of the American people at all and is all
done in the name of Israel.
@Counterinsurgency
I'm kind of having a mental barrier with this now.
There is a guy in Vancouver who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, Jensen I believe (he
wrote to the Bank of Canada and a list of people in 2006). He argues that the fundamentals
are even worse now due to the failure to finance these foreign adventures and other factors
(expenditures on domestic expenses not matching tax income, etc.).
I haven't even taken the time to consider the knock on effects. Mentally, I've been more
focused on having to sit through the screaming match that is going to occur over who is to
blame and the lying that will go on with respect to needing to move to a sound money system
but having bankers et al try to argue for a rollover into a new currency. It is going to be
ugly, I can feel it. It will provide an opportunity for some serious structural change and
constitutional amendments. A whole host of reforms are open when you have a debt induced
currency collapse. I just know it could be really ugly and I've been dreading thinking
through how this will play out. I keep thinking that I never expected to live in a time like
this; I think back to being a teenager during the Reagan years and, despite the Cold
War-nuclear war scenario hanging over our heads, it seemed a much more optimistic time.
I am not optimistic. I'm very worried.
@Robjil
Somalia under a failing Siad Barre regime was going to the dogs with various warlords
cannibalising each other. Then the Americans were told in the flush of victory in the Gulf in
1991, that they should just kick the door in to save the dumb Muslims. It is not the fault of
the late senior Bush that Somalia is compounded of that specimen of humanity that emerges
like clockwork when African tribalism is married to Islamic fanaticism (but is there any
other kind?) . The Americans were minding their own business, but were told that it was the
humanitarian thing (and furthermore quite cheap to boot) to do at little cost to themselves
to save Muslim chillun'.
Afghanistan was no better : The idiot, the younger George Bush instead of bombing the the
hell out of Al-Queda and leaving was instead misled by mystagogues of various hues, including
his own self into sinking lives and treasure in a vain attempt to civilise the Afghans.
The truth is the further you keep away from Muslims, the better it is for your health and
sanity, notwithstanding the parallel machinations of various neocohens, for Islam is a
pernicious religion that breeds insanity, intolerance and bloodshed all by itself.
E. Michael Jones: a very wise man. He believes in free speech and is hated by Jews who, of
course, label him an 'anti-semite'. I would argue they are 'truth averse' fanatical
maniacs.
He makes a good case that 'Christian Zionism' is a heresy. I don't believe he uses that term
BUT I do.
It's just another bubbling that is bursting.
What will they do besides scream and throw tantrums? Is it time for another false flag 911
type event?
What the media never really exposed was how Syria, and every Middle East country that has
been attacked by the DeepStateZio monster, has seen the oldest Christian communities on the
planet under attack. Strange pattern. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, initiated by the
British alliance with the Wahabi's and the Saud Family and furthered by the CIA/Mossad in
Afghanistan, has corresponded with the destruction and diasporas of the world's oldest
Christian communites.
Somehow, Europe has ended up with a bunch of Muslims when these Christians would have fit
into their societies much better.
I think that none of this just 'happened'. I strongly suspect that if we were to kick over
some rocks we would find the usual suspects: the Khazar/Black Nobility Alliance.
@renfro
How?????????????????????????????????????????
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I do think it was Mc Cain.
Concerning historically lazy Saudis I am entirely confident that they were only taking care
of payroll.
( I am not entirely confident but there is a possibility that CIA did channel some profits
from Afghanistan poppy fields for this noble cause.
@Counterinsurgency
Quote: "The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as
global trade will end with it."
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road project,
[IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global trade will
not nosedive along with it.
Too much a stake for the multinationals [not necessary a good thing, but alas].
Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington
that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, which
later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which were,
at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
It's very challenging to come up with any foreign policy initiatives that do not serve
Zionist Israel's interests, first and foremost. Israeli interests have defined American
foreign policy objectives in the ME for much of the post-WWII era. Not at Israel's behest,
but on Israel's instructions and demands via pro-Zionist lobbies and the infestation of the
Administration with Israel First officials, Israeli citizens and spies. Add to that the
Israel First MSM.
@ivan
Is it methamphetamine instead of regular fentanyl ? Anyway, this logic and perverted emotion
make sense to you. Unfortunately it will reinforce your decision to switch . Business will
sure be coming back from China to rural America.
@A123 I
respectfully disagree on this particular matter. There is no US law bestowing birthright
citizenship. All that would change is recognition of what the law really says.
Trump waiting to win another 4 (still a gamble) AND for RBG's animatronics to fizzle out
AND for her replacement to not be another skunk like Roberts is foolish.
There is no underwater 38th-dimensional quantum chess being played here, and we still have
no wall.
Oops, I posted this under another writer. (Small wonder I got no answer.) Since then, someone
else remarked that at the end of WWI this land (northern Syria) was taken from Turkey. So
this is a long grievance, with deep sense of entitlement.
Rurik wrote, " .the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they
use Libya's stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring that
Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the team.
Maybe Phil can enlighten us:
We know that Robert Ford, US Embassador to Syria, was meeting privately with Syrian "civil
society" activists before the 2011 demonstrations.
-- Was Erdogan/Turkey also involved in infiltrating, inflaming those anti-Assad
elements?
-- How did Turkey involvement begin?
-- Was the CIA actively involved in Syria before the fall of Libya?
C'mon guys.
Using prior military service as some sort of litmus test to the right to critique involvement
and opinion sharing today plays to an audience mentality that encourages blind
patriotism.
There really are no necessary wars these days as they are all being fought for the banker
elite which holds no loyalty to country though it plays on ppl's ignorance to use such
loyalties for propaganda purposes.
There is no justification for US troops to be all over the world as a banker mercenary force
and this site acknowledges 911 was an Israeli- internationalist false flag which removes all
justifications for the meddling in Israeli neighbor's internal affairs.
Tolerating this to get air time with magazines that lie for power is encouraging this
negative behavior for personal advantage in a country and world striving to control the most
minute areas of our lives.
Going along to get along only brings the eternal boot down of the forehead forever@!
The fact that none of these bickering forces are targeting Israel who always was the
catalyst for the divisions there, is a huge clue that we and Israel are the problem causers
primarily. Of course we need false flags to excite the population to support the fake war on
terror within the US and Europe (as well as justify the reverse colonialism going on). Jews
for hundreds of years have counted on stupid goyim to do the fighting but now that Israel is
a supposed stand alone nation, that should be harder to accomplish but apparently total
corporate media control keeps the truth hidden from 85% of the public.
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road
project, [IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global
trade will not nosedive along with it.
I actually hadn't thought of that. Now that you point it out, of course the dollar trade
will decrease. Negative interest rates are, in a way, saying that nobody wants US Dollars
anymore, and trades that are not in US Dollars are being actively sought. The decrease will
happen a bit before the USN becomes ineffective. And that will be hard on the
multi-nationals, but I can't say I have much sympathy. They were firmly behind the move of
Western manufacturing to East Asia – what did they think would happen?
But I do disagree over the assertion that global trade will remain about as it is.
The New Silk Road. Interesting topic.
Well, first of all it's a reasonable thing for the PRC to do. Historically, the Silk
Road has paid off for China, at least in terms of precious metals, and being dependent on a
single transportation mode for one's raw materials is strategically undesirable. It's a
good move. It's also an attempt to realize McKinder's proposed making the World Island into
a unified state[1].
But a couple of points:
a) New Silk Road is much more expensive than sea transport [2]. If sea lanes are cut
off, China's raw materials costs increase by several times.
b) New Silk Road recapitulates the interaction of European empires of the 1800s through
1900s with ethnicities along the Silk Road. The Europeans were resented and eventually
ejected. The Chinese are having similar problems.
China has loaned money to various nations which have then spent that money on immediate
consumption and are attempting to repudiate the debt. The Chinese (who have no compunctions
about debt repudiation through currency devaluation) are apparently taking over completion
of the Silk Road facilities for which the natives can no longer pay (having spent the money
on other things). Local rulers are saying that this makes the Chinese foreign invaders (on
a very low level so far). Just like the Europeans.
Chinese society also does not mix well with either Islamic or African tribal society, yet
the Silk Road crosses both cultural territories.
So far as I know, the Chinese takeover of the Panama Canal since the US evacuation has gone
well. Last I heard, a few years back, Panama had started teaching Chinese in its public
schools. Chinese operations in South and Meso America are increasing, however, and I know
little about how they are going.
The nice thing about policed sea lanes is that shippers don't have to worry much about
the natives. Piracy is and has been a problem, but so far not a serious one. New Silk Road
goes overland, and that has (historically) always led to security problems with the locals,
whoever the locals may be.
So: Let's suppose that the USN were to become ineffective. Only the part of the Silk
Road guarded by the Russian Federation would remain secure. The rest would be subject to
local raids and extortion from the local government. Note that raw materials costs would
increase drastically for everybody (because of less shipping), so local governments and
bandits would have motives for confiscating goods.
This would be especially the case in Africa, which is largely dependent on food imports.
That conflict could become severe, as China is increasingly dependent on Africa for raw
materials (as is the rest of the world).
In other words, sole reliance on the New Silk Road (should that ever be necessary) would
be expensive in terms of shipping and in terms of security / warfare costs. China's
bellicose policy is, IMHO, counterproductive. China should be positioning itself to police
the sea lanes cooperatively but reluctantly with a declining USN, gradually assuming the
mantle of worldwide protection of the sea lanes that China needs so badly. Current efforts
to be able to interdict the sea lanes are not in the PRC's interest, as the PRC needs these
sea lanes open. It's sort of like developing a hyperbomb to make the Sun go nova. Under
what circumstances would you use such a device? Under what circumstances would China want
to cease shipping by sea?
So, what's likely to happen? The USN will decline because it needs recapitalization due
to age and a changing threat, and the US is instead devoting its income to debt repayment
and immediate social stability expenditures. The PRC, which has never been a naval power,
will still attempt to keep global trade alive. When that fails, the PRC will trade more
with the Russian Federation It will also take what sea and land it has, make an
expeditionary force out of it, and deploy it in some trading zones (possibly in countries
that have resources China needs) rather than see its population starve and itself
overthrown. That's the standard response from any H. Sap. political organization. Things
will get very messy.
And please remember that I'm like the weatherman: I report, I don't cause.
@Stan
Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for the
West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility. A
confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,
@Daniel
Rich What part of BOTH the US and Russia are only there to serve their own
interest don't people understand. My only point is Russia is not there out of the goodness of
their hearts. People who claim Russia is fighting the globalist juggernaut and is only in
Syria to "fight ISIS/ISL" and to make Syria "safe for Democracy" aren't seeing the big
picture. Russia is working hand in hand with China to make sure America is reduced to a
second rate global power. Assad has become nothing more than Putin's puppet on a string.
Syria will need money for re-construction, thanks to Russia destroying much of their
infrastructure, that money more than likely will come from China(China's version of "Economic
Hit Men"). All the while, lurking in the back ground, that little shit stain known as Israel.
This report will present the reality of Russia's Syrian campaign. Russia launched air
strikes on hospitals, water treatment plants, and mosques. Russia used cluster bombs.
Russia almost exclusively targeted non-ISIS targets. These are the truths that Russia will
not admit, and the truths that must be understood when negotiating with Russia as a
potential partner.
It's all about the "Belt and Road Initiative". There are no good guy's in this mess, and
the real losers in this conflict are the citizens of Syria. Russia is a main partner in
"Globalization".
One of the main problems of the People's Republic is to connect the "Belt" with the
"Road". For China it is crucial to be able to bypass the choke points represented by the
straits that separate the South China Sea from the Indian Ocean (Malacca, Sunda and Lombok)
that, being controlled by the US, prevent the Chinese maritime power to fully develop. A
first important asset in this sense is represented by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,
which connects by land Eastern China to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, in turn connected
to the String of Pearls.
Why Syria?
In this perspective, Syria becomes a crucial junction within the BRI: a possible
development of its transport and port infrastructures, properly connected with each other
and with the Belt and Road Initiative, would allow China a further maritime outlet for its
land trade and a formidable trade post in the Mediterranean. A further advantage is
represented by the increased quantity of goods that China could deliver into the
Mediterranean, overcoming the further bottleneck of the Suez Canal.
Syria also has at least two important factors that represent opportunities to be
exploited by Beijing: the country's urgent need to obtain funds to be allocated to
reconstruction and development and the simultaneous disengagement of the United States from
the Middle East, an empty space not filled by the EU. Syria is therefore an extremely
interested and receptive partner to the proposals of the Chinese government, which finds
itself at the same time freed from any diplomatic controversy that could slow down its
action.
@Counterinsurgency
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and other
third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn sour for
them eventually.
@Abdul
Alhazred Thank you for that video. I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my
life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering to people like me,
but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said.
More on Trump by Shamir's recent article:
What is much worse for Israel, is Trump's intent to leave the region. There is a good
chance you haven't seen relevant tweets of the President, for the MSM doomed to surround it
by the wall of silence. That is what the President said while ordering withdrawal:
"Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA
should never have been in Middle East. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending! The
United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have
died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers
& military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE!"
Just for this recognition "GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN
THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY" and for this promise "The stupid endless wars, for us, are
ending!" Trump deserves to be re-elected and remembered as the most courageous and
independent US President since Richard Nixon.
His efforts on withdrawing from the Middle East remind of Nixon's hard struggle to leave
Vietnam and to make peace with Russia and China. If he succeeds in this endeavour, he will
be rewarded by the American people in 2020..
If he succeeds, then he sure will have my support!
One of the main instigators of the Syrian imbroglio – Saudi Arabia – had
been beaten in Yemen and is no longer eager for battle; ditto Qatar and UAE. Europe is less
keen on removing "bloody dictators" than it was. CIA, Jewish Lobby and Clintonite Democrats
would keep Syria boiling, but mercifully they are not in full command in Washington. .
@A123
What is allegedly being built is the same worthless fence. The wall prototypes couldn't
legally be used per a clause in one of the terrible spending bills hastily signed by "Master
Negotiator" Trump.
Better than cacklin' cankles? Yes, but so is my last bowel movement.
Even if we got a real wall, Orangemeister wants legal gimmegrants in record numbers. We
just can't effing win.
Don't you think Trump was a tad premature in announcing "Only I can fix," to all these
problems?
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and
other third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn
sour for them eventually.
Every high value PRC project in Africa seems to come with as suspiciously large number of
military age, ethnic Han Chinese staff.
The PRC colonization effort is informed by the lessons of former Euro colonies. They have
built-in measures to make them very hard to displace. And, should they eventually be forced
out, the locals will get nothing but destroyed and poisoned lands.
@geokat62
Know more News with Adam News covers the Christian Zionist story. He is still on you
tube.
Jones was banned from that platform recently. He can still be heard on bitchute as well as
his own website, Culturewars.com
the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they use Libya's
stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring
that Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the
team.
I have a metric that I use.
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.
Insofar as Erdogan has been aligned with Israel and its interests and agendas (the
destruction and carving up of Syria)- is the degree to which he has been a malefactor on the
world's stage.
/
Vs. the degree to which he's opposed to Israel's nefarious agendas;
– he's demonstrated actual statesmanship.
So that's my metric. That's why generally I don't have to pour over the minutia of every
action or issue with a fine tooth comb, rather I just ask, 'is this person or action aligned
with Israel's agenda.. (genocide, theft, murder, hegemony, strife ), and the question always
seems to answer itself!
Just consider the Obama regime. When I approved of what Obama was doing- peace with Iran-
it was when he was in Israel's crosshairs.
When I disapproved of Obama's treasons, it was when his actions were perfectly aligned
with Israel – destruction of Libya, destruction of Syria and so forth.
It really is a near perfect, if not perfect metric.
When Trump is betraying America and Americans, is when he's serving Israel – open
borders, drones, sanctions on Iran and Russia and others..
When he's acting like an actual American president, in the service of this nation, is when
he's in direct opposition to Israel's agenda – ending the Eternal Wars, making videos
about dead American soldiers, firing Bolton, talking about nationalism at the UN..
I'm really sort of waiting for this test to ever fail, it's been so reliably perfect for
so long.
So if you want to know if Erdogan is acting in good faith, just check to see if what he's
doing pleases Israel, and you'll know all you need to know!
Is a Kurdish state a good thing?
Well, what does the 'metric' say?
Is Turkey's incursion into Syria a good thing?
Here, a mouthpiece of Zion posits 'no'.
The Turkish government is no longer interested in helping Syrians liberate themselves
from Assad's murderous regime.
The video is very powerful, and this video linked in this link features Trump's speaking
with attendant images of the families of the soldiers and what they have to go through
.because of the lies of the warmongers.
@Rurik
As Commander in Chief tRump wanted to kill Syria President Basher Assad for having gassed his
own people & having to be restrained by his Generals, Amerikans now see another side to
their president which Rurik observed on video & gushed: "I've never been so proud of a
U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering
to people like me, but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said Thank
God. Peace."
Am sincerely glad you're "happy," Rurik, that Trumpstein moved to shed some of his
Adelson/Netantahu skin implants. Nonetheless, & I don't want to be a GOP Likud-Party
pooper, but am sticking with Philip Giraldi's advisory to, "Let's see what he actually
does."
At any rate, linked below (& fyr in ), is Brother Nathanael's latest video. In order
to stave off our nation's descent into Greater Sodom & Gomorrah, it's understandable to
me how Bro Nat prefers "The Chosen One" to continue as ZUS president over his uber-liberal
& decadent Zio-Democrat opponents.
Thanks Rurik, and enjoy the good times of tRump's proclamation of an end to endless wars
for Greater Israel while it lasts!
"Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue
for the West . . . A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons"
Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is at the heart of US
FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's
rise.
The wonderful context is, it's not up to Trump. It's not up to the US government. The world
will squeeze the CIA regime out of Syria. Russian doctrine of coercion to peace works equally
well on degenerate great powers, with the minor filip of face-saving subterfuge for routed US
functionaries.
Lindsay Graham gets to shake his tiny fist ineffectually at a sneering NATO ally instead
of shaking his tiny fist ineffectually at a nuclear power with overwhelming hypersonic
nonballistic missile capability. Much safer.
@Wally
The only way to change this cast of filthy charACTORs we have running this country is to have
a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" box located prominently at the bottom of every ballot. One I
would take the time and effort needed to check.
@Cloak And
Dagger Trump's problem is that he has very little support for his MAGA agenda in his own
party. People like Lindsey Graham who support him here and there will not hesitate to turn on
him if he takes positions that offend Sheldon Adelson. Trump's none-too-sophisticated,
none-too-affluent base is opposed by the media, academe, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the FBI
and CIA, and the Rainbow Coalition assemblage of minority voices. Even Fox News (apart from
Tucker) opposes Trump's agenda even as it defends Trump against spurious charges of colluding
with the Russians. For example, Hannity regularly charges the Democrats with being in league
with Putin, in effect conceding that the Russians are evil enemies. Yet Trump's MAGA proposal
was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian) Russia.
At the end of the day, the 4D Chess view seems more right than wrong. While Trump's
commitment to the right is both shallow and wavery, in the present setting he cannot do more
than hold the enemy at bay and wait for reinforcements to show up. That means it's up to US,
his supporters, to find ways to weigh in on his side. As the fascists used to say, a bundle
of sticks can be strong even if the individual sticks are weak.
@Sean
My question to you is: a confrontation between who or what and China? To the extent that
America collapses into a post-Christian, post-European congeries of plutocrats and their
commercial interests, such a confrontation has no clear shape. The evolving character of
American society has been put on the table by the Trump/populist revolution, and the role of
Jews in our cultural evolution is part of that even if it is taboo to discuss it. The issue
over the Palestinians is the only way to challenge the successful assumption of moral carte
blanche by the secular Jewish community, which Jewish thought leaders have parlayed into an
effective assault on freedom of speech and assembly (particularly in Europe but also here),
and a campaign to stigmatize whiteness, Christianity, and the nuclear family.
Conclusion: The issue of Palestine is a proxy for the larger issue of whether secular
Judaism deserves its current status as moral hegemon. It is the only way to raise this issue
that is not instantly dismissed as neo-Nazism.
@SolontoCroesus
SolontoCroesus wrote: "Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is
at the heart of US FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's rise."
To All commenters,
Above, when SolontoCroesus speaks, I listen & learn.
When President Bonespur speaks, it pains to listen, & I can potentially become
deceived.
Will likely get friendly fire from Rurik, but I truly wish he reads your comment &
astutely watches the very informative linked Talpiot video. Hurts when I see good men (like
him) gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
Thanks for your patriotic servus, S2C!
P.S.: Behind D.C.'s Blue & White House curtain, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin licks his
choppers in anticipation of effectual ZUS sanctions, & the Chinese communist government's
finally granting Goldman Sachs Group permission to do "untethered" investment business" in
the mainland; the largest consumer market on the planet.
@Sean'Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for
the West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility.
A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,'
As usual you've being dishonest. You agree Israel is a 'shitty little country' -- but
manage to insinuate we should continue to support it.
After all, we don't have to spend a penny to 'play Santa' to the Palestinians (as if we
had nothing to do with their expulsion.). It's the Israelis we subsidize and protect, not the
Palestinians.
In fact, we can help the Palestinians and save money too! Yank Israel off our tit and we
get to have our cake and eat it too. The Palestinians get their home back, and we save
billions every year. All we have to do is to stop funding their tormentors,
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.'
It is always wrong to support Israel.
In 2008, I voted for McCain instead of Obama. I told myself they'd both be equally
supportive of Israel, but I knew deep down inside that was a lie.
I voted for McCain because he wasn't black. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is
that I allowed some other consideration to seduce me into supporting Israel -- however
trivially and as it turned out ineffectually.
If you establish 911 was a fraud then subsequent war on terror is a fraud. The West will
exhaust themselves waging war against Islam and the Muslims despite killing millions of
people. They will dig their own graves and cast themselves in hell fire for eternal damnation
for subscribing to Santa Claus lies and Jesus died for their evils by supporting the money
changer's ideology for greater Israel project to usher in their Anti-Christ as their Messiah.
Anti-Christ Dajjal will take them for a ride to hell. He will play them "By way of Deception"
just as they are playing the rest of the world "By way of Deception wage wars." So how many
of us are willing to sell our souls in exchange for the worldly gains and pay a penalty for
eternal damnation?
gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
"I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video.
"
Gushing?
Perhaps, I suppose, depending on your definition.
But when's the last time you heard a Z.U.S. president speak of the war dead with
compassion and pathos? Hell, when's the last time you heard them speak of these tragic
victims of American f0lly (treason and war crimes), and their families- at all?
He was saying 'enough of this madness!'
And from what I understand, American troops are indeed vacating Syrian bases.
BTW, leaving for a few days, so keep up the good fight, Brother Chuck!
@Wally
Wally likes to cheap shot P.G., haha, and once again futilely asked him: "Has Giraldi ever
stated which current candidate is his preference vs. Trump?"
Get on the ball, wailing Wall! (zzZigh) Likely, even some knowledgeable CODAH associates
will inform that YOU'LL get what Supremacist Jews give you.
Haha. The Zionized D.N.C. is presently fretting over which Jewish Lobby-approved
presidential 2020 candidate they should give to their "base" voters. Haha. Liberal tribe
chieftains are confident that even Mayor Pete Buttigieg will make incumbent, Trumpstein,
Tweet-out "endless" sweat on election night.
Nonetheless, had Amerika a real choice, , Ron Paul would be my #1 "anti-Chosen One"
alternative. Refer to his article below, wailing Wall?
Yet Trump's MAGA proposal was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian)
Russia.
That's why the NeoCohens hate Putin so much, for re-establishing Russian Christian
Orthodoxy as the 'national' religion. Trump, on the other hand, admires Putin for his
nationalism and wants white Christian Russia to be friends with nominally Christian
America. Unfortunately he must bow down to the Satanic anti Christ power brokers, the Cabal,
that keeps him in power and checks his nationalist leanings. Hopefully he will overcome this
in a second term but I've been saying that about presidents for years!
@ChuckOrloski
Thanks ChuckOrloski.
Undeserved, tho -- I was just being a shepherd guiding the flock to other people's good work,
a practice I learned from your comment style.
I don't want to be in the business of educating you on un-American actions undertaken by
"Z.U.S. presidents." You really know better, but since Jacques Sheete, peace be upon him, is
M.I.A., I will now do my best.
No doubt, Trumpstein is different. Please pause momentarily and consider how he very
recently wanted to sell/provide nuclear weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. Fyi, and lucky for
the entire Middle East's general population, Trump's lack of "compassion" was overuled by
those higher in the ZUS's Blue & White House Lowerarchy. (Note: He ain't "The Decider,"
he is the ever useful & divisive Zion Tweet-Chord)
So given the U.R. Moderator sword is not activated, linked down below, is a joint radio
show, hosted by Dr. David Duke & Ryan Dawson. Ideally, this action will take the job of
trying to educate YOU from off my shoulders, Rurik. No reading needed, & just carefully
listen!
Fyi, Dr. Duke and Mr. Dawson will provide the means by which an anti-Zionist &
patriotic American can resist the evil sway dished-out daily by our "Homeland's" Zionist
Corporate Media. These largely demonized gentlemen/scholars explain how Zionized Republicans
& Democrats are curiously "on the same page" when it comes to humanely protecting the
Kurds.
But when it comes to supporting & defending The Land of Bilk & Money, they unite.
Yippie! On other hand, and when it comes to actually helping the restless & sorry lot of
dumb goyim working Amerikans, they fight like , er, "Tom and Jerry." (Zigh) Why Trumpstein
even moved to kill the underachieving & oft unaffordable "Affordable Care Act," a.k.a.,
Obamacare.
Enjoy your time off, my Brother Rurik, and I suggest, at minimum, partial evacuation from
the dug-in Jewish Corporate Media "bases."
@Rurik'That's a very honest act of self-reflection, Colin.
I voted for Ron Paul, (If I recall, I wrote in his name).
I would have preferred the racist commie to the war mongering scumbag, but only because by
then I understood the nature of McCain all too well '
Now you're reminding me of 2012. Of course, I was going to vote for Obama over Israel's
man-in-the-White House-to-be. An unpleasant choice, but there it was
So my wife and I were down in Alameda at a winery. Somewhat incongruously, the server was
right-wing, and started praising Romney. I stayed tactful, as I didn't want to kill my buzz,
but my wife -- who is easily influenced -- came out of there going 'Romney number one.
Yeah -- I'm going to vote for him!'
In an unusual display of wisdom, I bit my tongue. We'll see how this plays out
You need to understand my wife comes from a poor background. If you want to meet 'the
working poor,' go see her relatives.
So the very next day, Romney comes out with his '49%' remark. It was classic.
@Johnny
Walker Read Right. This happens every so often. I am not recommending de Sade or any of
his works.
I'm recommending the movie:
"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ", play 1963, movie 1967 [1].
The movie has very little to do with the writings of the original Marquis de Sade [2], but it
does do a good job of showing the spirit of revolutions.
de Sade had a good reputation with the revolutionaries. He was elected a delegate to the
French National Convention, but fell during the Reign of Terror [3]. He really did direct
publicly presented plays at Charenton starting in 1803, but was eventually arrested and
denied paper and pen in 1809. Died 1815, and several large manuscripts were subsequently
burned by his son, who apparently thought that de Sade had done quite enough harm
already.
Insofar as tje video has anything to do with the real de Sade, it is that the director
(fictional de Sade) manages to stage a small revolution himself in the final scene, _after_
demonstrating that the audience is little more sane than de Sade is ("15 glorious years"
scene). As in the link given by Read [4], de Sade acts as the philosophical godfather of
revolution and revolt as an end in itself.
The really pathetic attempt by ABC to pass off Kentucky gun range footage as a Syrian
conflict zone is a good example of the consequences of Congress' horrible 2013 decision
(that you may not have heard of) to totally legalize domestic propaganda. @_whitneywebb
In the age of legal, weaponized propaganda directed against the American people, false
narratives have become so commonplace in the mainstream media that they have essentially
become normalized, leading to the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts."
The bad and ugly shepherds persistently hit vulnerable & trusting Unzers with their
"best shot." For one example, the currently M.I.A. commenter, Maven Sam Shama.
Subsequently, I see no valid reason why intelligent & good men -- like you! -- should
not give their "best shot" and attempt to support & rescue lost sheeple who regularly
appear here.*
* Some lost sheep simply like it that way, and therefore, bad shepherds, for one example,
the featherweight commenter "Sean," get lots of practice at misguiding the flock.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
Right, what to do is the question now that everybody has been taken by surprise.
I'd say that the advice "get out of debt, get out of the major cities" is fairly good, and
fairly obvious, and has been so for some time. As to income, I just don't know. You might try
linking up to some group (non-Left) that seems to be cohesive and has _some_ plan of action
that isn't too weird. Under stress, cohesive groups can survive better than individuals.
You might also remember the rule of thumb that prophets can predict either what or when,
but not both. It's obvious that the US in general and cities in particular are in severe
decline, but _when_ the current system will cast off much of the population it now supports
is simply not known. Abandon it too soon and you end up extremely poor, so a sharp break is
extremely risky. I'd say that retiring debt, hardening your house against home invasion, and
finding some group as above, would be about all that would be justified right now. If your
neighborhood is deteriorating, it might be a good idea to go to another one that isn't, since
the deterioration is unlikely to reverse itself. If you're in with an ethnic group that
doesn't like your ethnic group, it might be a good idea to displace, if only to avoid the
unpleasantness.
@jack
daniels The current US system / world order will end within the next decade no matter
what Trump does. Trump is trying to shut it down with minimal casualties and replace it with
something viable, which is a good thing to do, but if Trump were to vanish tomorrow the
current US system / world order would still end within the next decade, maybe two decades if
things went very badly wrong.
Trump has the wind at his back, he's trying to do things that would do themselves (although
not as well) and that's why the appearance of 4D Chess. But, as you point out, Trump leads a
very small force of government officials, and would lose without the strength given by his
supporters. Continued support, in word and in deed, should reduce casualties (to include
Trump and his family) during the current transition.
MEANWHILE, Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US
"According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million
Americans, including over 11 million children -- the numbers likely way understated."
"Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually."
"At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity."
"Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide
problem."
"Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate
help."
"1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from."
"22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at
school, but as many as 3 million children still aren't getting the breakfast they need."
@Rurik
I applaud the sentiment too.
I'm hearing rumours that Trump has put a thousand troops into Saudi Arabia and claimed they
are paying for it.
Is it now America's lot to be not just Israel's but SA's mercenaries?
2020 can't come fast enough. I'd love to see a Trump super majority and some serious
reform.
It's pretty clear the Evangelical Zionist's are Israelis' b@tches.
America, it seems, must not only reclaim itself but also it's religion. EV is a heresy and
the leaders are on their knees f@llating Israel. It is disgusting to watch.
Yes, I agree, having trucks and trains go overland and via various countries comes with
the risk of conflicts erupting between 2 or more states participating in Chinese projects.
China burnt itself badly in Libya, where Hillary " We Came, We Saw, He Died! Haw, haw,
haw " Rotham Clingon ran amok.
China is actively setting up routes via the attic as well, so I think China carefully
weighs all its options, but doing business comes with certain risks, those are
unavoidable.
When I was in Africa [The Gambia and there about], I noticed a lot of Chinese merchandise
being sold all over the place. I heard stories of some Chinese being attacked and/or murdered
elsewhere in Africa, but haven't dealt with any Chinese businessman myself or heard their
stories in person.
Having been on that vast continent doesn't make me an expert whatsoever, but I see Africa
become a huge anchor around the world's neck. Can't use a single brush to paint entire
nations, I know, but what I saw didn't look good.
side note : I didn't live in a hotel with armed guards, I lived in a compound with
Africans, so it's not that I have no up close experience. Furthermore, I was always treated
with kindness, respect and warmth.
"... Just to remind you: the charge against Trump is that he tried to expose a massive rip off of the people of Ukraine, made practical thanks to the US replacing an elected President with a bunch of neo-nazis in uniforms, for political advantage. ..."
"... And that is to put aside the obvious point that nothing could be more advantageous to any Presidential candidate than to have to run against Joe Biden, supported by Hillary Clinton. ..."
"Will he be convicted in the Senate? Who cares so long as he slowly roasts in the court of
public opinion."
Do you not see how unlikely it is that a story which demonstrates the utter corruption,
personally, of Joe Biden and, institutionally, of the Obama regime will, as it unwinds, turn
the people against Trump?
Just to remind you: the charge against Trump is that he tried to expose a massive rip off
of the people of Ukraine, made practical thanks to the US replacing an elected President with
a bunch of neo-nazis in uniforms, for political advantage.
And that is to put aside the obvious point that nothing could be more advantageous to any
Presidential candidate than to have to run against Joe Biden, supported by Hillary
Clinton.
"... "Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary)." ..."
"... cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with 900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual budget. ..."
"... "The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress. ..."
Yves here. For those of you who have friends and colleagues who would go on tilt if you tried educating them about MMT, a simpler
approach to persuade them that Medicare for All is affordable is to sell them on another worthy goal, cutting the military-surveillance
state down to size.
Even then, I still encourage you to set them up for a later conversation about MMT: "Even if you accept the idea that taxes pay
for spending, which actually isn't true for the Federal government, we can still get the money for Medicare for All by ."
Note also that the Pentagon has various black budgets, an "official" one and covert ones.
By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
The Institute for Policy Studies on Thursday shared the results of extensive research into how the $750 billion U.S. military
budget could be significantly slashed, freeing up annual funding to cover the cost of Medicare for All -- calling into question the
notion that the program needs to create any tax burden whatsoever for working families.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a
New York Times op-ed at a "chorus of scolds" from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the
only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night's debate, while Medicare for All proponents
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.
At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was
criticized
by some opponents for saying that "costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families" under Medicare for All, without using
the word "taxes." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families
but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they'll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles,
and other medical costs.
"All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag," wrote Koshgarian. "Proposals to fund Medicare for All
have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?"
"Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and
beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare
for All (though estimates vary)."
"While we can't un-spend that $4.9 trillion," Koshgarian continued, "imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20
years."
Koshgarian outlined a multitude of areas in which the U.S. government could shift more than $300 billion per year, currently used
for military spending, to pay for a government-run healthcare program. Closing just half of U.S. military bases, for example, would
immediately free up $90 billion.
"What are we doing with that base in Aruba, anyway?" Koshgarian asked.
Other areas where IPS identified savings include:
cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion
ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with
900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion
per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual
budget.
"This item takes us well past our goal of saving $300 billion," Koshgarian wrote of the last item.
As Koshgarian published her op-ed in the Times , progressive think tank Data for Progress released
its own report showing that a majority
of Americans support a "progressive foreign policy" far less focused on decades-long on-the-ground wars, establishing military bases
around the world, drone strikes, and arms sales.
"The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American
foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress.
"Voters want to see U.S. funding go to domestic needs such as healthcare, or to other national security tools like diplomacy,
instead of to the Pentagon and more endless war," according to the report.
Polling more than 1,000 ppl with YouGov, Data for Progress found that 73 percent of Democratic primary voters ranked numerous
issues -- including economic challenges and the climate -- as more important to them than national security and military funding.
Progressive national security proposals proved popular with respondents, including closing Guantanamo Bay, ending arms sales to
Saudi Arabia, and leveraging military aid to Israel to force it to adopt better human rights policies toward Palestinians.
"There is a clear appetite for progressive reforms to U.S. foreign policy," wrote Data for Progress.
In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly "defense-based institution, rather than a war
machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes."
But, she wrote, "that's no excuse for continuing to spend hundreds of billions in ways that make our world more dangerous and
deny us the ability to seriously invest in things like jobs, healthcare, education, and all that makes our lives better."
I would love to see it, but I strongly doubt this would happen in my lifetime. The Pentagon budget seems to be one of those
political "third rail" issues like Social Security.
Many people are so paranoid that I think it constitutes a mass hysteria; others are propagandized into 24Χ7 jingoism. I'm not
talking concepts here, I deal with pro-military people almost daily. Its the glorifying and fetishizing of the military that bothers
me.
Most if not all pro-military types are also deeply conservative; bring up *any* social program and they will wonder how to
pay for it.
I don't know, how many "third rail" type taboos has Trump danced on and become more popular because he did? I think the average
voter would be *extremely* receptive to a well-crafted message promoting the redirection of resources away from forever foreign
wars and bases to concrete material benefits for Americans. I don't even think it'd be a hard sell, once the pearls had been gathered
up.
What's so maddening about this question is the fact that we know that the military budget is probably much more than 750 billion
per year, but we can never know how much more, because the government is expressly allowed to hide and even fake spending totals.
What matters is whether the goods and services are there for them to buy with that money, and this is where real wealth lies.
Governments can create all the money they want, but if they create too much you will get inflation, or hyper-inflation if they
type in too many zero's when creating money.
Money has no intrinsic value; its value comes from what it can buy.
Banks create money from loans and that's easy too, just type the numbers in.
They can dash wildly into the latest fad, like the dot.com boom, and finance it with money they create out of nothing.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bankers do need to ensure the vast majority of that money gets paid back, and this is where they keep falling flat on their
faces.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it.
If someone can't repay a loan, they need to repossess that asset and sell it to recoup that money. If they use bank loans to
inflate asset prices they get into a world of trouble when those asset prices collapse.
"It's nearly $14 trillion pyramid of super leveraged toxic assets was built on the back of $1.4 trillion of US sub-prime
loans, and dispersed throughout the world" All the Presidents Bankers, Nomi Prins.
When this little lot lost almost all its value overnight, the Western banking system became insolvent. Wall Street can turn
a normal asset price bubble into something that will take out the global economy using leverage.
Bankers create money out of nothing and the monetary system requires that nearly all that money they loaned out gets paid back.
Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity, and when you realise all that debt can't be paid back, a financial black hole
opens up, as it did in 2008.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation.
When banks create too much money you tend to see it in asset price inflation.
We see inflation in asset prices as good and consumer price inflation as bad.
The asset price boom will crash the economy, but no one realises while it's happening.
They believed in the markets and neoclassical economics in the 1920s and after 1929 they had to reassess everything. They had
placed their faith in the markets and this had proved to be a catastrophic mistake.
This is why they stopped using the markets to judge the performance of the economy and came up with the GDP measure instead.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised inflating asset prices doesn't create
real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and therefore does not add to GDP.
The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by GDP.
Inflated asset prices aren't real wealth, and this can disappear almost over-night, as it did in 1929 and 2008.
Real wealth creation involves real work, producing new goods and services in the economy.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it. Sound of the Suburbs
100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors means we (the general public) wouldn't have to give a flip if banks lent
prudently or not since we would have an additional but risk-free payment system consisting of debit/checking accounts for all
who want one at the Central Bank (or Treasury) itself.
Moreover without government privileges and without captive depositors and unable to hold the economy hostage via a SINGLE payment
system that must work through them, you can rest assured that banks WOULD lend prudently or go under, like they should, if they
don't.
So what is required is 100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors and that situation has NEVER before existed in history
so it cannot be said to have failed.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation. Sound of the Suburbs
Because the DEMAND for fiat is suppressed in that only depository institutions may use it in the private sector.
Fix that injustice and eliminate all other privileges for banks and then government should be able to create much MORE fiat
for the general welfare since banks would be much LESS able to create deposits for the private welfare of themselves and for the
so-called "worthy" of what is, currently, the public's credit but for private gain.
if they [governments] create too much you will get inflation
Is this true, or is it an economist's assumption? Here's the other thought:
Capitalism embraces borrowing for investment. Real estate development is an example. Borrowing involves an assumption of paying
back more than was borrowed, but at a future date. When that future date arrives, it is in the borrower's best interest if the
face value dollars are wroth less in spending power that the face value of the loan. You stated that, but the link to inflation
is fuzzy. Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity
Rather than the government's causality, and a nebulous prosperity, it may be the borrower's CFO who then decides to raise consumer
prices to keep up with expenses. The borrowed dollars came from a banker-created asset, but the inflation is tied to a direct
result similar to the so-called "wage-price spiral." In this case, the "interest-price spiral" that is not visibly tied to the
supply of money.
I've got a new disconnect. I understand and appreciate how MMT works. It is the only way, imo, for a sovereign country to pay
for the social costs of a good society. And, of course, the government does not charge itself interest, does not expect to be
"paid back" at all. The tradeoff for the government is the betterment of society. So if your neighbor loans you $500 and you tell
him you'll pay him back as soon as your check comes in and with some interest that seems fair bec. you're dealing with two private
budgets. But when a licensed bank loans you money for a new house under the terms that you pay it back over 30 years with interests
that amounts to triple the original cost of the house then you are not dealing as one private person to another. You are then
dealing with usury. Made legal by the private financial industry. This private industry does not use its own money it uses the
government's money by a computer click. And the government then lets it profiteer on this tiny transaction of apples and oranges
to the degree that over time the money "earned" by the private bank accumulates and topples the steady state of the economy. At
that point there's no place left to invest that "private" profit and the whole financial system goes haywire in a panic not to
"lose" money. Money that should never have been given to them in the first place. It's an oxymoron demanding that money be paid
back with interest when it's not your money in the first place and you do nothing to stabilize your profligate profiteering. Nothing.
Just a thought.
Zimbabwe found it all too easy to create so much money they caused hyper-inflation.
Yes, after destroying their Ag Industry, and having no Ag products to export, because Mugabe and his party assumed all the
white farmers just sat around drinking beer while the dark farm workers did all the work.
After Mugabe took the land, there was no collateral for the farmers to get loans for the next planting season.
Who knew that managing the farm was so much work? /s
Inflation in Zimbabwe first came from shortages, especially food, as things looted rhe country of 4x and mismanaged the economy,
like farm price controls under cost of production.
Historically shortages cause high inflation.
"In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly 'defense-based institution, rather than a
war machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes.'"
Interesting. Beyond cost cutting, what exactly would it take to remake the military into a true defense-based institution ?
How would assets be deployed? What weapons systems would be prioritized and ultimately receive funding? What doctrines would need
to change to flip from an offensive mindset to a defensive mindset? What alliances would we maintain and what alliances would
we discard?
I see that the article offers some examples, but I think crafting a progressive foreign policy would entail answering these
kinds of more fundamental military questions. Cost cutting is a laudable goal but it strikes me that there's much more to it if
real transformation is desired.
As a civil servant working for the Department of Defense, I can tell you that this would be a difficult shift in priorities
for Congress to accept. It all comes down to the defense industry political donations they receive year after year, and the jobs
the defense industry provides their constituents (no matter how meager or sub-optimal). Since defense spending is basically this
nation's sole industrial policy, I think that finding employment for displaced workers (whether defense civil servants or contractors)
is the biggest hurdle to address; a green new deal would solve the problem. We'd also need political campaign reform to force
Congress off of the teet of defense industry political contributions.
Finding employment for displaced defense civil servants or contractors? We've done that before . . . we tell them to train
for the jobs of the future as we did for manufacturing workers and leave it at that. The same goes for the parasites working in
health insurance companies, pharmacy benefit management and healtcare administration when M4A becomes a reality.
I have no sympathy for those people nor care for their well being as they deliberately, and with malice aforethought, make
life meaner for us all.
I remember when the defense/aerospace industry collapsed in Southern California in the early 1970's as the Vietnam war was
winding down.
Tech jobs were scarce.
The political sphere is well aware of potential job loss due to defense cutbacks.
I have mentioned before, the relatively liberal CA Senator Barbara Boxer fought to preserve Mare Island Naval Shipyard, in
Vallejo, CA, when it was slated to be shut down in the 1990's.
One could suggest that Vallejo has not fully recovered.
It is a tragedy of immense proportions, as I believe a future historian will remark that the USA, a nation that in its 200
+ year history had only one large deadly war on its soil (the internal Civil War), re-titled its WWII "War Department" as "Defense
Department" and then consumed tremendous resources in its purported defense for the next 70+ years.
A recent discussion with someone, that I regard as a "Northern California Liberal", about Trump's pullout of Syria further
re-enforced that the resistance to ANY change in the MIC in the USA is formidable.
He was sure that Trump would be deservedly impeached because he was pulling out of Syria and abandoning our allies, the Kurds.
And he is old enough to remember Vietnam.
The USA news media and entertainment industries (big sports/Hollywood) are fully on board with the righteous USA "war is good"
meme.
Given how the USA economy has restructured much employment and lifelihoods in costly sectors (finance, education, medicine,
military) it is difficult for me to see how there would be political will to downsize the military to any extent as "good paying"
jobs of politically powerful people would be lost.
Many of the manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas.
There is some hope for policy redirection in the Administration's recent Turkey-Syria-Kurd action. If there really is a shift
away from foreign nation building and away from endless wars over endless enmities, then that could lead to redirection and reduction
of military budgets. Watching the defenders of those engagements fall all over themselves recently has reconfirmed my notion that
they are not acting in the best interests of their constituents. Meanwhile, the sun rose today.
The current defense spending and growth of national debt
more or less "prove" the validity of MMT. This has supported the channeling of resources and energy into military activity (and
profits for enterprizes). Something similar is happening with healthcare; maybe it's inelastic
demand. (The similar something is ever-increasing costs.)
Healthcare at the moment seems to be outside of
the scope of current uses of MMT. But there are major
cost-control issues with it nonethess.
In what direction will things head if healthcare is
swept under the government MMT umbrella in the form of medicare for all? Will the government negotiate prices
with providers (hospitals, staff, pharma)? Certainly military procurement is no leading light.
While cutting the bloated Pentagon's budget is a very good idea, why is no one talking about the fringe benefit that is employer
provided healthcare? I do believe a sizable fraction of folks on private insurance (maybe 40%?) get their health coverage through
a fringe benefit from their employer. If that coverage is no longer necessary under universal coverage, it seems contractually
that the money spent on the fringe benefit should go to the employees. That money is enough to pay for their insurance under universal
coverage, so the employer pays it to the employee, the government taxes part of that to pay for the universal healthcare and everyone
is better off. The employee, due to savings in the system, ends up with more money in pocket. The employer is out from under the
ever increasing costs of the fringe benefit (plus can now claim to be paying higher salaries), and, well, the insurance companies
are left behind to pick up "expanded coverage" for those wanting to pay for it.
This and "defense" spending cuts could pay for the whole system easily, no?
The relative value of small business based jobs would increase with a functional health care system. There would be an outflow
of employees from jobs with healthcare benefits.
With single payer, looking for a less stressful job becomes an alternative. Big employers know this.
It also means people may retire earlier if they don't need their employer-provided health insurance.
Health insurance becomes a minor consideration in selecting which employer to work for.
Companies and state/local governments that provide health care coverage in retirement should see their liabilities for that
plummet as healthcare costs drop and public insurance improves.
COULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Technically, yes.
WOULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Not in this age of activist stockholders seeking new sources of "revenue." Everywhere. Benefits are simply a "cost." Human Resources
is a "cost center." Defined benefits that averaged out the risk among many have segued to defined contribution that is no more
than a tax-abated savings account. Risk has monetary value, but risk invisibly is shifting more and more to the individual.
After the last Democratic debate, it is safe say anti-war Progressivism is dead. Everyone was frothing at the mouth to prove
how much they care for the Kurds, and our nation's honor, and that we should stay in the ME. Except Tulsi, but her response fell
flat with the audience, and judging by my Left friends/family on Facebook, fell flat with them too. Having the same position as
Trump is a death sentence. My faith in my fellow citizens is at quite a low ebb.
Cheer up. No matter what you used to think of Lindsay Graham, he is setting the pace for a representative to think for him/herself.
Commentators reported surprise that he was "formerly in Trump's corner." Think about how easily we accept that the future is secured
by a majority in either house. The outrageous president is inspiring elected Republicans to analyze issues (imagine!). Even if
it is cold and calculated to influence their own voters, let's begin to applaud and encourage those who seem to think for them/ourselves.
We don't suffer from a lack of ideas in this area; no, we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Thus, another
exercise in mental masturbation.
we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Carl
A Citizen's Dividend would be the camel's nose under the tent since the less wasted by government, the more that could be distributed
to citizens to counter price deflation.
And it's only justice that all fiat creation, beyond that created for government to spend for the general welfare, be in the
form of an equal Citizen's Dividend.
Funny you should mention Europe since an equal Citizen's Dividend for all Euro zone citizens would be a way to eliminate austerity
that even Germany might not object to since Germans would receive it too.
For example, Italy gives the unemployed 500 euros per month and tries to find them any sort of job. I think you're a little
behind. But by all means, keep tilting at windmills.
i was just thinking about that this am while finishing my fence like in alaska.
i figger that after 40+ years of declining or stagnant wages, a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay.
but "dividend" works just as well.
a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay. Amfortas the hippie
The Citizen's Dividend would vary as required to counter price deflation but during the period when the banks are progressively
de-privileged, it would have to be quite high to provide for the conversion of bank deposits to fiat deposits at the Central Bank
with the banks, by necessity, having to borrow the needed fiat from citizens.
Its still the wrong set of arguments. The problem in the US is not that Medicare-for-All would require new taxes that need
funding. The problem is that the US spends twice per capita on healthcare what the average OECD country spends. The US spends
more public tax money on healthcare per capita than Canada does, and Canada insures the entire population.
We can pay for our entire military budget as it exists if we simply drop our per capita healthcare spending to less than what
Switzerland pays. Name one other thing that costs more in the US than in Switzerland.
Americans simply cannot comprehend how exorbitantly expensive and unequal the US healthcare system is compared to the rest
of the developed world.
While I gladly accept the results of these surveys, I question the reasons they seem to have garnered from the public. To most
citizens, lower taxes mean much more than non-aggresive foreign policy and peaceful diplomacy. If the question was phrased in
such a way that respondents were replying to the lower cost AND the concomitant peace-oriented habits that should (would?) come
from it, then it is an issue whether they agreed with both statements. Further, this reorientation of spending would have to be
bully-pulpited quite strongly to educate the US as to its long-term benefits since most of us have been prepped to be anxious
about foreign nations and the paranoia of saving us from the evil dictator "X". Oh, yes, peace should come, but compare the Syria
brou-ha-ha to what would descend upon us when peace broke out. The elites won't disappear.
Bizarre. The question is: How can we afford something that's half as expensive as what we're already paying? I wouldn't expect
that level of insanity from someone in a straitjacket yet it's a commonplace in these discussions.
Even worse: the argument that government is financially constrained. It's not "tax & spend," it can't be. Where would taxpayers
get dollars to pay those taxes if government didn't spend them first?
So it must be "spend first & then ask for some back in taxes." This is how reality works. And what do we call the dollar financial
assets left in the economy, not retrieved by taxes? a) The dollar financial assets of the citizens, i.e. their savings or (same
thing) b) National 'Debt'
National 'Debt' is completely unlike household debt. It's like bank debt. If you have a bank account, that's your asset, but
to the bank, it's a liability. It's the money they owe you. It's their debt.
Now imagine a mob of depositors marching down to the bank to demand it reduce the size of its debt (i.e. make their accounts
smaller) Crazy? Yes, but that's the austerian line of talk.
Finally, the inflationistas: "If you just print money, you'll have [gasp][hyper-]inflation!" This is the finest quality bullshit,
and people spout it practically without prompting. The truth: The Fed extended $16 $29 trillion in credit to cure the frauds
of the financial sector in 2007-8. I defy anyone to find a measurement of inflation that says there was any then.
Was there central-bank-run-amok inflation in the classical cases (Weimar, Zimbabwe). Nope. Not even there. Yes they did print
lots of Deutchmarks and Zimbabwe currency, but only after a shortage of good occurred that actually caused the inflation.
Just printing money, especially if there's spare capacity, does not cause inflation. You need a bidding war for some commodity
that's become scarce (like oil in the '70s). So Weimar had the burden of war reparations, a balance of payments problem, and when
they delayed sending some telephone poles to France, the French military shut down the German equivalent of Ohio (the Ruhr). Shortages
led to the hyperinflation. Similarly, the Rhodesian colonists left Zimbabwe, which had previously fed itself, and food shortages
led to the hyperinflation.
The Cato study of 56 hyperinflationary episodes in human history also validates the above. In *no* case did a central bank
"run amok" and print too much to kick off the hyperinflation. Always the cost push of a shortage of goods drove it.
Gosh, it's all so simple. We just need to take on the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, and our
corrupt political system all at the same time.
Researchers Detail How Slashing the Social Security and Medicare Budgets Could Pay for More Pointless Wars While Creating the
Progressive Wall Street Bailouts Americans Want.
Looks like our stable genius" pushed Putin against Erdogan and sided with Erdogan in the
process.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf. ..."
"... There is first President Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles, from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq. ..."
"... Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish troops. ..."
"... The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted, and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe. ..."
"... Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values. ..."
"... Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet without harming others. ..."
"... The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid situation. ..."
"... The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald Trump, has called the Democrats out on this. ..."
"... Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels (AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history is written in a few years all this will come out. ..."
"... ISIS formed in the chaos that was the Iraq War, neat how you guys never accept blame for anything. ..."
"... The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a 'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal. ..."
"... Our imperialists must have misread Tacitus, because it seems they aspire to making peaceful deserts. ..."
"... Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US politicians (Republican and Democrat). ..."
"... No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite. ..."
"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's
Telegraph .
The article began:
"Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir
Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the U.S."
"Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of yet another
Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role,"
declared the Financial Times .
The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is
us.
Before concluding that Trump's pullout of the last 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is America's
Dunkirk, some reflection is needed.
Yes, Putin has played his hand skillfully. Diplomatically, as the Brits say, the Russian
president is "punching above his weight."
He gets on with everyone. He is welcomed in Iran by the Ayatollah, meets regularly with Bibi
Netanyahu, is a cherished ally of Syria's Bashar Assad, and this week was being hosted by the
King of Saudi Arabia and the royal rulers of the UAE. October 2019 has been a triumphal
month.
Yet, consider what Putin has inherited and what his capabilities are for playing power
broker of the Middle East.
He has a single naval base on the Med, Tartus, in Syria, which dates to the 1970s, and a new
air base, Khmeimim, also in Syria.
The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania,
Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and
bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such
panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf.
We have the world's largest economy. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's, and not a
tenth the size of ours.
And now that we are out of Syria's civil war and the Kurds have cut their deal with
Damascus, consider what we have just dumped into Vladimir Putin's lap. He is now the man in the
middle between Turkey and Syria.
He must bring together dictators who detest each other. There is first President
Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds
from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles,
from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq.
Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is
unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish
troops.
Reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable Syrian and Turkish demands is now Putin's
problem. If he can work this out, he ought to get the Nobel Prize.
"Putin is the New King of Syria," ran the op-ed headline in Thursday's Wall Street
Journal.
The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS,
Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred
thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted,
and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe.
If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United
States of America, 6,000 miles away?
Wednesday, two-thirds of the House Republicans joined Nancy Pelosi's Democrats to denounce
Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and dissolve our alliance with the Kurds. And
Republican rage over the sudden abandonment of the Kurds is understandable.
But how long does the GOP believe we should keep troops in Syria and control the
northeastern quadrant of that country? If the Syrian army sought to push us out, under what
authority would we wage war against a Syrian army inside Syria?
And if the Turks are determined to secure their border, should we wage war on that NATO ally
to stop them? Would U.S. planes fly out of Turkey's Incirlik air base to attack Turkish
soldiers fighting in Syria?
If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war
for them -- against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran -- why does Congress not declare those
interests and authorize war to secure them?
Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their
Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the
nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining
American values.
If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and
treasure to keep his Russia's toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have
gone under without him.
Who dares wins. Now let's see how Putin likes his prize.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no
different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet
without harming others. At a recent interview with Arabic media a UAE journalist tried to
drive a wedge between Russia and Iran in favor of Saudi Kingdom by challenging Putin to
condemn Iran for alleged attacks on Saudi oil installations by Iran.
To which Putin
skillfully replied: "Russia will never be friends 'with one country against another' in the
Middle East". Nor would Putin condemn Iran unless he was presented with clear evidence - not
just accusations - of Iran's guilt. Point in case: Putin does it better than others; sure,
but why is that bad?
Oh of course envy and fear of one being exposed for inept leadership.
Time long overdue to shake hands with Putin and Russia.
https://www.rt.com/russia/o...
I haven't a concern for Russia in the middle east.
Russia is doing the US the biggest unasked favor proving where our friends and allies
loyalties in the middle east lay by forcing them to make choices in the face of shifting
alliances that they wouldn't reveal if the US continued its presence.
Russia is depopulating and it has choke points with China, with Central Asia, with the
middle east and Europe. Russia will eventually not have the population to defend all these
choke points and will eventually withdraw and focus on its own national security. At that
time, I think its possible to see Russia shift its relationship in eastern Europe while
distancing itself from Chinese expansionism that might one day want its old north pacific
territories back (like what is today Vladivostok and Sakhalin).
Depopulating? Where did you get that from? Population decrease in Russia stopped. By the
latest stats it is just about breaking even (death rates = birth rates). Moreover, population
is growing albeit very slowly. Sorry but Russkies won't die out like extinct species. As far
as its own national security; well, the old notion of "Russia is, more or less, a giant gas
station pretending to be a real country." is as dead as Senator McCain, who pretended to know
something about Russia; alas he was sadly and dangerously uninformed.
https://www.forbes.com/site...
The US has troops and a base or more in Syria?
I don't see any Syrian army bases in the US...
And, the US is telling/demanding where the Syrian army come and goes in...Syria?
What the hell is wrong with this picture?
You know!?
Oh, now hypocrite neo-con enabler Pelosi and some of the freaky other politicians are
concerned with human lives in Syria? Ha ha
But...not about the lives of children dying in Yemen and Afghanistan and Gaza?
How come?
And, the US is telling Turkey what it had better do with it's border? Also, friends and enemies o' mine,just which entity, nation and group is not a US ally?
Ally? What does that mean?
As if the American people know the hell that words means anymore and as if there's even a
meaning to that. And the American people do not watch the news, read magazines (news) as they
did before.
They don't know what is going on in the world, they gave up.
People under 50 automatically tune world news out, thanks mostly to the phonies at CNN and
the major, basically neo-con supporting networks confusing the public, purposely so that they
don't see the misery that is in the nations of the MId-East thanks to US invasions and
bombings. Just look at cnn-they spend all day talking about what Trump or some politician
said, no coverage of battles overseas, unless it benefits the continuing spinning of the news
for intervention and so on.
The US won't get a grip and stop threatening nation after nation
(while Russia does not) and so, people all over the world are thinking,
you now what, look at how dumb Americans are that they allow people from Obama, Hillary,
Schumer, Pelosi, Graham and more to conduct foreign policy that makes enemies for America
daily. And don't forget Cheney and that group, too from before. These people are actually an
insult to America.
Compare how the leaders of Russia and America talk and conduct themselves.
Russia has Lavrov, the gentleman diplomat, the US has Pompeo and the likes of Bolton and
Kushner, the Israeli lobbyist and the Presidents son in law.
How does a so-called Republic allow the President to have his daughter and Kushner, her
husband, to be security/foreign policy advisers. You're really losing it, America.
"But those same elites appear to lack the
confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they
contend are vital American interests and defining American values."
No, they don't lack "confidence". They've got all the confidence in the world. What they
lack is competence, integrity, and credibility with the American people and the rest of the
world. They have dragged America through the mud in the Middle East for nearly two decades.
They transformed the once proud American military and diplomatic corps into a customer
service operation for Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We don't need more lectures and directives about "our interests" and "Western values" that
always turn out to be Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests and values. We need new foreign
policy elites, free of the current elite's miserable record of failure, corruption, and
subordination to foreign interests. Above all, we need to get out of the Mideast swamps that
the younger Bush and Obama pushed us into, bring our troops back to America, start defending
America and American interests again.
How simple and true what U've said. Sounds like a sound position and logical too. So why is
this not happening? The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's
USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that
revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the
MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid
situation.
The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama
administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald
Trump, has called the Democrats out on this.
Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels
(AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when
Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not
backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history
is written in a few years all this will come out.
The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a
'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria
partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal.
Trump is indeed our Dorian Gray, he is just outwardly reflecting our narcissism, 'if we
don't get to do it then no one else can'.
Obvious Pat we have no consistent foreign policy in the region since we inherited the mantle
from the Brit Empire post WW 2. Oil and Israel were a marketable justification for our wars
and changing partners ( regime change ), for a long time. Now neither is relevant. We have
all the fossil fuels we need, and Israel is all powerful.. Long term I doubt the Russians
will make a difference, in the Muslim quest to resurrect the Ottoman Empire. We have lost too
many of our sons and daughters. get out.
Trump is a genius.
At the moment, Syria is a poisoned chalice to anyone accepting responsibility for it.
Russia is only there because they cannot get a naval base in any other Mediterranean
country.
When, or if peace is achieved in Syria, it will be the US that swoops in to market the
brands the Arabs love. The Syrians won't be buying Russian products.
Name an American brand the "Arabs love": Toyota, Lexis, Rollex, Sony, Nikon, Panasonic,
Samsung, iPhone (made in China)? Which one(s). While their infrastructure and basic
technology are and will continue to be Russian.
Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an
intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US
politicians (Republican and Democrat).
No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the
reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite.
The Middle East is home to oil, terrorism, access points for maritime transportation (The Red
Sea, The Bosphorus, Suez Canal, Persian Gulf). It is strategically important. It was a
mistake for Obama to leave Iraq before there was a stable situation and it is a mistake for
Trump to leave before there is a stable situation.
To say, "Just let them all fight it out" is foolhardy and likely just a rationalization
for your mistake to support the narcissistic fool in the White House.
I don't think Putin is going to be unhappy about it. The various powers of the ME will now go
to him for favors, and he will get favors in return. I doubt US interests will be among them.
Putin said, I've got your no fly zone right here. After Russian deployment of the SA400's,
america had no choice but to begin withdrawal.
And kind of missing from Buchanan's list of
putin friends, is erdogan himself.
So, it will be interesting to see what happens now. Putin
holds all the cards and is in the best position of anybody on the planet to broker a deal
between assad and erdogan. Part of that deal will likely be very bad for those who threw
their lot in with the US.
Turkey is not a small country and has an enormous military.
Buchanan himself said that we should stay out of Syria and let the Turks deal with ISIS.
But
they were too smart for that, and had their own coup to worry about. I have always thought
that the US should have brokered a homeland for the kurds. It would have been hard, but now
it is impossible.
Turkey is now a client state of Russia much more than a member of NATO. At
least in appearance. They now buy SA400's and SU-57's from mother russia.
Who supplies and
maintains your best weapon systems indicates who your real allies are. What has the US lost?
I would say we lost anybody across the globe that we ever hoped would ally with us against
the new sino-russian superpower. Russia has unlimited space and resources. China has
unlimited people and no limits on its technical growth and markets. The US? We are the
biggest debtor third world nation that has ever existed. But hey, we have the most stable
genius as our president, and the sky is the limit for what he will accomplish other than
permanent tax cuts for corporations. Right? The right again.
Except for 2 wrongs, they
wouldn't even exist. Can faith overcome inconvenient truth? Real faith probably could by
accepting inconvenient truth. But real faith is mostly dead. It was replaced with tax free
religiosity and assault weaponry sponsored by corporate fascist government. I watched it
happen. And his story is being rewritten in days or weeks instead of years and decades.
It's not often that I would agree with Pat B. Essentially never.
But on this point, yes. If Putin wants the Middle East, by all means proceed.
That region has been messing up our politics for literally my whole life - It is most
decidedly not a Promised Land for the United States. Let the Saudis and the
Iranians and the Russians and the Turks fight it out. It should be lovely. The Israelis call
sell weapons to all of them.
Thank you for this small bit of obvious wisdom, Mr. Buchanan. Your insights are very common
sensical here, and thus, most valuable. Too bad they will mostly fall on the deaf ears of our
moronic "Elites".
I believe Obama said that Putin would be overwhelmed in Syria. However, Putin has overseen an
excellent strategy of picking an area of insurgents, militarily pounding them, then offering
them free passage to a safe area (Idlib). After doing this across Syria, he and Assad now
have all of the jihadist groups in one place where they can pound them senseless or just sit
back and wait for them to start shooting each other.
Trump did not screw up the Kurds' clearing of ISIS above the Euphrates. Now he has given
Putin and Assad the results of that. I expect the PA team will stabilize that area in short
order.
So, Idlib and NW Syria will be a cauldron for a while. Now Al Tanf is the only insurgent
holdout. Be interesting to see how that unfolds.
Lest Trumpland forget, there is a reason we got involved in the region. Jihadists can and
will use neglect to later come after us.
Putin shows us how its done. 3 billion or so, find good Muslims (anyone other than Sunni
islamists) and help them blow up, conquer, and occasionally repress the bad Muslims.
We spent several TRILLION ourselves and thousands of American lives for nothing. We never
had a single achievable objective in any of these conflicts.
Donald is a moron for selling out the Kurds, who it cost nothing to back, to Turkey but
the DC elites made this inevitable by refusing to cut a deal with Assad for the Kurds. He's
been the only realistic option for a long time now.
"... It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field. ..."
"... The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications. ..."
"... Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan. ..."
Here's one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy : the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office
memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of
storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done
is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.
It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively
replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real
time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing
to pay attention to the action on the field.
Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction
to the stream of human culture, and managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the
here-and-now -- instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media
has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours,
or five weeks ago.
This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous
failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are
brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its
gross falsifications.
This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called "intelligence community," and
has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation -- for the purpose
of its own desperate self-defense. The "Whistleblower" episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most
interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the "narrative"
precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff's House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of
the replay didn't add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.
Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become
such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore.
The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply
because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running,
and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by
the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed
open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan.
The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected
of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its
computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant.
He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.
As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco.
The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things
worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI's
cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess -- all of it cataloged in digital records.
Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail
yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the
collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms.
In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most
of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
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Comments
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
"... I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans. ..."
"... This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description ..."
"... The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party. ..."
"... Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. ..."
"... Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment. ..."
"... Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local. ..."
Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the "favorite of the Russians" to win the 2020 presidential
election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.
...
The Russians already have their "eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party
candidate," she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.
"She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton
told David Plouffe, the podcast's host and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign.
"And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton added, referring
to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.
The responses were appropriate:
Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard - 22:20 UTC
· Oct 18, 2019
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that
has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy,
there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through
your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
The Streisand effect of Clinton's shoddy remark will help Tulsi Gabbard with regards to name recognition. It will increase her
poll results. With Joe Biden faltering and Elizabeth Warren increasingly exposed as a phony Clinton copy, Bernie Sanders could become
the Democrats leading candidate. Then the “favorite of the Russians” smear will be applied to him.
Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party for damaging it's chances to regain the White House. But the Democratic
establishment would rather sabotage the election than to let one of the more progressive candidates take the lead.
Voters do not like such internal squabble and shenanigans. The phony Ukrainegate 'impeachment inquiry' is already
a gift for Trump. Messing with the candidate field on top
of that will inevitably end with another Trump presidency.
and Suspend her from what? a lamp post? That's a little bit harsh.
Hillary is actually doing something constructive for the first time in her career - by giving a boost to Tulsi Gabbard who
is the only candidate who challenges the military industrial complex, which has probably caused more death and destruction than
anyone else in history.
I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against
'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans.
But none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance of beating Trump either. The two front-runners are medically unfit
for any important challenging job - Biden (senility) and Sanders (recent heart attack/stroke?).
Tulsi is urging Hillary to "enter the race" !! Hillary is foaming at the mouth with desire to enter the 2020 race. Is Tulsi
working for Hillary?
Behind the scenes it was decided to make HunterBidenGate the pretext for a Trump impeachment. This, it
was thought, would damage Trump AND Biden and make way for the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. There were so many other pretexts
available but they chose this one.
"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"
This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual
structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a
good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.
As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered,
I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.
It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the
US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely
two branches of the Business Party.
"It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed
as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:
"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have
supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing
and cheer-leading this regime-change war."
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing
the government in Damascus."
Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points
across at the same time. The way she tries to finesse her stances on Iran, India and Israel is disturbing though.
Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary
of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement.
When she's forthright, punches hard and says the things that many people are thinking but few dare say - as she did in her
statement on Syria, but didn't in her statement on Iran - she comes off as the first real candidate for President that I've seen
in my lifetime (I don't count the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who never seemed to actually want to win).
If Tulsi is serious about doing the world good, this is the path she needs to take. Speak the truths no one else is willing
to say; punch hard; stick with it. Yeah and be willing to die for it. If they can't stop you, which I don't think they can, they'll
come gunning for you...
Finally, at last, foreign affairs (i.e wars) has made it into a presidential campaign, and by a veteran, with veterans currently
being sanctified in the U.S. The women (Tulsi, Jill and Hillary) are getting down and dirty, too, which is always a good thing
and a feature of politics in time past, as in the Truman era. President Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of
the kitchen. If you cannot handle the pressure, you should not remain in a position where you have to deal with it."
Let's hope that they get into the details of Hillary's failures, including Libya, Somalia, and especially Syria. Let's get
it on! In the last election she never was forced to answer for her specific failures. Now's the time.
Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way
from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate
media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment.
What Trump has successfully done from the right that Sanders/Gabbard (like Corbyn in the UK) are struggling to do from the
left is to attack the establishment that's in a permanent state of warfare abroad and at home against its "enemies" and unfettered
capitalism at home For a brief moment it was hoped by progressives that Obama - who defeated the faces of the establishment, Clinton
and McCain in 2008 - would really fight the establishment but he ended up becoming more of a celebrity politician like Trudeau
who talked a good game but was unable to effect real change on the ground which of course led to a large number or African Americans
not voting in 2016 and a lot of white blue collar Obama 2008 voters going for Trump.
The corporate media which has been totally corrupted and infiltrated by intelligence agencies - quote openly versus covertly
as in the past - is going to make every effort to shut down not just Gabbard but Sanders and ensure that Warren - a wannabe feel-gooder
like Obama - be completely neutered to effect real change.
Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed
through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the
author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of
unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. And as is the case in developing countries, what
we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was
not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. How the civil unrest spun out of control the second in ten years,
can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is
false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and
jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist
monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more
adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US
was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be
kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously,
as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
All so very true. The crux of the matter is the word competition. US doesn't like that, as a monopolist entity (the world would
be hegemonic power). So you get Cold War 2.0 in overdrive now. Just think Great Britain, Russia, and Germany, at the end of 19th
century beginning of 20th. All three monarchies, with cousins in power, with more or less parliamentarian structures in place,
competing for a place under sun. And UK fretting that will loose its place...
"... For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world." ..."
"... a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his "isolationism" ..."
"... Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things. ..."
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen
Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
"I don't think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest," said the former president according
to The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin, whose
brief Twitter thread on the subject appears
to be the only record of Bush's speech anywhere online.
"An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world," Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was
a shot at the sitting president.
"We are becoming isolationist and that's dangerous for the sake of peace."
For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other
than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have
hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and
we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world."
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his
first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to
this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But
here we are.
From a certain point of view it's hard to say which is stranger:
(A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is
endangering peace with his "isolationism", or
(B) the claim that Trump is "isolationist" at all.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In
his farewell address to the nation , Bush said the following:
"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism
and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity
at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
As we discussed
recently , use of the pro-war buzzword "isolationism" has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word
debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct
ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which
are two wildly
different things . Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the "isolationist" pejorative
are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions
which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an "isolationist" makes as
much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing
from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real
purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness
that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the
political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt
to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is
of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal.
Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it's fun to
share a sporting arena suite or a
piece of hard candy or to
hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been
growing more and more popular with
Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like
Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John
Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don't start consulting this
man on matters of peace.
"... Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire. ..."
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
recently met in Minsk to revive the agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They
set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage of Ukrainian
legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong
opposition from nationalists, passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid
legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security
concerns. The U.S. and its allies should formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the
transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances, Moscow
would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine
protects local autonomy while Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted.
Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation, since the country would likely
be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of
Crimea while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent
referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object.
Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern
Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would certainly be
better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
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Comments
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public . .
. .
It's tempting to view Trump's presidency as sui generis. With norms and seemingly
well-settled historical precedents broken, with the liability casually laid at his feet by
most observers, even if not wholly out to destroy him.
Knowing its intent was remove him from office, Trump nevertheless ordered unprecedented
cooperation with the Mueller investigation. A brilliant move in hindsight. I don't recall
very much handwringing about the bad precedent this set for presidential power.
Trump's insight, and in no small part it explains his continued survival, is his refusal
to accept the appearance of his fully possessing his Article II powers. Most especially in
the context of the National Security State.
Utz has written how even Eisenhower was foiled from negotiating to reduce tensions with
the Soviet Union/Krushchev. If they could derail the POTUS then doing so with those that
followed him should have been easy by comparison and, I think, was. The trend since, as the
USG's global power grew, was for president's to ever quickly give way upon after office to
the role of what I call Figurehead/Pitchman. It's a Safe Space, as was palpably obvious
through Obama's two terms.
While Figurehead/Pitchman versus Real POTUS is, of course, a spectrum not a dichotomy,
Trump for reasons I don't need to belabor has effectively constituted a sharp break.
So, decisions of his like the following, facially a diminution of his authority, which
passed without a great deal of notice, struck me as him protecting himself from his
authorizing military actions designed to end his presidency:
The longer Trump survives the further these highest order threats of nuclear war and to
our Constitutional Republic recede. Even if it doesn't seem that way at moments like
this.
It's childish nonsense the idea that any foreign state, including Russia, thought Trump
would win, much less wanted him to do so. It's equally juvenile, especially close to three
years hence, to not understand that foreign adversaries and allies alike awaited a resolution
of this factional war internally within the US, avoiding catastrophe in the meantime.
Thankfully, at least so far, since Trump took the oath, the foreign powers for which a
Hillary presidency would have been a geopolitical gift of historic proportions (e.g. China;
Iran), have largely made their peace with that lost opportunity.
Precious! After all those years Ukraine tried to force Gazprom to prolong transportation
contracts, including in western Courts, now it is EUROCOMMISSION that plays their 3rd Energy
Package card, but how!
After Zelensky so daringly kissed up to Trump and talk dirt about Merkel and Macron
– EC says the prolongation of Gazprom-NaftaGaz contract is "not legally possible" and
that Ukraine has to kill and "unbundle" NaftaGaz, and when they done – only then the
new pipes-only company would be free to try negotiate a new unrelated contract for gas
transportation.
The Holy Grail of Ukrainian foreign economics is dead, backstabbed by EU.
What a fine present to President Ze :-DDDD
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Time to Extricate From Ukraine Kiev has become a drag on Trump, but if we don't watch out, it could turn into a geopolitical
threat to everyone. By Doug Bandow
October 17, 2019
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though,
is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended
up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being
reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture.
Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years
afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development
was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and
ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region.
Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
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The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached
in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia
failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from
their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political
division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged
Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists
have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine
cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents
reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia
and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment
of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere,
including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected
Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of
Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly
wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations
into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation
with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long
as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's
pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed
by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic
brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective
of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive
determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace;
now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily
protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with
them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian
Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without
Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However,
adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes
to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in
NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow
blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for
Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S.
has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration
defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing
to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally
backed Minsk accord.
Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia.
European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy
with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned
to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author
of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate
policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what
exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment
of dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.
Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination
and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture
sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal
with the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the
Donbass and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support
for the region would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?
As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the
Ukrainian military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev
and Odessa, what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word
"hegemony" to describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men
(which they are) in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign
policy establishment in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings
in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad
to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history
of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.
And as is the case in developing countries,
what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian
public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.
How the civil unrest spun out of control the second
time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief
is false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent
and jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a
communist monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary
would be more adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations
in which the US was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or
China are a to be kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without
tensions. But seriously, as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.
This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border.
And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.
When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate,
no international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans
should look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops
wherever it fancies.
This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats
protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy
for its own elites benefit is being denied.
This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you,
or that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives
for a while?
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed
only mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The
strategy should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening.
It may be slow to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether
they are using fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will
have China as a greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take
decades of building trust on both sides.
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then
spouse, at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that
it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria
Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.
If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were
born, near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued
in 1916 in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.
When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would
not extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and
the US broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.
The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs
of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our
own central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's
list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is paying Facebook Inc. to run false
advertisements that its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is endorsing President Donald
Trump.
Warren's campaign sponsored the posts which were blasted into the feeds of U.S. users of
the social network, as it pushed back against Facebook's policy to exempt politicians' ads
from its third-party fact-checking program.
The ads, which begin with the falsehood, quickly backtracks: "You're probably shocked. And
you might be thinking, 'how could this possibly be true?' Well, it's not." ...
"If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should
not be in the position of censoring that speech," Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, said
in a statement to CNN on the ads.
This isn't the first time Warren has used Facebook's own platform to make a political
point. In March, Facebook took down ads from her campaign that called for the company to be
broken up, but later restored them.
This time, Warren's latest ads strike a more forceful tone, calling on users to hold the
Facebook CEO accountable and to back her mission.
"Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once," the ads read. "Now, they're
deliberately allowing a candidate to intentionally lie to the American people."
Great tactic, and Hilarious at that. I passed it on on my face book account. Great political
humor has been a proven vote winner. Anytime you get a chuckle, the residual resentment gets
same relief.
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily
uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits
as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person
of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane
Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials
responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over
the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more
to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.
George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether
he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only
moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:
And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has
many deaths on his conscience:
Here's the money quote from her apologia:
"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio
audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be
kind to everyone."
This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it
should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still
have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end
of his days.
Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:
There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong,
and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion,
I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues
the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief
extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency
to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes
from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that
his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency
has to die.
DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity.
From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems
very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."
...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.
Tulsi Gabbard
Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago
.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear
us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha,
& work together for the people.
There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.
The term "centrist" is replaced by a more appropriate term "neoliberal oligarchy"
Notable quotes:
"... Furthermore, Donald Trump might well emerge from this national ordeal with his reelection chances enhanced. Such a prospect is belatedly insinuating itself into public discourse. For that reason, certain anti-Trump pundits are already showing signs of going wobbly, suggesting , for instance, that censure rather than outright impeachment might suffice as punishment for the president's various offenses. Yet censuring Trump while allowing him to stay in office would be the equivalent of letting Harvey Weinstein off with a good tongue-lashing so that he can get back to making movies. Censure is for wimps. ..."
"... So if Trump finds himself backed into a corner, Democrats aren't necessarily in a more favorable position. And that aren't the half of it. Let me suggest that, while Trump is being pursued, it's you, my fellow Americans, who are really being played. The unspoken purpose of impeachment is not removal, but restoration. The overarching aim is not to replace Trump with Mike Pence -- the equivalent of exchanging Groucho for Harpo. No, the object of the exercise is to return power to those who created the conditions that enabled Trump to win the White House in the first place. ..."
"... For many of the main participants in this melodrama, the actual but unstated purpose of impeachment is to correct this great wrong and thereby restore history to its anointed path. ..."
"... In a recent column in The Guardian, Professor Samuel Moyn makes the essential point: Removing from office a vulgar, dishonest and utterly incompetent president comes nowhere close to capturing what's going on here. To the elites most intent on ousting Trump, far more important than anything he may say or do is what he signifies. He is a walking, talking repudiation of everything they believe and, by extension, of a future they had come to see as foreordained. ..."
"... Moyn styles these anti-Trump elites as "neoliberal oligarchy", members of the post-Cold War political mainstream that allowed ample room for nominally conservative Bushes and nominally liberal Clintons, while leaving just enough space for Barack Obama's promise of hope-and-(not-too-much) change. ..."
"... These "neoliberal oligarchy" share a common worldview. They believe in the universality of freedom as defined and practiced within the United States. They believe in corporate capitalism operating on a planetary scale. They believe in American primacy, with the United States presiding over a global order as the sole superpower. They believe in "American global leadership," which they define as primarily a military enterprise. And perhaps most of all, while collecting degrees from Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Yale, they came to believe in a so-called meritocracy as the preferred mechanism for allocating wealth, power and privilege. All of these together comprise the sacred scripture of contemporary American political elites. And if Donald Trump's antagonists have their way, his removal will restore that sacred scripture to its proper place as the basis of policy. ..."
"... "For all their appeals to enduring moral values," Moyn writes, "the "neoliberal oligarchy" are deploying a transparent strategy to return to power." Destruction of the Trump presidency is a necessary precondition for achieving that goal. ""neoliberal oligarchy" simply want to return to the status quo interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility." Precisely. ..."
"... how does such misconduct compare to the calamities engineered by the "neoliberal oligarchy" who preceded him? ..."
"... Trump's critics speak with one voice in demanding accountability. Yet virtually no one has been held accountable for the pain, suffering, and loss inflicted by the architects of the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Why is that? As another presidential election approaches, the question not only goes unanswered, but unasked. ..."
"... To win reelection, Trump, a corrupt con man (who jumped ship on his own bankrupt casinos, money in hand, leaving others holding the bag) will cheat and lie. Yet, in the politics of the last half-century, these do not qualify as novelties. (Indeed, apart from being the son of a sitting U.S. vice president, what made Hunter Biden worth $50Gs per month to a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch? I'm curious.) That the president and his associates are engaging in a cover-up is doubtless the case. Yet another cover-up proceeds in broad daylight on a vastly larger scale. "Trump's shambolic presidency somehow seems less unsavory," Moyn writes, when considering the fact that his critics refuse "to admit how massively his election signified the failure of their policies, from endless war to economic inequality." Just so. ..."
"... Exactly. Trump is the result of voter disgust with Bush III vs Clinton II, the presumed match up for a year or more leading up to 2016. Now Democrats want to do it again, thinking they can elect anybody against Trump. That's what Hillary thought too. ..."
"... Trump won for lack of alternatives. Our political class is determined to prevent any alternatives breaking through this time either. They don't want Trump, but even more they want to protect their gravy train of donor money, the huge overspending on medical care (four times the defense budget) and of course all those Forever Wars. ..."
"... Trump could win, for the same reasons as last time, even though the result would be no better than last time. ..."
"... I wish the slick I.D. politics obsessed corporate Dems nothing but the worst, absolute worst. They reap what they sow. If it means another four years of Trump, so be it. It's the price that's going to have to be paid. ..."
"... At a time when a majority of U.S. citizens cannot muster up $500 for an emergency dental bill or car repair without running down to the local "pay day loan" lender shark (now established as legitimate businesses) the corporate Dems, in their infinite wisdom, decide to concoct an impeachment circus to run simultaneously when all the dirt against the execrable Brennan and his intel minions starts to hit the press for their Russiagate hoax. Nice sleight of hand there corporate Dems. ..."
There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they
think.
From the time of Donald Trump's election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At
long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed
fashion, Trump has given his adversaries the very means to destroy him politically. They will
not waste the opportunity. Impeachment now -- finally, some will say -- qualifies as a virtual
certainty.
No doubt many surprises lie ahead. Yet the Democrats controlling the House of
Representatives have passed the point of no return. The time for prudential judgments -- the
Republican-controlled Senate will never convict, so why bother? -- is gone for good. To back
down now would expose the president's pursuers as spineless cowards. TheNew York
Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC would not soon forgive such craven behavior.
So, as President Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919 put it, "The stage is set, the
destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God." Of
course, the issue back then was a notably weighty one: whether to ratify the Versailles Treaty.
That it now concerns a "
Mafia-like shakedown " orchestrated by one of Wilson's successors tells us something about
the trajectory of American politics over the course of the last century and it has not been a
story of ascent.
The effort to boot the president from office is certain to yield a memorable spectacle. The
rancor and contempt that have clogged American politics like a backed-up sewer since the day of
Trump's election will now find release. Watergate will pale by comparison. The uproar triggered
by Bill Clinton's "
sexual relations " will be nothing by comparison. A de facto collaboration between
Trump, those who despise him, and those who despise his critics all but guarantees that this
story will dominate the news, undoubtedly for months to come.
As this process unspools, what politicians like to call "the people's business" will go
essentially unattended. So while Congress considers whether or not to remove Trump from office,
gun-control legislation will languish, the deterioration of the nation's infrastructure will
proceed apace, needed healthcare reforms will be tabled, the military-industrial complex will
waste yet more billions, and the national debt, already at $22 trillion --
larger, that is, than the entire economy -- will continue to surge. The looming threat posed by
climate change, much talked about of late, will proceed all but unchecked. For those of us
preoccupied with America's role in the world, the obsolete assumptions and habits undergirding
what's still called " national
security " will continue to evade examination. Our endless wars will remain endless and
pointless.
By way of compensation, we might wonder what benefits impeachment is likely to yield.
Answering that question requires examining four scenarios that describe the range of
possibilities awaiting the nation.
The first and most to be desired (but least likely) is that Trump will tire of being a
public piñata and just quit. With the thrill of flying in Air Force One having
worn off, being president can't be as much fun these days. Why put up with further grief? How
much more entertaining for Trump to retire to the political sidelines where he can tweet up a
storm and indulge his penchant for name-calling. And think of the "deals" an ex-president could
make in countries like Israel, North Korea, Poland, and Saudi Arabia on which he's bestowed
favors. Cha-ching! As of yet, however, the president shows no signs of taking the easy (and
lucrative) way out.
The second possible outcome sounds almost as good but is no less implausible: a sufficient
number of Republican senators rediscover their moral compass and "do the right thing," joining
with Democrats to create the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and send him packing.
In the Washington of that classic 20th-century film director Frank Capra, with Jimmy Stewart
holding
forth on the Senate floor and a moist-eyed Jean Arthur cheering him on from the gallery,
this might have happened. In the real Washington of "Moscow Mitch"
McConnell , think again.
The third somewhat seamier outcome might seem a tad more likely. It postulates that
McConnell and various GOP senators facing reelection in 2020 or 2022 will calculate that
turning on Trump just might offer the best way of saving their own skins. The president's
loyalty to just about anyone, wives included, has always been highly contingent, the people
streaming out of his administration routinely making the point. So why should senatorial
loyalty to the president be any different? At the moment, however, indications that Trump
loyalists out in the hinterlands will reward such turncoats are just about nonexistent. Unless
that base were to flip, don't expect Republican senators to do anything but flop.
That leaves outcome No. 4, easily the most probable: while the House will impeach, the
Senate will decline to convict. Trump will therefore stay right where he is, with the matter of
his fitness for office effectively deferred to the November 2020 elections. Except as a source
of sadomasochistic diversion, the entire agonizing experience will, therefore, prove to be a
colossal waste of time and blather.
Furthermore, Donald Trump might well emerge from this national ordeal with his reelection
chances enhanced. Such a prospect is belatedly insinuating itself into public discourse. For
that reason, certain anti-Trump pundits are already showing signs of going wobbly,
suggesting , for instance, that censure rather than outright impeachment might suffice as
punishment for the president's various offenses. Yet censuring Trump while allowing him to stay
in office would be the equivalent of letting Harvey Weinstein off with a good tongue-lashing so
that he can get back to making movies. Censure is for wimps.
Besides, as Trump campaigns for a second term, he would almost surely wear censure like a
badge of honor. Keep in mind that Congress's
approval ratings are considerably worse than his. To more than a few members of the public,
a black mark awarded by Congress might look like a gold star.
Restoration Not Removal
So if Trump finds himself backed into a corner, Democrats aren't necessarily in a more
favorable position. And that aren't the half of it. Let me suggest that, while Trump is being
pursued, it's you, my fellow Americans, who are really being played. The unspoken purpose of
impeachment is not removal, but restoration. The overarching aim is not to replace Trump with
Mike Pence -- the equivalent of exchanging Groucho for Harpo. No, the object of the exercise is
to return power to those who created the conditions that enabled Trump to win the White House
in the first place.
Just recently, for instance, Hillary Clinton
declared Trump to be an "illegitimate president." Implicit in her charge is the conviction
-- no doubt sincere -- that people like Donald Trump are not supposed to be president.
People like Hillary Clinton -- people possessing credentials
like hers and sharing her values -- should be the chosen ones. Here we glimpse the true
meaning of legitimacy in this context. Whatever the vote in the Electoral College, Trump
doesn't deserve to be president and never did.
For many of the main participants in this melodrama, the actual but unstated purpose of
impeachment is to correct this great wrong and thereby restore history to its anointed
path.
In a
recent column in The Guardian, Professor Samuel Moyn makes the essential point:
Removing from office a vulgar, dishonest and utterly incompetent president comes nowhere close
to capturing what's going on here. To the elites most intent on ousting Trump, far more
important than anything he may say or do is what he signifies. He is a walking, talking
repudiation of everything they believe and, by extension, of a future they had come to see as
foreordained.
Moyn styles these anti-Trump elites as "neoliberal oligarchy", members of the post-Cold War political
mainstream that allowed ample room for nominally conservative Bushes and nominally liberal
Clintons, while leaving just enough space for Barack Obama's promise of hope-and-(not-too-much)
change.
These "neoliberal oligarchy" share a common worldview. They believe in the universality of freedom as
defined and practiced within the United States. They believe in corporate capitalism operating
on a planetary scale. They believe in American primacy, with the United States presiding over a
global order as the sole superpower. They believe in "American global leadership," which they
define as primarily a military enterprise. And perhaps most of all, while collecting degrees
from Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Yale, they came to
believe in a so-called meritocracy as the preferred mechanism for allocating wealth, power and
privilege. All of these together comprise the sacred scripture of contemporary American
political elites. And if Donald Trump's antagonists have their way, his removal will restore
that sacred scripture to its proper place as the basis of policy.
"For all their appeals to enduring moral values," Moyn writes, "the "neoliberal oligarchy" are deploying
a transparent strategy to return to power." Destruction of the Trump presidency is a necessary
precondition for achieving that goal. ""neoliberal oligarchy" simply want to return to the status quo
interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his
mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility." Precisely.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The U.S. military's "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad at the start of the Iraq War, as
broadcast on CNN.
For such a scheme to succeed, however, laundering reputations alone will not suffice.
Equally important will be to bury any recollection of the catastrophes that paved the way for
an über -qualified centrist to lose to an indisputably unqualified and
unprincipled political novice in 2016.
Holding promised security assistance hostage unless a foreign leader agrees to do you
political favors is obviously and indisputably wrong. Trump's antics regarding Ukraine may even
meet some definition of criminal. Still, how does such misconduct compare to the calamities engineered by the "neoliberal
oligarchy" who preceded him? Consider, in particular, the George W. Bush
administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (along with the spin-off wars that followed).
Consider, too, the reckless economic policies that produced the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
As measured by the harm inflicted on the American people (and others), the offenses for which
Trump is being impeached qualify as mere misdemeanors.
Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental
hubris. When it comes to tallying up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who
sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include
thousands of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to
struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands of non-Americans killed or injured ;
millions displaced ;
trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and in its case
even formed
inside a U.S. prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it
has yet to recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the
administration of President Bill Clinton and continued by his successor. Deregulating the
banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet, as a
direct result of
the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment
shot up to 10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock
market cratered and millions saw their life savings evaporate. Again, the question must be
asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?
Trump's critics speak with one voice in demanding accountability. Yet virtually no one has
been held accountable for the pain, suffering, and loss inflicted by the architects of the Iraq
War and the Great Recession. Why is that? As another presidential election approaches, the
question not only goes unanswered, but unasked.
Sen. Carter Glass (D–Va.) and Rep. Henry B. Steagall (D–Ala.-3), the co-sponsors of
the 1932 Glass–Steagall Act separating investment and commercial banking, which was
repealed in 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)
To win reelection, Trump, a corrupt con man (who jumped ship
on his own bankrupt casinos, money in hand, leaving others holding the bag) will cheat and lie.
Yet, in the politics of the last half-century, these do not qualify as novelties. (Indeed,
apart from being the son of a sitting U.S. vice president, what made Hunter Biden
worth $50Gs per month to a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch? I'm curious.) That
the president and his associates are engaging in a cover-up is doubtless the case. Yet another
cover-up proceeds in broad daylight on a vastly larger scale. "Trump's shambolic presidency
somehow seems less unsavory," Moyn writes, when considering the fact that his critics refuse
"to admit how massively his election signified the failure of their policies, from endless war
to economic inequality." Just so.
What are the real crimes? Who are the real criminals? No matter what happens in the coming
months, don't expect the Trump impeachment proceedings to come within a country mile of
addressing such questions.
Exactly. Trump is the result of voter disgust with Bush III vs Clinton II, the presumed
match up for a year or more leading up to 2016. Now Democrats want to do it again, thinking they can elect anybody against Trump. That's
what Hillary thought too.
Now the Republicans who lost their party to Trump think they can take it back with
somebody even more lame than Jeb, if only they could find someone, anyone, to run on that
non-plan.
Trump won for lack of alternatives. Our political class is determined to prevent any
alternatives breaking through this time either. They don't want Trump, but even more they
want to protect their gravy train of donor money, the huge overspending on medical care (four
times the defense budget) and of course all those Forever Wars.
Trump could win, for the same reasons as last time, even though the result would be no
better than last time.
LJ , October 9, 2019 at 17:01
Well, yeah but I recall that what won Trump the Republican Nomination was first and
foremost his stance on Immigration. This issue is what separated him from the herd of
candidates . None of them had the courage or the desire to go against Governmental Groupthink
on Immigration. All he then had to do was get on top of low energy Jeb Bush and the road was
clear. He got the base on his side on this issue and on his repeated statement that he wished
to normalize relations with Russia . He won the nomination easily. The base is still on his
side on these issues but Governmental Groupthink has prevailed in the House, the Senate, the
Intelligence Services and the Federal Courts. Funny how nobody in the Beltway, especially not
in media, is brave enough to admit that the entire Neoconservative scheme has been a disaster
and that of course we should get out of Syria . Nor can anyone recall the corruption and
warmongering that now seem that seems endemic to the Democratic Party. Of course Trump has to
wear goat's horns. "Off with his head".
Drew Hunkins , October 9, 2019 at 16:00
I wish the slick I.D. politics obsessed corporate Dems nothing but the worst, absolute
worst. They reap what they sow. If it means another four years of Trump, so be it. It's the
price that's going to have to be paid.
At a time when a majority of U.S. citizens cannot muster up $500 for an emergency dental
bill or car repair without running down to the local "pay day loan" lender shark (now
established as legitimate businesses) the corporate Dems, in their infinite wisdom, decide to
concoct an impeachment circus to run simultaneously when all the dirt against the execrable
Brennan and his intel minions starts to hit the press for their Russiagate hoax. Nice sleight
of hand there corporate Dems.
Of course, the corporate Dems would rather lose to Trump than win with a
progressive-populist like Bernie. After all, a Bernie win would mean an end to a lot of
careerism and cushy positions within the establishment political scene in Washington and
throughout the country.
Now we even have the destroyer of Libya mulling another run for the presidency.
Forget about having a job the next day and forget about the 25% interest on your credit
card or that half your income is going toward your rent or mortgage, or that you barely see
your kids b/c of the 60 hour work week, just worry about women lawyers being able to make
partner at the firm, and trans people being able to use whatever bathroom they wish and male
athletes being able to compete against women based on genitalia (no, wait, I'm confused
now).
Either class politics and class warfare comes front and center or we witness a burgeoning
neo-fascist movement in our midst. It's that simple, something has got to give!
"The president is dropping by the city on Thursday for one of his periodic angry
wank-fests at the Target Center, which is the venue in which this event will be inflicted
upon the Twin Cities. (And, just as an aside, given the events of the past 10 days, this one
should be a doozy.) Other Minneapolis folk are planning an extensive unwelcoming party
outside the arena, which necessarily would require increased security, which is expensive.
So, realizing that it was dealing with a notorious deadbeat -- in keeping with his customary
business plan, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has stiffed 10 cities this year for bills relating
to security costs that total almost a million bucks -- the company that provides the security
for the Target Center wants the president*'s campaign to shell out more than $500,000.
This has sent the president* into a Twitter tantrum against Frey, who seems not to be that
impressed by it. Right from when the visit was announced, Frey has been jabbing at the
president*'s ego. From the Star-Tribune:
"Our entire city will stand not behind the President, but behind the communities and
people who continue to make our city -- and this country -- great," Frey said. "While there
is no legal mechanism to prevent the president from visiting, his message of hatred will
never be welcome in Minneapolis."
It is a mayor's lot to deal with out-of-state troublemakers. Always has been."
This is not about Trump. This is not even about Ukraine and/or foreign powers influence on
the US election (of which Israel, UK, and Saudi are three primary examples; in this
particular order.)
Russiagate 2.0 (aka Ukrainegate) is the case, textbook example if you wish, of how the
neoliberal elite manipulates the MSM and the narrative for purposes of misdirecting attention
and perception of their true intentions and objectives -- distracting the electorate from
real issues.
An excellent observation by JohnH (October 01, 2019 at 01:47 PM )
"It all depends on which side of the Infowars you find yourself. The facts themselves are
too obscure and byzantine."
There are two competing narratives here:
1. NARRATIVE 1: CIA swamp scum tried to re-launch Russiagate as Russiagate 2.0. This is
CIA coup d'état aided and abetted by CIA-democrats like Pelosi and Schiff. Treason, as
Trump aptly said. This is narrative shared by "anti-Deep Staters" who sometimes are nicknamed
"Trumptards". Please note that the latter derogatory nickname is factually incorrect:
supporters of this narrative often do not support Trump. They just oppose machinations of the
Deep State. And/or neoliberalism personified by Clinton camp, with its rampant
corruption.
2. NARRATIVE 2: Trump tried to derail his opponent using his influence of foreign state
President (via military aid) as leverage and should be impeached for this and previous
crimes. ("Full of Schiff" commenters narrative, neoliberal democrats, or demorats.)
Supporters of this category usually bought Russiagate 1.0 narrative line, hook and sinker.
Some of them are brainwashed, but mostly simply ignorant neoliberal lemmings without even
basic political education.
In any case, while Russiagate 2.0 is probably another World Wrestling Federation style
fight, I think "anti-Deep-staters" are much closer to the truth.
What is missing here is the real problem: the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA (and
elsewhere).
So this circus serves an important purpose (intentionally or unintentionally) -- to disrupt
voters from the problems that are really burning, and are equal to a slow-progressing cancer in the
US society.
And implicitly derail Warren (being a weak politician she does not understand that, and
jumped into Ukrainegate bandwagon )
I am not that competent here, so I will just mention some obvious symptoms:
Loss of legitimacy of the ruling neoliberal elite (which demonstrated itself in 2016
with election of Trump);
Desperation of many working Americans with sliding standard of living; loss of meaningful
jobs due to offshoring of manufacturing and automation (which demonstrated itself in opioids
abuse epidemics; similar to epidemics of alcoholism in the USSR before its dissolution.
Loss of previously available freedoms. Loss of "free press" replaced by the neoliberal
echo chamber in major MSM. The uncontrolled and brutal rule of financial oligarchy and allied
with the intelligence agencies as the third rail of US politics (plus the conversion of the
state after 9/11 into national security state);
Coming within this century end of the "Petroleum Age" and the global crisis that it can
entail;
Rampant militarism, tremendous waist of resources on the arms race, and overstretched
efforts to maintain and expand global, controlled from Washington, neoliberal empire. Efforts
that since 1991 were a primary focus of unhinged after 1991 neocon faction US elite who
totally controls foreign policy establishment ("full-spectrum dominance). They are stealing money from
working people to fund an imperial project, and as part of neoliberal redistribution of wealth up
Most of the commenters here live a comfortable life in the financially secured retirement,
and, as such, are mostly satisfied with the status quo. And almost completely isolated from
the level of financial insecurity of most common Americans (healthcare racket might be the
only exception).
And re-posting of articles which confirm your own worldview (echo chamber posting) is nice
entertainment, I think ;-)
Some of those posters actually sometimes manage to find really valuable info. For which I
am thankful. In other cases, when we have a deluge of abhorrent neoliberal propaganda
postings (the specialty of Fred C. Dobbs) which often generate really insightful comments from the
members of the "anti-Deep State" camp.
Still it would be beneficial if the flow of neoliberal spam is slightly curtailed.
"... "Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars -- emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted. ..."
"... While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for which Bush is condemned today. ..."
"... From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan, establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria – Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. ..."
"... *Nobel Peace Drones™ ..."
"... "Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for the displacement and death of millions," ..."
Actor Mark Ruffalo was shredded for double standards after he posted a "callout" tweet
assailing George Bush for the sins of the Iraq War, with many netizens noting his aversion to
slamming Barack Obama's military adventures. Weighing into a controversy kicked off by TV
personality Ellen Degeneres, who came under fire for schmoozing it up with former President
George W. Bush at a football game last weekend, Ruffalo insisted no quarter or kindness should
be offered to perpetrators of heinous war crimes until they face consequences, including
Bush.
"Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted.
Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness. https://t.co/dpMwfck6su
While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why
similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a
pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for
which Bush is condemned today.
Claiming Bush is some monster while worshipping Obama even though they did the same things
abroad🤔
From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan,
establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading
a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria –
Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd
already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh
words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
"Woke Twitter, [including] Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call outs," one user
observed, noting the several occasions former first lady Michelle Obama posed affectionately
with Bush without facing a similar wave of outrage from figures like Ruffalo.
People ripping Jameela Jamil and the celebs in these screenshots but it was tumbleweed 101
when Michelle Obama was getting regular sweeties fixes from George W. Bush & going above
and beyond duty in friendly optics. Woke Twitter, incl Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call
outs. pic.twitter.com/snNYZEbAWM
It's funny how Mark Ruffalo can criticize Ellen, who was an actual person affected by
Bush's ignorance, but not a peep about Michelle Obama who admits to having a special
FRIENDSHIP with GW. https://t.co/9UM1BP8GpY
Another commenter seconded Ruffalo's views on Bush, but encouraged the actor to take his
criticism further, applying the same humanitarian standard evenly, regardless of the party in
power.
"Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible
for the displacement and death of millions," the user said.
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush.
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over.
Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for
the displacement and death of millions
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over
100% on Bush. You forgot to add Obama & Clinton though. No reason to root for justice
against one war criminal, while giving a free pass to others. It makes it partisan, rather
than ethical.
Hillary Clinton has threatened to enter the 2020 presidential race for president after
President Donald Trump suggested on Twitter that she throw her hat in the ring in an effort to
"steal it away" from Elizabeth Warren. Trump tweeted Tuesday that "Crooked Hillary"
should run for president again to deprive the "Uber Left" Warren of a shot at the White
House, but only on "one condition" to be subpoenaed to "explain all of her high
crimes and misdemeanors."
I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from
Uber Left Elizabeth Warren. Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her high
crimes and misdemeanors including how & why she deleted 33,000 Emails AFTER getting "C"
Subpoena!
Five hours after Trump's jab, Clinton replied: "Don't tempt me. Do your job."
Reaction to Clinton's warning was mixed, to say the least. While mainstream media outlets
seemed to love the idea, many social media users recoiled in horror at the thought of a 2016
re-run.
"I don't think my heart could take it" if Hillary really runs again, one fan
proclaimed on Twitter.
I did not vote for Trump, or for Hillary, but I firmly agree with analysis of Bacevich here:
> Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying
up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include thousands
of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands
of non-Americans killed or injured; millions displaced; trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and
in its case even formed inside a US prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it has yet to
recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
> The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the administration of President Bill Clinton
and continued by his successor. Deregulating the banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet,
as a direct result of the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment shot up to
10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock market cratered and millions saw their life
savings evaporate. Again, the question must be asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?
"... New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate. ..."
"... Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead. ..."
"... In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. ..."
US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016.
Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on 'Russian' meddling actually ran a "false
flag" meddling operation themselves. A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting
African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household
name.
Described by the New
York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has
ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan
previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox,
is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for
the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract
the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone. Morgan and Fox
have struck gold in the "Russiagate" racket, which sprung into being after Hillary
Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is
one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor
and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by
the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats
and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.
It is worth noting that the 600 "Russia-linked" Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This
inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however.
From the way it was formed to the secrecy of its "methods" to the blatantly false
assumptions on which its claims rest, "Hamilton68" is probably the single most successful
media fraud & US propaganda campaign I've seen since I've been writing about politics.
It's truly shocking.
New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017
special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false
flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by
a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious
creation, Hamilton 68.
Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points –
making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over
25 years.
Money trail and weak apologies
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece,
had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers
boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hurt
Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham."
This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ScottShaneNYT , who broke the
Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record
event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://t.co/gIAytOh2yy
The money for the venture came from a $750,000 contribution to AET by Reid Hoffman, the
billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a big Democrat donor. Once that emerged, Hoffman offered
a public apology for his connection to the shady operation, but insisted that he didn't know
what his money was going towards.
" I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing ," Hoffman
said in a statement.
"For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET -- the organization I did
support -- more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would
reject."
As for Shane, he told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, but had
signed a nondisclosure agreement at the request of AET, so he could not talk about it
further.
Spin and denial
Shane's spin on the tale was that New Knowledge "imitated Russian tactics" as part of
an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 and had no effect on the
election. Yet these tactics are only considered "Russian" because New Knowledge and
similar outfits said so! Moreover, New Knowledge's budget in Alabama was greater than the
reported amount spent by "Russians" on the 2016 US presidential election, yet Moscow's
alleged meddling was supposed to be decisive, while New Knowledge's failed?
New Knowledge responded to the Times story by insisting that the "false flag"
operation was actually a benign research project. In a statement posted on Twitter, the
company's CEO claimed that its activities during the Alabama Senate race were conducted in
order to "better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media
disinformation."
Morgan emphasized that he in no way took part in an influence campaign, and warned people
not to mischaracterize his "research."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that
Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility
– misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was
fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last
week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been
suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Meddlers
unmasked
The final nail in the coffin of Morgan's story came on Thursday, when the leaked secret
after-action report from "Project Birmingham" was published online, showing that those
behind the Alabama campaign knew perfectly well what they were doing and why.
BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.
So, it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots."
Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat
operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria
over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Some interesting estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters that participated in the Donbass War
from 2014-2019 from a report [PDF]
by the Soufan Center. (h/t
Kholmogorov)
Kiev-controlled Ukraine served as a destination for would-be murderers seeking impunity for
years. However, inviting foreign scum will help it about as much as it helped ISIS. Maybe
even less: some foreign and domestic ISIS bandits had ideology beyond raping and looting,
Ukrainian bandits in Donbass do not. "True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away
from the front in Ukraine itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they
can be maimed or killed.
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure, on the battlefield and in bed.
@Korenchkin If
you go by quintessence of Nazi ideology "my tribe is better than your tribe", every nation
has its Nazis, including Russia.
To its credit, tribal nationalists never got more than ~7% electoral support in
Russia.
After Ukrainian experience showed that any country can be quickly ruined by primeval
tribal nationalism, their support in Russia dropped to below 2%. But it still isn't zero.
Then again, ~1% of any population are schizophrenics, 2-3% are gays/lesbians, etc., so single
digit representation of any kind of deviation is not threatening country's survival.
@Mr. Hack I
asked the questions first, but I'll be generous and explain this to you on the fingers.
1. I used the term "Banderists" in the context of Ukraine's volunteer battalions –
that is, where foreigners have the most realistic chance of getting accepted.
2. Polls show Ukrainians to generally be 50/50 on Bandera, but obviously, that number will be
much higher amongst the rather self-selected sample that are volunteer battalion members. At
least 80%, if not 90%.
3. Poles obviously couldn't care less for Bandera. Polish *nationalists* – even less
so.
4. Nationalists are the likeliest foreigners to participate in the Donbass.
5. Do you now see why this would be a pertinent point to mention in the specific context of
why 10x fewer Poles fight for the Ukraine relative to Georgians, despite having 10x the
population?
I'm not sure if 14 fighters is a big enough sample size to justify lumping Canada into the
dreaded "Russophobe" category. But the 10 pro-Ukrainians to 4 pro-Russians ratio closely
mirrors that of self-declared ethnic Ukrainians (1,359,655) to Russians (622,445) in Canada.
Though many, possibly even a majority of those "Russians" are actually Jews. The Ukrainian
lobby has been disturbingly powerful in Canada for a long time (multiculturalism was their
bright idea), while the Russian lobby is seemingly invisible.
There are signs and symbols of Ukrainian nationalism everywhere (banks, festivals, flags,
bumper stickers etc), while similar Russian symbols are basically non-existent. The Uke to
Russkie ratio may be only 10-4, but it feels more like 10-1, or even 100-1.
I expected more Russians from the Baltics. Apparently, they and Serbs were early arrivals in
Girkin's group. Perhaps the ethnic Russians were counted as Russian?
Quite a few White Russians emigrated to France. The Whites were well supported by ethnic
Russians in the Donbass during the Civil War.
Many Irish Nationalist commentators supported Russia (enemy's enemy) but the table shows
Ireland Pro Ukraine (anti-imperialist a stronger driver?). The Russian settlers in the
Donbass are such an obvious parallel to the Orangemen.
1. Chechens would be the obvious answer. I recall reading there were 2x as many Chechens
fighting for Ukrainians than for Russians.
2. Svidomy Ukrainians in Russia.
3. And, as mentioned, Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists (~60%-70% on Ukraine's side, at
least initially). The other brands of Russian nationalists were overwhelmingly
pro-Russian.
@AnonFromTN
More foreign "scum" on Donbas side than Ukrainian side. As one would expect. It's not all bad
however, Donbas should be kept apart from Ukraine.
"True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away from the front in Ukraine
itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they can be maimed or
killed.
Ukrainian-American Paslawsky fought and died in the war.
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the only American known to have fought
alongside Ukrainian forces against pro-Russian separatists has been killed in eastern
Ukraine.
Mark Gregory Paslawsky, 55, died while fighting with the volunteer Donbas Battalion.
Paslawsky, who fought under the nom de guerre "Franko," was killed on August 19 during
fighting in the town of Ilovaysk, near the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, according to a Facebook
post by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko.
Paslawsky was born in 1959 in New York and grew up in a tight-knit Ukrainian-American
family in New Jersey. He moved to Ukraine around two decades ago and informed his family
earlier this year that he planned to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army, according to his
brother, Nestor Paslawsky.
::::::::::::::
The American fighting for Donbas, "Cowb0y", meanwhile was some sort of petty criminal in
the USA. Like Motorola in Russia, of course.
@Philip Owen
Well the Serbs played a major role in the defence of the territory that is today the Donbas
(not particularly well known among modern Russians). So Serbian nationalists have an extra
cause in regards to the Donbas
Slavo-Serbia or Slaveno-Serbia, was a territory of Imperial Russia between 1753-64. It was
located by the right bank of the Donets River between the Bakhmutka River
(Бахмут) and Luhan
(Лугань) rivers. This area today constitutes the
territories of present-day Luhansk Oblast and Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. The
administrative centre of Slavo-Serbia was Bakhmut (Bahmut).
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure
Not mutually exclusive. If you feel that you're leading a meaningless life and you are
looking for adventure, something radically different from a cubicle job or whatever, might as
well do something like join a war where you get to defend innocent people.
Considering ex ISIS fighters are often left to go free and claim benefits it was interesting
to see the fate of the fella who went to the Donbass and didn't even fight.
@anonymous
coward So was South Africa but didn't stop there being close ties between loyalists and
the apartheid government, a few Ulstermen were in the the government and there was the shared
settler Calvinist outlook. The IRA had quite close links to Croats, don't know if loyalists
had the same with Serbs. MP Ian Paisley junior is somewhat of a Russophile.
@SveVid This is
all true, but all those people are completely and utterly assimilated into Ukrainians /
Russians and have been for much longer than living memory. Most people in Serbia (except
history nerds etc) have no idea about this history. A much more plausible explanation for
Serbs going to fight in the Donbass would make some reference to Russian (and also Greek btw)
volunteer units fighting with the Serbs in the 1990s and contacts established during that
time.
@Anatoly Karlin
Mazepa is way up there and he joined the early 17th century Swedish invasion of Russia that
ended with the defeat at Poltava. That effectively ended Sweden as a great power. Seems like
Ukrainians have a thing for worshipping losers allied with anyone west of them, so there is
some hope for Porky's eventual rehabilitation.
Carl Bildt's ancestors were there in high stockings among the vanquished at Poltava
– the Bildts never forgave the humiliation, those Swedes can be sneaky. That explains
the persistent anti-Russian attitudes among the Nordics. Swedes also tend to be
simple-minded, nobody swallows the current globo-homo propaganda as eagerly or looks for
Russian submarines hiding behind every whale.
By and large Austria and Croatia are the only surprises – here, the history of the last
century is a bit complicated. "Altösterreicher" is a popular euphemism for "Galician
Jew" i.e. the current Kiew regime. The Croats are more probably channeling their recent
hatred for the Serbs. [Not really] funny what the separation of East and West Rome is still
doing to a people.
"... "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ." ..."
"... I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war. ..."
"... Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy. ..."
"... They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor. ..."
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in
power, all these people will come back from the cold & rain the bombs on the globally
deplorables.
Lily Lynch @lilyslynch
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."
"liberal internationalism in Obama's cabinet. That made her [Powers] a target for his
critics. Her openness to military intervention – she was against [W Bush?] it in Iraq
but for it in Libya – drew flak from the left."
How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post
modern?] favor military intervention?
Does it involve ignoring "state run industrial age mass murder"?
Does it see a rationalized outcome to justify state mass murder?
I think post modern morality goes more towards the means don't matter much less the end---
see Libya!
I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never
excuse war.
Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world
order to add to its Degeneracy.
"... The lawsuit also aggressively contests Boeing's spin that competent pilots could have prevented the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air crashes: ..."
"... When asked why Boeing did not alert pilots to the existence of the MCAS, Boeing responded that the company decided against disclosing more details due to concerns about "inundate[ing] average pilots with too much information -- and significantly more technical data -- than [they] needed or could realistically digest." ..."
"... The filing has a detailed explanation of why the addition of heavier, bigger LEAP1-B engines to the 737 airframe made the plane less stable, changed how it handled, and increased the risk of catastrophic stall. It also describes at length how Boeing ignored warning signs during the design and development process, and misrepresented the 737 Max as essentially the same as older 737s to the FAA, potential buyers, and pilots. It also has juicy bits presented in earlier media accounts but bear repeating, like: ..."
"... Then, on November 7, 2018, the FAA issued an "Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) 2018-23-51," warning that an unsafe condition likely could exist or develop on 737 MAX aircraft. ..."
"... Moreover, unlike runaway stabilizer, MCAS disables the control column response that 737 pilots have grown accustomed to and relied upon in earlier generations of 737 aircraft. ..."
"... And making the point that to turn off MCAS all you had to do was flip two switches behind everything else on the center condole. Not exactly true, normally those switches were there to shut off power to electrically assisted trim. Ah, it one thing to shut off MCAS it's a whole other thing to shut off power to the planes trim, especially in high speed ✓ and the plane noise up ✓, and not much altitude ✓. ..."
"... Classic addiction behavior. Boeing has a major behavioral problem, the repetitive need for and irrational insistence on profit above safety all else , that is glaringly obvious to everyone except Boeing. ..."
"... In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual so as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots " ..."
"... This "MCAS" was always hidden from pilots? The military implemented checks on MCAS to maintain a level of pilot control. The commercial airlines did not. Commercial airlines were in thrall of every little feature that they felt would eliminate the need for pilots at all. Fell right into the automation crapification of everything. ..."
At first blush, the suit filed in Dallas by the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SwAPA) against Boeing may seem like a family
feud. SWAPA is seeking an estimated $115 million for lost pilots' pay as a result of the grounding of the 34 Boeing 737 Max planes
that Southwest owns and the additional 20 that Southwest had planned to add to its fleet by year end 2019. Recall that Southwest
was the largest buyer of the 737 Max, followed by American Airlines. However, the damning accusations made by the pilots' union,
meaning, erm, pilots, is likely to cause Boeing not just more public relations headaches, but will also give grist to suits by crash
victims.
However, one reason that the Max is a sore point with the union was that it was a key leverage point in 2016 contract negotiations:
And Boeing's assurances that the 737 Max was for all practical purposes just a newer 737 factored into the pilots' bargaining
stance. Accordingly, one of the causes of action is tortious interference, that Boeing interfered in the contract negotiations to
the benefit of Southwest. The filing describes at length how Boeing and Southwest were highly motivated not to have the contract
dispute drag on and set back the launch of the 737 Max at Southwest, its showcase buyer. The big point that the suit makes is the
plane was unsafe and the pilots never would have agreed to fly it had they known what they know now.
We've embedded the compliant at the end of the post. It's colorful and does a fine job of recapping the sorry history of the development
of the airplane. It has damning passages like:
Boeing concealed the fact that the 737 MAX aircraft was not airworthy because, inter alia, it incorporated a single-point failure
condition -- a software/flight control logic called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System ("MCAS") -- that,if fed
erroneous data from a single angle-of-attack sensor, would command the aircraft nose-down and into an unrecoverable dive without
pilot input or knowledge.
The lawsuit also aggressively contests Boeing's spin that competent pilots could have prevented the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air
crashes:
Had SWAPA known the truth about the 737 MAX aircraft in 2016, it never would have approved the inclusion of the 737 MAX aircraft
as a term in its CBA [collective bargaining agreement], and agreed to operate the aircraft for Southwest. Worse still, had SWAPA
known the truth about the 737 MAX aircraft, it would have demanded that Boeing rectify the aircraft's fatal flaws before agreeing
to include the aircraft in its CBA, and to provide its pilots, and all pilots, with the necessary information and training needed
to respond to the circumstances that the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 pilots encountered nearly three
years later.
And (boldface original):
Boeing Set SWAPA Pilots Up to Fail
As SWAPA President Jon Weaks, publicly stated, SWAPA pilots "were kept in the dark" by Boeing.
Boeing did not tell SWAPA pilots that MCAS existed and there was no description or mention of MCAS in the Boeing Flight Crew
Operations Manual.
There was therefore no way for commercial airline pilots, including SWAPA pilots, to know that MCAS would work in the background
to override pilot inputs.
There was no way for them to know that MCAS drew on only one of two angle of attack sensors on the aircraft.
And there was no way for them to know of the terrifying consequences that would follow from a malfunction.
When asked why Boeing did not alert pilots to the existence of the MCAS, Boeing responded that the company decided against
disclosing more details due to concerns about "inundate[ing] average pilots with too much information -- and significantly more
technical data -- than [they] needed or could realistically digest."
SWAPA's pilots, like their counterparts all over the world, were set up for failure
The filing has a detailed explanation of why the addition of heavier, bigger LEAP1-B engines to the 737 airframe made the plane
less stable, changed how it handled, and increased the risk of catastrophic stall. It also describes at length how Boeing ignored
warning signs during the design and development process, and misrepresented the 737 Max as essentially the same as older 737s to
the FAA, potential buyers, and pilots. It also has juicy bits presented in earlier media accounts but bear repeating, like:
By March 2016, Boeing settled on a revision of the MCAS flight control logic.
However, Boeing chose to omit key safeguards that had previously been included in earlier iterations of MCAS used on the Boeing
KC-46A Pegasus, a military tanker derivative of the Boeing 767 aircraft.
The engineers who created MCAS for the military tanker designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with
limited power to move the tanker's nose. These deliberate checks sought to ensure that the system could not act erroneously or
cause a pilot to lose control. Those familiar with the tanker's design explained that these checks were incorporated because "[y]ou
don't want the solution to be worse than the initial problem."
The 737 MAX version of MCAS abandoned the safeguards previously relied upon. As discussed below, the 737 MAX MCAS had greater
control authority than its predecessor, activated repeatedly upon activation, and relied on input from just one of the plane's
two sensors that measure the angle of the plane's nose.
In other words, Boeing can't credibly say that it didn't know better.
Here is one of the sections describing Boeing's cover-ups:
Yet Boeing's website, press releases, annual reports, public statements and statements to operators and customers, submissions
to the FAA and other civil aviation authorities, and 737 MAX flight manuals made no mention of the increased stall hazard or MCAS
itself.
In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual so
as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots.
We urge you to read the complaint in full, since it contains juicy insider details, like the significance of Southwest being Boeing's
737 Max "launch partner" and what that entailed in practice, plus recounting dates and names of Boeing personnel who met with SWAPA
pilots and made misrepresentations about the aircraft.
Even though Southwest Airlines is negotiating a settlement with Boeing over losses resulting from the grounding of the 737 Max
and the airline has promised to compensate the pilots, the pilots' union at a minimum apparently feels the need to put the heat on
Boeing directly. After all, the union could withdraw the complaint if Southwest were to offer satisfactory compensation for the pilots'
lost income. And pilots have incentives not to raise safety concerns about the planes they fly. Don't want to spook the horses, after
all.
But Southwest pilots are not only the ones most harmed by Boeing's debacle but they are arguably less exposed to the downside
of bad press about the 737 Max. It's business fliers who are most sensitive to the risks of the 737 Max, due to seeing the story
regularly covered in the business press plus due to often being road warriors. Even though corporate customers account for only 12%
of airline customers, they represent an estimated 75% of profits.
Southwest customers don't pay up for front of the bus seats. And many of them presumably value the combination of cheap travel,
point to point routes between cities underserved by the majors, and close-in airports, which cut travel times. In other words, that
combination of features will make it hard for business travelers who use Southwest regularly to give the airline up, even if the
737 Max gives them the willies. By contrast, premium seat passengers on American or United might find it not all that costly, in
terms of convenience and ticket cost (if they are budget sensitive), to fly 737-Max-free Delta until those passengers regain confidence
in the grounded plane.
Note that American Airlines' pilot union, when asked about the Southwest claim, said that it also believes its pilots deserve
to be compensated for lost flying time, but they plan to obtain it through American Airlines.
If Boeing were smart, it would settle this suit quickly, but so far, Boeing has relied on bluster and denial. So your guess is
as good as mine as to how long the legal arm-wrestling goes on.
Update 5:30 AM EDT : One important point that I neglected to include is that the filing also recounts, in gory detail, how Boeing
went into "Blame the pilots" mode after the Lion Air crash, insisting the cause was pilot error and would therefore not happen again.
Boeing made that claim on a call to all operators, including SWAPA, and then three days later in a meeting with SWAPA.
However, Boeing's actions were inconsistent with this claim. From the filing:
Then, on November 7, 2018, the FAA issued an "Emergency Airworthiness Directive (AD) 2018-23-51," warning that an unsafe condition
likely could exist or develop on 737 MAX aircraft.
Relying on Boeing's description of the problem, the AD directed that in the event of un-commanded nose-down stabilizer trim
such as what happened during the Lion Air crash, the flight crew should comply with the Runaway Stabilizer procedure in the Operating
Procedures of the 737 MAX manual.
But the AD did not provide a complete description of MCAS or the problem in 737 MAX aircraft that led to the Lion Air crash,
and would lead to another crash and the 737 MAX's grounding just months later.
An MCAS failure is not like a runaway stabilizer. A runaway stabilizer has continuous un-commanded movement of the tail, whereas
MCAS is not continuous and pilots (theoretically) can counter the nose-down movement, after which MCAS would move the aircraft
tail down again.
Moreover, unlike runaway stabilizer, MCAS disables the control column response that 737 pilots have grown accustomed to and
relied upon in earlier generations of 737 aircraft.
Even after the Lion Air crash, Boeing's description of MCAS was still insufficient to put correct its lack of disclosure as
demonstrated by a second MCAS-caused crash.
We hoisted this detail because insiders were spouting in our comments section, presumably based on Boeing's patter, that the Lion
Air pilots were clearly incompetent, had they only executed the well-known "runaway stabilizer," all would have been fine. Needless
to say, this assertion has been shown to be incorrect.
Excellent, by any standard. Which does remind of of the NYT zine story (William Langewiesche
Published Sept. 18, 2019) making the claim that basically the pilots who crashed their planes weren't real "Airman".
And making
the point that to turn off MCAS all you had to do was flip two switches behind everything else on the center condole. Not exactly
true, normally those switches were there to shut off power to electrically assisted trim. Ah, it one thing to shut off MCAS it's
a whole other thing to shut off power to the planes trim, especially in high speed ✓ and the plane noise up ✓, and not much altitude
✓.
And especially if you as a pilot didn't know MCAS was there in the first place. This sort of engineering by Boeing is criminal.
And the lying. To everyone. Oh, least we all forget the processing power of the in flight computer is that of a intel 286. There
are times I just want to be beamed back to the home planet. Where we care for each other.
One should also point out that Langewiesche said that Boeing made disastrous mistakes with the MCAS and that the very future
of the Max is cloudy. His article was useful both for greater detail about what happened and for offering some pushback to the
idea that the pilots had nothing to do with the accidents.
As for the above, it was obvious from the first Seattle Times stories that these two events and the grounding were going to
be a lawsuit magnet. But some of us think Boeing deserves at least a little bit of a defense because their side has been totally
silenteither for legal reasons or CYA reasons on the part of their board and bad management.
Classic addiction behavior. Boeing has a major behavioral problem, the repetitive need for and irrational insistence on profit
above safety all else , that is glaringly obvious to everyone except Boeing.
"The engineers who created MCAS for the military tanker designed the system to rely on inputs from multiple sensors and with
limited power to move the tanker's nose. These deliberate checks sought to ensure that the system could not act erroneously or
cause a pilot to lose control "
"Yet Boeing's website, press releases, annual reports, public statements and statements to operators and customers, submissions
to the FAA and other civil aviation authorities, and 737 MAX flight manuals made no mention of the increased stall hazard or MCAS
itself.
In fact, Boeing 737 Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner asked the FAA to delete any mention of MCAS from the pilot manual
so as to further hide its existence from the public and pilots "
This "MCAS" was always hidden from pilots? The military implemented checks on MCAS to maintain a level of pilot control. The commercial airlines did not. Commercial
airlines were in thrall of every little feature that they felt would eliminate the need for pilots at all. Fell right into the
automation crapification of everything.
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second
chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives.", Stephen Walt
Actually, many of them should have been considered candidates for war criminals. "Waging the
war of agression" was part of the Nuremberg trials. This was the media called euphemistically
"the war of choice"!
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record
holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives. Beginning in
the mid-1990s, this influential network of hard-line pundits, journalists, think tank analysts,
and government officials developed, purveyed, and promoted an expansive vision of American
power as a positive force in world affairs.
They conceived and sold the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein and insisted
that this bold move would enable the United States to transform much of the Middle East into a
sea of pro-American democracies.
What has become of the brilliant strategists who led the nation into such a disastrous
debacle? None of their rosy visions have come to pass, and if holding people to account were a
guiding principle inside the foreign policy community, these individuals would now be marginal
figures commanding roughly the same influence that Charles Lindbergh enjoyed after making naive
and somewhat sympathetic statements about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.",
Walt, S. (2018). The Hell of good intentions: America's foreign policy elite and the decline
of US primacy. Straus and Giroux, p. 190.
You would have thought that these cheerleaders of invasion of Iraq and violation of the UN
charter would have run far, far away so that we never hear from them again--but no, they are
back explaining the world for us and making money doing that.
[ Milanovic was referring to a new column in Project Syndicate that I was confused by
before I noticed this reference to the column. Among the points of Milanovic, we find the
same self-defeating foreign policy being pushed by the same elite opinion-makers who hurt us
so much by taking us to war in Iraq and beyond.
Japan has a shrinking population. Can you explain to me why on the Earth they need
economic growth?
This preoccupation with "growth" (with narrow and false one dimensional and very
questionable measurements via GDP, which includes the FIRE sector) is a fallacy promoted by
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism proved to be quite sophisticated religions with its own set of True
Believers in Eric Hoffer's terminology.
A lot of current economic statistics suffer from "mathiness".
For example, the narrow definition of unemployment used in U3 is just a classic example of
pseudoscience in full bloom. It can be mentioned only if U6 mentioned first. Otherwise, this
is another "opium for the people" ;-) An attempt to hide the real situation in the neoliberal
"job market" in which has sustained real unemployment rate is always over 10% and which has a
disappearing pool of well-paying middle-class jobs. Which produced current narco-epidemics
(in 2018, 1400 people were shot in half a year in Chicago (
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-weekend-shooting-violence-20180709-story.html
); imagine that). While I doubt that people will hang Pelosi on the street post, her
successor might not be so lucky ;-)
Everything is fake in the current neoliberal discourse, be it political or economic, and
it is not that easy to understand how they are deceiving us. Lies that are so sophisticated
that often it is impossible to tell they are actually lies, not facts. The whole neoliberal
society is just big an Empire of Illusions, the kingdom of lies and distortions.
I would call it a new type of theocratic state if you wish.
And probably only one in ten, if not one in a hundred economists deserve to be called
scientists. Most are charlatans pushing fake papers on useless conferences.
It is simply amazing that the neoliberal society, which is based on "universal deception,"
can exist for so long.
"... The intemperate comments of an imperial-minded candidate for the presidency ..."
"... The democrat coup/impeach/coup machine suffers is bi-polar disorder. Every they way fill the military industry complex trough! In their war manic state they supress freedom fighters, and arm their jailers, in their war depress state they support rioters in Hong Kong. If Donbass rebels were in Macao they would get US support, in Dobass the US will suppress freedom. ..."
"... With Ukraine, because the democrat neocons want to surround Russia, US national security arms Ukriane to forcibly put down Donbass as they attempt some form of "self determination". ..."
"... In the case of Hong Kong because US is enemy to the PRC (Red China at Menzie Chinn blog) the US is all for self determination, like Hitler was for pulling Sudetenland out of Czechoslovakia in 1938! ..."
"... This bipolar morality fits with deep state surveillance on Trump in 2016 and in 2019 claiming Trump doing it to Biden so that Trump/DoJ cannot fight corrupt (all) democrats ever! ..."
Is Time for the United States to Stand Up to China in Hong Kong
Tweets aren't enough. Washington must make clear that it expects Beijing to live up to its
commitments -- and it will respond when China does not.
By ELIZABETH WARREN
It Is Time for the United States to Stand Up to China in Hong Kong
Tweets aren't enough. Washington must make clear that it expects Beijing to live up to its
commitments -- and it will respond when China does not.
By ELIZABETH WARREN
[ Shocking and appalling; unethical and immoral; discrediting. The intemperate comments of an imperial-minded candidate for the presidency. ]
The democrat coup/impeach/coup machine suffers is bi-polar disorder. Every they way fill the
military industry complex trough!
In their war manic state they supress freedom fighters, and arm their jailers, in their
war depress state they support rioters in Hong Kong. If Donbass rebels were in Macao they would get US support, in Dobass the US will suppress
freedom.
With Ukraine, because the democrat neocons want to surround Russia, US national security
arms Ukriane to forcibly put down Donbass as they attempt some form of "self
determination".
In the case of Hong Kong because US is enemy to the PRC (Red China at Menzie Chinn blog)
the US is all for self determination, like Hitler was for pulling Sudetenland out of
Czechoslovakia in 1938!
This bipolar morality fits with deep state surveillance on Trump in 2016 and in 2019
claiming Trump doing it to Biden so that Trump/DoJ cannot fight corrupt (all) democrats
ever!
"In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly
violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," said Kevin McAleenan, the
acting director of homeland security.
Homeland Security Dept. Affirms Threat of White Supremacy
After Years of Prodding https://nyti.ms/2oTNJmQ
NYT - Zolan Kanno-Youngs - October 1
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security is beginning to address white
supremacist terrorism as a primary security threat, breaking with a decade of flagging
attention after bigoted mass shooters from New Zealand to Texas took the lives of nearly 100
people in the last six months.
In a little-noticed strategy document (*) published last month to guide law enforcement on
emerging threats and in recent public appearances by Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary
of homeland security, the department is trying to project a new vigilance about violent white
nationalism, beating back criticism that the agency has spent a decade playing down the
issue.
"I would like to take this opportunity to be direct and unambiguous in addressing a major
issue of our time. In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism,
particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," Mr. McAleenan
said during an address last month, describing white nationalism as one of the most dangerous
threats to the United States.
The department's new stance contrasts that of President Trump, who has repeatedly
dismissed white supremacy as an insignificant fringe movement. But beyond words and
documents, many officials trying to combat the threat throughout the country remain skeptical
that the full weight of federal law enforcement is finally being used to give bigoted
domestic terrorism the attention it deserves. ...
* (Could be this.)
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM AND TARGETED VIOLENCE
A Secretive Committee of Wall Street Insiders Is the Least of the New York Fed's Concerns.
In July 17, Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s $2.2 trillion asset and wealth management division, walked into
the wood-paneled tenth-floor conference room at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to address some fellow Wall Street luminaries
-- Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio, Dawn Fitzpatrick of Soros Fund Management, short-seller Jim Chanos, and LBO kingpin David Rubenstein
among them.
All are members of the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets (IACFM) -- a forum to provide financial insight to the
New York Fed. Chairing the meeting was New York Fed president John C. Williams, vice chair of the powerful, rate-setting Federal
Open Market Committee, who was a year into his tenure.
Erdoes held forth at the meeting, which included a buffet lunch.
---
And so on.
This is us, we have a unexhaustable desire for these secret meetings to meet, so we vote, every year to convene them. If these
secret meeting did not occur then we could never do a deal with the super wealthy and our precious will not be insured. Reply Saturday,
October 05, 2019 at 06:04 PM
1) We don't know for certain what Shokin was investigating and what he wasn't.
2) Ukraine was rife with corruption. But most likely Biden was more concerned with
uprooting pro-Russian elements calling them corrupt as shorthand. Pro-Western corruption was
most likely overlooked.
3) We don't know why Hunter Biden was appointed to the Burisma board along with one of Joe
Biden's big bundlers and the CIA-friendly former President of Poland. We do know that Hunter
was put on the board immediately after the color revolution in Ukraine and that he served a
stint on the National Democratic Institute, which promotes regime change. Much more needs to
be learned about what the Bidens were up to in Ukraine and whether they were carpet baggers
cashing out.
As I have said, I would be delighted if Trump went down and took Joe Biden with him. The
last thing this country needs is a Joe Lieberman with a smiling face serving as President
which is basically what Joe Biden is.
"As I have said, I would be delighted if Trump went down and took Joe Biden with him."
Biden was already destroyed by Ukrainegate, being Pelosi sacrificial pawn (and for such
semi-senile candidate exit now looks the most logical; he can hand around for longer but the
question is why? ), but it is unclear how this will affect Trump.
In any case each accusation of Trump boomerang into Biden. And Biden China story probably
even more interesting then his Ukrainian gate story.
CIA ears over all Ukraine-gate are so visible that it hurts Pelosi case. Schiff is a sad
clown in this circus, and he has zero credibility after his well publicized love story with
Russiagate.
The fact that Warren is now favorite increases previously reluctant Wall Street support
for Trump, who is becoming kind of new Hillary, the establishment candidate.
And if you able to think, trump now looks like establishment candidate, corrupt
interventionist, who is not that far from Hillary in foreign policy and clearly as a "hard
neoliberal" aligns with Hillary "soft neoliberal" stance in domestic policy.
As Warren can pretend that she is better Trump then Trump (and we are talking about
Trump-2016 platform; Trump action were betrayal of his electorate much like was the case with
Obama) she has chances, but let's do not overestimate them.
Pelosi help with Trump re-election can't be underestimated.
"... After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental" organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation, and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today. ..."
"... There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government involvement. ..."
"... It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong for years. ..."
"... Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream media? ..."
"... The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its elites be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media at the expense of middle class and working-class America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge the US military budget larger than the next seven military budgets combined they are not only putting themselves and their families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups that there was a reduction in their power. ..."
"... The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate getting along with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. ..."
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why?
Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend's house and noticed that despite
an hour of Hannity ranting against the "deep state" in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence
agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US "deep state" itself. I tweeted about
this strange anomaly and as a comment to my own Tweet on it I happened to say that Hannity is "retarded." Twitter informed me
that I had committed "hateful conduct" for "promoting violence against or directly attacking or threatening other people on the
basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability,
or disease." It is clear on its face that I did none of these. I used a non-politically correct term to ridicule Hannity for attacking
the "deep state" while wearing the symbols of the deep state on his very lapel.
It is clear that Twitter is deeply biased against any voices outside the mainstream, pro-empire perspective. As a leading Tweeter
in opposition to interventionist US foreign policy, I had long been targeted by those who enable and enforce Twitter's political
biases. Look at who Twitter partners with and you will understand why I was banned for a transparently false reason: the US government-funded
Atlantic Council and other similar organizations are working with Twitter to eliminate any voices challenging US global military
empire.
In your opinion, what exactly is the role of the CIA in the regime changes of some countries around the world?
From its creation by the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency carried the dual role of analyzing
intelligence for its customers in the Executive Branch of the US government and conducting covert actions and operations in pursuit
of (claimed) US foreign policy goals. The history of CIA action in post-war Europe is extensive and includes founding front organizations
to prop up socialist and far-left publications and institutions as a challenge to Soviet communism as well as backing far-right
groups and political parties and even violent terror organizations to directly confront communism and overturn elections where
communists made gains.
After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a
global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted
US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental"
organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods
developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation,
and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic
government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today.
The practical value to the United States of such operations is less than zero, the costs to the American taxpayer are enormous,
and the immorality of manipulating the globe toward an outcome preferred by Washington's elites is self-evident.
When we see the generalized NSA surveillance, do you think we live in a democracy or a tenebrous fascist regime?
Americans have been manipulated by the elites in government and its allies in state propaganda (otherwise known as the "mainstream
media") to accept, particularly post-9/11, the deeply anti-American proposition that we must yield our privacy and Constitutionally-guaranteed
civil liberties to a government that promises it will not abuse its increased power over us but will only use it to keep us safe.
These promises have been over and over again proven to be lies. Government is not targeting terrorism or terrorists: they are
targeting average American citizens.
Americans were told that only terrorists' phone calls would be intercepted, but then Edward Snowden revealed that all of our
phone calls are intercepted. Americans were mad for a few weeks but then Washington promised "reform" of the PATRIOT Act in the
form of the FREEDOM Act and everybody calmed down. Even though the FREEDOM Act is actually worse than the PATRIOT Act because
it legalized all of the illegal activities that were taking place under the PATRIOT Act. "Reform" in Washington means obfuscation
and perception manipulation.
Likewise, Americans seeking to travel within their own country have been forced to allow strangers to invade and touch the
most private areas of their bodies and their children's bodies! American sheep just bow to the authorities and keep watching
their freedoms stolen from them, murmuring to themselves as they are raped by the authorities, "well I have nothing to hide "
You mentioned one time Operation Mockingbird, where the CIA manipulated journalists in the 1950s. In your opinion, does the CIA
continue to use these same practices today?
I have no doubt that the CIA continues to maintain a close relationship with both mainstream and independent journalists. This
is critical to establishing and controlling the narrative in each foreign "crisis." It is no accident that each mainstream media
outlet regardless whether left-wing or right-wing or any wing - has the exact same perspective on events like the Ukraine coup
or the Venezuela attempted coup, or Hong Kong protests. Part of this is the US "deep state" or "national security state" and part
of it is the increasing integration of US corporate entities into the US government. Major media outlets are owned by US corporations
that also own weapons manufacturing companies and cannot be trusted to report on events objectively. Similarly, virtually every
US mainstream media outlet employs "former" members of the US intelligence community to "explain" foreign events to their viewers.
When is the last time a credible non-interventionist or pro-peace analyst has been featured in any mainstream media outlet?
As in Soviet times, any view at odds with Washington's "party line" is simply disappeared. When independent media outlets begin
gaining traction and challenging the narrative, they are "de-platformed" on social media and even from their Internet service
providers under the recommendations of US government-funded NGOs like the Atlantic Council or the German Marshal Fund.
Is not what is currently happening in Hong Kong a CIA manipulation targeting China in the context of the Trump administration's
economic war?
There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single
body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see
the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government
involvement.
It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement
in Hong Kong for years. They don't even hide it: you can easily find on USAID and National Endowment for Democracy website
the level of funding the US government provides these organizations and political parties. And when these party leaders come to
Washington, they are received by the US Vice President, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House, and other high-ranking US government
officials. Which foreign opposition movements that Washington does not support are given such treatment?
Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly
went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist
Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream
media?
You mentioned a US-supported coup when you talked about Venezuela. In your opinion, does the US administration continue the same
interventionist policy to destabilize Latin American countries?
Any Latin American government not in Washington's constellation has been and is targeted for destabilization and overthrow.
We saw this with the 2009 coup in Honduras, whose architect was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We see it in Cuba. We
see it in Venezuela. We saw it with Ecuador, where a government wary of US persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was
"changed" in favor of a regime that handed Assange over to the authorities in exchange for a few billion dollars from the IMF.
Do what Washington says and get paid; oppose Washington and get overthrown. That is the foreign policy of the US empire. And like
the Soviet empire that preceded it, it is a policy doomed to failure.
Why in your opinion does the United States always need an enemy? Is not there a danger of world war when we see the multitude
of US imperialist interventions around the world?
The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its
elites be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media at the expense of middle class and working-class
America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge
the US military budget larger than the next seven military budgets combined they are not only putting themselves and their
families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on
terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted
in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups
that there was a reduction in their power.
After the Russian and Iranian success in beating back the jihadist threat in Syria, the 2017 US national security strategy
did an Orwellian about-face and abandoned the "war on terror" in favor of a declaration that our new enemies were again our old
enemies: China and Russia. It is literally Orwell's 1984: "we are at war with Eastasia. We had always been at war with Eastasia."
What do you think about the North Korean and Iranian case, where the Trump administration lacks a clear vision and where some
neoconservatives are pushing for a war?
There are few consistencies in President Trump's foreign policy. One emerging consistency, however, is that he seems genuinely
reluctant to take the country into a bona fide war. He's happy with sending a few dozen Tomahawk missiles into the Syrian countryside,
but when faced with an actual robust response to any US strike, he to this point has chosen de-escalation. This may be a function
of his keen eye for politics rather than any philosophical or moral concerns, but it to this point seems thematic. The problem
is that by surrounding himself with neoconservatives and make no mistake his replacement for Bolton is at least as much a neocon
as the Mustached One himself the president is isolating himself from any inputs advising military constraint when facing crises
overseas. That is why many of us were so much hoping that Bolton would be replaced with a Realist like Col. Douglas Macgregor.
There is a big danger that the president will be cornered by a lack of non-war options to the next crisis simply because he gives
no quarter to non-war voices in his administration.
When we consider the plight of activists and whistleblowers, such as Assange, Snowden, etc. can we still talk about freedom of
speech and human rights? Shouldn't we mobilize more to support these activists and others around the world?
The plight of Snowden and Assange and all of the persecuted whistleblowers and truth-tellers is the plight of what is life
of our liberty, freedom, and even Western civilization. When all dissent is quashed, imprisoned, tortured, we are left with only
the Total State. The Total State, as we know from history, brooks no dissent because it can only maintain power by continuing
the illusion that it alone is the source of truth. Thus any voice challenging the Total State, as the embodiment of truth, must
on its face be a lie. Why would truth allow lies to undermine it? Why would any sane person oppose "the people" as represented
in their Soviet government? Surely such a person would be insane and need of treatment rather than a citizen raising a legitimate
question or differing opinion.
This is what we are facing in the US today. A Total State, where opposing views are de-platformed and disappeared. Where truth-tellers
are jailed and tortured pour servir d'avertissement aux autres (to serve as a warning to others).
What is your assessment of the Trump Presidency and what do you think of its foreign policy?
The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch
foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate getting along
with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative
cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. He did not chart a wise course
in building a solid administration of professionals who agree with him and there are plenty to choose from and instead he
actually hired an entire team of people who not only disagree with his stated positions, but they actually publicly ridicule them
and work against them. It is unprecedented in my memory to see those who serve the president publicly undermining his stated positions,
yet Bolton and Pompeo never hesitated or hesitate to do just that. This is an enormous missed opportunity for President Trump
and for the United States.
You have been an advisor to Congressman Ron Paul and you are doing an excellent job as Director of the Ron Paul Institute for
Peace and Prosperity. Can you explain to our readers what the missions of this institute are?
Our mission as a non-profit educational institution is to make the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy and the restoration
of our civil liberties at home. We are the continuation of the Ron Paul liberty movement. To that end, we publish thousands of
articles making the case for non-interventionism on our website, we broadcast a daily Ron Paul Liberty Report, and we hold conferences
throughout the country bringing together a broad coalition of Americans and non-Americans to learn and promote peace and prosperity!
* * *
Daniel McAdams is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of the "Ron Paul Liberty
Report," a daily live broadcast. He served for 12 years on Capitol Hill as foreign affairs and national security advisor to former
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former
communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.
If Krugman is surprised that some Democratic donors will support Trump over Warren, he is not
an analyst.
And Obama was a Wall Street prostitute, much like bill Clinton, no questions about it. Trump
betrayal of his voters actually mirror the Obama betrayal. May suspect that Warren will be
malleable with will fold to Wall Street on the first opportunity, governing like Trump-lite.
Warren Versus the Petty Plutocrats. Why do they hate her? It's mainly about their
egos.
By Paul Krugman
Remember when pundits used to argue that Elizabeth Warren wasn't likable enough to be
president? It was always a lazy take, with a strong element of sexism. And it looks
ridiculous now, watching Warren on the campaign trail. Never mind whether she's someone you'd
like to have a beer with, she's definitely someone thousands of people want to take selfies
with.
But there are some people who really, really dislike Warren: the ultrawealthy, especially
on Wall Street. They dislike her so much that some longtime Democratic donors are reportedly
considering throwing their backing behind Donald Trump, corruption, collusion and all, if
Warren is the Democratic presidential nominee.
And Warren's success is a serious possibility, because Warren's steady rise has made her a
real contender, maybe even the front-runner: While she still trails Joe Biden a bit in the
polls, betting markets currently give her a roughly 50 percent chance of securing the
nomination.
But why does Warren inspire a level of hatred and fear among the very wealthy that I
don't think we've seen directed at a presidential candidate since the days of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt?
On the surface, the answer may seem obvious. She is proposing policies, notably a tax on
fortunes exceeding $50 million, that would make the extremely wealthy a bit less so. But
delve into the question a bit more deeply, and Warren hatred becomes considerably more
puzzling.
For the only people who would be directly affected by her tax proposals are those who more
or less literally have more money than they know what to do with. Having a million or two
less wouldn't crimp their lifestyles; most of them would barely notice the change.
At the same time, even the very wealthy should be very afraid of the prospect of a Trump
re-election. Any doubts you might have had about his authoritarian instincts should have been
put to rest by his reaction to the possibility of impeachment: implicit death threats against
whistle-blowers, warnings of civil war and claims that members of Congress investigating him
are guilty of treason.
And anyone imagining that great wealth would make them safe from an autocrat's wrath
should look at the list of Russian oligarchs who crossed Vladimir Putin -- and are now ruined
or dead. So what would make the very wealthy -- even some Jewish billionaires, who should
have a very good idea of the likely consequences of right-wing dominance -- support Trump
over someone like Warren?
There is, I'd argue, an important clue in the "Obama rage" that swept Wall Street circa
2010. Objectively, the Obama administration was very good to the financial industry, even
though that industry had just led us into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
Major financial players were bailed out on lenient terms, and while bankers were subjected to
a long-overdue increase in regulation, the new regulations have proved fairly easy for
reputable firms to deal with.
Yet financial tycoons were furious with President Barack Obama because they felt
disrespected. In truth, Obama's rhetoric was very mild; all he ever did was suggest that some
bankers had behaved badly, which no reasonable person could deny. But with great wealth comes
great pettiness; Obama's gentle rebukes provoked fury -- and a huge swing in financial
industry political contributions toward Republicans.
The point is that many of the superrich aren't satisfied with living like kings, which
they will continue to do no matter who wins next year's election. They also expect to be
treated like kings, lionized as job creators and heroes of prosperity, and consider any
criticism an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté.
And for such people, the prospect of a Warren presidency is a nightmarish threat -- not to
their wallets, but to their egos. They can try to brush off someone like Bernie Sanders as a
rabble-rouser. But when Warren criticizes malefactors of great wealth and proposes reining in
their excesses, her evident policy sophistication -- has any previous candidate managed to
turn wonkiness into a form of charisma? -- makes her critique much harder to dismiss.
If Warren is the nominee, then, a significant number of tycoons will indeed go for Trump;
better to put democracy at risk than to countenance a challenge to their imperial
self-esteem. But will it matter?
Maybe not. These days American presidential elections are so awash in money that both
sides can count on having enough resources to saturate the airwaves.
Indeed, over-the-top attacks from the wealthy can sometimes be a political plus. That was
certainly the case for F.D.R., who reveled in his plutocratic opposition: "They are unanimous
in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
So far Warren seems to be following the same playbook, tweeting out articles about Wall
Street's hostility as if they were endorsements, which in a sense they are. It's good to have
the right enemies.
I do worry, however, how Wall Streeters will take it if they go all out to defeat Warren
and she wins anyway. Washington can bail out their balance sheets, but who can bail out their
damaged psyches?
"Deductive reasoning" within the media message is mob control.
"It ain't what you know... it's what you know that ain't so"#. Keep reading the mainstream
media!
Given enough time [and strategy wrt 2020 election] we will get to the bottom of Obama's
"criminal influence" on 2016 election.
It takes a lot more to debunk the Biden, Clinton, Nuland, Obama Ukraine drama. To my mind,
Ukraine needs to be clean as driven snow* to "earn" javelins to kill Russian speaking
rebels.
Why do US from Obama+ fund rebels in Syria (Sunni radicals mainly) and want to send tank
killers to suppress rebels where we might get in to the real deal?
# conservatives have been saying that about the 'outrage' started by the MSM for
decades.
Warren might be an improvement over the current situation. Moreover she has some sound ideas about taming the financial
oligarchy
"Best alternative to the above? Get Liz Warren elected, IMO."
True. IMHO Warren might be an improvement over the
current situation. Moreover she has some sound ideas about taming the financial oligarchy.
The idea of taking on
financial oligarchy will find strong support of voters and in some respects she is "a better Trump then Trump" as for
restoring the honor and wellbeing of the working people mercilessly squeezed and marginalized by neoliberalism in the USA.
Her book "The two income trap"(2004) suggests that this is not just a classic "bait and switch" election trick in
best Obama or Trump style.
And I would say she in her 70 is in better shape then Trump in his 73+. He shows isolated
early signs of neurologic damage (some claim sundowning syndrome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwh6Fu9BcAw slurring speech patterns, repetitions, disorientation, etc), which is
natural for any person in his 70th subjected to his level of stress.
But it is completely unclear to me whether the impeachment favors Warren or Trump. the treat of impeachment already
cemented fractures in Trump base which now, judging from comments in forums, is really outraged.
Some people are
talking about armed resistance, which is, of course, hopeless nonsense in the current national-security state, but does show
the state of their mind.
Also nobody here can even imagine the amount of dirt Obama administration accumulated by
their actions in Ukraine. They really supported a neo-fascist party and cooperated with neo-Nazi (other important players
were Germany, Poland and Sweden). Just to achieve geopolitical victory over Russia. Kind of total reversion of WWII alliance
for me.
That avalanche of dirt can affect Warren indirectly as she proved to be a weak, unsophisticated politician by
supporting Pelosi drive for impeachment instead of pretending of being neutral. Which would be more appropriate and much
safer position.
Neoliberal democrats despite all Pelosi skills ( see https://mediaequalizer.com/martin-walsh/2017/12/gifford-heres-how-pelosi-learned-mob-like-tactics-from-her-father
) really opened a can of worms with this impeachment.
Also it looks like all of them, including Pelosi, are scared of
CIA: https://galacticconnection.com/nancy-pelosi-admits-congress-scared-cia/
== quote == In response to Senator
Dianne Feinstein’s speech last week calling out the CIA for spying on her staffers, Rep. Nancy Pelosi was asked to comment
and gave what might be the most revealing comments to date as to why Congress is so scared of the CIA:
“I salute
Sen. Feinstein,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference of the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’ll tell
you, you take on the intelligence community, you’re a person of courage, and she does not do that lightly. Not without
evidence, and when I say evidence, documentation of what it is that she is putting forth.”
Pelosi added that she has
always fought for checks and balances on CIA activity and its interactions with Congress: “You don’t fight it without a price
because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth. ==end==
I strongly doubt that Trump will ever
risk to drop a bomb by declassifying documents about Obama dirty actions in Ukraine; so to speak go "all in" against
neoliberal Democrats and part of intelligence community (and possibly be JFKed).
But Trump is unpredictable and
extremely vindictive. How he will behave after being put against the wall on fake changes is completely unclear. I wonder if
Pelosi correctly calculated all the risks.
I wrote the other day about Wall Street fear and loathing of Elizabeth Warren, suggesting
that it has more to do with threatened egos than with money per se 1/
Some more thoughts on reports that Wall Street Democrats will back Trump over Warren.
Obviously it's hard to know how big a deal this is -- how many of these guys are there, were
they ever really Dems, and will they back Trump as more revelations emerge 1/
So I remembered a sort of time capsule from the eve of the financial crisis that nicely
illustrated how these guys want to be perceived, and retrospectively explains their fury at
no longer getting to pose as economic heroes 2/
The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age
The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive
age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important
than it once was.
The thing is, even at the time the idea that financial deregulation had ushered in a
golden age of prosperity was flatly contradicted by the data 3/
[Graph]
And of course the financial crisis -- which is generally considered to have begun just
three weeks after that article was published! -- made utter nonsense of their boasting 4/
But they want everyone to forget about the hollowness of their claims to glory; and Warren
won't let that happen, which makes her evil in their minds 5/
When Bill was president Warren met with Hillary and persuaded her to talk Bill into killing
Biden's increased protection for lenders from rapacious borrowers. When Hillary was senator she
supported the Bill. Warren gave an interview on the subject before she was involved in
politics. She was not happy.
Warren was the single female Democratic senator who declined to give Hillary an endorsement
before the primaries started. That's an event of some significance.
During the debates Warren took actions that helped Bernie on several occasions. Someone, I
think Paul Krugman, said Glass Stegall would have done nothing to stop the meltdown because it
didn't deal with shadow banking. Bernie was able to respond that he supported Warren's proposed
Glass Stegall bill, which did have provisions to regulate shadow banking. On another occasion
someone pointed out that Warren's bill did not break up big banks. Warren stated publicly that
the bill didn't propose breaking up too big to fail banks but she supported the idea.
Warren and Sanders both supported Clinton when she had the nomination locked up. It was
Bernie's responsibility to defend his supporters from Team Clinton's smears and insults during
and after the convention.
It wasn't Warren that Clinton invited to the Hamptons to be introduced to a few dozen of her
favorite fundraisers. It was Harris.
It wasn't Warren that Clinton invited to the Hamptons to be introduced to a few dozen of
her favorite fundraisers. It was Harris.
But, even if so, Harris was to be nothing more than a Clinton place-holder to be swept
aside one HER decided to resurrect the same Dimocratic party, which she has still not
successfully destroyed, even with minor assistance from Barack, JoJo and Wild Bill. Nope. My
contention is that Hillary Rodent Clinton will sweep the field of duped pseudo-contenders in
a fixed horse race. HRC -- still with her!~
"... The first casualty of Pelosi's cause is almost certain to be the front-runner for the party nomination. Joe Biden has already, this past week, fallen behind Senator Elizabeth Warren in Iowa, New Hampshire, and California. ..."
"... By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Pelosi has also assured that the questionable conduct of Biden and son Hunter will be front and center for the next four months before Iowa votes. ..."
"... What did Joe do? By his own admission, indeed his boast, as vice president, he ordered then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to either fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden for $50,000 a month or forego a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee that Kiev needed to stay current on its debts. ..."
"... There is another question raised by Biden's ultimatum to Kiev to fire the corrupt prosecutor or forego the loan guarantee. Why was the U.S. guaranteeing loans to a Kiev regime that had to be threatened with bankruptcy to get it to rid itself of a prosecutor whom all of Europe supposedly knew to be corrupt? ..."
"... This is bad news for the Biden campaign. And the principal beneficiary of Pelosi's decision that put Joe and Hunter Biden at the center of an impeachment inquiry is, again, Warren. ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"... the Movers and Shakers in the Democrat Party have wanted Warren as their standard bearer on the belief that Biden is "yesterday" and that the rest of the field is either too loony (O'Rourke), nondescript (Booker) or -- potentially -- too corrupt (Harris).. ..."
"... Warren is the most pro-establishment candidate of all the non-establishment candidates, that is true ..."
"... Roughly 37% of Americans love Trump and will never change their mind. On the other side there are 38% who already supported impeachment based on previous investigations. That leaves 25% of Americans who are likely to be swayed one way or the other over this. In any case, those 25% are unlikely to be on this website. ..."
"... It'll be interesting to see what the voter turnout will be in 2020. 2016 --one of the most pivotal and controversial elections in modern times--saw 42% of the electorate stay home. This was a shockingly high numbter, little noted in the press. If you tack on the 6% who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, that would mean that 48% of the electorate--nearly half--did NOT vote for either Trump or Clinton. ..."
"... Well, given that Trump has already released the transcript and Zelensky has already confirmed there were no pressure in their conversation plus said that Hunter's case is to be investigated by the AG, any impeachment hearings can only be damaging to those who decide to go further with them, because, as it turns out, there is no basis for such hearings and they were started a year before the election, showing what those who started them think regarding their own chances to win. ..."
Even before seeing the transcript of the July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,
Nancy Pelosi threw the door wide open to impeachment.
Though the transcript did not remotely justify the advanced billing of a "quid pro quo," Pelosi set in motion a process that is
already producing a sea change in the politics of 2020.
The great Beltway battle for the balance of this year, and perhaps next, will be over whether the Democrats can effect a coup
against a president many of them have never recognized as legitimate and have sought to bring down since before he took the oath
of office.
Pelosi on Tuesday started this rock rolling down the hill.
She has made impeachment, which did not even come up in the last Democratic debate, the issue of 2020. She has foreclosed bipartisan
compromise on gun control, the cost of prescription drugs, and infrastructure. She has put her and her party's fate and future on
the line.
With Pelosi's assent that she is now open to impeachment, she turned what was becoming a cold case into a blazing issue. If the
Democrats march up impeachment hill, fail, and fall back, or if they vote impeachment only to see the Senate exonerate the president,
that will be the climactic moment of Pelosi's career. She is betting the future of the House, and her party's hopes of capturing
the presidency, on the belief that she and her colleagues can persuade the country to support the indictment of a president for high
crimes.
One wonders: do Democrats, blinded by hatred of Trump, ever wonder how that 40 percent of the nation that sees him as the repository
of their hopes will react if, rather than beat him at the ballot box, they remove him in this way?
The first casualty of Pelosi's cause is almost certain to be the front-runner for the party nomination. Joe Biden has already,
this past week, fallen behind Senator Elizabeth Warren in Iowa, New Hampshire, and California. The Quinnipiac poll has her taking
the lead nationally for the nomination, with Biden dropping into second place for the first time since he announced his candidacy.
By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Pelosi has also assured that the questionable conduct of Biden
and son Hunter will be front and center for the next four months before Iowa votes.
What did Joe do? By his own admission, indeed his boast, as vice president, he ordered then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko
to either fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company that hired Hunter Biden for $50,000 a month or forego a $1 billion
U.S. loan guarantee that Kiev needed to stay current on its debts.
Biden insists the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, that Hunter had done no wrong, that he himself was unaware of his son's business
ties. All these assertions have been contradicted or challenged.
There is another question raised by Biden's ultimatum to Kiev to fire the corrupt prosecutor or forego the loan guarantee. Why
was the U.S. guaranteeing loans to a Kiev regime that had to be threatened with bankruptcy to get it to rid itself of a prosecutor
whom all of Europe supposedly knew to be corrupt?
Whatever the truth of the charges, the problem here is that any investigation of the potential corruption of Hunter Biden, and
of the role of his father, the former vice president, in facilitating it, will be front and center in presidential politics between
now and New Hampshire.
This is bad news for the Biden campaign. And the principal beneficiary of Pelosi's decision that put Joe and Hunter Biden at the
center of an impeachment inquiry is, again, Warren.
Warren already appears to have emerged victorious in her battle with Bernie Sanders to become the progressives' first choice in
2020. And consider how, as she is rising, her remaining opposition is fast fading.
Senator Kamala Harris has said she is moving her campaign to Iowa for a do-or-die stand in the first battleground state. Senator
Cory Booker has called on donors to raise $1.7 million in 10 days, or he will have to pack it in. As Biden, Sanders, Harris, and
Booker fade, and "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg hovers at 5 or 6 percent in national and state polls, Warren steadily emerges as the probable
nominee.
One measure of how deeply Biden is in trouble, whether he is beginning to be seen as too risky, given the allegations against
him and his son, will be the new endorsements his candidacy receives after this week of charges and countercharges.
If there is a significant falling off, it could be fatal.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided
America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit
the Creators website at www.creators.com.
They would be, if it were Sanders to get the nomination. Warren's chances are, obviously, better than Biden's - anyone's, save
for complete fringe wackos, are - but, if they really wanted to win, they would need Sanders. Or, even better, Gabbard. But Sanders
is too independent, dangerously so, and Gabbard is an outright enemy of their totalitarian cult. Hence, they pick Warren, who
might be vaaaaaaaaaaguely considered Sanders-lite. But lite is not enough against someone like Trump. Or, even worse for them,
they resort to all possible and impossible machinations to still get Biden nominated. It'll be a screaming mistake, but it's not
excluded at all, given how easily the've just been lured into a trap.
Happened to tune in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday just as he was saying that Pelosi's motivation to spin the wheels was at least
in part to kill two birds with one stone--Trump AND Biden. Mehhh...maybe, but it's been clear from the beginning that the Movers
and Shakers in the Democrat Party have wanted Warren as their standard bearer on the belief that Biden is "yesterday" and that
the rest of the field is either too loony (O'Rourke), nondescript (Booker) or -- potentially -- too corrupt (Harris)..
Warren is the most pro-establishment candidate of all the non-establishment candidates, that is true . Incrowd-lite.
Bernie of course is the big unknown. Will he prevail over Warren?
If this scandal sinks Biden and Trump together, the Dems will come out ahead because they are not committed to Biden as their
nominee. I think Warren will be the biggest net winner. My prediction is that we see an impeachment with the Senate voting on
party lines to acquit. That could still be very damaging to Trump's election chances, if the portion of the public who dislikes
Trump decide that he abused his power.
Roughly 37% of Americans love Trump and will never change their mind. On the other side there are
38% who already supported impeachment based on previous investigations. That leaves 25% of Americans who are likely to be
swayed one way or the other over this. In any case, those 25% are unlikely to be on this website.
The main question, other than whether there is something damning that shows up, is whether the majority of voters think a quid
pro quo is necessary for corruption to be an impeachable offense. It is required in a criminal bribery conviction, but impeachment
isn't a criminal trial. Is the president using a diplomatic call to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political
rivals something the 25% will be okay with? If they believe the story of Biden's corruption, will they see that as justification
for using a diplomatic talk to push for an investigation into it? Will moderate voters who have a high opinion of Biden from the
his time as Vice President view this as an unfair attack on him or will they change their view of him to match Trump's narrative?
Biden is in a tough spot, because he will be smeared here whether he is guilty or not. Trump is very good as slinging mud to
distract from his actions. And most Americans are very unlikely to parse through the information overload to figure out whether
the fired prosecutor is corrupt, whether the decision to fire him came from Joe or the state department/UK/EU/local protest, whether
Hunter Biden was qualified for the job with his ivy law degree/experience on corp boards/previous consulting experience, and whether
the investigation into Burisma was actuall ongoing when Shokin was fired. Who has time to read through everything and figure out
which side is manufacturing a controversy?
But if Biden decides to go down a Martyr, it wouldn't be difficult for him to take Trump with him.
It'll be interesting to see what the voter turnout will be in 2020. 2016 --one of the most pivotal and controversial elections
in modern times--saw 42% of the electorate stay home. This was a shockingly high numbter, little noted in the press. If you tack
on the 6% who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, that would mean that 48% of the electorate--nearly half--did NOT vote for
either Trump or Clinton.
These numbers are ominous and do not bode well for the future of this thing of ours.
Well, given that Trump has already released the transcript and Zelensky has already confirmed there were no pressure in their
conversation plus said that Hunter's case is to be investigated by the AG, any impeachment hearings can only be damaging
to those who decide to go further with them, because, as it turns out, there is no basis for such hearings and they were
started a year before the election, showing what those who started them think regarding their own chances to win. If Democrats
want to cut losses, they should stop it now and, using military terms, regroup immediately, nominating Gabbard who consistently
opposed this stillborn impeachment stupidity. But something makes me think they won't. Their visceral hatred to an anti-war candidate
like her is simply too strong.
I think you are missing that Trump's lawyers can subpoena people and drag up a lot of dirt on the Democrats too. I think it can
go both ways.
Still Warren can be tough for Trump. She is not tainted by Clinton. She is a chameleon; will sound sufficiently WASP in New
England and sufficiently woke in California and new York. If Buttgig becomes her sidekick he can get all the gays on-board.
You're missing one thing about Warren: she's a wonk. And she actually has some good ideas alongside the more crazy ones. Even
Tucker Carlson praised her book.
But Warren is an absolute stiff. Zero charisma. Like Kerry or Gore on their very worst day. And in this day and age, where
the only thing that counts for the overwhelming majority of low information voters are soundbites and how telegenic you come off
in a debate, someone like Trump will chew her up and spit her out for breakfast.
Warren? OK. I don't see how she could be any worse than Trump. Plus, we might not feel like we were snorkeling in a cesspool all
the time, like we do now.
Literally every progressive I know save one is team Warren. I think there might be an age divide. Progressives under thirty are
more likely to be for Sanders, and over thirty for Warren.
I have no idea what will happen with the election. But if Trump wins it after the Dems have done nothing for four years except
impeach him - every day is going to be like Christmas.
I sincerely hope that Trump is right in thinking that Biden is his biggest threat, because this affair is going to ensure Warren
is the nominee. I think a lot of proggy Dems know this as well, which partly explains their enthusiasm for impeachment at this
particular moment (not that they haven't been itching for this since November 8, 2016).
I agree Biden and Bernie are toast but Warren is far from a sure thing. Of all the democratic candidates Tulsi is the most attractive
in more ways than one and I could see Tulsi appealing to the many Trump voters who voted for him because he claimed to be non-interventionist
only to discover he is a war-pig like the rest of them. Imagine Tulsi in a debate with Trump! If not Tulsi I would bet another
high profile Dem will enter the race because Warren is un-electable and I would not be surprised to see Hillary get in the race
at the last minute. American's love re-matches and come-back stories.
In breaking news: Pelosi has just revealed who was behind all this. It's Cardinal Richelieu Russians again.
Does the girl even understand that, by saying so, she's, basically, stating that she's the chief Russian agent out there, because
she was the one who initiated that freak show?
Jesus Harold Christ, what a travelling circus. And this passes for a parliament these days.
Ukrainegate is Watergate in reverse. The farcical impeachment unintentionally acts as a foil, amplifying the significance of the
Ukraine stories in the press (John Solomon, Andrew McCarthy) which reveal a culture of corruption and venality permeating the
Democratic leadership: the Clintons, the Bidens, the DNC, the current Democratic caucus, and the entire deep state remnants of
the obama administration. We haven't seen election interference like this since the Watergate break-in and coverup. This impeachment
is the coup-de-grâce of the Democratic Party not just Biden. The Democrat faithful now have a choice between Scylla and Charybdis
- self-proclaimed socialists with a tenuous hold on reality, or the discredited establishment. As an old-school Democrat, I can
only hope that Trump buries them in 2020, so that the Democrats finally get the message and return to their pre-Clinton roots.
It is insane to pursue impeachment this late in a divisive President's mandate. The Democrats should spend their efforts selecting
a moderate nominee that doesn't show signs of cognitive decline (Only candidate that matches these requirements is Tulsi Gabbard.
) rather than make Trump a "victim" in the eyes of many.
Drama Don is doing a good enough job himself to make sure that the Democrats win in 2020. "Trump fatigue" is going to be the
most used expression next fall if Trump runs. If Trump is pushed out before the election, the Republicans may choose a charismatic
new nominee who actually has a chance to win in 2020. The biggest asset that the Democrats have in 2020 is Trump.
Somebody, somewhere, had decided that Democrats stand little chance with Biden, because he is so old and gaffe prone. So they
have put their money on Warren. Warren will choose Buttigieg as VP candidate, primarily because they want all that gay billionaire
money flowing in. At the same time, they tick the SJW boxes -woman, gay candidates, so the left will love them. The fix is in.
Hence the stupid "impeachment " controversy, which is obviously a sham to knock Biden out.
I voted for Trump, not as a Republican because I despise both political parties. I voted for him based on the need for a nationalist
trade policy, and especially because I was so against the TPP --and President Trump rewarded me for that vote his first week in
office by pulling the US out of TPP negotiations. Also I have great respect for you, Mr. Buchanan, and learned much from the 3
of your books I've read and recommended to others. But it looks like President Trump has been using his office for personal political
gain, so I am sorry to admit I support the impeachment investigation to bring the facts to light and make a judgement of whether
it is true he used the office to solicit a foreign country to help undermine his political opponent. But even before this, I'd
decided I will not vote for him again, mainly because I have become alarmed at the looming climate crisis, and believe we need
urgent policy towards full decarbonization of the global energy economy. But that doesn't motivate me to support the impeachment
inquiry, a path I hate and regret...but it seems there is no other way to demand the President not abuse his office and manipulate
foreign governments to help his political career. That is no patriot, that is corrupt and an embarrassment to our nation.
"...effect a coup against a president many of them have never seen as legitimate and have sought to bring down since before he
took the oath of office."
Every single word of that describes the Republicans in Congress during the eight years Obama was president. Every single syllable.
Remember that birth certificate? And remember that Dick Tracy villain, Pocket-Neck McConnell, an excrescence that still infects
us, standing up and actually saying, with a straight face, "Our ONLY goal is to make Obama a one-term president." Never mind an
economy that was in free-fall, right Mitch? Or a couple of bothersome wars going on?
And what about how, for the very first time in history, Standard and Poor's downgraded America's credit rating, all because
of completely meaningless Republican obstruction about the debt ceiling? And when I say completely meaningless, I mean completely
meaningless. Now, under Trump, the deficit is approaching a trillion, and those very same Republicans couldn't give a hoot.
It's all in the great 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than it Looks, by Ornstein and Mann. We've had partisanship and gridlock before.
But what was new is how the Republicans behaved under Obama: they treated him as completely illegitimate from the word go, and
absolutely refused to work with him under any and all circumstances. The stimulus, which by the way saved the entire world economy
from complete meltdown, didn't get a single Republican vote.
But Republicans can feel proud of one thing: their disgusting, scorched-earth, win-at-all-costs tactics are now business-as-usual
in Washington. Probably for all time. Nice going, guys.
Warren is the best candidate to defeat Trump. She is super smart ,honest and works hard as heck for the non 1% to get more of
a fair shake. If she softens her hard left positions she could be a great candidate
I assume most here are sick of hearing about it further today.
I enjoy speculating on what Speaker Pelosi might do with the results of the Impeachment
Inquiry by the House.
Assumption: The House finds grounds for Impeaching Trump and hands it to Pelosi.
What will she do or rather what can she do?
She can have the full House vote to Impeach and march the Articles over to the Senate.
She can have the House Censure Trump, not vote to Impeach, and go no further at this time.
That brings Trump's crimes to light, but saves the country from a Political Trial in the
Senate, that won't convict Trump.
She can hold the Committee's report for review and not go forward until and unless she
see's the POLITICAL need.
She can, IMO, have the House vote Articles of Impeachment and then HOLD them in the House
waiting to take them to the Senate at a much later date of her choice or never.
The Senate cannot act until the Speaker delivers the Articles of Impeachment. No where
does the Constitution declare WHEN those Articles, once voted, must be delivered, only that
they are to be.
She can set a new precedent if she desires. Who can stop her?
This would allow the Articles to float over Trump's head - and the Re-Election campaign
serving to restrain Trump, like a cudgel over his head - preventing or at least limiting more
of Trump's outrageous unconstitutional and illegal acts in Office until Election 2020.
Simultaneously this would allow The House to continue its multiple investigations of
Trump, including the IRS Whistle Blower complaint, further checking Trump, and even to open
more investigations into Trump's abuse of Office, e.g., his use of AG Barr on Ukraine/Biden
as well as investigations of AG Barr pursuing Ukraine/Biden.
Not to mention other investigations into Trump including NY's pursuit of Trump's Tax
Returns, which could well be as revealing as the Ukraine phone call transcript.
So, while today was interesting in D.C., the future is far more so, imho.
1. Biden is now a zombie and has less then zero changes to beat Trump. Even if nothing
explosive will be revealed by Ukraine-gate, this investigation hangs like albatross around
his neck. Each shot at Trump will ricochet into Biden. Add to this China and the best he can
do is to leave the race and claim unfair play.
2. Trump now probably will be reelected on the wave of indignation toward Corporate Dems
new witch hunt. People stopped believing neoliberal MSM around 2015, so now neolibs no longer
have the leverage they get used to. And by launching Ukraine-gate after Russiagate they
clearly overplayed their hand losing critical mass of independents (who previously were ready
to abandon Trump_
3. If unpleasant facts about neolib/neocon machinations to launch Ukraine-gate leak via
alternative press via disgruntled DNC operatives or some other insiders who are privy to the
relevant discussions in the Inner Party, they will poison/destroy the chances of any Dem
candidate be it Warren or anybody else. Joining this witch hunt greatly damages standing of
Warren exposing her as a mediocre, malleable politician ( unlike Tulsi )
4. Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats again tried to find vague dirt with
which they can tarnish Trump. This is a huge political mistake which exposes them as
political swindlers.
Neolib/neocon in Democratic Party from now on will be viewed as "The Children of
Lieutenant Schmidt" (a fictional society of swindlers from the 1931 classic "The Little
Golden Calf" by Ilf and Petrov).
I would say that Pelosi might now be able to understand better the situation in which
Wasserman-Shultz had found herself in 2016 and resign.
IMHO this is a king of zugzwang for neoliberal Dems. There is no good exit from this
situation.
After two years of falsely accusing Trump to have colluded with Russia they now allege
that he colluded with Ukraine.
In addition to overpaying their hand that makes it more difficult for the Democrats to
hide their critical role in creating and promoting Russiagate.
Here is one post from MA which tries to analyse this situation:
== quote ==
nil , Sep 25 2019 19:37 utc | 24
I think what's going in the brain trust of the DNC is something like this:
i. Biden is a non-starter with the public. He'll be devoured alive by the Republicans, who
only need to bring up his career to expose his mendacity.
ii. Warren might be co-opted, having been a Republican and fiscal conservative up to the
mid-90s, but what if she isn't?
iii. Sanders is a non-starter, but with the "people who matter". Rather than having to
threaten him with the suspicions around his wife, or go for the JFK solution, they'd rather
[make that] he didn't even get past the primaries, much less elected.
iv. As a CNN talking head said weeks ago, it's better for the wealthy people the DNC is
beholden to that their own candidate loses to Trump if that candidate is Sanders.
So better to hedge their bets start impeachment hearings, give Trump ammunition to destroy
Sanders or Warren. That way, the rich win in all scenarios:
a. If Biden wins the nomination, the campaign will be essentially mudslinging from both
sides about who is more corrupt. The rich are fine with whoever wins.
b. If Warren gets the nomination and is co-opted, the media will let the impeachment
hearings die out, or the House themselves will quickly bury it.
c. If Warren gets the nomination and is not co-opted, or if Sanders get it, the
impeachment will suck up all the air of the room, Trump will play the witchhunt card and will
be re-elected.
That's a very good idea to concentrate on your job instead of some fluff, or worse, criminal
activity.
Millions of dollars, millions of manhours of political discourse and newsmedia coverage,
were wasted on Russiagate. That's a typical "control fraud." Control fraud occurs when a
trusted person in a high position of responsibility in a company, corporation, or state
subverts the organization and engages in extensive fraud (in this case a witch hunt) for
personal gain.
Those hours could have been used researching and discussing country foreign policy,
economic policy, healthcare policy, industrial policy, environment policy and other important
for this nation topics.
Instead the Dems chased a ghost (and they knew that this a ghost) for 3 years and now
Pelosi have just signaled that they will spend the next 6 months chasing another ghost --
trying to impeach Trump for his attempt to re-launch (in his trademark clumsy, bulling way)
investigating Joe Biden's family corruption in Ukraine. Action which is in full compliance
with The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA)
During the last two years there were actions of Trump that probably deserved launching
impeachment proceeding. For example, attempt of regime change in Venezuela. But neoliberal
Dems were fully on board with that. So the main loss which this bunch of swindlers can't
settle with is the the loss in their ability to defraud the country: I feel that the
neoliberal Democrats' real problem with Trump is that he ended their scheme of defrauding the
country in favor of his own.
Now with this Ukraine-gate scandal the US voters have, in effect, are being defrauded by a
group of the same sophisticated political swindlers that ruled the county during Clinton and
Obama administrations.
"Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats again tried to find vague dirt with
which they can tarnish Trump."
If Warren is nominated she can run on dirt because she does not have the sewage history.
If she runs on policy people will remember that she will fce 20 million families who got a
$500/month Obamacare tax. These are the families that cost Dems four elections. She should
not mention medicare at all, once she has the nomination.
Impeachment is what happens when a President has sex and lies about it. So it has become
meaningless, thanks to Repubs.
If I were Trump, I would take the impeachment and run with it. Trump will claim he got
impeached because he was hunting for Biden sewage, and there is no Biden, thanks to the
impeachment. His team agrees, take the impeachment and run with it.
Who liked Biden? None of the young turks, they want Biden out as badly as they want Trump
out. I just have this feeling, Biden is a gonner, sort of a bipartisan play if you ask
me.
For The First Time, Warren Beats Out Biden For No. 1 Spot In National Poll
--
Biden gone. Harris gone. Pete gone. Beto gone. It is between Bernie and Liz. Both of whom
will be telling 10 million families that health care is free and they will not get hit with a
$500/month tax. Problem is, voters regret on this is lifelong, a ot of voters, right here in
this blog, think Obamacare was deceptive. But these same voters now put the cost on the
federal debt machine, courtesy of Trump, and they prefer that.
Trump wins as long as there is no blue bar and Repubs avoid mass shootings in Florida or
Texas. We, this group and our favorite economists have lost credibility on medical
programs.
Sanders is spend force in any case. His endorsement does not matter much. But for Warren this
is a blunder. Tulsi is the only one out of this troika who proved to be capable politician.
As I reported on the previous thread, Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings in a
tweet I linked to and cited. Gabbard is apparently the only D-Party candidate that said this
decision is a mistake.
This article about her stance is actually balanced. Citing her recent interview by
FOXNews :
"'I have been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment in this juncture would
be terribly divisive for our country at a time when we are already extremely divided,'
Gabbard explained. 'Hyper-partisanship is one of the things that's driving our country
apart.'
"'I think it's important to defeat Donald Trump. That's why I'm running for president, but
I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard, making that decision,'
she said.
"Regardless of how you feel about Gabbard, you have to give her credit on this front.
America is extremely divided today and politicians in Washington play into that. The
impeachment saga is a prime example of their role in this division ." [My Emphasis]
When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of
the entire bunch, including the Rs. I haven't looked at her election websites recently, but
from what I see of her campaign appearances, her and Sanders seem to be sharing each other's
policy proposals, although they both choose to place more emphasis on some than others. For
Gabbard, its the wonton waste and corruption of the Empire that keeps good things from being
done for all citizens at home, whereas Sanders basically inverts the two.
"... Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest of you are on your own." ..."
And yet America's policies were headed in the wrong direction. The big banks kept lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would
gut families' last refuge in the bankruptcy courts -- the same bill we describe in this book. (It went by the awful name Bankruptcy
Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, but it should have been called the Gut the Safety Net and Pay OIT the Big Banks Act.).
The proposed law would carefully preserve bankruptcy protections for the likes of Donald Trump and his friends, while ordinary families
that had been crushed by debts from medical problems or job losses were thrown under the bus.
When we wrote The Two-Income Trap, it was already pretty clear that the big banks would win this battle. The fight kept going
for two more years, but the tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed
Congress.
In 2005, the Wall Street banking industry got the changes they wanted, and struggling families lost out. After the law was rewritten,
about 800,000 families a year that once would have turned to bankruptcy to try to get back on their feet were shut out of the system.1
That was 800,000 families -- mostly people who had lost jobs, suffered a medical catastrophe, or gone through a divorce or death
in the family. And now, instead of reorganizing their finances and building some security, they were at the mercy of debt collectors
who called twenty or thirty times a day -- and could keep on calling and calling for as long as they thought they could squeeze another
nickel from a desperate family.
As it turned out, the new law tore a big hole in the last safety net for working families, just in time for the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, the bank regulators kept playing blind and deaf while the housing bubble inflated. Once it burst, the economy collapsed.
The foreclosure problem we flagged back in 2003 rolled into a global economic meltdown by 2008, as millions of people lost their
homes, and millions more lost their jobs, their savings, and their chance at a secure retirement. Overall, the total cost of the
crash was estimated as high as S14 trillion.2
Meanwhile, America's giant banks got bailed out, CEO pay shot up, the stock market roared back, and the investor class got rich
beyond even their own fevered dreams.3
A generation ago, a fortune-teller might have predicted a very different future. With so many mothers headed into the workforce,
Americans might have demanded a much heavier investment in public day care, extended school days, and better family leave policies.
Equal pay for equal work might have become sacrosanct. As wages stagnated, there might have been more urgency for raising the minimum
wage, strengthening unions, and expanding Social Security. And our commitment to affordable college and universal preschool might
have become unshakeable.
But the political landscape was changing even faster than the new economic realities. Government was quickly becoming an object
of ridicule, even to the president of the United States. Instead of staking his prestige on making government more accountable and
efficient, Ronald Reagan repeated his famous barb "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are Tin from the government
and I'm here to help."'8 After generations of faithfulness to the promise of the Constitution to promote general welfare, at the
moment when the economic foundations of the middle class began to tremble, our efforts to strengthen each other and offer a helping
hand had become the butt of a national joke.
Those who continued to believe in what we could do together faced another harsh reality: much of government had been hijacked
by the rich and powerful. Regulators who were supposed to watch out for the public interest shifted their loyalties, smiling benignly
as giant banks jacked up short-term profits by cheating families, looking the other way as giant power companies scam mod customers,
and partying with industry executives as oil companies cut comers on safety and environmental rules. In this book we told one of
those stories, about how a spineless Congress rewrote the bankruptcy laws to enrich a handful of credit card companies.
Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's
Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest
of you are on your own."
These shifts played nicely into each other. Every' attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules tilted
more and These shifts played nicely into each other. Every attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules
tilted more and more in favor of those who could hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers. Lower taxes for the wealthy -- and more money
in the pockets of those who subscribed to the greed-is-good mantra. And if the consequence meant less money for preschools or public
colleges or disability coverage -- the things that would create more security for an overstretched middle class -- then that was
just too bad.
Little by little, as the middle class got deeper and deeper in trouble, government stopped working for the middle class, or at
least it stopped working so hard. The rich paid a little less and kept a little more. Even if they didn't say it in so many words,
they got exactly what they wanted. Remember the 90 percent -- America's middle class, working class, and poor -- the ones who got
70 percent of all income growth from 1935 through 1980?
From 1980-2014, the 90 percent got nothing.9 None. Zero. Zip. Not a penny in income growth. Instead, for an entire generation,
the top 10 percent captured all of the income growth in the entire country. l(X) percent.
It didn't have to be this way. The Two-Income Trap is about families that w'ork hard, but some things go wrong along the way --
illnesses and job losses, and maybe some bad decisions. But this isn't what has put the middle class on the ropes. After all, people
have gotten sick and lost jobs and made less-than-perfect decisions for generations -- and vet, for generations America's middle
class expanded. creating more opportunity to build real economic security and pass on a brighter future to their children.
What would it take to help strengthen the middle class? The problems facing the middle-class family are complex and far-reaching,
and the solutions must be too. We wish there could be a simple silver bullet, but after a generation of relentless assault, there
just isn't. But there is one overriding idea. Together we can. It's time to say it out loud: a generation of I-got-mine policy-making
has failed -- failed miserably, completely, and overwhelmingly. And it's time to change direction before the entire middle class
has been replaced by hundreds of millions of Americans barely hanging on by their fingernails.
Americas middle class was built through investments in education, infrastructure, and research -- and by' making sure we all have
a safety net. We need to strengthen those building blocks: Step up investments in public education. Rein in the cost of college and
cut out- standing student loans. Create universal preschool and affordable child care. Upgrade infrastructure -- mass transit, energy,
communications -- to make it more attractive to build good, middle-class jobs here in America. Recognize that the modem economy can
be perilous, and a strong safety net is needed now more than ever. Strengthen disability coverage, retirement coverage, and paid
sick leave. And for heavens sake, get rid of the awful banker-backed bankruptcy law, so that when things go wrong, families at least
have a chance at a fresh start. We welcome the re-issue of The Two-Income Trap because we see the original book as capturing a critical
moment, those last few minutes in which the explanation of why so many hardworking, plav-by- tho-mlcs people were in so much trouble
was simple: It was their own fault. If only they would just pull up their socks, cinch their belts a little tighter, and stop buying
so much stuff, they -- and our country -- would be just fine. That myth has died. And we say', good riddance.
Minor quibbles aside -- Warren presumably doesn't derive most of her income from capital
owner-ship, and markets are compatible with socialism -- the
Massachusetts senator is right. She and Sanders draw their lineage from distinct political
traditions.
Warren is a regulator at heart who believes that capitalism works well as long as fair
competition exists; Sanders is a class-conscious tribune who sees capitalism as fundamentally unjust . Warren
frames her most ambitious reforms as bids to make capitalism " accountable
"; Sanders pushes legislation called the "
Stop BEZOS Act " and denounces ceos for exploiting
workers . Warren seeks a harmonious accord between workers and employers; Sanders
encourages workers to fight back.
Foreign policy differences spring from their respective traditions as well. While both are
suspicious of military interventionism, Vermont's junior senator has shown himself much more
willing to criticize the crimes of US empire -- famously proclaiming in
a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton that "Henry Kissinger is not my friend." Warren, though a
critic of Bush-style adventurism, sees America's role in more conventional terms, arguing in a
Foreign
Affairs essay this year that we should "project American strength and values
throughout the world."
Warren's political tradition is the left edge of middle-class liberalism; Sanders hails from
America's socialist tradition. Or, to put the distinction in more personal terms: Warren is
Louis
Brandeis , Sanders is Eugene Debs .
A presentation and reading by Hamilton Gregory, author of "McNamara's Folly: The Use of
Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam." Because so many college students were avoiding military service
during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered mental standards to induct
354,000 low-IQ men. they were known as McNamara's "Moron Corps." Their death toll in combat was
appalling. Gregory indicates at the end of his talk that the situation didn't really change.
The same practice is taking place nowadays.
England patriot says:
September
24, 2019 at 5:27 pm GMT 100 Words A lot of people mistake low IQ brutishness for genuine
bravery and strength, which is why blacks are considered by many whites to be the toughest race
and probably why they are favoured by the military.
A big weakness of the US and UK militaries is the assumption that street thugs make the most
effective and capable troops, in reality such people are often the most useless and cowardly in
an actual war zone. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
Comments
The story is definitely true. Not only were there low moron troops but even the so called
West Point graduates with no experience in war were complete idiots. It was a two fold fiasco
because these graduates couldn't read coordinates on maps and the morons couldn't find them
and thus they often bombed our own troops.
There were a lot "friendly fire" deaths that were never reported. The carnage of Vietnam
was a disgrace from poor military strategies to morons and incompetents running them. We were
not prepared for the "Jungle Type Gorilla War" our leaders got us into and the results are
told forever on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. What did they die for? Another
"Communist" are taking over Domino Policy when the true Communist Jews were running the stuff
in the USA and destroying us.
Two destroyers were recently collided into by slow-moving merchant ships. Someone said that
this is like a Chevy Corvette being struck by a bulldozer on the Bonneville Salt Flats while
a team of trained experts had the job of keeping the Corvette from being hit.
@A123
Any civilization that sends their Best and Brightest to the front lines is taking huge risks.
Cannon fodder troops generally come (and should come) from the lower tiers of society. This
promotes a nation's long-term health and vitality.
There is no starvation–only fasting–during Ramadan. Fasting occurs each day
from sunrise to sundown. On the other hand, Israel's high fertility rates among Orthodox and
Sephardic Jews has dysgenics written all over it. This explains why Israel's average IQ
average remains below 100. Highly religious and less-intelligent Jews are producing a
disproportionate number of the births inside Israel.
It's a lesson the US could've learned back in World War II. The US deployed black troops in
France, and instead of proving that the blacks were just as capable fighters as the whites,
the blacks engaged in typical black behavior of rape and thievery. It got so bad in areas
like Cherbourg that the local population preferred the Germans over their supposed
'liberators'.
The same thing happened earlier in the war when the Allies deployed Moroccan mercenaries
in Italy.
After the battle of Monte Cassino, these savages could rape Italian women with impunity, they
wouldn't be stopped by the French, the British or indeed the Americans, and as a result more
than 30.000 Italian women became victims of these vicious assaults.
But I bet it was all in good faith of course, after all the US was making Europe safe for
stali I mean, 'democracy'
Politicians did not want the war to become an issue among the affluent. It was the old adage
about wars: "Rich men start them; poor men fight them." There were plenty of chicken hawks
around.
The article and comments, so far, are interesting.
A military is a tool of the ruling class/caste/layer/whatever. What is moronic, or not, is
for them to decide. The only principle: is the tool good for the job?
There are several very good reasons to have "low-level IQ" troops in the military, a
modern war/combat in particular.
In an infantry company of, say, 160 men, a smart O.C. would love to have 10-20 of those
types. Plenty of jobs/assignments for them and definitely attributing to combat efficiency of
the unit.
Even better in logistics, especially in higher units/rear areas. Comparison:
warehouse/storage facilities employees in civvy street.
BTW, those guys, if/when properly treated (LEADERSHIP) can be utterly loyal and
dependable. For "experts" around, there are plenty of miserable, mind-numbing jobs/tasks in
the military, plus quite dangerous, which those guys shall do when others won't. If .treated
properly
And, one more element, especially in contemporary wars: certain moral attitude, "relaxed"
approach to human life and limb etc. Ability to commit acs of war other, more, say, smart,
"sensitive" troops, are reluctant to do.
Israel. IDF as the state tool to keep Palestinians under control.
Occupation forces of The Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And one more thing: for suppressing possible internal unrest in a Western country ..For
that job you really don't want very intelligent/sensitive people.
Etc.
Big topic but, of course, not for this thread, for obvious reasons. Program.
Sorry for the interruption, guys. Feel free to resume the "bashing".
Infantry in Vietnam was known to be awful. Everyone in the military knew to avoid it. It was
openly used as a threat for non-compliance to troops elsewhere.
There were certainly exceptions. Some Marines, people wanting or needing to get their
ticket punched, etc. But before anything, Vietnam Infantry was getting the dregs. Not that I
doubt McNamera leaned into it as an opportunity.
Why in the world did they want or need all these troops? Westmorland kept asking for more
and more. After 500,000, per the pentagon papers, the JCS mood Westmorland that given US
presence in Europe, Japan, Korea, etc., there were no more extra troops.
Too bad that the US military has made a cottage industry out of revisionist accounts
regarding how it could have been "won". Showing a remarkable lack of insight into what it
means to win.
@A123
Interesting to see how a conniving Jew takes a piece about Vietnam and uses it to further his
objective of trying (quite unsuccessfully, one infers) to generate sympathy for the
Judenreich. He then doubles down with a further tangent leading somehow to Ramadan (!) It's
almost comical how transparent Jew scheming has become. It makes one wonder if the Hasbara
brigades have had to go low-IQ at this point?
Both in terms of IQ and class background, infantry in Vietnam were generally
representative of the general population. As one author assessed, "If they [soldiers in
combat units] were not the social and intellectual cream of American youth, neither were they
its dregs or castoffs."
nI saw the author of the book give at talk. I believe it was at a Tennessee Unversity. What
he described he saw as an enlisted man if I remember correctly. He was sent to OCS later and
sounded a very decent man. The conditions were awful for these guys. They were treated as
expendable by peers and officers alike.
I wonder how the IDF works this issue out. The Israelis are masters of the universe at
everything don't you know. They are utter geniuses.
"... Rudy Drops New Bombs: Slams Obama Cabinet 'Pattern Of Corruption'; Claims China 'Bought' Biden ..."
"... Warren wins the nomination because the issue is Swamp Sewage and she hasn't been around long enough to emit much of it. Biden has a ton of it. Trump has three years of it. ..."
Rudy Drops New Bombs: Slams Obama Cabinet 'Pattern Of Corruption'; Claims China 'Bought'
Biden
---
Rudy on a roll. Go look it up on a safe site.
Warren wins the nomination because the issue is Swamp Sewage and she hasn't been around
long enough to emit much of it. Biden has a ton of it. Trump has three years of it.
"... Warren proved to be a very weak, mediocre politician. By joining the calls to "Impeach Trump" she proved this again. And this is not the first time she made a very bad call. Looks like she is completely malleable candidate. The candidate without spine outside his favorite re-regulation issues. ..."
"... Ukraine-gate impeachment process (aka another attempt to demonize Trump after Russiagate fiasco) is what Trump badly needs now, as it will cement his voting block and might bring back those voters who are appalled by his betrayal of almost all election promises. ..."
"... As Ukraine-gate is based on a false rumor and actually implicates Biden, not Trump (and after Trump decision to open the transcript Dems now need to move goalposts like it was with the inner party member Parteigenosse Mueller witch hunt ). ..."
"... It portrays the Dems as clueless political scum who are ready to resort to dirty tricks in order to protect neoliberal warmonger Biden, and maintain Wall-Street favorable status quo. ..."
The Senate republicans should be forced to block trumps impeachment. This is a good election
issue in deep purple states with a senator up for re election. Plus a good house issue. Let
the people judge both party wagons
Trump and Biden make a perfect pair of party Totem heads
Tulsi is the only talented politician among those who are running on Democratic Platform.
And I applaud her courage to stand against the mob
Warren proved to be a very weak, mediocre politician. By joining the calls to "Impeach
Trump" she proved this again. And this is not the first time she made a very bad call. Looks like she is completely
malleable candidate. The candidate without spine outside his favorite re-regulation issues.
She essentially gave Trump additional ammunition to attack her and poach her supporters. I
would now attack her along the lines:
"Do not believe anything Warren say; she does have spine. Look how easily she was
co-opted to join this witch-hunt. If Warren wins, she will instantly fold and will do what
bought by Wall Street Dems leadership will ask her. I am not perfect but I withstood
Russiagate witch-hunt and that proves that with all my faults I am the only independent
politician in this race, who can go against the flow and deliver what was promised; please
give additional time and I will deliver"
Of course, this is disingenuous projection as Trump did the same, but that's politics
;-)
I still believe that Warren has chances to win against Trump. But with such moves by Dem
leadership this might no longer be true. Why Warren does not attack Trump disastrous domestic
and foreign policy record instead of making such questionable calls is not clear to me. Just
a diagram "Trump promises vs reality" as election advertisement might improve her
chances.
Ukraine-gate impeachment process (aka another attempt to demonize Trump after Russiagate
fiasco) is what Trump badly needs now, as it will cement his voting block and might bring
back those voters who are appalled by his betrayal of almost all election promises.
As Ukraine-gate is based on a false rumor and actually implicates Biden, not Trump (and
after Trump decision to open the transcript Dems now need to move goalposts like it was with
the inner party member Parteigenosse Mueller witch hunt ).
It portrays the Dems as clueless
political scum who are ready to resort to dirty tricks in order to protect neoliberal
warmonger Biden, and maintain Wall-Street favorable status quo.
Netanyahu's coalition was given the nod because they have 55 seats to the other side's
54.
There's still some question about whether Netanyahu can form a governing coalition.
But
Netanyahu now has 42 days to convince his former Defense Minister(!) Lieberman
(who heads the Yisrael Beiteinu Party) to join the coalition led by Likud.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has supported the nuclear agreement since its
inception, has levied criticism toward the White House. On June 18, in response to a New York
Times report titled, "Trump Adds Troops After Iran Says It Will Breach Nuclear Deal" (a
questionable media framing given that the U.S. had already violated the deal), she
tweeted:
"I hope Iran chooses a different path. But let's be clear: Trump provoked this crisis. He
has no strategy to contain it, he's burned through our friends and allies, and now he's
doubling down on military force. We can't afford another forever war."
While Warren was correct to argue against war, she opens by appearing to place blame
against Iran, neglecting to acknowledge the U.S.'s role in villainizing Iran in the first
place.
On June 20, after reports of the Navy drone were published, Warren elaborated on her
comments, adopting a stronger oppositional stance to the prospect of war with Iran.
"Trump provoked this crisis, and his reckless foreign policy by tweet will only worsen it.
I've co-sponsored legislation to prohibit a war with Iran. We need to de-escalate tensions --
not let the war hawks in this administration drag us into conflict. #NoWarWithIran"
That same day, she followed with
"Donald Trump promised to bring our troops home. Instead he has pulled out of a deal that
was working and instigated another unnecessary conflict. There is no justification for
further escalating this crisis -- we need to step back from the brink of war."
Here, Warren uses stronger language to denounce Trump's actions, but still falls short of
a moral denunciation of U.S. violence or a more incisive analysis of the Iran nuclear deal's
power relations. Meanwhile, Warren's vote for new sanctions against Iran in 2017 weakens her
legislative record. ...
Warren is far more progressive than mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden. She calls for
withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Warren campaigns for the United
State to rejoin the nuclear accord with Iran and to end trade pacts that hurt workers.
"Warren's foreign policy positions have shifted a fair amount in recent years,
particularly during the past few months," says Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the
University of San Francisco, who provides foreign policy advice to the Warren campaign.
"Warren's rise shakes up Democratic field" [ The
Hill ]. "A new poll showing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) leading former Vice President
Joe Biden in Iowa has shaken up the Democratic nomination battle -- and insiders across the
party are gaming out what it all means. Warren currently has 22 percent support to Biden's 20
percent, according to the well-respected Des Moines Register–CNN–Mediacom poll,
released Saturday night. The two are well clear of the rest of the field, with Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.) in third place with 11 percent support . With more than four months to go, the
experts all agree that it's too early to make solid predictions. But the battle for Iowa is
heating up by the day."
Is there any reason to see what is going on as more than just Biden support bailing to "Plan
C", i.e., the next most establishment-friendly candidate who has any apparent chance of
winning? Sanders' support seems solid. Admittedly, I would much rather see Sanders slowly
eating away at the "pro-establishment" fraction of Dem voters, but there is nothing to suggest
that he is losing support.
The more I see of Warren, the less I like her- and I would not have voted for her to begin
with. I'm getting very tired of moderate Republicans being packaged and sold as
"progressives".
To her credit, Warren does have a theory of change:
After dinner, "Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice," Ms. Warren
writes. "I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say
whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get
lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People -- powerful people -- listen to what
they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize
other insiders.
"• I'm not sure I agree. There are many, many, many of those "boutique lobbying or
consulting shops" -- "
And how is Trump's shakedown hotel any different from DNC dialing for dollars? Or would it
be better if he limited himself just renting out the Lincoln Bedroom like the Clintons did?
I want to reiterate the point that Yglesias seems incapable of recognizing* that a network
of small shops could create more damage than one guy, even a titan. Look at health care policy,
for example. It looks like Elizabeth Warren's daughter runs a body-shop for the kind of person
Yglesias regards as harmless. Thread:
Samuel Douglas Retweeted Samuel Douglas
I spent some time looking into Warren Tyagi's consulting firm (Business Talent Group), and I
learned some interesting things 1/
Elizabeth Warren's daughter co-founded HealthAllies, a venture capital-backed health
benefits firm which was later acquired by United Health Group, the second largest health
insurer in the U.S.
NOTE * Incapable of recognizing, because obviously professionals don't have class
interests.
Wow, thanks for this, Lambert. See my link to the story in a reply
above for yet another shady bit about Warren's daughter. I wouldn't normally find myself on
RedState, but searching 'WARren daughter WFP' in the googlygoo brought this up first and after
a read-through, seems pretty straight-up. It even includes reporting from Jordan Chariton in
the meat of the story.
It's time for Warren to drop out. She's way too compromised.
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon,
administering the occasional rap on the knuckles
to those acting in bad faith"
". Meanwhile, the system's multilateral institutions,
especially the International Monetary Fund,
helped countries in dire need of funds,
provided they followed the rules."
Behind the escalating global conflict over trade and technology is a larger breakdown of the
postwar rules-based order, which was based on a belief that any country's growth benefits
all. Now that China is threatening to compete directly with the United States, support for
the system that made that possible has disappeared.
By RAGHURAM G. RAJAN
CHICAGO – Another day, another attack on trade. Why is it that every dispute –
whether over intellectual property (IP), immigration, environmental damage, or war
reparations – now produces new threats to trade?
For much of the last century, the United States managed and protected the rules-based
trading system it created at the end of World War II. That system required a fundamental
break from the pre-war environment of mutual suspicion between competing powers. The US urged
everyone to see that growth and development for one country could benefit all countries
through increased trade and investment.
Under the new dispensation, rules were enacted to constrain selfish behavior and coercive
threats by the economically powerful. The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering
the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith. Meanwhile, the system's
multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in
dire need of funds, provided they followed the rules....
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to
those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites
(neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination
and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy. Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic
for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to
bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on
Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie
were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at
this stage of history.
The truth is that the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely
unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external
threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly,
London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient
to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it
not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet
and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New
Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001. In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops
posted abroad.
Still as an imperial state that is the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on
financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire
experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of
further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed
to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the
2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never
ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation" phase)
Although currently with unhinged Trump at the helm the USA empire still going strong in
forcing vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA. Trump
currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic neoliberal
globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be successful in the
short run.
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during
triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel
tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the
USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in
check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the
dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the
level of external debt and required devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force
trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China,
India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly
in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by
Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA
empire. That's not much.
"If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position "........
Think Italy moving into the Axis in 1937? Or the Soviet German Non Aggression Pact.
Nuclear weapons removes the incentive for large "rearmaments" or not?
Would the Britain to France 1938 relationship describe the US to EU? Thinking in 1939
(1914?) terms Europe is less stitched together than in 1936.
"... CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country, mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though, read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO 1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long while.) ..."
"... So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another and there fore vulnerable. ..."
It has been my contention that Biden's powerful backers from the
military-industrial-intelligence-media complex are fully aware of his mental state, and that
is precisely why they want him to be president. Why? He would only be a figure-head
president. He would be given a suggested running mate as well as a list of candidates for
cabinet and other appointed positions (as Obama was given) and Biden would follow that in
making appointments. Policies of his administration would be consistent with the interests of
the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex.
robert e williamson jr , September 20, 2019 at 15:19
Kids this is exactly what the intelligence community wants, someone who they can claim
needs to be told what to do or be kept discreetly out of the loop, so currently Joe maybe the
chosen one just as Bill Barr is reported to have told Slick Willy.
We end up where we are at the moment because our security state apparatus is ran by the
intelligence community who do not really want a strong intelligent, clear minded president
who can actually think for himself. Ask Barrack Obama!
For years I've used this analogy, crude as it maybe, that when the newly elected president
is called on for his national security briefing it is always a tense encounter because this
"Newby" is about to have a come to Jesus meeting with this most abusive of all government
entities. The intelligence community. He is "shown the way"he will act because if he doesn't
this community who has relieved him of one his go -- -s will come and relieve him of the
other.
This started as a joke on my part, I'm now convinced it reflects reality.
At some point many here will understand that since around the time of the murder of JFK ,
CIA has framed things in this manner.
CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country,
mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though,
read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO
1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long
while.)
Doing so will help make your mind more flexible , jeesh what a slog to get through it.
So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC
long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another
and there fore vulnerable.
I figured if Caitlin could say "dog balls " which I think was a great analogy I could say
gonads.
Time to sit down Joe.
Thanks again to Consortium News for their great efforts at informing the masses.
Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for
some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has
shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up
stuff to drive events.
Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my
journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing
the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in
office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."
Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false
narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try
to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for
them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to
remind
reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in
daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.
The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump
wasn't the
Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media
literally accused the president of treason by
melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were
run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made
into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little
consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the
rubes would believe and then pile on.
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The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media
created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last
Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a
cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal
testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.
Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing
following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up
accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on
leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.
But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became
certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were
recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data
is public. See the pattern yet?
If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite,
upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for
personal gain via hotel fees.
At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as
the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not
going to divest
. But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could
not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional
.
Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the
Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts
from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last
time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over
gifts from the Imam of Muscat.
The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official
getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny
percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then
they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course
because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency
itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!
It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site
Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous
source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one
hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a
reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when
we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support
American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone
got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.
Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every
timeanyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited
one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the
privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in
their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms
(which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump
Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service
rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.
More?
T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence
federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the
president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked
up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.
Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from
third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed
building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was
accused of "
hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash
customers if they were potentates or princes (the
headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments
Clause").
And of course, there was the
Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged
its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air
Force had
used the airport and hotel
hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a
decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the
Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece
speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's
cornerstone financial
plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.
But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to
compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the
past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if
his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there
pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of
president?
Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury
all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was
$191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is
zero.
Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was
$15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a
$65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his
book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction
book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for
a young adult version of Dreams From My
Father .
Obama's books were huge sellers
in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom
money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000
worth of his books to distribute as gifts.
As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president
making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the
presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was
designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used
to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat
two very similar situations so very differently?
Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running
false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate
calls for
hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will
soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly
charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden --
will go.
Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation,
arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.
FOX NEWS HOST Tucker Carlson was saying nice things about Elizabeth Warren again.
Well, not entirely nice things.
Speaking at a conference of conservative journalists and intellectuals this summer (*), he
took a moment to label the liberal Massachusetts senator and top contender for the Democratic
presidential nomination a "joke" and a "living tragedy."
But he also spoke, in admiring tones and at substantial length, about "The Two-Income
Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke," the book Warren wrote with her daughter in
2004.
"Elizabeth Warren wrote one of the best books I've ever read on economics," he said.
By that point, he'd already warned his audience about the perils of "monopoly power" and
declared that income inequality, which the right had long been trained to believe is "just a
pure invention of some diabolical French intellectual to destroy America," is actually
"completely real" and "totally bad."
His Bolshevist pronouncements were probably not a surprise to anyone who'd watched
Carlson's show closely in the months leading up to his speech. But Fox, despite its outsize
influence, has a relatively small audience.
And it's not just Carlson's evolution that's escaped notice. It's hard to keep track of
what most of the key players on the right are saying these days, with President Trump soaking
up so much attention.
But while the commander-in-chief thrashes about, something important is taking shape in
his shadow -- the outlines of a new conservatism inspired, or at least elevated, by his rise
to power.
It's a conservatism that tries to wrestle with the post-Cold War, post-industrial angst
that fired his election -- dropping a reflexive fealty to big business that dates back to the
Reagan era and focusing more intently on the struggles of everyday Americans.
"There are many downsides, I will say, to Trump," Carlson said, in his speech this summer.
"But one of the upsides is, the Trump election was so shocking, so unlikely ... that it did
cause some significant percentage of people to say, 'wait a second, if that can happen, what
else is true?' "
The reimagining is playing out not just on Carlson's show or in conservative journals, but
among a small batch of young, ambitious Republicans in Congress led by senators Josh Hawley
of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Their populist -- or "nationalist" or "post-liberal" -- prescriptions sometimes smack of
opportunism. And it's still not clear how far they're willing to stray from their party. But
it looks like there are places where the new nationalists could find common cause with an
energized left.
Whether the two sides can actually forge a meaningful alliance in the glare of our
hyperpartisan politics is an open question. But a compact -- even a provisional one -- may
offer the country its best shot at building a meaningful, post-Trump politics.
. . .
CARLSON DELIVERED HIS speech at the National Conservatism Conference -- the first major
gathering aimed at forging a new, right-of-center approach in the age of Trump.
"This is our independence day," said Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist and chief
organizer of the event, in his spirited opening remarks. "We declare independence from
neoconservatism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism."
"We are national conservatives," he said.
Any effort to build a right-of-center nationalism circa 2019 inevitably runs into
questions about whether it will traffic in bigotry.
And one of the speakers, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, seemed to do
just that -- suggesting that "cultural compatibility" should play a role in deciding which
migrants are allowed into the country.
"In effect," she said, this "means taking the position that our country will be better off
with more whites and fewer nonwhites."
But Wax's speech, however discomfiting, stood out because it was so discordant.
Conference organizers took pains to prevent hate-mongers from attending -- ultimately
rejecting six applicants. ...
"Your ideas," he said, "are not welcome here." ...
"The Israeli military is armed with the latest fast jets and precision weaponry, yet it has
turned to its fleet of drones to hit targets in Iraq. Deniability has played a big factor
– the ability of drones to elude radar and therefore keep targets guessing about who
actually bombed them is playing well for Israeli leaders who are trying to prevent an
increasingly lethal shadow war with Iran from developing into an open conflict."
Right! If you get into the cui bono game, the list is pretty long including US shale oil
companies.
Russia, too. I'm surprised that the 'Russia dun it crowd' (Team Pelosi) hasn't blamed it
all on Putin. I mean, isn't everything bad that happened since Nov. 2016 Putin's fault.
But now it would appear that Iran is the villain du jour. Maybe they'll even get blamed
for Trump's reelection next year!
In terms of cui bono, you can group Wall Street investors and banksters in with shale oil
companies they desperately need the shale oil companies to finally start generating some
profits. What better way than to knock out shal oil's biggest competitor?
But, as I said, Iran has become the villain du jour, even though they have the deterrent
capability of closing the Strait of Hormuz and taking most ME oil off line. To hear the
neocons, even that deterrence is not enough to dissuade them from a war on Israel's behalf.
To them war is certainly preferable to trying to make room for Iranian sovereignty and assure
the flow of ME oil to world markets.
Could this be the sort of false-flag
op where explosives are planted by
non-foreign operators to make a lot of
smoke and minimal real damage, and make
it look like the work of 'enemy missiles',
sort of like the 'Wag The Dog' plot. It
might be well worth it to Certain Parties
to even do a modest amount of real damage.
Iran's Foreign Minister Vows 'All-Out War'
if US or Saudis Strike https://nyti.ms/2AxMgFi
NYT - Richard Pérez-Peña - September 19
A military strike against Iran by the United States or Saudi Arabia would result in "an
all-out war," Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said on Thursday, repeating his
government's denial of responsibility for an attack last week that damaged Saudi oil
facilities.
The Houthi rebel faction in Yemen -- supported by Iran in its fight against a Saudi-led
coalition -- claimed responsibility for the Saturday attack. But Saudi and American officials
blamed Iran, raising the threat of military retaliation. But so far it is not clear how they
will react.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out an "act of war" with the
aerial attacks, but President Trump has appeared reluctant to order a military strike.
...
----
Trump's National Security Aides to Meet on
Possible Iran Options https://nyti.ms/2QgO2pa
NYT - Eric Schmitt - September 19
WASHINGTON -- Senior national security officials from across the government are scheduled
to meet Thursday to refine a list of potential targets to strike in Iran, should President
Trump order a military retaliation for missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabian oil fields
last weekend, officials said.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, are to present the updated options to Mr. Trump at a National Security
Council meeting scheduled for Friday, a senior American official said.
In advance of being presented with the newest set of options, Mr. Trump has sent different
signals on his intentions. He has threatened to order "the ultimate option" of a strike on
Iran to punish the nation for its behavior, but also has made clear his continued opposition
to ordering the United States into another war in the Middle East.
The Pentagon is advocating military strikes that one senior official described as at the
lower end of options. The official said that any retaliation could focus on more clandestine
operations -- actions that military planners predict would not prompt an escalation by Iran.
...
"The Russian Foreign Ministry issued an immediate response to the new US measures
denouncing them as "illegitimate."
"This will not affect our approaches to Iran," said Zamir Kabulov, the director of the
Russian Foreign Ministry Second Asian Department. "As we planned, we will continue to
cooperate with Iran in the banking sector. This will have no effect [on Moscow's position]
"
While Beijing, which counts Saudi Arabia as its second-largest source of oil imports, was
somewhat more circumspect, it is highly unlikely that any new measures will affect its own
ties to Iran. China accounts for half of Iran's sharply reduced oil exports, and Beijing and
Tehran this month signed $400 billion worth of deals connected to Beijing's Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI) of which Iran is a key component.
The sanctions imposed by the Trump administration after ripping up the nuclear agreement
in May 2018 amount to an economic blockade, tantamount to a state of war. They have led to
shortages of food and medicines, leaving cancer patients to die."
"Tehran has vehemently denied these accusations. The Houthi rebels, who control the
bulk of Yemen, claimed responsibility, declaring the attacks an act of self-defense against
the murderous US-backed war that the Saudi monarchy has waged against Yemen for nearly
four-and-a-half years, killing nearly 100,000 Yemenis and driving 8 million more to the brink
of starvation."
"The cost of the Patriot missile defense systems run into the billions while the price of
each missile that they fire is estimated at $5 million. This massively expensive weaponry
proved useless in countering drones costing a few thousand dollars that devastated the
world's largest oil refining facility."
The comments
"Authoritarian Western governments like the US, the UK, and Sweden preach an enlightened,
exalted rhetorical reverence for "the rule of law" and absolute dedication to "justice",
civil rights and due process. Meanwhile, whenever it serves their interests, their actions
are heinously and ruthlessly tyrannical, brutal, hypocritical, and capricious.
As we have seen over and over with Julian Assange, governments and their ministers of
(ostensible) justice will simply run roughshod over any technicalities and niceties that
ordinarily compel the release of incarcerated persons."
Pepe Escoabar (via Saker) has an interesting take on the Houthis capabilities and potential.
He suggests that they could destabilize Saudi Arabia via a lightning grab of Mecca and an
uprising of Shia in the eastern provinces. The recent successful drone attacks certainly must
have brought a smile to the Shia in that region and shown the ineptness of the Saudi military
and their US backers.
It is amusing to watch the US squirm over the failure of its radars and missile systems to
detect the attack. Also, if there any doubt, it was clearly the Houthis's handiwork likely
with help from Hezbollah. There was a good story on the drone's technical capabilities which
IIRC, carries a 100 pound warhead, flies at about 120 miles per hour and has a 1,000 mile
range approximately. Presumably, it uses GPS for guidance. Here is the link to the Escobar
story:
Mecca and the Red Sea port city of Jeddah are well within the range of drone and missile
strikes by the Houthis. They are not much farther away from the Yemeni border than Abqaiq is.
The Abqaiq attack serves as a warning to Riyadh of how vulnerable Mecca and Jeddah are, and
that warning could even have been the original intention of the attack.
I notice that Andrei Martyanov says that the Patriot systems have blind zones since they are
restricted to operate 7 degrees above the horizontal. According to Martyanov, this is in
contrast to the Russian S-series AD systems where missiles are launched vertically and then
take "a ride on the beam" towards the target. (This seems to explain the launch pattern of
these missiles where they are "popped" out vertically, whence their engines ignite sending
the missile off, (often) very low and flat towards their targets. http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-would-you-ask.html
From what Martyanov writes, it would seem that the US stuff has very serious design flaws.
Thanks for posting, I LOVED this episode of Crosstalk, because it was so contentious.
That delicious catfight between the "Arab" and the "Persian".
Arab guy clearly a vicious moron.
Persian guy seemed rational and logical compared to Arab guy, and then he goes on that
delicious rant about "What we will do to you, fucking Saudis, if you attack us!"
And not only Saudi Arabia will descend into Dante's hell, but AmeriKKKa too!
In complete fairness, though, Peter does simply talk over panelists he doesn't like until
they have to stop talking, because listeners can't make sense of two people talking loudly at
the same time. CrossTalk has its own politics, and the Arab was never going to get equal time
or have his viewpoints uncritically aired. He should have been allowed the same courtesy
everyone else was. I disagree strongly with what he was saying, but the immediate rejection
of his views and shouting him down did absolutely nothing to make the Kingdom look like the
party in the wrong.
Washington now claims cruise missiles were involved as well as drones. What bullshit. (a) An
enemy who was able to strike the Saudi oil fields with cruise missiles sent over drones as
well? (b) The Saudis had 50% of their damaged capacity back online in only a day, driving the
oil price spike back down? After a cruise-missile strike? Did they carry a warhead the size
of an orange? The Saudi oil fields are defenseless against a cruise-missile attack?
It's hard to say because some stuff is clearly being held back from public scrutiny. We don't
even know which weapons were fired at what targets.
My only thoughts about the domes is that they only need to be punctured by a high speed
delayed incendiary. If it is a weight trade off for range fuel v. warhead, then range wins if
popping a hole and igniting the gas is the aim. I don't know enough about the other
targets.
As others have pointed out, what is the intent behind these attacks? Is it an 'act
of war', a 'warning shot' or other? There are games within games and bluffs within bluffs
being played here.
You know who I feel sorry for in Saudi Arabia right now? The Air Defense Forces officer
in charge of the short range air defenses at the Abqaiq oil facility. He'll be lucky to get
out of this with his life.
On the one hand, elements within the USA want war with Iran really, really badly. Of slightly
greater value, though, is the opportunity to portray Trump as weak and dithering because he
hesitates to commit to it. But usually if Washington claims to have 'evidence it cannot
reveal publicly' , that's because it is making it up. When it makes up evidence which it
claims clearly demonstrates this or that, it always has a reason. I'm not sure yet what it
is, but the USA is very serious about putting Iran in the frame for it. They may have had
something to do with it, but like the so-convenient 'chemical attacks' in Syria. Iran would
have been beyond foolish to do something like that right now, while their attitude suggests
if they had done it, they'd be quite happy to own it.
It was a mystery to me how cruise missiles, drones or whatever could have evaded detection,
much less engagement, by US-supplied air defense systems. Per MOA, it was easy – US
systems such as the Patriot stare in one direction.
The PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems are sector defenses as their radars do not rotate. They can
only see an arc of 120°. In the case of the Saudis those radars only look towards the
east to Iran whcih is the most likely axis of attack. That left the crude oil processing
plant in Abqaiq completely unprotected against attacks from any other direction. Neither
Saudi Arabia nor the U.S. know from where the attack really came.
The foregoing explains why the US is unsure where the missiles originated despite the
knee-jerk braying by Pompeo. Moreover, it be be assumed that US Navy ships in the Gulf
certainly were scanning the skies yet apparently detected nothing from Iran. So it really
does look like the missiles originated from Yemen way.
I'd be careful about blaming Iran, in view of the allegation that the US-supplied air
defenses are focused in that direction and apparently did not even see the attack coming. It
also casts doubt on American bellowing that they have loads of new evidence that Iran was
responsible. If they had, why didn't they try to stop it?
What I find really amazing in that paragraph quoted from MoA is that these radars have such a
limited capability in surveying the skies. A 120° arc is about the same as the vision
span / field of view of one human eye. Two eyes working together increase the span to
210° or just over. How is it that current US radar defence technology development can't
produce a system of radars so that each can rotate at least 180° and can be paired with
another radar to provide a full 360° range of surveillance?
MOA suggests that the US has become stuck in the mindset that it will be always on the
offense thus has no need for a real defensive capability. That sort of worked with Iraq and
Grenada but against a country that can hit back, not so much. That profoundly inept piece of
junk Patriot missile system is proof positive.
I am not sure that stupidity is ever amazing- after all, it is very easy to do stupid things.
(Think Singapore, 1941) In all this, what took me a long time to accept is how
technologically advanced the Russian missile technology is- for example, it seems that
frequent swarm attacks by drones on the Russian air base at all been destroyed. Many decades
of research have clearly gone into the development of this technology. I suspect that the key
to this development was the strategic decision made by the Soviets back in the 70's to
develop missiles to destroy US carrier groups. Over a long period of time their missiles
became supersonic, and eventually the manoeuvrable hypersonic missiles that they have today.
Putin seems very confident that it will take many years for the US to catch up. He might be
right: "even 9 women cannot produce a baby within a month".
Kalen • 16 hours ago
There is no doubt that growing global tensions provocative rhetoric, erratic reckless
behavior of leadership , irrationality in global diplomatic , political or economic relations
permeating official propaganda narratives serve overall purpose of stoking nationalism as
counteroffensive to exploding class struggle worldwide.
In case of Saudis though it is all about destabilization of outdated medieval regime by US
and Israel via enticing trained in cruelty MbS to unnecessary useless and most of all
un-winnable Yemen war that in fact presents existential threat to the very existence of Saudi
puppet regime itself.
It is likely that Saudis regime will be at some point swept from power in the name of
progressive .. nationalism in fact fascism one way or another via sort of Arab color
revolution, as this medieval circus of flaccid clowns is too easy target for socialist
revolution.
In fact Saudi Arabia is ironically the prime place with required conditions for socialist
revolution to erupt not only because class division is so sharp and visible even embedded
into state law but also because working class there is truly international from Philippines,
Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and entire MENA and level of their exploitation is horrific
practically amounts to slavery.
The fragility of Saudi regime was clearly shown by this attack on practically unprotected
critical oil infrastructure from low intensity warfare threat Saudi are engaged in fact by
proxy in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, while spending $billions on useless junk that
in fact does not work at all as Houti ballistic missile attacks proved as while Soviet era
shor range ballistic missile missed the targets most of damage was done by falling patriot II
missiles falling down after missing their targets.
And hence Saudis and Turkey long wanted to buy Russian air defense systems already bought
by China, India and others triggering US sanctions against companies and individuals
involved.
US Empire is already a technical and scientific failure founded on fraud in military area
as well.
The question if quite primitive Houti forces were possibly able to pull of such attack of
about twenty armed drones (claimed by Houties 1500 km range) must be answered yes, with
recent technical support of Iranians (after reimposition of embargo) and local
spotters/controllers on the ground.
The similar swarm drone attacks was pulled by AQ terrorist affiliated forces (with US
training) several times against Russian Air and Navy base in Syria all unsuccessfully mostly
due to Russia electronic warfare capability and Panzir 2 system purposefully designed to
defend from drone swarm attacks.
The rather meek and balanced response of markets and politicians so far to this on its
face conditions imminent regional war involving nuclear powers tells me that there is no real
intention so far to start a war not because of better angel of ruling elites nature but
because they do not yet feel directly threatened by socialist revolution.
For them much valuable counterrevolutionary tool is inspiring nationalism simple threat of
war rather than war itself as it always unleashing law of unforeseen consequences and fuels
real political instability potentially threatening their own empires of domination.
Best way to prevent war is not defending national elites but engaging in international
socialist revolution.
jplotinus Kalen • 12 hours ago
In my view, the fact that Saudi Arabia's air defense system was unable to thwart an attack on
major oil infrastructure is quite damning and worthy of being the leading element of this
incident. However, as the Saudis have bought and paid for the very expensive but apparently
ineffective Patriot air defense system means that as little coverage as possible of this
aspect of the story will likely ensue in mainstream media.
I've noticed Putin has publicly offered to sell Saudi Arabia Russia's S-300 and S-400 air
defense systems. Hmmm
There will be no major war against Iran. The US will continue to try to strangle Iran but
success is becoming increasingly unlikely.
If there were to be a serious attack on Iran and Iran responded with its full capacity,
KSA could kiss its ass goodby. Desalination facilities would be targeted, oil infrastructure
would be destroyed including pipelines and loading facilities and power plants knocked out
all by missiles, US warships in the Gulf would be in dire straits as well. Yes, a social
revolution could then take place. I do wonder about the UAE. I hear that they are distancing
themselves from the Saudis lately.
The article and the comments..Absolute must read!!! (IMO)
e.g.
"Whatever the exact circumstances of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, they are being
exploited for the purpose of dragging the American people and all of humanity into a war that
can rapidly escalate into a regionwide and even global conflagration.
US strikes against Iran carried out under the pretext of retaliation for the attacks on
Saudi Arabia can trigger Iranian counterstrikes, sending US warships to the bottom of the
Persian Gulf and wreaking havoc on American military bases throughout the region.
The prospect of thousands of US soldiers and sailors dying as a result of Washington's
conspiracies and aggression carries with it the threat of the US government assuming
emergency powers and implementing police-state measures in the US itself in the name of
"national security."
This would, by no means, be an unintended consequence. The buildup to war is driven in
large measure by the escalation of social tensions and class struggle within the United
States itself, which has found fresh expression in the strike by 46,000 autoworkers against
General Motors. "
OR
"Charlotte Ruse • 12 hours ago
"If there is, as Washington claims, "no evidence' that the attacks were launched from Yemen,
one could, with equal if not greater justification, observe that there is likewise "no
evidence' that they were not launched by the US itself, or by its principal regional ally,
Israel.
If one proceeds from the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono? or Who benefits? Tehran is
the least likely suspect. There is clearly more to Washington's rush to judgment than meets
the eye."
Yes, Cui bono–who benefited most by this attack–all the usual neoconservative
warmongers who've been biting at the chomp for decades to go to War with Iran–the
"non-interventionist buffoon" may grant them their wish.
And undoubtedly, the usual Wall Street scum secured a financial "killing" as "Oil prices
rose 10 percent on Monday.
I think Tulsi Gabbard's tweet perfectly sums up who's in-charge of US foreign policy:
"Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's
bitch is not "America First." https://twitter.com/realDon
Iran having carried out the attack on the Abqaiq facilities from a southwest direction (when
it is to the northeast of the area of the attack) was a stunning achievement. How could Saudi
defences, aided by US satellites – and Israeli defences for that matter – have
possibly missed the Iranian drones or missiles as they circled around the entire Middle
Eastern region without being shot down before hitting those oil storage tanks?
"The barbaric war waged by Saudi Arabia on Yemen, with US military assistance, has been all
but omitted from the media coverage of the drone strikes. Since 2015, Saudi-led air strikes
on towns and cities in Houthi-held areas have killed tens of thousands of civilians, while
leaving 80 percent of the population in need of food aid and several million on the brink of
starvation.
Saudi war planes, armed with US and British bombs and provided with targeting information by
US officers based in Saudi Arabia, have carried out repeated attacks on civilian targets,
including schools, hospitals, residential areas, mosques and markets. Up to the end of last
year, the US also provided mid-air refueling for the Saudi-led onslaught.
Saudi Arabia has a huge military budget. Last year it ranked as the world's third highest
spender on military equipment, splurging for an estimated $67.6 billion. The ability of the
Houthi rebels to penetrate Saudi defences and strike crucial oil infrastructure has
heightened fears of further attacks."
(comment)
"Ric Size
The Trump administration & entire US political establishment must line-up behind the
narrative that Iran is responsible for this devastating drone strike. As noted in this
excellent article, Saudi Arabia now spends ~$68 billion annually on its military, and most of
this comes in the form of sophisticated weaponry from the US. But these expensive
instruments-of-death were unable to stop a coordinated drone attack from Yemeni rebels. This
calls into question the usefulness of Saudi Arabia-US alliance, and the sustainability of the
global petrodollar market.
A scapegoat is needed, and quickly. Look for an all-out war drive in the media, against Iran,
as a cover-up to this disaster. Gasoline prices will rise by at least a dollar a gallon
within a month, which is another embarrassment for political leaders during an election
cycle, and an added expense for workers who commute by vehicle."
"... The head of the White House, Donald Trump, declared that American policy towards the Ukraine was senseless of and added that Moscow should be a friend of Washington, and that no one cared about the Ukrainians. The day before, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said that the European Union was experiencing fatigue from the Ukraine. ..."
The head of the White House, Donald Trump, declared that American policy towards the
Ukraine was senseless of and added that Moscow should be a friend of Washington, and that no
one cared about the Ukrainians. The day before, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said that
the European Union was experiencing fatigue from the Ukraine.
US President Donald Trump considers US actions in the Ukraine senseless, which actions
at the same time aggravate relations with Russia, The Washington Post reports, citing a
former senior White House official.
According to the newspaper interlocutor, the president takes the position that
"Russians should be our friends".
"What we do in the Ukraine is pointless and annoying Russia", he said, describing the
president's opinion.
Earlier, former US Vice President Joe Biden called on Trump to publish a transcript of
a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
"... Ukraine have never kept to the ceasefire and have been destroying settlements -- once they get control of the border – Donbass is finished. ..."
"... You mention the killing in Mariupol. The assassinations will continue and the people of Donbass will be made to pay. ..."
"... Five years has shown that real hatred has been unleashed – this is not going to go away. ..."
"... the Steinmeir formula is a con to hasten the end of Donbass. This was the guy who signed the agreement with Yanukovich on early elections etc and then stood back when he was overthrown. ..."
"... I also agree. This is a trap. No treaty should be signed unless DPR/LPR are guaranteed to control the border with Russia. ..."
"... The best defense against that would be the vote, which must take place first and under OSCE supervision, without Ukrainian meddling or coercion. If the vote indicated that a majority wants to return to Kiev's control, then that's what should happen. But I don't see it going that way. ..."
Major issue with this formula is "The transfer of the border"
Ukraine have never kept to the ceasefire and have been destroying settlements -- once they
get control of the border – Donbass is finished.
You mention the killing in Mariupol. The assassinations will continue and the people of Donbass will be made to pay.
Five years has shown that real hatred has been unleashed – this is not going to go
away.
Germany in my view plays a double game – they want this to happen – the Steinmeir formula is a con to hasten the end of Donbass. This was the guy who signed the
agreement with Yanukovich on early elections etc and then stood back when he was
overthrown.
We'll see. According to the Minsk Agreement, the elections and the autonomous status were
supposed to be settled before the border was returned to Ukrainian control. That has always
been an issue for Kuh-yiv. It wants to be trusted to have control over the Donbas before the
other elements are fulfilled. But as His Nibs Shaun Of The Dead Walker has pointed out before
now, 'the border' in that region is largely an illusion, and checkpoints are for those who
have to travel by road. Military units, especially heavy armor, do not.
I think what is most likely to happen is little troublesome uprisings across a broad
front, initiated by Azov Battalion and other Ukie militias and making use of 'loyal'
Ukrainians in Donbas and Lugansk.
This would create a governance problem for the regions, and
be portrayed in the western press as an earnest desire among the inhabitants to return to
Ukraine, 'now that the Russians have gone'.
The best defense against that would be the vote,
which must take place first and under OSCE supervision, without Ukrainian meddling or
coercion. If the vote indicated that a majority wants to return to Kiev's control, then
that's what should happen. But I don't see it going that way.
But what of the Russian army that has supposedly been entrenched in the Donbass these past
few years?
Surely, the Russian Army will not allow this ethnic cleansing to happen, for that surely
is what will happen, albeit "ethnic" is not the right word, even though the brain-dead Nazi
"true Slavs" from the West believe it is.
"Our actions have to become offensive and have the disintegration of the Russian
Federation as a conscious ultimate goal. This is the only effective long-term solution that
the vast majority of countries will benefit from.
attempts to pacify Russia lead only to the growth of its arrogance, as was was the case
with the return of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe.
Attempts to reach an agreement in a civilised way with the Russian Federation are also
doomed to fail, "since such a decision contradicts the main expansionist thinking of the
Kremlin regime".
"The Russian Federation, in its present borders and with its present resources, is never
capable of becoming a normal civilised state", said the diplomat.
Aleksandrovich emphasises that "ways of disintegrating the Russian Federation don't demand
conducting military operations".
The ambassador lists a number of tools via which it is possible to "pacify Russia":
1. personal sanctions against bosses with the freezing of assets and a ban on
entrance;
2. tight restrictions for energy, bank, and financial-military and technical sectors;
3. a ban on the sale of modern technologies;
4 .a collapse in oil prices.
"There comes a time when the last evil empire has to fall," summarized the Ukrainian
diplomat.
In his recent interview, Oleksandr Oleksandrovych claimed Russia 'uses Serbia to
destabilize situation in Western Balkans and thereby destroy Europe'
09:15, 3 November 2017
Ukrainian ambassador's views on Russia-Serbia relations and Russia's role in
continental security, all the more expressed publicly, are unacceptable. Ivica Tonchev, the
State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia said this as quoted by
Frontnews International, commenting on the statement recently made by the Ukrainian
diplomat.
'The main role of ambassadors is to do everything to improve bilateral relations,
primarily political and economic, as well as all other forms of cooperation. The Ambassador
of Ukraine to Serbia, Oleksandr Oleksandrovych, seems to be constantly forgetting this, since
all his activities are reduced to fruitless attempts to break relations between the Republic
of Serbia and the Russian Federation. In the latest series of scandalous interviews he gave,
he said that the Republic of Serbia does not pursue an independent foreign policy, that is,
it is in the hands of Russia, thus destabilizing the entire region of the Western Balkans,
thereby 'destroying Europe,' Tonchev said.
He also called on the Ukrainian government to take action on the Ambassador and his
unacceptable behavior so that Serbia 'was not forced to make the usual steps in such
situations.'
In recent interviews with Serbian media, Ukraine's Ambassador to Serbia Alexander
Alexandrovich said that Russia is using Serbia to destabilize the situation in the region, in
particular, encouraging separatism in Bosnia and trying to influence Macedonia. The
ambassador also mentioned the Serbian mercenaries fighting on the side of the Russian armed
formations in Donbas.
Oleksandr Oleksandrovych: he might be better suited to playing Count Dracula in horror
movies.
In fact, the ambassador stepped so much out of line in November 2017 that even
Rumpleklimkin, then Banderastan Foreign Minister, was forced to call him to hold
consultations in Kiev because of his statements to the Serbian media.
At the same time, Ivica Toncev, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of
Serbia, stated that the Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Oleksandrovych's statements concerning
Russian influence on Serbia were unacceptable and threatened him with possible consequences
in accordance with the Vienna Convention.
Novosad is a graduate of the humanitarian lyceum in Kiev, and in 2011 she ended a
bachelor degree at the National University "Kiyevo-Mogilyansky Academy" as a "political
scientist". Two years later she received a master's degree in the Dutch Maastricht. She
studied in Spain and the Czech Republic, and was a scholar of the Soros fund. In addition, as Novosad wrote on Facebook, she took part in the Ukrainian-Canadian administrative program,
within the framework of which she attended a special course ran by the Canadian
authorities.
I.e., as we see, Anna Novosad is the classical representative of the new "Ukrainian
elite", which was raised and brought up abroad and which already is almost not connected to
Ukraine even at the mental level. And the reset of the Ukrainian authorities in the form of
"Zelensky's victory" was started to a large extent for the mass invasion of such artificially
grown mankurts that are supposed to completely remove people with a Soviet past and any ties
(family, friendly, business) with Russia from the country's governance structures.
And they absolutely do not need either knowledge of Ukrainian, knowledge of national
history, or understanding of what's admissible. Even intellectual qualities aren't especially
required from them, because their task is relaying the will of their masters and to control
their implementation.
And Farion doesn't like her because she can't talk the shitkicker Slav dialect as good as
she can. In fact, it's debatable whether Novosad can talk Yukie with any competence at
all.
Yes, what's the matter with her? Real Ukrainians ride sturdy ponies and wear their hair in
the khokol style. Government superiors are referred to as 'Hetman'. And there's a lot of
kneeling. The age of machines is an utter betrayal of Kievan ideals.
If commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks
called for a new investigation into the events of September 11 then official story is officially dead.
Notable quotes:
"... Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve. ..."
"... For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks. ..."
"... Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway. ..."
"... "We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last," he added. ..."
"... While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day. ..."
"... For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). ..."
"... Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new YouGov poll released on Monday. ..."
"... That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed. ..."
"... Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public "goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have heard about it." ..."
"... The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires. ..."
"... The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American. ..."
Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational
narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to
preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they
deserve.
Today the event that defined the United States' foreign policy in the 21st century, and
heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains
etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought
Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be
brought to justice.
While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different
trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11
attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright
dismissal being levied against the latter.
Yet, with 18 years having come and gone -- and with the tireless efforts from victims'
families, first responders, scientists and engineers -- the tide appears to be turning, as new
evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American
corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could
derail the "official story" of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on
American soil.
For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which
responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day,
called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of
commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of
around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the
attacks.
While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue
effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to "never
forget," the commissioners' call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the
mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote
was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained
the following clause:
Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any
doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries -- not just airplanes and the ensuing
fires -- caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast
majority of the victims who perished that day;"
In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their
claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as "conspiracy theorists" for questioning
the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11
did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it
is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that
lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts
of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.
Rescue workers climb on piles of rubble at the World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 13,
2001. Beth A. Keiser | AP
Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of
concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make
it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner
Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the
meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan
anyway.
"We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You
better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an
unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We
won't be the last," he added.
While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has
been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even
those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the
start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the
events of that day.
For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton,
wrote in their book Without
Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of
investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon
officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners
have outright said
that the "official" report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key
questions about the terror attacks.
Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative
bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that
day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the
"official story" say were deliberately kept from them.
Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in
Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11
investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners'
call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World
Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on
September 11, fewer are aware that a third building -- World Trade Center Building 7 -- also
collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC
7, or "Building 7," was never struck by a plane.
It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA
had a "secret office" in WTC 7 and that, after the building's destruction, "a special CIA team
scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the
station, either on paper or in computers." WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of
Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and the bank
Salomon Brothers.
Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building
fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the
footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject
the official story, based on a new
YouGov poll released on Monday.
That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected
that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent
saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed
with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the
footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed
on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had
collapsed.
Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11
Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public
"goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people
about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story
skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have
heard about it."
The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that "the mainstream
media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the
American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of
them," as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.
Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported,
while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows
that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District's recent call for a new investigation in
line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7's collapse raises more
questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the
official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.
The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the
official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific
evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building
came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the
building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to
determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed
solely due to office fires.
The study, currently available as a draft , concluded that "uncontrolled building fires"
did not lead the building to fall into its footprint -- tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate
of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse -- as has officially been
claimed. Instead, the study -- authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili
Quan -- found that "fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the
conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering
firms that studied the collapse," while also concluding "that the collapse of WTC 7 was a
global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in
the building."
This "near-simultaneous failure of every column" in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives
were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by
Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City
Housing Authority. Jennings
told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel
for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse
and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped
rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008,
two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7's collapse on fires. To
date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.
Still "crazy" after all these years?
Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative
of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling
for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history
frequently results in derision and dismissal.
Yet, this 9/11 anniversary -- with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7,
with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC
7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation -- is it still
"crazy" to be skeptical of the official story?
Firefighters hose down the smoldering remains of 7 World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 18,
2001, in New York. Ryan Remiorz | AP
Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more "off
limits," it was often first responders, survivors and victims' families who had asked the most
questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for
nearly two decades -- not wild-eyed "conspiracy theorists," as many have claimed.
The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own
authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the
American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so
is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American.
However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational
narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent
legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing
victims' families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, "Never Forget" has been
nearly synonymous with "Never Question."
Yet, failing to ask those questions -- even when more Americans than ever now favor a new
investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7's collapse -- is the ultimate
injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been
killed in their names in the years that have followed.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to
several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute
and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and
is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in
Journalism.
Leroy Hulsey et al. of the University of Alaska Fairbanks released their draft report on WTC7
on September 3rd. These are the major findings and conclusions:
" The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC
7 on
9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the
collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global
failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of
all
core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all
exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behavior observed in videos of
the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures that we simulated produced the observed
behavior."
So World Trade Tower 7 was an engineered demolition. This is something that the 9/11
"conspiracy theorists" believed all along. Now a major engineering study confirms it.
...The infuriating thing about 9/11 and the multitude of lesser false flags which both
preceded and followed it is that, although most Americans know it was as phoney as a three
and a half dollar fed reserve note, everyone seems content to put up with the extremely
phoney "war on terror" it was designed to create and which has already destroyed a hand full
of countries in the world, caused the murder of upwards of two million people, mostly using
U.S. military, and turned the U.S. into a ruthlessly insane police state wherein everyone is
made to obey patently unlawful statutes in the name of "emergency" while the ruling elite has
quit obeying any laws at all while gathering a massive military presence to cow the now
restless and resentful public. – See more at:Christopher Bollyn: The Man Who Solved
9/11
@The Alarmist An aerospace engineer. Good for you. Maybe you need a refresher course with
some architects and building engineers. Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth is a good
place to start.
As for steel losing 90% of its strength at half its melting temperature -- that does not
imply that heat not will stack on steel. The whole building was a steel radiator. And the
fires in building 7 were very small so just how do small fires get to half the melting
temperature of steel when the radiator effect is bleeding what little heat these fires have
from a certain spot.
Lets see the steel buildings you claim were demolished by fires, because I have heard many
architects and engineers say the number is zero. We are talking a total collapse of the
buildings not just a partial collapse. Let's see them.
Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government
narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many
This topic illustrates a few things about humans and their societies that many of us do
not realize, or are too afraid to realize. It's bigger than just the cognitive dissonance,
though this is part of it. Admittedly it is uncomfortable for most people to think about such
things Ignorance is bliss, and it is much easier to follow the herd.
But
Humans have been selectively bred and conditioned for obedience to authority for at least
the last 10,000 years. Stanley Milgram made the ramifications of this clear when he showed us
some of the dangers this fact presents for our world. Couple Milgram's findings with those of
Solomon Asch's conformity experiments and it starts becoming clear why a large part, about
30%, of the population will never be able to question the official orthodoxy regarding this
"New Pearl Harbor".
Many people simply do not have the mental ability to question those in a perceived
position of authority. These people are used to following orders. They are trained very well.
These are the people who will electrocute a stranger just because a man in a white coat says
to. These are the people who will throw a grenade into your babies crib while storming your
home in the middle of the night because some junkie informant told them they bought drugs
there in exchange for cash or a lighter sentence. These are the people who will not believe
their lying eyes when it contradicts the words of their masters or if it risks going against
the apparent consensus of a group of strangers.
I call them authoritarian followers. They love punishing members of the outgroup. They
love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They expect others
to follow too.
We all know September 11, 2001, was an inside/outside job. Cui bono? The axis of kindness.
The U.S./Nato, Saudi Arabia and Israel committed the events of September 11, 2001 so they
could escalate their wars in the middle east to redraw the map for Greater Israel while
securing the oil in the middle east and the trillions in minerals in Afghanistan. The
military industrial complex needs endless wars to justify their one trillion plus dollar
annual budget and all the power that comes with it. Some people, like lucky Larry
Silverstein, made billions off the transaction. There is plenty of profiteering and graft
that comes with waging forever war.
The same people who profited from the event are the same people who planned and executed
the event. They are also the people who had the tools to make it happen. Fortunately for the
criminals who committed the crimes of that day a large part of the population will line up to
ridicule anyone who has the audacity to question the official narrative.
So buy police brutality bonds and pay your victory tax. Your work will set you free.
@Adam Smith It's so unbelievably rare to run into a sincere description of the average
fellow. Because one cam't lie to himself about the others less than he does about himself (he
can't know the others more than he can know himself), so usually evident features of people
(thus of mainstream culture, history, journalistic narratives, ) must he denied because
evident features of the self must be denied.
It's co-operation.
And then, aren't they a social species? You have surely observed that a group of them
functions in ways very close to the ant colony, the bee hive, and so on. So many more billion
neurons but what rules the mind is still so close to what rules it in the other social
species.
The thing to consider is that for God knows how many thousands of years in mankind's
history, whenever two differently sized came to a confrontation, belonging in the largest
equated survival, in the smallest death.
Then there is the intragroup confrontations and dangers: here flattering the pack leaders
best equated to better chances of survival + a more comfortable life. On the other hand,
injuring their sense of power had the same outcome that it has for the ordinary bee or ant to
do the same to the colony's or hive's leader.
This has embedded a couple of instincts, which truth and fairness can't be where they are,
at the deepest level of the regular human mind.
Some minds are different, but they don't matter, first of all they don't matter
numerically.
So official accounts of historic events are no more and no less truth-free of the accounts
people make-up of their own lives' essential events.
If you assess the average divorce-asking woman's narrative on her marriage and why she wants
to break it up and the average account of, say, World War 2 in the average school book, the %
of untruth will be circa the same.
What happens at the higher levels follows from the nature of the majority.
They love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They
expect others to follow too.
Following rules as long as nobody above them tells them to make an exception.
They expect not all others, but only those below them in the power pole, to follow rules.
If they see/realize/know someone above them has broken a rule, they are awesomely good at,
wbile they have seen/realized/learned the fact, not having seen/realized/learned it.
This kind of mind can't afford unity and individuality, of course. There are always
inconsistencies, and even contradictory things believed at the same time.
And boy, how do the other authorities/authoritarian followers (depending whom they are
dealingwith) who make up the psych professions praise that kind of person! How do they master
selective blindness/forgetfulness/ignorance.
It's obvious from most reader comments that the educational systems in America (and
elsewhere) have completely decayed. "Cognitive dissonance" is just another cowardly way of
accepting lies as truths Most of you are lying to yourselves and expecting others to buy into
hype and bullshit.
Anyone who's worked with cutting steel plate knows that 5 inch thick steel plating (as
used in most lower columns of the towers) requires a perfect mixture of acetylene and oxygen
just to get the cutting area hot enough to apply the oxygen burst that cuts along the line.
Any cooling of the plate and it's no cigar. There is no way air craft fuel (kerosene) and
normal building materials can get anywhere near the melting point of steel, much less cause
complete structural failure of a perfectly engineered steel beamed structure.
Christopher Bollyn and many other dedicated journalists have connected all the relevant
dots, yet the unwashed continue to hide behind their collage degrees and talk complete
nonsense.
The first and second laws of thermodynamics should be mastered before graduating from
eighth grade People need to quit lying about the efficacy of truth
I am an agnostic on whether the twin towers were brought down by supplemental explosives. My
question is, what is gained by actually bringing the buildings down? If the attacks were to
serve as a pretext for war in the middle east, wouldn't the acts of hijacking the planes and
crashing them have been sufficient without the risks involved in planting explosives and
being being detected?
The only reasons I can offer are financial, such as the insurance payments, voided
contracts, shorting stocks etc. and perhaps destruction of evidence in criminal or civil
cases.
What is interesting is the 9/11 Commission's conclusion regarding the financing of 9/11: "
the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11
attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."
Then why do we have all the financial transaction laws?
"... Jolie King and Mark Firkin had been arrested relatively recently and charged with espionage. They had been apprehended while flying a drone around a military establishment not far from Tehran. ..."
"... They claim to be innocent civilians who had been flying their drone, taking vids with it and publishing them online in every country they drove through on the overland/sea jaunt from Darwin to London. ..."
"... Although the internet & associated cryptography has likely made such laws irrelevant, I cannot believe that a couple of months ago when the Grace II thing was kicking off any brit or australian could think flying drones around Iranian bases wouldn't get them into trouble. ..."
"... Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort Dietrick or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong? ..."
"... Well don't her specialties line up closely with another brit educated woman caught teaching local Iranians how to stir trouble online in Iran, one Zaghari-Ratcliffe convicted of espionage after now england PM, then secretary of foreign affairs B Johnson, slipped up and admitted she had been training Iranians, in Iran. ..."
"... This attempt to propagandize the arrests of spies may even succeed I suppose as most people just don't follow this stuff closely enough and the praised to the max western media is unlikely to disabuse them of their ignorance. ..."
"... The ruins of Angkor Wat Cambodia are a sacred place and you are warned that no drones are permitted, but you still are flying your drone and that all females must be fully covered, but you don't care, you just think you are untouchables, but you will fly your drone once too often in a restricted area and be caught. ..."
in response of how NK treats journalists, Eva Bartlett of Syria fame did a number of reports from NK and she said she had more
freedom than in many western countries. As long as you dont show fake propaganda and show the NK'ians in favorable ie real light,
they have no problems. They were not asked to take particular shots or taken to particular places but left to do everything themselves.
I remember cops pulling me over for taking pics of barns in south dakota.. Many such events.. I remember cops pulling me over
so many times I can write a book on it. Once for having a white bag on the front seat.. For looking too young.. For looking like
a car bugler because I was under the dash fixing speaker wires.. For having driving lights on before they had those on cars as standard..
For changing lanes to avoid police.. Free country my testicles..
I dunno how many have been following the issue of the 'brit-australian' trio who are in custody in Iran, but there are some oddities
about these cases which suggest MI6/
ASIS are moronic and barefaced
enough to try and propagandise the inevitable result of their own hamfisted stupidity.
No one had heard of Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Jolie King and Mark Firkin a week ago, then John Bolton copped the flick and suddenly
australians & englanders are told that Iran has more than British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe slotted up, that two pom/oz
types and a genuine Australian were also being held.
Jolie King and Mark Firkin had been arrested relatively recently and charged with espionage. They had been apprehended
while flying a drone around a military establishment not far from Tehran.
They claim to be innocent civilians who had been flying their drone, taking vids with it and publishing them online in
every country they drove through on the overland/sea jaunt from Darwin to London. Apparently both are University graduates
who claim they didn't see the harm in doing what they were doing . . . yeah right, I guess it is possible to be that stupid but
it is pretty unlikely. I'm old enough to remember that it wasn't that long ago when going into many of the nations between Oz
and Iran with a ghetto blaster that would allow you to record and which had an AM or FM radio receiver would get you into the
slammer quick smart.
Although the internet & associated cryptography has likely made such laws irrelevant, I cannot believe that a couple of
months ago when the Grace II thing was kicking off any brit or australian could think flying drones around Iranian bases wouldn't
get them into trouble.
Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort
Dietrick or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't
that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong?
But that is nothing cos up until today we have been told that nothing is known about another woman who has been in prison for
a year on 'unknown charges'.
According to
today's graun we still don't know the charges, but we do know she is another pom/oz type, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge-educated
academic who we are told:
"The University of Melbourne's website lists Dr Moore-Gilbert on its "Find an expert" page as a lecturer at the university's
Asia Institute.
It says she "specializes in Middle Eastern politics, with a particular focus on the Arab Gulf states," and that she had
published work on the 2011 Arab uprisings, authoritarian governance, and on the role of new media technologies in political
activism."
Well don't her specialties line up closely with another brit educated woman caught teaching local Iranians how to stir
trouble online in Iran, one Zaghari-Ratcliffe convicted of espionage after now england PM, then secretary of foreign affairs B
Johnson, slipped up and admitted she had been training Iranians, in Iran.
This attempt to propagandize the arrests of spies may even succeed I suppose as most people just don't follow this stuff
closely enough and the praised to the max western media is unlikely to disabuse them of their ignorance.
Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort Dietrick
or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't
that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong?
They were well aware that using drones could get them into trouble, they said so themselves talking about Cambodia, so in no doubt
the same applied to Iran. https://www.instagram.com/p/BngpgAIHqpD/
The ruins of Angkor Wat Cambodia are a sacred place and you are warned that no drones are permitted, but you still are
flying your drone and that all females must be fully covered, but you don't care, you just think you are untouchables, but you
will fly your drone once too often in a restricted area and be caught.
"... Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends. I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons. ..."
"... Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water – apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious frauds we all know they are. ..."
"... These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be a "Cakewalk" ..."
"... What they do know for sure is that the military industrial complex will increase its budget during and after such a war. Follow the money! ..."
Who Launched That Mystery Attack? Eric Margolis September 21, 2019 700 Words
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The Mideast has its own variety of crazy humor. The Saudis have been blasting and bombing
wretched Yemen, one of this world's poorest nations, since 2015.
These US-supported attacks and a naval blockade of Yemen imposed by Saudi Arabia and its
sidekick ally, the United Arab Emirates, have caused mass starvation. No one knows how many
Yemenis have died or are currently starving. Estimates run from 250,000 to one million.
The black humor? The Saudis just claimed they were victims of Iranian `aggression' this past
week after the kingdom's leading oil treatment facility at Abqaiq was hit by a flight of armed
drones or cruise missiles. The usual American militarists, now led by State Secretary Mike
Pompeo after the demented warmonger, John Bolton, was finally fired, are calling for military
retaliation against Iran even though the attack was claimed by Yemen's Shia Houthi
movement.
This drama came at roughly the same time that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a
close ally of US president Donald Trump, vowed to annex Palestine's entire Jordan Valley if
elected. Not a peep of protest came from the US, which recently blessed Netanyahu's annexation
of Syria's Golan Heights while scourging Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, for annexing Crimea
– a Russian possession for over 300 years.
I studied US photos of the damaged Saudi oil installations. Its oil tanks appear to be
precisely hit at the same place. After the attack, the Saudis claimed half of their oil
production was knocked out; but a day later, they vowed production would be resumed within a
week. Parts of so-called drones were shown that appeared way beyond the technological
capabilities of Yemen or even Iran. The missiles may have been supplied by Ukraine.
The Saudis, like their patron in Washington, have a poor record for truthfulness. Remember
the Saudi denials about the murder of journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi? More
important, we have been waiting for more false flag attacks in the Gulf designed to justify a
US attack on Iran.
The pattern of so-called drone attacks against the Saudi oil installations is just too neat
and symmetrical. The Israelis have a strong interest in promoting a US-Saudi War. The attacks
in Saudi came ironically right after the anniversary of 9/11 that plunged the US into war
against large parts of the Muslim world.
As a long-time military observer, I find it very hard to believe that drones could be guided
over such long distances and so accurately without aircraft or satellites to guide them. In
Yemen, which is just creeping into the 12th century, changing a flat tire is a major
technological achievement. To date, Iran's missile arsenal has poor reliability and major
guidance problems.
Adding to the questions, the Saudis have spent billions on US-made air defense systems. They
failed to protect the oil installations. The Saudis would have been better off buying air
defenses from the Russians, at a quarter of the US selling price.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that surround
him to launch major attacks on Iran. Blasting Iran would not serve much purpose and would
expose US forces in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, and Syria to Iranian guerrilla
attacks. Saudi oil installations – after what we saw last week – are
vulnerable.
Attacking Iran, even if just from the air, risks a much wider Mideast war just as the Trump
administration – which originally campaigned against 'stupid' Mideast wars – faces
next year's elections. But the administration is under intense pressure from its pro-Israel
base to go after Iran.
Bombing Iran's oil infrastructure would be relatively easy and has been intensively planned
since early 2002. But what next? So-called 'regime change' (Washington's favorite euphemism for
overthrowing disobedient foreign governments) rarely works as planned and can get the US into
horribly messy situations. The CIA overthrew Iran's democratic government in 1953 and look
where we are today.
Perhaps the attacks on Abqaiq may cause the reckless Saudi leaders to stop devastating Yemen
and throttle back on their proxy war against Iran which has gone on since 1979. But don't count
on it.
The so called "Zionist Hawks" in Israel and Washington, who want to start a war between
the USA and Iran.
These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be
a "Cakewalk", and that Iranians have no means to defend themselves, will capitulate –
these are of course delusional assumptions – only found in disturbed minds of a bunch
of Go-Getter Zionist Think-Tanks in Washington, DC who are eager to serve their own tribal
interests at the US expense.
The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, both are still ongoing –
have long proven how delusional are these ridiculous assumptions – Iran will be at
least 10 times harder nut to crack than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein – at least not
without serious consequences to the security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and the
US itself, along with serious ramification to the post WWII international order under the
USA; established since 1945.
By now, president Trump knows too well that he is being poorly served by these so called
"Zionist Hawks" – who have instigated the US unilateral withdrawal from the Iranian
Nuclear Agreement – but thanks to Trump's own instinct, and his close relationship with
Emmanuel Macron; Shinzo Abe; and of course Vladimir Putin – so far, Trump has resisted
the temptation of going to all out war against Iranians.
President Trump should ban these" Go-Getter Zionist Hawks" from the White House; they are
"Disloyal Jews" – who are eager to serve their own tribal interests at the US
expense.
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that
surround him to launch major attacks on Iran.
He doesn't want to get involved in another Iraq (or worse) which makes excellent sense for
the US and himself on many levels.
However, if the US Deep State (with the Israelis) could set up 9/11 without President Bush
in the loop, then they could also arrange a False Flag attack on these oil installations,
without Trump's knowledge.
The CIA looks very much like an independent international criminal enterprise, and they're
used to working with their Israeli and Saudi friends.
This is a seriously flawed analysis of Yemen's and Iran's actual capabilities. We've already
seen Iran's precision strike capability in Iran and Syria and we've seen Yemen's homemade
drones and missiles do similar to this at slightly lesser differences. The parts shown by SA
are matches to Yemeni made missiles and drones such as Iran has been sharing around with
their allies. The reason they avoided the US defences was that they came from a direction
these do not cover, being pointed as they are at Iran. I'd say this was a Houthis attack and
as they say, more will be coming if the aggression from SA against Yemen does not stop. One
thing this attack has done is cool the heels of US, Saudi and Zionist warmongers. The damage
done here by relatively small attack and cheap means gives some inkling of what things might
look like after an attack on Iran. This was doubtless supported by Iran and as such a
masterstroke. We enter a new paradigm.
Saudi Arabian oil pipelines have always been vulnerable to attack. They are not well guarded
at all. This is well known by Security Experts worldwide but not well known, it would seem,
by hack 'journalists'.
Saudi Arabia is attacking Yemen as part of a long term plan to reroute it's oil pipelines
to the other side of it's country, the Red Sea side, so that it is no longer vulnerable at
the Strait of Hormuz 'choke point'. In order to get rid of the Iranian threat to it's oil as
it leaves port in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi's must sustain huge costs and PR losses to
"stabilize" Yemen by a brutal war and then transit it's oil via the Red Sea. This is also
well known by Security Experts but not 'hack journalist'.
Trump rejected neocon demands for a war with Iran as he saw his chances for re-election
vanish in the smoke of an US-Iran war. If Trump is reelected Americans will have to worry
every day about a US-Iran war.
I love this comment by Margolis, that the KSA & US have a "poor record for truthfulness"
Priceless. Apparently Genghis Khan had a poor record for brushing his feet on the mat
before entering a town for a bit of light shopping.
Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil
installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated
away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is
common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends.
I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis
have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability
to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons.
Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other
reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd
suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water
– apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the
Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious
frauds we all know they are.
"... Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example, in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'." ..."
It's become standard procedure for the US and its MSM to consider that Iran is totally
responsible for all anti-US events in the Middle East because of actions by Iran's "proxy
forces" in other countries. While these events usually have more diverse objectives, it's
often Iran did this and Iran did that. But there's no legal basis for that.
Here's some words on proxy relationships from DefenseOne: (excerpts)
Iran's proxy relationships have given it an extraordinary ability to impose costs on its
adversaries while obscuring its role. Doing so allows it to manage its risks while
politically constraining its adversaries' response. It might seem intuitive to simply
declare Iran responsible, and satisfying to retaliate against it directly. But
international law sets a high bar for holding a proxy's benefactor responsible for the
actions of its proxy, making it difficult to build the kind of international consensus
necessary to the legitimacy for any retaliation.
Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy
only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient
simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example,
in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for
Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United
States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even
to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to
leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry
out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'."
Setting the bar so high establishes perverse incentives. A state that employs proxies is
discouraged from moderating their behavior, since any attempt at moderation could imply
effective control, and even from acknowledging the proxy relationships. So without proof
that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which typically manages Iran's proxy
relationships, ordered or participated in the attacks, there is little for which Saudi
Arabia or the United States can hold Iran legally accountable.. .
here
In 2001, drones were just a distant dream. It also involves a chain of once in a lifetime
of human errors by at least three governmental institutions (CIA, FBI and Pentagon).
What the Houthi did in 2019 is not that far fetched. Drones are a much more developed and
cheap technology, and Saudi Arabia is a basket case of a country. Surprise is how much soft
power they did enjoy in the West, since many commenters here still insist Saudi Arabia is
some kind of fascist utopia that couldn't be tricked by a bunch of stone age cave dwellers
(which the Houthi aren't any way). Looks like the USA's aura of invincibility is
contagious.
Jackrabbit #16. Perhaps increased tensions are enough to get Nuttyahoo elected (which I think
fits with the supposition that this attack is false flag). However My guess is that the
Houthis will prosecute this war to the very doorsteps of the holy mosques in KSA and exact
immense retribution if they can. They are responding to 5 years of geocidal assault and
cannot but fight to the death.
Trump and his immaculate surrounds of holy zionists and pentecostal towel boys are in
thrall. Mesmerised by their inspired service to the holy writ. No doubt they consult daily
with their personal rabbi who talks through his fedora as O would have it. But they are
beholden to something evil and beneath the dignity of humankind.
Perhaps war will be avoided by dithering and too elaborate plotting but I still consider
that justice might manifest in a meteor strike on their heads.
"... Yet in spite of all this American sacrifice, the Taliban controls more territory than at any time since 2001. ..."
"... After all, President Trump hasn't even signed off on Khalilzad's draft deal, and even if he does, he could always change his mind. The ability of the Blob to swallow presidents is not to be underestimated -- and Trump is a case in point. For decades, reaching back to his career as a businessman, Trump had been a skeptic of foreign military engagements, and he explicitly campaigned against "endless wars" in 2016. ..."
"... Yet since then, the Blob has been extending pseudopods of keep-the-status-quo cajolery deep within his administration. Trump has thus been persuaded to keep the U.S. engaged, or, if one prefers, quagmired ..."
"... The Taliban are not an invading military force. The struggle as it is has been one of internal forces and players sharing the land and never having been but various communities that fought, lived and negotiated agreements all nearly all of the countries history, unlike Vietnam which has almost entire history had a North/South division. ..."
"... Quit calling the Kabul regime a "client". It's a puppet. The minute US forces leave Afghanistan, the puppet government in Kabul will fall. Don't be surprised if it collapses before the last US transport has its landing gear all the way up. Notwithstanding 2., yes, it's over. Time to pack up and move on. However, Trump can't do that. ..."
"... If Trump had really wanted to leave Afghanistan, the time to do it was when he first entered office. Blame his predecessors and wash his hands of the situation while the political price was at its lowest. But Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He listened to the generals, and the price of leaving has only risen and will only keep rising. ..."
"... They aren't much good for anything but staging, but Trump wants those Afghan outposts for the war on Iran that his Saudi owners and Israeli masters so crave. ..."
"... All the Democrats should be on the bandwagon for withdrawal yesterday because Trump's October Surprise could be announcing peace in our time and getting the hell out. It is a promise he can actually keep. It is not like he is getting his wall. ..."
"... Trump has become, himself, part of "the Blob." By hiring Pompeo and Bolton to head his foreign policy team he has abandoned any pretense of being an anti-war pro-restraint president. He's gone full neo-con and it's long past time conservatives stop pretending he hasn't. ..."
Needless to say, the news from Afghanistan is always murky, and the U.S. is far from gone.
Still, the BBC headline from September 3 tells us a lot:
"Afghanistan war: US-Taliban deal would see 5,400 troops withdraw." U.S. negotiator Zalmay
Khalilzad has hammered out an agreement, "in principle," with the Taliban.
He has now shared some of the details with the Afghan government -- which, revealingly,
hasn't been involved in the negotiations -- and with the world as well. In other words, the
U.S. has been bypassing its Kabul client regime in pursuit of a deal with the Taliban.
Obviously, the fact that our Afghan ally has been left out of the negotiations is not a good
sign for its relevance -- or its viability.
To be sure, even if those 5,400 American troops leave, another 8,600 would remain, plus an
unknown number of contractors and operatives. Yet it's obvious that if the U.S. couldn't pacify
Afghanistan with
100,000 troops at the beginning of this decade, it's not going to do much with a tiny
fraction thereof. In fact, our current dealings with the Taliban recall our dealings with North
Vietnam in the early '70s.
Back then, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger were
looking to negotiate with North Vietnam to find a way out. Their hope was for "peace with
honor." Yet the appearance of "peace with honor" is not necessarily the same thing as
the reality . Behind the scenes, it was grubbier. Nixon and Kissinger understood that
the South Vietnamese government was deathly afraid of a U.S. deal with North Vietnam because
Saigon understood that any such agreement would leave it in the lurch, unable to defend itself.
North Vietnam, after all, was supported by both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of
China. And so Nixon and Kissinger simply pushed South Vietnam out of the loop. Indeed, South
Vietnamese fears would have been fully confirmed had they heard Kissinger speaking to Nixon
inside the White House in October 1972, as recorded by the notorious secret taping system.
As Kissinger put it, the U.S. should be hoping for a
"decent interval" between the American departure and the inevitable fall of the Saigon
government. And that's what happened: the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973,
and barely more than two years later, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. Understandably, millions
of South Vietnamese sought to flee the communists, and that, again, is how D.C. -- and the U.S.
as a whole -- gained so many new restaurants. All that history is familiar to the policymakers
and pundits of today. And so inside the Beltway, the debate over the future of Afghanistan --
more precisely, U.S. involvement in the conflict -- is far from over.
As TAC contributor
Doug Bandow noted on August 29, the foreign policy establishment, a.k.a. "the
Blob," is perpetually in favor of staying in Afghanistan, because, well, establishments are
always perpetually in favor of doing everything that they're doing, perpetually. After all, who
wants to admit a mistake? Especially when establishmentarians can snugly oversee the war from
their armchairs in a Massachusetts Avenue think-tank? In the meantime, American losses continue
to mount. On August 29, another G.I. was killed in Afghanistan; that would be Army Sergeant
First Class
Dustin B. Ard of Idaho Falls, Idaho. He leaves behind his pregnant wife Mary and daughter
Reagan. Ard's death was the 15th this year, bringing the total of American military deaths in
Afghanistan to nearly 2,400
.
Yet in spite of all this American sacrifice, the Taliban controls more territory than at
any time since 2001. Indeed, the Taliban has proven its ability to strike anywhere,
including inside Kabul; just on September 3, suicide bombers struck an international compound,
killing at least 19. Tellingly, local Afghans now want the international residents out of their
neighborhood, because they know the presence of foreigners is a magnet for Taliban killers --
whom nobody seems able to stop.
We can pause to observe that such popular fatalism dooms a regime. It makes people --
especially those with links to the West -- likely to flee. To be sure, there's no telling
exactly when the Kabul government will crumble, as well as how, exactly, it will crumble.
After all, President Trump hasn't even signed off on Khalilzad's draft deal, and even if
he does, he could always change his mind. The ability of the Blob to swallow presidents is not
to be underestimated -- and Trump is a case in point. For decades, reaching back to his career
as a businessman, Trump had been a skeptic of foreign military engagements, and he explicitly
campaigned against "endless wars" in 2016.
Yet since then, the Blob has been extending pseudopods of keep-the-status-quo cajolery
deep within his administration. Trump has thus been persuaded to keep the U.S. engaged, or, if
one prefers, quagmired .
Remarkably, in August 2017, Trump even delivered a primetime speech on Afghanistan in which
he pledged
"victory." Even if Trump doesn't talk up victory anymore, nobody can say what exactly he
will do. Does he want to get credit for extricating the U.S., finally, from an unpopular
war?
Or does he not want to see a foreign capital fall on his watch? Whatever the case, it seems
evident that the remaining sand is running out of the Afghan hourglass.
In the two years since that go-get-'em speech, Trump has expended zero rhetorical effort in
support of the Afghan mission; instead he and his administration have shifted their focus to
China. (And yes, there's also that fascination with Iran, although there again, because Trump
is Trump, it's hard to know what will come of it. It could be anything from an armed conflict
to a Kim Jong-un-ish summit.) In the meantime, the Democrats, too, have moved on. It wasn't
that long ago that Barack Obama was referring to Afghanistan as the "good war," while surging
American troops; Obama, too, was pseudopod-ed by the Blob. And while the 44th president soon
enough realized that the new doctrine of counter-insurgency wasn't working any better than the
old doctrine of counter-terrorism, he chose not to get cross-wise with the Blob -- and so
American troops stayed. Yet today, nobody in the 2020 Democratic presidential field -- not even
Obama alum Joe Biden -- has any enthusiasm for the Afghan mission. So whether it's a re-elected
Trump or a newly elected Democrat in the White House in 2021, the U.S. is going to be looking
for that fig-leafy "decent interval." It could come in the form of a bilateral agreement, or
perhaps an international conference, complete with the promise of U.N. peacekeepers (although
unless they're Pakistani or Chinese "peacekeepers," any foreign force will likely wilt in the
face of the Taliban, which is nothing if not good at killing). Yes, it's intriguing to note
that Afghanistan has trillions of dollars' worth of natural
resources waiting to be mined. And so if a stable regime could ever be established in that
war-crossed land, great wealth could spring forth. But that's a manifest
destiny for someone else, not Uncle Sam. What we're going to get stateside when this
misadventure finally comes to an end is a lot of new refugees -- and a lot of new
restaurants.
James P. Pinkerton is an author and contributing editor at . He served as a White
House policy aide to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
IMHO, we should have left Afghanistan years ago. I'll settle for yesterday. To hell with the
Rare Earth and our warmongers running/ruining foreign affairs!
Too late. The "decent interval" ended well over fifteen years ago.
I'm actually surprised that Trump isn't getting us out of there. He's told a lot of lies
and broken a lot of promises, but that's one that would have been easy to keep, and he didn't
do it. No spine.
This all depends on one simple factor. The integrity of the Taliban verses the integrity of
the communists in North Vietnam.
And trying to hedge a "we lost in Vietnam" slip and slide assail has no more veracity
here than it had in 1975.
The Taliban are not an invading military force. The struggle as it is has been one of
internal forces and players sharing the land and never having been but various communities
that fought, lived and negotiated agreements all nearly all of the countries history, unlike
Vietnam which has almost entire history had a North/South division.
We are going to have foreign restaurants regardless, but interventions just invite more of
them.
Quit calling the Kabul regime a "client". It's a puppet. The minute US forces leave
Afghanistan, the puppet government in Kabul will fall. Don't be surprised if it collapses
before the last US transport has its landing gear all the way up. Notwithstanding 2., yes,
it's over. Time to pack up and move on. However, Trump can't do that.
a. If Trump were to order a withdrawal from Afghanistan, his political opponents would
pounce. Expect lots of cries of "Putin puppet", angry denunciations of "Who lost
Afghanistan?" and heart-rending images depicting the fates of suffering girls. Not to mention
the grisly fates those persons so foolish as to cooperate with the United States.
Let us not kid ourselves - some of these images will in fact be genuine.
Also, Sunni Islamicists will be emboldened. It took some 18 years, but in the end, they
sent the Americans home packing.
No matter how you spin it, they won and we lost. Yes, the much hyped and much bloated
United States military was unable to defeat some medieval farmers in flip flops, who cannot
boast so much as a Piper Cub to their name, much less a drone or a cluster bomb.
If Trump had really wanted to leave Afghanistan, the time to do it was when he first
entered office. Blame his predecessors and wash his hands of the situation while the
political price was at its lowest. But Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He
listened to the generals, and the price of leaving has only risen and will only keep
rising.
b. They aren't much good for anything but staging, but Trump wants those Afghan outposts
for the war on Iran that his Saudi owners and Israeli masters so crave.
Of course, eighteen odd years and countless dollars, only to be defeated by peasants
without a single fighter jet or drone is not exactly great PR for the folks trying to
convince us that they really can win this time, why, Iran will be a walk in the park!
Trump is an imbecile, of course, but he is doing about the only thing he can do in
Afghanistan, which is, to try and maintain a semblance of control over major population
centers and pretend we're not losing.
All the Democrats should be on the bandwagon for withdrawal yesterday because Trump's October
Surprise could be announcing peace in our time and getting the hell out. It is a promise he
can actually keep. It is not like he is getting his wall.
'Does he want to get credit for extricating the U.S., finally, from an unpopular war? Or does
he not want to see a foreign capital fall on his watch?'
Any politician with sense knows that the American public could not care less about the
fall of Kabul (what's a kabul?). That's the American people. Campaign contributions from the
MIC is a different matter.
Trump has become, himself, part of "the Blob." By hiring Pompeo and Bolton to head his
foreign policy team he has abandoned any pretense of being an anti-war pro-restraint
president. He's gone full neo-con and it's long past time conservatives stop pretending he
hasn't.
Who gets to decide how many "refugees" the US will get from Afghanistan? Some of us would
gladly forgo all these wonderful new restaurants to protect our communities from yet another
"refugee" surge.
If this not of the Biden run, I do not know what can be. He now has an albatross abound his neck in the form of interference
in Ukrainian criminal investigation to save his corrupt to the core narcoaddict son. Only the raw power of neoliberal MSM
to suppress any information that does not fit their agenda is keeping him in the race.
But a more important fact that he was criminally involved in EuroMaydan (at the cost to the USA taxpayers around five billions) is swiped under the carpet. And will never be discussed
along with criminality of Obama and Nuland.
As somebody put it "with considerable forethought [neoliberal MSM] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will
faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate and faithfully work for their employers for as low a
wage as possible."
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States after a whistleblower
lodged an 'urgent' complaint about something Trump promised another world leader - the details of which the White House has refused
to share.
Here's the scandal; It appears that Trump, may have made promises to newly minted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - very
likely involving an effort to convince Ukraine to reopen its investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, after Biden strongarmed
Ukraine's prior government into firing its top prosecutor - something Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have pursued for months
. There are also unsupported rumors that Trump threatened to withhold $250 million in aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists.
And while the MSM and Congressional Democrats are starting to focus on the sitting US president having a political opponent investigated,
The New
York Times admits that nothing Trump did would have been illegal , as "while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities
with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community
to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit."
Moreover, here's why Trump and Giuliani are going to dig their heels in; last year Biden openly bragged about threatening to hurl
Ukraine into bankruptcy as Vice President if they didn't fire their top prosecutor , Viktor Shokin - who was leading a wide-ranging
corruption investigation into a natural gas firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling,
Biden described
how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin. -
The Hill
"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them
and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the
conversation with Poroshenko.
" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired . And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on
Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
In short, there's both smoke and fire here - and what's left of Biden's 2020 bid for president may be the largest casualty of
the entire whistleblower scandal.
And by the transitive properties of the Obama administration 'vetting' Trump by sending spies into his campaign, Trump can simply
say he was protecting America from someone who may have used his position of power to directly benefit his own family at the expense
of justice.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are acting as if they've found the holy grail of taking Trump down. On Thursday, the House
Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interviewed inspector general Michael Atkinson, with whom the whistleblower
lodged their complaint - however despite three hours of testimony, he repeatedly declined to discuss the content of the complaint
.
Following the session, Schiff gave an angry speech - demanding that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire share
the complaint , and calling the decision to withhold it "unprecedented."
"We cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming
to Congress," said Schiff, adding "We're determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is to make sure
that the national security is protected."
According to Schiff, someone "is trying to manipulate the system to keep information about an urgent matter from the Congress
There certainly are a lot of indications that it was someone at a higher pay grade than the director of national intelligence," according
to the
Washington Post .
On thursday, Trump denied doing anything improper - tweeting " Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand
that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. "
"Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on
such a potentially 'heavily populated' call. "
Giuliani, meanwhile, went on CNN with Chris Cuomo Thursday to defend his discussions with Ukraine about investigating alleged election
interference in the 2016 election to the benefit of Hillary Clinton conducted by Ukraine's previous government. According to Giuliani,
Biden's dealings in Ukraine were 'tangential' to the 2016 election interference question - in which a Ukrainian court ruled that
government officials meddled
for Hillary in 2016 by releasing details of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's 'Black Book' to Clinton campaign staffer Alexandra
Chalupa.
And so - what the MSM doesn't appear to understand is that President Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden over something
with legitimate underpinnings.
Which - of course, may lead to the Bidens'
adventures in China , which Giuliani referred to in his CNN interview. And just like his
Ukraine scandal
, it involves actions which may have helped his son Hunter - who was making hand over fist in both countries.
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5
billion
Meanwhile, speculation is rampant over what this hornet's nest means for all involved...
The latest intell hit on Trump tells me that the deep-state swamp rats are in a panic over the Ukrainian/Obama admin collusion
about to be outed in the IG report. They're also freaked out over Biden's shady Ukrainian deals with his kid.
Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which
expanded to $1.5 billion
Lets clarify this a bit. The 1 billion came from the RED CHINESE ARMY, lets call spade a spade here. And why? To buy into (invest
in ) DARPA related contractors. The RED CHINESE NAVY was so impressed with little sonny's performance (meaning daddy's help),
that they handed over an additions 500,000.
Without daddy's influence as VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and that FREE PLANE RIDE on Air Force TWO with daddy holding
sonny's little hand, little sonny never would have gotten past the ticket booth.
"House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma."
LOL looking into someone looking into a crime that may have been committed by a Democrat... they're some big brained individuals
these dummycrats.
Putting him in the hot seat would be to ask why he sponsored a coup and backed a neo Nazi party. When he starts to lie, put
up images of the party he back wearing inverted Das Reich arm bands and flying flags. Now that would be real journalism.
The Bidens show precisely that power corrupts. They both need to be investigated and then jailed. To the countries of the world
that depend on the USA for any kind of help, they had to deal with Joe 'what's in-it-for-me' Biden? What a disgrace for America.
I think every sitting President, Vice President, senator, and representative needs a yearly lie-detector test that asks but
one question: "did you do anything in your official duties that personally benefited you or your family?"
Didn't you ever wonder how so many senators and representatives end up multi-millionaires after a couple terms in office?
Why the fuuk do we have have to put up with this jackass. All the talk on cable, etc, is all ********. Trump is a fuuking crook,
and Barr is his bag man,. He has surrounded hinmself with toadies, cowards , incompetents and a trash family. Rise up, call your
representatives, March on DC get this crook out of office.
Call anyone you can think of, challenge them to overcome their cowardice, including members of congress, cabinet, your governor
Same could be said for the Democrats and all their Russian collusion lies and Beto wants to FORCE people to sell their weapons
to the government, right.......
" ...The complaint <against the president> involved communications with a foreign leader and a "promise" that Trump made, which
was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official <who monitored Trumps call> who had worked at the White House went to the inspector
general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said. ..."
What this tells:
1. If president Trump is monitored this way our spooks know the number of hairs in our crotches...
2. If we convicted on promises most in congress would be hung by the neck til dead for treason for not following the constitution...
Anybody that thinks that Trump, having had Roy Cohn as his mentor, and working in cut-throat NY real estate for years, AND
having dealt with political snakes for many years..would allow himself to be taped saying something on a call that he KNOWS the
Intel Community is listening in, is not paying attention.
This will backfire on the Dems and the media. Trump set them all up again..
My guess is the Dems will be hounding the IC for the complaint, will call Barr and the DNI in an investigation ran live on
CNN and MSNBC..that will show how corrupt Biden was. Everytime you hear Alexandra Chalupa's name come up, look for the MSM to
go ballistic..she is the tell in this one also. It cannot be allowed for the plebes to find out how Manafort was setup, Ukraine
assisted the DNC in the fake Russian election interference farce..hey, guess what, guess who is an ardent Ukraininan nationalist?
The head of Crowdstrike. Chalupa and Alparovich, the names that will bring down more dirty Dems than anyone in history.
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States
Trump is a traitor, but he does not work for either Ukraine nor Russia but instead he works for Israel first and foremost!
He even admits it himself. Lol he doesn't even give a shite when Israel taps his phone :)
House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma.
This bunch of filthy swine should be looking up each others asses for answers. Actually the Ukrainians have been screaming
for over a year at the DOJ and FBI to take the evidence they have. But the rotten to the core Democrat socialist lefties wanted
to block it.
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Stephen Wertheim explains
what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:
American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do
what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political
leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership."
A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire
itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.
U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at
the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to
use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military
force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.
Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and
intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts.
Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure,
but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:
Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate
deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the
idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous
goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse
for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we
have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become
an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived
as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."
Wertheim adds:
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned"
-- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in
itself.
Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also
become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the
U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck
won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.
Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership,
resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.
Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is
considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.
It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted
dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we
were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan.
We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and
starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.
Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've
never happened if we took that policy.
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only
from reward and punishment.
So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early
days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would
have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several
decades longer.
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?
How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for
Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances
and interests be damned!"
I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that
the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without
destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.
This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic
realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have
a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our
debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.
We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending
and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only
take counterfactuals so far.
I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/
hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.
The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled
congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.
It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The
money and power is too corrupting.
Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion)
that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be
curtailed or even better, changed.
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that
since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing
left to dominate or own.
Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists"
on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for
70 years.
China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive
purchase of their output.
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own
hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes.
Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India
nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant
US presence.
None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with
our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.
It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have
no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological
lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing,
our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic
voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs
and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking.
Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits.
War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big
wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled
profitably to be encouraged.
"... The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government -- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area. President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in April with Haftar and appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's stance. ..."
"... One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her new book, The Education of an Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed, flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison correctly excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?" ..."
"... Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling! ..."
"... I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians. ..."
The United States cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials can't seem to
decide which faction they want to back.
The Western-created disaster in Libya continues to grow worse. Fighting between Field
Marshal Khalifa Haftar's so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the even more misnamed
Government of National Accord (GNA) has intensified in and around Tripoli. The LNA boasted on
September 11 that its forces had routed troops of the Sarraj militia, a GNA ally, killing
about two hundred of them. That total may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the
situation has become increasingly violent and
chaotic in Tripoli and other portions of Libya, with innocent civilians bearing the brunt
of the suffering.
An article in Bloomberg News provides a
succinct account of the poisonous fruits of the U.S.-led "humanitarian" military
intervention in 2011. "Libya is enduring its worst violence since the 2011 NATO-backed ouster
of Muammar el-Qaddafi, which ushered in years of instability that allowed Islamist radicals to
thrive and turned the country into a hub for migrants destined to Europe. Haftar had launched
the war as the United Nations was laying the ground for a political conference to unite the
country. It is now more divided than ever." The country has become the plaything not only of
rival domestic factions but major
Middle East powers , including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab
Emirates. Those regimes are waging a ruthless geopolitical competition, providing arms and in
some cases even launching airstrikes on behalf of their preferred clients.
The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly
can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to
support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government
-- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area.
President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in
April with Haftar and
appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and
bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's
stance.
Given the appalling aftermath of the original U.S.-led intervention, one might hope that
advocates of an activist policy would be chastened and back away from further meddling in that
unfortunate country. Yet, that is not the case. Neither the Trump administration nor the
humanitarian crusaders in Barack Obama's administration who caused the calamity in the first
place seem inclined to advocate a more cautious, restrained U.S. policy.
One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential
national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
her new book, The Education of an
Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed,
flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect
to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the
culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison
correctly
excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the
effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan
culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never
have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they
couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the
policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?"
The answer to Larison's rhetorical question is "extraordinarily arrogant." It is not as
though prudent foreign-policy experts didn't warn Power and her colleagues about the probable
consequences of intervening in a volatile, fragile country like Libya. Indeed, as Robert Gates,
Obama's secretary of defense, confirms in his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War , the Obama
administration itself was deeply divided about the advisability of intervention. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gates were opposed. Among the most outspoken
proponents of action were Power and her mentor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates notes
further that Obama was deeply torn, later telling his secretary of defense that the decision
was a "51 to 49" call.
The existence of a sharp internal division is sufficient evidence by itself that Power's
attempt to absolve herself and other humanitarian crusaders of responsibility for the
subsequent tragedy is without merit. Indeed, it has even less credibility than Pontius Pilate's
infamous effort to evade guilt. They were warned of the probable outcome, yet they chose to
disregard those warnings.
Power, Clinton, Obama and other proponents of ousting Qaddafi turned Libya into a chaotic
Somalia on the Mediterranean, and the blood of innocents shed since 2011 is on their hands.
Given the stark split within the president's national security team, the Libya intervention was
especially reckless and unjustified. The default option in such a case should have been against
intervention, not plunging ahead.
The Trump administration should learn from the blunders of its predecessor and resist any
temptation to meddle further. America does not have a dog in the ongoing fight between Haftar
and the GNA, and we should simply accept whatever outcome emerges. Washington's arrogant
interference has caused enough suffering in Libya already.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of thirteen books and more than
eight hundred articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur .
The outcome in Libya is what the intent was - chaos, per the Yinon plan. The side effect
of mass immigration to Europe was warned by Gaddafi! All was known, yet the destabilization
war continued.
Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis
who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their
stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling!
Libya was and still is the case of a civil war into which foreign powers have intervened.
The major parties of that war have always been the Tripolitanian West and the Cyrenaican
East. Whoever is on top considers the others to be the rebels. That is how the demise of
Qaddafi began. For him Benghazi was the rebel's nest which needed some cleaning. Nothing has
changed. Haftar is the new Qaddafi.
I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan
intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of
governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians.
You can always make things worse. It is one thing that Trump and friends are good at.
They don't consider that a criticism either, since they want what the rest of us consider
worse -- more war, more enemies, more inequality in outcomes at home, more desperation at
home giving more power to the haves over the have-nots.
Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is a timeless classic that still applies to articles
produced for electronic consumption. One of Adler's primary admonitions was to consider the
author's expertise, credibility, and potential biases. With regard to this article, scrolling
down to the end reveals the author's association with the Koch Brother financed Cato
Institute. The Koch Brothers and their money have done more to destroy American democracy
than any foreign tyrant or Presidential folly.
And oh, by the way, what did the Neocons and the Vulcans of the W Administration do to the
entire Middle East other than create a contiguous geographic belt of Iranian Shiite influence
from Tehran to Beirut?
"... The aim of the panel, called the Joint Authorities Technical Review, was to expedite getting the 737 Max into the air by creating a vehicle for achieve consensus among foreign regulators who had grounded the 737 Max before the FAA had. But these very regulators had also made clear they needed to be satisfied before they'd let it fly in their airspace. ..."
"... The FAA hopes to give the 737 Max the green light in November, while the other regulators all have said they have issues that are unlikely to be resolved by then. The agency is now in the awkward position of having a body it set up to be authoritative turn on the agency's own procedures. ..."
"... the FAA had moved further and further down the path of relying on aircraft manufactures for critical elements of certification. Not all of this was the result of capture; with the evolution of technology, even the sharpest and best intended engineer in government employ would become stale on the state of the art in a few years. ..."
"... Although all stories paint a broadly similar picture, .the most damning is a detailed piece at the Seattle Times, Engineers say Boeing pushed to limit safety testing in race to certify planes, including 737 MAX ..The article gives an incriminating account of how Boeing got the FAA to delegate more and more certification authority to the airline, and then pressured and abused employees who refused to back down on safety issues . ..."
"... In 2004, the FAA changed its system for front-line supervision of airline certification from having the FAA select airline certification employees who reported directly to the FAA to having airline employees responsible for FAA certification report to airline management and have their reports filtered through them (the FAA attempted to maintain that the certification employees could provide their recommendations directly to the agency, but the Seattle Times obtained policy manuals that stated otherwise). ..."
"... On Monday, the Post and Courier reported about the South Carolina plant that produced 787s found with tools rattling inside that Boeing SC lets mechanics inspect their own work, leading to repeated mistakes, workers say. These mechanic certifications would never have been kosher if the FAA were vigilant. Similarly, Reuters described how Boeing weakened another safety check, that of pilot input. ..."
"... As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of these people, is that essential design changes didn't receive adequate FAA attention. ..."
"... But the report could influence changes to traditional engineering principles determining the safety of new aircraft models. Certification of software controlling increasingly interconnected and automated onboard systems "is a whole new ballgame requiring new approaches," according to a senior industry safety expert who has discussed the report with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. ..."
"... For instance, the Journal reports that Canadian authorities expect to require additional simulator training for 737 Max pilots. Recall that Boeing's biggest 737 Max customer, Southwest Airlines, was so resistant to the cost of additional simulator training that it put a penalty clause into its contract if wound up being necessary. ..."
"... Patrick Ky, head of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, told the European Parliament earlier this month, "It's very likely that international authorities will want a second opinion" on any FAA decision to lift the grounding. ..."
"... Most prominently, EASA has proposed to eventually add to the MAX a third fully functional angle-of-attack sensor -- which effectively measures how far the plane's nose is pointed up or down -- underscoring the controversy expected to swirl around the plane for the foreseeable future. ..."
"... It's hard to see how Boeing hasn't gotten itself in the position of being at a major competitive disadvantage by virtue of having compromised the FAA so severely as to have undercut safety. ..."
"... has Boeing developed a plan to correct the trim wheel issue on the 787max? i haven't seen a single statement from them on how they plan to fix this problem. is it possible they think they can get the faa to re-certify without addressing it? ..."
"... Don't forget that the smaller trim wheels are in the NG as well. any change to fix the wheels ripples across more planes than just the Max ..."
"... The self-inflicted wound caused by systematic greed and arrogance – corruption, in other words. Boeing is reaping the wages of taking 100% of their profits to support the stock price through stock buybacks and deliberately under-investing in their business. Their brains have been taken over by a parasitic financial system that profits by wrecking healthy businesses. ..."
"... Shareholder Value is indeed the worst idea in the world. That Boeing's biggest stockholder, Vanguard, is unable to cleanup Boeing's operations makes perfect sense. I mean vanguards expertise is making money, not building anything. Those skills are completely different. ..."
"... One maxim we see illustrated here and elsewhere is this: Trust takes years to earn, but can be lost overnight. ..."
The FAA evidently lacked
perspective on how much trouble it was in after the two international headline-grabbing crashes
of the Boeing 737 Max. It established a "multiagency panel" meaning one that included
representatives from foreign aviation regulators, last April. A new Wall Street Journal article
reports that the findings of this panel, to be released in a few weeks, are expected to
lambaste the FAA 737 Max approval process and urge a major redo of how automated aircraft
systems get certified .
The aim of the panel, called the Joint Authorities Technical Review, was to expedite getting
the 737 Max into the air by creating a vehicle for achieve consensus among foreign regulators
who had grounded the 737 Max before the FAA had. But these very regulators had also made clear
they needed to be satisfied before they'd let it fly in their airspace.
The JATR gave them a venue for reaching a consensus, but it wasn't the consensus the FAA
sought. The foreign regulators, despite being given a forum in which to hash things out with
the FAA, are not following the FAA's timetable. The FAA hopes to give the 737 Max the green
light in November, while the other regulators all have said they have issues that are unlikely
to be resolved by then. The agency is now in the awkward position of having a body it set up to
be authoritative turn on the agency's own procedures.
The Seattle Times, which has broken many important on the Boeing debacle, reported on how
the FAA had moved further and further down the path of relying on aircraft manufactures for
critical elements of certification. Not all of this was the result of capture; with the
evolution of technology, even the sharpest and best intended engineer in government employ
would become stale on the state of the art in a few years.
However, one of the critical decisions the FAA took was to change the reporting lines of the
manufacturer employees who were assigned to FAA certification.
From a May post :
Although all stories paint a broadly similar picture, .the most damning is a detailed
piece at the Seattle Times,
Engineers say Boeing pushed to limit safety testing in race to certify planes, including 737
MAX ..The article gives an incriminating account of how Boeing got the FAA to delegate
more and more certification authority to the airline, and then pressured and abused employees
who refused to back down on safety issues .
As the Seattle Times described, the problems extended beyond the 737 Max MCAS software
shortcomings; indeed, none of the incidents in the story relate to it.
In 2004, the FAA changed its system for front-line supervision of airline certification
from having the FAA select airline certification employees who reported directly to the FAA
to having airline employees responsible for FAA certification report to airline management
and have their reports filtered through them (the FAA attempted to maintain that the
certification employees could provide their recommendations directly to the agency, but the
Seattle Times obtained policy manuals that stated otherwise).
Mind you, the Seattle Times was not alone in depicting the FAA as captured by Boeing. On
Monday, the Post and Courier reported about the South Carolina plant that produced 787s found
with tools rattling inside that
Boeing SC lets mechanics inspect their own work, leading to repeated mistakes, workers say.
These mechanic certifications would never have been kosher if the FAA were vigilant. Similarly,
Reuters described how Boeing weakened another safety check, that of pilot input.
One of the objectives for creating this panel was to restore confidence in Boeing and the
FAA, but that was always going to be a tall order, particularly after more bad news about
various 737 Max systems and Boeing being less than forthcoming with its customers and
regulators emerged.
From the Wall Street Journal :
As part of roughly a dozen findings, these government and industry officials said, the
task force is poised to call out the Federal Aviation Administration for what it describes as
a lack of clarity and transparency in the way the FAA delegated authority to the plane maker
to assess the safety of certain flight-control features. The upshot, according to some of
these people, is that essential design changes didn't receive adequate FAA attention.
The report, these officials said, also is expected to fault the agency for what it
describes as inadequate data sharing with foreign authorities during its original
certification of the MAX two years ago, along with relying on mistaken industrywide
assumptions about how average pilots would react to certain flight-control emergencies .
The FAA has stressed that the advisory group doesn't have veto power over modifications to
MCAS.
But the report could influence changes to traditional engineering principles determining
the safety of new aircraft models. Certification of software controlling increasingly
interconnected and automated onboard systems "is a whole new ballgame requiring new
approaches," according to a senior industry safety expert who has discussed the report with
regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
If the FAA thinks it can keep this genie the bottle, it is naive. The foreign regulators
represented on the task force, including from China and the EU, have ready access to the
international business press. And there will also be an embarrassing fact on the ground, that
the FAA, which was last to ground the 737 Max, will be the first to let it fly again, and
potentially by not requiring safety protections that other regulators will insist on. For
instance, the Journal reports that Canadian authorities expect to require additional simulator
training for 737 Max pilots. Recall that Boeing's biggest 737 Max customer, Southwest Airlines,
was so resistant to the cost of additional simulator training that it put a penalty clause into
its contract if wound up being necessary.
It's a given that the FAA will be unable to regain its former stature and that all of its
certifications of major aircraft will now be second guessed subject to further
review by major foreign regulators. That in turn will impose costs on Boeing, of changing its
certification process from needing to placate only the FAA to having to appease potentially
multiple parties. For instance, the EU regulator is poised to raise the bar on the 737 Max:
Patrick Ky, head of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, told the European
Parliament earlier this month, "It's very likely that international authorities will want a
second opinion" on any FAA decision to lift the grounding.
Even after EASA gives the green light, agency officials are expected to push for
significant additional safety enhancements to the fleet. Most prominently, EASA has proposed
to eventually add to the MAX a third fully functional angle-of-attack sensor -- which
effectively measures how far the plane's nose is pointed up or down -- underscoring the
controversy expected to swirl around the plane for the foreseeable future.
A monopoly is a precious thing to have. Too bad Boeing failed to appreciate that in its zeal
for profits. If the manufacturer winds up facing different demands in different regulatory
markets, it will have created more complexity for itself. Can it afford not to manufacture to
the highest common denominator, say by making an FAA-only approved bird for Southwest and
trying to talk American into buying FAA-only approved versions for domestic use only? It's hard
to see how Boeing hasn't gotten itself in the position of being at a major competitive
disadvantage by virtue of having compromised the FAA so severely as to have undercut
safety.
Even if Boeing finds solutions that international regulators can finally accept, their
implementation will take additional months. The AoA sensor and trim wheel issues will
likely require hardware changes to the 600 or so existing MAX airplanes. The demand for
simulator training will further delay the ungrounding of the plane. There are only some two
dozen 737 MAX simulators in this world and thousands of pilots who will need to pass
through them.
has Boeing developed a plan to correct the trim wheel issue on the 787max? i haven't seen
a single statement from them on how they plan to fix this problem. is it possible they think
they can get the faa to re-certify without addressing it?
The self-inflicted wound caused by systematic greed and arrogance – corruption, in
other words. Boeing is reaping the wages of taking 100% of their profits to support the stock
price through stock buybacks and deliberately under-investing in their business. Their brains
have been taken over by a parasitic financial system that profits by wrecking healthy
businesses.
It's not only Boeing – the rot is general and it is terrible to see the destruction
of American productive capacity by a parasitic finance sector.
Shareholder Value is indeed the worst idea in the world. That Boeing's biggest
stockholder, Vanguard, is unable to cleanup Boeing's operations makes perfect sense. I mean
vanguards expertise is making money, not building anything. Those skills are
completely different.
Shareholder value does what it intended to do, which is to maximise stock value in the
short term, even if it significantly cuts value in the long term.
By that measure allowing Boeing to take over the FAA and self-certify the 737-MAX was a
big success, because of short term maximization of stock value that resulted. It is now
someone else's problem regarding any long term harm.
Having worked at Boeing and the FAA, this report is very welcome. One thing: federal
hiring practices in a way lock out good people from working there. Very often the fed
managing some project has only a tenuous grasp is what is going on.
But has the job bc they
were hired in young and cheap, which is what agencies do with reduced budgets. That and job
postings very often stating that they are open only to current feds says it all.
So deferring
to the airline to "self-certify" would be a welcome relief to feds in many cases. At this
point, I doubt the number of their "sharpest and best intended" engineers is very high.
If
you want better oversight, then increase the number and quality of feds by making it easier
to hire, and decrease the number of contractors.
I deal with federal and state regulators (not airplane) all the time. Very well meaning
people, but in many cases are utterly unqualified to do the technical work. So it works well
when they stick to the policy issues and stay out of the technical details.
However, we have
Professional Engineers and other licensed professionals signing off on the engineering
documents per state law. You can look at the design documents and the construction
certification and there is a name and stamp of the responsible individual.
The licensing laws clearly state that the purpose of licensing is to hold public health
and safety paramount. This is completely missing in the American industrial sector due to the
industrial exemptions in the professional engineering licensing laws. Ultimately, there is
nobody technically responsible for a plane or a car who has to certify that they are making
the public safe and healthy.
Instead, the FAA and others do that. Federal agencies and the
insurance institute test cars and give safety ratings. Lawyers sue companies for defects
which also helps enforce safety.
One maxim we see illustrated here and elsewhere is this: Trust takes years to earn, but
can be lost overnight.
Boeing management and the FAA, having lost the trust of most people in the world through
their actions lately, seem to nevertheless think it will be a simple matter to return to the
former status quo. It seems as likely, or perhaps more likely, that they will never be
able to return to the former status quo. They have been revealed as poseurs and imposters,
cheerfully risking (and sometimes losing) their customers' lives so they can buy back more
stock.
This image will be (rightfully) hard for them to shake.
So people are going to quit their jobs rather than fly on Boeing planes? Joe and Marge
Six-Pack are going to choose flights not based on what they can afford but based on what make
of plane they are flying on? As if the airlines will even tell them in advance?
There are close to zero consequences to Boeing and FAA management. Click on the link to
the Purdue Sacklers debacle. The biggest inconvenience will be paying the lawyers.
From 1992 to 1999 I worked for the FAA running one of their labs in OKC. My role, among
other things, was to provide data to the Administrator on employee attitudes, business
practice changes, and policy impact on morale and safety. Back then, likely as now, it was a
common complaint heard from FAA execs about the conflict of interest of having to be both an
aviation safety regulatory agency and having to promote aviation. Congress seemed fine with
that – apparently still is. There is FAA pork in nearly every Congressional district
(think airports for example). Boeing is the latest example of how mission conflict is not
serving the aviation industry or public safety. With its headquarters within walking distance
of Capitol Hill, aviation lobbyists do not even get much exercise shuttling.
The 1996 Valuejet crash into the Florida swamps shows how far back the mission conflict
problem has persisted. Valuejet was a startup airline that was touted as more profitable than
all the others. It achieved that notoriety by flying through every FAA maintenance loophole
they could find to cut maintenance costs. When FAA started clamping down, Senate Majority
Leader Daschle scolded FAA for not being on the cutting edge of industry innovation. The
message was clear – leave Valuejet alone. That was a hard message to ignore given that
Daschle's wife Linda was serving as Deputy FAA Administrator (the #2 position) – a
clear conflict of interest with the role of her spouse – a fact not lost on
Administrator Hinson (the #1 position). Rather than use the disaster as an opportunity to
revisit FAA mission conflict, Clinton tossed Administrator Hinson into the volcano of public
outcry and put Daschle in charge. Nothing happened then, and it looks like Boeing might
follow Valuejet into the aviation graveyard.
Nothin' like regulatory capture. Along with financialized manufacturing, the cheap &
profitable will outdo the costly careful every time. Few businesses are run today with the
moral outlook of some early industrialists (not enough of them, but still present) who,
through zany Protestant guilt, cared for their reputations enough to not make murderous
product, knowing how the results would play both here and in Heaven. Today we have PR and
government propaganda to smear the doubters, free the toxic, and let loose toxins.
From food to clothing, drugs to hospitals, self-propelled skateboards to aircraft,
pesticides to pollution, even services as day care & education, it is time to call the
minions of manufactured madness to account. Dare we say "Free government from Murder
Inc."?
This is an excellent summary of the untenable situation that Boeing and the Federal
Government have gotten themselves into. In their rush to get richer the Elite ignored the
fact that monopolies and regulatory capture are always dangerously corrupt. This is not an
isolated case. FDA allows importation of uninspected stock pharmaceutical chemicals from
China. Insulin is unaffordable for the lower classes. Diseases are spreading through homeless
encampments. EPA approved new uses of environmentally toxic nicotinoid insecticide,
sulfoxaflor. DOD sold hundreds of billions of dollars of armaments to Saudi Arabia that were
useless to protect the oil supply.
The Powers-that-be thought that they would be a hegemon forever. But, Joe Biden's green
light for the Ukraine Army's attack against breakaway Donbass region on Russia's border
restarted the Cold War allying Russia with China and Iran. This is a multi-polar world again.
Brexit and Donald Trump's Presidency are the Empire's death throes.
NC readers know what the problem is as two comments above indicate clearly. Isn't the FAA
ashamed to keep conniving with the money and permitting dangerous planes to fly?
Boeing just got a WTO ruling against Airbus. It seems that one rogue produces others. Time
to clean the stable and remove the money addiction from safety regulation
I think that I can see an interesting situation developing next year. So people will be
boarding a plane, say with Southwest Airlines, when they will hear the following announcement
over the speakers-
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. On behalf of myself and the
entire crew, welcome aboard Southwest Airlines flight WN 861, non-stop service from Houston
to New York. Our flight time will be of 4 hours and 30 minutes. We will be flying at an
altitude of 35,000 feet at a ground speed of approximately 590 miles per hour.
We are pleased to announce that you have now boarded the first Boeing 737 MAX that has
been cleared to once again fly by the FAA as being completely safe. For those passengers
flying on to any other country, we regret to announce that you will have to change planes at
New York as no other country in the world has cleared this plane as being safe to fly in
their airspace and insurance companies there are unwilling to issue insurance cover for them
in any case.
So please sit back and enjoy your trip with us. Cabin Crew, please bolt the cabin doors
and prepare for gate departure."
Sep 16, 2019 Welcome
to the world where things don't add up. For instance, some people did some things to
the Saudi Arabian oil refinery at Abqaiq over the weekend. Like, sent over a salvo of cruise
missiles and armed drone aircraft to blow it up. They did a pretty good job of disabling the
works. It is Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facility, and for now, perhaps months, a
fair amount of the world's oil supply will be cut off. President Trump said "[we] are waiting
to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what
terms we would proceed!" Exclamation mark his.
How many times the past few years has our government declared that "we have the finest
intelligence services in the world." Very well, then, why are we waiting for the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia to tell us who fired all that stuff into Abqaiq? Whoever did it, it was
unquestionably an act of war. And, of course, what are we going to do about it? (And what will
some people do about it?)
Let's face it: the USA has had a hard-on for Iran for forty years, ever since they overthrew
their shah, invaded the US embassy in Tehran, and took fifty-two American diplomats and staff
hostage for 444 days. On the other hand, the Arabians and Iranians have had a mutual hard-on
for centuries, long before the Saud family was in charge of things, and back when Iran was
known as Persia, a land of genies, fragrant spices, and a glorious antiquity (while Arabia was
a wasteland of sand populated by nomads and their camels). The beef was formerly just about
which brand of Islam would prevail, Sunni or Shia. Lately (the past fifty years) it has been
more about the politics of oil and hegemony over the Middle East. Since the US invaded Iraq and
busted up the joint, the threat has existed that Iran would take over Iraq, with its majority
Shia population, especially the oil-rich Basra region at the head of the Persian Gulf. The
presence of Israel greatly complicates things, since Iran has a hard-on for that nation, too,
and for Jews especially, often expressed in the most belligerent and opprobrious terms, such as
"wiping Israel off the map." No ambiguity there. The catch being that Israel has the capability
of turning Iran into an ashtray.
The world has been waiting for a major war in the Middle east for decades, and it might have
one by close of business today. Or perhaps some people will do nothing . The
Iran-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen supposedly claimed responsibility for the attack. That's
rich. As if that rag-tag outfit has a whole bunch of million-dollar missiles and the knowledge
and capacity to launch them successfully, not to mention the satellite guidance mojo. A
correspondent suggests that the missiles were fired from a pro-Iranian military base in Iraq,
with the Houthis brought in on flying carpets to push the launch buttons.
President Trump is trumpeting America's "energy independence," meaning whatever happens over
there won't affect us. Well, none of that is true. We still import millions of barrels of oil a
day, though much less from Saudi Arabia than before 2008. The shale oil "miracle" is hitting
the skids these days. Shale oil production has gone flat, the rig-count is down, companies are
going bankrupt, and financing for the debt-dependent operations is dwindling since the
producers have demonstrated that they can't make a profit at it. They're trapped in the
quandary of diminishing returns, frontloading production, while failing to overcome steep
decline curves in wells that only produce for a couple of years.
It's also the case that shale oil is ultra-light crude, containing little heavier
distillates such as diesel and aviation fuel (basically kerosene). Alas, American refineries
were all built before shale oil came along. They were designed to crack heavier oil and can't
handle the lighter shale. The "majors" don't want to invest their remaining capital in new
refineries, and the many smaller companies don't have the ability. So, this makes necessary a
high volume of oil swapping around the world. Without diesel and aviation fuel, US trucking and
commercial aviation has a big problem, meaning the US economy has a big problem.
With the new crisis in the Middle East, benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is up from
around $55-a-barrel to just over $60 at the market open (European Brent crude is just above
$70). That's a pop, but not a spectacular one, considering that a whole lot more damage might
ensue in the days ahead. China, Korea, and Japan stand to lose bigly if the players in the
Middle East really go at it and bust up each other's assets. If that happens, the world will
never be the same. You can kiss the global economy goodbye for good. Let's hope some people
don't do something.
Not just the Saudi's. The Houthis support Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
They also control the Straits of Mandeb where most of Israel's oil transits to Asia.
Hence the war in Yemen an the problems in the Sudan. So its no wonder its not just
the Saudi's who are fighting the Houthis. The Houthis are fighting against the U.K.,
Germany, the U.S., Israel and the UAE, who are all supporting the Saudi's. Yemen, one
of the worlds oldest civilizations
Iran never said "wiping Israel off the map."It was Ahmadinejad that said "..wipe
the Zionist entity off the map".
This author should know better than to repeat Zionist lies.
Kunstler has some huge holes in his game. He seems to take many of the US MSM
talking points as good coin. Like, exhibit A, the "wipe Israel off the map" quote
which has long since been shown to be a mis-translation. Often his bigotry also slips
like when he dismisses Houthi capabilities and gets wrong what actually hit the
refineries. These were DRONES not missiles. That is why they were able to evade the
Saudi air defenses. But Houthis are to uncouth to pull of such an operation and
moreover how dare they defend themselves or accept assistance from Iran even if it
were true they are supplying the Houthis with weapons and intelligence. Of course, he
also fails to explain, following like a dog on a leash the US media, why Iran would
launch such an attack considering it may provoke the Israelis or the US. Sure they
may hate the Saudis but they certainly do not want a war where, though they would not
technically lose, would see their society destroyed. Again Cui Bono.
Kunstlers's roots are definitely showing here. His usual barbed wit has simply
disappeared and he seems to have bitten off and swallowed whole the officialbullshit , very unwise at this stage.
"A correspondent suggests" just doesn't cut it. Correspondents have suggested all
sorts of things and he should learn to ignore these voices and rely on facts
instead.
He forgets the fact that Saudi Arabia has been waging war on Yemen since 2015 and
that the damage inflicted upon the Saudi oil installations is only a tiny fraction of
the retribution that the Saudis deserve.
Kunstler predictably forgets the fact that Israel has been illegally attacking
Iranian interests in Syria for several years and that as a result many Iranians have
been killed by Israel in recent times. The fact is that these illegal forays are also
acts of war, which of course Kunstler forgets to tell us.
One other fact pertains to his boasting that Israel could wipe Iran off the map,
which is not just bad taste, but ignores the fact that Iran has enough conventional
power to do the same to its postage stamp sized and bellicose neighbour.
We now know that when the chips are down, Kunstler will simply revert to type and
tow the crooked official zio line. We don't need Kunstler for that, we all ready have
a zionist media, a craven Congress and Trump's government of crazies, very important
facts.
If the Yemenis are being assisted by Iran I say that's a good thing. The Saudi
beasts are being assisted by our jew rulers. If I was a Yemeni blowing up that oil
infrastructure would have been on top of my list. And Israel is the country that
would be turned into an ashtray. The US is gone, over run invaded, already lost.
"Let's face it:" says Kunstler. Iran started it forty years ago, "ever since they
overthrew their shah ..." Bad Iranians attacking the USA.
But if we go back a few decades further, we find USUKisrael smashing the elected
government of Iran and installing The Shah! So Kunstler is lying when he says "their
shah"; he should say OUR shah. I think he probably knows this. He's not accidentally
mixing things up.
Catastrophic or not the neocons are itching for a big confrontation and Iran fits
the bill.
Keep in mind that most collateral damage will be suffered by the Saudis.
The US is now the biggest producer of oil, just imagine the boost that the US shale
investors will get in an industry that was about to have its bubble burst.
No longer will it struggle to break even, no it will make a good profit, more
importantly the bubble will not hit the financial sector hard.
Now KSA will suffer a blow, but that will only serve the US - new loans and new
contracts will reverse the money stream and tie the Saudi regime even more to
Washington.
As a bonus it will please the Israelis when finally Iran will be taken out and
Hezbollah isolated.
Wild cards - how hard can Iran retaliate beyond KSA, is it able and willing to
strike against Israel? How hard can it strike US targets in the region? And finally
will they go full on against the Arabian energy infrastructure. If a couple of Houthi
cruise missiles in a single strike can drop total oil production by 5% and raise
prices by 20%, imagine what kind of havoc a real Iranian campaign can cause (again
ignoring the oil bonanza the US oil industry will score).
I really believe there is now a 50/50% that Washington will gamble a full blown
war against Iran, its perceived benefits outweighing the dangers.
If anything Israel will be the deciding factor, if Tel Aviv does not fear Iranian
retribution and gives the go ahead, we'll have a war on our hands,
The US is certainly stretched thin defending the national and security interest
across the globe - aka defending and expanding the empire.
However there is enough fire power to defeat the Iranian military as an organized
force and Teheran as a government, it all depends on the US rules of engagement and
how far they are willing to push this war.
But afterwards it will be no better than Iraq or Afghanistan.
That may actually be the excuse to do what some strategists have been itching to
do since the Korean war, that is to use a couple of tactical nukes - the ultimate
terror weapon of state.
The current NPR is a strong sign in favor of nuclear weapons in conflict as it
greatly reduces the threshold. Iran's perceived threat to global oil production could
be used to set an example.
In what condition will Saudi Arabia be in, after Iran has been subdued? Also the
plethora of US bases in the area will also be fat juicy targets for Iranian
missiles.
Did the condition of South East Asia other than the ubiquitous Domino Theory,
worry many when they went to war in Viet Nam, what about Iraq?
Oil and Israel are key.
Oil prices and Israel's safety.
They want to take out Iran, but this small attack shows how vulnerable the
regional energy infrastructure really is. That can be a temporary advantage, in
boosting US oil income, but that can be easily off set by the impact of rising oil
prices on all other sectors and the public.
That's why I think it is 50/50 at best, and slowly leaning to less likely we'll
see a major escalation.
Otoh, if I were the Houthis, I'd launch a couple of additional strikes to press
the message.
Saudi Arabia supplies oil to China, so to believe Iran was behind the drone attack
on Saudi oil is a bit of a stretch. The question is was it the U.S. and Israel
coordinating that attack? Israel's influence on the U.S. in the middle east is what
is getting America running in circles
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said recent drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure were
a proportionate Yemeni response to years of daily bombings carried out by a Saudi-led
coalition.
Speaking to reporters in Ankara following three-way talks between the presidents
of Turkey, Russia and Iran, Rouhani suggested the drone attacks were a legitimate act of
self-defense.
"On a daily basis Yemen is being bombarded and innocent civilians are dying so they have
to retaliate," Rouhani explained.
Yemeni people are exercising their legitimate right of defense the attacks were a
reciprocal response to aggression against Yemen for years.
Rouhani added his hope that the conflict in Yemen would be resolved through diplomacy, and
said that such a process might even mirror Syria's Astana talks.
Addressing the same question, Turkish President Recep Erdogan also pointed out that it was
Saudi Arabia who'd started the cycle of attacks. He said the international community should
inquire into the causes of Yemen's crisis, noting the country had been "basically
destroyed" during its four-year conflict, and called on other world powers to consider how
to rebuild Yemen "from scratch" and "put it back on its feet."
While Russia's President Vladimir Putin said the drone attacks had not been discussed at
Monday's meeting, he noted the "humanitarian catastrophe" in the country and urged a
diplomatic solution to the conflict.
The war in Yemen began in earnest in March 2015, when a coalition of states, led by Saudi
Arabia and backed by the US and Britain, launched a bombing campaign in an attempt to defeat
the rebel Houthi movement and restore the rule of President Mansour Hadi, who'd been ousted in
2014. In addition to tens of thousands killed in the fighting, the conflict has sparked one of
the world's worst humanitarian crises, leaving millions without food, water or healthcare, and
dependent on international aid.
Pat Lang won't let me post on his site, so I'll have to point this out here instead.
He has just posted an open letter to Trump regarding a war with Iran, and he points out
(correctly) that:
1) Iran can set its proxy forces in Syria and Iraq loose on US troops in those countries
2) Iran will fire every missile in its arsenal at any US troops within range
3) Iran will fire its AA missiles at any and all USAF planes
4) Iran will keep attacking the 5th fleet until they run out of boats
All true, and all well and good as far as it goes.
But Pat seems to have the same blind spot as all other US pundits, in that they apparently
have forgotten all about the Iranian Army.
They do have an Army, and can muster half a million fighting men.
Which, indeed, is probably ten times as many ground troops that CENTCOM possesses.
Seems to me that the Iranians can think of several good uses for such an army.
For one thing, they can launch an invasion of Afghanistan with the intention of killing each
and every GI who has the misfortune of being in-theatre.
They'll have at least a 10-to-1 advantage of men.
Not so much a fight as a slaughter.
Bernhard, excellent article, as usual, thank you. The recent situation in KSA is just a small
example of the collapse on classic warfare, we have seen it closely in Vietnam, Lebanon 2006,
then Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and for 2,500 years in Afghanistan, time and time again. The
supposed richer countries trying to impose their will and military power when facing
organized societies with, purpose and means to defend, do exactly that, they fend off the
aggressors.
In the case of Yemen, which has not been conquered due to the terrain and its people
(similar to Afghanistan), they, as few other cases, had friends that supplied means of
defense and attack, this is why Yemen/Houthis, after 5 years of war of aggression against
them, they can hit back, in a way that KSA is not able to defend, small drones, flying low
and hard to be spotted with a long range, this is the perfect weapon to demoralize arrogant
regimes, it creates terror and damages in highly explosive places. Yemen will not back down
until KSA leaves its aggressive policy and pay reparations, or Yemen will continue to inflict
damages, slowly bleeding KSA and demoralizing its corrupt leadership.
I my view a decision to remove the current royalty from KSA was already taken, I mean, The
Resistance will pursue it, slowly, will create situations for an internal coup, internal
revolts and so on, KSA's security is mostly done by foreigners, many from Pakistan, Sudan
etc...these people are treated as slaves, very badly, a time bomb when an opportunity arises,
and KSA is approaching that dangerous zone, few more well placed strikes that put KSA on its
knees and expose wide open its vulnerability will be the sign for the large & oppressed
Shia population to revolt, with it goes Bahrain as well.
Lets remember that Qatar is a mortal enemy for KSA, and has its own ambitions to expand
territory beyond its tiny area, KSA is playing with fire by bending to the US,Uk and Israel,
it is risking being retaliated in pieces.
Grieved @80 noted that "...these countries... are in fact in a coalition..."
The response to that from imperial loyalists is not unexpected: "Nooo! Primitive sand
people cannot put aside the identity politics differences that our empire cultivates in them
and unite against us!"
The imperial loyalists, despite considering themselves to be "woke" and
"inclusive" and unbigoted and moral, find it inconceivable that any peoples other than
those of northern European and anglo descent could unite in the face of an existential
threat. To be certain, these empire loyalists cannot even see themselves as being the
existential threat that is uniting peoples, despite having literally slaughtered millions of
innocents over the last half century or so. Their sense of moral and cultural superiority is
an axiom that must remain beyond question lest their all-important identities be
exposed as cheap narcissism, so they pour into the forum to promote conspiracy theories about
how the stunning successes of the coalition that Grieved notes above are actually convoluted
and inscrutably super-sophisticated moves on a Grand Chessboard . To maintain this
fiction they must overlook the fact that their empire's best strategists reached the limits
of their geostrategic talent playing the board game Risk . Consider that the imperial
mass media has begun to refer to pompous Pompeo as "the next Kissinger" , and recall
that even the former Kissinger was never really that bright but was just ruthless and totally
lacking a conscience.
Face reality, imperial loyalists: The Houthis, whom you cannot even credit with being
human, have just successfully wounded your lackeys in the Middle East. The Houthis
accomplished this with skill, intelligence, and determination.
"... And President Trump himself said Wednesday from the White House that it looks like Iran did it but that he still hopes to avoid war . He announced via a statement on Twitter that, "I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!" -- ..."
"... Pompeo is in Jedda where he's expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to evaluate a possible response, where the are expected to "coordinate efforts to counter Iranian aggression in the region," according to a State Department statement . ..."
"... Wednesday's Saudi Def. Ministry press briefing showcasing missile and drone debris alleged "evidence" the Iranians were behind attack. ..."
"... The fact that Johnson's statement included the word "diplomatic" - along with Trump's emphasis on extending stronger sanctions - is a good sign however, that the White House is not prepping for war. ..."
What's the end game here? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just arrived in Jeddah for talks with Saudi leaders over a response
to the weekend attacks on two of the kingdom's major oil facilities.
After a prior press conference by the Saudi Defense Ministry
where it for the first time assigned public blame on Iran for the attacks which initially knocked out half of the kingdom's daily
oil output, saying the air attacks "unquestionably" had Iranian state sponsorship, Pompeo
has announced the Aramco attacks constitute
an "act of war" by Iran .
And President Trump himself said Wednesday from the White House that it looks like Iran did it but that he still hopes to avoid
war . He announced via a statement on Twitter that, "I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase
Sanctions on the country of Iran!" -- in what appears an alternative to launching a military response.
"I'm not looking to get into new conflict, but sometimes you have to," Trump told reporters Wednesday.
Pompeo's new "act of war" declaration indeed takes the potential for escalation right back to boiling point.
Pompeo is in Jedda where he's expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to evaluate a possible response, where
the are expected to "coordinate efforts to counter Iranian aggression in the region," according to
a State Department
statement .
Meanwhile, if the 'military option' is being considered, it appears we could be in the beginning phases of an international coalition
response. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he and Trump held a phone call to discuss the need for a "united diplomatic response
from international partners" after the Aramco attacks.
The fact that Johnson's statement included the word "diplomatic" - along with Trump's emphasis on extending stronger sanctions
- is a good sign however, that the White House is not prepping for war.
"... the attack dented the image of invincibility of Aramco's infrastructure ..."
"... Saudi Military stated the Aramco facilites were attacked with 18 missiles and 7 drones. They state cruise missiles were used. However, now they state the attack was simply "backed" by Iran. The weapons were all Iranian design. ..."
"... That Iran is backing the Houthis we already knew and nobody doubts. But those drones and missiles didn't come from Iranian territory nor were they operated by Iranian personel. It's a free market world, and everybody can buy weapons from anybody. ..."
"... The GOAL of exaggerating the attack could be to simply increase oil prices or to justify war with Iran. Tensions with Iran will be elevated for weeks, if not months. That will mean higher oil prices than otherwise. ..."
"... The timing is also suspicious because it comes just before the Israeli election and just after John Bolton was dismissed. ..."
"... Russian oil experts say 3 to 6 months to repair damage from strike as components must come from Europe according to TASS. As the remains of the uavs have been recovered their effective range can be determined. I suspect they were launched from within Saudi territory. ..."
"... It is embarrassing to the Saudis because they scarcely bother to unpack the weapons the US sends them-at premium prices - and dare not allow any of their countrymen to learn how to use them. And it is embarrassing to the Americans because they understand all this and ship over arms that don't work simply to ensure that those petrodollars circulate. ..."
"... Hence the current campaign to convince us that Iran was responsible. Mind you, that propaganda is only effective so long as the American people don't really believe it because, if they did, they might demand war (you can imagine Pelosi, Schumer and Biden insisting on it) and Washington doesn't want that. Jingoism isn't about fighting it's about threatening. ..."
1) USA: that would only help if Trump was decided to go to a hot war against Iran. By his
declarations since yesterday, we already know that isn't going to happen. He didn't even jump
to the "Iran did it!" bandwagon right away. He said he increased sanctions against Iran --
but Iran is already sanctioned to the maximum by the USA, so that's empty rhetoric.
2) Israel: wars in Israel only work as an election boost to the incumbent Prime Minister when Israel emerges with a clear
victory. ...
3) Saudi Arabia: it has a 188 billion barrel reserve to cover up for the losses for a
couple of days, so they benefited a little bit from the 20% price rise. But so did everybody
else -- including enemies of the USA, such as Russia and Venezuela. Besides, the attack
dented the image of invincibility of Aramco's infrastructure, and Saudi Arabia's image as a
neofascist ideal State.
4) Iran: Iran can block the Hormuz Strait -- a much more benign and cheap way to stop
Saudi oil from being exported. If Iran attacks its neighbors' oil infrastructure, then it
kind of states it's fair game for its neighbors to attack theirs. This is bad move for Iran
from a purely game theory standpoint, let alone from the geopolitical one.
5) Masters of the Universe: yes, the oil price went up 20% in one day. But let's remember
that even a USD 100.00 a barrel isn't that impressive from a historical standpoint: when the
Iraq invasion happened, the barrel reached USD 300.00. Yes, a selected elite benefited a lot
from this, but the USA didn't become a capitalist utopia because of that. We must not
overestimate the effects of oil prices on capitalism and, specially, on the USA: the West is
in terminal decline for a myriad of factors, not because of one silver bullet. Higher oil
prices won't save the West.
My hypothesis is this: the USA/Saudi Arabia are too embarassed to admit their
anti-aircraft weapons and systems are useless against puny drones and created a big,
subterranean enemy in the form of Iran in order to avoid public embarassment.
The Houthis are telling the truth, and they will do more attacks if the Saudis don't stop
with theirs and settle for peace.
The headline calls that the Saudi Military stated the Aramco facilites were attacked with
18 missiles and 7 drones. They state cruise missiles were used. However, now they state the
attack was simply "backed" by Iran. The weapons were all Iranian design.
That Iran is backing the Houthis we already knew and nobody doubts. But those drones and
missiles didn't come from Iranian territory nor were they operated by Iranian personel. It's
a free market world, and everybody can buy weapons from anybody.
US and Saudis say that over 20 missiles and drones were used in the attack. They say that
this showed that Iran did the attack or participated in the attack because the Houthi only
claim to have used 10 drones.
Peter AU 1 and I have said that it's possible to account for the excess damage as an
attempt to exaggerate damage caused by the Houthi attack.
The GOAL of exaggerating the attack could be to simply increase oil prices or to justify
war with Iran. Tensions with Iran will be elevated for weeks, if not months. That will mean
higher oil prices than otherwise.
The timing is also suspicious because it comes just before the Israeli election and
just after John Bolton was dismissed.
And despite Trump's backing away from his asinine "locked and loaded" comment, war with
Iran is still very possible. The Iraq War started 18 months after 9-11.
Russian oil experts say 3 to 6 months to repair damage from strike as components must come
from Europe according to TASS. As the remains of the uavs have been recovered their effective
range can be determined. I suspect they were launched from within Saudi territory.
Their main argument is that the attacks came "from the north".
If that's true, then the question remains: why didn't the Saudi radars detect it? Either b
is lying, or the Saudi military is lying.
It's really hilarious at this point: the attack caught the West so low-guarded and stunned
them so much that they can't even come up with a unified official narrative.
Houthi Armed Forces Spokesman
is at this moment tweeting a series of statements explaining how the last attack was done
that includes drone capabilities and types of munitions used!!!!!!!!!!! An example:
"Drones have fission heads carrying four precision bombs."
Given that the entire relationship between the USA and the KSA is an elaborate protection
racket the failure of all those high priced systems to protect the oil fields against
Ansrullah drones is particularly embarrassing.
It is embarrassing to the Saudis because they scarcely bother to unpack the weapons the
US sends them-at premium prices - and dare not allow any of their countrymen to learn how to
use them. And it is embarrassing to the Americans because they understand all this and ship
over arms that don't work simply to ensure that those petrodollars circulate.
Hence the current campaign to convince us that Iran was responsible. Mind you, that
propaganda is only effective so long as the American people don't really believe it because,
if they did, they might demand war (you can imagine Pelosi, Schumer and Biden insisting on
it) and Washington doesn't want that.
Jingoism isn't about fighting it's about threatening.
And, now that 57 varieties of Israeli Fascism are squabbling about whether the Prime
Minister goes to jail for theft, even that distraction is no longer useful.
Statement from the Iranians "Saudi press conference shows they are clueless about how attack
was executed and know nothing about the military capabilities of their adversary".
Seems about right. Statement by bevin is on target.
The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again
that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in
blowback. In 2015 Saudi Arabia attacked its neighbor, Yemen, because a coup in that country
ousted the Saudi-backed dictator. Four years later Yemen is in ruins, with nearly 100,000
Yemenis killed and millions more facing death by starvation. It has been rightly called the
worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.
But rich and powerful Saudi Arabia did not defeat Yemen. In fact, the Saudis last month
asked the Trump Administration to help facilitate talks with the Houthis in hopes that the war,
which has cost Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars, could finally end without Saudi crown
prince Mohammad bin Salman losing too much face. Washington admitted earlier this month that
those talks had begun.
The surprise Houthi attack on Saturday disrupted half of Saudi Arabia's oil and gas
production and shocked Washington. Predictably, however, the neocons are using the attack to
call for war with Iran!
Sen. Lindsay Graham, one of the few people in Washington who makes John Bolton look like a
dove, Tweeted yesterday that, "It is now time for the US to put on the table an attack on
Iranian oil refineries " Graham is the perfect embodiment of the saying, "when all you have is
a hammer, everything looks like a nail." No matter what the problem, for Graham the solution is
war.
Likewise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who is supposed to represent US diplomacy
– jumped to blame Iran for the attack on Saudi Arabia, Tweeting that, "Iran has now
launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply." Of course, he provided no
evidence even as the Houthis themselves took responsibility for the bombing.
What is remarkable is that all of Washington's warmongers are ready for war over what is
actually a retaliatory strike by a country that is the victim of Saudi aggression, not the
aggressor itself. Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia in 2015. It was the other way around. If
you start a war and the other country fights back, you should not be entitled to complain about
how unfair the whole thing is.
The establishment reaction to the Yemeni oilfield strike reminds me of a hearing in the
House Foreign Affairs Committee just before the US launched the 2003 Iraq war. As I was arguing
against the authorization for that war, I pointed out that Iraq had never attacked the United
States. One of my colleagues stopped me in mid-sentence, saying, "let me remind the gentleman
that the Iraqis have been shooting at our planes for years." True, but those planes were
bombing Iraq!
The neocons want a US war on Iran at any cost. They may feel temporarily at a disadvantage
with the departure of their ally in the Trump Administration, John Bolton. However, the sad
truth is that there are plenty more John Boltons in the Administration. And they have allies in
the Lindsay Grahams in Congress.
Yemen has demonstrated that it can fight back against Saudi aggression. The only sensible
way forward is for a rapid end to this four-year travesty, and the Saudis would be wise to wake
up to the mess they've created for themselves. Whatever the case, US participation in Saudi
Arabia's war on Yemen must end immediately and neocon lies about Iran's role in the war must be
refuted and resisted.
"... Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen. Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution, they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. ..."
"... "Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the region." ..."
"... "The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued. ..."
"... Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing a successful bill to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen. ..."
"... "It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians." ..."
"... "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran. ..."
"... "This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not a walk in the park." ..."
"... "In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's desulphurization capacity out of commission. ..."
"... "This little accident was designed to be maximally disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil in the long run. ..."
"... On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump understands." ..."
Retired Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis pointed out that the puncture marks do not actually show
the origin of the attack. "Missiles can fly from almost anywhere. They have the ability to
maneuver! And certainly drones can, too," the Defense Priorities senior fellow told the
National Interest . "There hasn't been the time to do an actual analysis on the
ground, so let's wait and see."
Mark Latham, managing partner at the London-based analysis firm Commodities Intelligence,
told the National Interest that the puncture marks pointed to a cruise missile with no
explosive warhead. Removing the payload would allow the missile to carry more fuel and launch
from farther away from its target.
... ... ...
"Mr. X is a sophisticated fellow. He's sourced some Iranian cruise missiles.
He's removed the explosive payload. He's replaced the explosive payload with fuel," he said.
"So this isn't your twenty dollar Amazon drone. This is a sophisticated military operation."
"The culprit behind the Abqaiq attack is most definitely the Islamic Republic, either
directly or through one of its proxies," argued Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst at
the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"The attack fits the pattern of Iran signaling to the Gulf states that if it can't get its
oil out, it will cause their oil exports to become collateral damage," Koduvayur told the National Interest . "It's because of how strong our coercive financial tools are that
Iran is resorting to attacks like this: it's lashing out."
Violating an Obama-era agreement to regulate Iran's nuclear research program, the Trump
administration imposed massive sanctions on Iran's oil industry beginning in May 2018. The goal
of this "maximum pressure" campaign was to force Iran to accept a "better" deal. Since then,
Iranian forces have captured a British oil tanker and allegedly sabotaged tankers from other
countries.
There were some signals that Trump was planning to use the ongoing United Nations General
Assembly in New York to open a new
diplomatic channel with Iran, especially after the
firing of hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton. But the weekend attack sent Trump
into reverse.
"Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their 'airspace'
when, in fact, it was nowhere close. They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a
very big lie," he said in a Monday morning Twitter post, referring to a June incident
when Iranian and American forces almost went to war. "Now they say that they had nothing to do
with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We'll see?"
He also hinted at a violent U.S. response.
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of
this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" Trump wrote on Sunday.
"Saudi Arabia is not a formal treaty ally of ours, so there are no international agreements
that obligate us to come to their defense," John Glaser, director of foreign-policy studies at
the CATO Institute, stated. "This does not amount to a clear and present danger to the United
States, so no self-defense justification is relevant. He would therefore need authorization
from Congress."
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had mixed reactions to the attack.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed putting "on the table an attack on Iranian oil
refineries" in order to "break the regime's back." His press office did not respond to a
follow-up question from the National Interest asking whether the president would have
the authority to do so.
Amy Grappone, spokeswoman for Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), told the National Interest
that the Senator "will support an appropriate and proportionate response" after "studying the
latest intelligence pertaining to Iran's malign activities, including these recent attacks in
Saudi Arabia."
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, condemned the attack with
a backhanded insult towards Saudi Arabia. "Despite some ongoing policy differences with the
kingdom, no nation should be subjected to these kinds of attacks on it soil and against its
people," he wrote on Twitter, declining to name Iran as the culprit.
Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced
their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen.
Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution,
they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder
reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The
president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin
(D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi
Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain
its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the
region."
"The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with
Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi
Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued.
Asked how he would vote on a declaration of war, the senator told the National
Interest : "Let's hope it does not come to that. Congress has not authorized war against
Iran. The majority voted to engage them diplomatically to slow their nuclear ambitions. The
international community is ready to work with the U.S. again to ease economic pressure on Iran
in exchange for their restraint. We are at a dangerous precipice."
In a statement emailed to the National Interest and posted to Twitter, Sen. Tim
Kaine (D-Va.) was even more direct: "The US should never go to war to protect Saudi oil."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing
a successful bill
to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override
the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread
explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen.
"It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual
defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And
frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long
term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest
between the Saudis and Iranians."
But the reaction did not fall neatly along party lines.
"Iran is one of the most dangerous state sponsors of terrorism. This may well be the thing
that calls for military action against Iran, if that's what the intelligence supports," said
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) in a Monday interview with Fox News. Others pointed out that
attacking Iran would contradict Trump's own principles.
"Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic
presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.),
who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud
with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran.
"This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States
needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he
told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the
Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not
a walk in the park."
Davis agreed with Paul's assessment. "There's too many people who have lost touch with
understanding what war is all about. They think it's easy," he told the National
Interest . "Just imagine this. What we go ahead and do this, and Iran makes good on their
threats, and American warships get sunk in the Gulf?" "This is not America's fight," he
concluded. "The American armed forces are not on loan as a Saudi defense force."
"There's another claim that the impact on oil markets is sufficient to impact the vital U.S.
interest in the free flow of energy coming out of that region, but that argument quickly
descends into absurdity when we remember that the Trump administration has been trying to
zero-out Iranian oil exports, for a host of spurious reasons," Glaser told the National
Interest . "Washington is also aggressively sanctioning Venezuela, making it harder for
Caracas to bring oil to market, too. If we really cared about the supply of oil, we wouldn't be
doing this."
In any case, the attack may not have affected oil markets in such a straightforward way.
Latham says that the attack struck an oil desulphurization facility. At the moment,
desulphurized fuel is in high demand from the shipping industry, which is rushing to comply
with new international environmental regulations.
"In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping
fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur
fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham
explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's
desulphurization capacity out of commission.
"This little accident was designed to be maximally
disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is
really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous
stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might
delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil
in the long run.
On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's
not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy
infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense
capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale
war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what
that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump
understands."
Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest.
"... By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools , a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. produced by Our Schools , a project of the Independent Media Institute. ..."
"... One of the first school districts to become entangled in the conglomeration of firms Wise and Sundstrom assembled was Nashville, which in 2016 chose Jim Huge and Associates to help with hiring a new superintendent. The following year the board hired Shawn Joseph, whom Huge had recommended. ..."
"... Shortly after Joseph arrived in Nashville, according to local News Channel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams, he began pushing the district to give $1.8 million in no-bid contracts to Performance Matters, a Utah-based technology company that sells "software solutions" to school districts. ..."
"... In addition to pushing Performance Matters, Williams reported, Joseph gave an "inside track" to Discovery Education, a textbook and digital curriculum provider and another company he and his team had ties to from their work in Maryland. ..."
"... By June 2018, Nashville school board member Amy Frogge was questioning Joseph about possible connections these vendors might have to ERDI. A district audit would confirm that ERDI's affiliated companies -- including Performance Matters, Discovery Education, and six other companies -- had signed contracts totaling more than $17 million with the district since Joseph had been hired. ..."
"... "Too often, national search firms are also driven by money-making motives and/or connections with those seeking profit," Frogge contended. That conflict of interest is a concern not only in Nashville but also in other districts where school leaders with deep ties to education vendors and consultants have resulted in huge scandals that traumatized communities and cost taxpayers millions. ..."
Lambert here:
More corruption in the professional class.
By Jeff Bryant, a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools , a project of the
Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy
journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center
for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear
in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public
education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm. produced by Our Schools , a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
In July 2013, the education world was rocked when a breaking story by Chicago independent
journalist Sarah Karp
reported that district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett had pushed through a no-bid $20 million
contract to provide professional development to administrators with a private, for-profit
company called SUPES Academy, which she had worked for a year before the deal transpired.
Byrd-Bennett was also listed as a senior associate for PROACT Search, a superintendent search
firm run by the same individuals who led SUPES.
By 2015, federal investigators
looked into the deal and found reason to charge
Byrd-Bennett for accepting bribes and kickbacks from the company that ran SUPES and PROACT. A
year-and-a-half later, the story made national headlines when Byrd-Bennett was convicted and
sentenced to prison for those charges. But anyone who thought this story was an anomaly
would be mistaken. Similar conflicts of interest among private superintendent search firms,
their associated consulting companies, and their handpicked school leaders have plagued
multiple school districts across the country.
In an extensive examination, Our Schools has discovered an intricate web of businesses that
reap lucrative school contracts funded by public tax dollars. These businesses are often able
to place their handpicked candidates in school leadership positions who then help make the
purchasing decision for the same businesses' other products and services, which often include
professional development, strategic planning, computer-based services, or data analytics. The
deals are often brokered in secrecy or presented to local school boards in ways that make
insider schemes appear legitimate.
As in the Byrd-Bennett scandal, school officials who get caught in this web risk public
humiliation, criminal investigation, and potential jail time, while the businesses that
perpetuate this hidden arrangement continue to flourish and grow.
The results of these scandals are often disastrous. School policies and personnel are
steered toward products that reward private companies rather than toward research-proven
methods for supporting student learning and teacher performance. School governance becomes
geared to the interests of well-connected individuals rather than the desires of teachers and
voters. And when insider schemes become public, whole communities are thrown into chaos,
sometimes for years, resulting in wasted education dollars and increased disillusionment with
school systems and local governance.
While media accounts generally frame these scandals as examples of corrupt school leaders
who got caught and brought to justice, reporters rarely delve into the corporate-operated
enterprises that undergird the whole system.
A Potent Business Model
Months before Byrd-Bennett's conviction, another individual connected to the Chicago
scandal, SUPES co-owner Gary Solomon,
pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges related to a scheme that diverted over $5 million in
public money from the Chicago contracts into his private pocket.
Solomon, who had been forced out of a previous job as a high school administrator after he
was accused of racist
comments and "preying" on female students, cofounded SUPES -- along with sister companies
PROACT Search and Synesi Associates -- with his former student Thomas Vranas, who also pleaded
guilty to charges stemming from the Chicago deals.
Although Solomon and Vranas got caught and were convicted for their scheme, they
nevertheless stumbled on a potent business model that combined PROACT's superintendent search
services with SUPES Academy professional development programs and consulting by Synesi
Associates to help districts "implement
reform strategies." Combining leader recruitment with leadership training and consulting gave
Solomon and Vranas three ways into a business relationship with a school district and multiple
ways to upsell clients into more expensive new contracts.
New administrators PROACT helped place in leadership roles could be reliable allies for
pitching professional development services to the district. School districts that had employed
SUPES might be more inclined to hire PROACT for a leadership search. And Synesi would have an
inside track for its consulting services. Further, any of the firm's school leader contacts who
became idle between full-time jobs, which often happens in this profession, would be able to
work for the firm as "associates."
School districts may have welcomed this arrangement as a form of "one-stop shopping" for
their needs, but it's not hard to see how it could lead to conflicts of interest and a veil for
fraud.
Chicago was not the only district that fell for the pitch. Shortly after news of the
Byrd-Bennett scandal broke, school districts in
DeKalb County , Illinois;
Fayette County (Lexington), Kentucky; and
Lancaster , Pennsylvania ended their contracts with PROACT.
In Iowa City, Iowa, a local reporter
found the district had a contract with Synesi Associates to conduct an audit of the
district and then hired PROACT to recruit candidates for a vacant director position. At the
same time, superintendent Stephen Murley took 34 days off work to do paid consulting for those
two organizations and for SUPES Academy.
In St. Louis ,
superintendent Kelvin Adams started consulting for SUPES shortly after the school board awarded
a $125,000 contract to the firm, Sarah Karp and Melissa Sanchez reported. The district also
awarded a $16,500 no-bid deal to Synesi.
But Solomon and Vranas did not invent this money-making strategy, nor did it die when they
were convicted and sent to jail.
From Retail Store to Mega-Mall
In June 2016, the Chicago Sun Times
reported that in the wake of the Byrd-Bennett scandal, parts of SUPES Academy were
purchased by Joseph Wise and his partner David Sundstrom. Their Chicago-based firm Atlantic
Research Partners (ARP) had already gotten at least $5 million in recent business from Chicago
schools. (Sundstrom would later
contend ARP rescinded the agreement to acquire SUPES and that the "only remaining
connection between the companies" was a licensing of training material.)
Wise founded ARP with Sundstrom in 2007 after both had been ousted from their jobs in the
Duval County, Florida, school district due to alleged
"serious misconduct." According to the ARP website, the project's mission was to launch a
"teacher-training program focused on instructional coaching and school capacity-building."
Around the same time ARP was acquiring parts of SUPES, the company also
merged with Jim Huge and Associates, a firm with deep experience in school superintendent
and other talent searches. Huge had also
served as chief strategy officer for PROACT Search. The announced rationale of the merger
was "to maximize seamless delivery of the intensive executive services to schools and school
leaders."
Undoubtedly, what Wise and Sundstrom assembled was similar to the three-part business model
Solomon and Vranas put together. What was different, though, was Wise and Sundstrom would
expand on the model with their
subsequent acquisition of Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI).
According to Louisiana school teacher and wily blogger
Mercedes Schneider , Sundstrom registered an entity called ERDI Partners as a business with a Florida address in 2017.
But an entity called ERDI had been in existence since at least 2005 when an article in
Education Week described the company as
an intermediary organization bringing together school administrators and education vendors to
help companies improve the products and services they offer school systems. Specifically, ERDI
arranged get-togethers by paying superintendents consulting fees plus expenses to travel to
conferences at luxury resorts where they would meet with company representatives. The
companies, in turn, underwrote the conferences with substantial fees paid to ERDI.
Critics of ERDI
argue that the company's model for paying school administrators for their advice on
education products inevitably leads to conflict of interest issues when those administrators
are presented with offers to purchase products promoted by ERDI.
Byrd-Bennett had a relationship with ERDI dating back to at least 2014 and was listed as senior
advisor on the firm's website while she was employed as Chicago schools' CEO.
With the acquisition of ERDI, Wise and Sundstrom could transform their business model from a
lone retail operation to a mega-mall of
education vendors of all kinds.
'The Search Was Manipulated'
One of the first school districts to become entangled in the conglomeration of firms Wise
and Sundstrom assembled was Nashville, which in 2016
chose Jim Huge and Associates to help with hiring a new superintendent. The following year
the board
hired Shawn Joseph, whom Huge had recommended.
Shortly after Joseph arrived in Nashville, according
to local News Channel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams, he began pushing the district to
give $1.8 million in no-bid contracts to Performance Matters, a Utah-based technology company
that sells "software solutions" to
school districts.
Williams found Joseph had spoken at the company's conference and he had touted the company's
software products in promotional materials while he was employed in his previous job in
Maryland. Williams also unearthed emails
showing Joseph began contract talks with Performance Matters two weeks before he formally
took office in Nashville. What also struck Williams as odd was that despite the considerable
cost of the contract, district employees were
not required to use the software.
In addition to pushing Performance Matters, Williams reported, Joseph gave an
"inside track" to Discovery Education, a textbook and digital curriculum provider and another company he and his team had
ties to from their work in Maryland. With Joseph's backing, Discovery Education received an
$11.4 million contract to provide a new science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM)
program even though a smaller company came in with a
bid that was a fraction of what Discovery proposed.
By June 2018, Nashville school board member Amy Frogge was
questioning Joseph about possible connections these vendors might have to ERDI. A district
audit would confirm that ERDI's affiliated companies -- including Performance Matters,
Discovery Education, and six other companies -- had signed contracts totaling more than $17
million with the district since Joseph had been hired.
Frogge also came to realize that all these enterprises were connected to the firm who had
been instrumental in hiring Joseph -- Jim Huge and Associates.
"The search that brought Shawn Joseph to Nashville was clearly manipulated," Frogge told Our
Schools in an email, "and the school board was kept in the dark about Joseph's previous tenure
in Maryland and his relationships with vendor companies."
Frogge said some of the manipulation occurred when the search firm told school board members
that disputes among current board members -- over charter schools, school finances, and other
issues -- indicated the district was "'too dysfunctional' to hire top-level superintendents and
therefore needed to hire a less experienced candidate."
But
previous investigations of school leadership search firms conducted by Our Schools have
found companies like these frequently forego background checks of prospective candidates they
recommend, promote favored candidates regardless of their experience or track record, and push
board members to keep the entire search process, including the final candidates, confidential
from public scrutiny.
"Too often, national search firms are also driven by money-making motives and/or connections
with those seeking profit," Frogge contended. That conflict of interest is a concern not only
in Nashville but also in other districts where school leaders with deep ties to education
vendors and consultants have resulted in huge scandals that traumatized communities and cost
taxpayers millions.
In the Youngstown City School District in Ohio, CEO Krish Mohip
became mired in questions about his role as a paid consultant for ERDI while the district
had a $261,914 contract with a partner company of ERDI. Under calls for his resignation, Mohip
left before his contract was up.
Beaufort County School District in South Carolina became the
subject of an FBI investigation because of contracts with ERDI and 30 other companies
connected to the firm while superintendent Jeff Moss worked as a paid consultant for ERDI. He
resigned from the district two years before his contract was up.
In Pittsburgh, superintendent Anthony Hamlet drew
scrutiny when reporters found the district spent more than $14 million on dozens of no-bid
contracts to firms connected to ERDI at the same time Hamlet was serving as a paid consultant
with the company.
In Baltimore County, Maryland, Shaun Dallas Dance made national
headlines when he was convicted of perjury committed during his time as superintendent of
the district. Dance had concealed $4,600 he'd been paid by ERDI. After Dance participated in
confidential meetings with vendors at an ERDI conference, the district extended contracts from
companies connected to the firm.
Obviously, school board members could avoid these conflicts by avoiding leadership search
firms and consultants connected to ERDI. But that is easier said than done.
After Baltimore County's troubles with Dance, it hired
the independent firm Ray and Associates to conduct a search to find an interim leader. The
search resulted in six finalists, from which the board chose Verletta White. Shortly after she
took the job, the board's ethics review panel found she had violated financial disclosure rules
and "used the prestige of her office or public position for private gain" by accepting
compensation from ERDI.
Indeed, superintendent search firms
frequently fail to find conflicts of interest and other problems in the candidate
background checks they conduct. And some of these firms operate side businesses that also lead
to conflict of interest issues.
A Revolving Door of Business Deals Funded by Taxpayers
One of the largest superintendent search firms in the United States, Schaumburg,
Illinois-based Hazard, Young, and Attea (HYA), is part of
the ECRA Group , a consulting firm providing an array of services to schools.
ECRA claims to have worked with over 1,000 districts, but a close examination of how the
company worked with a number of school districts in Illinois reveals how the firm uses a
revolving-door business model in which its search service rotates administrators into and out
of leadership positions while the company uses those leadership connections to successfully
upsell districts into expensive long-term consulting contracts funded by taxpayers.
ECRA's business relationships with Oak Park Elementary District 97 in Illinois go back to at
least 2010 when it was
hired to help replace outgoing superintendent Constance Collins. With HYA's
help , the district
hired Albert Roberts. In 2013, during Roberts' tenure, school board minutes
show the district considered a plan to hire ECRA to analyze the district's achievement data
at a cost of $74,000 a year. The following year, the district
hired ECRA to produce an analysis of the achievement gap between white and nonwhite
students in the district. Board minutes from 2015
show the district continuing to work with ECRA.
When Roberts retired, District 97 used HYA again for a superintendent search that resulted
in hiring
Carol Kelley. Kelley currently appears in ECRA's marketing literature touting the firm's Strategic Dashboard, which
District 97 apparently employs.
Former superintendent Collins was
hired to lead Round Lake District 116, also in Illinois, just before HYA and ECRA acquired
the district's superintendent search and strategic planning contracts. Under her tenure, Round
Lake paid ECRA $75,918 for consulting services in
2016 ,
2017 , and 2018 .
Collins
retired from Round Lake in 2018, but, according to her LinkedIn page, she became an HYA
associate in 2017. She also serves on the advisory board of ECRA, according to her bio at a nonprofit for developing school
leaders.
Another Illinois district, Niles Township High School District 219, placed its
superintendent on administrative leave after it became known she was the daughter of the
president of ECRA, which had a contract with the district worth $149,419 and $120,389 in the
final two years of her tenure. (She claimed that relationship with ECRA
dated to before she was made superintendent, but she decided to resign anyway.)
Huntley Community School District 158, also in Illinois, had contractual arrangements with
ECRA dating to at least 2009 when
John Burkey was superintendent. When Burkey
resigned in 2017, District 158
hired HYA to find a new superintendent at a cost of $17,500. At the end of a hiring process
in which HYA kept all finalists
confidential , District 158 announced it had hired Scott Rowe. Under his leadership, District 158
spent $94,980.11 on ECRA in 2018
alone.
One more example in Illinois: Evanston/Skokie School District 65 has hired ECRA for a
variety of consulting services since at least 2010 when it paid the firm $22,737.50, according
to state records, to survey
the district's administrators. By 2013, Evanston/Skokie
considered ECRA a "long-standing partner" and hired
the firm to help pick its new superintendent. Outgoing superintendent Hardy Murphy also
recommended
the district hire the firm for teacher appraisal work.
Based on HYA's recommendations
, Evanston/Skokie
hired Paul Goren in 2014, and under his tenure, checks continued to flow to ECRA's
consulting business, including $129,855.92 in 2015 .
However, Goren's tenure was troubled and brief, and in 2019 he
resigned with a $100,000 severance package. A local reporter
noticed that unmentioned in the district's settlement statement was that under his
leadership "the district's own progress reports [showed] declines in test scores across all
groups of students and district losing ground against its own five-year targets."
ECRA's own leadership has also been embroiled in conflict of interest issues. Current ECRA
president Glenn "Max" McGee
resigned from his last superintendent job, in Palo Alto, California after an outside
investigation found the district had mishandled claims of sexual assault. With a payout of
roughly $150,000, McGee, on his way out the door,
recommended the district hire HYA to conduct the search for his replacement, just after he
had accepted the offer to become leader of ECRA. The district went with McGee's
recommendation.
When asked whether this relationship among McGee, ECRA, and the Palo Alto district was a
possible conflict of interest, McGee told Our Schools in a phone call that he "stayed out of
the search" to fill his old position. Of his replacement, Don Austin from nearby Palos Verdes
Peninsula Unified School District in California, McGee admitted being an acquaintance of "many
years."
Who's to Blame?
When controversies arise over superintendents and contracts with outside services, private
firms that are responsible for pushing these hiring and outsourcing decisions are
quick to blame school board members who signed off on the decisions. And critics of public
schools frequently
use these scandals to argue that democratically elected school boards are dysfunctional and
need to be scrapped for other governance structures.
These criticisms leave a lot of context out.
First, being a school board member is customarily a part-time job paying very little money.
And school board members are elected to serve as representatives of parents and voters, not to
be experts on school finance and administration.
"School board members, although often well intentioned, are sometimes too unqualified and
uninformed to exercise effective oversight of spending, and board members are not aware of the
personal relationships and personal interests that may be driving decisions by administrative
leaders," Nashville board member Frogge explained.
Also, there are multiple ways superintendents can keep board members in the dark about the
inner workings of contractor relationships and district operations.
"From the beginning, Joseph surrounded himself with those who promoted him, including
organizations he hired to 'train' the board," Frogge explained. "Joseph also prohibited all
district employees from speaking to school board members, which prevented board members from
recognizing leadership problems during the early days of his tenure. When board members finally
began to confront Joseph about problems, including disturbing financial irregularities and his
failure to follow board policy, Joseph lied to board members, exacted retribution from those
questioning him, and stirred up controversy to distract from the issues at hand."
That said, Frogge noted school boards have alternatives to using private search firms that
promote tainted candidates willing to feed the search firms' side businesses.
"School board members need to become better informed and more savvy about profit motives and
organizations that seek to influence their selection," she wrote. "School boards can instead
opt to hire a local school boards association (for example, the Tennessee School Boards
Association) or a local recruiter with a reputation for personal integrity to conduct a search.
They can also choose to hire from within."
How school boards decide to avoid conflicts of interest with school leaders and outside
consulting firms is "critical" according to Frogge because decisions that are driven by these
insiders "can lead to catastrophic outcomes for students and staff."
Among those negative outcomes are increased community acrimony, wasted education funds, and
career debacles for what could perhaps have been promising school leaders.
In the case of Joseph and Nashville, controversies with his leadership decisions strongly
divided
the city's black community, and taxpayers were
stuck with a $261,250 bill for buying out the rest of his contract. As a result of the
fallout, Joseph
lost his state teaching license, and he
vowed never to work in the state again.
In the meantime, HYA continues to win contracts for high-profile superintendent
searches, and ERDI's conferences bringing school leaders and vendors together continue to
sell out .
As S
Brian Wilson put it: "There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I
had been taught about "America" was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. "
Well, I still think the failure to anticipate a Houthi attack is suspicious.
Another "failure of imagination" like 9-11 that conveniently allowed the attack to
happen.
Even if the radar only points one way, they could've set up radars that pointed in other
directions. After all, the Houthi had already demonstrated their ability to strike targets
far from Yemen.
And the damage done is also suspicious. 17 targets hit by 10 long-range drones/cruise
missiles? And the high precision? USA+Saudis are saying the ONLY explanation is that Iran
participated in the attack. But there's another explanation: sabotage (or photoshop) that
increased the damage so that oil prices would go higher and fears of war with Iran would
distract everyone from the possibility that its really all about oil prices and Netanyahu's
election.
Self-inflicted damage after a major attack? That too was something we saw in 9-11 when
WTC7 was brought down.
PS Like many, my initial reaction was that this attack would be the justification for
war with Iran. But increased TENSIONS are probably enough for TPTB to achieve some very
desireable ojectives:
1. Election of Netanyahu
TINA!
2. Funding Trump's "Deal of the Century" for Palestinians Saudis will pay them to leave with the increased revenue from higher oil
prices
3. USA financial bailout Financial firms have tens of billions invested in fracking which is not profitable at
low oil prices
A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold
War and its dire consequences.
I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February,
after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in
Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police,
sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at
police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by
murder squads.
The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two
Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military
help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under
Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly
granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured
against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy
kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.
In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment
bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major
refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in
July 2014.
Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.
By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been
internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a
lesser extent Poland.
There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal
clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last
month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need
of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian
enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi
invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.
Flashpoint Syria
Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian
Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by
foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war
turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical
attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian
Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.
NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions
An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath,
England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50
personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in
the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)
Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to
the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous
brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles
were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are
easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.
Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired
in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that
Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that
render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we
can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has
returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly
what it means.
Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in
Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea
underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the
world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world
led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and
ASEAN.
Return to Moscow
In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well
beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers
like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com,
Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.
In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a
literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had
lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been
huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be
there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar
one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take
my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of
Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not
intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.
I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January
2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.
My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It
was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the
Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and
thought during the year.
I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I
happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three
independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and
authenticity.
Russophobia Becomes Entrenched
Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially
unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian
positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party
establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.
Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and
hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London
U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of
Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic
propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist
cover from October 2016 shows.
My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after
publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:
We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance
information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of
detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.
In the Thick of Information War
When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this
information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in
the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving
forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential
national security. I did not then know why, or how.
I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences
for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to
be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of
any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this
haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018
by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown
from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies
remain.
Truth, Trust and False Narratives
Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national
communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the
fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.
Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since
WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the
battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as
much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is
about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.
The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of
information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are
able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant
books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of
information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with
which to control their gullible populations.
The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter
in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda
narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and
Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the
Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy
ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell
tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But
because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.
We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world
that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information
control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to
generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the
three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.
People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the
armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to
be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career
prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral
issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for
people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were
expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:
Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the
non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books.
These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to
acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.
'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'
Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay
optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in
Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:
"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of
trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point,
many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."
Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough
public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.
The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted
voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks
in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.
" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able
to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens,
you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If
you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As
long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no
limit to the evils you can get away with."
The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of
hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough
clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the
lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible
false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.
Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for
the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with
false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in
Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.
It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent
people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone
print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse
and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements
about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?
We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and
SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate
on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian
social media sites.
Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is
used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story
was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President
Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.
The Skripals Gambit
The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted
Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans
returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.
How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical,
incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018
sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic
quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at
their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is
maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army
Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and
emergency treatment.
Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman
mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where
are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May
2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered
too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16
months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British
custody?
A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to
the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the
samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.
Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018
A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow
that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and
UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing
them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered
with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before
passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok,
which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high
volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez
lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure
rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.
Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.
'Boshirov and Petrov'
These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and
'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent
to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They
needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies
to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative
around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions.
British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole
British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games
based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.
The Douma False Narrative
I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely
alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came
close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of
Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.
The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons
against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims,
made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda
organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security
specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in
making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a
thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their
bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.
White Helmets
As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White
Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as
alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this
attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all
over the Western world.
Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from
his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a
fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his
testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.
In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report
from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the
air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole
in the roof.
I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often
they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if
they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute
them.
So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win
the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special
Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if
it were true. So, even, with MH17.
Managing Mass Opinion
This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically
directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies
provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed
malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.
So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington
and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same
establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the
science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way
that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media
messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in
order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts
enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.
Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct
Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington,
all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business,
and it works closely with the national security state.
Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by
the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they
hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the
activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative
(II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy
Corbyn.
We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation
networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK
government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel,
often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that
serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.
Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former
British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December
2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.
He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply
defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia.
He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under
attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to
'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.
Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of
warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the
issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third
dimension'.
He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.
We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being
recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism,
publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents
suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening
interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.
Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been
reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity
Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media
interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British
under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office
subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also
gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office
support in Britain's overseas embassies.
This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It
is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.
In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters
of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and
American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.
Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial
outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente;
and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West.
Do I have evidence for this? Yes.
It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my
sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with
[Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was
cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date;
that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return
to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of
them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited
to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or
institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the
ISAA.
My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published
in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation,
Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I
have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National
University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing
to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited
back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too
pro-Putin.
In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded
writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively
suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is
there.
This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order
to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to
put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence
laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their
careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next
promotion.
There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been
indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement
with Russia (or indeed, with China).
There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media,
including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given
an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like
last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by
Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.
The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified
in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after
the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor
of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré
dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio'
spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.
A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic
in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in
Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms
control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national
security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic
sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China
and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American
influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes
more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation
tool kit.
I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false
narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the
Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this
is how most Russians now see it too.
The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria
fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered
to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton,
who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018
and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates
Trump's foreign policy.
Self-Inflicted Wounds
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)
Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years –
self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me
list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds:
casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.
Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job
after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months
until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14
months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo.
Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign
chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.
Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an
invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable
Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly
lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos
and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that
people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial
wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as
a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S.
bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as
Russia is concerned .
Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under
way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been
other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial
rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.
False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed
at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of
audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis
from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor –
I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed
to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.
To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand
this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are
unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I
choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream
Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.
Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global
nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the
Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful
ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former
public servants and ex-military chiefs.
These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of
Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.
Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!
Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971,
and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to
Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.
Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58
Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the
narrative.
Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the
Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks
of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past
"mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then
scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with
details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a
version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a
scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The
government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of
which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous
government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national
security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.
The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long
time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket
playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely
ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.
When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.
Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a
voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal,
assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most
outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all
avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians
are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not
know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB
assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state
has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading
role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.
Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29
Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two
parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent
Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the
assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in
particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part
were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in
defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans.
The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from
Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian
mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state
institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the
Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and
confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey
were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution
and abduction of patriotic citizens began."
Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36
Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing
South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never
listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they
came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really
was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once
the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.
dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17
Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If
Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.
Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where
candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without
bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government
media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will
not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and
unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.
Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies.
Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as
Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd
think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into
the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia
prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.
John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18
judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which
utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the
case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the
mainstream media at all. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/
MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero
publicity.
I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left'
ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was
more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory
propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.
The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the
MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.
People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of
lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in
ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots
that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or
ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about
the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.
I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the
rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform
and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to
australistan.
Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21
Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population
by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his
administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his
article.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10
I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least
in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.
Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).
What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming
through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for
revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to
account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.
Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others
for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would
have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet
horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing
the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always
edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong
rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of
Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin
Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful
takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most
appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't
drop off their twigs disappointed.
This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate --
increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly
encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.
nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49
The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The
author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the
topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.
John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35
I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian
establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that
his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of
mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.
Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.
If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and
China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest
of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by
facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the
empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign
their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally
find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.
* * *
The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only
briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the
Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly
contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American
nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and
economic deep freeze.
While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the
enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and
sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help
their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked
their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West
shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door
again and the second cold war commenced.
* * *
The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It
enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total
dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.
Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a
truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their
eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their
adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of
the PetroDollar ponzi.
The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will
not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer
content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at
the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is
large enough to include their growing list of friends.
If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot
lucks.
John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11
Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.
Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33
Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble
Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone
??
Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58
WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN
An excellent article.
There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often
rely.
Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are
they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.
Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts
Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24
As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream
media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum.
Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history
(at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it
is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.
Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48
I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that
any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally
likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the
assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the
US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when
Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this
was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly
be true, or so we were told.
Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military
hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations
affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to
the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the
American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective
this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are
creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign
policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and
US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.
Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its
logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not
very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:
"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But
the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of
knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who
manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into
their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative.
They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei,
Martyanov)
Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the
US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.
John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15
The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days
of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia
and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging
China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed
enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic
Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.
Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will
consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and
quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is
preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians
have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge,
Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly
toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the
degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)
Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them
and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear
arsenal.
Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights
out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.
The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make
deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are
over.
Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).
Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36
Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01
Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech"
(e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically
elected" government) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and
have been for a long time.
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15
Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that
gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.
Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34
The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic
dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended
primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the
blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a
handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department,
FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved,
innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with
alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to
be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch
about what they are doing.
Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42
The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank
Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind".
– The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change
your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.
Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11
Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed
analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?
Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.
John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02
Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.
rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37
At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen
russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is-
a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not
prejudice.
If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary
of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on
it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal
poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's
fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26
As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.
Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46
Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most
important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to
tumble.
Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45
Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.
' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And
possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced
periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the
two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna,
to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One.
That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was
followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are
they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration
see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21
With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in
Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the
discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the
constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of
lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the
absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are
winning the propaganda war.
He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many
lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the
world.
Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine
is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine
Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia
propaganda. It's a true tell.
Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53
The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what
a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.
Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52
"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a
critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its
dissemination becomes self-sustaining."
This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years
late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color
revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power
throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was
imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing)
proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy
I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went
to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The
fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.
Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48
As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions,
like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my
book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive.
Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21
Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada,
coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism.
I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with
the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it).
And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in
distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.
Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44
This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate
history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.
Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17
Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have
concluded nonetheless.
Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10
Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative.
Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest
vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The
average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys
massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who
works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder-
OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC
controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.
Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48
?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world
from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative
subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals,
gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful
was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly
being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the
problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most
certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad,"
to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or
in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.
Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54
Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media
is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit
propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in
the West.
During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a
giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to
look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long
ago.
Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against
Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the
top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are
now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO
propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been
turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.
Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your
book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.
Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37
Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China,
precisely the same policies and forces are at work.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the
country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced
the end of the war
You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for
the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading.
The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing
but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state,
with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do
slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while
people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now.
Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.
Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08
Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't
yet read it.
The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to
CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.
Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52
I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy,
or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.
Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19
Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the
entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always
the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed
through our own self-immolation as a species.
Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54
As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should
do what Craig Murray has done start a website.
"... This is no coincidence. The DNC elite, a who's who of Wall Street donors and "party insiders," have chosen Elizabeth Warren as the safest insurance policy to Joe Biden. Warren has positioned herself as the safer version of progressivism in contradistinction to Bernie Sanders' full-fledged New Deal politics. ..."
"... In recent weeks, Elizabeth Warren has been putting smiles on the faces of the Democratic Party establishment. Her performance at the DNC's summer fundraiser in San Francisco in late August received widespread positive coverage from the corporate media. The New York Times , for example, reported that Warren has been sending private messages to Democratic Party insiders to let them know that she is more interested in leading a "revival" of the Democratic Party rather than a revolution. ..."
"... In other words, Elizabeth Warren is saying and doing all the right things to position herself as the DNC's choice for the presidential nomination should the Biden campaign continue to falter. ..."
"... The DNC is looking for a candidate who will oppose Trump but support the neoliberal and foreign policy consensus that exists in Washington. At first, Warren's mimicry of Bernie Sanders' talking points raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street. While some of those eyebrows remain raised, the DNC clearly prefers Warren's "revival" over Sanders' "political revolution." ..."
From forgetting former President Barack Obama's name to having your
wife ask voters to "swallow
a little bit" of his pro-corporate positions on healthcare, the oligarchs in control of the
two-party political system in the United States are well aware of Biden's struggles .
According to the Washington Times , Biden is losing the support from the corporate
media. The editorial
cited a study from Axios which concluded that of 100 media stories about the Biden
campaign that received the most attention on social media, 77 were negative in character. While
Biden consistently leads in the polls, the DNC elite has gone fishing for of an insurance
policy for Biden's flailing campaign.
Enter Elizabeth Warren. At first, the Massachusetts Senator seemed like a dark horse in the
race and a mere thorn in the side of Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris appeared to be the early DNC
favorite and her campaign has worked overtime to show its commitment to a neoliberal economic
and political agenda. However, Harris was stymied by Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's
thirty second run
down of her record as Defense Attorney and Attorney General for the state of California
during the second Democratic Party primary debate. Ever since, Harris has seen her stock
decline mightily
in the polls while Elizabeth Warren's polling numbers have increased dramatically.
This is no coincidence. The DNC elite, a who's who of Wall Street donors and "party
insiders," have chosen Elizabeth Warren as the safest insurance policy to Joe Biden. Warren has
positioned herself as the safer version of progressivism in contradistinction to Bernie
Sanders' full-fledged New Deal politics. As far back as late February of 2019, Warren was
deriding corporate "special interests" while signaling that she would not succumb to
"unilateral disarmament" in a general election against Trump by forgoing corporate
donations.
The progressivism of Elizabeth Warren was thus a malleable project with a history of
inconsistency, as evidenced by her constant flip-flopping on issues such as the privatization
of education in Massachusetts.
In recent weeks, Elizabeth Warren has been putting smiles on the faces of the Democratic
Party establishment. Her performance at the DNC's summer fundraiser in San Francisco in late
August received widespread positive coverage from the corporate media. The New York
Times , for example, reported that Warren has been
sending private messages to Democratic Party insiders to let them know that she is more
interested in leading a "revival" of the Democratic Party rather than a revolution.
An article
in The Atlantic provided snippet remarks from people like Don Fowler, described in the
piece as a former DNC-chair and "long-time Clinton-family loyalist," who called Warren "smart
as shit" for her inside-out approach to her political campaign. A more recent editorial in The
New York Times offered a glimpse into Warren's former big donor connections from her
2018 Senate campaign. According to the Times , Warren was able to transfer 10.4
million USD to her presidential campaign effort in part because of the generosity of the
very same corporate elite that she now condemns as holding too much influence over the
Democratic Party. NBC News further revealed that Elizabeth Warren has an open line of
communication with the much maligned but infamous Democratic Party establishment leader,
Hillary Clinton.
In other words, Elizabeth Warren is saying and doing all the right things to position
herself as the DNC's choice for the presidential nomination should the Biden campaign continue
to falter.
Donald Trump is guaranteed the nomination for the Republican Party ticket after
taking over the party in 2016 from defunct establishment figures such as Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush,
and Ted Cruz.
The DNC is looking for a candidate who will oppose Trump but support the
neoliberal and foreign policy consensus that exists in Washington. At first, Warren's mimicry
of Bernie Sanders' talking points raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street. While some of those
eyebrows remain raised, the DNC clearly prefers Warren's "revival" over Sanders' "political
revolution."
That's because Warren's campaign to "revive" the Democratic Party is bereft of political
principle. Whatever Sanders' political limitations as a "left" alternative to the
establishment, the Vermont Senator is by far more progressive than Warren. Warren voted for the
Trump Administration's recent
military budget in 2017 even after tens of billions of dollars were added by Congress to
the original proposal. During Israel's 2014 massacre of the Palestinians in Operation
Protective Edge, Warren claimed Israel had a
right to defend itself. Bernie Sanders offers a clear proposal for Medicare for All already
drafted in the Senate, while Elizabeth Warren believes that Medicare for All can be implemented
in
"many different ways." In CNN's Climate Town Hall, Warren opposed public control of utilities
while Sanders supported it. A deeper look at Elizabeth Warren reveals that she is more aligned
with the establishment than she wants the public to believe.
All of this is to say that the DNC is looking for the best-case scenario for its corporate
masters, which is the worst-case scenario for working people in the United States. The
principle goal of the DNC is to stop Bernie Sanders from getting anywhere near the nomination.
Prior to Warren becoming insurance policy for Joe Biden, the DNC hoped that the Massachusetts
Senator would split supporters of Bernie Sanders down the middle. This would lead either to a
clear path to the nomination for a handpicked candidate (Biden, Harris, fill in the blank) or
to a contested convention where the unelected but very wealthy
"superdelegates" would cast the deciding vote. Should Warren have turned out a lame duck,
the DNC could still rely on over a dozen candidates with careerist ambitions to force a
contested election at the DNC convention in Milwaukee.
Workers in the United States have no insurance policy when it comes to the 2020 presidential
election or any other election for that matter. Austerity, privatization, and super
exploitation is the law of the capitalist land in the USA. Sanders is attractive to many
workers in the U.S. because of his consistent articulation of an anti-austerity platform which
includes living wage employment, a Green New Deal to help provide that employment, and a solid
commitment to Medicare for All. But Sanders remains deeply loyal to the Democratic Party and
has stated firmly on several occasions on the campaign trail that he would support any
Democratic Party candidate should he lose the nomination. Sanders frames Donald Trump as the
most dangerous element in U.S. society even as his own party colludes to prevent him from
having a fair shot at the nomination. Sanders and his supporters must realize that Elizabeth
Warren is not a friend, but an opportunist who is more than willing to profit from their
demise. The best-case scenario for the working class is that wall to wall resistance to Sanders
will lead to a mass exodus from the party and open the door for an independent worker's party
to form amid the collapse of the DNC.
Pompeo is just MIC lobbyst who got position of the Secretary of State due to Trump
incompetence of pressure from donors like Adelson. Nothing good can come from this strange choice
of warmonger and neocon hawk, not that different from Hillary Clinton.
Notable quotes:
"... It may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region have gone from being an intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic vulnerability. ..."
"... The first priority was to deny the Iranian leadership resources. Previous administration taken a different approach. It said olly olly oxen free, here's all the money you can possibly stand to build out your terror campaign, to build your nuclear weapons system, to take nuclear physicists, all of the things that money can deliver – terror against Israel out of Hizballah and from Syria. Our – the first proposition for our campaign was to deny wealth and resources for the Iranian leadership, and it has been enormously successful in doing so. You can see it. Hizballah is passing the tin cup. ..."
It may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region have gone from being an
intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic vulnerability.
For hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, American power, as the Bolshevik adage goes,
cannot fail, it can only be failed. For many of his ilk, the superiority of American power
means the willingness to project it is the only thing needed to earn the capitulation of foes
and the only way America loses is if it chooses to relent. Donald Trump, however, watched
George W. Bush's presidency burn in the Iraq war and is unlikely to embrace the chaos of war
heading into an election year. President Trump would be wise to heed the lessons of the most
recent volatile security episode in the Persian Gulf region, especially as it pertains to his
administration's campaign against Tehran.
... ... ...
Without the basic ability to guard against even crude air assets, any notion of the United
States empowering its regional network to dictate terms to Iranian allies with military action
seems impractical. The credibility of U.S. anti-missile capabilities were
already in question . For Saudi Arabia and hawks inside the U.S. government, the notion
that a tribal force like the Houthis could reach into their territory and engage in this kind
of tactical action is militarily embarrassing and practically discrediting from a policy
standpoint.
...If it is conceivable that Iranian cruise missiles -- the newest and least tested section
of Iran's missile fleet -- flew across the militarized Persian Gulf and evaded both Saudi and
American sensors and air-defenses to hit an oil facility, then how much safer are U.S. forces
in the region?
...Add to this the survivability and precision that Pompeo is now attributing to Iranian
missiles and the conclusion very well may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf
region have gone from being an intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic
vulnerability.
... ... ...
Pompeo has been on a months-long media campaign promoting, among other
things, what he describes as the success of the "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran. But
Pompeo's primary argument for the success of the anti-Iran efforts centers on the narrative
that U.S. sanctions have severely damaged Iran's alliance network in the region. Consider the
way he framed
the issue to a right-wing talk show host in July:
The first priority was to deny the Iranian leadership resources. Previous administration
taken a different approach. It said olly olly oxen free, here's all the money you can possibly
stand to build out your terror campaign, to build your nuclear weapons system, to take nuclear
physicists, all of the things that money can deliver – terror against Israel out of
Hizballah and from Syria. Our – the first proposition for our campaign was to deny wealth
and resources for the Iranian leadership, and it has been enormously successful in doing so.
You can see it. Hizballah is passing the tin cup.
...The attack on the Saudi refiner disrupted Pompeo's public victory lap in a particularly
bright and striking way.
... ... ...
Simply put, Washington's hopes to stop Iran from supporting its allies by pressing the
Iranian economy is unlikely to work. Iran's support for its alliance network is largely
dismissed in Washington as a frivolous imperial project that Iran can simply choose to abandon.
But for Iran, its non-state allies are a core national-security issue and will, therefore, be
prioritized in budgetary considerations especially when tensions are high. Iran's support for
non-state actors, like Hezbollah, are also not financially intensive and therefore can continue
under sanctions.
Alireza Ahmadi is a researcher and analyst focused on U.S. foreign policy towards the
Middle East. His work has been published by the National
Interest ,
The
Hill and Al-Monitor
. Follow him on Twitter @AliAhmadi_Iran.
Casting itself once again as the world's judge, jury and executioner, US imperialism is
recklessly hurtling toward yet another war in the Middle East, with catastrophic
implications. This time, Washington has seized upon Saturday's attacks on Saudi installations
as its pretext for war against Iran.
The reaction of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to these attacks, which have cut the
kingdom's oil production by almost half and slashed global daily output by 6 percent, was as
noteworthy for its haste as for its peculiar wording.
"Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply," Pompeo
tweeted late Saturday, adding, "There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
This
image provided on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019, by the U.S. government and DigitalGlobe and
annotated by the source, shows damage to the infrastructure at Saudi Aramco's Abaqaiq oil
processing facility in Buqyaq, Saudi Arabia. (U.S. government/Digital Globe via AP)
The indictment of Iran for attacks that set off a series of fires which devastated two oil
facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia came without a shred of supporting evidence, outside of
the bald assertion that there was "no evidence" that they were launched from Yemen.
Yemen had to be discounted, according to the secretary of state's predatory logic, because
the Houthi rebels, who control most of the country, had claimed responsibility for the
attacks and had a clear motive -- given the kingdom's near-genocidal war against Yemen's
civilian population -- for carrying them out. The US mass media has by and large echoed
Pompeo's allegations as absolute truth. On Monday night, television news broadcasts quoted
unnamed intelligence sources, citing unspecified evidence, claiming Iranian responsibility
for the attacks. No doubt this "evidence" will prove just as compelling as that of the Gulf
of Tonkin in Vietnam and "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. These same media outlets have
made virtually no mention of Saudi crimes in Yemen.
For the last four and a half years, Saudi Arabia has waged a near-genocidal war against
Yemen, the Middle East's poorest country. The violence has claimed the lives of nearly
100,000 Yemenis outright -- the greatest share through a relentless bombing campaign against
civilian targets -- while pushing some 8 million more to the brink of starvation.
Washington is a direct accomplice in this bloodbath, providing the warplanes, bombs and
missiles used to carry it out, along with logistical support and, until the end of last year,
mid-air refueling that allowed Saudi bombers to carry out uninterrupted carnage. Meanwhile,
the US Navy has helped enforce a blockade that has starved Yemen of food and medicine.
If what the Yemeni Houthis say is true, that they sent a swarm of 10 weaponized drones to
attack the Saudi facilities, then the action was clearly an act of self-defense, far less
than proportionate to the slaughter inflicted by the Saudi regime against Yemen.
Meanwhile, Washington's new ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, repeated the
charges against Iran on Monday before a United Nations Security Council meeting on Yemen.
Providing no more proof than Pompeo did two days earlier, merely repeating the formulation
that "there is no evidence that the attacks came from Yemen," she described the damage to the
Saudi oil installations as "deeply troubling."
Like the government she represents, the UN ambassador -- the wife of billionaire Kentucky
coal baron Joe Craft and a top Republican donor -- clearly finds the spilt oil of the Saudi
monarchy far more upsetting than the spilt blood of tens of thousands of Yemeni men, women
and children.
On Saturday night, President Donald Trump made a call to Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman,
the kingdom's de facto ruler, offering his condolences and unqualified support to a man
exposed as a cold-blooded murderer. Bin Salman is responsible not only for the grisly
assassination and dismemberment of the Washington-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the
Saudi consulate in Istanbul nearly a year ago, but also the beheadings of at least 134 people
in just the first half of this year, 34 of them political activists slaughtered en masse on
April 23.
Trump subsequently announced that the US was "locked and loaded" to avenge Saudi oil with
military force. (This was a variation on his assertion in June that the Pentagon had been
"cocked and loaded" when he came, by his own account, within 10 minutes of launching
devastating attacks on Iran after it shot down an unmanned US spy drone over its
territory.)
If there is, as Washington claims, "no evidence" that the attacks were launched from
Yemen, one could, with equal if not greater justification, observe that there is likewise "no
evidence" that they were not launched by the US itself, or by its principal regional ally,
Israel.
If one proceeds from the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono? or "Who benefits?",
Tehran is the least likely suspect. There is clearly more to Washington's rush to judgment
than meets the eye.
The attack on the Saudi oil facilities provides a casus belli desired by a major
section of the US ruling oligarchy and its military and intelligence apparatus, which is
determined to prosecute a war for regime change in Iran. Such a war would be the latest
installment in Washington's protracted drive to reverse by military means the decline of US
imperialism's global hegemony, in particular by claiming unfettered US control over the
world's energy reserves and the power to deny them to its rivals.
The thinking within these layers was expressed in an editorial published Monday by the
Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of US finance capital. The Journal
warned that Iran was "probing Mr. Trump as much as the Saudis." It continued, "They are
testing his resolve to carry out his 'maximum pressure' campaign, and they sense weakness."
It pointed disapprovingly to Trump's failure to launch airstrikes in June following the
downing of the US drone.
The Journal approvingly cited calls by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for
bombing Iranian oil refineries in order to "break the regime's back" and suggested that Trump
"apologize to John Bolton, who warned repeatedly that Iran would take advantage of perceived
weakness in the White House." Bolton, a long-time advocate of bombing Iran, resigned as
Trump's national security adviser last week, reportedly over differences on policy toward
Tehran.
The attack on the Saudi oil facilities also provides leverage for Washington in corralling
the Western European powers -- the UK, France and Germany -- behind US war aims. Signatories
to the Iranian nuclear accord that the Trump administration renounced, they have made feeble
gestures toward countering Washington's "maximum pressure" sanctions regime in an attempt to
salvage their own imperialist interests. While thus far failing to endorse US charges of
Iranian responsibility, they could, by means of the attack on Saudi Arabia, be swung behind
the US drive to war.
Israel and its beleaguered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also have ample motive to
stage a military action aimed at provoking war with Iran. On the eve of Tuesday's Israeli
election, the threat of a major war with Iran serves the political interests of Netanyahu,
whose political fortunes are inextricably tied to the escalation of military conflict in the
Middle East. The Israeli state, moreover, had become increasingly concerned over an apparent
cooling of the appetite of the ruling monarchies in both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates for a confrontation with Iran.
Recent drone strikes against Shia militias in Iraq that had allegedly received Iranian
weapons were, according to a report by the web site Middle East Eye, staged by Israeli drones
operating out of bases controlled by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the main
US proxy force in Syria. A similar covert US-Israeli collaboration could easily have produced
the attacks on the Saudi oil installations.
Whatever the exact circumstances of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, they are
being exploited for the purpose of dragging the American people and all of humanity into a
war that can rapidly escalate into a regionwide and even global conflagration.
US strikes against Iran carried out under the pretext of retaliation for the attacks on
Saudi Arabia can trigger Iranian counterstrikes, sending US warships to the bottom of the
Persian Gulf and wreaking havoc on American military bases throughout the region.
The prospect of thousands of US soldiers and sailors dying as a result of Washington's
conspiracies and aggression carries with it the threat of the US government assuming
emergency powers and implementing police-state measures in the US itself in the name of
"national security."
This would, by no means, be an unintended consequence. The buildup to war is driven in
large measure by the escalation of social tensions and class struggle within the United
States itself, which has found fresh expression in the strike by 46,000 autoworkers against
General Motors. There is a powerful incentive for the US ruling class to direct these
tensions outward in the eruption of military conflict, while creating the pretext for mass
repression.
The threat of a US assault on Iran paving the way to a third world war must be answered
through a politically conscious and independent intervention of the working class to put an
end to imperialism and reorganize society on socialist foundations.
gjohnsit on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 3:10pm Remember in 2002 when the neocons in Washington
told us that we had to attack Iraq because of 9/11, eventhough Iraq had nothing to do with
it?
So now Iran is being blamed for the attack on Saudi oil fields, and
anonymous warmongers claim that they have proof.
The United States has identified the exact locations in Iran from which a combination of more
than 20 drones and cruise missiles were launched against Saudi oil facilities over the
weekend, a senior U.S. official told CBS News national security correspondent David Martin on
Tuesday. The official said the locations are in southern Iran, at the northern end of the
Persian Gulf.
What a coincidence! That also happens to be around Iran's major oil fields.
What's more, the Saudi air defenses would have stopped it if it came from Yemen.
Saudi Arabia's air defenses have been aimed south for months, to protect against missile
attacks launched by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, so they were useless against the
missiles and drones coming in from the north, the official told Martin.
Let's put a pin in that for now.
Washington immediately dismissed the Houthi's claim of responsibility for the attack. Why?
Because the Houthis don't have the
knowledge or the means to carry it out.
But U.S. officials have cast doubt on the Houthis’ claim, arguing that the
sophisticated nature of the attack suggested that it was beyond the capabilities of the rebel
group.
Analysts say this is what the Houthis appear to have used to hit the Abha International
Airport in southern Saudi Arabia a few months ago. But the Quds 1 lacks the range to get from
northern Yemen to the oil installations in Saudi Arabia.
The range, scale and precision of the latest attack — including the successful
penetration of Saudi air defenses and the avoidance of obstacles like power lines and
communication towers — far exceeds anything the Houthis have ever done.
So it's all wrapped up. The Houthis aren't capable of doing it, and we have proof that Iran
did it. We just can't show it to you.
It makes a good story if you have no long-term memory.
Because
this happened less than a month ago.
A drone attack launched by Yemen’s Houthi group on an oilfield in eastern Saudi Arabia
on Saturday caused a fire at a gas plant but had no impact on oil production, state-run oil
company Saudi Aramco said.
A Houthi military spokesman said earlier that the group had targeted the Shaybah oilfield
with 10 drones, in what he said was the “biggest attack in the depths” of the
kingdom, the world’s top oil exporter, by the Iran-aligned group.
Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih described Shaybah as a “vital
facility”.
That oilfield is 900 kilometres away from Yemen.
Literally everything about this Houthi attack is the same as Saturday's attack, except for
fewer explosions. So what the fuck is the NY Times talking about?
To make this even more interesting, I happened upon
this report by the UAE following the Houthi attack from last month.
The report also reveals critical Saudi defence weaknesses to the weaponised drones used by
the Houthis.
It reports that from January to May there were 155 such attacks against Saudi targets in
Yemen and throughout the Gulf, a much higher figure than previously admitted.
“The attack on the Lahj Military Base demonstrates a weakness in Saudi air defences
and the lack of capacity in electronic war if we take into account that these drones are
basic and are not launched on tarmac,” the report says.
“Air defences such as the Patriot are not capable of spotting these drones because
the systems are designed to intercept long and medium range Scud missiles.”
Najran airport has been hit repeatedly by Houthi drones despite being protected by a
Patriot battery, the report reveals.
155 drone attacks? U.S. Patriot missiles unable to detect and stop them?
Why that sounds a lot different than what we are being told.
Recall that the Houthis had brought
down a U.S. drone just a few weeks ago. That was the second U.S. drone they shot down just
this summer.
Recall that the Houthis have been
hitting Riyadh with missiles for over a year.
All the evidence points to the Houthis being more than capable of not just being responsible
for this attack, but for repeating this attack in a matter of weeks Mark F. McCarty
and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on board
the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable
evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do that.
Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world, the
last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.
We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those
drones, and it looks like we can't do that.
If we had proof it was Iran we would have shown it to someone by now.
Aren't we monitoring the airspace around Iran?
And what is Iran's motivation?
It's not worth the risk for Iran if they were caught.
OTOH, if Iran gives the weapons to the Houthis...that makes a Hell of a lot more
sense.
and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on
board the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally
verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do
that.
Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world,
the last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.
"... Ms. Warren described Washington as utterly compromised by the influence of corporations and the extremely wealthy, and laid out a detailed plan for cleansing it. ..."
"... "Corruption has put our planet at risk, corruption has broken our economy and corruption is breaking our democracy," Ms. Warren said Monday evening. "I know what's broken, I've got a plan to fix it and that's why I'm running for president of the United States." ..."
"... Their version of populism, which Mr. Sanders pioneered but did not bring to fruition when he challenged Hillary Clinton in 2016, is about attacking concentrated wealth and economic power and breaking its influence over government. Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, effectively tied for second place in their party's primary, both describe the country's political institutions as rotten and vow to make vast changes to the economy ..."
Warren and Trump Speeches Attack Corruption,
but Two Different Kinds https://nyti.ms/2IaKMVQ
NYT - Alexander Burns - September 17
In New York, Senator Elizabeth Warren described a government compromised by the influence
of the wealthy. President Trump, in New Mexico, denounced a "failed liberal
establishment."
Senator Elizabeth Warren stood beneath a marble arch in New York City, telling a crowd of
thousands that she would lead a movement to purge the government of corruption. Not far from
the site of a historic industrial disaster, Ms. Warren described Washington as utterly
compromised by the influence of corporations and the extremely wealthy, and laid out a
detailed plan for cleansing it.
"Corruption has put our planet at risk, corruption has broken our economy and
corruption is breaking our democracy," Ms. Warren said Monday evening. "I know what's broken,
I've got a plan to fix it and that's why I'm running for president of the United
States."
Only a few hours later, on a stage outside Albuquerque, President Trump took aim at a
different phenomenon that he also described as corruption. Before his own roaring crowd, Mr.
Trump cast himself as a bulwark against the power not of corporations but of a "failed
liberal establishment" that he described as attacking the country's sovereignty and cultural
heritage.
"We're battling against the corrupt establishment of the past," Mr. Trump said, warning in
grim language: "They want to erase American history, crush religious liberty, indoctrinate
our students with left-wing ideology."
The two back-to-back addresses laid out the competing versions of populism that could come
to define the presidential campaign. From the right, there is the strain Mr. Trump brought to
maturity in 2016, combining the longstanding grievances of the white working class with a
newer, darker angst about immigration and cultural change. And on the left, there is a vastly
different populist wave still gaining strength, defined in economic terms by Ms. Warren,
Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The messages underlined the possibility that the 2020 election could be the first in a
generation to be fought without an ally of either party's centrist establishment on the
ballot. While it is by no means certain that Ms. Warren will emerge as the Democratic
nominee, two of her party's top three candidates -- Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders -- are
trumpeting themes of economic inequality and promises of sweeping political and social
reform.
Their version of populism, which Mr. Sanders pioneered but did not bring to fruition
when he challenged Hillary Clinton in 2016, is about attacking concentrated wealth and
economic power and breaking its influence over government. Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders,
effectively tied for second place in their party's primary, both describe the country's
political institutions as rotten and vow to make vast changes to the economy . ...
Let's hope the Sanders campaign does not play this card.
"Senator Professor Warren continues to play error-free baseball in this here presidential
campaign. Not only does she schedule a certified Big Speech in Washington Square Park in New
York on Monday night to talk about the contributions of women to the labor movement not far
from the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, but also, in the afternoon, she scoops an
important endorsement across town. From The New York Times:
'The party endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during the last presidential cycle,
at which time he described Working Families as "the closest thing" to "my vision of
democratic socialism." The group's endorsement of Ms. Warren on Monday, one of the few by a
prominent progressive organization this early in the primary, is sure to turn heads among
left-leaning Democrats who are desperate to defeat the current front-runner, Mr. Biden, in a
primary election where their party's ideological future is at stake.
Mr. Mitchell brushed off the possibility that the group's endorsement would be seen as a
sign of a splintering of the progressive left. The vote among "tens of thousands" of party
members resulted in a commanding majority for Ms. Warren, a party spokesman said; she
received more than 60 percent of the votes on the first ballot.'
The Sanders camp is already raising holy hell. They will now position SPW as a tool of her
corporate masters. (That's been going on for a while now among some of the more enthusiastic
adherents of the Sanders campaign. My guess is that it will become more general now.) The WFP
endorsement is an important and clarifying one. If there is a liberal lane, there's some
daylight open now."
"... I do like the author's take on the importance of corporations' fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, though. There WAS a time when a company's first priority was customer satisfaction. The moment they became corporations, however, customers went out the window in favor of the shareholders. ..."
Go to the section of Warren's website entitled
"Plans" and at the time of this writing you'll have a choice between a staggering 43 links.
Many of the plans could hugely impact our economy, but one stands above the rest in its
potential to overhaul our commercia landscape. Warren calls the reforms she envisions to
corporate mandates and governance
"accountable capitalism."
Corporations sometimes do bad things, and Warren's plan might stop some of them.
So just what is accountable capitalism? It was originally a bill proposed by Senator Warren
last year. In a fawning write-up in Vox
, Matthew Yglesias inadvertently exposed the idea's flimsy intellectual foundation:
Warren's plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of
personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.
... ... ...
Warren's plan requires corporations valued at over $1 billion to obtain a special federal
charter. This charter exposes corporations to regulation from a new Office of United States
Corporations that "tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant
stakeholders -- shareholders, but also employees, customers, and the community within which the
company operates -- when making decisions."
... ... ...
Warren has spent much of her career crusading against the harmful and unjust cozy
relationships between Wall Street and government, often to her credit. It's curious that
someone with such expertise in the matter doesn't seem at all concerned that this new
"accountability" would multiply the number of meetings, phone calls, and emails between senior
regulators and the titans of the private sector.
These billion-dollar corporations already employ armies of lawyers and accountants to
navigate regulatory minefields and turn them into weapons against their smaller competitors.
Does Warren believe this practice will stop overnight?
If most rent-seeking were a matter of nefarious corporate executives buying off weak or
greedy officials, we could just elect better people. The fact that this problem persists over
decades is indicative of a more subtle process. Rent-seeking is an inevitable systemic feature
in a network with thousands of contact points between business and government.
She had her chance in the '08 credit crash when she took on Wall Street & The
Banksters!
She ended up filling the Banksters & 1%'ers pockets with billions of Tarp funds some
of which were donated to her campaign while enacting competition killing Dodd Frank
compliance laws! No one was ever charged or convicted for the $9Trillion debacle!
I recall Barry the magical ***** had similar plans that disappeared the moment of his
coronation/deification. Campaign plans are like that: fictional lies that vanish like
magic.
I do like the author's take on the importance of corporations' fiduciary
responsibility to shareholders, though. There WAS a time when a company's first priority was
customer satisfaction. The moment they became corporations, however, customers went out the
window in favor of the shareholders.
These days, thanks to algos, things like revenue and performance don't even seem to matter
to stock valuation anymore, only buybacks and options seem to keep prices up.
The problem of corporation lack of empathy is not caused by capitalism, it is caused by
the lack of moral values of the people running the corporation. What is needed is a moral
framework within which to raise our young... Religion? Yes! correct answer.
I think the author is too generous with Warren's intentions. She pretends she cares, and
this is her misguided effort to "help". I don't think that's true.
Look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It, too, sounds like it's about
"helping" people. Warren proposed the whole thing, and wrote much of the legislation.
Its real purpose, if you look at its actions (which, I remind you, speak louder than
words) is to extort money from large companies in order to fund left-wing activist groups. In
nearly all its settlements, the CFPB offers companies the option to "donate" money to these
third-party groups in lieu of larger fines and penalties. They've diverted billions of
dollars to activist groups. Controlling the money allows them to control the groups, and
these groups can exert all kinds of pressure, usually in ways that would be illegal, if done
directly by the government.
It's the equivalent of having the government fund paramilitary groups or third party
propaganda.
Warren would establish this new "Office of United States Corporations" to extort even more
money, diverted to third parties to use to destroy people, companies, and anything else she'd
like to target but cannot target directly through government because of our pesky
Constitution.
She's an aspiring totalitarian dictator, using clever language and 21st century tools.
Don't pretend, for a moment, that she's interested in "helping" anyone - she'd happily kill
as many people as Hitler or Stalin ever did, if she had the chance.
Iran Rejects US Accusation It Is Behind
Saudi Attacks https://nyti.ms/30iNte7
NYT - Michael Wolgelenter - September 15
Iran on Sunday forcefully rejected charges by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it was
responsible for drone attacks that caused serious damage to two crucial Saudi Arabian oil
installations, with the foreign minister dismissing the remarks as "max deceit."
The attacks on Saturday, which hold the potential to disrupt global oil supplies, were
claimed by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Mr. Pompeo said that Iran had launched "an unprecedented
attack on the world's oil supply," although he did not offer any evidence and stopped short
of saying that Iran had carried out the missile strikes.
The Houthis are part of a complex regional dynamic in the Middle East, receiving support
from Iran while the Saudis, Tehran's chief rival for supremacy in the region and the leader
of a coalition that is fighting the Houthis in Yemen, are aligned with the United States.
Seyed Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, castigated the Saudis
for their role in the war in Yemen, where the Saudis have directed airstrikes that have
caused heavy civilian casualties and exacerbated a humanitarian crisis. He also ridiculed Mr.
Pompeo's comments.
The semiofficial Fars news agency reported on its English-language website that Mr.
Mousavi described Mr. Pompeo's allegations as "blind and fruitless remarks" that were
"meaningless" in a diplomatic context.
Saudi Arabia has yet to publicly accuse Iran of involvement in the attack. On Sunday, its
Foreign Ministry urged international action to preserve the world oil supply in response to
the attack, but it said nothing about assigning blame or striking back.
The developments come at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and the United States,
which have mounted since President Trump pulled out of the 2015 accord in which Iran agreed
with the West to restrict its nuclear program. Since the American withdrawal, Iran has
gradually pulled away from its some obligations under the agreement. ...
... "US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will
lead to military victory," Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter. "Blaming Iran won't end disaster.
Accepting our April '15 proposal to end war & begin talks may.
The attack on Saturday, which the Houthis said involved 10 drones, represented the rebels'
most serious strike since Saudi Arabia inserted itself into the conflict in Yemen four years
ago. That the rebels could cause such extensive damage to such a crucial part of the global
economy astonished some observers. ...
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
"... Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in fact have been a missile strike ..."
"... But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's? ..."
"... Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed. ..."
"... In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu. ..."
"... That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS Liberty. ..."
"... Israel has the means, plus the motive (Bib's reelection), and might have taken the opportunity to attribute the attack to Iran and force Trump's hand. ..."
"... I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess. ..."
"... There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran and the United States. ..."
"... Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions. ..."
"... I do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone, neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any better. ..."
"... However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see. ..."
"... It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ (dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded" ..."
"... The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran but because they were brutalized for almost a century. ..."
"... One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi . According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on going attacks and the IPO proceeds? ..."
"... We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability. Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors. ..."
"... In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints behind - at least based on recent events. ..."
"... Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar soon to prove they are responsible. ..."
"... israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things. ..."
"... ''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup. And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day. ..."
"... And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE, and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment. ..."
"... Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made sense. We are so messed up. ..."
"... Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. ..."
"... It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing: ..."
"... "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said "valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch (humint or cyber component to one attack vector). ..."
"... It cries out "sure, it's bad, but it is reversible." ..."
"... Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the curtailing of Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10 billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be strong action against the rogues. ..."
"... Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a UN investigation into the source of the attacks. ..."
"... "The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government coalition. ..."
What made this attack different from other recorded Houthi drone attacks was not only the
unprecedented amount of material damage caused but also lingering doubt about the nature and
the attribution of the attack. First,
a video allegedly showing flying objects entering Kuwaiti airspace led to speculation that
like a
previous "Houthi" drone attack this strike might actually have originated in Iraq or even
Iran. While the video remains unverified, the fact that the Kuwaiti government
launched a probe into the issue lends some credence to the idea that something might have
happened over Kuwait that day. Speculation about the origins of the attack was further fueled
by a tweet
by Mike Pompeo in which he claimed that there was no evidence the attacks came from
Yemen.
Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in
fact have been a missile strike. Previous Houthi drone strikes against oil facilities tended to
result in quite limited damage which could be an indication that a different weapons system was
used this time. Indeed, Aramco
came to the conclusion that its facilities were attacked by missiles. Even more curious,
several pictures began to emerge on social media purportedly showing the wreckage of a missile
in the Saudi desert. While the images appear real, neither the date the photos were taken nor
their location can be verified.
Social media users quickly claimed the images showed a crashed
Iranian-made Soumar cruise missile. The Soumar and its updated version, the Hoveyzeh, are
Iran's attempts at reverse-engineering the Soviet-designed KH-55 cruise missile, several of
which the country
illegally imported from Ukraine in the early 2000s . Others claimed it was the Quds 1, a
recently unveiled Houthi cruise missile often claimed to be a rebranded Soumar."
armscontrolwonl
---------------
TTG raised the issue of whether or not this wave of strikes was done by UAVs or cruise
missiles. IMO this cruise missile could be built in Yemen with Iranian assistance. I am very
interested in the question of what the actual vector of the attacks was in this case. pl
The accuracy of the strikes in the spherical pressurized gas storage containers all being in
the same place relative to each target is the place to start for those who, unlike me, are
capable of analyzing these things.
But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will
it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's?
Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's
Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a
blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed.
In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection
tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of
an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before
tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu.
That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were
proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS
Liberty.
"The Israeli military is armed with the latest fast jets and precision weaponry, yet it has
turned to its fleet of drones to hit targets in Iraq. Deniability has played a big factor
– the ability of drones to elude radar and therefore keep targets guessing about who
actually bombed them is playing well for Israeli leaders who are trying to prevent an
increasingly lethal shadow war with Iran from developing into an open conflict."
The Samad 3 is laden with explosives that allow it to detonate a shaped charge which
explodes downwards towards its target. Footage provided to MintPress by Yemen's Operations
Command Center shows the Samad landing on an asphalt runway, confirming that the drone is
now capable of conducting operations and then returning to base.
There is a huge sea water desalination plant not far away that provides all the treated water
via pipeline for injection into the oil reservoirs to improve recovery of oil. Target that
and not only have you already impacted the processing of the oil produced but would then
impact the total volume of oil available for processing.
I can see no happy ending short of
negotiation between interested parties. MBZ looks to have already reached that conclusion in
respect of the UAE. what will be the self preservation response for the House of Saud
Could the Committee speculate on possible 'steps of retaliation' operating, for theoretical
purposes, at the moment, on the assumption that regardless of where the 'bullets' were fired
from, or from what 'gun' they were fired, Iran paid for deed. What steps are open for action?
I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between
Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess.
There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran
and the United States.
Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions.
I
do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone,
neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be
meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani
has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change
if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any
better.
With all due respect, I think one of us fails to grasp the true nature of Trump. If he puts
his mind to it, and thinks it will benefit him, nobody, not Bolton, not Pompeo, not the whole
Neocon cabal, Israeli govt, the present one or the next one, will stop him if he is President
and alive. He will do what is best for Trump.
And trust has nothing to do with this. Why in the hell should I trust Iran? Hell, why
should I trust the UK? I trust that people and nations have interests. That's all I trust.
But that does mean I could not reach a deal with them. Now, as to whether that deals
holds...that is another question. However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and
fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to
bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see.
Babak, I value your input here. However, I hope you are wrong and that a meeting or meetings
(substantive or not) will start as soon as the dealbreaker is out of office, and the
sanctions are called off. But I would never wish you an early death. May you live a hundred years.
Thank you very kindly.
I would like to ask the following questions:
Will the United States restore sovereign immunity to Iran?
Will the United States Congress rescind all the laws against Iran that form the basis of
economic war against Iran?
Will the United States rescind the sanctions against Ayatollah Khamenei, Dr. Zarif,
General Soleimani, etc., etc. etc.?
Will the Protestant Christians in the United States ever tire of their unrequited love for
all things Old Testament?
In my opinion, the answer to all of these are "no". Unfortunately, even if a man with the caliber of an FDR or a Nixon is elected to the US
Presidency, he will not be able to accomplish much because of the difficulty, nay the
impossibility, of untangling the rules and regulations that US has woven against Iran.
In my opinion, all of that was predicated on the strategic defeat of Iran and her
surrender.
If I WERE ANSWERING. I got some demands of my own..but we can put them aside for the moment.
In general, I would be inclined to respond: Yes, to the "sovereign immunity" question.
Certainly. Regarding "economic warfare", you would have to give me your legal definition of
such a broad phrase, but in principle, yes. Whole heartedly yes. Sanctions against Iran, and
it individuals officers? Yes, absolutely. Sick of sanctions, in general. It is not in my
power to answer the "unrequited love" issue, but I do solemnly state that I would agree to
stop laughing--in public, anyway, at the question. Wanna meet?
Nassim Nicolaas Taleb, author of "Black Swan":
"SAUDI FIELDS It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ
(dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like
sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded"
The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite
inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran
but because they were brutalized for almost a century.
Why would Iran have done it? Just to show they can or to provoke a attack on Iran?
One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi
. According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed
oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is
talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on
going attacks and the IPO proceeds?
Only other beneficiary would be Israel if the attack actually does and likely has killed
any Trump-Iran meeting.
Yemenis claimed credit for it, Iran and Iraq said they didn't do it. First word out of US
mouth is Iran did it. The mouth I am least likely to believe is the US. I remember Iraq has
WMDs propaganda....and those it came from.
Oh well, if Iran says they did not do it.......the US govt lies. The Iranian govt lies, the
Saudis surely lie. This is not about innocents. That search is for children and mighty young
ones at that.
The Quds-1 cruise missile is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). The remotely piloted aerial
vehicles, which are more commonly referred to as drones are also UAVs. The difference is in
the degree of autonomy in flight control. On board autonomous flight control negates the need
for LOS radio or satellite communications with the cruise missile. Cruise missiles, with
their autonomous control, were always characterized by their high degree of accuracy.
I've
started looking a little closer at the Arduino/RasberryPi and model aircraft hobbyist groups.
With the availability of affordable microcontrollers and sensors, along with the massive
library of open source software, I am convinced a hobbyist could put together a guidance
system in his garage workshop capable of doing what the Quds-1 just did in SA. I also agree
with Colonel Lang that an airframe like the Quds-1 could easily be built in war-torn Yemen. A
cave would make an outstanding workshop.
Even if Iran exported dual use components or even blue prints; it should be counted as part
of the unfortunate world weapons market & wouldn't be illegal.
Your point TTG was nicely illustrated in b's video of the Russian guy building in his
workshopa turbofan engine that flew . Providing there is a set of plans it can be constructed
and it only has to have a one time reliability.
Evidence for what delivered the strike will be found within the complex and there will be a
lot of skills on the ground looking for those answers. The projectiles that struck the
spheres looked to have had penetrating qualities rather than high explosive, putting a hole
in a pressure vessel is sufficient to destroy its usefulness. I would be interested to know
if the projectiles that struck the train were explosive to maximise damage there. Do we need
to be considering what could deliver multiple targeted projectiles or were there simply
multiple independent units or some combination as there were more strikes logged over two
target complexes than the ten delivery platforms mentioned in the Al Ansar press release. Was
there a flight controller and if so where were they located also comes to mind.
There is also the TJ200 built bij Polaris from Brazil with the following description::
"Turbine TJ200:
TJ200 was specially designed to be used in either small cruise missiles or small high
performance UAVs. The most important advantage of TJ200 engine is small diameter and a
relatively low SFC (Specific Fuel Consumption) when compared to other engines of the same
thrust, what makes TJ200 perfect to be used in long range small missiles."
http://www.polaristec.com.br/products.html
That's a pretty specific description. So there are a number of COTS engines out there.
I'd have more confidence in the reporting if I could match it up better with what I can see
in Google Maps/Earth.
The only two satellite pictures I've seen of "burning oil plants" disticntly show a large
plume of black smoke centered a little ways away from the actual refinery area, in some kind
of rectangular area outside the actual "plant". Are those wellheads burning? or adjacent
underground storage? or what?
And the pictured of a burning plant labeled "Haradh Gas Plant" is actually (according to
Google Maps & my eyeballs) the Hawiyah Gas Plant, about 60 miles NNE of Haradh.
In Google Maps/Earth, the Abqaiq facility is on the East side of the city/town of Buquaiq,
and the details match the recent pix. The plume lines up with an empty square patch of desert
at the end of a pipeline running SSE out of the plant.
I've looked all around Khurais, and haven't found anything which could possibly be the
"Oil/Gas Infrastructure at Khurais", as the pictures of the damaged facility there are
labeled.
Elkern, I was referring to the pictures of the cruise missile parts in the sand. Seems to me
they are old from previous attacks.
As far as I can tell the pics of damage at Buqaiq and Khurais are valid. With the
exception of the eleven spherical tanks, which I believe were NOT hit. But I've been wrong
before and am no expert on imagery analysis.
We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability.
Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm
not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors.
The Houthis are not an Iranian "proxy" and I highly doubt they would accept responsibility
for something they didn't do.
Moon of Alabama links some photos and has discussion that suggests very high precision
5-10 m. That is not easily achievable with commercial GPS absent a lot of additional
correction hardware. On the other hand, drones can easily do so. Further, it would be
negligent for SA not to have GPS jamming around such facilities.
In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that
Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It
seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints
behind - at least based on recent events.
Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off
all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them
inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar
soon to prove they are responsible.
imo, the saudi's and washington are going to have to take one for the team. the team being
the global oil based world economy and all the notional value FOR THE present ONLY oil
derivatives and interest rate derivatives burdening the western banking system.... think the
insolvent deutsche bank et al.
a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran
which both russia and china can not.. will not allow to die.
israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for
all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion
THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has
exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things.
i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if
israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations
israel is viewed as responsible for.
''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel
were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is
viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup.
And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day.
Only one tank appears to have minor sooting or scorching. As though they were emptied after
an initial strike then targeted in a second strike, but no reports of a second strike.
In the sat pic showing targets in red boxes, top square, the target appears to be smaller
spheres which do look darkened.
Several correspondents here, including Adrestia and b, seem to lack faith in an autonomous
navigation and terminal guidance system for these cruise missiles. They do not need a radio
or cell phone communication link. This could have been even without a GPS signal. Given that
the strikes appear to come from the west, the smartest route would be to fly north to the
pipelines and then east to the targets. Once the missiles are close to the target either a
visual terminal guidance system could take over or the targets are marked and the missiles'
terminal guidance systems just home in on the marked targets. The marks could be laser
illumination, small IR strobes or offset targeting devices. These offset targeting devices
are emplaced with the exact azimuth and distance to the desired target programmed into the
missiles' terminal guidance system. As I said before, we did this in the early 80s. In the
90s, I used the IR strobes. These were tiny lights snapped to the top of a 9V battery. You
could carry a dozen in your pocket. I personally like the idea of emplacing small IR strobes
on target or a set distance and azimuth from the target. The missiles could home on a spot
say due east and 100 meters from the strobe. I'm sure there are other methods I haven't
thought of yet. My educated guess is that this strike was well thought out with both
intelligence and operational support on and near the target site. Anyone who thinks the
Houthi and their Yemeni allies are incapable of planning and executing this is magnificently
ignorant.
GPS is not accurate enough for the last 10-30 feet. Another possiblity that doesn't need
any human terminal guidance could be a creative use of sensors.
Using CARVER select suitable targets. Pick something that is hot, big or fumes gas.
Then use a combination of gas-sensing, parking-sensors, heat-sensing sensors for the last
few feet.
I'm reading the manual for an FY41AP autopilot right now. About $250, made in china.
As for optical guidance, the attacks happened about 0400 - night or dawn?
This autopilot has a video link as well as autonomous and ground based control modes I think.
If the Yemenis had a guy with a transceiver near abqaiq, then maybe they could send these
things over from yemen using gps and a guy with transceiver provided terminal guidance. If
that were to happen the drones would need to be launched at set intervals.
Your last sentence is true enough as far as it goes, but also, if Israel were all
Zoroastrians (or any other group) the world would have dealt with their paranoid and
psychopathic behavior decades ago. The only reason they get away with everything is because
they are Jewish.
Bacevich in NYT op ed. Behind a paywall, here is a copy. Please do not post if it is too long or off topic
Iran Might Be America's Enemy, but Saudi Arabia Is No Friend
After last week's refinery attack, Trump should be careful about throwing America's weight
behind an unreliable "ally."
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Mr. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Sept. 16, 2019
Image The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987.
In 1987, an Iraqi warplane attacked an American Navy frigate, the Stark, on patrol in the
Persian Gulf. Accepting Saddam Hussein's explanation that the attack, which killed 37
sailors, had been an accident, American officials promptly used the incident, which came at
the height of the Iran-Iraq war, to ratchet up pressure on Tehran. The incident provided the
impetus for what became a brief, and all but forgotten, maritime war between the United
States and Iran.
Last week, someone -- precisely who remains to be determined -- attacked two oil
refineries in Saudi Arabia. American authorities have been quick to blame Iran, and the
possibility of a violent confrontation between the two countries is once again growing.
Before making a decision on whether to pull the trigger, President Trump would do well to
reflect on that 1987 episode and its legacy.
Back then, the United States had become involved in the very bloody and seemingly
interminable Iran-Iraq war, which Hussein had instigated in 1980 by invading Iran. As that
war turned into a brutal stalemate, President Ronald Reagan and his advisers persuaded
themselves that it was in America's interests to come to Iraq's aid. Iran was the "enemy" so
Iraq became America's "friend."
After the Stark episode, American and Iranian naval forces in the Gulf began jousting, an
uneven contest that culminated in April 1988 with the virtual destruction of the Iranian
Navy.
Yet the United States gained little from this tidy victory. The principal beneficiary was
Hussein, who wasted no time in repaying Washington by invading and annexing Kuwait soon after
his war with Iran ground to a halt. Thus did America's "friend" become America's "enemy."
The encounter with Iran became a precedent-setting event and a font of illusions. Since
then, a series of administrations have indulged the fantasy that the direct or indirect
application of military power can somehow restore stability to the Gulf.
In fact, just the reverse has occurred. Instability has become chronic, with the
relationship between military policy and actual American interests in the region becoming
ever more difficult to discern.
In 2019, this now well-established penchant for armed intervention finds the United States
once more involved in a proxy conflict, this time a civil war that has ravaged Yemen since
2015. Saudi Arabia supports one side in this bloody and interminable conflict, and Iran the
other.
Under President Barack Obama and now President Trump, the United States has thrown in its
lot with Saudi Arabia, providing support comparable to what the Reagan administration gave
Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. But American-assisted Saudi forces have exhibited no more
competence today than did American-assisted Iraqi forces back then. So the war in Yemen drags
on.
ImageSmoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco
oil facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.
Smoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco oil
facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.CreditAgence
France-Presse -- Getty Images
Concrete American interests in this conflict, which has already claimed an estimated
70,000 lives while confronting as many as 18 million with the prospect of starvation, are
negligible. Once more, as in the 1980s, the demonization of Iran has contributed to a policy
that is ill advised and arguably immoral.
I am not suggesting that Washington is supporting the wrong side in Yemen. I am
suggesting, however, that neither side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America's
"enemy." But Saudi Arabia is not a "friend," regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends
purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.
The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf
(and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring
mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of
further destabilizing the Gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite
the folly of one side or the other.
Supporting Iraq in its foolhardy war with Iran in the 1980s proved to be strategically
shortsighted in the extreme. It yielded vastly more problems than it solved. It set in train
a series of costly wars that have produced negligible benefits. Supporting Saudi Arabia today
in its misbegotten war in Yemen is no less shortsighted.
Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by
recognizing that Saudi Arabia's folly need not be our problem.
Andrew J. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the
author of the forthcoming "The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War
Victory."
"a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran"
And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE,
and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran
was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can
simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things
at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are
incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment.
Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are
insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made
sense. We are so messed up.
use the pic released by USG of the damage to get an idea of the orientation of the incoming
projectiles, I used that rectangularish pond behind as an aid,
Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni
military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla
conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. Yemen had a serious air force
consisting mostly of missile systems before the war. Much of it was destroyed by the bombing
campaign carried out for Saudi Arabia, but the military organization survived. They have now
reconstituted the Yemeni air forces under fire and in the midst of famine, blockade and
invasion.
Stock up on popcorn, the show has only just begun.
Using my CAD and graphic tools and Google Earth along with the photo showing the four
perforated pressure tanks, I have estimated the four vectors as:
E1 280W. E2 279W, E3 281W and E4 273W. I have numbered the tanks from the most eastwards (the
furthermost away in the photo). Angles from true north (0/360 deg). This averages as 278N
with a STDEV of 3 degrees. Its almost due west. Must be very difficult for autopilots (or
real pilots) could perform more than one group-turning maneuver and still maintain final-run
accuracy to what was achieved.
p.s. I'm not specialist in this field apart from terrestrial navigation and drafting
experience.
RobW
The Czech company which produces the TJ100 does have strong links with Iran.
"2005 TPP Iranshahr Iran, the largest project in the company's history, a turnkey project
- four power plant units." But then again. Creating a crash site in the desert with some COTS components in it is
also easy to do. I would be surprised if Iran is launching missiles now. That would be pretty
stupid to do.
I know. I was attempting a comparison between the way most Americans perceive the desert
peoples and the way most Americans fail to extrapolate from their beliefs of one groups
capabilities and motivations and another group closer to home. The perfumed fops in Ryadh and
the Perfumed Princes in DC are very similar under the perfume.
I remember in the mid sixties how the "benighted" Vietnamese and VC were on their last legs,
unable to do anything militarily significant, that the war would be over in 67. This was that
generations perfumed princes attitude towards a people who had been fighting against invaders
since the 1850s. I remember 68 and the most unexpectedly successful operational and strategic
level victory by the NVA and the VC that was TET.
From an infotainment/Cronkite perspective
the important thing was that the Saigon embassy was broached. From and operational
perspective a "defeated" enemy launched several hundred simultaneous attacks all over South
Vietnam while holding down as a diversion the Dien Bien Phu look alike that was Khe San. 51
years 2 and 1/2 generations and today we make the exact same mistakes in evaluating the
current situation.
It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning
because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do."
I have seen articles over the last month or so (sorry, no links) saying that because they are
not able to send large amounts of material aid through the Saudi and U.S. Navy blockade of
Yemen, the Iranians sent blueprints and a few engineers and the Ansar Allah have been
building them in Yemen.
What looks like missile hits at identical positions on those spherical tanks are not.
They are the locations of pressure relief valvaes that blew when the towers hit, venting gas
up out and away.
I am in full agreement with your assessment Dave. I don't see any penetrations on those 11
spherical tanks. Look at the complete devastation on the three smaller spherical pressure
tanks.
Unless we get higher resolution pics that definitely show those tanks were pierced there
is no way I am going to believe those tiny scorch marks are UAV or missile hits. Much too
symmetrical! No amount of geometrical explaining of drone tracks will account for that
symmetry.
Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said
"valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch
(humint or cyber component to one attack vector). Yes, tremors or shakes triggering sensor
which blows valve is possible, I suppose. But the thing that had me up at night was the
nagging sense that this was a prearranged message of sorts.
It cries out "sure, it's bad, but
it is reversible." So I had been wondering about invitation for pow-wows given UN upcoming
meeting in NY. I'm tending to lean toward an advance blowout rather than blowout in reaction
to stress. Why damage such delicate, custom equipment as those beautiful tanks? As you say,
it has to be something intrinsic/internal to the construction of the tanks. So - before or
after remains to be discussed. Assuming the pics are legitimate. But that's why I thought
especially there was a subtle message sent. If they are legit - see above. If not legit -
then it is howling reversibility or caution at the very least.
The processor trains are a linear series of stabilizer columns that help separate the sour
hydrogen sulfide gas from the crude oil. They are at the heart of the process and probably
the highest value target. They are to the left of the 11 pressure tanks in the pictures
shown, or perhaps just NNW of those tanks.
I buy the idea of HUMINT assets having collected target informatoin but the idea of
mini-strobes, etc. seems to me to be too difficult to do given the separation of the missile
force and the HUMINT assets. Very hard to coordinate.
Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to
bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic
campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia
and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the
curtailing of Iran's nuclear program.
Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif
in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10
billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct
move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any
diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be
strong action against the rogues.
Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo
has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to
the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a
UN investigation into the source of the attacks.
2) a general redirection of attention is achieved from 2 points:
- from Syria
In the issue of National Geographic Bulgaria of 04.2019, April 2019 number 4 (162),on p.29
there is a map of the migratory route of a bird - Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Turkey, Bulgaria. BUT the name of Syria is missing, just an empty space within its current
borders.
Maybe, I sincerely hope not, it was just a part of a campaign of mass indoctrination - the
"former Syria" to be divided between neighbors with a US military base here and there or to
turn onto a No Man's land of lawlessness right there, flanking the EU, Russia's Muslim areas,
China's silk road etc
"The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government
coalition.
- from the temptation to mix with West's "rivals" internal issues
A strange coincidence that there was such a recent burst of "opposition" activity first in
Russia, then in China. The velvet revolution recipe of the Arabian spring, Ukraine, etc (if
it was such) didn't quite work however.
And the "empires strike back" - subtly and not so subtly. China offers for the London
stock exchange (let's not forget that the Chinese take-over of the London metal exchange went
without a fuss). Saudi Arabia next.
Maybe the message is "Just stay out of your ex-colonies"
Richard Gill, managing director of the UK company Drone Defence:
"But [drone defence is] military-grade technology and it's massively expensive. To install a
defensive system is extremely complex and the threat is evolving at such a rate that it's
very hard to keep up to date, because the adversaries change the type of technology they use
in a way that almost renders the defence moot."
The strikes, which unidentified U.S. officials have said involved at least 20 drones and
several cruise missiles, forced Saudi Arabia to shut down half its oil production capacity, or
5.7 million barrels per day of crude -- 5% of the world's global daily oil production.
The images, first obtained by The Associated Press, show that at least 19 strikes were
launched and 17 actually hit targets." CNBC
------------ --
I get a big kick out of those of you who think someone faked this attack for, what; An excuse to go to war with Iran?
An opening gambit to get the Iranians to talk to Trump at the UN? If so, that did not work.
Khamenei has said unequivocally that they are not going to talk to the US.
Mikey Pompeo is now going to travel to Saudi Arabia to see if he can jawbone the Saudis into
saying that it was undoubtedly the Iranians who done it. Would that be going on if the Saudis
had been in the plot?
So, some of you think that the Saudis blew up their own processing plant for some nefarious
reason.
Or, maybe the Izzies blew it up to start a war?Will wonders never cease? I mean you, not the attack. pl
"Iran has launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply,"
declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Putting America's credibility on the line, Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out the devastating
attack on Saudi oil facilities that halted half of the kingdom's oil production, 5.7 million
barrels a day.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump did not identify Iran as the attacking nation, but did appear,
in a tweet, to back up the secretary of state:
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia) as to who they believe
was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed!"
Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have been fighting Saudi Arabia for four years and have used drones
to strike Saudi airport and oil facilities, claim they fired 10 drones from 500 kilometers away to
carry out the strikes in retaliation for Saudi air and missile attacks.
Pompeo dismissed their claim,
"There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
But while the Houthis claim credit,
Iran denies all responsibility.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says of Pompeo's charge, that
the U.S. has simply
replaced a policy of "maximum pressure" with a policy of "maximum deceit." Tehran is calling us
liars.
And, indeed, a direct assault on Saudi Arabia by Iran, a Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack on
the Saudis' crucial oil production facility, would be an act of war requiring Saudi retaliation,
leading to a Persian Gulf war in which the United States could be forced to participate.
Tehran being behind Saturday's strike would contradict Iranian policy since the U.S. pulled out
of the nuclear deal. That policy has been to avoid a military clash with the United States and
pursue a measured response to tightening American sanctions.
U.S. and Saudi officials are investigating the sites of the attacks, the oil production facility
at Abqaiq and the Khurais oil field.
According to U.S. sources, 17 missiles or drones were fired, not the 10 the Houthis
claim, and cruise missiles may have been used. Some targets were hit on the west-northwest facing
sides, which suggests they were fired from the north, from Iran or Iraq.
But according to The New York Times, some targets were hit on the west side, pointing away from
Iraq or Iraq as the source. But as some projectiles did not explode and fragments of those that did
explode are identifiable, establishing the likely source of the attacks should be only a matter of
time. It is here that the rubber meets the road.
Given Pompeo's public accusation that Iran was behind the attack, a Trump meeting with Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering next week may be a dead
letter.
The real question now is what do the Americans do when the source of the attack is known and the
call for a commensurate response is put directly to our "locked-and-loaded" president.
If the perpetrators were the Houthis, how would Trump respond?
For the Houthis, who are native to Yemen and whose country has been attacked by the Saudis for
four years, would, under the rules of war, seem to be entitled to launch attacks on the country
attacking them.
Indeed, Congress has repeatedly sought to have Trump terminate U.S. support of the Saudi
war in Yemen.
If the attack on the Saudi oil field and oil facility at Abqaiq proves to be the work of Shiite
militia from inside Iraq, would the United States attack that militia whose numbers in Iraq have
been estimated as high as 150,000 fighters, as compared with our 5,000 troops in-country?
What about Iran itself?
If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired
on Saturday -- shutting down about 6% of world oil production -- imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war
would do to the world economy.
In recent decades, the U.S. has sold the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars of military
equipment. Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the
kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?
Before Trump orders any strike on Iran, would he go to Congress for authorization for his act of
war?
Sen. Lindsey Graham is already urging an attack on Iran's oil refineries to "break the
regime's back,"
while Sen. Rand Paul contends that "there's no reason the superpower of
the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran."
Divided again:
The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war
with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.
How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see.
John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.
Steve Peoples and Will Weissert - AP - September 16
NEW YORK -- Elizabeth Warren has released a sweeping anti-government corruption proposal,
providing a detailed policy roadmap for a fight she says is at the core of her presidential
campaign.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts is announcing the plan Monday in Manhattan's
Washington Square Park, near the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Co., which caught fire in
1911, killing 140-plus workers. Many of those deaths later were attributed to neglected
safety features, such as doors that were locked inside the factory.
Warren's plan would ban lobbyists from many fundraising activities and serving as
political campaign bundlers, tighten limits on politicians accepting gifts or payment for
government actions and bar senior officials and members of Congress from serving on nonprofit
boards. ...
Senator Elizabeth Warren is blitzing the 2020 Democratic primary field with a series of
ambitious policy proposals covering everything from student loans to the use of federal
lands.
Her proposals have become a signature part of her campaign, solidifying her reputation as
a policy wonk and spurring a new campaign slogan: "I have a plan for that."
Big Tech breakup
Child care
Clean energy
Criminal justice
Economic patriotism
Electoral college
Farmers
Filibuster
Green energy
Gun control
Higher education
Housing
Immigration
Minority entrepreneurship
Native American issues
Opioids
Pentagon ethics
Public lands
Puerto Rico
Racial wage disparities
Reparations
Roe v. Wade
Rural communities
State Department
Tax plans
Trade
Voting rights
Wall Street regulation
Clintonism was the introduction of mafia style in the US justice system and conversion of the
key law enforcement agency -- FBI -- in mafia style organization.
Re: Krugman's article on the death of American Democracy he asserts: " In less than three
years it has been transformed from an agency that tries to enforce the law to an organization
dedicated to punishing Trump's opponents."
I think that I agree with Bill Black that the roots of the criminogenic environment go
much deeper. Where was the DOJ in the prosecution of the massive banking fraud that led to
the great financial crisis ? Busy prosecuting poor people while the big fish criminals were
rescued by the corrupt institutions. I agree that Democracy dies when the institutions become
corrupt and the beneficiaries of the same corrupt institutions become smugly comfortable in
control of the narrative.
A troubling article by the New Yorker, "Clarence Thomas's Radical Vision of Race",
Points to a real world example: The profound corruption of the conservative SCOTUS that
led to Citizens United. The angst of the entitled bemoaning their good fortune, like spoiled
children.
"... USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions... ..."
"... Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of its wealth. ..."
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
Personally, I choose to be lead by people that do the right thing long term for the People,
not the most politically expedient or the one that makes the most money in the short run or
the smartest, etc.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions about USA
capability. Have not yet seen any press questions in that direction.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions...
Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor
Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of
its wealth.
"American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military
dominance across the globe. Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To
get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end
America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace."
The Americans have gotten themselves in a real bind with their maximum pressure campaign on Iran. This latest attack on Saudi
Arabia's oil production looks like an escalation of the previous attacks on shipping and the spy drone. It is not evident how
the Americans can respond to this latest attack.
As I see it their options are:
1. To let KSA respond to the Houthi attack and continue with their campaign to shut down Iranian oil production, without any
direct U.S. response to the attack. However this will achieve nothing, as next month Iran will up pressure again with another
attack on Middle-East oil assets, and we'll be back to the same place.
2. To bomb Iran's oil industry, as Pompeo and Graham suggest. However this risks blowing up the whole Middle East, as well
as the World's oil market and their own (Western) economies.
3. Forget about Iran and move the fight to maintain U.S. global hegemony to another front: back to Venezuela? Serbia? Hong
Kong? Taiwan? However the end result of such a move would more than likely be another humuliating defeat for the U.S.
4. Do as Stephen Wertheim / New York Times suggest and sue for peace. This will end the dream of U.S. World dominance, Globalization
and the current western based financial system. The U.S. will become no more than a heavily indebted regional power in a 'Multi-polar
World Order' led by China and Russia.
As I see it, the U.S. is out of options to continue their war for global dominance. #4 is the only viable option. But, as one
author argued in a recent paper (I don't have the reference), wars continue long after the victor is clear, because the loser
can't admit defeat (at heavy additional costs to the loser). I think that this is the position that the U.S. finds itself in now.
What the attack on Saudi oil infrastructure shows us, is that now Iran has united her proxys into one united front.
While they were cautious to not leave evidence of their involvment with the Houtis before, they now are putting their support
more and more into the open.
The attack seemed to have involved not only Houti drones (already build with help from Iran), but also Iranian backed forces
in Iraq, AND pro Iranian forces in Saudi Arabia itself. And maybe even other actors.
This is a major new development. Not only for the war on Yemen, but also in the context of Iran providing a credile detterence
against US+Saudi aggression.
They excalated with increasing levels, and one wonders, what could top this last attack off.
And i am pretty sure, we will find out sooner rather than later.
@ 27
WaPo: Abqaiq . .damaged on the west-northwest sides
That's it! It was Hezbollah for sure. (not)
Actually there were two targets, the Buqaiq (Abqaiq) oil processing plant and the Khurais oil field, both in the Eastern Province.
These attacks are not the first -- from longwarjournal:
Last month, the Houthis claimed another drone operation against Saudi's Shaybah oil field near the United Arab Emirates. At
more than 1,000 miles away from it's Yemen territory, that strike marked one of the Houthis farthest claimed attacks.
The Houthis also claimed a drone strike on the Abu Dhabi airport last year, but that has been denied by Emirati officials.
Additionally, a drone strike on Saudi's East-West oil pipeline near Riyadh earlier this year, which the Houthis claimed responsibility,
was allegedly conducted by Iranian-backed Iraqi militants. If accurate, that means the Houthi claim of responsibility acted
as a type of diplomatic cover for the Iraqi militants.
Since beginning its drone program last year, the Houthis have launched at least 103 drone strikes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia
according to data compiled by FDD's Long War Journal. . .
here . . .and more
here .
Really appreciated the write up on the Houthis attack.
Sounds like the attack left substantial damage. Another bigger issue underlying all of this, aside from Saudi inability to get
what it wants now from it's IPO, is the fact that the US Patriots did not detect this attack.
The Saudis spent billions last year on this defense system. Sounds like the clown Prince better give Russians a call about their
S-400.
But the US wouldn't appreciate that much, would they?
An Iranian parliamentary faction has come up with the idea of establishing a club of
sanctioned countries for concerted action against the US economic terrorism.
The chairman of the Parliament's faction on countering sanctions, Poormokhtar, gave a report
on the formation of the faction and its activities, as well as the ongoing efforts to establish
the club of sanctioned countries. Iran's FM, Zaraf, said this would be enhancing the already
existing alliance of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela against US economic
terrorism.
PressTV: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela are among the nations that have
come out against the United States' use of sanctions to enforce its foreign policy around the
world. In what ways can they fight these US sanctions as a group?
Peter Koenig: Brilliant idea! Solidarity makes stronger and eventually will attract other
countries who are sick and tired of the US sanction regime, and since they have the backing of
Russia and China, that's a very strong alliance, especially an economic alliance. The sanction
regime can only be broken through economics, meaning decoupling from the western monetary
system. I said this before and say it again, at the risk of repeating myself.
After all, China is the world's largest and strongest economy in Purchasing Power GDP
measures which is the only comparison that really counts. I believe this solidarity alliance
against US sanctions is certainly worth a trial.
And personally, I think it will be a successful trial, as more countries will join, possibly
even non-sanctioned ones, out of solidarity against a common tyrant.
The countries in solidarity against sanctions, in addition to ignoring them -- and the more
they ignore them, the more other countries will follow-suit -- that's logical as fear
disappears and solidarity grows.
For example, Iran and Venezuela, oil exporting countries, could accompany their tankers by
war ships. Yes, it's an extra cost, but think of it as temporary and as a long-term gain. Would
"Grace I" have been accompanied by an Iranian war ship the Brits would not have dared
confiscating it. That's for sure.
PressTV: Many of the US sanctions have led to death of civilians in those particular
countries. At the same time, sanctions have also led to the improvement of these countries to
the point where domestic production in various fields advanced. Don't sanctions become
country-productive to US aims?'
PK: Of course, the sanctions are counter-productive. They have helped Russia to become
food-self-sufficient, for example. That was not Washington's intention and less so the
intention of the EU, who followed Washington's dictate like puppets.
Sanctions are like a last effort before the fall of the empire, to cause as much human
damage as possible, to pull other nations down with the dying beast. It has always been like
that starting with the Romans through the Ottoman's. They realize their time has come but can't
see a world living in peace. So they must plant as much unrest and misery as possible before
they disappear
That's precisely what's happening with the US.
Intimidation, building more and more military bases, all with fake money, as we know the
dollar is worth nothing – FIAT money – that the world still accepts but less
and less so, therefore military bases, deadly sanctions, and trade wars. Trump knows that a
trade war against China is a lost cause. Still, he can intimidate other countries by insisting
on a trade war with China or that's what he thinks.
PressTV: The more countries US sanctions, illegally, more people turn against the US:
doesn't that defeat the US so-called fight against terrorism and violence?
PK: Well, US sanction and the entire scheme of US aggression has nothing to do with fighting
terrorism, as you know. It's nothing but expanding US hegemony over the world, and if needed,
and more often than not, the US finances terrorism to fight proxy wars against their so-called
enemies, meaning anybody not conforming to their wishes and not wanting to submit to their
orders and not letting them exploit – or rather steal – their natural
resources.
Syria is a case in point. ISIL is funded and armed by the Pentagon, who buys Serbian
produced weapon to channel them through the Mid-East allies to Syrian terrorists, the ISIL or
similar kinds with different names -- just to confuse.
Venezuela too – the opposition consist basically of US trained, financed and armed
opposition "leaders" – who do not want to participate in totally democratic elections
– order of the US – boycott them. But as we have seen as of this day, the various
coup attempts by the US against their legitimate and democratically elected President,
Nicolás Maduro, have failed bitterly, and this despite the most severe sanctions regime
South American has known, except for Cuba, against whom the US crime has been perpetuated for
60 years.
So, nobody should have the illusion that Washington's wars are against terrorism. Washington
is THE terrorist regime that fights for world hegemony.
"... By that point, he'd already warned his audience about the perils of "monopoly power" and declared that income inequality, which the right had long been trained to believe is "just a pure invention of some diabolical French intellectual to destroy America," is actually "completely real" and "totally bad." ..."
"... The reimagining is playing out not just on Carlson's show or in conservative journals, but among a small batch of young, ambitious Republicans in Congress led by senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida. ..."
"... Their populist -- or "nationalist" or "post-liberal" -- prescriptions sometimes smack of opportunism. And it's still not clear how far they're willing to stray from their party. But it looks like there are places where the new nationalists could find common cause with an energized left. ..."
"... And one of the speakers, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, seemed to do just that -- suggesting that "cultural compatibility" should play a role in deciding which migrants are allowed into the country. "In effect," she said, this "means taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites." But Wax's speech, however discomfiting, stood out because it was so discordant. Conference organizers took pains to prevent hate-mongers from attending -- ultimately rejecting six applicants. ... "Your ideas," he said, "are not welcome here." ... ..."
...But he also spoke, in admiring tones and at substantial length, about "The Two-Income Trap:
Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke," the book Warren wrote with her daughter in 2004.
"Elizabeth Warren wrote one of the best books I've ever read on economics," he said.
By that point, he'd already warned his audience about the perils of "monopoly power" and
declared that income inequality, which the right had long been trained to believe is "just a
pure invention of some diabolical French intellectual to destroy America," is actually
"completely real" and "totally bad."
His Bolshevist pronouncements were probably not a surprise to anyone who'd watched Carlson's
show closely in the months leading up to his speech. But Fox, despite its outsize influence,
has a relatively small audience.
And it's not just Carlson's evolution that's escaped notice. It's hard to keep track of what
most of the key players on the right are saying these days, with President Trump soaking up so
much attention.
But while the commander-in-chief thrashes about, something important is taking shape in his
shadow -- the outlines of a new conservatism inspired, or at least elevated, by his rise to
power.
It's a conservatism that tries to wrestle with the post-Cold War, post-industrial angst that
fired his election -- dropping a reflexive fealty to big business that dates back to the Reagan
era and focusing more intently on the struggles of everyday Americans.
"There are many downsides, I will say, to Trump," Carlson said, in his speech this summer.
"But one of the upsides is, the Trump election was so shocking, so unlikely ... that it did
cause some significant percentage of people to say, 'wait a second, if that can happen, what
else is true?' "
The reimagining is playing out not just on Carlson's show or in conservative journals, but
among a small batch of young, ambitious Republicans in Congress led by senators Josh Hawley of
Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Their populist -- or "nationalist" or "post-liberal" -- prescriptions sometimes smack of
opportunism. And it's still not clear how far they're willing to stray from their party. But it
looks like there are places where the new nationalists could find common cause with an
energized left.
Whether the two sides can actually forge a meaningful alliance in the glare of our
hyperpartisan politics is an open question. But a compact -- even a provisional one -- may
offer the country its best shot at building a meaningful, post-Trump politics.
. . .
CARLSON DELIVERED HIS speech at the National Conservatism Conference -- the first major
gathering aimed at forging a new, right-of-center approach in the age of Trump.
"This is our independence day," said Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist and chief
organizer of the event, in his spirited opening remarks. "We declare independence from
neoconservatism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism." "We are national conservatives," he said. Any effort to build a right-of-center nationalism circa 2019 inevitably runs into questions
about whether it will traffic in bigotry.
And one of the speakers, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, seemed to do just
that -- suggesting that "cultural compatibility" should play a role in deciding which migrants
are allowed into the country. "In effect," she said, this "means taking the position that our country will be better off
with more whites and fewer nonwhites." But Wax's speech, however discomfiting, stood out because it was so discordant. Conference organizers took pains to prevent hate-mongers from attending -- ultimately
rejecting six applicants. ... "Your ideas," he said, "are not welcome here." ...
* At the National Conservatism Conference, an 'Intellectual Trumpist' Movement Begins to
Take Shape
"... Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression." ..."
"... That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro. ..."
"... When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .." ..."
"... As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery." ..."
"... The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging." ..."
"... The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more." ..."
"... By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community. ..."
"... But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy. ..."
"... Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders. ..."
"... "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996." ..."
"... Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals. ..."
When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee
declared that "the two mighty power blocs,
have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating
the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the
realization that "The Cold War is back."
In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international
system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity
wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?
The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian
lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian
blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also
a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the
history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.
But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.
The Hot War
Most histories of the cold war begin at the dawn of the post World War II period. But the history of U.S-U.S.S.R. animosity starts
long before that: it starts as soon as possible, and it was hot long before it turned cold.
The label "Red Scare" first appeared, not in the 1940s or 50s, but in 1919. Though it is a chapter seldom included in the history
of American-Russian relations, America actively and aggressively intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to push the Communists
back down. The United States cooperated with anti-Bolshevik forces: by mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had sent 13,000 American
troops to Soviet soil. They would remain there for two years, killing and injuring thousands. Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev would
later remind America of "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution." Churchill would record for history the admission
that the West "shot Soviet Russians on sight," that they were "invaders on Russian soil," that "[t]hey armed the enemies of the Soviet
government," that "[t]hey blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed for its downfall."
When the cause was lost, and the Bolsheviks secured power, most western countries refused to recognize the communist government.
However, realism prevailed, and within a few short years, by the mid 1920s, most countries had recognized the communist government
and restored diplomatic relations. All but the US It was not until several years later that Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized
the Soviet government in 1933.
The Cold War
It would be a very short time before the diplomatic relations that followed the hot war would be followed by a cold war. It might
even be possible to pin the beginning of the cold war down to a specific date. On April 22 and 23, President Truman told Soviet foreign
minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "Carry out his agreement" and establish a new, free, independent government in Poland as promised
at Yalta. Molotov was stunned. He was stunned because it was not he that was breaking the agreement because that was not what Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. The final wording of the Yalta agreement never mentioned replacing Soviet control of
Poland.
The agreement that Roosevelt revealed to congress and shared with the world – the one that still dominates the textbook accounts
and the media stories – is not the one he secretly shook on with Stalin. Roosevelt lied to congress and the American people. Then
he lied to Stalin.
In exchange for Soviet support for the creation of the United Nations, Roosevelt secretly agreed to Soviet predominance in Poland
and Eastern Europe. The cold war story that the Soviet Union marched into Eastern Europe and stole it for itself is a lie: Roosevelt
handed it to them.
So did Churchill. If Roosevelt's motivation was getting the UN, Churchill's was getting Greece. Fearing that the Soviet Union
would invade India and the oil fields of Iran, Churchill saw Greece as the geographical roadblock and determined to hold on to it
at all cost. The cost, it turned out, was Romania. Churchill would give Stalin Romania to protect his borders; Stalin would give
Churchill Greece to protect his empire's borders. The deal was sealed on October 9, 1944.
Churchill says that in their secret meeting, he asked Stalin, "how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in
Romania, for us to have ninety percent predominance in Greece? . . ." He then went on to offer a fifty-fifty power split in in Yugoslavia
and Hungary and to offer the Soviets seventy-five percent control of Bulgaria. The exact conversation may never have happened, according
to the political record, but Churchill's account captures the spirit and certainly captures the secret agreement.
Contrary to the official narrative, Stalin never betrayed the west and stole Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and the rest were
given to him in secret. Then Roosevelt lied to congress and to the world.
That American lie raised the curtain on the cold war.
The New Cold War
Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that
it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really
intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future
"Russian aggression."
At the close of the cold war, at a meeting held on February 9, 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, promised
Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany and Russia pulled its troops out of East Germany, NATO would not expand east of Germany and engulf
the former Soviet states. Gorbachev records in his memoirs that he agreed to Baker's terms "with the guarantee that NATO jurisdiction
or troops would not extend east of the current line." In Super-power Illusions , Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was the American
ambassador to Russia at the time and was present at the meeting, confirms Gorbachev's account, saying that it "coincides with my
notes of the conversation except that mine indicate that Baker added "not one inch." Matlock adds that Gorbachev was assured that
NATO would not move into Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact moved out, that "the understanding at Malta [was] that the United States
would not 'take advantage' of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe." At the February 9 meeting, Baker assured Gorbachev
that "neither the President or I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place."
But the promise was not made just once, and it was not made just by the United States. The promise was made on two consecutive
days: first by the Americans and then by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. According to West German foreign ministry documents,
on February 10, 1990, the day after James Baker's promise, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Soviet counterpart
Eduard Shevardnadze "'For us . . . one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.' And because the conversation revolved
mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: 'As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.'"
A few days earlier, on January 31, 1990, Genscher had said in a major speech that there would not be "an expansion of NATO territory
to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union."
Gorbachev says the promise was made not to expand NATO "as much as a thumb's width further to the east." Putin also says mourns
the broken promise, asking at a conference in Munich in February 2007, "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made
after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."
Putin went on to remind his audience of the assurances by pointing out that the existence of the NATO promise is not just the
perception of him and Gorbachev. It was also the view of the NATO General Secretary at the time: "But I will allow myself to remind
this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. [Manfred] Woerner in Brussels on 17 May
1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet
Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are those guarantees?"
Recent scholarship supports the Russian version of the story. Russian expert and Professor of Russian and European Politics at
the University of Kent, Richard Sakwa says that "[r]ecent studies demonstrate that the commitment not to enlarge NATO covered the
whole former Soviet bloc and not just East Germany." And Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and
of Russian Studies and History at New York University, adds that the National Security Archive has now published the actual
documents detailing what Gorbachev was promised. Published on December 12, 2017, the documents finally, and authoritatively,
reveal that "The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved
– the US, the UK, France, Germany itself – made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways."
That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American
President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia
and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro.
It was this shattered promise, this primal betrayal, this NATO expansion to Russia's borders that created the conditions and causes
of future conflicts and aggressions. When, in 2008, NATO promised Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership, Russia saw the threat
of NATO encroaching right to its borders. It is in Georgia and Ukraine that Russia felt it had to draw the line with NATO encroachment
into its core sphere of influence. Sakwa says that the war in Georgia was "the first war to stop NATO enlargement; Ukraine was the
second." What are often cited as acts of Russian aggression that helped maintain the new cold war are properly understood as acts
of Russian defense against US aggression that made a lie out of the promise that ended the Cold War.
When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy,
warned that NATO expansion would be
"the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected
to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .."
The broken promise restored the cold war. Though it is the most significant root of the new cold war, it was not the first. There
was a prior broken promise, and this time the man who betrayed Russia was President H.W. Bush.
The end of the Cold War resulted from negotiations and not from any sort of military victory. Stephen Cohen says that "Presidents
Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the
Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending 'with no losers, only winners.'"
The end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union occurred so closely chronologically that it permitted the American mythologizers
to conflate them in the public imagination and create the doctrinal history in which the US defeat of the Soviet Union ended the
cold war. But the US did not defeat the Soviet Union. Gorbachev brought about what Sakwa calls a "self-willed disintegration of the
Soviet bloc." The Soviet Union came to an end, not by external force or pressure, but out of Gorbachev's recognition of the Soviet
Union's own self interest. Matlock flatly states that "pressure from governments outside the Soviet Union, whether from America or
Europe or anywhere else, had nothing to do with [the Soviet collapse]." "Cohen demythologizes the history by reinstating the chronological
order: Gorbachev negotiated the end of the cold war "well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union." The Cold War officially
ended well before the end of the Soviet Union with Gorbachev's December 7, 1988 address to the UN
Matlock says that "Gorbachev is right when he says that we all won the Cold War." He says that President Reagan would write in
his notes, "Let there be no talk of winners and losers." When Gorbachev compelled the countries of the Warsaw Pact to adopt reforms
like his perestroika in the Soviet Union and warmed them that the Soviet army would no longer be there to keep their communist
regimes in power, Matlock points out in Superpower Illusions that "Bush assured Gorbachev that the United States would not
claim victory if the Eastern Europeans were allowed to replace the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them." Both the reality
and the promise were that there was no winner of the Cold War: it was a negotiated peace that was in the interest of both countries.
When in 1992, during his losing re-election campaign, President Bush arrogantly boasted that "We won the Cold War!" he broke his
own promise to Gorbachev and helped plant the roots of the new cold war. "In psychological and political terms," Matlock says, "President
Bush planted a landmine under the future U.S.-Russian relationship" when he broke his promise and made that claim.
Bush's broken promise had two significant effects. Psychologically, it created the appearance in the Russian psyche that Gorbachev
had been tricked by America: it eroded trust in America and in the new peace. Politically, it created in the American psyche the
false idea that Russia was a defeated country whose sphere of interest did not need to be considered. Both these perceptions contributed
to the new cold war.
Not only was the broken promise of NATO expansion not the first broken American promise, it was also not the last. In 1997, when
President Clinton made the decision to expand NATO much more than an inch to the east, he at least signed the
Russia-NATO Founding Act , which explicitly
promised that as NATO expanded east, there would be no "permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." This obliterated American
promise planted the third root of the new cold war.
Since that third promise, NATO has, in the words of Stephen Cohen, built up its "permanent land, sea and air power near Russian
territory, along with missile-defense installations." US and NATO weapons and troops have butted right up against Russia's borders,
while anti-missile installations have surrounded it, leading to the feeling of betrayal in Russia and the fear of aggression. Among
the earliest moves of the Trump administration were the moving of NATO troops into Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and nearby Norway.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who offered the West Russia and cooperation in place of the Soviet Union and Cold War, was rewarded with lies,
broken promises and betrayal. That was the sowing of the first seeds of the new cold war. The second planting happened during the
Yeltsin years that followed. During this stage, the Russian people were betrayed because their hopes for democracy and for an economic
system compatible with the West were both destroyed by American intervention.
The goal, Matlock too gently explains, "had to be a shift of the bulk of the economy to private ownership." What transpired was
what Naomi Klein called in The Shock Doctrine "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history."
The States allowed no gradual transition. Matlock says the "Western experts advised a clean break with the past and a transition
to private ownership without delay." But there was no legitimate private capital coming out of the communist system, so there was
no private money with which to privatize. So, there was only one place for the money to come. As Matlock explains, the urgent
transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could,
as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen,
"a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its
people into poverty and misery."
The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush
to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but
sometimes actually damaging."
Sometimes damaging? In the first year, millions lost their entire life savings. Subsidy cuts meant that many Russians didn't get
paid at all. Klein says that by 1992, Russians were consuming 40% less than they were the year before, and one third of them had
suddenly sunk below the poverty line. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international
development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending
the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration
of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty],
the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more."
By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions
of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community.
But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because
Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in,
and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy.
In late 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of special powers from the Russian Parliament: for
one year, he was to be, in effect, the dictator of Russia to facilitate the midwifery of the birth of a democratic Russia. In March
of 1992, under pressure from the, by now, impoverished, devastated and discontented population, parliament repealed the dictatorial
powers it had granted him. Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency, re-bestowing upon himself the repealed dictatorial
powers. Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin was acting outside the constitution. But the US sided – against the Russian
people and against the Russian Constitutional Court – with Yeltsin.
Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution
of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with
Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian
people's choice of leaders.
Yeltsin took the money and sent police officers and elite paratroopers to surround the parliament building. Clinton "praised the
Russian President has (sic) having done 'quite well' in managing the standoff with the Russian Parliament," as The New York Timesreported at the time.
Clinton added that he thought "the United States and the free world ought to hang in there" with their support of Yeltsin against
his people, their constitution and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be "on the right side of history."
On the right side of history and armed with machine guns and tanks, in October 1993, Yeltsin's troops opened fire on the crowd
of protesters, killing about 100 people before setting the Russian parliament building on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin's
troops had killed approximately 500 people and wounded nearly 1,000. Still, Clinton stood with Yeltsin. He provided
ludicrous cover for Yeltsin's
massacre , claiming that "I don't see that he had any choice . If such a thing happened in the United States, you would have
expected me to take tough action against it." Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, said that the US supported Yeltsin's
suspension of parliament in these "extraordinary times."
In 1996, elections were looming, and America's hegemonic dreams still needed Yeltsin in power. But it wasn't going to happen without
help. Yeltsin's popularity was nonexistent, and his approval rating was at about 6%. According to Cohen, Clinton's interference in
Russian politics, his "crusade" to "reform Russia," had by now become
official policy . And so, America
boldly interfered directly in Russian elections . Three American political consultants, receiving "direct assistance from Bill
Clinton's White House," secretly ran Yeltsin's reelection campaign.
As Time magazine
broke the story , "For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's
campaign."
"Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers,
drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996."
More incriminating still is that Richard Dresner, one of the three American consultants, maintained a direct line to Clinton's
Chief Strategist, Dick Morris. According to
reporting by Sean Guillory , in his book, Behind the Oval Office , Morris says that, with Clinton's approval, he received
weekly briefings from Dresner that he would give to Clinton. Based on those briefings, Clinton would then provide recommendations
to Dresner through Morris.
The US not only helped run Yeltsin's campaign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund
(IMF) loan for Russia, the second-biggest loan the IMF had ever given. The New York Timesreported
that the loan was "expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." The Times explained
that the loan was "a vote of confidence" for Yeltsin who "has been lagging well behind in opinion polls" and added that the US Treasury
Secretary "welcomed the fund's decision."
Yeltsin won the election by 13%, and Time magazine's cover declared: "Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American
advisers helped Yeltsin win". Cohen reports that the US ambassador to Russia boasted that "without our leadership we would see a
considerably different Russia today." That's a confession of election interference.
Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end
of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian
hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were
not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that
the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals.
Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
The USA might eventually pay the price for the economic rape and alienation of Russia by
criminal Clinton and his coterie
Notable quotes:
"... Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at this stage of history. ..."
"... The truth is that after the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR. ..."
"... Still as an imperial state and the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country. ..."
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to
those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites
(neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination
and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy.
Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to
bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on
Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie
were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at
this stage of history.
The truth is that after the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became
completely unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no
external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly,
London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient
to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it
not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet
and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New
Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001.In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops posted
abroad.
Still as an imperial state and the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more
on financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire
experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of
further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed
to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the
2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never
ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation: phase)
Although currently with a bully at the helm the USA empire still going strong in forcing
vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA that situation will
not last. Trump currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic
neoliberal globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be
successful in the short run but in the "long run" that undermines the USA centered neoliberal
empire and speed up its demise. .
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during
triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel
tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the
USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA Np.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in
check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the
dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the
level of external debt and requires devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force
trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China,
India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly
in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by
Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA
empire. That's not much.
"... Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the targeted regimes. ..."
"... At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion. In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million barrels. ..."
"... The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries. ..."
"... The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer, agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy supplies to Europe. ..."
"... As stated by Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program. ..."
"... The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage. ..."
"... In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach, increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is transited each day? ..."
"... It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump publicly and repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President. ..."
"... The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on systems that are controlled by the USA. ..."
"... Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a city. ..."
"... John Bolton is clueless. He's a throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an idiot. ..."
"... Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get their balance sheets under control. ..."
Yves here. Even though most
readers know the general point very well, that US trade and financial sanctions haven't brought
targets to their knees, and had instead pushed them to find allies, but it's useful to have
detail to flesh out the story. There are some bits one can quibble with, like the "annexation
of Crimea" bit, and the US objectives for its sanctions against Russia. At least under the
Obama Administration, the belief was that they would damage the economy severely and force a
regime change.
By Robert Berke, an energy financial analyst with experience as a government consultant
to the State of Alaska. Originally published at
OilPrice
Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual
military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the
targeted regimes.
A prime example was President Obama sanctioning Russia over its annexation of Crimea. The
sanctions were designed to block Russia from any access to western financing, aimed at causing
a dire financial and economic crisis in Russia that would force it to relinquish Crimea and end
support for Ukraine's breakaway territories.
In fact, the sanctions did cause Russia to enter a short-lived recession. But it also had
other, much more drastic results for the West. It forced Russia to move closer to China, and
Moscow saw Beijing as a great alternative to western financing for Russian industries.
At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because
of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic
joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion.
In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million
barrels.
As noted by Reuters, the withdrawal was costly:
Exxon will post an after-tax loss of $200 million as a result of pulling out of the
Rosneft deal, but the true costs for the company run much deeper. Exploring and developing
giant offshore fields in Russia was supposed to provide long-term growth for the company,
and, in recent years, has seen falling reserves.
But the opportunity losses are likely to be far higher for Exxon, the company that famously
missed the US shale revolution. The long-term deal with Rosneft, expected to continue for
decades, included exploration for oil in the Black Sea, enormous shale resources in Western
Siberia, and the development of three large blocks in the Arctic (Kara Sea).
The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports
to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute
mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an
alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries.
China's major state-owned oil companies and its Silk Road fund each became 10% partners in
Russia's first major Arctic LNG (liquified natural gas), project in the Yamal Peninsula,
undertaken with Novatek, Russia's largest independent gas producer. The project offers great
prospects for enormous expansion.
The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years
before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer,
agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia
has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy
supplies to Europe.
A similar scenario is taking place in the Persian Gulf where the US has withdrawn from the
Iran nuclear deal, while imposing economic sanctions on Iranian oil exports. The French energy
giant, Total, that in recent years has been a leading international oil company in that
country, was forced to withdraw because of sanctions, just like Exxon in Russia's Arctic, it
left billions of dollars on the table.
This may also answer the question as to why French Prime Minister Macron was so intent on
inviting the Iranian Foreign Secretary to the recent G7 meeting in France. It's also no secret
that French carmakers Peugeot and Renault are the main suppliers to Iran's auto assembly
plants.
As stated by
Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing
Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a
bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again
become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to
develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve
transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program.
The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and
petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus
an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using
local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the
Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage.
GBS further reports that the security for these projects will include up to 5,000 Chinese
security personnel on the ground in Iran to protects Chinese projects and to safeguard the
transit of energy products from Iran to China, including security for the very strategic Hormuz
Straits.
In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach,
increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance
partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If
the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own
borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is
transited each day?
If these are considered winning policies for the West, one has to ask what failure looks
like.
The West is already slowly becoming aware of the blowback this disastrous policy has caused.
Evidence for this can be found in Macron's efforts to persuade Trump towards a peaceful
resolution with Iran.
It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to
the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump
publicly and
repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg
also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease
sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary
Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong
opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that
Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President.
The firing of Bolton was
immediately followed by a fall in the price of oil and gold. Allowing Iran to continue to
increase supplies into already well supplied oil markets will add downward pressure on oil
prices. For the Trump administration, this is not necessarily a bad thing unhappy consumers at
the gas pump make for unhappy voters.
Similarly, the Trump Administration badly needs to move towards ending the trade war with
China in order to calm global markets. The recent announcement of the resumption of trade talks
between the US and China in October may provide an opportunity for a similar easing of tariffs
and a path towards further resolution.
Although these actions could help to quell global tensions, it may be too late to reverse
some of the serious damage caused by US-led economic warfare. Once China positions itself in
Iran, it will not likely be interested in withdrawing from its new strategic position in the
Middle East, that it gained as a result of US near sighted foreign policy.
Prior to the election, we may see a breakthroughs in the trade war, and the alleviation of
sanctions with Russia, Iran, China, and perhaps even North Korea, but the US will almost
certainly see the negative consequences from adversaries it helped to expand and
strengthen.
Can't speak much about the effects of the Chinese sanctions but I know a little bit about
the Russian ones. These Russian sanctions are biting hard but not the way they were intended
and it is not only the big oil companies that are losing big. Since they kicked in Russia has
lost about $50 billion in trade with the European Union which kinda stings. But in the same
time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion.
Considering that fact that these
sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US, that is a very
expensive price tag. The US lost only about $17 billion but I remember reading that after the
sanctions kicked in, trade between the U and Russia actually increased. Europe is a big loser
here, particularly with agriculture. When the EU sanctioned Russian products to the EU, the
Russians did the same to them a few weeks later which came as a shock. Since then Russia has
made huge investments into growing their own food crops and those markets will never come
back again for the EU. As an example, Russia is once more a world leader in the production of
wheat second only to the US and has learned the value of autarky.
You see these results in all sorts of areas as the country started phasing out imports and
replacing them with domestically made products. They even started making marine engines out
of necessity as they were denied purchase of foreign ones. People might remember how Russia
was going to buy two specially built ships from France but France reneged under pressure from
Washington.
France not only had to give back all the money the Russians paid but also had to
compensate Russia for all related costs that the Russians made. In the end France paid Russia
over a billion dollars which was triple what the Russians initially paid. And now the
Russians are constructing their own ships of this class in the Crimea using the knowledge
acquired from France. Perhaps it is things like this that has cause Macron to open up
contacts with Russia once more in spite of what Washington demands.
Add in the purchase of gold stocks, developing financial systems in case the US cuts
Russia off from the SWIFT clearance systems, the development of weaponry that makes the
deployment of nuclear missile systems in Europe futile, you realise that Washington has
massively underestimated the response of counties like Russia, China and Iran and depended on
unicorn wishes instead.
But in the same time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion. Considering
that fact that these sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US,
that is a very expensive price tag.
Well, Looks like Donald Trump let "The Swamp(tm)" run loose and they went and over-torqued
the screws!
Some decision makers in within the EU have begun to see the US sanctions against
everything and everyone as having the true goals of ablating EU's influence on the world
while hampering EU-based businesses. There are initiatives and polices that hints at "cutting
the cord" are quietly being introduced.
The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or
defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on
systems that are controlled by the USA.
The 'North Stream' pipeline and keeping the Iran deal kinda alive are more immediate and
direct challenges, as was the total unwillingness to join in any of the planned military
adventures involving Syria and Iran.
France is being rather open about about it. Possibly to test out on behalf of the EU what
the USA is actually willing to do to exact revenge and enforce compliance, possibly also
because opposing the USA in France remains a reliable way to win votes.
It's not just Trump. Our Congress is totally at the beck of special pleaders such as LNG
exporters and arms companies. All seek to use the US economic weapon to further their own
interests.
Plus, Russia is determinedly GMO free. The more the US goes down the GMO route, the less
likely the food trade with the EU – the European dogs wont eat GMO dogfood.
Post Brexit perhaps, Britain will accept US foods, all the more reason to insist on a proper
border if NI remains part of the 'UK'.
It's not just GMO, but the level and quality of technocratic oversight. US government
agencies are incapable of regulating anything in the private sector. While the EU is still
greatly influenced by private money, it has not completely sold out.
What is ignored by media is the harm sanctions inflict on the people living in these
countries. I think it should be considered a crime against humanity and our leaders should be
prosecuted. Sanctions are a weapon that is just as harmful as weapons to kill. We only seem
to look at the economic effects and ignore the social effects.
Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a
city.
I've known in a vague intuitive way that US sanctions would alienate nations and isolate
the US, it's useful seeing how exactly these sanctions are backfiring with more nuance!
What is the next step after you have sanctioned everything and everyone and the reaction
is a shrug and a work around? Sanctions do have their bite, but they are, or are becoming, a
more effective tool for global economic and political realignment than a means to accomplish
their stated purpose.
Good question. I am wondering the same thing. There is a vague pattern here with Russia,
the most resource-rich oil producer. We don't want Russia to take off too fast. What can be
left in the ground should be left in the ground. And maybe that was the existential threat
posed by Exxon – a private, profit seeking US corporation geared to do everything fast
in order to make their profits.
Just thinking about slamming the breaks on manufacturing and
consumption and how this can make a mess of the oil industry if it is going for profits
– race to the bottom (currently). Rather, anyone thinking straight would want to
conserve oil, control it's production and marketing. John Bolton is clueless. He's a
throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an
idiot.
There was a discussion of China's role in manufacturing drugs for Big Pharma on the news
last night, truly frightening.
They've already been found to be selling us contaminated drugs, what happens when they
refuse to deliver anything other than fentanyl?
I find it hard to understand how we're going to recover from the damage done by the
short-sighted, wholesale outsourcing of our manufacturing to China.
Given the centrality of drugs to American life, we should categorize them as sensitive
items of national security and declare a war on foreign drugs. That would brilliantly combine
the failed policies of the past with the failed policies of the present. We could make
exceptions for most-favored nations like Colombia or Afghanistan.
As in military conflicts, the fog of geoeconomic war together with partisan lens and poor
leadership can prevent adversaries from developing an accurate assessment of reality. The
writer has raised some examples that support his view pertaining to pushback, and he could be
right as The Rev Kev so eloquently pointed out here WRT Russia. However, whether his article
provides an accurate overview of the current state of play remains an open question IMO.
Setting aside deeply troubling questions about our national values and whether sanctions
should ever be employed due to their very damaging effects on domestic populations, together
with their evident past failure to realize policy goals, there are credible accounts that
China is now confronting a U.S. dollar shortage; that China has significant issues in its
financial system and economy; and that the people of China are seeing sharply rising food
prices as a result of decreased supplies of pork and soybeans. These issues are being
perceived as sufficient to cause China's leaders to be receptive to negotiating resolution of
the current tariffs, trade, intellectual property, and investment impasse on terms favorable
to the U.S. Whether this will be so remains to be seen, of course.
A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis
Fukuyama said it was the end of history. It was all going so well, until the neoliberals got to work. The US created an open, globalised world with the Washington Consensus. China went from almost nothing to become a global super power.
That wasn't supposed to happen, let's get the rocket scientists onto it. Maximising profit is all about reducing costs. China had coal fired power stations to provide cheap energy.
China had lax regulations reducing environmental and health and safety costs.
China had a low cost of living so employers could pay low wages.
China had low taxes and a minimal welfare state.
China had all the advantages in an open globalised world. "The Washington Consensus was always going to work better for China than the US"
the rocket scientists.
If the US left this running it would be China first and America second. PANIC!
It seems since about the Vietnam war era, US FP has been run by hubristic idiots with
delusions of grandeur. Its foreign policy 101 that you never, never, set policy to drive your
2 largest rivals to alliance.
Yet these morons did exactly that. Since Trump, there have been many retirements form the
State Dept.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They show no evidence of competence.
Russia is leasing out old collective farm lands that was abandoned in the eastern part of
the country to Asian countries to farm and grow the export food products needed. It seems the
collective farms were abandoned and now the Russian government is re-purposing the vast
amounts of land available.
"Russia is now considering requests from Asian firms to farm another 1 million hectares
(2.5 million acres) -- an area roughly the size of Jamaica, according to the head of a
government agency."
It may be said that Trump's tariffs are the best things that could have happened to China
and Russia.
Frankly, I think it has pushed up consumer spending and that is about it. In other words,
this economy has overcapacity problems in the auto sector and its relation to junk corporate
debt, is not good.
Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and
manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get
their balance sheets under control.
"... Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down. ..."
"... Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically. ..."
"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy,
saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons,
it's always good business."
He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton,
Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and
he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war
– maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and
Haaretz
-------------
Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar
of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite
German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them
allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not
accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.
Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they
developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like
Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic
campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as
whatever was most useful politically.
They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.
They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like
all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.
As for the gory details of CIA involvement in the Chilean coup d'état of 1973,
Costa-Gavras' film "Missing" (Universal Pictures, 1982) staring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek
exposes the surreptitious U.S. involvement via CIA operatives, supportive of Pinochet's
cold-bloodied massacre of students and other innocent bystanders. Not surprisingly, the film
was removed from the U.S. market following a lawsuit against the director and Universal
Pictures by former ambassador Nathaniel Davis for defamation of character. When Davis lost his
lawsuit, the film was re-released by Universal in 2006.
The face of neoliberalism in Chile today is disheartened, reflecting deep losses for the
wealthy class as the people of the country reject Milton Friedman's neoliberal policies,
including clever tax evasion techniques by the business class. Could this be the start of a
worldwide movement against neoliberalism?
After all, Chile is the country that neoliberal advocates crowned their "newborn" in the
battle against big government, "get government off our backs," according to Milton Friedman
(and, Reagan picked up on the adage.) But, au contraire, according to the film "Missing,"
fascism took control over Chile. Is it possible that Friedman and Kissinger secretly cherished
a fascist empire, where control would be complete, disguised as "the land of individual
economic freedom?" Whatever their motives, that's what they got, and they never hesitated to
revere Chile's remarkable economic achievements, fascism and all, which is powerfully expressed
in the film "Missing," from end to end the heavy hand of fascism is ever-present.
Today is a new day as the people of Chile abandon decades of rotting neoliberal policies.
They've had enough of Milton Freidman. The people have decided that the "state" is a beneficial
partner for achievement of life's dreams. The "state" is not the menacing force of evil
preached by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The people of Chile are embracing an anti-neoliberalistic nation/state for the first time in
over four decades. Will the world follow in their footsteps similar to the world adopting the
principles of the "Miracle of Chile" these past four decades?
As for the new way forward, it's all about student debt. Yes, student debt was the catalyst
behind Chile's repudiation of neoliberalism. In 2011 students in Chile made headlines by
launching nationwide strikes over high tuition costs that drove their families into debt (sound
familiar?) The strike lasted for eight months.
Over time, the student marches gained recognition by other like-minded organizations like
trade unions and protests of environmental degradation. According to Tasha Fairfield, an
assistant professor for the London School of Economics' Department of International
Development, the strikes were pivotal: "The student movement played a critical role in creating
political space," according to Fairfield, it "dramatically changed the political context in
Chile and helped to place the issues of Chile's extreme inequalities centrally on the national
agenda," Sebastian Rosemont, Chilean Activists Change the Rules of the Game, Foreign Policy In
Focus, Dec. 2, 2014.
Subsequently, the national election of 2013 swept the left wing into power with a huge wave
of public support, gaining strong majorities in both houses of the National Congress as well as
electing Michelle Bachelet president. The big leftward sweep came as over two thirds of the
population grew to support student demands for free university tuition.
Ever since the 2013 election, neoliberal policies have crumbled like a decrepit equestrian
statue of Pinochet, who carried the stigma of brutal criminality to, and beyond, the grave.
In stark contrast to 40 years ago, today, when students, armed with only stones clashed with
police equipped with full regalia of riot gear, tear gas, and armored vehicles, the harsh
police activity drew heavy international criticism. That, combined with more than two-thirds of
the population in support of the student movement, led to a new politics, Nueva Mayoria (New
Majority), a center-left coalition made up of Bachelet's Socialist Party, the Christian
Democratic Party, and the Party for Democracy.
Whereupon, Nueva Mayoria, turning up its nose to neoliberalism, raised corporate taxes from
20 percent to 25 percent and closed tax loopholes for companies and wealthy business owners.
Those changes added $8.3 billion annually to government coffers, thus, serving as a source of
funds to provide free education to all Chileans by 2020, as well as improved health care, and
including a roll back of the for-profit schools that emerged under Pinochet's dictatorship,
which is another neoliberal fascination, witness the U.S. for-profit schools listed on the New
York Stock Exchange honestly, what's with that? In order to achieve success, the new Chilean
politics astutely employed a key tactical move by applying the corporate tax hikes to only the
largest corporations. As a result, nearly 95% of businesses are not be affected by higher
taxation. This, in fact, served to secure a broad base of support for the new politics by
having those who can afford to pay Pay.
Along those same lines, the new government removed a tax dodge employed by large business
owners that allowed them to mostly escape taxes on $270 billion of profits (similar to the U.S.
15% "carried interest" for private equity entities, e.g., Mitt Romney's 15% tax rate).
Thus, it's little wonder that public backlash is challenging neoliberalism, especially
considering the conditions throughout the Pinochet regime, as described in the meticulously
structured documentary film, "The Pinochet Case," (Icarus Films, 2002), which opens with scenes
of ordinary Chileans scouring the desert for the remains of family members who were tortured
and killed decades previous.
Chile, "The Babe of Neoliberalism," came to life as an experiment for the "Chicago School"
of economic thought. It worked. Today neoliberal theory rules the world, laissez-faire
capitalism as practiced from China to the United States, privatization, open markets, slash
government, and deregulation, in short, "whatever works best for profits works best for
society." But, does it?
Forty years of neoliberal thought and practice has changed the world's socio-economic
landscape, but it only really, truly works for the same class of people today as it did 800
years ago for the nobility of the Middle Ages.
Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at [email protected] .
It seems since about the Vietnam war era, US FP has been run by hubristic idiots with
delusions of grandeur. Its foreign policy 101 that you never, never, set policy to drive your
2 largest rivals to alliance.
Yet these morons did exactly that. Since Trump, there have been many retirements from
the State Dept. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They show no evidence of
competence.
Ukraine is mainly the result of attempt of the USA to encircle Russia well as EU design for economic
Drang nach Osten -- attempt to displace Russia in xUSSR
republics.
So they pushed Ukraine into the pat that Baltic republic were already known for.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a "first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians. ..."
"... In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept. ..."
"... She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience." ..."
"... Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion" in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War. ..."
"... NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." ..."
"... To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of [Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II." ..."
"... Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military. ..."
"... American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches emblazoned on their sleeves. ..."
On Saturday September 7, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap which has brought
hope of improved relations between the two countries and an end to the 5-year long conflict in
Eastern Ukraine.
A peace accord is being planned for later this month in Normandy involving Ukraine, Russia,
France and Germany.
Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a
"first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000
civilians.
The Ukraine War remains largely unknown to the American public even though the United States
has had a great stake in it.
The war started after a coup d'états in Ukraine in February 2014, which overthrew the
democratically elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovuch.
In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for
independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept.
The United States was a heavy backer of the coup and dirty war that unfolded in the
East.
Victoria Nuland, the head of the State Department's European desk, traveled to Ukraine three
times during the protests that triggered the coup, handing out cookies to demonstrators.
She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and
later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime
Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience."
Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion"
in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on
the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War.
Ukraine has long been considered an important bridge between Eastern and Western Europe and
holds lucrative oil and gas deposits.
NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step
towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not
just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to
the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of
[Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II."
Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the
1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration
further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military.
It was supplied with counter-artillery radars, anti-tank systems, armored vehicles and
drones in a policy expanded upon by Trump.
Before and after the Ukrainian military's campaign began, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA
Director John Brennan, and Vice President Joe Biden visited Kiev, followed by a flow of senior
Pentagon officials.
A back-door arms pipeline was set up through the United Arab Emirates and Blackwater
mercenaries were allegedly deployed.
American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket
propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including
with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches
emblazoned on their sleeves.
Obama's National Security adviser, Samantha Power, claimed that the [Ukrainian] governments
"response [to alleged provocations by eastern rebels] [was] reasonable, it is proportional, and
frankly it is what any of our countries would have done."
The Ukrainian military and allied warlord and neo-Nazi militias were not acting reasonably
or proportionally, however, when they carried out artillery and air attacks on cities and
struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks, schools, hospitals and orphanages in
Eastern Ukraine, and tortured and executed POWs in what amounted to clear war crimes.
NYU Professor Stephen Cohen notes that even TheNew York Times , which mainly
deleted atrocities from its coverage, described survivors in Slovyansk living "as if in the
Middle Ages."
That the American public knows nothing of these events is a sad reflection of the
superficiality of our media and decline in the quality of international news coverage.
It is also a testament to the failing of the political left, which has embraced the cause of
immigrant and Palestinian rights and fighting climate change, legitimately, but neglected the
plight of the Eastern Ukrainian people. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jeremy Kuzmarov
"... After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism. ..."
"... In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ..."
"... Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system." ..."
"... The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another. ..."
This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One based on the principle of non-interference,
respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual
cooperation. A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is possible and even though
there are currently players around the world who are striving in that direction we need look no further than our own history for
inspiration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.
(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article provided below.) --
The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign policy was the politician Henry Wallace,
who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the
Progressive Party.
After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's
role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with
partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a post-war world that offered "freedom
from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens, rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting that the Second World War was being
fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and
France give up their colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation.
In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in
war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and
by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other
nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there
must be neither military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was to be based on non-interference
in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core constituency for US foreign policy has been
corporations, rather than the "common man" either in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign
relations have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result the military was transformed
from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.
-- - Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without
political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high
"the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key
policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance
of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."
--
Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest internationalism in US foreign policy that
is in essence American. His approach was proactive not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who
can only suggest that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who embrace sanctions
and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.
Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce tensions between the North and the
South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many
other politicians of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against Trump), progressives should call for
a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions
and reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to NATO and the perpetuation of the
dangerous global rift between East and West that it perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough, progressives should seek to create new
synergies between China and the US economically, politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them," China's BRI proposes an open plan
for development that is not grounded in the models of French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and
science projects that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously ignored by American
and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment
China does not demand that free market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global
investment banks to ravish.
-- The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing
its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying
on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with
nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another.
The irony of the Bush administration demanding unquestioning obedience following 9/11, in
the name of defending American freedom and democracy, is not lost on my students. Many openly
recognize the danger of the proto-fascistic value system that demands unqualified, blind
support for political leaders and their war agenda, without any consideration of the dangers
involved in an infinite war conducted in country after country, with little concern for the
humanitarian consequences.
One benefit of the intellectual curiosity of young Americans today is it translates into a
willingness to seriously consider the motives of the 9/11 attackers. This curiosity barely
existed in the days and years after September 11. Sure, Americans purchased books about the
Middle East and Islam in rising numbers post-9/11. But I can't remember a single person that I
spoke to in my years of studying U.S. foreign policy who bothered to actually read an interview
with Osama Bin Laden. Had they done so, they would have discovered that his and his comrades'
ideology, while fanatical and extreme, was also driven by serious grievances against the United
States that are shared by majorities in Muslim countries. These include: anger at U.S. military
support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestine; bitterness over U.S. military bases
throughout the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia; opposition to U.S. support for
authoritarian regimes in the region; and disgust with the U.S. in the wake of the 1991 Iraq war
and subsequent sanctions, which caused the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children.
War fatigue became a staple of American politics in the late 2000s and 2010s, as most
Americans came to see the Iraq war as immoral and not worthy of the cost in finances, lives,
and blood, and considering the lies for war regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass
destruction and fictitious ties to Al Qaeda terrorism. Many young Americans seem to share this
war fatigue today, even if they weren't closely following American politics during the
2000s.
Having been exposed to the words of Osama Bin Laden, my students also understand just how
dangerous the onset of the "War on Terror" was, in a conflict which Bin Laden coldly and
diabolically sought to draw the U.S. into destructive wars in the Middle East, in order to
achieve a "balance of terror" on both sides, defined by vicious acts of destruction against
civilian populations by both the U.S. military and Islamic fundamentalists.
This is all false. The goal was establish military bases in former soviet republics to encircle Russia and this goal was
achieved. Putin was probably not so wise giving 100% support to Bush invasion, which was a typical false flag invasion.
Taliban was the creation of the USA to fight Soviets, like political Islam in general so any complains are just pure
hypocity.
Notable quotes:
"... Afghanistan borders China. For that reason alone, we are never leaving whatever the cost in blood or treasure. The country is a very forward, strategic military base that can be used to launch air attacks on Chinese assets and impede China's Belt and Road initiative. ..."
"... Despite his bluster, Trump is very weak and knows the Taliban is winning and fears they will try to drive us out before the election, ushering in his defeat. Most of his time is spent cowering in his golf resorts, ranting and raving on a tiny little cellphone. ..."
"... The Blob will not allow any of his fears to shake the resolve of the Deep State to make Afghanistan a colony for a thousand years. ..."
"... American's negotiating position in every instances with rival nations is to dictate the terms for surrender regardless of the circumstances on the ground. It's an untenable position and guarantees perpetual war and occupation which is precisely the point. ..."
"... It seems to me that if one parsed reports from the Special Inspector General Afghanistan Reconstruction along with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime's "Afghanistan Opium Survey", any illusions as to what the reasons for the West's intervention in that country were, should dissipate rather speedily. ..."
"... we invaded Afghanistan so that we could steal the foreign aid money that we would give them and could sponsor the opium trade. ..."
"... Gramsci and his like stand vindicated. Capture the academies and the rest of us follow, often willingly. ..."
"... And just a few, of those in the public eye, standing up true and declaring "This emperor has no clothes!" ..."
Where we are now in Afghanistan- Editorial Opinion by PL
(Lt. Hamilton VC at Kabul where he commanded Sir Louis Cavangnari's escort)
A year or so after the US intervention in Afghanistan began in 2001 I perceived that there
was a danger that US public and government opinion might begin to favor the idea of "nation
building" in Afghanistan. From long experience in and study of the area of Islamicate
civilization and its history it seemed clear to me that such an effort would be doomed to
failure at any price that one should be willing to pay in; expended effort over time, money and
blood shed on all sides.
The basic problem with Afghanistan is that there "is no there there." Afghanistan is really
a geographical expression rather than a country in the sense understood of the word in the
post-Westphalian system of independent states.
Across the Islamicate world from Mauritania to BanglaDesh and beyond to Oceania there is a
pronounced tendency to atomization in group perception of identity. Arabs do not identify with
Berbers, etc., Tribes and clans within these groups regard all others as rivals and often
enemies unless they are needed as temporary allies.
The Islamic religion which holds unity to be an ideal is often thought to be a unifier
against the atomizing tendency in these cultures, but in fact there are many, many varieties of
Islam, each one believing that it is uniquely favored by God. This often cancels out whatever
unifying effect Islam, as religion, can have.
Afghanistan, created as a buffer between imperial Russia and British India, is an extreme
case of atomization among the inhabitants of a state which has recognition in the world
political system including membership in the UN. In spite of that status , a status that might
deceive one into believing that there is such a thing as "the Afghan People,"the population of
Afghanistan is actually made up of a number of different ethnic nations; Pushtuns, Hazzara,
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turcomans, Arabs, etc. These different peoples all speak mutually
unintelligible languages which often have such extreme separation in dialect that this amounts
to uninteligibility as well. Some of these groups are Sunni and others Shia. This is yet
another factor in the separation of the segments of the population.
The country has little substantial physical infrastructure. What there is was largely
constructed in the 50s and 60s as part of Cold War competition between the USSR and the US.
There is very little legal or governmental infrastructure. A commercial company investing its
own or borrowed money in Afghanistan is taking a great risk of never being able to recover its
investment from the local "pirates." Government is generally predatory in its attitude toward
foreign investment funds. I tried to find a safe haven in Afghanistan for some of my company's
funds and could find none. Senior Afghan government people would typically respond to questions
about legal infrastructure with exhortations to "bring your project, all will be well."
Needless to say ...
US intervention in this place was inevitable after 9/11, but what was not necessary or wise
were repeated US decisions for a COIN nation building campaign. As this tendency began to be
evident I argued for a much more limited goal in which the US would keep about 20K troops in
country to maintain a government controlled enclave around Kabul and Bagram. This would enable
pursuit of located international terrorist groups through raiding operations from that base
area. The basis for this strategy was my conclusion that the US could never "pacify" all of the
territory of Afghanistan and that we would "break our teeth" trying.
I pressed this belief in various fora and with various individuals within the Obama
Administration even as Obama endlessly contemplated the entreaties of the COINista generals,
Petraeus, Mattis, McChrystal etc. for a country wide nation building COIN campaign. The most
interesting of these encounters was at an IQ2 debate at NYU in 2009 where I (and teammates)
argued that "The US can never win in Afghanistan." My side lost on points but the leader of the
other team recently told me that he knows now that we were completely correct. Obama gave in to
the generals, and gave them the COIN war that they wanted. I suppose that for "Barry" it was
immensely flattering to have them "butter him up."
It is clear now that the COIN strategy has failed miserable and totally. Afghanistan is not
one bit more united or modernized than it has ever been. The US has spent a sea of money there
and many brave people have perished or been wrecked in chasing the idea of Afghanistan as a
Central Asian Switzerland.
Trump has allowed Zalmai Khalilzad to attempt to achieve a negotiated peace with the
Taliban, the former salafi takfiri, Pushtun rulers of Afghanistan, in the apparent belief that
they could be "talked down out of the tree" just as his business competitors could always be
talked down to meet at a "closing" table where his supposed "closing genius' would bring a
DEAL.
Unfortunately this belief in his closing talent goes unrewarded in Palestine, Syria,
Turkey,Yemen, Iran, China (not yet), North Korea and Afghanistan. IMO his difficulty in finding
solutions lies in his entrapment within his own New York City business model, a model in which
everything is for sale if the deal is structured skillfully to advantage the stronger party
while all the while claiming that the party you are screwing is your friend.
Sadly for The Donald all those "stupid" foreigners do not understand that "everything is for
sale." Among them, the Taliban, an army and religio-political movement are notable for a lack
of belief in the commercial possibilities of selling out to Donald Trump for a "mess of
pottage" or thirty pieces of silver whichever reference you prefer. They want to win, and they
want to be seen to have driven the "crusaders" from Afghanistan and in the process to have
humiliated the US as the leading infidel state. To that end they lie, prevaricate and await the
day when they can crush the puny forces of "modernism" after the American departure. Zalmai
Khalilzad is an Afghan pushtun Sunni by birth and rearing. Did he not know that they could not
be trusted in dealings with the US? I do not blame the Taliban for being what they are. I blame
all the American and NATO fools for believing that they could make the Taliban either go away
or become "happy campers." They were never going to do either of those things. We should have
known that. Some of us did, but Americans are addicted to all the melting pot, right side of
history foolishness so common in "levelled" America,
What should the US do now that the scales have fallen from Trump's eyes and the time of
"good faith" negotiation with the Taliban is "dead?" The first thing to do is to fire
Khalilzad.
Last night, Col. (ret.) Douglas Macgregor told Tucker Carlson that the US should simply
leave, and should have never intervened. IOW we should get the hell out totally and forever.
This is a tempting thought. I have wrestled with the attractiveness of the idea but there are
certain problems with it.
1. We should not want to give the jihadi movements proof of our feckless defeatability. IMO
if we leave suddenly the Afghan government and armed forces will soon collapse. The country
will then further disintegrate into a welter of jihadi factions and regional tribal strongmen,
the strongest of which will be the Taliban.
2. We have encouraged modernist Afghan men, women and girls to emerge from the shadows.
Shall we leave them to their fates under the rule of the jihadis.
3. What about all the translators, base workers and other people who have cast their lots
with us. The Taliban and other jihadis will simply kill them as apostates. We abandoned a lot
of such people in Iraq. Will we do it again?
On balance I would say Macgregor is right that we must leave. The time for a small remaining
presence is past. The forces in the field are too strong for a small force to maintain itself
even with massive long range air support. Think of Sir Louis Cavangnari. No, we should leave,
but we should leave on a schedule that will enable us to control the timing of our going and to
protect the departure of those who wish to leave with us. pl
BTW, SWMBO says that no mutually understood languages = no country.
"We should not want to give the jihadi movements proof of our feckless defeatability."
Gee, like admit to reality?
My view: Acknowledge the U.S. is not omnipotent, and has very limited ability to
influence, let alone, control, other parts of the world other than those to which it has
extremely close ties, most especially the Five Eyes and other parts of what was once called
Western Civilization.
I just want to mention that about once a year I dig the IQ2 debate out and watch it again
in full. Call it a sanity check I suppose. It is clear that you were trying to be substantive
throughout, which was somewhat hampered by the amorphous premise of "success" undergirding
the debate question. The other side (Nagle in particular) was trying to "win" the debate by
defining success so broadly as to exclude questions over the "how," and they used that as an
excuse to dodge your indictment of COIN. But it is very clear who had the right of it, and it
is at least somewhat gratifying to hear that same admission was made to you.
I suspect that we will retain our forces in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. To
understand why you've got to consider the politics rather than the pragmatics.
No president wants to be the one who "lost Afghanistan" (as though it were ours to lose)
or, worse yet, be the president who removed forces from a country from which an attack on the
U. S. would emanate afterwards or be staged from or planned from.
The greatest likelihood of our removing our forces from Afghanistan would be towards the
end of a president's second term, especially if that president were a Democrat and could
expect to take less heat from the media. In other words Obama should have removed our forces
from Afghanistan and if he wouldn't Trump won't, especially not before being re-elected.
These kind of wars seem to take 3 presidents to end. Trump is this war's Nixon and was
elected on a platform which included 'losing' Afghanistan. The media will howl once the
Taliban take over, but it will swiftly pass as they realize Americans have no interest in a
place where their countrymen are no longer dying.
No matter what the US government does or does not do, wouldn't Afghanistan revert to its
natural state as you have described it?
It seems Trump's "negotiated" deal with the Taliban would have been a good approach to
getting out but that's now no longer a possibility. Would supporting the Tajiks through
Russia and India as a counter-balance to the Taliban work to keep them from completely
dominating? Russia and India likely have an interest in preventing jihadis from using Taliban
dominated territory to infiltrate. Is it even worth any effort on the part of the US
government? It would seem Pakistan and China would continue working to influence events
there.
My longstanding belief is that Afghanistan to be 'tamed' requires the type of Steel that only
existed long ago.
The Modern World has modernized beyond the brutal realities that taming it likely
requires, and as such may lose a fraction of the Lives and Treasure as past - but cannot
sustain it politically or socially.
The next Question - If Afghanistan is simply a construct, why not forsake most of it and
develop the regions of Afghanistan that ARE more amiable and Homogenous?
A lot of the Tadzhiks and Uzbeks (varied Turkmen) I suspect could be far more easily
propped up and supported in their own Lands, which back to back with the Central Asian FSU
States is a more viable 'Nation Building' Exercise.
What ultimately tamed the 'Wilds'? The Development of strong local States, Force of Arms
and ultimately - Demographics. If you will not do it yourself, pick a unified Team and back them in doing it. Ironically the means to inflict harm on occupying Militaries seems to go down as those
Armies means to stomach it does also.
The next obvious Question. Is it worth considering (not necessarily for the US and Western
States - who will appear as desperate Losers the idea that Afghanistan if allowed to run as
strong Armed Islamic State, albeit modernized - might actually one day develop into one more
approachable to further modernization?
I agree we should unilaterally withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan. The military can
surely plan and carry out a unilateral withdrawal. Just do it. The Taliban are not al Qaeda
or the Islamic State. Their desires don't extend beyond the mountains of Afghanistan. Hell,
they're fighting IS. Let them do so and don't give them reason to go over to them.
The rub will be all those Afghanis who tied their futures to us. We should resettle them
here or somewhere more familiar to them as part of that withdrawal. The chance of that
happening under the Trump administration is nil.
That is the exact same argument I heard in 72 and again in 75. By early 76 no one cared.
There are in every country and in every involvement Quislings and main chancers who find the
short term gelt available to be worth the future risk of making the wrong and visible
choice.
In the case of most of these Afghanis the tie was a slip knot at best.
A "long, long, time ago" in "a land far away", Najibullah was deposed. Pat, you'll recall
that I was then serving as the chair of the Inter-agency Task Force on Afghanistan. Well, we
had our regular meeting at which a couple of the folks opined that this was a wonderful
development for the country and the folks would now all join hands, dance around the
campfire, and sign Kumbaya. To bring the group back to reality, I asked for someone to
identify the national sport of Afghanistan. One of the group said that, obviously, it was
buzkhasi. So I then asked for someone else to clarify how such a game unfolds and another
stalwart did so. This dialogue quickly brought everyone back to reality. For those unfamiliar
with the sport, buzkhasi consists of two nominal "teams" on horseback trying to get a
headless goat carcass across the opponent's goal line. All goes well at first, but ultimately
the teams disintegrate until it's every man for himself in mass mayhem. Thus, IMHO will go
Afghanistan.
Sadly enough this old quote seems especially true in the case of the "Afghan War" or whatever
it is. Our experts' obdurate insistence on pursuing "peace with honor" or some outcome we can
get our heads around and feel good about has become a receding horizon...
The only way we could "win" would be by waging a war of extermination with the goal of
totally depopulating the entire territory and building an impenetrable barrier around it. But
of course that would be a hard sell for a country with a good guy reputation to protect. And
then what would we do with the land? After all, we still haven't been able to settle most of
Nevada and Wyoming!
"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about
by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
I said at the beginning of this mess that the one sure thing was that we would end up with
chains of Iraqi and afghan restaurants begun by the refugees who had to leave their countries
with us when we left. I just hope we have progressed from leaving behind card indexes of our
in-country supporters for the Taliban to discover, as allegedly happened in Vietnam.
I enjoyed the IQ2 debate you reference, particularly your coining of the word "Vermontize".
Incredible to think this conversation about an 8 year old war was 10 years ago - and we are
still having it. Here is the link for anyone interested:
I really enjoy these type of situational overview and analysis posts, thanks!
Although I see your point about Trump's crass business approach, let's face it... the
military and various US gov't orgs have had any many years to try various approaches to
"solving" (cough, cough) Afghanistan. After all the US has been in Afghanistan since 2001. We
had been in Afghanistan for 15 years before Trump was elected. After all those years of failure
by the Borg I have no problem whatsoever with Trump taking a shot at the situation in his own
way. Trump tried a certain tactic and it didn't work. Oh well, but lessons learned. He'll
regroup, get more advice and try something else. He's making more of an effort to resolve
things than previous presidents, and willing to think outside of the Borg box.
No, all Trump was doing was looking for a re-election publicity stunt and a shot at that
elusive Nobel like Obama got....he's done this kind of thing for the last 40 years - he isn't
going to change his personality now...
If the US leaves and I believe it should it doesn't have to mean the end of days. China,
Russia, Iran, India and Pakistan have all expressed interest in clearing the area of
terrorists. They have all been blocked by the US presence. Preferably the US would work a
deal with those players who are far better connected and prepared to clean up the
neighbourhood than the US is from the other side of the world. Russia was willing to act as
guarantor for the collapsed deal. Work a deal for one or more of them to move in as the US
moves out.
My concern is that with all the big players wanting a piece of the pie that it evolves into
an even worse proxy war. But China, Pakistan, Russia and Iran are all rowing in more or less
the same direction these days and India has bitten off all it can chew in Kashmir so this may
be the perfect time. Americans just have to get over that indispensable nation nonsense.
Thank you for thinking of the women and girls....and perhaps their little boys.
I've lived through the abandonment of Vietnam and the influx of refugees from that part of
the world, the mess after the Iraq War that included bringing to our country many who had
tied their fortunes to us. We can not this time decide to abandon any who have tied their
hopes to us after we came in and caused so much turmoil in their country.
I always thought it was hubris on our part to think we could do what the Soviets failed to
do.
If we bring these people here, my hope is that we examine how our bringing in Somalis has,
in many places, not been a successful effort in regard to integrating them into our society.
(Do not many of us, including Nancy Pelosi, regret the bringing in of at least one Somali
woman?) We need to prepare for their entry into our country in some way that will not mean
just dropping them somewhere and letting them fend for themselves.
I know the government has some sort of protocol for finding them places to live. Often,
however, the people seem to be dropped in and left in some ways to depend on themselves "as
strangers in a strange land." This should be our last time. Stop the "nation-building"
efforts.
I feel that most Americans are welcoming and friendly people, but they often just do not
understand how difficult it is for some to adapt to a very different way of life.
Afghanistan borders China. For that reason alone, we are never leaving whatever the cost in
blood or treasure. The country is a very forward, strategic military base that can be used to
launch air attacks on Chinese assets and impede China's Belt and Road initiative.
Despite his bluster, Trump is very weak and knows the Taliban is winning and fears they
will try to drive us out before the election, ushering in his defeat. Most of his time is
spent cowering in his golf resorts, ranting and raving on a tiny little cellphone.
The Blob will not allow any of his fears to shake the resolve of the Deep State to make
Afghanistan a colony for a thousand years.
They have been successful in implanting in the psyche of every American the incorrect
notion that the Taliban launched 9/11. That notion alone means there is no support for any
truce or treaty with our bete noir.
These lines from Rudyard Kipling immediately came to my mind:
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!"
We are never going to change Afghanistan so getting out and taking those who supported us
is appealing to me.
Maybe that's why Mr. Prince wanted Trump to make him the viceroy of Afghanistan.
What a career that would be - a former SEAL lieutenant, then mercenary, promoted to
something like a field marshal, bringing fabulous quarter numbers, strategy or something like
that, peace and freedom to the place by privatizing the war and fighting it more cost
effective for himself .
It is not a base. It is a sinkhole--A distinction without a difference.
Confusedponderer
Your reference to Mr. Prince was spot on. He understood what the long-term plans for
Afghanistan were and still are. A viceroy is the designated ruling representative of a
colonial power.
American's negotiating position in every instances with rival nations is to dictate the
terms for surrender regardless of the circumstances on the ground. It's an untenable position
and guarantees perpetual war and occupation which is precisely the point.
It seems to me that if one parsed reports from the Special Inspector General Afghanistan
Reconstruction along with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime's "Afghanistan Opium
Survey", any illusions as to what the reasons for the West's intervention in that country
were, should dissipate rather speedily.
so, your belief is that we invaded Afghanistan so that we could steal the foreign aid money that we would give them and
could sponsor the opium trade. Funny! A joke right?
IMO Trump has no clarity of anyhthing in foreign policy. He is just trying to make a deal
in accordance with his experience of deal making and is not doing well. It will be
interesting to see if he and Trudeau can sell the USMCA to Pelosi. this is clearly a
gooddeal. Let's see how hard he pushes for it. With regard to the ME, have reached the
conclusion that his basic attitudes are formed in the culture of New York City Jewry. A
Christian Brother who had two PH.D.s in STEM and was a New York City guy once told me that I
had to understand that everyone in NY City is to some extent Jewish, even the cardinal
archbishop.
I spent several years in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014. I was there, with a front row
seat, when the shift to nation-building began. The best days of my life were in Afghanistan,
spent amongst the finest men and women from many nations...including Afghanistan.
We lost the war a long time ago. By 2006, I could see we were losing. By 2008, I knew it
was lost. How many Afghans have hitched their horses to our wagon? More than enough. How many others
chose to live as free men and women because we were there? A significant part of the
population. They face a reckoning for living that hope out loud, in public.
The Afghan people are amazing, and a lot of them believed in us, and in a future where
women could be more than a piece of property. I can see why some would say we should walk
away, and, it's hard to argue against that.
I'll carry what we did in Afghanistan to my grave. DOL,
Colonel ...I agree with your Opinion on this matter of Withdrawal. I have read a Year by Year
timeline of The Millions spent. for the Training Of Afghanistan Military and Security
Forces and Like in Viet Nam..they will fail. Fail to defend themselves..
Their hearts wont be in it..and like Vietnam..It Just made The Communist North Vietnamese the Third Most Powerful
Conventional Weapons stockpile in the World..with all the Equipment we Left
behind...The..billions spent to keep our military presence there..
The millions Spent for VA
Resources to care for our wounded. Many with traumatic head injuries...The loss of Our People
there..Overt and Covert...The loss of Seal Team 6 in the Aftermath of Finally Getting Osama
Bin Laden...It will Never End...
There will always be those willing to die for JiHad..Forever..Over a Trillion Dollars..Plus all The Money we sent to
Pakistan. Which has
been Most of Our Foreign Aid..Its been a Tragic Blunder and there has never been such a
thing as "Mission Accomplished"..
This has been the second most Costly War since WWII.
..Bring Them Home.. ...
9/11/2001,,,,9/11/2019.A War of the Politicians..By The Politicians
For The Politicians.and the Military..Industrial Complex....and Their Egos..and Bank
accounts..Period...Thomas Jefferson Knew This was coming.
I know nothing about Doug Macgregor but he sounds really sane in this interview with
Tucker. If Trump does what he suggests it would be a welcome approach and drive the Borg
insane.
I agreed with sending SOF in to kill AQ being harbored by the Taliban. I said at the time,
"Go in, kill the people who need killing & get the hell out."
There is only one thing that can unify Afgan tribes, that's the presence of foreigners. A
very long history has resulted in the reference to "the graveyard of empires." I don't
believe that the Taliban is a threat to the US outside of Afghanistan. They are a threat to
any American in Afghanistan. Nation building in Afghanistan is domed to failure. The only
issue is what is to be the fate of the Afghani's who assisted us or bought into the idea of
westernization. Our recent history is to abandon these people.
Eventually we will join the list of Afghan invaders from Cyrus, to Alexander, to the
Brits. The only question is how we depart & how much more blood & treasure we
spend.
In my experience, nothing can unify Afghan tribes, or even the sub-tribes. There is a saying
amongst the Pashtun: "Me against my brothers, my brothers and I against my cousins, my
cousins and I against the world." The real Taliban (meaning the political entity, exiled to
the east, also known as "The Quetta Shura," have never been able to get "Taliban" factions in
Afghanistan to unite against anything. COL Lang is spot-on, there is no collective "Afghan"
identity.
Afghanistan is still run by warlords. The vast majority of folks referred to as "Taliban"
are really just warlords (and the warlords' minions) wrapping themselves in the Taliban flag,
as it suits them now. If the Taliban were to come back to controlling power in Afghanistan,
many of the warlords would switch to fighting the Taliban. True territorial gains in
Afghanistan are generally made when warlords switch sides. Afghan warlords are the most loyal
people money can buy...well, rent, anyway.
The IQ2 debate was significant for me personally when I first saw it. The arguments for
staying in Afghanistan were set out coherently and for perhaps the first time I caught a
glimpse of the immense intellectual effort, in the think tanks and the academies, that goes
into justifying the neocon position. That neocon position working through almost by osmosis
to the heavyweight newspapers and media outlets, and providing the narrative framework within
which the Intelligence Initiatives of this world right down to the little propaganda sites
work. Such varied figures as Charles Lister or Peter Tatchell have backup, and how.
It's an intellectual fortress, the whole, and for many of us in the general public
it confirms us comfortably in the neocon rationale. It gives us the arguments, and the
excuses, and as long as one declines to notice that those arguments and excuses do shift
around, we pay our taxes for this or that crazy neocon venture without complaint and often
gladly. Gramsci and his like stand vindicated. Capture the academies and the rest of us
follow, often willingly.
And just a few, of those in the public eye, standing up true and declaring "This emperor
has no clothes!"
Which happened, as I saw several years later when I got to view it, in that IQ2 debate.
Around that time I came across Major Stueber's documentary which had rather more than seven
minutes to lay out how hopeless it was for Western armies to fight alongside local forces,
when those local forces were so hopelessly factional, corrupt, and therefore ineffectual.
And a footnote just recently. I head a Swedish aid worker relating just how impossible it
was for him too to function in Afghanistan. Money put through to local groups swallowed up in
false invoicing, ghost workers whose salaries went to swell the pay packet of their
superiors, slush funds because that was the only way to get things done.
It was never a doable venture, Afghanistan. That was clear to a few in that debate ten
years ago and it's clear to more now. I hope it's possible to get out without leaving the
urban Westernised Afghans too much at the mercy of the rest.
And perhaps, also reflecting that the Rovean narratives that the academies and think tanks
conjure up for us, at such expense and at such effort, all crumble eventually when reality,
as it must finally, breaks through.
Looks like Clinton and Obama made books deal a part of revolving door corruption.
Notable quotes:
"... Or a third story, of how normalized this is. Clintons made millions on speeches and books, as did Obama in and out of office. This seems to be how we have decided legal payoffs work in America; money in a brown paper bag is a bribe but ridiculous overpayments for speeches and tell-nothing books is just fine. ..."
"... Biden has had two aneurysms, has blood pouring into his eye, while taking blood thinners to avoid a stroke. He should be getting his affairs in order, not running for office. ..."
The reason why I'm asking is you received
five student draft deferments during the Vietnam War draft, the same number as Donald Trump
and Dick Cheney. And in 1968, when your student status was wrapping up, you were medically
reclassified as "not available" due to asthma as a teenager.
In your autobiography , you described
your active youth
as a lifeguard and high school football player. You also lied (note: Biden lies
are usually called gaffes) about being on the University of Delaware football team. Was all
that hard with asthma? Were you diagnosed for asthma in 1968 by a podiatrist? Your vice
presidential physicals mention multiple aneurysms
. Asthma, no.
... ... ...
Q: Joe, can you explain your recent financial success?
In 2008, you earned a $165,200 salary as a senator, supplemented by $20,500 as an adjunct
professor at Widener University Law School. You got an advance of $112,500 for your book
Promises to Keep . Your wife Jill
taught at a community college while you were vice president. You two reported a combined income
of $396,000 in 2016, your last year in the Obama administration.
Then, after leaving the Obama White House, you and Jill made more than $15 million , mostly via a new
book deal. In fact, you and your wife made nearly
twice as much in 2017 as you did in the previous 19 years combined .
Now, we know about inflation and everything, but you were given $10 million for your 2017
memoir, Promise Me, Dad , roughly
10 times what your first book pulled in. Jill was paid more than $3 million for her book,
Where the Light Enters , in 2018,
by the same publisher as you.
We all know how publishing works: the publisher, Flatiron, pays you, the author, an advance.
Profits from book sales are subtracted from that advance. For a publisher to be successful,
they need to sell more than they paid out for the advance, and because of this, successful
publishers like Flatiron get pretty good at estimating those numbers. Forbes
reports that your new book sold 300,000 copies against that $10 million, meaning you, Joe,
took home about $33 per copy on a book Amazon is selling for only $13.99 . Of course, it's more complicated than that, but off the
cuff do you feel that pocketing $33 on a $13.99 sale was a good deal for you?
And speaking of which, a friend passes along her respect. Hillary Clinton only earned around
$5
million from her campaign book.
Your teaching pay went up nicely as well. You got $20,500 for teaching when you entered the
White House. After you left office, the University of Pennsylvania gave you
$775,000 to teach, and then was nice enough to offer you indefinite leave of absence from
actually teaching anything while you campaign. And you got signed for that gig only a month
after leaving the White House. Side question: did you post your résumé on Monster
or Indeed.com?
What role do you think your being the likely nominee played in how much you were paid? It's
almost as if people are giving you money to be your friend. Is there a definition of corruption
that might encompass that?
Another friend sends his respect, too, Joe. He's jealous almost no one talks about how you
charge the Secret Service
$2,200 a month rent for a cottage on your property so they can protect you! He wants to ask
if you jokingly call the cottage "Biden Tower." Q: Joe, do you remember the tax loophole you
and Obama tried to close, called the "S Corporation"? Since leaving office, you and your wife
have laundered money through S Corps tosavemillions in taxes ordinary Americans have to pay. Why the change of heart, Joe?
In 2012, you said paying higher taxes on higher incomes was patriotic. You told
us, "We're not supposed to have a system with one set of rules for the wealthy and one set of
rules for everyone else." Along those lines, you and Obama sought to end a well-known dodge,
the use of
S Corporations to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes.
You'll remember, Joe: by creating a paper S Corporation, an individual receives money for
things like book advances and speaking fees not directly, which would cause him to have to pay
Social Security and Medicare taxes as with salaries, but
laundered as divestitures from a corporation he owns. As corporate money, nasty personal
taxes are fully avoided, and the corporation can claim nearly unlimited "business expenses" to
be deducted against those profits, as well as benefits from other tax rules that favor
companies over individual earners.
So Joe, it seems that after trying to
close that S Corp loophole while in the White House, you and Jill are now fans. In fact,
your lucrative deals were funneled to you through two S Corps -- CelticCapri for Joe and
Giacoppa for Jill. Your S Corp is registered at 1201 North Orange in Wilmington, Delaware.
That's a popular block; right nearby is 1209 North Orange, the legal address of 285,000
separate businesses. Delaware, in fact, is ground zero for corporate tax
shell companies. Michael Cohen had his there for Trump's use as well.
Delaware has
more (paper) corporate entities than people. And Joe, you were one of Delaware's senators
for decades. So you knew how things worked when you established your his-and-her S Corps
only days after leaving the White House. As a corporate entity, S Corps can also make
political contributions. Joe, your own S Corp did so, neatly donating money to your
own political PAC, American Possibilities.
So Joe, the question is: is everything regarding your taxes a load of malarkey?
Q: Final question, because I know you're getting tired. How do you intend to debate Trump
when corruption, tax fudging, and skipping out on military service come up?
Are you just going to rely on the mainstream media not to ask about those things? Or are you
going to go with Trump's sleaze is worse than yours and you're the lesser of two evils
candidate because that worked out so well as a strategy in 2016?
There is actually a second story here, apart from Biden's apparent neck-deep corruption.
Why hasn't the MSM covered any of this? The information is not hard to find, available in
online public records.
Or a third story, of how normalized this is. Clintons made millions on speeches and
books, as did Obama in and out of office. This seems to be how we have decided legal
payoffs work in America; money in a brown paper bag is a bribe but ridiculous overpayments
for speeches and tell-nothing books is just fine.
I have a question for Biden, and it is dead serious.
What are going to be the president's policies when you die or become fully mentally
disabled in office?
Biden has had two aneurysms, has blood pouring into his eye, while taking blood
thinners to avoid a stroke. He should be getting his affairs in order, not running for
office.
The problem then is that Biden appears electable compared to the Communists running, but
if he picks one as a running mate, then that is who we end up as president and that could
be the end of our nation.
"Saudi jets, armed with US and UK bombs and provided with targeting information by US
military intelligence officers stationed in Saudi Arabia, have continued to carry out
repeated attacks on civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, residential
neighborhoods, mosques, funerals and markets. The US had provided coalition jets with mid-air
refueling until the end of last year, ensuring maximum carnage."
Russia has no net public debt left
06:54 09/10/2019 (updated: 07:26 09/10/2019)
MOSCOW, Sep 10 – RIA News. The net public debt of Russia has become negative for
the first time since the introduction of the first sanctions for the annexation of the Crimea
and the fall in oil prices in 2014, RBC writes, with reference to Ministry of Finance and
Central Bank data.
As of August 1, the volume of public debt of the federal government, regions and
municipalities, including state guarantees for enterprise loans, amounted to 16.2 trillion
rubles.
At the same time, the liquid assets of the state – federal authorities, regions
and extrabudgetary state funds – totalled 17.6 trillion ruble son the same
date.
Thus, in the widest sense, the public debt since mid-2019 has become less than the
liquid assets of the "expanded government", the publication indicates.
As noted, this has became possible owing to record reserves that have fully covered the
state debt. That is to say, if Russia needed to immediately pay off all existing debts, this
could be done at the expense of only government deposits with the Central Bank and commercial
banks.
As the Minister of Economic Development, Maxim Oreshkin, emphasized, "what has been
done in Russian macroeconomics from 2014 to 2019 will definitely fall into the textbooks", At
the same time, the flip side of such a tough approach is the lack of fiscal incentives for
economic development.
Over to you Bloomberg, WSJ, FT etc., etc!
Waddya say to that, arseholes?
And think on this, you happy folk of the Exceptional Nation who prosper ever onwards:
MOSCOW, 16 August 2019/ Radio Sputnik . Russia
continues to reduce investments in US bonds in June, reducing their size to 10.8 billion
dollars, the United States Ministry of Finance has reported.
According to Finance Department data, 5,296 billion dollars of this amount is for
long-term securities and 5,552 billion are short – term.
For comparison, in may, the total amount was $ 12 billion.
As part of the de-dollarization course for Russia, other financial instruments are
gaining importance: gold and investments in European and Asian securities, chief expert of
FinEk agency Mikhail Belyaev said on Sputnik radio.
According to the economist, the instability of the US economy also contributes to the
withdrawal of Russian assets from it.
Olson's doubts deepened. In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret Microbiological
Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying
the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old
soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions,
and died an hour later. Afterward, Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who
helped direct the research, William Sargant .
####
That's very unBritish! Not really. This is not the first time that something that has been
declassified in the United States and uncovered British (shameful) secrets. The thing is the
Brits like to see themselves as not 'going as far' as their American cousins and this myth is
perpetuated – a bit like the British sense of 'fairness'. Yet again we discover
that the UK has worked hand in glove in the deepest of sh*t, something that most probably
would have been buried forever under their Secrets Act if it wasn't for the US' relative
openness.
Olson's doubts deepened. In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret Microbiological
Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying
the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old
soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions,
and died an hour later. Afterward, Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who
helped direct the research, William Sargant .
####
That's very unBritish! Not really. This is not the first time that something that has been
declassified in the United States and uncovered British (shameful) secrets. The thing is the
Brits like to see themselves as not 'going as far' as their American cousins and this myth is
perpetuated – a bit like the British sense of 'fairness'. Yet again we discover
that the UK has worked hand in glove in the deepest of sh*t, something that most probably
would have been buried forever under their Secrets Act if it wasn't for the US' relative
openness.
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Freefall speed
is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because freefall is impossible for a naturally
collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the
Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Below is a video showing several film sequences
taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen
years ago on September 11, 2001.
The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative"
promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.
Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska
published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane
on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building
-- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).
This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue
to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.
Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building
7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed,
as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an
interview
here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.
Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all
the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to
prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning
by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence
which points to the same conclusion.
Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly
during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting
the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).
However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission
that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously
admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.
For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united
states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on
September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since
that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the
failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to
negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.
Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan
but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters
to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a
jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless
the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.
I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the
Guns and Butterpodcast archive here . These interviews,
from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.
I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not
of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully
read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a
blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he
explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of
9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.
That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told
about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy --
even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge
what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken.
This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which
is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing
as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).
This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept
what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that
our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self,
sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character
of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see
here for example,
and also here .
The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement
of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which
already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster
upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman
Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo.
Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.
Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the
divine realm.
If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately
refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm.
Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must
be corrected.
In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that
the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.
Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government
is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators
actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution,
forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries
that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government
under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes
a very clear penalty for treason.
When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11,
the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was
enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were
initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations
that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.
The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent
pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media
for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September
11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies
which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and
which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within
their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.
When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed
justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in
the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and
women.
Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and
the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people
and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women
as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001
-- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a
long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very
powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 --
but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that
they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.
Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.
But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle
still has us .
*
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David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
"... Any honest Eisenhower Republican would be a lot better than Clinton or Obama (although still capitalist and imperialist). I am worried, however, about the palling around with HRC and it seems to me that she is (willingly or unknowingly) being used as a firebreak to prevent voters from moving to Bernie. ..."
Essentially, Toback argues that Warren's project is to somehow hoodwink us into believing that she is an opponent of neoliberalism
when in reality she is committed to legitimating neoliberalism. For Warren, neoliberalism is simply really 2 legit 2 quit (I'll spare
you the MC Hammer video).
Still, while stark differences between Sanders, Biden and the rest seem obvious to most, when it comes to Elizabeth Warren,
many on the alleged left have taken to collapsing distinctions. They argue that Warren's just as, or even more progressive, equal
but a woman and therefore better, not quite as good but still a fundamental shift to the left, or at the very least, a serious
opponent of neoliberalism. Some have even fantasized that Sanders and Warren function as allies, despite the obvious fact that
they are, you know Running against each other.
All of these claims obscure the fundamental truth that Sanders and Warren are different in kind, not degree. Warren has always
been a market-first neoliberal and nothing she's doing now suggests deviation. Despite her barrage of plans and recent adoption
of left rhetorical shibboleths like "grassroots movements" and "structural change," Warren remains a neoliberal legitimization
machine. Anybody who's serious about amending and expanding the social contract and/or preserving the habitability of the planet
needs to oppose her candidacy now.
Toback nicely weaves together and systematically presents pretty much all the analysis I've seen here at C99%. It's well worth
reading as is the David Harvey interview linked above.
And for some icing on the cake, Toback quotes some lyrics from the splendid Leonard Cohen song 'Democracy':
"It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat." -- Leonard Cohen
might be someone I could support. She said all the right things. That was all I had to judge by. So I took a wait and see.
I have always been able to see the reality of actions that differ from words. Hers don't match. It's far better that she lacks
Obama's charisma and has shown who she is before she's sitting in Trump's chair.
might be someone I could support. She said all the right things. That was all I had to judge by. So I took a wait and see.
I have always been able to see the reality of actions that differ from words. Hers don't match. It's far better that she lacks
Obama's charisma and has shown who she is before she's sitting in Trump's chair.
@orlbucfan
I can sympathize with being weary of theory, but I think it's important to try to be precise in discerning a politician's ideological
underpinnings. And I think there really is a full, expanding, and even oscillating spectrum of ideologies at play.
It seems to me that fascists would more accurately be characterized as "corporate rightwingers. As fed up as I am with Warren's
phony baloney, I don't think she's a fascist or a corporate rightwinger.
Consider Harvey's portrayal of the liberal/neoliberal divide:
In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism
it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through
the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as
Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal
freedoms.
#3
I can sympathize with being weary of theory, but I think it's important to try to be precise in discerning a politician's ideological
underpinnings. And I think there really is a full, expanding, and even oscillating spectrum of ideologies at play.
It seems to me that fascists would more accurately be characterized as "corporate rightwingers. As fed up as I am with Warren's
phony baloney, I don't think she's a fascist or a corporate rightwinger.
Consider Harvey's portrayal of the liberal/neoliberal divide:
In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism
it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through
the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such
as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of
neoliberal freedoms.
#3
I can sympathize with being weary of theory, but I think it's important to try to be precise in discerning a politician's ideological
underpinnings. And I think there really is a full, expanding, and even oscillating spectrum of ideologies at play.
It seems to me that fascists would more accurately be characterized as "corporate rightwingers. As fed up as I am with Warren's
phony baloney, I don't think she's a fascist or a corporate rightwinger.
Consider Harvey's portrayal of the liberal/neoliberal divide:
In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism
it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through
the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such
as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of
neoliberal freedoms.
over toward Obama. I don't think she's to the left of him. Then again, I'm not really sure how much of what she says I believe.
A lot of it seems mushy and ill-defined (what is "access to healthcare?"), and she certainly isn't consistent in her support for
MFA. For that matter, how can you take large donations from the people who put us where we are if you intend to change the system
they created? Does that mean that the multi-millionaires and billionaires don't like the system they created? That they see its
destructiveness and now, finally, want to head it off? That's the only logical way you can put together "I'm going to change the
system" and "I'm going to take large donations from people who built, maintain, and profit from the system." Since I've seen no
evidence that the "smart money," or any other money, is interested in changing the system, I'd have to reject this hypothesis.
So what am I left with? I'm left with guessing that Warren is another one of those "all we need to do is tweak the system a
little" types--but if that's the case, she's not going to solve global warming, the health care crisis, the economic crisis, the
collapse of wages, the destruction of basic human rights, the destruction--or distortion--of the rule of law, or the endless wars.
All those things have been put in place by the people she wants to take lots of money from. And take it in the dark, too. Spiffing.
She was an outspoken opponent of the TPP in 2015 before she could be seen reasonably as posturing for a Presidential run. The
TPP is the essence of neoliberalism.
I have seen her as an Eisenhower Republican and therefore to the left of the Democratic leadership. I think the Consumer Protection
Agency was an attempt at moderating some of the worst effects of unrestrained capitalism.
Any honest Eisenhower Republican would be a lot better than Clinton or Obama (although still capitalist and imperialist).
I am worried, however, about the palling around with HRC and it seems to me that she is (willingly or unknowingly) being used
as a firebreak to prevent voters from moving to Bernie.
slippery...just like Clinton (Bill I mean). And don't get me started on this whole palling around with Hillary crap. I mean
really Liz?
This is a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. Not necessary right but they his some relevant
points.
Notable quotes:
"... The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. ..."
"... The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. ..."
"... While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand. ..."
"... The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5 ..."
"... This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis. ..."
"... The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6 ..."
"... If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment. ..."
"... The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market ..."
"... In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people ..."
"... In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. ..."
"... The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support. ..."
"... The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism. ..."
"... And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more. ..."
"... Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it. ..."
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth.
But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this
ideological prop.
Harry Magdoff's The Age of
Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not
negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it
follows in V. I. Lenin's footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at
the time operated globally. On the other hand, it raises a question that is less frequently
discussed in Marxist literature -- namely, the need for imperialism. Here, Magdoff not only
highlighted the crucial importance, among other things, of the third world's raw materials for
metropolitan capital, but also refuted the argument that the declining share of raw-material
value in gross manufacturing output somehow reduced this importance, making the simple point
that there can be no manufacturing at all without raw materials. 1
Magdoff's focus was on a period when imperialism was severely resisting economic
decolonization in the third world, with newly independent third world countries taking control
over their own resources. He highlighted the entire armory of weapons used by imperialism. But
he was writing in a period that predated the onset of neoliberalism. Today, we not only have
decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end.
Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting.
Globalization and
Economic Crisis
There are two reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end.
The first is an ex ante tendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the
only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price
bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the
economy back into crisis. In short, to use the words of British economic historian Samuel
Berrick Saul, there are no "markets on tap" for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as
had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the
post-Second World War period of dirigisme . 2
The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages
across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector
of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world
output. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital , following the lead of
Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, such a rise in the share of economic surplus, or a shift
from wages to surplus, has the effect of reducing aggregate demand since the ratio of
consumption to income is higher on average for wage earners than for those living off the
surplus. 3
Therefore, assuming a given level of investment associated with any period, such a shift would
tend to reduce consumption demand and hence aggregate demand, output, and capacity utilization.
In turn, reduced capacity utilization would lower investment over time, further aggravating the
demand-reducing effect arising from the consumption side.
While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous
phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an
explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy?
The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the
first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the
metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in
the latter and meet global demand.
Historically, while labor has not been, and is still not, free to migrate from the third
world to the metropolis, capital, though juridically free to move from the latter to the
former, did not actually do so , except to sectors like mines and plantations, which
only strengthened, rather than broke, the colonial pattern of the international division of
labor. 4
This segmentation of the world economy meant that wages in the metropolis increased with labor
productivity, unrestrained by the vast labor reserves of the third world, which themselves had
been caused by the displacement of manufactures through the twin processes of
deindustrialization (competition from metropolitan goods) and the drain of surplus (the
siphoning off of a large part of the economic surplus, through taxes on peasants that are no
longer spent on local artisan products but finance gratis primary commodity exports to
the metropolis instead).
The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to
the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and
take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of
the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the
third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the
real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was
marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5
At the same time, such relocation of activities, despite causing impressive growth rates of
gross domestic product (GDP) in many third world countries, does not lead to the exhaustion of
the third world's labor reserves. This is because of another feature of contemporary
globalization: the unleashing of a process of primitive accumulation of capital against petty
producers, including peasant agriculturists in the third world, who had earlier been protected,
to an extent, from the encroachment of big capital (both domestic and foreign) by the
postcolonial dirigiste regimes in these countries. Under neoliberalism, such protection
is withdrawn, causing an income squeeze on these producers and often their outright
dispossession from their land, which is then used by big capital for its various so-called
development projects. The increase in employment, even in countries with impressive GDP growth
rates in the third world, falls way short of the natural growth of the workforce, let alone
absorbing the additional job seekers coming from the ranks of displaced petty producers. The
labor reserves therefore never get used up. Indeed, on the contrary, they are augmented
further, because real wages continue to remain tied to a subsistence level, even as
metropolitan wages too are restrained. The vector of real wages in the world economy as a whole
therefore remains restrained.
Although contemporary globalization thus gives rise to an ex ante tendency toward
overproduction, state expenditure that could provide a counter to this (and had provided a
counter through military spending in the United States, according to Baran and Sweezy) can no
longer do so under the current regime. Finance is usually opposed to direct state intervention
through larger spending as a way of increasing employment. This opposition expresses itself
through an opposition not just to larger taxes on capitalists, but also to a larger fiscal
deficit for financing such spending. Obviously, if larger state spending is financed by taxes
on workers, then it hardly adds to aggregate demand, for workers spend the bulk of their
incomes anyway, so the state taking this income and spending it instead does not add any extra
demand. Hence, larger state spending can increase employment only if it is financed either
through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on capitalists who keep a part of their income
unspent or saved. But these are precisely the two modes of financing state expenditure that
finance capital opposes.
Its opposing larger taxes on capitalists is understandable, but why is it so opposed to a
larger fiscal deficit? Even within a capitalist economy, there are no sound economic
theoretical reasons that should preclude a fiscal deficit under all circumstances. The root of
the opposition therefore lies in deeper social considerations: if the capitalist economic
system becomes dependent on the state to promote employment directly , then this fact
undermines the social legitimacy of capitalism. The need for the state to boost the animal
spirits of the capitalists disappears and a perspective on the system that is epistemically
exterior to it is provided to the people, making it possible for them to ask: If the state can
do the job of providing employment, then why do we need the capitalists at all? It is an
instinctive appreciation of this potential danger that underlies the opposition of capital,
especially of finance, to any direct effort by the state to generate employment.
This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as
finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state,
the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second
World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is
globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a
nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large
fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse ,
causing a financial crisis.
The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews
direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since
that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their
social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument,
as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the
pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6
It may be thought that this compulsion on the part of the state to accede to the demand of
finance to eschew fiscal intervention for enlarging employment should not hold for the United
States. Its currency being considered by the world's wealth holders to be "as good as gold"
should make it immune to capital flight. But there is an additional factor operating in the
case of the United States: that the demand generated by a bigger U.S. fiscal deficit would
substantially leak abroad in a neoliberal setting, which would increase its external debt
(since, unlike Britain in its heyday, it does not have access to any unrequited colonial
transfers) for the sake of generating employment elsewhere. This fact deters any fiscal effort
even in the United States to boost demand within a neoliberal setting. 7
Therefore, it follows that state spending cannot provide a counter to the ex ante
tendency toward global overproduction within a regime of neoliberal globalization, which makes
the world economy precariously dependent on occasional asset-price bubbles, primarily in the
U.S. economy, for obtaining, at best, some temporary relief from the crisis. It is this fact
that underlies the dead end that neoliberal capitalism has reached. Indeed, Donald Trump's
resort to protectionism in the United States to alleviate unemployment is a clear recognition
of the system having reached this cul-de-sac. The fact that the mightiest capitalist
economy in the world has to move away from the rules of the neoliberal game in an attempt to
alleviate its crisis of unemployment/underemployment -- while compensating capitalists
adversely affected by this move through tax cuts, as well as carefully ensuring that no
restraints are imposed on free cross-border financial flows -- shows that these rules
are no longer viable in their pristine form.
Some Implications of This Dead End
There are at least four important implications of this dead end of neoliberalism. The first
is that the world economy will now be afflicted by much higher levels of unemployment than it
was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, when
the dot-com and the housing bubbles in the United States had, sequentially, a pronounced
impact. It is true that the U.S. unemployment rate today appears to be at a historic low, but
this is misleading: the labor-force participation rate in the United States today is lower than
it was in 2008, which reflects the discouraged-worker effect . Adjusting for this lower
participation, the U.S. unemployment rate is considerable -- around 8 percent. Indeed, Trump
would not be imposing protection in the United States if unemployment was actually as low as 4
percent, which is the official figure. Elsewhere in the world, of course, unemployment
post-2008 continues to be evidently higher than before. Indeed, the severity of the current
problem of below-full-employment production in the U.S. economy is best illustrated by capacity
utilization figures in manufacturing. The weakness of the U.S. recovery from the Great
Recession is indicated by the fact that the current extended recovery represents the first
decade in the entire post-Second World War period in which capacity utilization in
manufacturing has never risen as high as 80 percent in a single quarter, with the resulting
stagnation of investment. 8
If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a
beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the
United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen
the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the
United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already
appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be
because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping
unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we
look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment.
There has been some discussion on how global value chains would be affected by Trump's
protectionism. But the fact that global macroeconomics in the early twenty-first century will
look altogether different compared to earlier has not been much discussed.
In light of the preceding discussion, one could say that if, instead of individual
nation-states whose writ cannot possibly run against globalized finance capital, there was a
global state or a set of major nation-states acting in unison to override the objections of
globalized finance and provide a coordinated fiscal stimulus to the world economy, then perhaps
there could be recovery. Such a coordinated fiscal stimulus was suggested by a group of German
trade unionists, as well as by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
9
While it was turned down then, in the present context it has not even been discussed.
The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large
over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with
protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even
spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world
market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the
ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their
home market.
Such a transition will not be easy; it will require promoting domestic peasant agriculture,
defending petty production, moving toward cooperative forms of production, and ensuring greater
equality in income distribution, all of which need major structural shifts. For smaller
economies, it would also require their coming together with other economies to provide a
minimum size to the domestic market. In short, the dead end of neoliberalism also means the
need for a shift away from the so-called neoliberal development strategy that has held sway
until now.
The third implication is the imminent engulfing of a whole range of third world economies in
serious balance-of-payments difficulties. This is because, while their exports will be sluggish
in the new situation, this very fact will also discourage financial inflows into their
economies, whose easy availability had enabled them to maintain current account deficits on
their balance of payments earlier. In such a situation, within the existing neoliberal
paradigm, they would be forced to adopt austerity measures that would impose income deflation
on their people, make the conditions of their people significantly worse, lead to a further
handing over of their national assets and resources to international capital, and prevent
precisely any possible transition to an alternative strategy of home market-based growth.
In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over
third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits
in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or
that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even
domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people.
The fourth implication is the worldwide upsurge of fascism. Neoliberal capitalism even
before it reached a dead end, even in the period when it achieved reasonable growth and
employment rates, had pushed the world into greater hunger and poverty. For instance, the world
per-capita cereal output was 355 kilograms for 1980 (triennium average for 1979–81
divided by mid–triennium population) and fell to 343 in 2000, leveling at 344.9 in 2016
-- and a substantial amount of this last figure went into ethanol production. Clearly, in a
period of growth of the world economy, per-capita cereal absorption should be expanding,
especially since we are talking here not just of direct absorption but of direct and indirect
absorption, the latter through processed foods and feed grains in animal products. The fact
that there was an absolute decline in per-capita output, which no doubt caused a decline in
per-capita absorption, suggests an absolute worsening in the nutritional level of a substantial
segment of the world's population.
But this growing hunger and nutritional poverty did not immediately arouse any significant
resistance, both because such resistance itself becomes more difficult under neoliberalism
(since the very globalization of capital makes it an elusive target) and also because higher
GDP growth rates provided a hope that distress might be overcome in the course of time.
Peasants in distress, for instance, entertained the hope that their children would live better
in the years to come if given a modicum of education and accepted their fate.
In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with
neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological
prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop
and finds fascism. This changes the discourse away from the material conditions of people's
lives to the so-called threat to the nation, placing the blame for people's distress not on the
failure of the system, but on ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, the
other that is portrayed as an enemy. It projects a so-called messiah whose sheer
muscularity can somehow magically overcome all problems; it promotes a culture of unreason so
that both the vilification of the other and the magical powers of the supposed leader
can be placed beyond any intellectual questioning; it uses a combination of state repression
and street-level vigilantism by fascist thugs to terrorize opponents; and it forges a close
relationship with big business, or, in Kalecki's words, "a partnership of big business and
fascist upstarts." 10
Fascist groups of one kind or another exist in all modern societies. They move center stage
and even into power only on certain occasions when they get the backing of big business. And
these occasions arise when three conditions are satisfied: when there is an economic crisis so
the system cannot simply go on as before; when the usual liberal establishment is manifestly
incapable of resolving the crisis; and when the left is not strong enough to provide an
alternative to the people in order to move out of the conjuncture.
This last point may appear odd at first, since many see the big bourgeoisie's recourse to
fascism as a counter to the growth of the left's strength in the context of a capitalist
crisis. But when the left poses a serious threat, the response of the big bourgeoisie typically
is to attempt to split it by offering concessions. It uses fascism to prop itself up only when
the left is weakened. Walter Benjamin's remark that "behind every fascism there is a failed
revolution" points in this direction.
Fascism Then and Now
Contemporary fascism, however, differs in crucial respects from its 1930s counterpart, which
is why many are reluctant to call the current phenomenon a fascist upsurge. But historical
parallels, if carefully drawn, can be useful. While in some aforementioned respects
contemporary fascism does resemble the phenomenon of the 1930s, there are serious differences
between the two that must also be noted.
First, we must note that while the current fascist upsurge has put fascist elements in power
in many countries, there are no fascist states of the 1930s kind as of yet. Even if the fascist
elements in power try to push the country toward a fascist state, it is not clear that they
will succeed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that fascists in power
today cannot overcome the crisis of neoliberalism, since they accept the regime of
globalization of finance. This includes Trump, despite his protectionism. In the 1930s,
however, this was not the case. The horrors associated with the institution of a fascist state
in the 1930s had been camouflaged to an extent by the ability of the fascists in power to
overcome mass unemployment and end the Depression through larger military spending, financed by
government borrowing. Contemporary fascism, by contrast, lacks the ability to overcome the
opposition of international finance capital to fiscal activism on the part of the government to
generate larger demand, output, and employment, even via military spending.
Such activism, as discussed earlier, required larger government spending financed either
through taxes on capitalists or through a fiscal deficit. Finance capital was opposed to both
of these measures and it being globalized made this opposition decisive . The
decisiveness of this opposition remains even if the government happens to be one composed of
fascist elements. Hence, contemporary fascism, straitjacketed by "fiscal rectitude," cannot
possibly alleviate even temporarily the economic crises facing people and cannot provide any
cover for a transition to a fascist state akin to the ones of the 1930s, which makes such a
transition that much more unlikely.
Another difference is also related to the phenomenon of the globalization of finance. The
1930s were marked by what Lenin had earlier called "interimperialist rivalry." The military
expenditures incurred by fascist governments, even though they pulled countries out of the
Depression and unemployment, inevitably led to wars for "repartitioning an already partitioned
world." Fascism was the progenitor of war and burned itself out through war at, needless to
say, great cost to humankind.
Contemporary fascism, however, operates in a world where interimperialist rivalry is far
more muted. Some have seen in this muting a vindication of Karl Kautsky's vision of an
"ultraimperialism" as against Lenin's emphasis on the permanence of interimperialist rivalry,
but this is wrong. Both Kautsky and Lenin were talking about a world where finance capital and
the financial oligarchy were essentially national -- that is, German, French, or British. And
while Kautsky talked about the possibility of truces among the rival oligarchies, Lenin saw
such truces only as transient phenomena punctuating the ubiquity of rivalry.
In contrast, what we have today is not nation-based finance capitals, but
international finance capital into whose corpus the finance capitals drawn from
particular countries are integrated. This globalized finance capital does not want the world
to be partitioned into economic territories of rival powers ; on the contrary, it wants the
entire globe to be open to its own unrestricted movement. The muting of rivalry between major
powers, therefore, is not because they prefer truce to war, or peaceful partitioning of the
world to forcible repartitioning, but because the material conditions themselves have changed
so that it is no longer a matter of such choices. The world has gone beyond both Lenin and
Kautsky, as well as their debates.
Not only are we not going to have wars between major powers in this era of fascist upsurge
(of course, as will be discussed, we shall have other wars), but, by the same token, this
fascist upsurge will not burn out through any cataclysmic war. What we are likely to see is a
lingering fascism of less murderous intensity , which, when in power, does not
necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically
annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally.
But since its successor government, as long as it remains within the confines of the neoliberal
strategy, will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to
return to power as well. And whether the fascist elements are in or out of power, they will
remain a potent force working toward the fascification of the society and the polity, even
while promoting corporate interests within a regime of globalization of finance, and hence
permanently maintaining the "partnership between big business and fascist upstarts."
Put differently, since the contemporary fascist upsurge is not likely to burn itself out as
the earlier one did, it has to be overcome by transcending the very conjuncture that produced
it: neoliberal capitalism at a dead end. A class mobilization of working people around an
alternative set of transitional demands that do not necessarily directly target neoliberal
capitalism, but which are immanently unrealizable within the regime of neoliberal capitalism,
can provide an initial way out of this conjuncture and lead to its eventual transcendence.
Such a class mobilization in the third world context would not mean making no truces with
liberal bourgeois elements against the fascists. On the contrary, since the liberal bourgeois
elements too are getting marginalized through a discourse of jingoistic nationalism typically
manufactured by the fascists, they too would like to shift the discourse toward the material
conditions of people's lives, no doubt claiming that an improvement in these conditions is
possible within the neoliberal economic regime itself. Such a shift in discourse is in
itself a major antifascist act . Experience will teach that the agenda advanced as part of
this changed discourse is unrealizable under neoliberalism, providing the scope for dialectical
intervention by the left to transcend neoliberal capitalism.
Imperialist
Interventions
Even though fascism will have a lingering presence in this conjuncture of "neoliberalism at
a dead end," with the backing of domestic corporate-financial interests that are themselves
integrated into the corpus of international finance capital, the working people in the third
world will increasingly demand better material conditions of life and thereby rupture the
fascist discourse of jingoistic nationalism (that ironically in a third world context is not
anti-imperialist).
In fact, neoliberalism reaching a dead end and having to rely on fascist elements revives
meaningful political activity, which the heyday of neoliberalism had precluded, because most
political formations then had been trapped within an identical neoliberal agenda that appeared
promising. (Latin America had a somewhat different history because neoliberalism arrived in
that continent through military dictatorships, not through its more or less tacit acceptance by
most political formations.)
Such revived political activity will necessarily throw up challenges to neoliberal
capitalism in particular countries. Imperialism, by which we mean the entire economic and
political arrangement sustaining the hegemony of international finance capital, will deal with
these challenges in at least four different ways.
The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation
that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even
before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby
denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only
increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may
well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from
a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers
and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their
support.
Even if capital controls are put in place, where there are current account deficits,
financing such deficits would pose a problem, necessitating some trade controls. But this is
where the second instrument of imperialism comes into play: the imposition of trade sanctions
by the metropolitan states, which then cajole other countries to stop buying from the
sanctioned country that is trying to break away from thralldom to globalized finance capital.
Even if the latter would have otherwise succeeded in stabilizing its economy despite its
attempt to break away, the imposition of sanctions becomes an additional blow.
The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the
sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the
local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of
civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection
generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions,
imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political
elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of
neoliberalism.
And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic
warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military
warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third
world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when
revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more.
Two aspects of such intervention are striking. One is the virtual unanimity among the
metropolitan states, which only underscores the muting of interimperialist rivalry in the era
of hegemony of global finance capital. The other is the extent of support that such
intervention commands within metropolitan countries, from the right to even the liberal
segments.
Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing
for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First
World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state
intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only
occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11
Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize
itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist
intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against
it.
Samuel Berrick Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1966).
One of the first authors to recognize this fact and its significance was Paul Baran in
The Political Economy of
Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
For the role of such colonial transfers in sustaining the British balance of payments and the
long Victorian and Edwardian boom, see Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain,' or Transfers
from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism," in Agrarian
and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri , ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and
Utsa Patnaik (Delhi: Tulika, 2017), 277-317.
Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, "Capacity Utilization:
Manufacturing," February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org .
This issue is discussed by Charles P. Kindleberger in The World in Depression,
1929–1939 , 40th anniversary ed. (Oakland: University of California Press,
2013).
Joseph Schumpeter had seen Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace as
essentially advocating such state intervention in the new situation. See his essay, "John
Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)," in Ten Great Economists (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1952).
Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation (1987),
The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). Prabhat Patnaik
is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997),
The Value of Money(2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism(2011).
The question why the USA intelligence agencies were "unaware" about Epstein activities is an interesting one. Similar question can
be asked about Hillary "activities" related to "Clinton cash".
Actually the way the USA elite deal with scandals is to ostracize any whistleblower and silence any media that tryt to dig the story.
Open repression including physical elimination is seldom used those days as indirect methods are quite effective.
Notable quotes:
"... Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall. ..."
"... If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken." ..."
"... America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy. ..."
"... Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case. ..."
Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired
to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.
When you discover rot in an apparently sound structure, the first question is: how far has the rot penetrated? If the rot
has reached the foundation and turned it to mush, the structure is one wind-storm from collapse.
How deep has the rot of corruption, fraud, abuse of power, betrayal of the public trust, blatant criminality and insiders protecting
the guilty penetrated America's key public and private institutions? It's difficult to tell, as the law-enforcement and security
agencies are themselves hopelessly compromised.
If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom;
2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward;
3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell
and surroundings were "broken."
If this all strikes you as evidence that America's security and law-enforcement institutions are functioning at a level that's
above reproach, then 1) you're a well-paid shill who's protecting the guilty lest your own misdeeds come to light or 2) your
consumption of mind-bending meds is off the charts.
How deep has the rot gone in America's ruling elite? One way to measure the depth of the rot is to ask how whistleblowers
who've exposed the ugly realities of insider dealing, malfeasance, tax evasion, cover-ups, etc. have fared.
America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security)
and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy.
Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the
few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging
down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case.
The closer wrong-doing and wrong-doers are to protected power-elites, the less attention the mass media devotes to them.
... ... ...
Here are America's media, law enforcement/security agencies and "leadership" class: they speak no evil, see no evil and
hear no evil, in the misguided belief that their misdirection, self-service and protection of the guilty will make us buy the narrative
that America's ruling elite and all the core institutions they manage aren't rotten to the foundations.
Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired
to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
"... A UN report published last week explicitly held the US, Britain and France liable for complicity in massive war crimes from their unstinting supply of warplanes, munitions and logistics to the Saudi and Emirati warplanes that have indiscriminately bombed civilians and public infrastructure. ..."
"... The infernal humanitarian conditions and complicity in war crimes can no longer be concealed by Washington's mendacity about allegedly combating "Iran subversion" in Yemen. The southern Arabian Peninsula country is an unmitigated PR disaster for official American pretensions of being a world leader in democratic and law-abiding virtue. ..."
"... After four years of relentless air strikes, which has become financially ruinous for the Saudi monarchy and its precocious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who conceived the war, the Houthis still remain in control of the capital Sanaa and large swathes of the country. Barbaric bombardment and siege-starvation imposed on Yemen has not dislodged the rebels. ..."
"... The defeat is further complicated by the open conflict which has broken out over recent weeks between rival militants sponsored by the Saudis and Emiratis in the southern port city of Aden. There are reports of UAE warplanes attacking Saudi-backed militants and of Saudi force build-up. A war of words has erupted between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. There is strong possibility that the rival factions could blow up into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supposed coalition allies. ..."
"... When the US starts to talk about "ending the war" with a spin about concern for "mutual peace", then you know the sordid game is finally up. ..."
The war was launched by the US-backed Saudi coalition, including the United Arab Emirates,
in March 2015, without any provocation from Yemen. The precipitating factor was that the
Houthis, a mainly Shia rebel group aligned with Iran, had kicked out a corrupt Saudi-backed
dictator at the end of 2014. When he tucked tail and fled to exile in Saudi capital Riyadh,
that's when the Saudis launched their aerial bombing campaign on Yemen.
The slaughter in Yemen over the past four years has been nothing short of a calamity for the
population of nearly 28 million people. The UN estimates that nearly 80 per cent of the nation
is teetering on hunger and disease.
A UN report
published last week explicitly held the US, Britain and France liable for complicity in massive
war crimes from their unstinting supply of warplanes, munitions and logistics to the Saudi and
Emirati warplanes that have indiscriminately bombed civilians and public infrastructure. The UN
report also blamed the Houthis for committing atrocities. That may be so, but the preponderance
of deaths and destruction in Yemen is due to American, British and French military support to
the Saudi-led coalition. Up to 100,ooo civilians may have been killed from the Western-backed
blitzkrieg, while the Western media keep quoting a figure of "10,000", which magically never
seems to increase over the past four years.
Several factors are pressing the Trump administration to wind down the Yemen war.
The infernal humanitarian conditions and complicity in war crimes can no longer be concealed
by Washington's mendacity about allegedly combating "Iran subversion" in Yemen. The southern
Arabian Peninsula country is an unmitigated PR disaster for official American pretensions of
being a world leader in democratic and law-abiding virtue.
When the American Congress is united in calling for a ban on US arms to Saudi Arabia because
of the atrocities in Yemen, then we should know that the PR war has been lost. President Trump
over-ruled Congress earlier this year to continue arming the Saudis in Yemen. But even Trump
must at last be realizing his government's culpability for aiding and abetting genocide is no
longer excusable, even for the most credulous consumers of American propaganda.
After four years of relentless air strikes, which has become financially ruinous for the
Saudi monarchy and its precocious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who conceived the war, the
Houthis still remain in control of the capital Sanaa and large swathes of the country. Barbaric
bombardment and siege-starvation imposed on Yemen has not dislodged the rebels.
Not only that but the Houthis have begun to take the war into the heart of Saudi Arabia.
Over the past year, the rebels have mounted increasingly sophisticated long-range drone and
ballistic missile attacks on Saudi military bases and the capital Riyadh. From where the
Houthis are receiving their more lethal weaponry is not clear. Maybe from Lebanon's Hezbollah
or from Iran. In any case, such supply if confirmed could be argued as legitimate support for a
country facing aggression.
No doubt the Houthis striking deep into Saudi territory has given the pampered monarchs in
Riyadh serious pause for thought.
When the UAE – the other main coalition partner – announced a month ago that it
was scaling back its involvement in Yemen that must have rattled Washington and Riyadh that the
war was indeed futile.
The defeat is further complicated by the open conflict
which has broken out over recent weeks between rival militants sponsored by the Saudis and
Emiratis in the southern port city of Aden. There are reports of
UAE warplanes attacking Saudi-backed militants and of Saudi force build-up. A war of words has
erupted between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. There is strong possibility that the rival factions could
blow up into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supposed coalition allies.
Washington has doubtless taken note of the unstoppable disaster in Yemen and how its
position is indefensible and infeasible.
Like so many other obscene American wars down through the decades, Washington is facing yet another ignominious defeat in
Yemen. When the US starts to talk about "ending the war" with a spin about concern for "mutual peace", then you know the
sordid game is finally up.
We have been in Afghanistan for how long? 16 years? It is our longest war. How much progress
have we actually made?
1. The government that we have tried so long to nurture controls a shrinking percentage of
both territory and population.
2. How much money have we poured into the pockets of crooks of all nationalities? In spite
of that the country is severely lacking in physical, social, legal, and business
infrastructure.
3. The country's armed forces have been expanded under NATO tutelage to such a size that the
small GDP will never be able to pay for them on its own. In spite of that they are unable even
to defend their own installations.
4. The country is still racked by tribal, ethnic and jihadi wars. It has always been thus
with the exception of a golden age when the last Afghan king ruled in the 50s and 60s. How did
he do that? He did it by careful inter-ethnic diplomacy and a minimum effort to "unify" his
realm.
5. Attacks on NATO personnel by Afghan soldiers and police continue.
6. The capital, Kabul, is not secured and is regularly attacked.
7. The much vaunted COIN doctrine has failed there as it has failed in so many places in the
world.
In spite of this the generals and the COIN nuts persist in trying to reverse Obama's policy
of withdrawal from the "country" (a geographical expression really). President Trump, who knows
nothing of things military or geo-political is about to begin the process of re-introducing US
combat and training forces into this blank space on the map, a space filled with hostile
tribesmen and religious fanatics. This blank space was given the dubious status of a state in
the international system of states because the Russians and the British wanted to establish a
buffer entity between the Tsar's empire and the Raj.
President Trump should be told that there is nothing there of real importance to the US,
nothing worth more vast quantities of our money and more rivers of our blood. Let the Afghans,
Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians and Russians deal with the chaos. pl
These idiots don't hire themselves. The problem is Trump. It doesn't matter whether Bolton
(or Pompeo, or Hook, or Abrams) is in or out as long as Trump himself is in the White
House.
That realization has turned my 2016 protest vote for Trump into a 2020 protest vote for
Elizabeth Warren. The underlying principle is be the same, voting yet again for the lesser
of two evils.
"... Thanks for posting the Corbett report video on WTC7. I had seen the Barry Jennings interview before, but had not read it in detail for many, many years. It is very significant, just as is the way the official narrative has ignored it. ..."
"... Also, this morning, Sputnik news has picked up on the UAF WTC7 report. The word is spreading, slowly, although in this case the authorities will probably just blame in on Putin causing trouble. I still have not seen a mainstream news outlet pick it up yet though. Maybe this will change on Sept. 11th. Or maybe they will just pretend it doesn't exist. ..."
"... The most fascinating aspect of 9/11 is the speed with which the Cheney Gang decided that a large scale military response was the only 'logical' option. ..."
"... Professor Hulsey did a presentation this week to accompany the draft UAF report. A youtube of the slides, with audio, is attached. For those that are serious about critiquing the report, I strongly recommend that you listen to the presentation, as well as (please) read the report carefully. ..."
"... On September 3rd, the University of Alaska Fairbanks released a study on their analysis of the infamous Twin Towers collapse. In it, they found that the third tower's collapse was, "caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." ..."
"... remember watching a video of multiple interviews with first responders and was gobsmacked at their tale. Only a controlled demolition will achieve the sight of that collapse. Simultaneous controlled demolition. That collapse could not have the observed uniformity when an isolated fire is concentrated in one corner. ..."
"... Now of course we have additional facts, that there were important records of an ongoing financial investigation there, it was a CIA office, also the NYC gov't under Mayor Giuliani (remember him) had it as the emergency command center, luckily moved that day to a temporary one out on the piers due to some military exercise or something. ..."
"... Finally to any honest skeptics out there who are unsure about the whole September 11th 2001 thing -- there's a lot of fake "9/11" stuff out there too about nuclear bombs, beam weapons, all kinds of nonsense put out to distract us from the reality that those three buildings, and the Pentagon too, were deliberately set up to destroy evidence and scare everyone into a panic so things could change politically. ..."
"... If you look at what's happened in the US and the world, things changed for the worse after the 2001 event. It must have taken years to plan and execute this criminal hoax. One of many I'm sure. ..."
Thanks for posting the Corbett report video on WTC7. I had seen the Barry Jennings
interview before, but had not read it in detail for many, many years. It is very significant,
just as is the way the official narrative has ignored it.
Also, this morning, Sputnik news has picked up on the UAF WTC7 report. The word is
spreading, slowly, although in this case the authorities will probably just blame in on Putin
causing trouble. I still have not seen a mainstream news outlet pick it up yet though. Maybe
this will change on Sept. 11th. Or maybe they will just pretend it doesn't exist.
Also, just for continuity, the UAF WTC7 report was discussed extensively on last week's
open thread, starting at comment #131. I have really enjoyed being part of the discussion.
And as Jackrabbit said so eloquently in his post, there are so many other aspects of the
official 9/11 narrative that "stink", that it is hard to know where to start when performing
a critique.
see 9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money (2015) at Corbett
also
Episode 346 – 9/11 War Games (Corbett)
His Oklahoma investigation also> and an interesting evaluation of T McVeigh's - strange
life, which may continue (he says) - that dovetails to the Epstein "suicide"...which may also
have been a jailbreak.
Like I said - it's a Big Global Picture, and disturbing.
Had read somewhere awhile back that the WTC towers had to have some sort of demolition plan
built into them from the beginning in case one started to tip over onto other buildings
and/or for whenever they needed to be demolished.
Instead of having to rig up the whole building for destruction wouldn't it be easier just
to put the building into an unsafe condition that triggers the buildings own self destruction
mechanism?
Could the towers have come down perfectly because they were designed to go down like that
from the beginning?
Think about Larry Silverman's "pull it" statement...
The most fascinating aspect of 9/11 is the speed with which the Cheney Gang decided that
a large scale military response was the only 'logical' option.
Nicholas Negroponte - brother of John Negroponte - war criminal, facilitator of right wing
paramilitary death squads & supporter of your 80's style Central American military
dictator. As Reagan's man in Honduras, that country became the headquarters for the Contras
in their bloody campaign against the people of Nicaragua. This is only a small part of what
this shitstain has inflicted on the world.
A true American hero - I very much doubt that young Nicholas is much different.
This is my second attempt at this post. The first one disappeared. Apologies if it shows
as a duplicate.
Professor Hulsey did a presentation this week to accompany the draft UAF report. A youtube
of the slides, with audio, is attached. For those that are serious about critiquing the
report, I strongly recommend that you listen to the presentation, as well as (please) read
the report carefully.
On September 3rd, the University of Alaska Fairbanks released a study on their analysis
of the infamous Twin Towers collapse. In it, they found that the third tower's collapse was,
"caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the
building."
Thank you retiredmecheng #95. That was an excellent video presentation. NIST response will be
interesting. We have waited a while for this panel to present their response to NIST and the
wait was worth it. There must have been some mighty important reason to drop that building
and to prevent any access to the two burning floors.
I remember watching a video of multiple interviews with first responders and was
gobsmacked at their tale. Only a controlled demolition will achieve the sight of that
collapse. Simultaneous controlled demolition. That collapse could not have the observed
uniformity when an isolated fire is concentrated in one corner.
Thanks for your considered and clear explanations re: WTC 7 and its demise.
I agree that it seems undeniable that the building did not "fall down" due to a fire ...
at the time I assumed that they had filled it with explosives during the day, so that it
could be demolished later. Was unsure of the why, but in the moment it was entirely clear
that the building was deliberately destroyed.
Now of course we have additional facts, that there were important records of an
ongoing financial investigation there, it was a CIA office, also the NYC gov't under Mayor
Giuliani (remember him) had it as the emergency command center, luckily moved that day to a
temporary one out on the piers due to some military exercise or something.
Anyone with two brain cells can see that two planes can't take down three buildings.
Finally to any honest skeptics out there who are unsure about the whole September 11th
2001 thing -- there's a lot of fake "9/11" stuff out there too about nuclear bombs, beam
weapons, all kinds of nonsense put out to distract us from the reality that those three
buildings, and the Pentagon too, were deliberately set up to destroy evidence and scare
everyone into a panic so things could change politically.
If you look at what's happened in the US and the world, things changed for the worse
after the 2001 event. It must have taken years to plan and execute this criminal hoax. One of
many I'm sure.
From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA's darkest secrets -
Stephen Kinzer/Guardian
I read about that a year or so ago. In one of the North Korea threads, someone posted some
links to the Erik Olson website, in connection with the use of biological weapons in North
Korea.
If I remember correctly there was a very detailed pdf report, maybe published by or on
behalf of Erik Olson, about Frank Olson's death and the circumstances leading to it.
It was a lot more detailed about some of the areas whitewashed by the Guardian article,
such as connections between his trips to Germany and his realization that germ warfare was
being used in North Korea, and also more about the Porton Down war criminal William
Sargant.
Meet American Empire's 'Doctor Death'
Stephen Kinzer's new book shows how Greatest Generation spooks justified their horrific experiments on
unwitting Americans.
By
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
September 10, 2019
In the 1962 film
adaptation of Richard Condon's
The Manchurian Candidate,
a diabolical North Korean doctor named Yen Lo tells Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw to "pass the time with a little
solitaire." These trigger words, accompanied by a Queen of Diamonds playing card, prompts the lanky soldier to get up,
and when instructed, brutally kill two of his own comrades sitting on the stage, both of whom appear under the same
trance as Raymond.
Later, we find out this was not a dream but a real test of Shaw's programming through
elaborate mind control, undertaken before he is sent home to the United States as a sleeper agent for a Communist Party
cell, led by his own mother. "His brain has not only been washed, as they say, but cleaned," declares a gleeful Dr. Lo.
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962, Universal Artists)
The film
was released when the country was in a state of high Cold War anxiety. The idea that the Communists were deep into
finding a way to brainwash and program individuals to deploy as weapons of war was not new, of course. It was just
finding its way into the increasingly paranoid popular culture. But what Americans did not know was that our own
government was in part responsible for those stories as a cover for their own brainwashing experiments, which were
racing along at the speed of a freight train.
Advertisement
In 1953,
Allen Dulles
told a group of fellow Princeton alumni that the U.S. was far behind the Russians and North Koreans in "brain warfare."
He warned of a mind control gap that would likely grow because "we in the West..have no human guinea pigs to try these
extraordinary techniques."
This was a lie of breathtaking proportions. For several years, his CIA had already
been conducting extreme experiments on unwitting "human guinea pigs" at black sites in France, Germany, and South Korea.
Shortly after he broadcast this cynical lament to the Princeton lads, he approved MK-ULTRA, the most illicit and morally
corrupt intelligence program in American history (that we know of). In it, the CIA tested a stomach roiling variety of
unregulated drugs, electro-shock, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on unwitting souls across the United
States -- in "safe houses," prisons, psychiatric hospitals, doctors' offices -- even in the CIA itself. People died, went
crazy, or withered away in a vegetative state, often with little or no clue of what had happened to them.
In
Poisoner in Chief,
released today, journalist and author Stephen Kinzer makes Dr. Sidney Gottlieb the manifestation of the U.S.
government's Cold War obsession with winning, its warped moral compass, and its utter disregard for the law. From 1951
to the late 1960s, under Dulles' protection, Gottlieb was the principal player in what can only be called a maniacal
mission to find the perfect drug to destroy/control/reprogram the human mind (he believed, though he was never able to
prove, that the drug was LSD).
Gottlieb was also the chief scientist in a CIA program that developed poisons with
which to assassinate world leaders (failed attempts included Cuba's Fidel Castro and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice
Lumumba), tested aerosol-delivered germs and deadly gases, and honed extreme torture techniques. He's been called Dr.
Death, Washington's "official poisoner," and a mad scientist. But "Sidney Gottlieb" never became a household name,
mostly because he never paid for his crimes. Thanks to Deep State politics, statutes of limitations, a great lawyer, and
depressingly weak congressional investigators, Gottlieb was able to take the worst of his secrets to the grave in 1999.
Now, pulling together a trove of existing research, newly unearthed documents, and
fresh interviews, Kinzer puts the fetid corpus of American Empire back under a microscope. It isn't pretty -- but it is
instructive.
"Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts.
Patriotism is the most seductive of those causes," Kinzer surmises in an attempt to give context to Gottlieb and Dulles,
and Gottlieb's closest patron and conspirator,
Richard Helms,
who served as CIA chief after
Dulles and during the later years of MK-ULTRA.
"Some do things they know are wrong for what they consider good reasons," Kinzer
continued. "No one else of Gottlieb's generation, however, had the government-given power to do so many things that were
so profoundly and horrifically wrong. No other American -- at least, none that we know of -- ever wielded such terrifying
life-or-death power while remaining so completely invisible."
With so much material to work with,
Poisoner
in Chief
is a parade of outrages. But by the time the twisted calliope falls
silent, two major themes are left to contemplate.
First, Gottlieb did not emerge in a vacuum but in the primordial ooze of moral
justification following World War II. While America was putting its public virtue on display during the
Nuremberg trials
, the army under the Joint Intelligence
Objectives Agency was courting Nazi scientists who had been involved in the most grotesque human experimentation
imaginable during the war. Their expertise in biological warfare and psychoactive drugs was highly prized. The Americans
had to make sure, after all, that the commies didn't get to them first.
So under
Operation
Paperclip
, the army "bleached" their records and brought these men in among several hundred other scientists,
engineers, and technicians who served the Third Reich. Instead of prison, they were settled into comfortable obscurity
in suburban Washington, working for the U.S. government.
For those whose crimes were not so easily scrubbed, the army found ways to collaborate
with them overseas in even less controlled environs. Like
Kurt Blome
, a Nazi scientist who deliberately
infected prisoners with deadly viruses, including the plague, at the Auschwitz concentration camp and other sites. After
saving him from the gallows at Nuremburg, officials quietly installed him in the European Command Intelligence Center at
Oberursel, West Germany -- otherwise known as "Camp King" -- to conduct more experiments, but on our side.
The same went for Japanese scientist
Shiro Ishi,
who was
reportedly responsible for some 10,000 deaths in and around his
Manchurian complex called
Unit 731 during the war. His ghastly activities included everything from slow-roasting test subjects with electricity,
to amputating limbs and dissecting people alive to monitor their slow deaths. At one point, he lined up naked Chinese
women and children to see how long they would live after being struck by shrapnel in the buttocks. He also created tons
of anthrax that was later used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.
But instead of bringing this monster to justice, U.S. agents granted Ishi and his
Japanese collaborators immunity and obtained all of his research on how toxins affect the body -- including all of the
tissue slides from people whose organs were taken out while they were still alive. "Scientists at Camp Detrick
(Maryland) were delighted," Kinzer writes.
"Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners escape punishment," he
adds, noting that Ishi and his minions were deployed to U.S. detention centers in East Asia, where they "helped
Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not legally be conducted in the United States.
Secondly, Kinzer highlights how easily American government officials adopted their
former wartime foes' detached, ruthless approach to human experimentation, embarking without guidance or oversight on
what appears to be a fanatical quest without consequences. At a time when many Americans were zooming to suburbia in
search of "Leave it to Beaver," Gottlieb was hiring people like George White, straight out of
"The Sweet Smell of Success."
White was "a hard charging narcotics detective who lived large in the twilight world
of crime and drugs" writes Kinzer. In 1953 he started setting up "safe houses" in New York and San Francisco where he
would use pay hoodlums and prostitutes in drugs and dough to dose unsuspecting subjects with increasing amounts of LSD
at "parties" while the CIA peeped the action from two-way mirrors outfitted with cameras.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb gave tons of cash and LSD to doctors like Harris Isbell at the
Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. "Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a
prison," writes Kizner. "Most inmates were African American from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain
if abused."
And abused they were, like most of the test subjects at the prison programs financed
by the CIA. If they were told they were part of a test (agreement was typically in exchange for something, like good
behavior credits or high grade heroin), they weren't told what kind of drugs they were given or how much. Many of the
experiments involved dosing subjects with greater and greater amounts of LSD over long periods of time. Gottlieb wanted
to see at what point the mind would dissolve. "He was pleased to have secured a supply of 'expendables' across the
United States," Kinzer notes.
Certainly his test subjects at the CIA interrogation cites overseas were "expendable."
Kinzer offers a number of cases in which foreign detainees, usually suspected spies, were given massive amounts of
different drugs "to see if their minds could be altered." Others were given electro shock. They were later killed, "and
their bodies burned."
Then there were the seemingly random tragedies. Like art student Stanley Glickman who
was believed to be drugged directly by Gottlieb while at a Paris cafe in 1952, and then taken into a hospital where more
"testing" occurred. It was the end of "his productive life," writes Kinzer. Glickman died alone and mentally ill in New
York city several decades later. Or Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who "fell or jumped" from a Manhattan hotel window
after being unwittingly dosed at a "retreat" hosted by Gottlieb a week earlier. Though his family tried, they were never
able to pin his strange death on Gottlieb or the government.
"A Clockwork Orange" (Warner Bros./1971)
Kinzer shows that sometimes paranoia comes from a very real place -- that Big Brother was
not only watching, but for nearly 20 years he was drugging and testing germs and other toxins on unsuspecting Americans
like they were laboratory animals. And Gottlieb, Dulles, and Helms were no fictional spawn of an over-active
imagination. They were highly respected and powerful men with a combined 105 years of government service. They
were
the
system.
So how do we digest this today? We can start by acknowledging that the ends will
always justify the means because the government always gets away with it. And we are still living with the effects. The
torture techniques set into motion in the 1950's, for example, later surfaced in the dark corners of the
Phoenix Program
in Vietnam, and more recently in the dirty cells of
Abu Ghraib detention center.
Indeed, with a head full of Red Menace and lord knows what else, these so-called
stalwart men of the "Greatest Generation" pounded the earth as though America owned the world. Perhaps it did. American
Empire had many faces during the Cold War, and thanks to Kinzer, Sidney Gottlieb is one you shouldn't forget.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is
e
xecutive
editor at
.
Follow her on Twitter
@Vlahos_at_TAC
Elizabeth Warren Stands Out at New Hampshire Democratic
Party Convention https://nyti.ms/2POixCr
NYT - Katie Glueck - September 7
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s backers roared supportive slogans and banged on
drums as they camped outside Southern New Hampshire University Arena. Backers of Senator
Elizabeth Warren marched as part of a jazz-inflected brass band. A fan of Senator Amy
Klobuchar admonished passers-by to consider electability, and banners associated with Senator
Bernie Sanders that highlighted his own standing in the polls appeared aimed at drawing a
contrast with Mr. Biden.
The New Hampshire Democratic Party State Convention drew 19 of the presidential candidates
and some of the state's most committed party activists -- including more than 1,200 delegates
-- to its gathering here Saturday, offering an early test of campaign organization and
enthusiasm in a contest that is traditionally a must-win for candidates from neighboring
states.
This cycle, that includes Mr. Sanders of Vermont, who won New Hampshire by a wide margin
in 2016, and Ms. Warren of Massachusetts, whose ground game is often regarded as the most
extensive in a contest that party officials describe as still fluid -- though Ms. Warren
received the most enthusiastic reception of the day, with an opening standing ovation that
stretched on for nearly two minutes.
Her supporters wielded inflatable noise makers and she received thunderous applause
throughout her address.
"There is a lot at stake and people are scared," she said. "But we can't choose a
candidate we don't believe in because we're scared."
It's a version of a line that Ms. Warren has deployed before, though it took on new
significance when she deployed it Saturday, days before she faces off against Mr. Biden for
the first time on the debate stage.
While many voters feel warmly toward Mr. Biden, some have also cited the perception that
he is the most electable candidate in the race, rather than displaying outright enthusiasm
for his campaign.
"There's that sense of, we know who Joe is and we trust him," said former State Senator
Sylvia Larsen, the former New Hampshire Senate president. "There's still a little bit of
people still looking around to say, 'Well, O.K., so what else is out there? Where are the
voices? Who else might be a voice?'"
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, was the first of the presidential contenders to
speak, and he received a polite though hardly raucous reception as attendees trickled into
the arena, which was not yet full on Saturday morning.
Mr. Biden has led in most polls here since entering the race -- though the surveys have
been relatively few. He is focused on blue-collar voters, moderates and other Democrats who
believe his more centrist brand offers the most promising path to defeating Mr. Trump, in
contrast to the more progressive coalitions Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders are working to
build.
On the ground, Mr. Sanders's supporters challenged the notion that Mr. Biden is the only
candidate well positioned to defeat Mr. Trump.
"Bernie beats Trump," read one banner hanging in the arena. Outside, another banner
affixed to a pro-Sanders tent read, "In poll after poll after poll Bernie BEATS Trump."
Mr. Sanders received frequent applause throughout his speech and his supporters -- who
appeared dispersed throughout the arena -- greeted many of his remarks with loud whoops.
"Together, we will make Donald Trump a one-term president," he said. "But frankly,
frankly, it is not enough just to defeat Trump. We must do much, much more. We must finally
create a government and an economy that works for all of us, not just the one percent."
In a sign of organizational strength, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., was also a
prominent presence at the convention: He had a large cheering contingent that punctuated his
address with rounds of applause. Flush with a field-leading fund-raising haul, his campaign
has significantly expanded its presence in New Hampshire, and has announced the opening of 12
new offices in the state.
Senator Kamala Harris of California had a visible support section, too -- her fans wore
bright yellow T-shirts -- and she also received applause and cheers.
Yet Ms. Harris's standing in the polls has slipped over the summer, and party leaders here
say she does not have the same footprint in the state as some of the other contenders.
Perhaps reflecting those dynamics -- and a lunchtime-hour speaking slot -- her ability to
excite the room was at times uneven.
"Everybody else and the pundits can ride polls; I'm not on that roller coaster," she told
reporters after her speech. "I am working hard, we are steady, I don't get high with the
polls, I don't go low with the polls."
Senator Cory Booker, too, found himself brushing off the polls when speaking to reporters
after giving an energetic speech that resonated in the room. His candidacy has mystified some
veteran New Hampshire Democrats who note his relatively stagnant poll numbers despite
extensive on-the-ground campaign organization, endorsements and an ability to deliver a fiery
speech.
Certainly, the convention is an imperfect test of the state of the New Hampshire primary.
It's a window into the mood of the most plugged-in activists, but isn't necessarily
representative of the entire electorate that will turn out on Primary Day -- and it also drew
attendees from out of state, from places including Massachusetts, New Jersey and even, in at
least one case, California. ...
Here are just some of the twists and turns in the case, which has gone on for more than
three years.
Flynn's trip to Russia in 2015, where it was claimed Flynn went without the knowledge or
approval of the DIA or anyone in Washington,
was proven not to be true .
Flynn was suspected of being compromised by a supposed Russian agent, Cambridge academic
Svetlana Lokhova, based on allegations from Western intelligence asset Stefan Halper.
This was also proven to be not true.
The very strange post-dated FD-302 form on the FBI's January 2017 interview of Flynn that
wasn't filled out until August 2017, almost seven months afterward, is
revealed in a court filing by Flynn's defense team .
FBI agent Pientka became the
"DOJ's Invisible Man," despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly called for him to
testify. Pientka has remained out of sight and out of mind more than a year and a half since
his name first surfaced in connection with the Flynn case.
Now, it's not that far-fetched of an idea that the Mueller special counsel prosecutors would
hide exculpatory evidence from the Flynn defense team, since they've just admitted to having
done exactly that in another case their
office has been prosecuting .
The defense team for Internet Research Agency/Concord, more popularly known as "the Russian
troll farm case," hasn't been smooth going for the Mueller prosecutors.
Then, in a
filing submitted to the court on Aug. 30, the IRA/Concord defense team alerted Judge
Friedrich that the prosecutors just got around to handing them key evidence the prosecutors had
for the past 18 months. The prosecution gave no explanation whatsoever as to why they hid this
key evidence for more than a year.
It's hard to see at this point how the entire IRA/Concord case isn't tossed out.
What would it mean for Flynn's prosecutors to have been caught hiding exculpatory evidence
from him and his lawyers, even after the presiding judge explicitly ordered them in February to
hand over everything they had?
It would mean that the Flynn case is tossed out, since the prosecution team was caught
engaging in gross misconduct.
Now you can see why Flynn refused to withdraw his guilty plea when Judge Sullivan gave him
the opportunity to do so in late December 2018.
A withdrawal of the guilty plea or a pardon would let the Mueller prosecution team off the
hook.
And they're not getting off the hook.
Flynn hired the best lawyer he possibly could have when it comes to exposing prosecutorial
misconduct. Nobody knows the crafty, corrupt, and dishonest tricks federal prosecutors use
better than Powell, who actually wrote a compelling book about such matters, entitled "
License to Lie: Exposing
Corruption in the Department of Justice ."
Everything this Mueller prosecution team did in withholding exculpatory evidence from
Flynn's defense team -- and continued to withhold even after Judge Sullivan specifically issued
an order about it -- is going to be fully exposed.
Defying a federal judge's Brady order is a one-way ticket to not only getting fired, it's a
serious enough offense to warrant disbarment and prosecution.
If it turns out Mueller special counsel prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence -- not
only in the IRA/Concord case, but also in the cases against Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael
Cohen, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and others -- that will have a huge impact.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn't they do the
same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven't they have already demonstrated they
are willing to break the rules? Tags
We have become a third-world country. Even throwing Mueller and his entire prosecutors'
team in jail would not be enough to restore confidence in our legal system. But it would be a
start.
On or about December 28, 2016, the Russian Ambassador contacted FLYNN.
c. On or about December 29, 2016, FLYNN called a senior official of the Presidential
Transition Team ("PTT official"), who was with other senior ·members of the
Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss
what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. Sanctions. On that
call, FLYNN and 2 Case 1:17-cr-00232-RC Document 4 Filed 12/01/17 Page 2 of 6 the PTT
official discussed the U.S. Sanctions, including the potential impact of those sanctions on
the incoming administration's foreign policy goals. The PIT official and FLYNN also discussed
that the members of the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to
escalate the situation. d. Immediately after his phone call with the PTT official, FLYNN
called the Russian Ambassador and requested that Russia not escalate the situation and only
respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner. e. Shortly after his phone call with
the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with the PTT official to report on the substance of his
call with the Russian Ambassador, including their discussion of the U.S. Sanctions. f. On or
about December 30, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement indicating
that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. Sanctions at that
time. g. On or about December 31, 2016, the Russian Ambassador called FLYNN and informed him
that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to FL YNN's request. h. After his phone
call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with senior members of the Presidential
Transition Team about FL YNN's conversations with the Russian Ambassador regarding the U.S.
Sanctions and Russia's decision not to escalate the situation.
The coup plot between the international intelligence community (which includes our
FBI-CIA-etc) and their unregistered foreign agents in the multinational corporate media is
slowly being revealed.
Here’s another possibility... elites in the US Gov set on running a soft coup
against a duly elected president and his team made up a whole pile of **** and passed it off
as truth.
The Manafort thing has me totally riled since HRC's "Password" guy and his brother were
PARTNERS with manafort, did the same damn things, and were NOT investigated.
Donald Trump is many things to many people, but is not his social personna to be patient.
He is being VERY patient to let this unfold, to "give a man enough rope" or political party
and its owner, as it may be....
Donna Brazile's book is under-rated: it holds they keys as to who ran the DNC and why
after Obie bailed.
Our local community rag (Vermont) had an opinion piece last week about "The slide towards
Facism", where the author breathlessly stated that she had learned from a MSNBC expose by
Rachel Maddow that the administration was firing researchers at NASA and EPA as well as
cutting back funding for LGBTQ support groups. Oh the horror. The author conveniently forgot
that the same dyke had lied for 2 years about Russia,Russia,Russia but it's still OK to
believe any **** that drops out of her mouth.
This is the level of insanity happening around here. Of course it is Bernie's turf.
People who are so stupid and gullible deserve everything they are gonna get.
Poor Flynn. Rail-roaded by ZOG and Obama and Hillary and Co. I hope beyond hope that the
truth is revealed and that he can sue the **** out of the seditionists/(((seditionists))) who
put him into this mess such that his great-great-grandchildren will never have to work.
I also blame Trump for throwing Flynn under the bus.
If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn’t they
do the same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven’t they have already
demonstrated they are willing to break the rules?
Duh! Because it's easy and the media never covers it and AG Barr and FBI director Wray
will cover it all up. America no longer operates under rule of law, and now we all know it.
Never cooperate with them!
flynn didn't rape children, to buzy trying to fight liberators of iraq and afganistan from
invasion... that's his major crime.
I guess, kelly, mattis, mcmaster neither are on the child rape trend. but what can they
do? when the entire cia and doj and fbi are full on controlled and run by the pedos? it's
like when all the cardinals and the pope are pedos, what a bishop to do...
Why would CIA Rothschild'd up puppet Trump pick only the best William Barr?
Who told Acosta to cut no prosecution deal with Epstein? George Bush? Robert Mukasey? or
Bob Mueller?
Trump, Barr, Bush, Mueller all on the same no rule of law national no government
pys op , for Epstein & 9/11 clean op team Poppa Bush, Clinton, &
Mossad.
Barr: CIA operative
It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone
out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.
Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael
Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno
(1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.
Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting
in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA.
CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA
operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of
Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy
(Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.
When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s
“legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s
longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines,
and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy
assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden
Triangle narco-trafficking.
Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA
abuses.
Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean
opposition leader Orlando Letelier.
Barr joined George H.W. Bush’s legal/intelligence team during Bush’s vice
presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief
Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.
Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of
the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also “fixing” the
legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure
or arrest.
In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to “attack criminal
organizations”, drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr
would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use
Justice Department power to escape punishment.
Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes,
including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all
crimes of state committed by Bush
Barr provided legal cover for Bush’s illegal foreign policy and war crimes
Barr left Washington, and went through the “rotating door” to the corporate
world, where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies.
In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law
firm Kirkland
& Ellis . Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John
Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys.
K&E’s clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt
Romney’s Bain Capital.
A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the
Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.
there is a war on america, and the DoD and men like flynn are too arrogant, dumb, and
proud to admit they have been fucked and conned deeply by men way smarter than them...
we don't need ******* brains, but killers to wage this revolution against the american
pedostate.
and that, what they master, they don't want to do.
if they want money, they should have learned to trade and not kill...
""Certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have 'conspired' with key unknown
figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet
securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet
Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence. These securities,
originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of
September 11th
through the BoNY. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street
Journalas being experienced in the BoNY was tip of a three day operation, when these
securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.
"... The man was remarkable at one specific thing: pleasing his bosses and single-minded self-promotion. Sure he lacked anything resembling empathy, saw his troops as little more than tools for personal advancement, and his overall personality disturbingly matched the clinical definition of sociopathy. Details, details ..."
It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the
Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw.
After all, I could hardly write a thing
down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a
book
on
the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan hopefully winds to something approaching a
close, it's finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this new, recurring, semi-regular
series, the reader won't find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not
that this author doesn't have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in
countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.
With that in mind, I propose to tell a number of very different sorts of stories
profiles, so to speak, in absurdity.
That's what war is, at root, an exercise in
absurdity, and America's hopeless post-9/11 wars are stranger than most. My own 18-year long quest
to find some meaning in all the combat, to protect my troops from danger, push back against the
madness, and dissent from within the army proved Kafkaesque in the extreme.
Consider what
follows just a survey of that hopeless journey...
The man was remarkable at one specific thing: pleasing his bosses and single-minded
self-promotion.
Sure he lacked anything resembling empathy, saw his troops as little more
than tools for personal advancement, and his overall personality disturbingly matched the clinical
definition of sociopathy. Details, details
Still, you (almost) had to admire his drive, devotion, and dedication to the cause of
promotion, of rising through the military ranks.
Had he managed to channel that
astonishing energy, obsession even, to the pursuit of some good, the world might markedly have
improved. Which is, actually, a dirty little secret about the military, especially ground combat
units; that it tends to attract (and mold) a disturbing number of proud owners of such personality
disorders. The army then positively reinforces such toxic behavior by promoting these sorts of
individuals who excel at mind-melding (brown-nosing, that is) with superiors at
disproportionate rates. Such is life.
Only there are
real
consequences,
real
soldiers,
(to say nothing of local civilians) who suffer under their commanders' tyranny.
Back in 2011-12, the man served as my commander, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.
As such, he led and partly
controlled the destinies of some 500 odd soldiers
.
Then a lowly captain, I commanded about one-fifth of those men and answered directly to the
colonel.
I didn't much like the guy; hardly any of his officers did.
And he didn't
trust my aspirational intellectualism, proclivity to ask "why," or, well,
me
in general.
Still, he mostly found this author an effective middle manager. As such, I was a means to an end
for him that being self-advancement and some positive measurable statistics for his annual
officer evaluation report (OER) from his own boss. Nonetheless, it was the army and you sure don't
choose your bosses.
So it was, early in my yearlong tour in the scrublands of rural Kandahar province, that
the colonel treated me to one his dog-and-pony-show visits.
Only this time he had some
unhappy news for me. The next day he, and the baker's dozen tag-alongs in his ubiquitous entourage,
wanted to walk the few treacherous miles to the most dangerous strongpoint in the entire
sub-district. It was occupied, needlessly, by one of my platoons in perpetuity and suffered under
constant siege by the local Taliban, too small to contest the area and too big to fly under the
radar, this at one point the most attacked outpost in Afghanistan base just provided an
American flag-toting target. I'd communicated as much to command early on, but to no avail. Can-do
US colonels with aspirations for general officer rank hardly
ever
give up territory to the
enemy even if that's the strategically sound course.
Walking to the platoon strongpoint was dicey on even the best of days. The route between
our main outpost and the Alamo-like strongpoint was flooded with Taliban insurgents and provided
precious little cover or concealment for out patrols.
On my first jaunt to the outpost, I
(foolishly, it must be said) walked my unit into an ambush and was thrown over a small rock wall by
the blast of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) with my apparent name on it. Since then, it was
standard for our patrols to the strongpoint to suffer multiple ambushes during the roundtrip
rotation. Sometimes our kids got wounded or killed; sometimes they were lucky. Mercifully, at
least, my intelligence section led by my
friend
and
rebranded artillery lieutenant did their homework and figured out that the chronically lazy local
Taliban didn't like to fight at night or wake up early, so patrols to the strongpoint that stepped
off before dawn had a fighting chance of avoiding the worst of ambush alley.
I hadn't wanted to take my colonel on a patrol to the outpost. His entourage was
needlessly large and, when added to my rotational platoon, presented an unwieldy and inviting
target for Taliban ambush.
Still I knew better than to argue the point with my
disturbingly confident and single-minded colonel. So I hedged. Yes, sir, we can take you along,
with one caveat:
we have to leave before dawn!
I proceeded to explain why, replete with
historical stats and examples, we could only (somewhat) safely avoid ambush if we did so.
That's when things went south.
The colonel insisted we leave at nine,
maybe even ten, in the morning, the absolute
peak
window for Taliban attack. This prima
donna reminded me that he couldn't possibly leave any earlier.
He had a "battle rhythm,"
after all, which included working out in the gym at his large, safe,
distant-from-the-roar-of-battle base each morning.
How could I expect him to alter that
predictable schedule over something as minor as protecting the lives and limbs of his own troopers?
He had "to set an example," he reminded me, by letting his soldiers on the base "see him in the
gym" each and every morning. Back then, silly me, I was actually surprised by the colonel's absurd
refusal; so much so that I pushed back, balked, tried to rationally press my point. To no avail.
What the man said next has haunted me ever since.
We would leave no
earlier than nine AM, according to his preference. My emotional pleas begging really was not
only for naught but insulted the colonel. Why? Because, as he imparted to me, for my own growth and
development he thought,
"Remember: lower caters to higher, Danny!"
That, he reminded me, was the way of the military world, the key to success and advancement. The
man even thought he was being helpful, advising me on how to achieve the success he'd achieved.
My heart sank forever, and never recovered.
The next day he was late. We didn't step off until nearly ten AM. The ambush, a massive
mix of RPG and machine gun fire, kicked off as predicted within sight of the main base. The
rest was history, and certainly could've been worse.
On other, less lucky, days it was.
But I remember this one profound moment. When the first rocket exploded above us, both the colonel
and I dove for limited cover behind a mound of rocks. I was terrified and exasperated. Just then we
locked eyes and I gazed into his proverbial soul. The man was incapable of fear. He wasn't scared,
or disturbed; he didn't care a bit about what was happening. That revelation was more terrifying
than the ongoing ambush and would alter my view of the world irreparably.
Which brings us to some of the discomfiting morals if such things exist of this
story.
American soldiers fight and die at the whims of career-obsessed officers as much they do
so at the behest of king and country.
Sometimes its their own leaders as much as the
ostensible "enemy" that tries to get them killed. The plentiful sociopaths running these wars at
the upper and even middle-management levels are often far less concerned with long-term, meaningful
"victory" in places like Afghanistan, than in crafting on the backs of their soldiers sacrifices
the
illusion
of progress, just enough measurable "success" in their one year tour to
warrant a stellar evaluation and, thus, the next promotion. Not all leaders are like this. I, for
one, once worked for a man for whom I and all my peers would run through walls for, a (then)
colonel that loved his hundreds of soldiers like they were his own children. But he was the
exception that proved the rule.
The madness, irrationality, and absurdity of my colonel was nothing less than a
microcosm of America's entire hopeless adventure in Afghanistan.
The war was never
rational, winnable, or meaningful. It was from the first, and will end as, an exercise in futility.
It was, and is, one grand patrol to my own unnecessary outpost, undertaken at the wrong time and
place. It was a collection of sociopaths and imbeciles both Afghan and American tilting at
windmills and ultimately dying for nothing at all. Yet the young men in the proverbial trenches
never flinched, never refused. They did their absurd duty because they were acculturated to the
military system, and because they were embarrassed not to.
The Major totally failed to mention
the Patriot Act and the removal of
US Constitutional rights from
Americans based on a false flag
attack that cold bloodily murdered
3,000 people and cost the taxpayers
over 10 trillion dollars.
Just to put it in perspective, the US has been in Afghanistan
for 18 years and has lost less than 3000 troops and just over
20000 wounded. The US was in Vietnam 20 years and loss nearly
60000 troops and 150000 wounded. This not to diminish the
misery of those that served in either war, but not really
comparable in scope.
You did what you had to do, Major. You were a good shabbos goy
for world financial oligarchy but now they don't need you any more
so go shoot heroin up your veins or jump off a ******* building,
but you dare not even so much as ask for a "thank you" from the
financial oligarchy!
Let's say it's
January 2021
, and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as
commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy
team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a
group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African
Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants.
The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives.
What should Bernie do?
For
Samantha Power
, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama's
second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her
life to promoting humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the United States, as the world's
"indispensable nation," has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or
halt atrocities. First as a war reporter covering the Balkans in the 1990s, then as the Pulitzer
Prizewinning author of "
A
Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
, and finally as a government official
herself, Power has insisted that the "responsibility to protect" innocents from slaughter is
sacrosanct, even if it means U.S. military adventurism or violating foreign nations' sovereignty.
When civilians are threatened, Power believes we must save them.
THE
EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by Samantha Power
Dey Street Books,
592 pp., $29.99
For this position, she has been both praised and
lambasted. Power's supporters see her as a
moral beacon
in a world focused on power politics at the expense of human rights. In the last
two decades, she has shaped the way a generation of liberal analysts and policymakers understand
international relations and their role within it: Barack Obama has
called her
"one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy," while Ben Rhodes has said she was
"who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington." Meanwhile, critics like the law professor
Aziz Rana
understand her as an unreconstructed "war hawk," who employs the discourse of human
rights to mask American imperialism. For them, Power embodies the contradictions of liberal
geopolitics, in which lofty rhetoric is used to justify military action in regions where the United
States has at best tangential interests.
Power's memoir arrives at a time when she and her approach have fallen from favor -- both with the
current administration, which has adopted a nakedly transactional approach to foreign affairs, and
with left-wing foreign policy thinkers, who want to dismantle U.S. military dominance. Against
these tides, Power's new book seems intended to rehabilitate both her agenda and her own
reputation, as she narrates in vivid and engaging prose her rapid rise to some of the most
influential positions in U.S. foreign policy-making. It's the story of a sympathetic protagonist
just trying to save innocent lives -- yet one that inadvertently demonstrates the lethality of good
intentions. The most startling thing about a book titled
The Education of an Idealist
is that Power appears not to have learned very much.
Power's early years exemplified the peripatetic privilege of the global bourgeoisie. She was
born in Ireland in 1970, the daughter of a doctor mother and a dentist father. In 1979, after her
father's alcoholism destroyed her parents' marriage, Power's mother moved with Samantha and her
brother to the United States. Power quickly acclimated to American life; she lost her Irish accent,
began a lifelong love affair with baseball, and started on her high school's basketball team. She
also studied hard for the SAT, and in 1988 was accepted to Yale University.
During Power's sophomore year, the
Berlin Wall
came
down, the Cold War ended, and she became a political junkie who quizzed herself on the news of the
day. In the summer of 1990, she took a trip to Europe that would transform her life. Power began
her journey with a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through the bleak Secret
Annex drove home to Power "the horror of Hitler's crimes," and after her visit she started to keep
a list of books she wanted to read on "what U.S. officials knew about the Holocaust and what they
could have done to save more Jews." Soon after, she traveled to Dachau, where she "wondered aloud
what the modern world would look like if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war."
(Ignoring, naturally, the Soviet Union's role in ending World War II, and that it was the Red Army
that liberated Auschwitz.)
Power's trip persuaded her that U.S. military force could legitimately be used to save innocent
lives. The Holocaust became for her the moral justification for American empire in an era in which
the United States no longer faced any perceived existential threats. Power concluded that if the
United States didn't rule the world, genocide was inevitable, and for the remainder of her career
she would view atrocities in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East through the prism of the
Holocaust: After all, if the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why
couldn't it do the same in the
1990s
,
2000s
, and
2010s
?
If the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the
1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?
The timing of Power's
trip was also crucial for her intellectual development. Before the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s, it was difficult to argue that the U.S. military could serve as a neutral
arbiter of human rights. Not only was the nation engaged in an avowedly political struggle with an
existential communist enemy, but the Vietnam War and several other failed interventions underlined
the dangers of using military force for ideological ends. Communism's collapse made it possible for
Power to imagine the U.S. military as a nonideological guarantor of broadly accepted human rights.
The empire could act for humanity, not politics. For Power -- and for many in her generation -- the U.S.
military was the base upon which the liberal international order of free markets, democracy, and
human rights would be constructed.
By her senior year at Yale, Power had determined that she "wanted to end up in a position to 'do
something'" about humanitarian crises. After graduating, she interned at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, where Mort Abramowitz, the endowment's president and a former ambassador to
Turkey, was turning his attention to the incipient Bosnian War. The more Power learned about the
conflict and its atrocities, "the more unnerved" she became. The war, she writes, provided her with
"a focus -- a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized." To publicize
their suffering, she decided to become a
war reporter
, and in late 1993 she moved to the Balkans, armed with little more than a laptop.
Power was in Zagreb, Croatia, when on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs mortared the
Markale
market
in Sarajevo, killing 68 civilians. As she watched news footage of "market vendors
carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends," she found herself "rooting for the
first time in [her] life for the United States to use military force." She spent the next year and
a half writing pieces on
civilian
suffering
that she hoped would engender a domestic outcry and convince President Bill Clinton
to forcibly end the siege of Sarajevo.
As time went on and Clinton refused to intervene (the U.S.-led NATO Operation Deliberate Force
would not commence until August 1995), Power began to consider a new track that was "less about
describing events and more about directly trying to shape them." The decisive moment came in July
1995, when she learned that the Bosnian Serb army
murdered
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The sheer brutality of the genocide
compelled Power to take up a place at Harvard Law School (she had applied and been accepted earlier
that year), with the intention of becoming a prosecutor "who could bring murderers to justice."
At Harvard, Power returned to the question that had haunted her at the Anne Frank House and
Dachau: Don't Americans, as citizens of the world's greatest power, have a personal responsibility
to save lives if we have the capacity to do so? She enrolled in a class on the ethics of using
force and, most important for her future career, she wrote a paper that examined "what U.S.
policymakers
themselves
were thinking" when they failed to respond to twentieth-century
genocides. This paper was her first step toward her 2002 book
"A Problem From Hell,"
which
codified a decade of liberal thinking about humanitarian intervention, and which transformed Power
into an
internationally renowned expert
on human rights and genocide prevention.
"A Problem From Hell"
had two main arguments. First, it claimed that throughout the
twentieth century "the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress
genocide" and, by not acting, had failed the people of Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, among other
places. Second, the book maintained that in the future, U.S. decision-makers should take steps to
prevent or halt atrocities along "a continuum of intervention" that would range "from condemning
the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force."
Power did not, as many critics later avowed, unthinkingly advocate military intervention; rather,
she considered intervention as the final in a series of graduated steps intended to avert or stop
genocide. But as Power herself would soon learn, when Americans were presented with the hammer of
military force, many atrocities began to look like nails.
Power's book was perfectly primed for the post-9/11 moment, during which the question on many
Americans' minds was not whether the United States should remake the world, but how.
"A Problem
From Hell"
quickly became a cudgel in the
debate
over invading Iraq; as Power notes, several pundits clamoring for war invoked her book, arguing
that the 1980s Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds gave the United States a casus belli.
Even though Power herself opposed the invasion, the writers who referenced
"A Problem From
Hell"
were not exactly misreading the book: Power
had placed
U.S. military intervention on the menu of options available to policymakers who said
they wanted to protect human rights.
In a moment defined by paranoia, revenge fantasies, and a sense of moral crusade, it is not
particularly surprising that
"A Problem From Hell"
was employed to rationalize war. The
book's relevance at the time, in fact, helps explain why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction in April 2003, one month after the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Samantha
Power in 2013 at an International Civil Society event with Secretary of State John Kerry and National
Security Adviser Susan Rice
Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Power got the chance to use her ideas to shape U.S.
policy more directly. Obama and Power first met in the spring of 2005, when Obama was an ambitious
junior senator from Illinois. They worked together for a year (Power volunteered to serve in his
office), and when Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008, he hired her as a foreign policy
adviser, later appointing her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral
affairs and senior director for human rights.
In government, Power swiftly learned that few officials cared about human rights; many, in fact,
deemed them a distraction from more important issues of power politics. Nevertheless, while at the
NSC, Power helped expand by $50 million U.S. aid to Iraqi refugees, increased the number of Iraqis
allowed to resettle in the United States, and doubled the government's refugee stipend. She also
advocated for the United States to run for a seat on the
U.N.
Human Rights Council
, which it won in 2009. From this perch, U.S. officials spurred a number of
resolutions focused on revealing human rights abuses in various nations, including Iran, Syria,
Sudan, and North Korea. Moreover, Power proudly emphasizes, the United States "succeeded in getting
the Human Rights Council to reduce by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel."
As this last comment indicates, for Power, protecting human rights means disciplining nations of
the Global South that are not U.S. allies. Throughout
The Education of an Idealist
, she
barely mentions Israel or Saudi Arabia -- she says nothing about Israel's occupation of the West Bank
or the Saudi war on women and LGBTQI+ people. These silences are deafening, because the type of
world Power wants to build will never be realized if only certain countries -- namely, those that
stand outside America's imperial sphere -- are held to account. Her approach does not make much sense
from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human
rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital
in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Meanwhile, Power completely ignores the human rights violations that took place in her own
country under Obama's watch; like many liberal interventionists, she is far more vexed by suffering
abroad. Nowhere does she address
police violence
against African Americans,
mass surveillance
,
refugee
detention
, or
mass
incarceration
. Nor does she give much thought to the colonial violence that defines American
history: In
The Education of an Idealist
, she recalls inviting a Serbian official to meet
with her in the so-called Indian Treaty Room, where she lectured him on the importance of
apprehending the war criminal Ratko Mladić. Somehow, Power overlooks the irony of championing
justice in a room named for repeatedly broken treaties that the U.S. government made with the
native population against which it committed genocide.
Power's most consequential decision during Obama's first term displayed a shortsightedness that
has often accompanied her faith in U.S. military power. With the outbreak of civil war in Libya,
Power began to advocate vociferously in favor of intervention to stop a potential massacre at
Benghazi. In particular, during a March 15, 2011, meeting, Power endorsed U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice's proposal to establish a
no-fly zone
over Libya and attack Muammar Qaddafi's forces. Obama approved Rice's plan, and on
March 19, a U.S.-led NATO coalition began
bombing Libya
,
initiating a process that concluded with Qaddafi's death. Despite the war's expansion and the chaos
that ensued, Power remains proud of her contribution. For her, "once the revolution spread, the
real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible -- or the
least bad -- outcome."
But was that the real question? Here are some other questions that are equally important and
that she should have taken more seriously before Obama commenced Operation Odyssey Dawn: Is the war
likely to expand? If the war expands and Qaddafi is deposed, who will govern Libya? Is the United
States -- especially the American public -- willing to commit itself to reconstruction efforts? What
precedent does the intervention potentially set? Power never really asked these questions, because
ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a
categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course). For this reason,
throughout her time in office Power regularly encouraged war.
In Obama's second term, Power left the NSC to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
this position, she won many admirable victories: She aided in establishing a U.N. post
dedicated
to monitoring global LGBT rights;
brought countries together
to end the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014; and promoted a resolution
that demanded the United Nations
deport
any peacekeeping units from countries in which U.N. soldiers were reported to have
committed sexual assault.
Yet it was also during Obama's second term that Power found herself less able to convince the
president of the moral necessity of intervention. In her memoir, she relates that when she first
learned that Bashar al-Assad's government had employed chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war,
she hoped "Obama would respond forcefully" and was disappointed when he didn't. Nevertheless, in
August 2013, Power was heartened to discover that Obama intended to answer the Syrian government's
murder of 1,400 people in a
chemical weapons attack
with airstrikes of military targets.
Power's expectations, however, were dashed when she was informed that Obama had decided to seek
congressional authorization for the airstrikes. "What happens if Congress doesn't support you?" she
asked the president. "Does that mean Assad could just keep using chemical weapons?" In the end,
Obama determined that Congress would rebuff his plan and
chose not
to go ahead with a vote; against Power's wishes, he also refused to intervene.
Instead, the president accepted Russia's offer to work together to disable Assad's chemical weapons
program. For her part, Power "shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort" to decrease Assad's
stockpile, despite the fact that U.S.-Russian collaboration provided an opportunity to build the
trust necessary to reach a political resolution of the conflict.
Power's recollection of the Syria debate highlights her meritocratic skepticism of democratic
politics. She writes that she "regretted that our administration had not ascertained whether we had
the votes
before
the President announced he was going to Congress. Had he known he would
fail, [she] did not believe he would have chosen the path he did." Power, in other words, wanted
Congress to rubber-stamp Obama's decision to intervene; she wasn't interested in having a real
public discussion about the potential benefits and drawbacks of using military force. In fact,
Power has the temerity to express disappointment with the U.S. public for refusing to support
intervention. Most Americans, she laments, "wanted no part of Syria. The student activists, civic
groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out
en masse
to demand help for
the people of Darfur [where in the mid-2000s a genocide erupted] were largely silent." Such a
statement evinces the privilege of an individual who has no reason to fear the
effects
another Middle Eastern intervention might have on her own family -- or on the people of
the Middle East.
The assumption running through Power's career is that the American empire is able to act as a
force for good in the world. At her memoir's end -- and in the wake of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria -- she affirms that "on issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the
table or else the problem worsened." Though this might be true in some cases, it is certainly not
the rule, especially when one considers the
disastrous effects
of the nation's wars in the Greater Middle East; its
pointless
antagonism
of China, Russia, and Iran; its unwillingness to take the business-unfriendly steps
required to arrest climate change; and its unhesitating promotion of a capitalist system that has
exploited the labor of untold millions. The last several decades have taught us that the world
needs far less American "leadership" than it has enjoyed.
If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely
philosophical inquiry: Is it right to save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of
course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a thought experiment; it takes
place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical
uncertainty. Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers
actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the
American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here
may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.
Simply maintaining an enormous military able to intervene anywhere in the world carries its own
set of malign consequences: endless wars, global arms proliferation, a militaristic political
culture, the diversion of resources from welfare to weapons, and the strengthening of the
military-industrial complex, to name just a few.
The Education of an Idealist
does not
account for these social ills, or consider that the only way we can avoid them is by giving up the
capacities that enable us (theoretically, if not in practice) to alleviate foreign suffering.
The historian Samuel Moyn has
warned
that we must be careful not to elevate "the narrow and rare problem of when to send the military to
help strangers into the decisive one around which the future of American foreign policy revolves."
Power's memoir shows how much the discourse of humanitarian intervention obscures. By focusing on
the question "Do we save innocent lives?" liberal interventionists like Power shift our attention
from an equally important query: "How do we change conditions so lives don't need to be saved?" A
world oriented around this last question would look very different from the one we have now.
Daniel Bessner is the Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington
and author of
Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
.
@ dbessner
"... It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception of the environment. ..."
"... literal medical necessity ..."
"... @humphrey ..."
"... My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs? ..."
Imagine if America had to answer for its war crimes
gjohnsit on Thu, 09/05/2019 - 5:25pm Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demonstrated what the term "ugly American" meant the
other day when he
bragged about his defeat of the International Criminal Court.
"Americanism means taking care of our own," said Pompeo.
"We stopped international courts from prosecuting our service members," Pompeo continued, adding that the potential probe "was
an outrage."
...
Pompeo confirmed earlier this year that the administration would revoke or deny visas for ICC personnel who try to investigate
or prosecute U.S. officials or key allies for potential war crimes. A month later, in April, the administration followed through
and revoked prosecutor Bensouda's visa for entry into the U.S.
Just because you defeated justice doesn't mean the crimes go away.
However, it does mean that there is no incentive to stop committing war crimes.
That brings us to today's news from Yemen .
The UK, US, France and Iran may be complicit in possible war crimes in Yemen over their support for parties to the conflict there,
UN experts say.
A new report warns the countries they could be held responsible for aiding or assisting the commission of violations.
The Western powers provide weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen's government, while Iran backs
the Houthi rebels.
...
The UN says the four-year conflict has claimed the lives of at least 7,290 civilians and left 80% of the population - 24 million
people - in need of humanitarian assistance or protection, including 10 million who rely on food aid to survive.
Yemen has gotten a significant amount of much needed attention in recent years, but just across the Gulf of Aden another
humanitarian disaster of gigantic size is happening in
near total silence and obscurity.
"In the absence of humanitarian assistance, up to 2.1 million people across Somalia face severe hunger through December," the
UN warned, citing the 2019 Post-Gu report's conclusion that this would bring the total number of Somalis expected to be food insecure,
to 6.3 million by year's end.
1 million children are expected to be malnourished in Somalia by year's end.
The United States may have committed war crimes as it bombed al-Shabab militants in Somalia, a new report Amnesty International
alleges...
They found that the airstrikes killed farmers, women and an eight-year-old girl, whom the group assessed had no ties to al-Shabab.
"Due to the nature of the attacks, the U.S. government is violating international humanitarian law and these violations may
amount to war crimes," Hassan said.
While the United States has been bombing Somalia for more than a decade, the Trump administration has accelerated the attacks.
The insurgency there is fueled by
Somali rage over now decades-long American interference in their country.
Why Americans cannot bring themselves to care about Somalia is something I will never understand.
Meanwhile in Libya things have gone from
bad to worse .
"Unless action is taken in the near term, it is highly likely that the current conflict will escalate into full civil war," Guterres
said on Thursday in his latest report on the UN Support Mission in Libya.
AFRICOM says that a civil war would "give existing terrorist elements in Libya oxygen."
The leading instigator of the fighting is General Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar, after the defeat of the Libyan troops he was commanding in 1987, he offered his services to
the CIA
, which backed him for years as he awaited the opportunity to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
Is it really any surprise that
Trump loves him
?
An airstrike by Khalifa Haftar's forces hit a migrant detention center east of Tripoli yesterday and killed at least 44 people
and wounded up to 130. Haftar and his forces are mainly backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and this airstrike is part
of the assault on the Libyan capital that Trump reportedly endorsed when it began. The Trump administration is now shielding Haftar
from condemnation by the Security Council by blocking the statement promoted by the U.K.
The
ICC plans to investigate these war crimes, but since the Trump Administration won't even allow a condemnation, and considering
how much Washington hates the ICC, i wouldn't count on this investigation going very far.
The idea that POMPEO is "outraged" is...well, he's a Nazi. So is anybody who thinks that way (lookin' at you, Dubya & Friends).
THEY ARE DETERMINED TO OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE 20TH CENTURY, THE CENTURY THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT PRECISELY BECAUSE, FOR A BRIEF
MOMENT IN TIME, IT CAST OFF AND STOOD AGAINST THAT VERY MENTALITY.
Men like him belong in their own torture-camps...or a short distance under them.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
NUREMBERG II: JUDGMENT DAY.
It is what they most dread.
It is the least they deserve.
It is what the entire world - the American people most of all - NEEDS NOW. It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception
of the environment.
FIAT JUSTICIA, RUUAT CAELUM: "Let there be Justice, though the Heavens may fall".
I believe that Justice (REAL Justice, not just the way it's been redefined by some as "goodies for my clique"), delivered in
a timely, precise, and reliable manner, is nothing short of a literal medical necessity - and the truth is, Caelum IS
Ruuating PRECISELY BECAUSE there has been no Justicia.
Our war crimes go way back and they continue to today.
Unfortunately, the US is the 800 lb gorilla on the world stage and no one is willing or courageous enough to challenge that
gorilla.
thank you. i look forward to reading it more carefully later, especially your link on somalia. i remember bill clinton's hypocritical
R2P only too well.. which precious Somalian mineral was the hegemon really after?
In the book The Ugly American, the ugly guy was actually the good guy who understood and respected local culture; he was just
ugly and unsmooth. The "pretty" Americans were the villains. IIRC, it's been over 50 years. Might be worth re-reading.
Are we surprised? This is the Pax (or Bellus?) Americana. Since the USSR folded, the UN is toothless and GodGun$Gut$ dominates
the world with endless war -- or thinks it does; after all, one in six humans is Chinese.
My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall
for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs?
In comparison with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, Warren is huge progress even with her warts and all.
Notable quotes:
"... the DNC is already gaming polls, cherry-picking which are "official" for their 2% threshhold. MSNBC and other networks and pundits also cherry-pick. Or even simply outright lie if the poll doesn't match what they want it to. ..."
"... Polling should either be eliminated or held to MUCH more consistent and much more scientific standards. (demographics, prediction analysis, neutral rather than leading questions, standardized formats, etc.) Until then they're simply more and more useless as predictors of the real poll, the primaries or general. ..."
"... The difference no is, that countries like Canada, the U.S., Australia, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and with the AfD Germany are either as fascist, or more fascist than ever before. Once again, Russia is hyped up to be the eternal arch enemy of 'Western fascist values', 'freedom and democracy'. How much more difficult would it be today to round up resistance against a fascist axis that is hellbent to march again Russia? ..."
"... Sure, Trudeau is nothing but a bag of lukewarm air, but he employs hard core fascists in his cabinet paid for by the Canadian people. ..."
"... History will look at the Sanders Warren debacle in the same way it must look now at the theft of the nomination of Henry A. Wallace in favor of the person that had no whatsoever second thoughts about dropping two nukes on an enemy that had already succumbed to the Soviet forces. Henry A. Wallace would heve never dropped these nukes. He was a staunch supporter of the 'common man'. All his policies reflected that. He was a presidential nominee for, of and by the people. ..."
"... To all the mindless party members of the Democratic fascist party: if you repeat history by allowing for the second time to install a puppet of the fascist powers in the U.S., you bear the full responsibilty for the dropping of the next nukes. ..."
"... The difference between Sanders and Wallace is a painful one. Wallace fought against the theft of his nomination with all he got. Subsequently, he realized that the 'Democratic' party would never allow for a person with integrity and the well being of the people at heart to win any nomination. He would have won the following presidency as a third party nominee Trumann however knew how to prevent that. ..."
"... Much of what is sickening about the US as an imperial power today was present well before 1944 indeed was present during the 19th century when the US made colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines in the 1890s, and occupied Haiti in 1915 (?), not leaving that country until the 1930s. ..."
"... Forgive me for saying so, but is a party of working folks really supposed to be grovelling for favours from billionaires? ..."
"... I think Gabbard is as authentic a new voice as i have ever seen in the DNC. She may well make it as an independent. Would Sanders? ..."
"... I'd say if a Gabbard/Paul grassroots campaign run by the Sanders 'momentum' network got their act together the USA may finally mature into a proper democracy not owned by their neolib con artistes. ..."
"... America where democracy has been extinguished and their increasingly paranoid voters are under the mistaken belief that yet another talking head can return them to a fair and impartial existence. ..."
"... Too late. Money is king and those that have most want more. The sideshow of elections produces the performing clowns such as Trump, Obama, Bush etc.all spouting the same vacuous promises on behalf of their wealthy benefactors. No real choice or change and an illusion of caring for the welfare of their citizenry. Listen carefully to the clowns, it's the sound of money talking. ..."
So: the rise of Elizabeth Warren gives the billionaires a 'progressive' candidate who might either win the
nomination or else at least split progressive voters during the primaries (between Sanders and Warren) and thus give
the nomination to Buttigieg, who is their first choice (especially since both Biden and Harris have been faltering so
badly of late).
I feel like any analysis that even mentions polls is guesswork, because nowadays polls are almost
entirely useless. In that they aren't accurately measuring people who are actually going to go to
open/semi-open or even closed primaries, and caucuses. The cohort of likely voters is different from
the cohort who bothers to pick up a phone call from an unknown (polling) number. Or make it through a
whole poll. Or do any online polls. Or have a reachable phone # at all.
Plus the fact that the DNC is already gaming polls, cherry-picking which are "official" for their
2% threshhold. MSNBC and other networks and pundits also cherry-pick. Or even simply outright lie if
the poll doesn't match what they want it to.
Polling should either be eliminated or held to MUCH more consistent and much more scientific
standards. (demographics, prediction analysis, neutral rather than leading questions, standardized
formats, etc.) Until then they're simply more and more useless as predictors of the real poll, the
primaries or general.
I liked the article other than that though.
mark
"Vote for me, I'm gay!"
"Vote for me, I'm a Red Indian!"
Daniel Rich
Do these 'Democratic Party billionaires ' have names and further affiliations?
Could it be that most of these 'Democratic Party billionaires ' favor the Apartheid State?
Hmmmmm?
George Cornell
David Bradley's The Atlanticmagazine headlined on August 26th, "Elizabeth Warren Manages to Woo the
Democratic Establishment". Wooing in American politics = betraying your principles, cutting deals,
bending to the wishes of the powerful, and all round submissive boot-licking.
Roberto
That would be describing successful politics in any country at any time in history.
An unsuccessful politician would do the inverse of what you list. For those with good memories,
let's try to name some.
George Cornell
Not everyone would agree with that definition of success, but you are quite right.
wardropper
Voice in the "Emperor's New Clothes" story:
"Why don't we just ban all financial support of presidential candidates? I thought this was supposed
to be about the person best qualified and best suited to run the country "
HEY! Somebody shut that
child up right now, will you!
The significance of Sanders is this: if he wins the nomination he will have done so by leading an
insurrectionary movement, not only within the Democratic Party but in US society itself. He simply
cannot win otherwise. And if he wins the primaries it will have been in spite of the great mass of
money and Establishment influence having been mobilised against him.
In other words he is right to call his supporters a "revolution."
It is of course equally true of the Corbyn movement- any victories are immense defeats for both the
Establishment and its media. That, in itself is important.
And nowhere more than in Canada where the third and fourth parties- the NDP and the Greens- continue
to tack further and further to the right, trying to catch up with the rightward swing of the Liberal
Party -now close to full on neo-naziism- and the ultra right Tories.
Thank You for the link. While I am keenly aware of the untold history of WWII and the fact that
Hitler would have never gotten where he was from 1933-1941 without the propping up by both U.S. and
Zionist interests (mind the redundancy), eager to crush the perceived anti-capitalist behemoth
Soviet Union, I am wondering about the present re-run of the same story unfolding.
The difference
no is, that countries like Canada, the U.S., Australia, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and with the
AfD Germany are either as fascist, or more fascist than ever before. Once again, Russia is hyped up
to be the eternal arch enemy of 'Western fascist values', 'freedom and democracy'. How much more
difficult would it be today to round up resistance against a fascist axis that is hellbent to march
again Russia?
Sure, Trudeau is nothing but a bag of lukewarm air, but he employs hard core fascists in his
cabinet paid for by the Canadian people. The rest of the what goes for the 'value West' is more
of a disgrace than at any time before. These are the real dark ages, as I have stated before.
Nothing good can come from these psychopathic puppets in control of countries that ought to deserve
much better. Maybe, just maybe, the people of the countries in question should read Rudi Dutschke's
works about 'Extra Parliamentary Opposition' for Dummies?
Until Turkey is able to produce S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems it will buy weapons from Russia.
Turkey intends to buy from Russia additional S-400 air defense systems
While Bernie Sanders is no Henry A. Wallace by a long shot, Elizabeth Warren is the new Harry Trumann.
The Democrats are still the Democratic fascist Party of America and have their party base hypnotized
into believing that it has the well being of its voters on its mind.
That is of course a lie and
pure propaganda. And since the U.S. is the second most vulnerable nation to propaganda and fascism
with Germany being the number one, in both the past and the present the people that refuse to leave
the Democratic Fascist Party are remiscent of those people who kept following Hitler, even after it
had become clear that his 'party' would drive Germany into the abyss.
For the brownshirt-like followers of proven war criminals that both lead, or finance the 'party',
absolutely no crime is big enough that would warrant to turn their back on the fascist party.
History
will look at the Sanders Warren debacle in the same way it must look now at
the theft
of the nomination of Henry A. Wallace
in favor of the person that had no whatsoever second
thoughts about dropping two nukes on an enemy that had already succumbed to the Soviet forces. Henry
A. Wallace would heve never dropped these nukes. He was a staunch supporter of the 'common man'. All
his policies reflected that. He was a presidential nominee for, of and by the people.
That did not sit too well with the fascists and they stole the nomination from him. Present day
America has turned into this corrupt cesspool because of this stolen nomination. Everything that is
sickening about the U.S. today, started in 1944. All the surveillance, the mindcontrol, the cold war
and the transformation into a wannabe empire they are all the result of this infamy by the hands of
the Democratic fascists.
To all the mindless party members of the Democratic fascist party: if you repeat history by
allowing for the second time to install a puppet of the fascist powers in the U.S., you bear the full
responsibilty for the dropping of the next nukes. Suffering from such deep sitting cognitive
dissonance, party members will find all kinds of excuses to prevent the truth from coming out. Just as
there was no war crime by Clinton and Obama sufficient enough to not cheer them like the greatest
baseball team ever. Leave the Democratic fascist party now, or have history piss on your graves.
Norcal
Very convincing argument and link, perfectly done. Thank you nottheonly1.
nottheonly1
Thank You, Norcal. It may be best to download these video clips, since they are all taken down
one after another based on 'copyright issues'.
The difference between Sanders and Wallace is a painful one. Wallace fought against the theft
of his nomination with all he got. Subsequently, he realized that the 'Democratic' party would
never allow for a person with integrity and the well being of the people at heart to win any
nomination. He would have won the following presidency as a third party nominee Trumann
however knew how to prevent that. As the clip states, the American people only have to be
frightened and you can sell them their own demise on a golden platter. The ridicule and shaming
of those who want a third party can also be traced back to this time.
It is equally very disturbing that the owner class managed to brain wash the people into
accepting the use of 'oligarchs', 'billionaires', or 'donors' when in truth they are the real
fascists Henry Wallace had warned about. This must be reversed by all means available. People
must understand that the concerted use of these euphemisms will make it next to impossible to
accept what these persons really are and what their goals are.
Jen
Much of what is sickening about the US as an imperial power today was present well before 1944
indeed was present during the 19th century when the US made colonies of Hawaii and the Philippines
in the 1890s, and occupied Haiti in 1915 (?), not leaving that country until the 1930s. Of course
there was also the genocide of First Nations peoples through the theft of their lands, the wars
waged to force them onto reservations, and the massive slaughter of bison as a way of destroying
many indigenous cultures.
nottheonly1
Yes, but never before was the deliberate change of course towards fascism so blatant than with
the ouster of Wallace. This was the watershed moment that turned the U.S. into the greatest
threat for humanity. When You read about Wallace, You will find out that he generally wanted
reconcile with the Native Indian Nation. He wanted cooperation with the Soviet Union/Russians
for a lasting global peace and prosperity for everyone, not just a few American maggots. Present
day U.S. started at that real day of infamy.
Lysias
Wallace was also a big supporter of establishing Israel.
Seamus Padraig
So, whereas they would be able to deal with Warren, they wouldn't be able to deal with Sanders,
whose policy-record is remarkably progressive in all respects, and not only on domestic U.S.
matters.
Frankly, Bernie could be better on foreign policy. While he
did
vote against the Iraq WarI give him all due credit for thathe hasn't really opposed any of
Washington's other wars, coups and rιgime-change operations in recent memory. Oh: and Bernie, the
self-described socialist, once referred to Hugo Chavez as a "dead dictator". That being said, he would
still be preferable to the remaining flotsam in the today's Democrap Party.
Rhys Jaggar
Forgive me for saying so, but is a party of working folks really supposed to be grovelling for favours
from billionaires? The Republicans are supposed to be the party for the rich, not the Democrats .
And is not time for billionaires to be bumped off by politicians, not politicians bumped off by
billionaires?
A tad uncritical on Sanders, especially his foreign policies, but otherwise an excellent and closely
argued takedown of the risible but sadly widespread delusion that America is a democracy. Thanks Eric.
Wilmers31
Democracy itself does not say anything about quality of life, it's just a system. US democracy runs
on money. Most thing in life do pretending it is otherwise, that's where the problem is.
Democracy is just the shell if you fill it with sh1t it's bad; if you fill it with honey it's
sweet.
Biden is remote-controllable, he'd do as told so of course big money would prefer him.
I've just the other day written
this piece on democracy
. The immediate context is
the fiasco re the UK Queen granting Boris Johnson's request to prorogue (temporarily dissolve)
parliament, but the issues run deeper and wider.
Dungroanin
I skimmed through and didn't spot one mention of Gabbard!
Seems as if she is being non-personed
and ignored as a viable candidate (much like JC has been over here).
There is a long way to that election yet. (The US, ours is finally within reach, unless some
wildebeast tramples in )
The DNC dirty tricks won't wash this time perhaps its time to start reading and talking about
the nitty gritty of these leaked mails if for nothing else for the bravery and ultimate sacrifice
of Seth Rich.
Well I'm already stretched perilous thin, DG, but will give it thought.
Meantime,
this piece from last week
by Katia Novella Miller, first of a two parts with second part to
follow on the same KBNB World News site, gives a precis of what Wikileaks showed the world.
The lack of mention of Gabbard is telling, as is the fact the Billionaire crowd (Rubinites) are
pushing for a candidate I ain't even heard of.
The fact remains, a Sanders Gabbard ticket
against Trump is the preferable outcome for many observers on the Left.
Just as a reminder, neither Sanders & Gabbard are God like figures, in much the same way
Corbyn ain't, however, they are the best available at this juncture in time if we really want
some change, even if it is incremental.
Dungroanin
I think Gabbard is as authentic a new voice as i have ever seen in the DNC. She may well make
it as an independent. Would Sanders?
I read somewhere that the US electorate were self
identified as third Republican, Democrat and independent.
If they were given an independent ticket- not part of the two billionaire funded main
parties then enough may join the independent third from these.
I'd say if a Gabbard/Paul grassroots campaign run by the Sanders 'momentum' network got
their act together the USA may finally mature into a proper democracy not owned by their
neolib con artistes.
Grafter
America where democracy has been extinguished and their increasingly paranoid voters are under the
mistaken belief that yet another talking head can return them to a fair and impartial existence.
Too
late. Money is king and those that have most want more. The sideshow of elections produces the
performing clowns such as Trump, Obama, Bush etc.all spouting the same vacuous promises on behalf of
their wealthy benefactors. No real choice or change and an illusion of caring for the welfare of their
citizenry. Listen carefully to the clowns, it's the sound of money talking.
This discussion avoids comparing society in the mid-19th century and today. It really isn't that long ago. I've lived through
almost half of it. Except for officers most of the soldiers I served with were conscripted or enlisted because of the draft. In
a war your choices are limited. If they were in the march, driving wagons, armed to the teeth, they were soldiers; no matter how
they got there.
Today's volunteer Army most of the soldiers and contractors are there because they couldn't get a better job unless they are
adrenaline junkies or psychopaths. The current neoliberal economy purposefully exploits people and the environment to make a profit.
Today's soldiers aren't too different than the slave legions of ancient Rome. Perhaps, "warriors" isn't that much of a misnomer.
"... But what happens when those "standards of excellence" lead to 20 years of fighting unwinnable wars on the peripheries of the planet? When do habits and practices turn into mental stagnation? ..."
"... You know when it comes to generals, whether they're Marines, whether they're Army, whether they're Mattis who's supposedly this "warrior monk," these guys talk tactics and then claim it's strategy. What they consider to be strategic thinking really is just tactical thinking on a broad scale . I think the biggest problem with all the four-star generals are they're "how" thinkers not "if" thinkers. ..."
"... This inability of America's elites (including its generals) to grapple with strategic concepts is a result of the United States' post-Cold War unipolar moment. When there's only one superpower, geopolitics and the need for international balancing fall by the wayside. ..."
"... Mattis, like virtually all of his four-star peers, is a reactionary, fighting every day against the forces of change in modern warfare ..."
"... "[W]hen you shave it all down, his problem with being the epitome of establishment Washington is that he sees the alliance as the end, not as a means to an end," says Davis. "The means should be to the end of improving American security and supporting our interests." ..."
"... "By clinging to unsustainable military solutions from the distant past, he has condemned future generations of soldiers and marines to repeat disasters like Pickett's Charge," says Macgregor. ..."
Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy
op-ed written by former secretary of defense James Mattis, his first public statement since
his resignation in December. The article is adopted from his forthcoming book, Call Sign
Chaos: Learning to Lead , out this week.
The former Pentagon chief opens a window into his decision making process, explaining that
accepting President Trump's nomination was part of his lifelong devotion to public service:
"When the president asks you to do something, you don't play Hamlet on the wall, wringing your
hands. So long as you are prepared, you say yes." Mattis's two years at DoD capped off 44 years
in the Marine Corps, where he gained a popular following as a tough and scholarly leader.
Mattis received widespread praise from the foreign policy establishment when he resigned in
protest over President Trump's directive for a full U.S. military withdrawal from Syria and a
partial withdrawal from Afghanistan. "When my concrete solutions and strategic advice,
especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite
the limitless joy I felt serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution," he
writes.
But did Mattis really offer "concrete solutions and strategic advice" regarding America's
two decades of endless war? spoke with four military experts, all veterans, who painted a very
different picture of the man called "Mad Dog."
"I think over time, in General Mattis's case a little over 40 years, if you spend that many
years in an institution, it is extremely hard not to get institutionalized," says Gil
Barndollar, military fellow-in-residence at the Catholic University of America's Center for the
Study of Statesmanship. Barndollar served as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps and
deployed twice to Afghanistan. "In my experiences, there are not too many iconoclasts or really
outside-the-box people in the higher ranks of the U.S. military."
It's just that sort of institutionalized thinking that makes the political establishment
love Mattis. "[A] person with an institutional mind-set has a deep reverence for the
organization he has joined and how it was built by those who came before. He understands that
institutions pass down certain habits, practices and standards of excellence," wrote David
Brooks in a hagiographic New York Timescolumn .
But what happens when those "standards of excellence" lead to 20 years of fighting
unwinnable wars on the peripheries of the planet? When do habits and practices turn into mental
stagnation?
"The problem is, from at least the one-star the whole way through, for the last two decades,
you've seen them do nothing but just repeat the status quo over and over," observes Lieutenant
Colonel Daniel L. Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, who served 21 years in the U.S.
Army and deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. "I mean every single general that was in
charge of Afghanistan said almost the same boilerplate thing every time they came in (which was
nearly one a year). You see the same results, nothing changed."
"And if those guys took someone from a major to a two-star general, we'd probably have a lot
of better outcomes," he adds.
Major Danny Sjursen, who served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, agrees:
You know when it comes to generals, whether they're Marines, whether they're Army, whether
they're Mattis who's supposedly this "warrior monk," these guys talk tactics and then claim
it's strategy. What they consider to be strategic thinking really is just tactical thinking
on a broad scale . I think the biggest problem with all the four-star generals are they're
"how" thinkers not "if" thinkers.
Barndollar says: "The vast majority of military leaders, up to and including generals at the
three-, four-star level, are not operating at the strategic level, in terms of what that word
means in military doctrine. They're not operating at the level of massive nation-state
resources and alliances and things like that. They're at the operational level or often even at
the tactical level."
This inability of America's elites (including its generals) to grapple with strategic
concepts is a result of the United States' post-Cold War unipolar moment. When there's only one
superpower, geopolitics and the need for international balancing fall by the wayside.
The only component of national security policy Mattis discusses in his op-ed is America's
system of alliances, which he believes is the key to our preeminence on the world stage.
"Returning to a strategic stance that includes the interests of as many nations as we can make
common cause with, we can better deal with this imperfect world we occupy together," he
writes.
"Mattis, like virtually all of his four-star peers, is a reactionary, fighting every day
against the forces of change in modern warfare," counters Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who served
28 years in the U.S. Army. "He lives in denial of the technological breakthroughs that make the
World War II force structure (that he as SecDef insisted on funding) an expensive tribute to
the past."
Mattis muses that the Department of Defense "budget [is] larger than the GDPs of all but two
dozen countries." Yet having acknowledged that disparity, how can such underpowered foreign
nations possibly contribute to American security?
"He has that line in there about bringing as many guns as possible to a gun fight. What are
those guns?" asked Barndollar. For example, the British Royal Navy is the United States' most
significant allied naval force. But the United Kingdom has
only seven vessels stationed in the Persian Gulf and they're "stretched to the absolute
limit to do that."
"Our problem has been double-edged," says Davis of America's reliance on others. "On the one
hand, we try to bludgeon a lot of our allies to do what we want irrespective of their interests
as an asset. And then simultaneously, especially in previous administrations, we've almost gone
too far [in] the other direction: 'we'll subordinate our interests for yours.'"
"[W]hen you shave it all down, his problem with being the epitome of establishment
Washington is that he sees the alliance as the end, not as a means to an end," says Davis. "The
means should be to the end of improving American security and supporting our interests."
Sjursen says:
Mattis's view is the old Einstein adage: "doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." Well that's all he's proposed.
He has no new or creative solutions. For him, it's stay the course, more of the same, stay in
place, fight the terrorists, maintain the illegitimate and corrupt governments that we back.
That's what he's been talking about for 18 years. It's all the same interventionist dogma
that's failed us over and over again since September 12, 2001.
"In the two years he was in office, what did he do that changed anything? He was a caretaker
of the status quo. That's the bottom line," says Davis, adding, "you need somebody in that job
especially that is willing to take some chances and some risk and is willing to honestly look
at 18 consecutive years of failure and say, 'We're not doing that anymore. We're going to do
something different.' And that just never happened."
Barndollar is more generous in his estimation of Mattis: "He needs to be lauded for standing
for his principles, ultimately walking away when he decided he could no longer execute U.S.
national security policy. I give him all the credit for that, for doing it I think in a
relatively good manner, and for trying to do his best to stay above the fray and refuse to be
dragged in at a partisan level to this point."
Mattis ends his Wall Street Journal op-ed by recounting a vignette from the 2010
Battle of Marjah, where he spoke with two soldiers on the front lines and in good cheer. But
his story didn't sit well with Sjursen, who says it encapsulates Mattis' inability to ask the
bigger questions: "He never talks about how those charming soldiers with the can-do attitude
maybe shouldn't have been there at all. Maybe the mission that they were asked to do was
ill-informed, ill-advised, and potentially unwinnable."
All this suggests that a fair evaluation of Mattis is as a soldier who is intelligent but
unoriginal. A homegrown patriot, but one who'd like to plant the Stars and Stripes in Central
Asia forever. A public servant, but one who would rather resign than serve the cause of
restraint.
"By clinging to unsustainable military solutions from the distant past, he has condemned
future generations of soldiers and marines to repeat disasters like Pickett's Charge," says
Macgregor.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter for The National Interest .Follow him on
Twitter@HunterDeRensis
.
Libya war was a pure oil grab. Pretexts always can be found.
Notable quotes:
"... Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all. ..."
"... The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons. ..."
"... As Bessner notes, she doesn't have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently said nothing. ..."
"... And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice, all of them. ..."
Daniel Bessner has written a very interesting
review of Sar's memoir, The Education of an Idealist . Here he focuses on her narrow thinking about "humanitarian" intervention:
If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely philosophical inquiry: Is it right to
save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a
thought experiment; it takes place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical uncertainty.
Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the
ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest
answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.
Can military intervention ever be humanitarian? It may be possible in theory, but as Bessner notes it doesn't work that way in
practice. "Humanitarian" interventionists want the wars they support to be judged by their intentions to save lives and not by the
results of ensuing chaos, instability, and violence. Taking sides in foreign conflicts inevitably means deciding that our government
should end the lives of some people that have done nothing to us because we have concluded that it is the right thing to do. That
takes for granted that our government has the right to act as judge and executioner in other people's wars simply because we have
the power to affect the outcome. When we think about "humanitarian" intervention this way, we can see that it is driven by the worst
kind of arrogant presumption. The first question we should ask is this: what gives us the authority to interfere in another country's
internal conflict? We should also ask ourselves what gives us the right to cast aside international law whenever we deem it necessary.
Isn't "humanitarian" intervention in practice little more than international armed vigilantism?
The Libyan war is one example of just such a "good" intervention that pretty clearly caused more harm than it prevented. It also
violated most of the requirements of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine that was invoked to justify it. Like more than a few
other die-hard Libyan war supporters, Power remains convinced that it was the right decision, because she doesn't ask the questions
that would force her to confront the harm that the intervention did to Libya and the surrounding region. Bessner comments:
Power never really asked these questions, because ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian
intervention a categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course).
That last qualification is an important one, and it gets at the heart of what is wrong with "humanitarian" interventionism in
the U.S. and the West. If a government is considered to be on "our" side, it can commit war crimes with impunity, devastate whole
countries, and starve tens of millions of people, and the most vocal "humanitarian" interventionists will usually have nothing to
say about it. I have remarked on several occasions that "humanitarian" interventionists just ignored the catastrophe in Yemen despite
the fact that it was the world's worst man-made humanitarian disaster, and it has only been in the last year or two that any of them
have spoken up about it now that it is Trump's policy.
The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was
enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes
being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons.
As Bessner notes, she doesn't
have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or
pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying
full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized
U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently
said nothing.
Bessner observes that railing against hostile and pariah states while letting clients off the hook makes no sense if the goal
is to minimize the harm to civilians:
Her approach does not make much sense from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending
human rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital in a mostly quixotic attempt
to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Of course, it is much safer politically to denounce the states with which our government has no ties or influence, and it is much
easier to remain silent about the crimes of client states that have significant clout in Washington. The point here is not just that
Power failed her own test when she served in government, but that the impulse to intervene on "humanitarian" grounds amounts to agitating
for war against certain governments while giving U.S. clients a free pass to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with our
government's blessing.
There's yet one more reason to why she wasn't saying anything about Yemen when in office beside the one that it were her guys
who directed that war then. Perhaps less phony, but, I'd rather say, more tragic. It's much easier to criticize someone for neglecting
his duties than not to neglect those duties when you've got them yourself.
I almost see those lemmings on her Twitter chirping:
'Oh, you're so brave, you're standing up to the Terrible Orange Tyrant.' (Not that the "Tyrant" was even aware that she's standing
up to him).
And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering
yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice,
all of them.
"... What do all those "safe" candidates have in common? Oh, that's right- they all lost . ..."
"... So the more overtly neoliberal candidates are stalling or bailing, with the more progressive candidates (actually or putatively) -- Sanders and Warren -- sailing along. Is that some kind of surprise? ..."
Warren has the Acela corridor's backing and that has been expressed in some fawning
coverage from the likes of the WaPo and NYT. Krugman has hinted that she's his candidate as
well.
Unless something completely untoward happens, expect her to get great reviews in the next
debate.
I don't see how a classic Massachusetts liberal like Warren (to me she's very close to
Teddy K in her policy views ) motivates enough abstaining voters to beat Trump. Not enough
there, there.
Re the polls: Matt Taibbi recently wrote that if Biden lost ground Sanders would be the
likely gainer, since Bernie is the second choice for most Biden supporters. But it appears
Warren is benefiting as Biden slides.
Too bad. Still, maybe it's just the minority of Biden supporters who pick Warren as their
2nd choice who are bailing on Biden so far. Sanders may still gain if the more hard-core
Bidenites begin to leave.
As for Beto's plan to snatch our AK's and AR's, good for him for being so forthright. It's
a terrible idea, but one can appreciate the flat-out honesty.
" the enduring questions surrounding Biden's age and fitness for office may mean
Democrats will lack the "safe" choice they have had in the past, whether the candidate has
been former Vice President Al Gore in 2000, former U.S. Senator John Kerry in 2004 or
Clinton, the former U.S. senator and secretary of state, in 2008 and 2016."
What do all those "safe" candidates have in common? Oh, that's right- they all lost
.
That and they didn't upset the apple carts of the political consultants and the major
donors.
Funnily I think the author is missing several 'safe' candidates still in the running, all
of whom might secure the nomination on the second ballot depending on who the superdelegate
darling is. All of whom would probably be able to uphold that loss record of the safe
candidate.
I didn't click through to read if it was a joke, but I suspect "safe" for Team Blue types
means "a candidate who most assuredly won't be criticized by the Republicans."
Al Gore would blunt whining about the deficit. John Kerry was for a "stronger America."
Hillary was so qualified and had faced all arrows including machine gun fire in Serbia.
Yep, those moderate Republicans are going to eliminate the need for Team Blue elites to ever
have to worry about the poors again.
Right -- and none of them had the press openly speculating about a lack of cognitive
capacity, as is happening with the current "safe" candidate. That's what passes for "safe"
these days, I guess.
Also: "Biden's appeal wanes," Gillibrand crashes and burns, Harris "hasn't caught fire,"
and Black Lives Matter of South Bend calls for Buttigieg to resign as mayor. (What
language(s) will "Mayor Pete" give his resignation speech in, one wonders.)
So the more
overtly neoliberal candidates are stalling or bailing, with the more progressive candidates
(actually or putatively) -- Sanders and Warren -- sailing along. Is that some kind of
surprise?
"... Hitler's Final Solution missed the entire point of racism within the capitalist world-economy. The object of racism is not to exclude people, much less exterminate them, but to keep them within the system as Untermenschen, to be exploited economically and used as political scapegoats . What happened with Nazism was what the French would call a dérapage – a blunder, a skid, a loss of control. Or perhaps it was the genie getting out of the bottle. ..."
"... Second, and just as important, there was a need to restore a sanitised racism to its original function: that of keeping people within the system, but as Untermenschen. If Jews could no longer be treated thus ..."
"... So began the era of what the Germans gingerly called the Gastarbeiter. ..."
"... Who were these Gastarbeiter? Mediterranean peoples in non-Mediterranean Europe, Latin Americans and Asians in North America, West Indians in North America and Western Europe, Black Africans and South Asians in Europe. And, since 1989, citizens of the former socialist bloc. They have come in large numbers because they wanted to come and because they could find jobs: indeed, were desperately needed to make the pan-European countries flourish. But they came, almost universally, as persons at the bottom of the heap – economically, socially and politically ..."
Since 1989, social science has thrown very little light on [such matters as the growth of
extreme right in Austria]. Indeed, its failure has been lamentable. All anyone –
whatever their politics – talks about is globalisation, as though that were anything
more than current rhetoric for the continuing struggle within the capitalist world-economy
over the degree to which transborder flows should be unimpeded It is dust in our eyes.
So, too, is the endless litany about ethnic violence, and here human rights activists, as
well as social scientists, are to blame. Ethnic violence, however horrifying, is not the
preserve of some less fortunate, less wise, less civilised other. It follows from the deep
and growing inequalities within our world-system, and cannot be addressed by moral
exhortation, or by any meddling on the part of the pure and advanced in zones controlled by
the impure and backward. World social science has offered us no useful tools to analyse what
has been happening in the world-system since 1989, and therefore no useful tools to
understand contemporary Austrian reality.
The reason everyone was so appalled by Nazism after 1945 is obvious. While almost
everyone in the pan-European world had been openly and happily racist and anti-semitic before
1945, hardly anyone had intended it to lead where it did. Hitler's Final Solution missed the
entire point of racism within the capitalist world-economy. The object of racism is not to
exclude people, much less exterminate them, but to keep them within the system as Untermenschen, to be exploited economically and used as political scapegoats . What
happened with Nazism was what the French would call a dérapage – a
blunder, a skid, a loss of control. Or perhaps it was the genie getting out of the
bottle.
It was acceptable to be racist up to the point of a final solution, but no
further . It had always been a delicate game, and no doubt there had been
dérapages before – but never on such a large scale, never in so central
an arena of the world-system, and never that visible. Collectively, the pan-European world
came to terms with what had happened by banning public racism, primarily public
anti-semitism. It became a taboo language .
One of the reasons the EU reacted so strongly to Haider is that Austria has refused to
assume its share of guilt, insisting that it was primarily a victim. Perhaps a majority of
Austrians had not wanted the Anschluss, although it is hard to believe it when you see
newsreel clips of the cheering Viennese crowds. But, more to the point, no non-Jewish,
non-Roma Austrian was considered anything other than German after the Anschluss, and the
majority gloried in that fact.
The realisation that racism had been undone by going much too far had two major
consequences in the post-1945 pan-European world. First, these countries sought to emphasise
their internal virtues as integrative nations untroubled by racist oppression, 'free
countries' facing an 'evil empire' whose racism, in its turn, became a regular theme of
Western propaganda. All sorts of socio-political actions followed from this: the 1954
decision by the US Supreme Court to outlaw racial segregation; the philo-Israel policies of
the whole pan-European world; even the new emphasis on ecumenicism within Western
Christianity (as well as the invention of the idea of a joint Judaeo-Christian heritage).
Second, and just as important, there was a need to restore a sanitised racism to its
original function: that of keeping people within the system, but as Untermenschen. If Jews
could no longer be treated thus, or Catholics in Protestant countries, it was necessary to
look further afield. In the pan-European world the post-1945 period was, at least at first, a
time of incredible economic expansion accompanied by a radically reduced rate of
reproduction. More workers were needed and fewer were being produced than ever before. So
began the era of what the Germans gingerly called the Gastarbeiter.
Who were these Gastarbeiter? Mediterranean peoples in non-Mediterranean Europe, Latin
Americans and Asians in North America, West Indians in North America and Western Europe,
Black Africans and South Asians in Europe. And, since 1989, citizens of the former socialist
bloc. They have come in large numbers because they wanted to come and because they could find
jobs: indeed, were desperately needed to make the pan-European countries flourish. But they
came, almost universally, as persons at the bottom of the heap – economically, socially
and politically
The rhymes with immigration policy debates in this country are obvious. And I love the irony
of dérapage .
Thatcher was an English politico. It is not what she said, but what she did that counts. She is probably down in Dante's Inferno,
Ring 8, sub-rings 7-10. (Frauds and false councilors.) See, oh wayward sinners:
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle8b.html
Ah, you think that Milton should be at the bottom, eh? Then, I hope that he knows how to ice skate. (He was the worst kind
of 'class traitor.' [His parents were small store owner/managers.])
Ring 8 of the Inferno is for 'frauds' of all sorts, sub-rings 7-10 are reserved for Thieves, Deceivers, Schismatics, and Falsifiers.
Maggie should feel right at home there.
While details on Epstein death are not interesting (he ended like a regular pimp) the corruption of high level officials his case
revealed in more troubling.
Notable quotes:
"... Epstein was released, and various lawsuits were filed against him and settled out of court, presumably in exchange for silence. The media was quiet or complimentary as Epstein worked his way back into high society. ..."
"... What would I do if I were Epstein? I'd try to get the President, the Attorney-General, or the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to shut down the investigation before it went public. I'd have all my friends and all my money try to pressure them. If it failed and I were arrested, it would be time for the backup plan -- the Deal. I'd try to minimize my prison time, and, just as important, to be put in one of the nicer federal prisons where I could associate with financial wizards and drug lords instead of serial killers, black nationalists, and people with bad breath. ..."
"... What about the powerful people Epstein would turn in to get his deal? They aren't as smart as Epstein, but they would know the Deal was coming -- that Epstein would be quite happy to sacrifice them in exchange for a prison with a slightly better golf course. What could they do? There's only one good option -- to kill Epstein, and do it quickly, before he could start giving information samples to the U. S. Attorney. ..."
"... Trying to kill informers is absolutely routine in the mafia, or indeed, for gangs of any kind. ..."
"... Famous politicians, unlike gangsters, don't have full-time professional hit men on their staffs, but that's just common sense -- politicians rarely need hit men, so it makes more sense to hire them on a piecework basis than as full-time employees. How would they find hit men? You or I wouldn't know how to start, but it would be easy for them. Rich powerful people have bodyguards. Bodyguards are for defense, but the guys who do defense know guys who do offense. And Epstein's friends are professional networkers. One reporter said of Ghislaine Maxwell, "Her Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else's I can think of -- probably even Rupert Murdoch's." They know people who know people. Maybe I'm six degrees of separation from a mafia hit man, but not Ghislaine Maxwell. I bet she knows at least one mafioso personally who knows more than one hit man. ..."
"... Or, if you can hire a New York Times reporter for $30,000 ( as Epstein famously did a couple of years ago), you can spend $200,000 on a competent hit man to make double sure. Government incompetence does not lend support to the suicide theory; quite the opposite. ..."
"... Statutory rape is not a federal crime ..."
"... At any time from 2008 to the present, Florida and New York prosecutors could have gone after Epstein and easily convicted him. The federal nonprosecution agreement did not bind them. And, of course, it is not just Epstein who should have been prosecuted. Other culprits such as Prince Andrew are still at large. ..."
"... Why isn't anybody but Ann Coulter talking about Barry Krischer and Ric Bradshaw, the Florida state prosecutor and sheriff who went easy on Epstein, or the New York City police who let him violate the sex offender regulations? ..."
"... Krischer refused to use the evidence the Palm Beach police gave him except to file a no-jail-time prostitution charge (they eventually went to Acosta, the federal prosecutor, instead, who got a guilty plea with an 18-month sentence). Bradshaw let him spend his days at home instead of at jail. ..."
"... In New York State, the county prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, fought to prevent Epstein from being classified as a Level III sex offender. Once he was, the police didn't enforce the rule that required him to check in every 90 days. ..."
"... Trafficking is a federal offense, so it would have to involve commerce across state lines. It also must involve sale and profit, not just personal pleasure. ..."
"... Here, the publicity and investigative lead is what is most important, because these are reputable and rich offenders for whom publicity is a bigger threat than losing in court. They have very good lawyers, and probably aren't guilty of federal crimes anyway, just state crimes, in corrupt states where they can use clout more effectively. Thus, killing potential informants before they tell the public is more important than killing informants to prevent their testimony at trial, a much more leisurely task. ..."
"... Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the only government official who is clearly trustworthy, because he could have stopped the 2019 Epstein indictment and he didn't. I don't think Attorney-General Barr could have blocked it, and I don't think President Trump could have except by firing Berman. ..."
"... "It was that heart-wrenching series that caught the attention of Congress. Ben Sasse, the Republican senator from Nebraska, joined with his Democratic colleagues and demanded to know how justice had been so miscarried. ..."
"... President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein. He is too canny to have gotten involved with him, and the press has been eagerly at work to find the slightest connection between him and Epstein and have come up dry as far as anything but acquaintanceship. But we must worry about a cover-up anyway, because rich and important people would be willing to pay Trump a lot in money or, more likely, in political support, if he does a cover-up. ..."
"... he sealing was completely illegal, as the appeals court politely but devastatingly noted in 2019, and the documents were released a day or two before Epstein died. Someone should check into Judge Sweet's finance and death. He was an ultra-Establishment figure -- a Yale man, alas, like me, and Taft School -- so he might just have been protecting what he considered good people, but his decision to seal the court records was grossly improper. ..."
"... Did Epstein have any dealings in sex, favors, or investments with any Republican except Wexner? ..."
"... Dershowitz, Mitchell, Clinton, Richardson, Dubin, George Stephanopolous, Lawrence Krauss, Katie Couric, Mortimer Zuckerman, Chelsea Handler, Cyrus Vance, and Woody Allen, are all Democrats. Did Epstein ever make use of Republicans? Don't count Trump, who has not been implicated despite the media's best efforts and was probably not even a Republican back in the 90's. Don't count Ken Starr– he's just one of Epstein's lawyers. Don't count scientists who just took money gifts from him. (By the way, Epstein made very little in the way of political contributions , though that little went mostly to Democrats ( $139,000 vs. $18,000 . I bet he extracted more from politicians than he gave to them. ..."
"... What role did Israeli politician Ehud Barak play in all this? ..."
"... Remember Marc Rich? He was a billionaire who fled the country to avoid a possible 300 years prison term, and was pardoned by Bill Clinton in 2001. Ehud Barak, one of Epstein's friends, was one of the people who asked for Rich to be pardoned . Epstein, his killers, and other rich people know that as a last resort they can flee the country and wait for someone like Clinton to come to office and pardon them. ..."
"... "intelligence" is also the kind of excuse people make up so they don't have to say "political pressure." ..."
"... James Patterson and John Connolly published Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him , and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein . Conchita Sarnoff published TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case. I never heard of these before 2019. Did the media bury them? ..."
"... There seems to have been an orchestrated attempt to divert attention to the issue of suicides in prison. Subtle differences in phrasing might help reveal who's been paid off. National Review had an article, "The Conspiracy Theories about Jeffrey Epstein's Death Don't Make Much Sense." The article contains no evidence or argument to support the headline's assertion, just bluster about "madness" and "conspiracy theories". Who else publishes stuff like this? ..."
"... The New York Times was, to its credit, willing to embarrass other publications by 2019. But the Times itself had been part of the cover-up in previous years . Who else was? ..."
"... Not one question involving Maurene Comey, then? She was one of the SDNY prosecutors assigned to this case, and her name has been significantly played down (if at all visible) in the reportage before or after Epstein's death. That she just "happened" to be on this case at all is quite an eyebrow raiser especially with her father under the ongoing "Spygate" investigation ..."
"... As important as it is to go on asking questions about the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein, I have to admit that personally I'm just not interested. I've always found people of his social class to be vaguely repulsive even without the sordid sex allegations. Just their demanding personalities, just the thought of them hanging around in their terrycloth jogging suits, sneering at the world with their irrefrangible arrogance, is enough to make me shudder. I want nothing of their nightmare world; and when they die, I couldn't care less. ..."
"... We are supposed to have faith in this rubbish? The cameras malfunctioned. He didn't have a cellmate. The guards were tired and forced to work overtime. ..."
"... One tiny mention of Jewish magnate Les Wexner but no mention how he & the Bronfmans founded the 'Mega Group' of ultra-Zionist billionaires regularly meeting as to how they could prop up the Jewish state by any & all means, Wexner being the source of many Epstein millions, the original buyer of the NYC mansion he transferred to Epstein etc the excellent Epstein series by Whitney Webb on Mint Press covering all this https://www.mintpressnews.com/author/whitney-webb/ ..."
"... ex-OSS father Donald Barr had written a 'fantasy novel' on sex slavery with scenes of rape of underage teens, 'Space Relations', written whilst Don Barr was headmaster of the Dalton school, which gave Epstein his first job, teaching teens ..."
The Jeffrey Epstein case is notable for the ups and downs in media coverage it's gotten over the years. Everybody, it seems, in
New York society knew by 2000 that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were corrupting teenage girls, but the press wouldn't cover
it. Articles by New York in 2002 and
Vanity Fair in 2003 alluded to it gently,
while probing Epstein's finances more closely. In 2005, the Palm Beach police investigated. The county prosecutor, Democrat Barry
Krischer, wouldn't prosecute for more than prostitution, so they went to the federal prosecutor, Republican Alexander Acosta, and
got the FBI involved. Acosta's office prepared an indictment, but before it was filed, he made a deal: Epstein agreed to plead guilty
to a state law felony and receive a prison term of 18 months. In exchange, the federal interstate sex trafficking charges would not
be prosecuted by Acosta's office. Epstein was officially at the county jail for 13 months, where the county officials under Democratic
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw gave him scandalously
easy treatment , letting him spend his days outside, and letting him serve a year of probation in place of the last 5 months
of his sentence. Acosta's office complained, but it was a county jail, not a federal jail, so he was powerless.
Epstein was released, and various lawsuits were filed against him and settled out of court, presumably in exchange for silence.
The media was quiet or complimentary as Epstein worked his way back into high society. Two books were written about the affair, and
fell flat. The FBI became interested again around 2011 (
a little known fact
) and maybe things were happening behind the scenes, but the next big event was in 2018 when the Miami Herald published a
series of investigative articles rehashing what had happened.
In 2019 federal prosecutors indicted Epstein, he was put in jail, and
he mysteriously died. Now, after much complaining in the press about how awful jails are and how many people commit suicide, things
are quiet again, at least until the Justice Department and
the State of Florida finish their
investigation a few years from now. (For details and more links, see " Investigation: Jeffrey Epstein
"at Medium.com and " Jeffrey Epstein " at Wikipedia
.)
I'm an expert in the field of "game theory", strategic thinking. What would I do if I were Epstein? I'd try to get the President,
the Attorney-General, or the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to shut down the investigation before it went public.
I'd have all my friends and all my money try to pressure them. If it failed and I were arrested, it would be time for the backup
plan -- the Deal. I'd try to minimize my prison time, and, just as important, to be put in one of the nicer federal prisons where
I could associate with financial wizards and drug lords instead of serial killers, black nationalists, and people with bad breath.
That's what Epstein would do. What about the powerful people Epstein would turn in to get his deal? They aren't as smart as Epstein,
but they would know the Deal was coming -- that Epstein would be quite happy to sacrifice them in exchange for a prison with a slightly
better golf course. What could they do? There's only one good option -- to kill Epstein, and do it quickly, before he could start
giving information samples to the U. S. Attorney.
Trying to kill informers is absolutely routine in the mafia, or indeed, for gangs of any kind. The reason people call such talk
"conspiracy theories" when it comes to Epstein is that his friends are WASPs and Jews, not Italians and Mexicans. But WASPs and Jews
are human too. They want to protect themselves. Famous politicians, unlike gangsters, don't have full-time professional hit men on
their staffs, but that's just common sense -- politicians rarely need hit men, so it makes more sense to hire them on a piecework
basis than as full-time employees. How would they find hit men? You or I wouldn't know how to start, but it would be easy for them.
Rich powerful people have bodyguards. Bodyguards are for defense, but the guys who do defense know guys who do offense. And Epstein's
friends are professional networkers.
One reporter said
of Ghislaine Maxwell, "Her Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else's I can think of -- probably even Rupert Murdoch's." They know
people who know people. Maybe I'm six degrees of separation from a mafia hit man, but not Ghislaine Maxwell. I bet she knows at least
one mafioso personally who knows more than one hit man.
In light of this, it would be very surprising if someone with a spare $50 million to spend to solve the Epstein problem didn't
give it a try. A lot of people can be bribed for $50 million. Thus, we should have expected to see bribery attempts. If none were
detected, it must have been because prison workers are not reporting they'd been approached.
Some
people say that government incompetence is always a better explanation than government malfeasance. That's obviously wrong --
when an undeserving business gets a contract, it's not always because the government official in charge was just not paying attention.
I can well believe that prisons often take prisoners off of suicide watch too soon, have guards who go to sleep and falsify records,
remove cellmates from prisoners at risk of suicide or murder, let the TV cameras watching their most important prisoners go on the
blink, and so forth. But that cuts both ways.
Remember, in the case of Epstein, we'd expect a murder attempt whether the warden of
the most important federal jail in the country is competent or not. If the warden is incompetent, we should expect that murder attempt
to succeed. Murder becomes all the more more plausible. Instead of spending $50 million to bribe 20 guards and the warden, you just
pay some thug $30,000 to walk in past the snoring guards, open the cell door, and strangle the sleeping prisoner, no fancy James
Bond necessary. Or, if you can hire a New York Times reporter for $30,000 (
as Epstein famously did a couple of years ago), you can spend $200,000 on a competent hit man to make double sure. Government
incompetence does not lend support to the suicide theory; quite the opposite.
Now to my questions.
Why is nobody blaming the Florida and New York state prosecutors for not prosecuting Epstein and others for statutory rape?
Statutory rape is not a federal crime, so it is not something the Justice Dept. is supposed to investigate or prosecute. They
are going after things like interstate sex trafficking. Interstate sex trafficking is generally much harder to prove than statutory
rape, which is very easy if the victims will testify.
At any time from 2008 to the present, Florida and New York prosecutors could have gone after Epstein and easily convicted him.
The federal nonprosecution agreement did not bind them. And, of course, it is not just Epstein who should have been prosecuted. Other
culprits such as Prince Andrew are still at large.
Note that if even if the evidence is just the girl's word against Ghislaine Maxwell's or Prince Andrew's, it's still quite possible
to get a jury to convict. After all, who would you believe, in a choice between Maxwell, Andrew, and Anyone Else in the World? For
an example of what can be done if the government is eager to convict, instead of eager to protect important people, see
the 2019 Cardinal
Pell case in Australia. He was convicted by the secret testimony of a former choirboy, the only complainant, who claimed Pell
had committed indecent acts during a chance encounter after Mass before Pell had even unrobed. Naturally, the only cardinal to be
convicted of anything in the Catholic Church scandals is also the one who's done the most to fight corruption. Where there's a will,
there's a way to prosecute. It's even easier to convict someone if he's actually guilty.
Why isn't anybody but Ann Coulter talking about Barry Krischer and Ric Bradshaw, the Florida state prosecutor and sheriff who went
easy on Epstein, or the New York City police who let him violate the sex offender regulations?
Krischer refused to use the evidence the Palm Beach police gave him except to file a no-jail-time prostitution charge (they eventually
went to Acosta, the federal prosecutor, instead, who got a guilty plea with an 18-month sentence). Bradshaw let him spend his days
at home instead of at jail.
In New York State, the county prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, fought to prevent Epstein from being classified
as a Level III sex offender. Once he was, the
police didn't enforce the
rule that required him to check in every 90 days.
How easy would it have been to prove in 2016 or 2019 that Epstein and his people were guilty of federal sex trafficking?
Not easy, I should think. It wouldn't be enough to prove that Epstein debauched teenagers. Trafficking is a federal offense, so
it would have to involve commerce across state lines. It also must involve sale and profit, not just personal pleasure.
The 2019 indictment
is weak on this. The "interstate commerce" looks like it's limited to Epstein making phone calls between Florida and New York. This
is why I am not completely skeptical when former U.S. Attorney Acosta says that the 2008 nonprosecution deal was reasonable. He had
strong evidence the Epstein violated Florida state law -- but that wasn't relevant. He had to prove violations of federal law.
Why didn't Epstein ask the Court, or the Justice Dept., for permission to have an unarmed guard share his cell with him?
Epstein had no chance at bail without bribing the judge, but this request would have been reasonable. That he didn't request a
guard is, I think, the strongest evidence that he wanted to die. If he didn't commit suicide himself, he was sure making it easy
for someone else to kill him.
Could Epstein have used the safeguard of leaving a trove of photos with a friend or lawyer to be published if he died an unnatural
death?
Well, think about it -- Epstein's lawyer was Alan Dershowitz. If he left photos with someone like Dershowitz, that someone could
earn a lot more by using the photos for blackmail himself than by dutifully carrying out his perverted customer's instructions. The
evidence is just too valuable, and Epstein was someone whose friends weren't the kind of people he could trust. Probably not even
his brother.
Who is in danger of dying next?
Prison workers from guard to warden should be told that if they took bribes, their lives are now in danger. Prison guards may
not be bright enough to realize this. Anybody who knows anything important about Epstein should be advised to publicize their information
immediately. That is the best way to stay alive.
This is not like a typical case where witnesses get killed so they won't testify.
It's not like with gangsters. Here, the publicity and investigative lead is what is most important, because these are reputable and
rich offenders for whom publicity is a bigger threat than losing in court. They have very good lawyers, and probably aren't guilty
of federal crimes anyway, just state crimes, in corrupt states where they can use clout more effectively. Thus, killing potential
informants before they tell the public is more important than killing informants to prevent their testimony at trial, a much more
leisurely task.
What happened to Epstein's body?
The Justice Dept. had better not have let Epstein's body be cremated. And they'd better give us convincing evidence that it's
his body. If I had $100 million to get out of jail with, acquiring a corpse and bribing a few people to switch fingerprints and DNA
wouldn't be hard. I find it worrying that the government has not released proof that Epstein is dead or a copy of the autopsy.
"Beyond its isolation, the wing is infested with rodents and cockroaches, and inmates often have to navigate standing water
-- as well as urine and fecal matter -- that spills from faulty plumbing, accounts from former inmates and lawyers said. One lawyer
said mice often eat his clients' papers."
" Often have to navigate standing water"? "Mice often eat his clients' papers?" Really? I'm skeptical. What do the
vermin eat -- do inmates leave Snickers bars open in their cells? Has anyone checked on what the prison conditions really like?
Is it just a coincidence that Epstein made a new will two days before he died?
I can answer this one. Yes, it is coincidence, though it's not a coincidence that he rewrote the will shortly after being denied
bail. The will leaves everything to a trust, and it is the trust document (which is confidential), not the will (which is public),
that determines who gets the money. Probably the only thing that Epstein changed in his will was the listing of assets, and he probably
changed that because he'd just updated his list of assets for the bail hearing anyway, so it was a convenient time to update the
will.
Did Epstein's veiled threat against DOJ officials in his bail filing backfire?
Epstein's lawyers wrote in his bail request,
"If the government is correct that the NPA does not, and never did, preclude a prosecution in this district, then the government
will likely have to explain why it purposefully delayed a prosecution of someone like Mr. Epstein, who registered as a sex offender
10 years ago and was certainly no stranger to law enforcement. There is no legitimate explanation for the delay."
I see this as a veiled threat. The threat is that Epstein would subpoena people and documents from the Justice Department relevant
to the question of why there was a ten-year delay before prosecution, to expose the illegitimate explanation for the delay. Somebody
is to blame for that delay, and court-ordered disclosure is a bigger threat than an internal federal investigation.
Who can we trust?
Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the only government official who is clearly trustworthy,
because he could have stopped the 2019 Epstein indictment and he didn't. I don't think Attorney-General Barr could have blocked it,
and I don't think President Trump could have except by firing Berman. I do trust Attorney-General Barr, however, from what I've
heard of him and because he instantly and publicly said he would have not just the FBI but the Justice Dept. Inspector-General investigate
Epstein's death, and he quickly fired the federal prison head honcho. The FBI is untrustworthy, but Inspector-Generals are often
honorable.
Someone else who may be a hero in this is Senator Ben Sasse.
Vicki Ward
writes in the Daily Beast :
"It was that heart-wrenching series that caught the attention of Congress. Ben Sasse, the Republican senator from Nebraska,
joined with his Democratic colleagues and demanded to know how justice had been so miscarried.
Given the political sentiment, it's unsurprising that the FBI should feel newly emboldened to investigate Epstein -- basing
some of their work on Brown's excellent reporting."
Will President Trump Cover Up Epstein's Death in Exchange for Political Leverage?
President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein. He is too canny to have gotten involved with him, and the
press has been eagerly at work to find the slightest connection between him and Epstein and have come up dry as far as anything but
acquaintanceship. But we must worry about a cover-up anyway, because rich and important people would be willing to pay Trump a lot
in money or, more likely, in political support, if he does a cover-up.
Why did Judge Sweet order Epstein documents sealed in 2017. Did he die naturally in 2019?
Judge Robert Sweet in 2017 ordered all documents in an Epstein-related case sealed. He died in May 2019 at age 96, at home in
Idaho. The sealing was completely illegal, as the appeals court politely but devastatingly noted in 2019, and the documents were
released a day or two before Epstein died. Someone should check into Judge Sweet's finance and death. He was an ultra-Establishment
figure -- a Yale man, alas, like me, and Taft School -- so he might just have been protecting what he considered good people, but
his decision to seal the court records was grossly improper.
Did Epstein have any dealings in sex, favors, or investments with any Republican except Wexner?
Dershowitz, Mitchell, Clinton, Richardson, Dubin, George Stephanopolous, Lawrence Krauss, Katie Couric, Mortimer Zuckerman,
Chelsea Handler, Cyrus Vance, and Woody Allen, are all Democrats. Did Epstein ever make use of Republicans? Don't count Trump, who
has not been implicated despite the media's best efforts and was probably not even a Republican back in the 90's. Don't count Ken
Starr– he's just one of Epstein's lawyers. Don't count scientists who just took money gifts from him. (By the way, Epstein made very
little in the way of
political contributions
, though that little went mostly to Democrats (
$139,000 vs. $18,000
. I bet he extracted more from politicians than he gave to them.
What role did Israeli politician Ehud Barak play in all this?
Remember Marc Rich? He was a billionaire who fled the country to avoid a possible 300 years prison term, and was pardoned
by Bill Clinton in 2001. Ehud Barak, one of Epstein's friends, was one of the people
who asked for Rich to be pardoned
. Epstein, his killers, and other rich people know that as a last resort they can flee the country and wait for someone like Clinton
to come to office and pardon them.
Acosta said that Washington Bush Administration people told him to go easy on Epstein because he was an intelligence source. That
is plausible. Epstein had info and blackmailing ability with people like Ehud Barak, leader of Israel's Labor Party. But "intelligence"
is also the kind of excuse people make up so they don't have to say "political pressure."
Why did nobody pay attention to the two 2016 books on Epstein?
James Patterson and John Connolly published Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him ,
and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein . Conchita Sarnoff published TrafficKing:
The Jeffrey Epstein Case. I never heard of these before 2019. Did the media bury them?
Which newspapers reported Epstein's death as "suicide" and which as "apparent suicide"?
More generally, which media outlets seem to be trying to brush Epstein's death under the rug? There seems to have been an
orchestrated attempt to divert attention to the issue of suicides in prison. Subtle differences in phrasing might help reveal who's
been paid off. National Review had an article,
"The Conspiracy
Theories about Jeffrey Epstein's Death Don't Make Much Sense." The article contains no evidence or argument to support the headline's
assertion, just bluster about "madness" and "conspiracy theories". Who else publishes stuff like this?
How much did Epstein corrupt the media from 2008 to 2019?
Even outlets that generally publish good articles must be suspected of corruption. Epstein made an effort to get good publicity.
The New York Times
wrote,
"The effort led to the publication of articles describing him as a selfless and forward-thinking philanthropist with an interest
in science on websites like Forbes, National Review and HuffPost .
All three articles have been removed from their sites in recent days, after inquiries from TheNew York Times .
The National Review piece, from the same year, called him "a smart businessman" with a "passion for cutting-edge science."
Ms. Galbraith was also a publicist for Mr. Epstein, according to several news releases promoting Mr. Epstein's foundations In
the article that appeared on the National Review site, she described him as having "given thoughtfully to countless organizations
that help educate underprivileged children."
"We took down the piece, and regret publishing it," Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review since 1997, said in an email.
He added that the publication had "had a process in place for a while now to weed out such commercially self-interested pieces from
lobbyists and PR flacks.""
Eric Rasmusen is an economist who has held an endowed chair at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and visiting
positions at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the Harvard Economics Department, Chicago's Booth School of Business, Nuffield
College/Oxford, and the University of Tokyo Economics Department. He is best known for his book Games and Information. He has published
extensively in law and economics, including recent articles on the burakumin outcastes in Japan, the use of game theory in jurisprudence,
and quasi-concave functions. The views expressed here are his personal views and are not intended to represent the views of the Kelley
School of Business or Indiana University. His vitae is at http://www.rasmusen.org/vita.htm
.
Not one question involving Maurene Comey, then? She was one of the SDNY prosecutors assigned to this case, and her name has
been significantly played down (if at all visible) in the reportage before or after Epstein's death. That she just "happened"
to be on this case at all is quite an eyebrow raiser especially with her father under the ongoing "Spygate" investigation
Apparently, there will always be many players on the field, and many ways to do damage control.
So the problem was finding a motivated prosecutor in case of Jewish predator with very likely links to intelligence services
of several countries. The motivation was obviously lacking.
Your "expertise" in game theory would be greatly improved if you let yourself consider the Jewish factor.
As important as it is to go on asking questions about the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein, I have to admit that personally
I'm just not interested. I've always found people of his social class to be vaguely repulsive even without the sordid sex allegations.
Just their demanding personalities, just the thought of them hanging around in their terrycloth jogging suits, sneering at the
world with their irrefrangible arrogance, is enough to make me shudder. I want nothing of their nightmare world; and when they
die, I couldn't care less.
More generally, which media outlets seem to be trying to brush Epstein's death under the rug?
Not the National Enquirer:
Jeffrey Epstein Murder Cover-up Exposed!
Death Scene Staged to Look Like Suicide
Billionaire's Screams Ignored by Guards!
Fatal Attack Caught on Jail Cameras!
Autopsy is Hiding the Truth!
I don't hold AG Barr in the high regard this piece does. While I'm not suggesting he had anything to do with Epstein's
death I do think he's corrupt. I doubt he will do anything that leads to the truth. As for him relieving the warden of
his duties, I would hope that was to be expected, wasn't it? I mean he only had two attempts on Epstein's life with the second
being a success. Apparently the first didn't jolt the warden into some kind of action as it appears he was guilty of a number
of sins including 'Sloth.'
As for the publications that don't like conspiracy theories –like the National Review
-- they are a hoot. We are supposed to have faith in this rubbish? The cameras malfunctioned. He didn't have a cellmate. The
guards were tired and forced to work overtime. There was no camera specifically in the cell with Epstein.
In the end I think Epstein probably was allowed to kill himself but I'm not confident in that scenario at all. And yes the media
should pressure Barr to hav e a look in the cell and see exactly how a suicide attempt might have succeeded or if it was a long-shot
at best, given the materiel and conditions.
19. Why is the non-prosecution agreement ambiguous ("globally" binding), when it was written by the best lawyers in the country
for a very wealthy client? Was the ambiguity bargained-for? If so, what are the implications?
20. With "globally" still being unresolved (to the bail judge's first-paragraph astonishment), why commit suicide now?
21. The "it was malfeasance" components are specified. For mere malfeasance to have been the cause, all of the components would
have to be true; it would be a multiplicative function of the several components. Is no one sufficiently quantitative to estimate
the magnitude?
22. What is the best single takeaway phrase that emerges from all of this? My nomination is: "In your face." The brazen, shameless,
unprecedented, turning-point, in-your-faceness of it.
ER the answer is easy to you list of questions .. there is no law in the world when violations are not prosecuted and fair open
for all to see trials are not held and judges do not deliver the appropriate penalties upon convictions. .. in cases involving
the CIA prosecution it is unheard of that a open for all to see trial takes place.
This is why we the governed masses need a parallel government..
such an oversight government would allow to pick out the negligent or wilful misconduct of persons in functional government
and prosecute such persons in the independent people's court.. Without a second government to oversee the first government there
is no democracy; democracy cannot stand and the governed masses will never see the light of a fair day .. unless the masses have
oversight authority on what is to be made into law, and are given without prejudice to their standing in America the right to
charge those associated to government with negligent or wilful misconduct.
There are big questions this article is not asking either
The words 'Mossad' seems not to appear above, and just a brief mention of 'Israel' with Ehud Barak
One tiny mention of Jewish magnate Les Wexner but no mention how he & the Bronfmans founded the 'Mega Group' of ultra-Zionist
billionaires regularly meeting as to how they could prop up the Jewish state by any & all means, Wexner being the source of many
Epstein millions, the original buyer of the NYC mansion he transferred to Epstein etc the excellent Epstein series by Whitney
Webb on Mint Press covering all this https://www.mintpressnews.com/author/whitney-webb/
Was escape to freedom & Israe,l the ultimate payoff for Epstein's decades of work for Mossad, grooming and abusing young teens,
filmed in flagrante delicto with prominent people for political blackmail?
Is it not likely this was a Mossad jailbreak covered by fake 'suicide', with Epstein alive now, with US gov now also in possession
of the assumed Epstein sexual blackmail video tapes?
We have the Epstein 'death in jail' under the US Attorney General Bill Barr, a former CIA officer 1973-77, the CIA supporting
him thru night law school, Bill Barr's later law firm Kirkland Ellis representing Epstein
Whose Jewish-born ex-OSS father Donald Barr had written a 'fantasy novel' on sex slavery with scenes of rape of underage
teens, 'Space Relations', written whilst Don Barr was headmaster of the Dalton school, which gave Epstein his first job, teaching
teens
So would a crypto-Jewish 'former' CIA officer who is now USA Attorney General, possibly help a Mossad political blackmailer
escape to Israel after a fake 'jail suicide'?
An intriguing 4chan post a few hours after Epstein's 'body was discovered', says Epstein was put in a wheelchair and driven
out of the jail in a van, accompanied by a man in a green military uniform – timestamp is USA Pacific on the screencap apparently,
so about 10:44 NYC time Sat.10 Aug
FWIW, drone video of Epstein's Little St James island from Friday 30 August, shows a man who could be Epstein himself, on the
left by one vehicle, talking to a black man sitting on a quad all-terrain unit
Close up of Epstein-like man between vehicles, from video note 'pale finger' match-up to archive photo Epstein
The thing that sticks out for me is that Epstein was caught, charged, and went to jail previously, but he didn't die .
The second time, it appears he was murdered. I strongly suspect that the person who murdered Epstein was someone who only met
Epstein after 2008, or was someone Epstein only procured for after 2008. Otherwise, this person would have killed Epstein
back when Epstein was charged by the cops the first time.
Either that, or the killer is someone who is an opponent of Trump, and this person was genuinely terrified that Trump would
pressure the Feds to avoid any deals and to squeeze all the important names out of Epstein and prosecute them, too.
The author professes himself "expert in the field of "game theory", strategic thinking," but he doesn't say how his 18 questions
were arrived at to the exclusion of hundreds of others. Instead, the column includes several casual assumptions and speculation.
For example:
"Probably the only thing that Epstein changed in his will was the listing of assets, and he probably changed that because
he'd just updated his list of assets for the bail hearing anyway, so it was a convenient time to update the will."
"President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein."
"I do trust Attorney-General Barr, however, from what I've heard of him and because he instantly and publicly said he would
have not just the FBI but the Justice Dept. Inspector-General investigate Epstein's death, and he quickly fired the federal
prison head honcho. The FBI is untrustworthy, but Inspector-Generals are often honorable."
As to this last, isn't "quickly [firing] the federal prison head honcho" consistent with a failure-to-prevent-suicide deflection
strategy? And has Mr. Rasmusen not "heard" of the hiring of Mr. Epstein by Mr. Barr's father? Or of the father's own Establishment
background?
I hope to be wrong, but my own hunch is that these investigations, like the parallel investigations of the RussiaGate hoax,
will leave the elite unscathed. I also hope that in the meantime we see more rigorous columns here than this one.
...Also, subsequently, it should have been a top priority to arrest Ghislaine Maxwell but the government, justice and media
lack interest . Apparently, they don't know where she is, and they're not making any special efforts to find out.
"... A new opinion poll released by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last Sunday shows that 70% of Americans are "angry" because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power. Both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren have also reflected on this sentiment during their campaigns. Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else." ..."
A new opinion poll released by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last Sunday shows that 70% of Americans are "angry" because
our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power. Both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth
Warren have also reflected on this sentiment during their campaigns. Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system
designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks
dirt on everyone else."
A New York Times opinion article written by the political scientist Greg Weiner felt compelled to push back on this message, writing
a column with the title, The Shallow Cynicism of 'Everything Is Rigged'. In his column, Weiner basically makes the argument that
believing everything is corrupt and rigged is a cynical attitude with which it is possible to dismiss political opponents for being
a part of the corruption. In other words, the Sanders and Warren argument is a shortcut, according to Weiner, that avoids real political
debate.
Joining me now to discuss whether it makes sense to think of a political system as rigged and corrupt, and whether the cynical
attitude is justified, is someone who should know a thing or two about corruption: Bill Black. He is a white collar criminologist,
former financial regulator, and associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He's also the
author of the book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again, Bill.
BILL BLACK: Thank you.
GREG WILPERT: As I mentioned that the outset, it seems that Sanders and Warren are in effect taking an open door, at least when
it comes to the American public. That is, almost everyone already believes that our political and economic system is rigged. Would
you agree with that sentiment that the system is corrupt and rigged for the rich and against pretty much everyone else but especially
the poor? What do you think?
BILL BLACK: One of the principal things I study is elite fraud, corruption and predation. The World Bank sent me to India for
months as an anti-corruption alleged expert type. And as a financial regulator, this is what I dealt with. This is what I researched.
This is a huge chunk of my life. So I wouldn't use the word, if I was being formal in an academic system, "the system." What I would
talk about is specific systems that are rigged, and they most assuredly are rigged.
Let me give you an example. One of the most important things that has transformed the world and made it vastly more criminogenic,
much more corrupt, is modern executive compensation. This is not an unusual position. This is actually the normal position now, even
among very conservative scholars, including the person who was the intellectual godfather of modern executive compensation, Michael
Jensen. He has admitted that he spawned unintentionally a monster because CEOs have rigged the compensation system. How do they do
that? Well, it starts even before you get hired as a CEO. This is amazing stuff. The standard thing you do as a powerful CEO is you
hire this guy, and he specializes in negotiating great deals for CEOs. His first demand, which is almost always given into, is that
the corporation pay his fee, not the CEO. On the other side of the table is somebody that the CEO is going to be the boss of negotiating
the other side. How hard is he going to negotiate against the guy that's going to be his boss? That's totally rigged.
Then the compensation committee hires compensation specialists whoagain, even the most conservative economists agree it is a
completely rigged system. Because the only way they get work is if they give this extraordinary compensation. Then, everybody in
economics admits that there's a clear way you should run performance pay. It should be really long term. You get the big bucks only
after like 10 years of success. In reality, they're always incredibly short term. Why? Because it's vastly easier for the CEO to
rig the short-term reported earnings. What's the result of this? Accounting profession, criminology profession, economics profession,
law profession. We've all done studies and all of them say this perverse system of compensation causes CEOs to (a) cheat and (b)
to be extraordinarily short term in their perspective because it's easier to rig the short-term reported results. Even the most conservative
economists agree that's terrible for the economy.
What I've just gone through is a whole bunch of academic literature from over 40-plus years from top scholars in four different
fields. That's not cynicism. That's just plain facts if you understand the system. People like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders,
they didn't, as you say, kick open an open door. They made the open door. It's not like Elizabeth Warren started talking about this
six months ago when she started being a potential candidate. She has been saying this and explaining in detail how individual systems
are rigged in favor of the wealthy for at least 30 years of work. Bernie Sanders has been doing it for 45 years. This is what the
right, including the author of this piece who is an ultra-far right guy, fear the most. It's precisely what they fear, that Bernie
and Elizabeth are good at explaining how particular systems are rigged. They explain it in appropriate detail, but they're also good
in making it human. They talk the way humans talk as opposed to academics.
That's what the right fear is more than anything, that people will basically get woke. In this, it's being woke to how individual
systems have been rigged by the wealthy and powerful to create a sure thing to enrich them, usually at our direct expense.
GREG WILPERT: I think those are some very good examples. They're mostly from the realm of economics. I want to look at one from
the realm of politics, which specifically Weiner makes. He cites Sanders, who says that the rich literally buy elections, and Weiner
counters this by saying that, "It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting something
specific that it has not eventually gotten." That's a pretty amazing statement actually, I think, for him to say when you look at
the actual polls of what people want and what people get. He then also adds, "That's not possible to dupe the majority with advertising
all of the time." What's your response to that argument?
BILL BLACK: Well, actually, that's where he's trying to play economist, and he's particularly bad at economics. He was even worse
at economics than he is at political science, where his pitch, by the way isI'm not overstating thiscorruption is good. The real
problem with Senator Sanders and Senator Warren is that they're against corruption.
Can you fool many people? Answer: Yes. We have good statistics from people who actually study this as opposed to write op-eds
of this kind. In the great financial crisis, one of the most notorious of the predators that targeted blacks and Latinoswe actually
have statistics from New Century. And here's a particular scam. The loan broker gets paid more money the worse the deal he gets you,
the customer, and he gets paid by the bank. If he can get you to pay more than the market rate of interest, then he gets a kickback,
a literal kickback. In almost exactly half of the cases, New Century was able to get substantially above market interest rates, again,
targeted at blacks and Latinos.
We know that this kind of predatory approach can succeed, and it can succeed brilliantly. Look at cigarettes. Cigarettes, if you
use them as intended, they make you sick and they kill you. It wasn't that very long ago until a huge effort by pushback that the
tobacco companies, through a whole series of fake science and incredible amounts of ads that basically tried to associate if you
were male, that if you smoked, you'd have a lot of sex type of thing. It was really that crude. It was enormously successful with
people in getting them to do things that almost immediately made them sick and often actually killed them.
He's simply wrong empirically. You can see it in US death rates. You can see it in Hell, I'm overweight considerably. Americans
are enormously overweight because of the way we eat, which has everything to do with how marketing works in the United States, and
it's actually gotten so bad that it's reducing life expectancy in a number of groups in America. That's how incredibly effective
predatory practices are in rigging the system. That's again, two Nobel Laureates in economics have recently written about this. George
Akerlof and Shiller, both Nobel Laureates in economics, have written about this predation in a book for a general audience. It's
called Phishing with a P-H.
GREG WILPERT: I want to turn to the last point that Weiner makes about cynicism. He says that calling the system rigged is actually
a form of cynicism. And that cynicism, the belief that everything and everyone is bad or corrupt avoids real political arguments
because it tires everyone you disagree with as being a part of that corruption. Would you say, is the belief that the system is rigged
a form of cynicism? And if it is, wouldn't Weiner be right that cynicism avoids political debate?
BILL BLACK: He creates a straw man. No one has said that everything and everyone is corrupt. No one has said that if you disagree
with me, you are automatically corrupt. What they have given in considerable detail, like I gave as the first example, was here is
exactly how the system is rigged. Here are the empirical results of that rigging. This produces vast transfers of wealth to the powerful
and wealthy, and it comes at the expense of nearly everybody else. That is factual and that needs to be said. It needs to be said
that politicians that support this, and Weiner explicitly does that, says, we need to go back to a system that is more openly corrupt
and that if we have that system, the world will be better. That has no empirical basis. It's exactly the opposite. Corruption kills.
Corruption ruins economies.
The last thing in the world you want to do is what Weiner calls for, which he says, "We've got to stop applying morality to this
form of crime." In essence, he is channeling the godfather. "Tell the Don it wasn't personal. It was just business." There's nothing
really immoral in his view about bribing people. I'm sorry. I'm a Midwesterner. It wasn't cynicism. It was morality. He says you
can't compromise with corruption. I hope not. Compromising with corruption is precisely why we're in this situation where growth
rates have been cut in half, why wage growth has been cut by four-fifths, why blacks and Latinos during the great financial crisis
lost 60% to 80% of their wealth in college-educated households. That's why 70% of the public is increasingly woke on this subject.
GREG WILPERT: Well, we're going to leave it there. I was speaking to Bill Black, associate professor of economics and law at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City. Thanks again, Bill, for having joined us today.
BILL BLACK: Thank you.
GREG WILPERT: And thank you for joining The Real News Network.
Well, Sanders certainly knows that elections are rigged. But he's not quite right when he says that money does the rigging.
It would be more accurate to say that powerful people are powerful because they're criminals, and they're rich because they're
criminals.
Money is a side effect, not the driver. Specific example: Hillary and Bernie are in the same category of net worth, but Bernie
isn't powerful. The difference is that Bernie ISN'T willing to commit murder and blackmail to gain power.
> Hillary and Bernie are in the same category of net worth
Clinton's net worth (says Google) is $45 million; Sanders $2.5 million. So, an order of magnitude difference. I guess that
puts Sanders in the 1% category, but Clinton is much closer to the 0.1% category than Sanders.
There's also a billion-dollar foundation in the mix.
We had our choice of two New York billionaires in the last presidential election. How is this not accounted for? It's like
the bond market, the sheer weight carries its own momentum.
Very similar to CEO's. I may not own a private jet, but if the company does, and I control the company, I have the benefit
of a private jet. I don't need to own the penthouse to live in it.
"We came, we saw, he died. Tee hee hee!"
"Did it have anything to do with your visit?"
"I'm sure it did."
From a non-legal perspective at least, that makes her an accessory to murder, doesn't it?
Is it fair to say the entire system is rigged when enough interconnected parts of it are rigged that no matter where one turns,
one finds evidence of corruption? Because like it or not, that's where we are as a country.
Yes. And it is also fair to say, and has been said by lots of cynics over the centuries, that both democracy and capitalism
sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Burns me to see yet another "water is not wet" argument being foisted by the NYT, hard to imagine another reason the editorial
board pushed for this line *except* to protect the current corrupt one percenters who call their shots. Once Liz The Marionette
gets appointed we might get some fluff but the rot will persist, eventually rot becomes putrefaction and the polity dies. Gore
Vidal called America and Christianity "death cults".
"Due to technical difficulties, comments are unavailable"
Pisses me off that I gave the propaganda rag of note a click and didn't even get the joy of the comments section. I'm sure
there's some cynical reason why
The other thing is that the NYT runs this pretty indefensible piece by a guy who is a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. Just how often does NYT -- whose goal,
according to its
executive editor, "should be to understand different views" -- run a piece from anyone who is leftwing? What's the ratio of pro-establishment,
pro-Washington consensus pieces to those that are not? Glenn Greenwald
points out that the political spectrum at the NYT op-ed page "spans the small gap from establishment centrist Democrats
to establishment centrist Republicans." That, in itself, is consistent with the premise that the system is, indeed, rigged.
I think we have to drill down another level and ask ourselves a more fundamental question "why is cynicism necessarily bad
to begin with?" Black's response of parsing to individual systems as being corrupt is playing into the NYT authors trap, sort
to speak.
This NYT article is another version of the seemingly obligatory attribute of the american character; we must ultimately be
optimistic and have hope. Why is that useful? Or maybe more importantly, to whom is that useful? What is the point?
In my mind (and many a philosopher), cynicism is a very healthy, empowering response to a world whose institutional configuration
is such that it will to fuck you over whenever it is expedient to do so.
Furthermore, the act of voting lends legitimacy to an institution that is clearly not legitimate. The institution is very obviously
very corrupt. If you really want to change the "system" stop giving it legitimacy; i.e. be cynical, don't vote. The whole thing
is a ruse. Boycott it .
Some may say, in a desperate attempt to avoid being cynical, "well, the national level is corrupt but we need to increase engagement
at the community level via local elections ", or something like that. This is nothing more than rearranging the chairs on the
deck of the titanic. And collecting signature isn't going to help anymore than handing out buckets on the titanic would.
So, to answer my own rhetorical question above, "to whom is it useful to not be cynical?" It is useful to those who want things
to continue as they currently are.
So, be cynical. Don't vote. It is an empowering and healthy way to kinda say "fuck you" to the corrupt and not become corrupted
yourself by legitimizing it. The best part about it is that you don't have to do anything.
Viva la paz (Hows that for a non cynical salutation?)
Uh this sounds like the ultimate allowing things to continue as they currently are, do you really imagine the powers that be
are concerned about a low voting rate, and we have one, they don't care, they may even like it that way. Do you really imagine
they care about some phantom like perceived legitimacy? Where is the evidence of that?
Politicians do care about staying in office and will respond on some issues that will cost them enough votes to get booted
from office. But it has to be those particular issues in their own backyard; otherwise, they just kind of limp along with the
lip service collecting their paychecks.
IMO, it is sheer idiocy to not vote. If you are a voter, politicians will pay some attention to you at least. If you don't
vote, you don't even exist to them.
"I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress," said Ocasio-Cortez.
"At minimum there should be a long wait period."
"If you are a member of Congress + leave, you shouldn't be allowed to turn right around&leverage your service for a lobbyist check.
I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress."
AOC, as reported by NakedCapitalism on May 31, 2019
I try to be despairing, but I can't keep up.
Attributed to a generation or two after Lily Tomlin's quote about cynicism.
Out of curiosity, would it be cynical to question that political scientist's grant funding or other sources of income? These
days, I feel inclined to look at what I'll call the Sinclair Rule* , added to Betteridge's, Godwin's and all those other, ahem,
modifications to what used to be an expectation that communication was more or less honest.
* Sinclair Rule, where you add a interpretive filter based on Upton's famous quote: It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
It's good to look at funding sources. But it's kind of a slander to those who must work for a living when assuming it's paychecks
(which we need to live in this system) that corrupt people.
If it's applied to the average working person, maybe it's often true, maybe it has a tendency to push in that direction, but
if you think there are no workers that realize the industry they are working in might be destructive, that they may be exploited
by such systems but have little choice etc. etc., come now there are working people who are politically aware and do see a larger
picture, they just don't have a lot of power to change it much of the time. Does the average working person's salary depend on
his not understanding though? No, of course not, it merely depends on him obeying. And obeying enough to keep a job, not always
understanding, is what a paycheck buys.
With all the evidence of everyday life (airplanes, drug prices, health insurance, Wall Street, CEO pay, the workforce changes
in the past 20 years if you've been working those years etc) this Greg better be careful as he might be seen as a Witch to be
hanged and burned in Salem, Ma a few hundred years ago.
It's cynical to say it's cynical to believe the system is corrupt.
Greg Weiner is cynic, and his is using his cynicism to dismiss the political arguments of people he disagrees with.
And just this week, I found out I couldn't even buy a car unless I'd be willing to sign a mandatory binding arbitration agreement.
I was ready to pay and sign all the paperwork, and they lay a document in front of me that reserves for the dealer the right to
seek any remedy against me if I harm the dealer (pay with bad check, become delinquent on loan, fail to provide clean title on
my trade); but forces me to accept mandatory binding arbitration, with damages limited to the value of the car, for anything the
dealer might do wrong.
It is not cynical at all when even car dealers now want a permission slip for any harm they might do to me.
Okay, a few more. We are literally facing the possibility of a mass extinction in large part because of dishonesty on the par
of oil companies, politicians, and people paid to make bad arguments.
"Assad (and by implication Assad's forces alone) killed 500,000 Syrians."
"Israel is just defending itself."
I can't squeeze the dishonesty about the war in Yemen into a short slogan, but I know from personal experience that getting
liberals to care when it was Obama's war was virtually impossible. Even under Trump it was hard, until Khashoggi's murder. On
the part of politicians and think tanks this was corruption by Saudi money. With ordinary people it was the usual partisan tribal
hypocrisy.
The motivator is "
Gap Psychology
," the human desire to distance oneself from those below (on any scale), and to come nearer to those above.
The rich are rich because the Gap below them is wide, and the wider the Gap, the richer they are .
And here is the important point: There are two ways the rich widen the Gap: Either gain more for themselves or make sure
those below have less.
That is why the rich promulgate the Big Lie that the federal government (and its agencies, Social Security and Medicare) is
running short of dollars. The rich want to make sure that those below them don't gain more, as that would narrow the Gap.
Negative sum game, where one wins but the other has to lose more so the party of the first part feels even better about winning.
There is an element of sadism, sociopathy and a few other behaviors that the current systems allow to be gamed even more profitably.
If you build it, or lobby to have it built, they will come multiple times.
A successful society should be responsive to both threats and opportunities. Any major problems to that society are assessed
and changes are made, usually begrudgingly, to adapt to the new situation. And this is where corruption comes into it. It short
circuits the signals that a society receives so that it ignores serious threats and elevates ones that are relatively minor but
which benefit a small segment of that society. If you want an example of this at work, back in 2016 you had about 40,000 Americans
dying to opioids each and every year which was considered only a background issue. But a major issue about that time was who gets
to use what toilets. Seriously. If it gets bad enough, a society gets overwhelmed by the problems that were ignored or were deferred
to a later time. And I regret to say that the UK is going to learn this lesson in spades.
'Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said
it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else."'
Yet the rest of the article focuses almost entirely on internal US shenanigans. When it comes to protecting wealth and power,
George Kennan hit the nail on the head in 1948, with "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population.
This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the
object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity." This, which has underpinned US policy ever since, may not be corrupt in the sense of
illegal, but it certainly seems corrupt in the sense of morally repugnant to me.
About Kennan's comment. That's interesting because no one questioned the word "wealth". Even tho' we had only 6.3% of the world's
population we had 50% of the wealth. The point of that comment had to be that we should "spread the wealth" and we did do just
that. Until we polluted the entire planet. I'd like some MMT person to take a long look at that attitude because it is so simplistic.
And not like George Kennan at all who was sophisticated to the bone. But that's just more proof of a bred-in-the-bone ignorance
about what money really is. In this case Kennan was talking about money, not wealth. He never asked Nepal for advice on gross
national happiness, etc. Nor did he calculate the enormous debt burden we would incur for our unregulated use and abuse of the
environment. That debt most certainly offsets any "wealth" that happened.
Approaching from the opposite direction, if someone were to say "I sincerely believe that the USA has the most open & honest
political system and the fairest economic system in human history" would you not think that person to be incredibly naive (or,
cynically, a liar)?
There has been, for at least the last couple of decades. a determined effort to do away with corruption by defining it away.
"Citizens United" is perhaps the most glaring example but the effort is ongoing; that Weiner op-ed is a good current example.
What is cynical is everyone's response when point out that the system is corrupt. They all say " always has been, always will be so just deal with it ".
Strawmannirg has got to be the most cynical behavior in the world. Weiner is the cynic. I think Liz's "the system is rigged
" comment invites discussion. It is not a closed door at all. It is a plea for good capitalism. Which most people assume is possible.
It's time to define just what kind of capitalism will work and what it needs to continue to be, or finally become, a useful economic
ideology. High time.
Another thing. Look how irrational the world, which is now awash in money, has become over lack of liquidity. There's a big
push now to achieve an optimum flow of money by speeding up transaction time. The Fed is in the midst of designing a new real-time
digital payments system. A speedy accounting and record of everything. Which sounds like a very good idea.
But the predators are
busy keeping pace witness the frantic grab by Facebook with Libra. Libra is cynical. To say the least. The whole thing a few
days ago on the design of Libra was frightening because Libra has not slowed down; it has filed it's private corporation papers
in Switzerland and is working toward a goal of becoming a private currency backed by sovereign money no less! Twisted. So there's
a good discussion begging to be heard: The legitimate Federal Reserve v. Libra. The reason we are not having this discussion is
because the elite are hard-core cynics.
I work for a law firm that represents Wall Street banks and I can tell you who they don't
like, and that is Sanders and Warren. They hate that Warren created the CFPB and blew the
whistle on Wells Fargo and all the other games being played by Wall Street banks. Therefore, I
will vote for either of them, Warren preferred.
The USA centered global neoliberal empire falls from grace at alarming speed.
Just the discussion of this possibility would be unthinkable in 90th -- the period of triumphal advance of neoliberalism all over
the globe. So thinks did change although it is unclear what is that direction of the social change -- neo-fascism or some kind of return
to the New Del Capitalism (if so who will replace previous, forged by Great Depression political alignment between trade unions and
management against the financial oligarchy, which financial oligarchy managed to broke using neoliberalism as the Trojan horse and bribing
CEOs)
Om a was original fascist movements were also a protest against the rule of financial oligarchy. Even anti-Semitism in Germany was
a kind of perverted protest against financial oligarchy as well. They were quickly subverted and in Germany anti-Semitism degenerated
into irrational hatred and genocide, , but the fact remains. Just looks at
NSDAP program of 1920 . Now we have somewhat
similar sentiments with Wexner and Meta group in the USA. To say that they do not invoke any sympathy is an understatement.
The problem with empires that they do not only rob the "other people". They rob their own people as well, and rob them hard. The
USSR people were really robbed by Soviet military industrial complex and Soviet globalist -- to the far greater extent then the USA
people now. People were really as poor as church rats. Epidemic of alcoholism in the USA resembles the epidemic of narcoaddtion in the
USA --- both are signs of desire then there is no jobs and now chances.
Like the collapse of the USSR was the result of the collapse of bolshevism, the collapse of the USA can be the result of the collapse
of neoliberalism. Whether it will take 10 or 50 years is unclear, but the general tendency is down.
The competitors has grown much strong now and they want their place under then sub. That means squeezing the USA. Trump did agrat
job in alientaing the US and that was probably the most important step is dismantling the USA empire that was taken. Add to that trade
war with China and we have the situation that is not favorable to the USA politically in two important parts of the globe.
Add to this Brexit and we have clear tendency of states to reassert their sovereignty, which start hurting the USA based multinationals.
The only things that work in favor of the USA is that currently there is no clear alternative to neoliberalism other then some kind
of restoration of the New Deal capitalism or neo-fasist dictatorship.
Notable quotes:
"... Self-discipline, self sacrifice and self restraint are the prices which must be paid for a civilization to survive, much less flourish, and Americans are increasingly unwilling to pay up. The America of a generation or two down the road will have the social cohesion of El Salvador. ..."
"... Being that history is always written by the tyrant of the time (which in our case was definitely behind the two last empires and a big player in Rome as and Spain as well) people are also led to believe that empire is a desireable state of cicumstance. It never was. Its the ambitions and conquistador actions of the collective psychopath. They feed on the strength of civilizations and utilize it for megalomaniac ambitions over power of others and power over everything. ..."
"... Those of you hoping for the end of American Empire need to think about what would replace it. ..."
"... You are completely delusional. The world is not better off under American stewardship. We don't need and shouldn't want anything to replace it. We don't need and shouldn't want any empire ruling the world. We would be better off without any state at all, so we could finally be free people. ..."
"... And no it probably wouldn't be better off under the Chinese. Although if the world stopped respecting American IP law, that would be a huge positive step forward. ..."
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, "Empires fall from grace with alarming speed."
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers
uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it's one that I've kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I'm from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to
the "New World" to seek promise for the future.
As I've spent most of my life centred in a British colony the Cayman Islands I've had the opportunity to observe many British
contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most
returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on
board when Britain "came back."
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world's foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and
downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn't returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal.
Whether we're looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that's existed at one time, history
is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it's fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world's undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it's going through a
bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I'm afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant.
Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in
partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began
this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began
to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, "Empires fall from grace with alarming speed"?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes
first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his
bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful
manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the
bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing
that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they
take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs
into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow
to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing
but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the
US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that "no option is off the table."
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple
as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend
to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The "brain drain" occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere
for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country,
their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing.
At some point in the near future, it's likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either
is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The greatest (so called) threats to America- the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, ISIS, ( fill in the blank for
the latest overseas bogeyman-of-the-week ) pale into a wisp beside the ongoing disintegration of American traditional family life.
Self-discipline, self sacrifice and self restraint are the prices which must be paid for a civilization to survive, much less
flourish, and Americans are increasingly unwilling to pay up. The America of a generation or two down the road will have the social
cohesion of El Salvador.
You also cant warn people about the collapse of empire either. People notoriously go into denial about it and it shocks the
**** out of everybody. Since empires bluff and bluster at the end its all to easy for people want to believe.
Being that history is always written by the tyrant of the time (which in our case was definitely behind the two last empires
and a big player in Rome as and Spain as well) people are also led to believe that empire is a desireable state of cicumstance.
It never was. Its the ambitions and conquistador actions of the collective psychopath. They feed on the strength of civilizations
and utilize it for megalomaniac ambitions over power of others and power over everything.
Those of you hoping for the end of American Empire need to think about what would replace it. if you think that the world would
enter the age of Aquarius and peace will rule the planet you are extremely naive and stupid. If you think that the Chinese would
be more benign rulers you are mistaken. The only reason China doesn't use its military to dominate other countries is because
it is kept in check by the US.
You are completely delusional. The world is not better off under American stewardship. We don't need and shouldn't want anything
to replace it. We don't need and shouldn't want any empire ruling the world. We would be better off without any state at
all, so we could finally be free people.
And no it probably wouldn't be better off under the Chinese. Although if the world stopped respecting American IP law, that
would be a huge positive step forward.
In the real world, Chinese terrorists are just as bad as American terrorists. Despite the most popular hypnosis gripping the
American psyche, you can't have liberty or justice as long as either one is in charge. Whether the Chinese would be worse is debatable.
It's not like America has some great track record to compete against. Their reign has been a complete disaster for human rights.
If China became the new empire we wouldnt live under it. It would be at least 100 years out. This empire will screw everybody
epically first, plus we have decline weather patterns with super solar grand minimum. Also those people's who may see that next
empire will deal with whatever circumstances present themselves and they wont give one **** what we think about it.
Basically power has kept moving west. Nobody will forget the depravity of this one. If written about accurately this one will
be remembered most for the medical tyranny and intentional damage it did to human beings through injections and modified good
supply, as well as moral depravity and proxy sadistic terrorism. Remember empire backed terrorist groups trafficked children and
harvested organs. You can miss it if you want, few will.
I do not _hope_ for an end of the American Empire, and I dread what is going to replace it. Howsoever, no empire lasts forever,
and our empire is near its end. The Chinese are relentlessly cruel, and that's in their genotype. I probably won't live to see
them take over the scraps and bits and pieces of our former empire. Those who are alive and in the prime of their lives when that
happens will suffer unimaginably while they live, and their blood will cry out from the grave after they die. It makes me so heart-sick
I can't bear to think about it for long, but our progeny will be forced to live it without let or hindrance.
Lets find out the whole details of what they have done to our biology and our children's first before we say how cruel China
might be. For starters look at what US and British did in Africa compared to China and Russia's involvement there. They are doing
deals and not killing anybody, same with Venezuela.
Where else you going to go? What nation ISN'T broke? Europe is going to hell. So is South America. Africa has always been hell.
Asia? Look what's going down in Hong Kong. China's broke. Make no mistake, the USA is in decline. But so is the rest of the world...
regardless of what is printed China is not falling, they have a plan and have only advanced it. The debt side will not hurt
them because they have been poor before and they have a route to success. They do not have resources but the industrial side is
needed everywhere in the world. We are talking about a nation that literally prospered off of our garbage and resells it back
to us! Think about it we use something up and pay them to take it away, they recycle it and resell it to us again and moved a
nation 4x our population forward!
You really think debt will hurt them, especially the way the US determines debt! A huge portion of it is in the infrastructucture
in China and along the BRI which will have returns over time, just as if we in the states rebuilt all our infrastructure by living
wage employment rather than MIC investment!
Yes, all are broke. Assisted suicides of countries all over the world. Emphasise on "assisted".
Nations have been demoralized (the US most certainly, check Yuri Bezmenov) we are in destabilization phase already, collapse
has to be next, it is unavoidable now. This will not end well, ignore at your own risk!
I am not talking about countries, just some Life Hedge Regions left in the world. People with brains and resources, you don
need a Life Hedge Property! Away from Northern Hemisphere, away from Ring of Fire, etc... Get in touch. lifehedge(at)
protonmail.com
What got America into trouble was when Americans who thought of themselves as being "exceptional" became exceptionally stupid.
The best and the brightest have already left America. Any wonder why we now depend on Russia to send our astronauts up on their
rockets into space, or depend on China, South Korea, and Japan for our electronic products, or why better health care is found
in other places outside the U.S., why our educational system has become poorer than what it was 60 years ago, etc.,?
When we decided to financialize everything and make nothing but investments we crippled our advancement.
When we decided to take the brightest minds in the world and recruit them into the US and then rather than advance the world
with true science, we offer them lucrative money to enter financial markets to use their knowledge in that field.
We take the ones with morals and principles that choose to actually remain in science and then corrupt them over time with
money/fame to regurgetate whatever their contractor chooses or lose funding for their projects.
We have corrupted every aspect of advancement and now just use our fake printed money to force the desperate to bend to our
will.
Good read on the subject of empires Sir John Glubb - The fate of empires and Search for survival.
We are probably near the end of the American Empire. And a fascinating by product of the HK protests is that we may well be near the end of Chinese Communism.
Nothing moves forward in a straight line. They move up and down. Empires are no exception. The Romans had their ups and downs
throughout the course of their empire. You never know when a down cycle is the end but people who want it to end will always write
articles like this.
American dominance might be drawing to an end....or it might be gearing up to go another 200 years. Nobody knows so it's a
waste of time to speculate.
Thatcher was an English politico. It is not what she said, but what she did that counts. She is probably down in Dante's Inferno,
Ring 8, sub-rings 7-10. (Frauds and false councilors.) See, oh wayward sinners:
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle8b.html
Ah, you think that Milton should be at the bottom, eh? Then, I hope that he knows how to ice skate. (He was the worst kind
of 'class traitor.' [His parents were small store owner/managers.])
Ring 8 of the Inferno is for 'frauds' of all sorts, sub-rings 7-10 are reserved for Thieves, Deceivers, Schismatics, and Falsifiers.
Maggie should feel right at home there.
"... By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50 percent(compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by half, and meat and dairy herds by 75 percent. . . . while epidemics of cholera and typhus . . . re-emerged, millions of children suffer[ed] from malnutrition and adult life expectancy . . . plunged." Several of the oligarchs were prosecuted and harassed by Putin's government between 2000 and 2004, before an unofficial agreement was struck to permit most of them to keep their lives and their fortunes as long as they demurred from opposing Putin's political power. ..."
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud related to his control of Siberian oil fields through his Yukos corporation and was
sentenced to nine years in prison on this date in 2005. Khodorkovsky, who was behind bars until Vladimir Putin pardoned him in 2013,
is half-Jewish (on his father's side).
Many of the Russian oligarchs, most of whom exploited their political connections during the privatization years under Boris Yeltsin's
highly corrupt government to become hugely wealthy, are similarly half-Jewish or Jewish, including Boris Berezovsky, who took over
Russia's main television channel and died under uncertain circumstances (likely suicide) in 2013; Alexander Abramov, a steel magnate;
Mikhail Fridman, a banker; Roman Abramovich, a younger billionaire investor; Viktor Vekselberg, an aluminum tycoon; and Leonid Mikhelson,
a natural-gas billionaire, and a half-dozen others.
The shock-capitalism that vaulted these men to the Forbes list of billionaires is known in Russia as the katastroika
and "brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemployment," writes Seumas Milne in The Guardian , "wild extremes of
inequality; rampant crime; virulent antisemitism and ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and precipitous
looting of public assets. . . .
By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50 percent(compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during
the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by half, and meat and dairy herds by 75 percent. . . . while
epidemics of cholera and typhus . . . re-emerged, millions of children suffer[ed] from malnutrition and adult life expectancy . .
. plunged." Several of the oligarchs were prosecuted and harassed by Putin's government between 2000 and 2004, before an unofficial
agreement was struck to permit most of them to keep their lives and their fortunes as long as they demurred from opposing Putin's
political power.
"The oligarchs, idiotically rich in a country that was largely poor, and given to parading their wealth in a manner that makes
American hip-hoppers look like an especially reticent community of Amish farmers, could certainly have given any former Soviet citizen
pause to wonder, as he queued for beetroot, what the proletarian revolution had been for. The oligarchs, not content with buying
companies, villas, yachts, planes and the most beautiful of Russia's beautiful women, also bought power. In 1996, they connived to
engineer the re-election of the politically and physically ailing Boris Yeltsin. In 2000, they helped steer Yeltsin's successor into
power -- Vladimir Putin, a saturnine former spook with the KGB, and its descendant organisation, the FSB. This, as Russian Godfathers
demonstrates, may have been the moment at which the oligarchs out-clevered themselves." Andrew Mueller, The Guardian
"... For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged. ..."
"... We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny. ..."
People on the "woke" hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth
(with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting,
politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them
feel "unsafe." They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.
The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the "wokers" is that both
disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes
and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the
burden of proof.
For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe
someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt?
The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty
perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any
process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.
That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the "woke" hard-left is more
dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who
would use -- and have used -- violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are
indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their
counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and
grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The
opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they
are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the
unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends
justify ignoble means.
We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good
intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.
"... It also has Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, front-runners for the presidential nomination, who reject the neoliberal economic policies that the Democratic Party has been championing since the waning days of the Carter administration. ..."
"... In calling them front-runners, I haven't forgotten Joe Biden, still in the lead in most polls. It is just that I think that, after nearly three years of Trump, the candidacy of a doddering Clintonite doofus doesn't – and shouldn't -- merit serious consideration. I trust that this will become increasingly apparent even to the most dull-witted Democratic pundits, and of course to the vast majority of Democratic voters, as the election season unfolds. ..."
"... The better to defeat Trump and Trumpism next year, Sanders or Warren or whichever candidate finally gets the nod, along with the several rays of light in Congress – there are more of them than just the four that Trump would send back to "where they came from" -- will undoubtedly make common cause with corporate Democrats at a tactical level. ..."
With Trump acting out egregiously and mainstream Democrats in the House doing nothing more about it than talking up a storm, it
would be hard to imagine the public mood not shifting in ways that would force a turn for the better.
Thus, despite the best efforts of Democratic National Committee flacks at MSNBC, CNN, and, of course, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and, worst of all, PBS and NPR, the Democratic Party now has a "squad" with which its Pelosiite-Hoyerite-Schumerian
leadership must contend.
It also has Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, front-runners for the presidential nomination, who reject the neoliberal
economic policies that the Democratic Party has been championing since the waning days of the Carter administration.
In calling them front-runners, I haven't forgotten Joe Biden, still in the lead in most polls. It is just that I think that,
after nearly three years of Trump, the candidacy of a doddering Clintonite doofus doesn't – and shouldn't -- merit serious consideration.
I trust that this will become increasingly apparent even to the most dull-witted Democratic pundits, and of course to the vast majority
of Democratic voters, as the election season unfolds.
The better to defeat Trump and Trumpism next year, Sanders or Warren or whichever candidate finally gets the nod, along with
the several rays of light in Congress – there are more of them than just the four that Trump would send back to "where they came
from" -- will undoubtedly make common cause with corporate Democrats at a tactical level.
This is all to the good. Nevertheless, the time to start working to assure that it goes no deeper than that is already upon
us.
When the dust clears, it will become evident that the squad-like new guys and the leading Democrats of the past are not on the
same path; that the former want to reconstruct the Democratic Party in ways that will make it authentically progressive, while the
latter, wittingly or not, want to restore and bolster the Party that made Trump and Trumpism possible and even inevitable.
... ... ...
Could the Israel lobby be next? As Israeli politics veers ever farther to the right, its lobby's stranglehold over the Democratic
Party, though far from shot, is in plain decline -- as increasingly many American Jews, especially but not only millennials, lose
interest in the ethnocratic settler state, or find themselves embarrassed by it.
... ... ...
ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and
POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell)
as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is
In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the
Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy)
at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Illusion (AK Press).
Weinar's oped exemplifies one of their tactics to counter opposition to corruption and
other damaging behavior, to their neoliberal policy framework, the Citizens United
court decision, and the enormous concentration of wealth and economic inequality that has
resulted; i.e., "The best defense is (a good) offense."
Rather than addressing the economically and socially damaging causes and effects of
corruption in a constructive way, they engage in a coordinated media effort to portray the
opponents of corruption as cynical, envious, or having some other offensive personality or
behavioral characteristic that resonates with the public. Further, they present corruption as
an acceptable value, and that it is even economically and socially constructive in the face
of the statistical evidence.
In my view this tactic is similar in many respects to their many socially damaging "divide
and conquer" initiatives based on demographic differences (race, religion, age, national
origin, etc). Instead of these defenses of an ethically and intellectually bankrupt status
quo, we need constructive policy makers and policies that meaningfully address the many
challenges we face as a society in a rapidly changing world.
Its just from slow growth and the Boomer deleveraging era. Its a global phenom and its
impacts are global into the cultural realm. The college degree boom is a great example of
this phenom. It was really based on the surge in consumer debt boom after WWII boosting these
supply chains in the US to increased consumption to GDP and reduced manufacturing, which fell
in real terms during the 1950-2000 period.
This created traditionally required college degree jobs into a nexus that was originally
based around the Baby Boomer generation and strengthened afterwards. Once growth petered in
2007(and we developed a oversupply since 2000) we now have too many people with college
degrees.
Even the rich aren't as rich as they were in 2007. Real profits are struggling this cycle
and are showing up with weak job growth this year. The unemployment rates flaws are showing
up this cycle as well, as total numbers mean little compared historically than the potential
that is lowest unemployment can go.
Based on that, the current level of labor market saturation seems to be at a late 70's
cycle level. In otherwards, if you adjust the population growth and total size this cycle is
doing no better than the Carter era top in 1979 .then we see the whining. Both the Reagan and
Bush II era expansions were a bit better and probably onto a intro of a "boom". Obviously it
is noticeably the Korean,Vietnam and Tech era booms which would require unemployment to fall
below 3% to reach, maybe down to 2.5%, which tells you something about potential unemployment
drop peaks.
Is it fair to say the entire system is rigged when enough interconnected parts of it are
rigged that no matter where one turns, one finds evidence of corruption? Because like it or
not, that's where we are as a country.
Yes. And it is also fair to say, and has been said by lots of cynics over the centuries,
that both democracy and capitalism sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Very true that transparency is essential to democracy. That also requires lifelong
monitoring of officials and their relatives for paybacks and other influence. But (for
example) Florida has an Sunshine Act that merely moves the bribes into other channels, and
may be the most corrupt state. I am investigating extensive racketeering there involving
state officials stealing conservation funds. They can be quire careless because their party
runs the entire state including state and federal judiciary, and instantly approves whatever
their rich "donors" want to steal. But the FBI and DOJ refuse to take action when given the
evidence on a silver platter – no doubt because they are appointed by the same party.
Theft is their sacred right and duty, to protect their country from its people.
"... For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged. ..."
"... We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny. ..."
People on the "woke" hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth
(with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting,
politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them
feel "unsafe." They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.
The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the "wokers" is that both
disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes
and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the
burden of proof.
For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe
someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt?
The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty
perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any
process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.
That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the "woke" hard-left is more
dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who
would use -- and have used -- violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are
indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their
counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and
grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The
opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they
are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the
unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends
justify ignoble means.
We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good
intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.
"... If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Before commenting please read Robert Parry's ..."
"... . Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive language toward other commenters or our writers will be removed. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. ..."
Film 'Official Secrets' is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg August 29, 2019 •
37 Comments
A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion,
is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.
T wo-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is known for being in "period pieces" such as "Pride
and Prejudice," so her playing the lead in the new film "Official Secrets," scheduled to be
released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers that the
time span being depicted -- the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- is one of the most
dramatic and consequential periods of modern human history.
It is also one of the most poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun,
played by Knightley, is so little known. Having followed this story from the start, I find this
film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of what has happened to
date–"to date" because the wider story still isn't over.
Katharine Gun
worked as an analyst for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent
of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency. She tried to stop the impending invasion of
Iraq in early 2003 by exposing the deceit of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their claims
about that country. For doing that she was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act -- a
juiced up version of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in recent years has been used repeatedly by
the Obama administration against whistleblowers and now by the Trump administration against
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Gun was charged for exposing -- around the time of
Colin Powell's infamous testimony to the UN about Iraq's alleged WMDs – a top secret
U.S. government memo showing it was mounting an illegal spying "surge" against other U.N.
Security Council delegations in an effort to manipulate them into voting for an Iraq invasion
resolution. The U.S. and Britain had successfully
forced through a trumped
up resolution, 1441 in November 2002. In early 2003, they were poised to threaten, bribe or
blackmail their way to get formal United Nations authorization for the invasion. [See
recent interview with Gun .]
Katherine Gun The leaked memo, published by the British Observer , was big news in
parts of the world, especially the targeted countries on the Security Council, and helped
prevent Bush and Blair from getting the second UN Security Council resolution they said they
wanted. Veto powers Russia, China and France were opposed as well as U.S. ally Germany.
'Most Courageous Leak' It was the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy,
where I work ( accuracy.org ), Norman
Solomon, as well as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who in the U.S. most
immediately saw the importance of what Gun had done. Ellsberg would later comment: "No one else
-- including myself -- has ever done what Katharine Gun did: Tell secret truths at personal
risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important --
and courageous -- leak I've ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the
Pentagon Papers."
Daniel Ellsberg on the cover of Time after leaking the Pentagon Papers
Gun said: "I went to the local bookshop, and I went into the political section. I found two
books, which had apparently been rushed into publication, one was by Norman Solomon and Reese
Erlich, and it was called Target Iraq . And the
other one was by Milan Rai. It was called War
Plan Iraq . And I bought both of them. And I read them cover to cover that weekend, and
it basically convinced me that there was no real evidence for this war. So I think from that
point onward, I was very critical and scrutinizing everything that was being said in the
media." Thus, we see Gun in "Official Secrets" shouting at the TV to Tony Blair that he's not
entitled to make up facts. The film may be jarring to some consumers of major media who might
think that Donald Trump invented lying in 2017. Gun's immediate action after reading critiques
of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for trying to reach government workers by
handing out fliers and books and putting up
billboards outside government offices to encourage them to be more critically minded.
Solomon and Ellsberg had debunked Bush administration propaganda in real time. But Gun's
revelation showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to invade Iraq,
they were violating international law to blackmail whole nations to get in line.
Mainstream reviews of "Official Secrets" still seem to not fully grasp the importance of
what they just saw. The trendy AV
Club review leads : "Virtually everyone now agrees that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a
colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or fabricated (at worst) intelligence." "Mistake" is
a serious understatement even with "colossal" attached to it when the movie details the
diabolical, illegal lengths to which the U.S. and British governments went to get other
governments to go along with it.
Gun's revelations showed before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood
depends on following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to out the lies and
threats.
Portrayal of The Observer
Other than Gun herself, the film focuses on a dramatization of what happened at her work; as
well as her relationship with her husband, a Kurd from Turkey who the British government
attempted to have deported to get at Gun. The film also portrays the work of her lawyers who
helped get the Official Secrets charge against her dropped, as well as the drama at The
Observer , which published the NSA document after much internal debate.
Observer reporter Martin Bright, whose strong work on the original Gun story was
strangely followed by an ill-fated stint at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, has recently noted
that very little
additional work has been done on Gun's case. We know virtually nothing about the apparent
author of the NSA document that she leaked -- one "Frank Koza." Other questions persist, such
is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other
purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former NSA analyst
Russ
Tice about the NSA having massive files on political people?
Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy is energetically depicted getting tips from former CIA
man Mel Goodman. There do seem to be subtle but potentially serious deviations from reality in
the film. Vulliamy is depicted as actually speaking with "Frank Koza," but that's not what he
originally
reported :
"The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency
which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The
Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the
United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'. On protesting that the
assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an
erroneous extension, and hung up."
There must doubtlessly be many aspects of the film that have been simplified or altered
regarding Gun's personal experience. A compelling part of the film -- apparently fictitious or
exaggerated -- is a GCHQ apparatchik questioning Gun to see if she was the source.
Little is known about the reaction inside the governments of Security Council members that
the U.S. spied on. After the invasion, Mexican Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser spoke in blunt
terms about U.S. bullying -- saying it viewed Mexico as its patio trasero , or back yard
-- and was Zinser was compelled to resign by President Vicente Fox. He then,
in 2004 , gave details about some aspects of U.S. surveillance sabotaging the efforts of
the other members of the Security Council to hammer out a compromise to avert the invasion of
Iraq, saying the U.S. was "violating the U.N. headquarters covenant." In 2005, he tragically
died in a car crash
.
Documents
leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept in 2016 boasted of how the NSA
"during the wind-up to the Iraq War 'played a critical role' in the adoption of U.N. Security
Council resolutions. The work with that customer was a resounding success." The relevant
document specifically cites resolutions 1441 and 1472 and quotes John Negroponte ,
then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "I can't imagine better intelligence support
for a diplomatic mission." (Notably, The Intercept has never published a word on "
Katharine Gun ." )
Nor were the UN Security Council members the only ones on the U.S. hit list to pave the way
for the Iraq invasion. Brazilian Jose Bustani, the director-general of the international
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. was ousted in an effective coup by John
Bolton in April of 2002 . Bolton is now national security adviser.
"Official Secrets" director Gavin Hood is perhaps more right than he realizes when he says
that his depiction of the Gun case is like the "tip of an iceberg," pointing to other deceits
surrounding the Iraq war. His record with political films has been uneven until now. Peace
activist David Swanson, for instance, derided his film on drones, " Eye in the Sky ." At a D.C. showing of "Official Secrets,"
Hood depicted those who backed the Iraq war as being discredited. But that's simply untrue.
Keira Knightley appears as Katherine Gun in Official Secrets (Courtesy of Sundance
Institute.)
Leading presidential candidate Joe Biden -- who not only voted for the Iraq invasion, but
presided over rigged
hearings on in 2002 – has recently falsified
his record repeatedly on Iraq
at presidential debates with hardly a murmur. Nor is he alone. Those refusing to be held
accountable for their Iraq war lies include not just Bush and Cheney, but John Kerry and
Nancy
Pelosi .
Biden has actually faulted Bush for not doing enough to get United Nations approval for the
Iraq invasion. But as the Gun case helps show, there was no legitimate case for invasion and
the Bush administration had done virtually everything, both legal and illegal, to get UN
authorization.
Many who supported the invasion try to distance themselves from it. But the repercussions of
that illegal act are enormous: It led directly or indirectly to the rise of ISIS, the civil war
in Iraq and the war in Syria. Journalists who pushed for the Iraq invasion are prosperous and
atop major news organizations, such as Washington Post editorial page editor
Fred Hiatt. The
editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The
Observer , Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News.
After Gun's identity became known, the Institute for Public Accuracy brought on Jeff Cohen,
the founder of FAIR, to work with program director Hollie Ainbinder to get prominent
individuals to support
Gun . The film -- quite plausibly -- depicts the charges being dropped against Gun for the
simple reason that the British government feared that a high profile proceeding would
effectively put the war on trial, which to them would be have been a nightmare.
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist, senior analyst at the Institute for Public
Accuracy and founder of VotePact.org .
Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
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one.
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David G , August 31, 2019 at 19:49
Saw the film today. Solid work; recommended.
Did her ultimate court appearance really go down in such a dramatic fashion? I suppose I
shouldn't be surprised if it did: English courtroom proceedings may not deliver better
justice than U.S. ones, but they're definitely more entertaining.
William , August 31, 2019 at 19:06
U.S. Government officials should be indicted for war crimes. It is quite clear that U.S.
officials conspired to ensure that an invasion
of Iraq would take place. The U.S. and Britain -- George Bush and Tony Blair -- initiated a
war of aggression against Iraq, and under
international law should be tried for war crimes, just as numerous German officials were
tried and convicted of war crimes.
No U.S. politician has called for investigation, and the main stream media has not touched
this topic. It is unquestionably clear that
the U.S. congress is a collection of spineless, cowardly, corrupt, greedy men and women. They
have allowed the U.S. to become a rogue,
criminal nation.
Katherine Gun is awesome! I heard her speak as part of a panel of whistleblowers –
wish there were many more like her
michael , August 31, 2019 at 08:15
Inequality.org reports that the majority of our top 1% are corporate executives. Finance,
which reportedly accounted for 3% of our economy in 1980, now accounts for 30%. Many of the
US's 585 billionaires have monopolies in their business domain, no different from the Robber
Barons of the late 19th and early 20th century. "Stability is more important than democracy",
the market hates uncertainty, and our foreign policies, determined by think tanks staffed and
funded by our "allies" Israel and Saudi Arabia, will continue to push for the greed of our
Richest. "Democracy" is a just a hypocritical bon mot for stealing and destroying.
The Republicans have always supported these people. What is worrisome is that the Democrats
have come to the same place as the GOP, since donations– pay-to-play- lead to
re-elections. The Democrats have deserted the Poor and working class, since they have no
money for pay-to-play. Our 17 technologically advanced Stasis work in concert with Congress,
our entitled government bureaucrats, and their lapdog main stream media to "make things
happen" for our Richest. How long before people like Assange, Katherine Gunn, Chelsea
Manning, Edward Snowden, Binney, Kiriakou etc learn that it pays to keep their mouths shut?
Transparency and whistleblowing is punished. Maybe other approaches are needed?
Tony , August 31, 2019 at 07:26
Very interesting to see what inspired her to act the way that she did.
Of course, the supporters of the war had various motives.
But one motive behind President Bush's plan was revealed by Russ Baker in his book 'Family of
Secrets' page 423.
He recalls a conversation with Bush family friend and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. He
says that he told him:
"He (George W. Bush) was thinking about invading in 1999."
Bush apparently said:
"If I have a chance to invade if I had that much (political) capital, I'm not going to
waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I'm going to have
a successful presidency."
So there we have it, he thought that a war would boost his presidency.
David G , August 31, 2019 at 05:16
"The editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The
Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News."
That's a repulsive little nugget I would never have known otherwise.
Thanks to Sam Husseini for this account. The film is playing in my town, at least for this
coming week; I plan to get to it.
RomeoCharlie29 , August 30, 2019 at 19:24
This is a really interesting story and one I knew nothing about, although I was one who
opposed the Iraq war because to me it was obvious the whole WMD issue was bullshit. Now I
understand the perception that that war was an American/ Brit thing but you might recall that
America's deputy Sheriff in the Pacific, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, was Gung
ho for the war and committed Australian troops to the ill-fated endeavour with the result
that our country has subsequently become a target for ISIS inspired terrorism. Australia's
Opposition Leader at the time, Simon Crean led a vocal opposition to the war but "Little
Johnny" as we called him was not to be denied. Incidentally I don't think he has ever
admitted being wrong on this.
Xander Arena , August 30, 2019 at 18:15
Tip of an iceberg is right. Iraq was the second big lie of the 21st century. I wonder how
the world will react to the University of Alaska Fairbanks report which proves fraud at NIST,
and arguably reveals aiding and abetting of treason by the contractors who wrote NIST's
analysis of the WTC7 destruction. The UAF report drops Tuesday 9/3/19, and chisels away at
the big lie that preceded all the related Iraq deceit. BTW great article :)
Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:49
I enjoyed the article and learned some things, but it does seem a bit of Hollywood
promotion at the same time.
If only Gun's sacrifice had stopped the invasion it would have been a sensation. As is,
the UN did not sanction the invasion, making that effort a bit moot, and since the reveal of
NSA bugging the world under Obama that dulls the sensibilities of those who might today have
otherwise been shocked, shocked like the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane downing over the USSR and
Ike being caught in a lie on TV.
But overall, knowing the downhill Gun's livelihood has taken over the 15 years makes the
story more of a warning for whistle blowers than inspiration. Maybe Gun will be well
compensated by the movie makers!
Neil E Mac , August 30, 2019 at 15:54
En fin!
bevin , August 30, 2019 at 14:13
One thing is certain: The Observer of 2019 would not publish a story like this. That is
one of the major changes since 2003: the capitalist media has tightened up. There are no
longer papers competing to attract readers at risk of cozy relations with the State. The
Observer/Guardian today – since the Snowden revelations- does what it is told.
Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:16
"In 2005, he tragically died in a car crash."
Unfortunately -- or fortunately? -- this no longer seems to be credible when it comes to
those who have gone ouit on a limb to challenge the Deep State, or the US version of the Deep
State.
Can Bush and Blair be charged with crimes? In connection with the Third Reich there is
AFAIK no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Well, Iraq was also full of
'humanity." These guys belong in The Hague. Or in Iraq, doing community service.
In connection with Ellsberg's reviewing the evidence and concluding there was no
evidentiary justification for invading Iraq -- I wanna say, you didn't need to be Ellsberg or
any kind of expert to see clearly that there was no evidence that justified invading Iraq.
Millions of common folk could see this clearly. That is why over 14 million people worldwide
demonstrated against the planned illegal invasion. That is why people like me when to NYC, to
Washington, and also the front our local US Post Office in small towns all over the country
to protest the country's being lied into war. And were greeted mostly with thumbs-up from the
passers- and drivers-by.
The people knew it was all a pack of lies. It was the gullible PRESS that ginned up this
show. Remember Judith what's her name at the NYT? These people also should be indicted as war
criminals.
Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:19
Judith Miller, the NYTimes reporter who did maybe the most to make the invasion of Iraq,
is the last name you were seeking.
SteveF , August 30, 2019 at 12:22
The timescales are interesting, we have the alleged US blackmail to get this illegal war
'approved' by the UN and in the same timescale we have the Jeffery Epstein story unfolding
and the corresponding allegations that he was a CIA/Mossad agent operating honey traps to
entangle the rich and famous.
The evil machinations of our governments are indeed breathtaking.
As we can see from so very many modern instances, it matters not at all that truth is on
your side, if what you are doing is attacking those with money and power.
And there's an entire American establishment dedicated to keeping it just that way.
America's history of the last half century, at least so far as foreign relations and
control of an empire, is almost entirely an artificial construct.
Absolutely no truth in everything from John Kennedy's assassination, which was intimately
concerned with America's relationship with Cuba, and the despicable Vietnam War to 9/11 and
the despicable Neocon Wars in the Middle East.
From hundreds of millions of printed newspapers and television broadcasts to speeches from
prominent American politicians, you have tissue of lies not unlike that that was constantly
being created by Oceania's Inner Party in 1984.
That's not even the slightest exaggeration, but, truly, are Americans in general the least
concerned or bothered?
We have no evidence of significant concern. None.
The Democratic Party just weeded out the only candidate it had, brave and informed enough
to speak to truth in some of these matters.
The ten left just represent varying degrees of hopelessness. On and on with weaving dreams
about this or that creative social program while the resources and close attention dedicated
to destruction in a dozen lands make them all impossible.
At the sae time, there is an almost complete lack of information and courage about
anything that is happening in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Israel, and in such massively
important countries as China, Russia, and Iran.
Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are brave contemporary examples of the American
establishment's methods for shutting down truth and punishing severely those who reveal it.
While they have followers and supporters, I am always amazed at how relatively small their
numbers are.
And we have remarkably few individuals like Manning or Assange, especially when you
consider the scale and scope of America's many dark works. Mostly, we see only "willing
helpers" carrying on with their sensitive, secretive careers in government.
In the Democratic nomination contest, the "star" liberals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren, are virtually no different in these absolutely critical matters than a confirmed old
puke of a war criminal like Joe Biden, someone who probably deserves recognition as father of
Obama's industrial-scale extrajudicial killing project with drones and Hellfire missiles
making legally-innocent people in a dozen countries just disappear. Biden has a long record
of smarmy deeds and lack of courage and principles. He is, of course, most likely to get the
nomination too.
Act, from America's CIA, no different in principle and in law to those of the old
Argentine military junta's massive efforts at dragging people off the streets, drugging them,
and throwing them out of planes over the ocean, something they did to thousands. Oh, and
during that wonderful project there were no objections from America, only silence.
Aimee , August 30, 2019 at 22:31
Excellent post. Agree completely. Tulsi was our only hope and she never had a chance. We
are doomed.
Coleen Rowley , August 30, 2019 at 23:29
Here are some of the reasons for the ever lessening concern over US-NATO-Israel-Saudi's
(aka our current Empire's) wars: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/04/recipe-concocted-for-perpetual-war-is-a-bitter-one/
By the way my co-author and I tried unsuccessfully to get this published in about 15
different US papers before Robert Parry posted it on Consortiumnews.
Robert Edwards , August 30, 2019 at 11:17
It's time these liers and war criminals are brought to Justice – I know that's
wishful , but sometimes wishes come true America must get back to a country run on integrity
and honesty, otherwise all will be lost in the spiral of evil
Sorry, but, oh please, America is lost. Has been so for a very long time.
Only tremendous outside influences like depression or war and the growth of competing
states and the loss of the dollar's privileged status, are going to change the reality.
America's feeble democratic system is capable of changing almost nothing. After all, it
was constructed with just that in mind.
john wilson , August 31, 2019 at 05:07
I think think the real worry is that these days they don't even bother to lie anymore and
they just do what they want. Think Venezuela.
Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:42
"Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign
governments to get UN votes or for other purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with
allegations made by former NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on
political people?"
This also stands out , as given what we now know is standard modus opendi of CIA / Mossad
operations ,due to the Epstein arrest and ensuing information , who knows what is used to
leverage other nations to follow along with US and in this case UK demands.Birds of a feather
fly together.
Very good report by Sam Husseini.
Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:32
Absolutely. It is an obvious avenue now to investigate: How did the Epstein operation
impact on the decision to invade Iraq? How were teh votes wrung out for the war authorization
in October 2002?
Regarding Kerry, as a resident of Mass. I couldn't believe that Vietnam vet Kerry would
vote Yes on the war authorization act. I called his office a number of time to beg him to
vote no. Rumors emanated from within his office in Boston or wherever that phone calls from
constituents were running 180 to 1 urging him to vote NO. But he voted YES anyhow.
I simply believe that Yalie Kerry didn't see what was up with the obvious lying that drove
the runup to an illegal invasion. This is the kind of scenario where one now has to wonder --
and ask openly -- whether Kerry had been compromised in some way that made him vulnerable to
blackmail. Why the hell else would he vote so stupidly?
Recall that Scott Ritter ran afoul of some kind of sex trap and so he, one of the most
knowledgeable and outspoken critics of the fake WMD narrative, was effectively muzzled.
Did Kerry have a little skeleton in the closet somewhere?
The same could be asked of all the esp. Democratic legislators who voted YES. Because we
now understand which state in the EAstern Med wanted the war most and profited the most from
it. We now know how deep and how wide the tentacles of that state's intelligence service
intrude into our own national sphere, our Congress, our own intelligence services, our media,
and, most likely, our military. Epstein seems to been part f this web of pressure and
blackmail.
Epstein is gone, but Ghislaine Maxwell apparently still runs free.
Let's bring her in for questioning specifically about pressure applied on the Oct. 2002 vote.
(Although some speculate that she, too, is already dead.)
Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:23
At a time when despair in political affairs is very depressing ,it is very refreshing to
see that the voices of reason are being vindicated.
I really want to see this film as this is the first time that I hear of the voice of
Katherine Gun .Bless her heart for standing up and her efforts to warn of deception . Does
the film make any mention of Dr.David Kelly's so-called suicide / murder ? Will have to wait
ans see.
Thank you CN for once again coming through for your excellent report.
Pablo , August 30, 2019 at 10:15
Lawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff?) told me that Collin knew Bush was
fabricating, but went to the U.N. as a "loyal foot soldier".
AnneR , August 30, 2019 at 08:25
Thank you, Sam Husseini, for this overview of the background – real story – to
the film Official Secrets.
To be frank, I'd not heard of Katherine Gun's revelations at the time – not
surprising because I don't think that the US MSM gave the leak any oxygen. They were all too
gung-ho for the war.
While the film undoubtedly soft-pedals some of the story and likely doesn't reveal or make
explicit as much as we'd all hope, I really do hope that it receives at least as much
publicity (good) and viewing as that execrable film Zero dark Thirty which basically
supported the CIA and its torturers. But somehow I doubt that.
TomR , August 31, 2019 at 06:19
Zero Dark Thirty is just about the worst bullshit fake narrative put out by the CIA that
I've ever seen. I watched it but cringed with the dramatized fake narrative that the CIA is
famous for – think the bullshit 9/11 US govt. narrative – if you or anyone else
believes that totally bunkum govt. narrative – well, I feel sorry for you.
Druid , August 31, 2019 at 17:28
Im a good- movie buff. I avoided Zero Dark Thirty. Not a farthing for those lies
Sylvia Bennet , August 30, 2019 at 07:51
I applaud Keira Knightley and all who were involved in bringing this story to the public.
It is vital that more people who have the eyes and ears of the public speak out on these
issues. Sadly, most of them keep their heads below the parapet. With the Main Stream Media
colluding with corrupt corporations and governments to lie or distort the truth, we need
decent people with influence to step up before it is too late.
Toxik , August 30, 2019 at 02:42
Looked at my local theaters and Official Secrets will not be shown.
jmg , August 29, 2019 at 18:39
Katharine Gun's case can also be very relevant for Julian Assange's defense:
"Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer
evidence. . . . The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any
records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the
war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence
were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of
aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act 1989. . . . In 2019 The
Guardian stated the case was dropped 'when the prosecution realised that evidence would
emerge that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful.'"
So Katharine Gun, like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, etc., by revealing corruption and
crimes, maybe didn't obey the code of silence of organized crime, government sector, but
that's not a law.
For example, the US Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information,
explicitly outlaws any classification that covers up crimes or embarrassing information.
This means that whistleblowers like Katharine Gun or Chelsea Manning, and investigative
journalists like Julian Assange are the ones defending the law here, while the US and UK
governments are the criminals.
lindaj , August 29, 2019 at 22:10
Hear, Hear!
Me Myself , August 30, 2019 at 12:11
The espionage act has and would protect those who were responsible for the war I
believe.
If we could Abrogate the espionage act it would make are representatives more
accountable.
I was unaware of Katherine Gun she is clearly a standout person and will join the ranks of
are most respected truthers.
WTF Burkie , August 31, 2019 at 14:05
Our not are.b.c. burkhart
evelync , August 30, 2019 at 13:34
And the secrecy, apparently, is required in the name of "national security" .that's what I
was told by a Harvard JFK School of Government associate when I emailed 200+ of 'em to
express my outrage over their withdrawal of Chelsea Manning's honorary degree when Pompeo and
Morrell bullied them. I responded with – that's INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE at Harvard
– as a "respected" educational institution you should be front and center critiquing
foreign policy instead of helping to bury the wrongdoing ..no wonder voters didn't trust the
establishment candidates in 2016 but the DNC was too much a part of it all to see or care
what was going on. Except for Tulsi Gabbard who resigned at DNC VP in protest for what was
being done to the Sanders campaign and to endorse Sanders instead of Clinton. The DNC knee
capped the campaign of the one person who had won peoples' trust for his honesty.
We have incompetent people with no moral fiber making terrible decisions and burying the
mistakes under secrecy, a fear based "code of silence", as you say.
Biden touts his being chosen by Obama for VP; therefore "he's qualified".
Since Clinton and Biden were the most dangerously ambitious critics of Obama, I think he may
have chosen to add them to his administration as VP and Sec of State to practice "keep your
friends close and your enemies closer" .but his decision was very costly to the lives of
people around the world including the Caribbean and South American countries whose wealth our
oligarchs coveted.
And as far as Honduras is concerned those political choices by Obama sadly explains refugees
fleeing from that violent country even now ..thanks to our failing to declare the 2009 Coup a
"military coup". One of Clinton's "hard choices". Obama and Biden went along with that of
course.
Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide an Empire" tells the sordid tale of how waterboarding was
used long before Bush II – used on the freedom fighters for their independence in the
Philippines after the Spanish American War and we took over as imperialists ..
Most people, I think, don't know all the gruesome details of our aggression but they now know
enough to be troubled by it. Few political candidates have the backbone to criticize
wrongheaded foreign policy.
I'm disappointed that Tulsi Gabbard won't be permitted to join Bernie Sanders at the
September 12 2019 "debate" as the only ones who speak out on how wrong for this country and
the world our foreign policies have been. This courageous woman should be heard.
When Bernie was challenged in the 2016 Miami debate on his enlightened views on Cuba and
other Caribbean and South American countries, Clinton used Cold War rhetoric to attack him.
She was shocked, I tell you, shocked that he would not grind his heel on the Cuban people. I
wondered at the time whether she really believed the crap she was selling or just put on a
good political show for the national security state.
We so need transparency if we want to be a real democracy.
Sam F , August 30, 2019 at 21:06
Very true that transparency is essential to democracy. That also requires lifelong
monitoring of officials and their relatives for paybacks and other influence. But (for
example) Florida has an Sunshine Act that merely moves the bribes into other channels, and
may be the most corrupt state. I am investigating extensive racketeering there involving
state officials stealing conservation funds. They can be quire careless because their party
runs the entire state including state and federal judiciary, and instantly approves whatever
their rich "donors" want to steal. But the FBI and DOJ refuse to take action when given the
evidence on a silver platter – no doubt because they are appointed by the same party.
Theft is their sacred right and duty, to protect their country from its people.
michael , August 31, 2019 at 07:30
Florida's Sunshine laws were on display at Epstein's only trial, much of it still sealed
from public view.
Strawmannirg has got to be the most cynical behavior in the world. Weiner is the cynic. I
think Liz's "the system is rigged " comment invites discussion. It is not a closed door at
all. It is a plea for good capitalism. Which most people assume is possible. It's time to
define just what kind of capitalism will work and what it needs to continue to be, or finally
become, a useful economic ideology. High time.
Burns me to see yet another "water is not wet" argument being foisted by the NYT, hard to
imagine another reason the editorial board pushed for this line *except* to protect the
current corrupt one percenters who call their shots. Once Liz The Marionette gets appointed
we might get some fluff but the rot will persist, eventually rot becomes putrefaction and the
polity dies. Gore Vidal called America and Christianity "death cults".
"... This is not an unusual position. This is actually the normal position now, even among very conservative scholars, including the person who was the intellectual godfather of modern executive compensation, Michael Jensen. He has admitted that he spawned unintentionally a monster because CEOs have rigged the compensation system. How do they do that? Well, it starts even before you get hired as a CEO. This is amazing stuff. The standard thing you do as a powerful CEO is you hire this guy, and he specializes in negotiating great deals for CEOs. His first demand, which is almost always given into, is that the corporation pay his fee, not the CEO. On the other side of the table is somebody that the CEO is going to be the boss of negotiating the other side. How hard is he going to negotiate against the guy that's going to be his boss? That's totally rigged. ..."
"... Then the compensation committee hires compensation specialists who–again, even the most conservative economists agree it is a completely rigged system. Because the only way they get work is if they give this extraordinary compensation. Then, everybody in economics admits that there's a clear way you should run performance pay. It should be really long term. You get the big bucks only after like 10 years of success. In reality, they're always incredibly short term. Why? Because it's vastly easier for the CEO to rig the short-term reported earnings. What's the result of this? Accounting profession, criminology profession, economics profession, law profession. We've all done studies and all of them say this perverse system of compensation causes CEOs to (a) cheat and (b) to be extraordinarily short term in their perspective because it's easier to rig the short-term reported results. Even the most conservative economists agree that's terrible for the economy. ..."
"... That's what the right fear is more than anything, that people will basically get woke. In this, it's being woke to how individual systems have been rigged by the wealthy and powerful to create a sure thing to enrich them, usually at our direct expense. ..."
BILL BLACK: One of the principal things I study is elite fraud, corruption and predation.
The World Bank sent me to India for months as an anti-corruption alleged expert type. And as a
financial regulator, this is what I dealt with. This is what I researched. This is a huge chunk
of my life. So I wouldn't use the word, if I was being formal in an academic system, "the
system." What I would talk about is specific systems that are rigged, and they most assuredly
are rigged.
Let me give you an example. One of the most important things that has transformed the world
and made it vastly more criminogenic, much more corrupt, is modern executive compensation. This
is not an unusual position. This is actually the normal position now, even among very
conservative scholars, including the person who was the intellectual godfather of modern
executive compensation, Michael Jensen. He has admitted that he spawned unintentionally a
monster because CEOs have rigged the compensation system. How do they do that? Well, it starts
even before you get hired as a CEO. This is amazing stuff. The standard thing you do as a
powerful CEO is you hire this guy, and he specializes in negotiating great deals for CEOs. His
first demand, which is almost always given into, is that the corporation pay his fee, not the
CEO. On the other side of the table is somebody that the CEO is going to be the boss of
negotiating the other side. How hard is he going to negotiate against the guy that's going to
be his boss? That's totally rigged.
Then the compensation committee hires compensation specialists who–again, even the
most conservative economists agree it is a completely rigged system. Because the only way they
get work is if they give this extraordinary compensation. Then, everybody in economics admits
that there's a clear way you should run performance pay. It should be really long term. You get
the big bucks only after like 10 years of success. In reality, they're always incredibly short
term. Why? Because it's vastly easier for the CEO to rig the short-term reported earnings.
What's the result of this? Accounting profession, criminology profession, economics profession,
law profession. We've all done studies and all of them say this perverse system of compensation
causes CEOs to (a) cheat and (b) to be extraordinarily short term in their perspective because
it's easier to rig the short-term reported results. Even the most conservative economists agree
that's terrible for the economy.
What I've just gone through is a whole bunch of academic literature from over 40-plus years
from top scholars in four different fields. That's not cynicism. That's just plain facts if you
understand the system. People like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they didn't, as you
say, kick open an open door. They made the open door. It's not like Elizabeth Warren started
talking about this six months ago when she started being a potential candidate. She has been
saying this and explaining in detail how individual systems are rigged in favor of the wealthy
for at least 30 years of work. Bernie Sanders has been doing it for 45 years. This is what the
right, including the author of this piece who is an ultra-far right guy, fear the most. It's
precisely what they fear, that Bernie and Elizabeth are good at explaining how particular
systems are rigged. They explain it in appropriate detail, but they're also good in making it
human. They talk the way humans talk as opposed to academics.
That's what the right fear is more than anything, that people will basically get woke. In
this, it's being woke to how individual systems have been rigged by the wealthy and powerful to
create a sure thing to enrich them, usually at our direct expense.
President Trump wants his supporters to know that he is
still draining the swamp over which he has presided for nearly three years. One of his
Democratic rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, says Americans are trapped in a "rigged system
that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else." Her colleague and fellow
candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders,
calls it "a corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful."
These claims of corruption and rigging make for a strange campaign
of ideas , like the one Ms. Warren is lauded for waging and an even more bizarre populism
of the kind associated with Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders. Each of them deflects criticism by
delegitimizing opposition. Mr. Trump may have perfected that art, but Democrats should be
cautious about imitating it. Accusations of corruption are rooted in the assumption that one's
positions are so obviously correct that the only explanation for opposing them is that the
opponent has been bought and his or her supporters have been brainwashed.
This corruption chatter, a mainstay of American political history that has accelerated in
recent years, is unhealthy for political conversation. It is a film noir conception of
politics, in which everyone is good or evil, mostly evil, and no one simply disagrees. It is
also inaccurate. American politics has never been cleaner of classic corruption -- of the
cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety -- than it is
now. The bigger problem is that the political puritanism that sees corruption around every
corner actually makes it harder to address the issues in whose name it is invoked.
The contemporary scandal, it is often said, is not that criminal corruption occurs but
rather that the political system is legally rigged. It supposedly takes the form of campaign
contributions that, Mr. Sanders says, enable corporations to " literally buy elections ." This is,
literally, false. Money unquestionably influences elections. But the candidate with the most
votes, a commodity that cannot be legally bought or sold, always wins (except when it comes to
the presidency, a discussion for another day). Sign Up for Debatable
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What Mr. Sanders means to say, of course, is that money allows those with an opinion on, or
a stake in, a given issue to buy the means of persuading voters that the spenders are right.
That was what he meant when, in the second Democratic presidential debate, he defended his
single-payer health insurance proposal and warned darkly -- although how surprising was it,
really? -- that private health insurers had purchased advertising time during the program to
register their disagreement.
But this "buys" elections only to the extent Mr. Sanders is claiming voters are passive
automatons incapable of discernment. This is a paternal populism according to which voters need
politicians to protect them from being duped by ensuring they are never spoken to in the first
place.
Whether this activity on the part of health insurers is corrupt hinges on what corruption,
which is notoriously hard to define, actually means. Critics of the campaign finance system
typically warn of a rigged "quid pro quo" arrangement, in which a donor contributes to a
campaign on the assumption that the recipient will support the donor's interests.
But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the health insurer
that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the grandmother who sends
Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. The two are separated by degree rather
than kind. For her part, Ms. Warren thinks it is corrupt for the wealthy to defend their
economic interests, but her campaign also plays to what she believes is the self-interest of
her supporters. Why is one corrupt but not the other?
That voters are not simply dupes of contributors is clear from the fact that, in the 2016
Republican primary, when Jeb Bush was a powerhouse fund-raiser and Donald Trump relied on the
cost-free device of Twitter, there was little evident correlation
between money spent and votes received. American voters often blame money in politics for
political outcomes they dislike. In fact, the constitutional system is designed to require
majorities to persist in supporting something concrete before they prevail. It is difficult to
identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting something specific that
it has not eventually gotten.
Clearly, members of Congress are far wealthier on average than their constituents. This may
affect their thinking, but not nearly as much as the fact that each of them holds his or her
office by the permission of voters. It is also difficult to deny that contributions correlate
with policy outcomes on some issues -- although causation is difficult to establish because
most major policies trigger spending on both sides -- or that large contributors enjoy enhanced
access to politicians, who are susceptible to lobbying.
The question is which issues these contributors are able to influence. The answer is those
to which voters do not pay attention. This tends to happen in a system that attempts -- as in
Mr. Trump's industrial policy or Mr. Sanders' democratic socialism -- to dictate precise
economic distributions and consequently involves itself in far more than voters can monitor.
Rent-seeking -- the attempt to use government power to tilt the market in one's favor -- is
certainly a problem. But it arises not simply from the fact that economic favors are sought but
also from the fact that they are provided.
Anthropomorphizing economic "systems" that are actually the products of trillions of
individual choices further confuses the issue. Ms. Warren may wish to describe the results of
those choices as kicking "dirt" on workers, but there is no single identifiable system doing
the kicking.
All the claims of rigged systems that now saturate American politics make reasoned
conversation more difficult. Whether one supports or opposes it, for example, abolishing the
private insurance that hundreds of millions of Americans hold is certainly a radical
proposition. Is it really impossible for anyone other than the venal or the duped to oppose the
idea?
In reality, the activities swept into the label of corruption -- campaign finance and
quid-pro-quo negotiation -- are important means of building coalitions. Whatever their merit,
Ms. Warren's ambitious plans to remake the economy are doomed unless she is elected along with
a Democratic Senate, which will only happen if money is spent to persuade voters to dislodge
entrenched Republican incumbents. Given the advantages of incumbency -- incumbents, for
example, do not have to spend money to garner name recognition -- they almost certainly will
have to be outspent.
Similarly, earmarked, pork-barrel spending -- which the Republican House of Representatives
prohibited
in 2011 as part of the Tea Party wave -- is an invaluable tool for assembling bipartisan
majorities for legislation because it helps members of Congress see the good a bill does for
their constituents.
The go-to argument that everything is corrupt is, in fact, not intellectual engagement at
all. It is an escape from the responsibility to defend one's position on its merits. It is
polarizing because it turns argument, which is healthy in a republic, into accusation. It
yields cheap cynicism that falsely regards outcomes with which one disagrees as the product of
corruption rather than diversity of opinion. The result is intellectual paralysis, since
shallow cynicism does away with the need to make or listen to an argument at all.
This puritan strain in American politics makes it more difficult to find common ground
because it stigmatizes, and therefore hardens, opposition. How can there be a legitimate
compromise with corruption? It would be healthier for politicians to make their best arguments
for their positions, let their opponents argue back and accept the realities that defending
one's own interests is normal, that honest people disagree, and that the candidate who
persuades more of them prevails.
It's horrible. This mentality that everything is rigged, everyone is a racist (or sexust,
etc...) Is a hallmark of the kind of shallow cynicism that makes a society open to radical
ideologies like fascism and socialism. I agree with the author that we have to be careful. 2
Replies
Old quid-pro-quo politics has always been a dark part of U.S. governance. The deeper
corruption is less visible and far more powerful. It is the structural corruption of the
institutions of Democracy that put in a long-term "fix". In this Warren and Sanders are
correct. Some examples make the point. From the founding of the Republic, the fix has been in
to allow discrimination against Black people. Originally, it was to allow slavery to be evil.
But after Reconstruction, the fix against Blacks was maintained by allowing the States to
regulate elections for President, Senators and Members of the House. Virtually unlimited ways
were created to deny Blacks the vote from poll taxes to intimidation through the KKK. Even
today, States set the rules for those elections and in the old Confederate States and a few
others, those rules are used to suppress the votes of people of color. GOP leaders refuse to
reverse this because they and their supporters are advantaged. The fix remains. Another
example of structural corruption is how the fix is put into our education. The Koch Brothers
spend $77 million in donations to dozens of colleges in Universities in 2017, a practice that
has existed for years. The Koch advisors often get to pick and fire faculty. Climate change
advocates are excluded as are Progressive views. The fix is in.
https://www.charleskochfoundation.org/our-giving-and-support/higher-education/list-of-supported-colleges
/. Warren and Sanders get it right. 1 Reply
If I remember correctly - a decade ago or so Californian were told that if they changed the
way Energy was bought and sold in their state the costs would go down. The Ads for that
"choice" were everywhere. Two years later, after the regulations were changed, it came to
light that the Energy companies were manipulating the whole system of delivering electricity
so consumers had to pay far, far more to get electricity on the hottest days. That is how the
system is rigged. When you go to Washington you see the armed security outside the Supreme
Court, outside the Congress, outside the White House. Where is our security ? That is how the
system is rigged. Whatever happens to Health Care and Pensions you can be sure that
Congressmen will not lose theirs. That is how the system is rigged. Your Public Schools are
horrible. You'd like to send your child to a Parochial, Private or Charter School - after all
how many Congressmen send their children to the Washington, D.C. Public Schools - [ Why don't
you find out and tell us NY Times ? ] but Teacher's Unions and Democrats fight such
possibilities tooth and nail. That is how the System is Rigged. Decided to join the Military
in 2000 ? - found yourself deployed to the Middle East 5 times - in three years - even though
you have small children at home - most Americans you age never serve a day - will Congress
bring back the Draft ? That is how the system is rigged unto your death. 7 Replies
It is correct that quid pro quo monetary corruption is rare. What corrupts politicians is the
reality that they must spend all their time grubbing for money. This creates an environment
where money talks.
This article, an implicit defense of corporate and wealthy interests, is fundamentally
intellectually dishonest; the author totally neglects to mention the Citizens United decision
and how that has radically changed how money operates in our politics. We have millions of
dollars filtering through social media telling voters lies. The author also neglects to
mention the massive rise of income inequality, the fact that the fossil fuel industry is
still prospering despite a moral climate change threat. You know what probably doomed Hillary
Clinton's election? Many variables, but a key one was her taking all the money to speak at
Goldman Sachs. It destroyed her credibility. I'm sure the author thought it was just fine,
that it was "serving" her constituents. The old dinosaur, third way Democrats nearly killed
the party. Time for them to step aside. 16 Replies
James Murphy Providence Forge, Virginia Aug. 26 Times Pick
Both Sanders and Warren are absolutely right. Come the Revolution!
@Independent thinker Votes win elections, but publicity paid for by campaign money get the
candidates on the ballot and on the tv ads. It's not coincidence that Mulvaney as a
congressman would only speak to donors at his office. It's not a coincidence that our
Congressmen told us they voted for an unfair, not middle-class tax bill to (their own words)
"pay back their donors." (And much of that campaign money comes from out of state......not
constituents. It's not a coincidence that the NRA gave 30 million alone to Trump in 2016 and
has for years contributed millions to other Congressmen, and therefore, McConnell will NOT
EVEN ALLOW an gun laws to be debated. It's not a coincidence that the two SCOTUS judges
chosen by Trump were vetted by monied organizations who mounted expensive campaigns for their
names to "buy" the third branch of government. It's not a coincidence that after the name and
party affiliation in a campaign there is a statement of their monetary war chests. Policy?
Mentioned only after an afterthought. If money is free speech (Citizens United), big
corporate and wealthy money speaks far louder than small constituent donations. (That's why
McConnell won't even allow gun laws to come up for debate.....or foreign election
interference.
Independent thinker Pennsylvania Aug. 26 Times Pick
Thank you, Mr. Weiner, for your thoughtful editorial. Having read many of the comments, the
one point that people seem to not have grasped is that votes win elections. That requires
someone to convince huge numbers of people to walk into a private voting booth and "pull the
lever" for them. That doesn't require money – that requires persuading people that you
will represent their interests. And in the House, that means showing up 2 years later to that
same voter and proving you did vote for their interests. The cynicism in most of the comments
is that they believe the average American is a dupe – they will vote against the things
that matter to them. In 2018 Conor Lamb, a democrat, won in my district, a district Trump won
by a landslide, by convincing voters he would defend Social Security and Medicare, as well as
our gun rights and union representation. That is apparently what matters to the people in our
district. And he has to show up in 2020 and prove to people he voted as he said he would
– and defend his ideas against a challenger who may have different ideas. That is the
beauty of American democracy. Its not rigged at all. Indeed, the mid-term 2018 elections saw
innumerable democrats win in supposedly republican gerrymandered districts. I am puzzled that
the comments here bring up the Electoral college as evidence of the system being rigged. So
the Presidential election has been rigged since the founding of the country? Now that is
cynicism.
"Bizarre populism"? I think the American public is savvy enough to realize that the game is
in fact rigged in favor of those who can pay for lobbyists to write the laws that will
eventually get passed by lawmakers in over their heads. It starts at the local and state
level and eventually gets to the level of international law via treaties. I've actually
drafted these legal instruments myself, as well as working in the public interest sueing the
corporate canals pushing them on legislators. The public will no longer accept such
deception. It's time to get money out of the public interest. Conflating Sanders with Trump,
that's the icing on the cake here. What a joke. 10 Replies
"But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the health insurer
that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the grandmother who
sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. " No. One is a voter and one
is not. 10 Replies
Sorry, but our political arena is indeed rigged. After yet more senseless gun massacres, when
even Donald Trump was willing to consider even modest regulations, Wayne La Pierre weighs in,
and poof! - gun control is back off the table. Just like how the NRA always prevails over our
safety. The system is rigged and the swamp is thick, just not in the ways that Trump whines
about. 3 Replies
Mr. Weiner uses an outlier event, the Jeb Bush campaign, as a complete refutation of money as
a corrosive influence on democracy and then asserts all money in politics is in fact just
that, money in politics, and therefore equally legitimate for the purposes of democracy. He's
just plain ol' wrong. While both grandma's $25 for Bernie and a corporate gift of $250,000 to
an "independent" PAC supporting Trump are gifts meant to influence a political outcome, I
think most people sensibly realize that such a difference in degree creates something that is
different in kind. And no surprise. the actual outcomes in our politics show that these two
kinds of 'political influence buying" are not alike: money has significantly warped our
political and legal world to the advantage of the moneyed. Being very rich is, and should be,
its own reward, but it shouldn't make anyone more 'represented' by our political system.
Suggesting that our loosely regulated approach to money in politics is not a real problem
seems clueless. 3 Replies
"American politics has never been cleaner of classic corruption -- of the
cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety -- than it is now." Setting the bar awfully low. I'm
fine with calling what David Koch did--spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help convince
tens of millions of people that reality isn't reality, and that government can do only harm,
not good, to the public interest--something other than "classic corruption." I'm fine with
saying the PACs lavishly funded by him and others to give tens of millions of dollars to
candidates for office isn't "cash under the table" corruption. It's cash over the table
corruption. That it's nominally legal doesn't make it not corrupt. 4 Replies
@Tone Thank you for reminding us that a corporation may have a voice 1,000 times louder than
a voter, yet is not a voter and was never intended to be represented like one in any branch
of government.
The political system is not rigged, when a candidate with 2.86 million fewer votes, becomes
President? What about a tax system that treats different forms of income differently, such as
capital gains, which could be taxed at half the rate of wages received or much less. Not many
people poor people pay capital gains tax, but a lot of very rich people pay a lot less tax on
their capital gains than other forms of income. 4 Replies
"American politics has never been cleaner of classic corruption -- of the
cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety -- than it is now." Say what? This administration is
rife with corruption: the president is profiting from his businesses on the taxpayer's dime;
he's managed to placate his biggest political donors (NRA, Sheldon Adelson, energy
industries) by following their policy wish list; a record number of cabinet appointees have
been forced to resign for being on the take. As for the author's example of Jeb Bush's
fundraising proving money doesn't secure nominiations, even that rings hollow. Because the
eventual nominee was such a phenomenon, the media covered him nonstop for two full years into
the election, essentially bestowing on him millions, if not billions, of free political
advertising. Finally, what was Citizens United--dark donor money hiding behind lofty-sounding
think tank names--if not rigging? It's classic pay to play. If buying politicians didn't
work, dark money groups wouldn't spend so much. 2 Replies
You don't need to believe "everything is rigged" to believe that our current system greatly
favors the interests of the rich and powerful. Or that a great deal of political advertising
is little more than bad-faith fearmongering.
We are living in a system where bribery is legal. It's called lobbying. I could go on. So I'm
sorry if I'm cynical sometimes, but frankly, it's better than naïveté.
Greg Weiner "a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute". And... there you go.
Climate change was universally scientifically identified as a real issue in 1969, i.e. 50
years ago. Being a problem for the commons, it cannot be 'seen' by the market. It must be
recognized as a problem by the government. And why, 50 years later, has our government never
formally recognized climate change as a problem? Greg Weiner "a visiting scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute". That is why. "Money doesn't buy politics", says the guy
accepting money to buy politics.
This article, an implicit defense of corporate and wealthy interests, is fundamentally
intellectually dishonest; the author totally neglects to mention the Citizens United decision
and how that has radically changed how money operates in our politics. We have millions of
dollars filtering through social media telling voters lies. The author also neglects to
mention the massive rise of income inequality, the fact that the fossil fuel industry is
still prospering despite a moral climate change threat. You know what probably doomed Hillary
Clinton's election? Many variables, but a key one was her taking all the money to speak at
Goldman Sachs. It destroyed her credibility. I'm sure the author thought it was just fine,
that it was "serving" her constituents. The old dinosaur, third way Democrats nearly killed
the party. Time for them to step aside. 16 Replies
I don't agree that with the comparison of a $25 to Sanders to protect Social Security is
anything like big Pharma contributions. Social Security is for the good of the whole.
@Independent thinker Votes win elections, but publicity paid for by campaign money get the
candidates on the ballot and on the tv ads. It's not coincidence that Mulvaney as a
congressman would only speak to donors at his office. It's not a coincidence that our
Congressmen told us they voted for an unfair, not middle-class tax bill to (their own words)
"pay back their donors." (And much of that campaign money comes from out of state......not
constituents. It's not a coincidence that the NRA gave 30 million alone to Trump in 2016 and
has for years contributed millions to other Congressmen, and therefore, McConnell will NOT
EVEN ALLOW an gun laws to be debated. It's not a coincidence that the two SCOTUS judges
chosen by Trump were vetted by monied organizations who mounted expensive campaigns for their
names to "buy" the third branch of government. It's not a coincidence that after the name and
party affiliation in a campaign there is a statement of their monetary war chests. Policy?
Mentioned only after an afterthought. If money is free speech (Citizens United), big
corporate and wealthy money speaks far louder than small constituent donations. (That's why
McConnell won't even allow gun laws to come up for debate.....or foreign election
interference.
Readers who can remember McCain-Feingold, back before Citizens United, are not fooled by such
sophistry as: "But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the
health insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the
grandmother who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. The two are
separated by degree rather than kind." 4 Replies
The gerrymander, voter suppression, the electoral college, are not conspiracy theories I'm
imagining. The voter suppression efforts of the Republican Party are not the product of
individual choices, their gerrymandering is likewise not the product of individual choices;
both are imposed by a small group of people meeting in secret rooms, in the case of the
gerrymander with the help of sophisticated computer programs.
@Tone Exactly. And we are a democracy made up of many grandmothers and others. And it would
take 1,000 of them to match the one health insurer giving $25,000.
It is correct that quid pro quo monetary corruption is rare. What corrupts politicians is the
reality that they must spend all their time grubbing for money. This creates an environment
where money talks.
I strongly disagree. Of course, the system is rigged against average Americans. You only have
to look at the recent tax cuts for the wealthiest in this country to know that the people
passing laws are doing so to benefit themselves, their friends, and their donors. Where are
working people and poor people and retired people in their calculations? They don't have the
wealth to sway that kind of policy or, for the most part, an elected voice in Congress. So
the benefits of the government go to those who do. If that's not a rigged system, I don't
know what is.
Mr. Wiener seems to have assimilitated both-siderism to the point where he can't distinguish
real differences between the two. Anyone who can conflate Donald Trump with Sanders or Warren
has an interesting view of the world, to say the least. There are two kinds of people who say
everything is corrupt: people who honestly believe it, and people who say it out of
projection. And then there are people who either can't or won't recognize corruption even
when it's right in front of them. "It would be healthier for politicians to make their best
arguments for their positions, let their opponents argue back and accept the realities that
defending one's own interests is normal, that honest people disagree, and that the candidate
who persuades more of them prevails." Mr Wiener has apparently been living on another planet
for the last several decades. "Normal" and "honest" are not words that can be applied equally
to both sides here, and "reality" is a concept one side has abandoned. It's much easier to
demagogue than it is to defend the indefensible; so much for honest arguments. Mr. Weiner
appears to be terrified that Democrats may be taking notice of this and starting to act on
it. Sometimes it's not cynicism to say the system is rigged. Sometimes it's an observation of
fact. And while making that observation, it's also useful to see who is doing the rigging and
who benefits from it. It's a necessary step if you want to do something about it. 1 Reply
Frederic Bastiat explained it completely in the mid-19th century. It worked then, it works
even better today: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over
the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral
code that glorifies it." We now glorify "the rule of law"even when that law is used to tax
labor in order to further enrich capital via laws written by the owners of capital. Well
done, boys.
James Murphy Providence Forge, Virginia Aug. 26 Times Pick
Both Sanders and Warren are absolutely right. Come the Revolution!
C'mon man. First place Bernie Sanders and Trump have less than zero in common and it's
disingenuous to pretend they do. Second, life is absolutely rigged in favor of people born
into a certain class. Money talks. That's a fact. Money also talks in politics. Ask Chief
Justice Roberts. He says money is political speech and corporations are people with religious
feelings and the right to "speak" with their big bucks. Then tell us the system isn't rigged.
2 Replies
I am now totally convinced that the $300m the healthcare industry - with its $3.5Tr in
revenues, higher than the GDP of all nations except China, Japan and Germany - contributes to
political campaigns has no more influence than my paltry $100. And of course there are no
links whatsoever between any of the various heads and operatives of governmental departments
and the industries they are supposed to be regulating, because there is no revolving door
between government and lobbying whatsoever. That is all a figment of my imagination, inflamed
by political posturing, as is any concern I might have about template legislation writing
organizations like ALEC, or indeed the energy industry's affect on the climate change debate.
The Koch Brothers have been donating millions because, well, what else are they going to do
with all that money? They clearly don't seriously expect anyone to be influenced by it. I
mean really, it stands to reason. Thank you for setting me straight.
If this author isn't convinced there's a powerful correlation between money and winning
elected office, and between money and national policy, he need only look at our poverty
levels and inequality stats, compared to other rich industrial democracies It's not a
"puritan strain" which leaves so many Americans disgusted with this system. It's the reality
of their lives. This pretty obvious, outside the halls of the American Enterprise Institute.
"Accusations of corruption are rooted in the assumption that one's positions are so obviously
correct that the only explanation for opposing them is that the opponent has been bought" It
is not just an assumption when it is true. Not when we can see it happen, when it is done
openly as "donations" with published lists for which the politicians spend fully half their
time begging on the phone or in person. The Supreme Court said in Citizens United, "this
Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do
not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." That is laughable. It is
absurd. It is a lie. It is why this is not an assumption but an in-our-face fact.
When it costs money to merely run for office, any office, money becomes a necessity for
political success. And when it costs hundreds of millions to even gain entry to the political
arena, those who can offer candidates more money than others have an advantage over those who
can't offer as much. Anyone with courage enough to argue the advantage isn't with those who
have the most money is braver than wise. Entry into politics is more cost dependent than
entry into Ivy League schools, and in those cases as well, money is a very highly determinant
factor in success. To argue otherwise requires tremendous powers of avoidance and denial. 4
Replies
Greg Weiner writes that the system is not rigged, but I wonder what other explanation he
offers for why the rich keep getting richer. Personally, I don't so much care if people are
rich, but I do object to their effort to translate their wealth directly into political
clout, and then to use that clout to alter the tax code and regulations in order to make
themselves even richer. There is no good justification for the system of legalized bribery
that we euphemistically call "campaign finance." Our government should represent citizens,
not the power of organized money.
When American workers have not had a meaningful pay raise in 40 years when adjusted for
inflation, and fat cat CEO pay has increased by 1,000 percent during the same time period,
something is rotten in Denmark. What do we call this rot? We call it a rigged system. In a
rigged system, the wealthy oligarths buy up political power, and they rewrite the laws and
rules in their favor (tax code, environmental regulations, health care, etc.) The wealthy one
pecent (e.g., people like the Koch brothers) contribute millions to political campaigns to
gain favor. The NRA contributed 30 million to the Trump campain in 2016. Politicians become
puppets of the ultra wealthy. For example, Trump just totally caved to the NRA's Wayne
LaPierre in one 30 minute phone call last week regarding new gun reform legislation. The
ultra wealthy buy and contribute to propaganda news media outlets in order to brainwash the
public. They mix in slick graphics, beautiful women, music and concerts, and flag waving to
hook viewers into watching. The ultra rich purchase expensive prime time TV commercials to
misinform the public and sling mud at rivals. So, how does one unrig the system? By calling
it what it is. And when either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren is president and the Senate
has a democratic majority again, the playing field will begin to untilt and level again (via
campaign finance reform, fair taxes, union creation, worker pay increases, universal health
care, etc.).
The Citizens United ruling, for one thing, permits corporations to spend as much money as
they like influencing politics. Money buys ad blitzes, astroturf campaigns, clout with
politicians through direct donations, funding bought-and-paid-for 'studies' with flawed
methodologies that conveniently align with their calls for deregulation. Anyone who claims
that economic power can't be translated into political power is either lying or ignorant of
reality. The USA needs leaders who will directly oppose this kind of plutocracy. As do all
nations who want to have any hope of preserving democracy...
The system is rigged. Republicans like Mr. Weiner have spent the past decades weakening the
rights of workers and making life easier for corporations and those at the top of them. It is
the conscious policy decisions pushed by republicans that creates the system that benefits
those at the top while those at the bottom see no benefits from their increased productivity.
It's not just the random effect of trillions of economic decisions: it's the policy of
republicans that skews the benefits towards those who invest capital and against those that
invest labor. The fact that Mr. Weiner doesn't seem to understand the importance of policy as
a senior aide to a senator should tell you just how unfit republicans are for governance and
how bereft their party is of ideas about how to improve the state of this nation. 2 Replies
CMS is legally prohibited from negotiating directly with pharmaceutical manufacturers by a
"non interference" clause. This clause exists only because the system is rigged. Who is
responsible for rigging the system? Answer: The Congress members and Senators who have
accepted money from the drug industry and who then drafted legislation for Medicare Part D
which included the non-interference clause. If this is not an example of rigged system, then
I don't know what is.
Assuming companies are rational and look out for themselves, why would the healthcare
industry spend over 500 million a year on lobbying if it were not buying influence? And if
the influence was already in the best interest of the common citizen why would it need to be
lobbied for?
Wow, that was one of the most naive editorials I have ever seen. There is quite a bit of
corruption in this country and what makes it stand out among the developed economies of the
world is that most of our corruption is legal. And small donations and large ones of the
wealthy may be philosophically analogous but in reality , the wealthy have out-sized power,
the ability to prevail. Our unofficial congressional leader recently passed, David Koch , was
able to stop a mass transit bid in Nashville in order to preserve our dependence on fossil
fuels. $25 donations to E. Warren have not that sort of power. This is so obvious but I
mention it only because Mr Weiner willfully ignores it 1 Reply
@TMSquared They no longer have to do it under the table. They've legalized influence
peddling, it is out in the open; except in places where they want to remain anonymous.
It is difficult to credit Mr. Weiner's sincerity here for one simple reason: He persists in
maintaining the fiction that money is spent in politics to buy votes. That is, perhaps, true
for about 10 percent of the money pumped into politics. The real story is that money in
politics is overwhelmingly used to buy politicians, not votes, and to give those politicians
cover for transforming corruption into public policy. This "cover" is created by by funding a
blizzard of half truths. clever misdirection, and outright lies. Often, voters literally
cannot tell where their own self-interests lies, yet they are convinced that they are under
attack by enemies, and that the people they vote for will protect them from those enemies and
fight for their interests. Sadly, this is completely untrue: Their "enemies" are actually
fellow citizens "in the same boat," and their elected representatives are literally in league
with their real enemies -- enemies who benefit not from the voters best interests, but from
their ignorance and docility. "Ms. Warren may wish to describe the results of those choices
as kicking "dirt" on workers," Mr. Weiner says, adding, "But there is no single identifiable
system doing the kicking." And here again we find that Weiner seems oddly baffled. To the
casual observer it seems obvious: The identifiable system is not single; it is aggregate! The
problem is not that we say the system is rigged. The problem is the truth, that the system IS
rigged.
The American Enterprise Institute propaganda machine posing as a think tank funded by Koch
Industries promoting eliminating the social safety net, was in favor of regime change in Iraq
thus bolstering up the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney argument of "weapons of mass destruction",
fewer protections for consumers & the environment. The AEI was also a think tank driver
producing position papers on the philosophy behind the "No Child Left Behind" legislation
which was disastrous for public education. In addition, the AEI favored Comcast's push for
consumer unfriendly net neutrality legislation deceptively labeled, "Restoring Internet
Freedom Order" which removed all federal oversight of the internet & put broadband
providers like Comcast in charge of oversight. Now broadband providers are allowed to amplify
messages & have the power to control narratives and thus shape perceptions &
perspectives. AEI also aligned with & accepted donations from the tobacco industry.
Believes that minimum wage hikes would be "disastrous" for the economy. Helped create doubt
about climate change research. Posited that the Dodd-Frank Wall St. reform legislation was
the "disastrously wrong approach" and supported hawkish military spending. The AEI received
over $20 million dollars in support from dark money PAC called "Donors Trust" many of whose
funders have ties to the Koch. In other words, Koch Industries shallowly funds think tanks
like AEI, buys up politicians, public media & fools the public.
I don't know where to start. I am still waiting for my head to stop spinning. This is
obviously a person who was so immersed in a corript system that he no longer sees it. It is
as if he has rationalized its acceptability because it is not as quid pro quo as Teapot Dome.
I am more concerned about what it is, not some extreme example of what it is not. Perhaps
this is his way of psychologically washing his hands clean. Except, unlike him I have not
drunk the koolaid. The fact that I cannot meet either one of my Senators without a huge check
in hand says everything about political speech in this country. People with means get an
audience and repeat their concerns backed by a promise of more money. My views are reduced to
poll numbers which are then massaged and messaged to try to move me to support the agenda of
people with means. Federal officials spend hours each week calling donors in a game of
dialling for dollars. I may get a robocall after pollsters and hacks have studied how to
wrangle my support for someone else's priorities. But I guess I must be living some
uninforned paranoid fantasy according to the author. Hey, I still have my vote, even with
gerrymandering, Russian intereference and the Electoral College. I guess I should stop
whining because democracy has never been greater.
This is perhaps one of the worst opinion pieces I've ever read. For a moment, I thought I had
mistakenly entered the warped dated world view of Mr. Murdoch's WSJ. "Trump Allies Target
Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House" Not rigged enough for you? They've
taken the old covert M/R Nixon Revenge Protocols to a whole new level, openly. It's not As
Though. It is Film Noir. That $25 to Warren is hardly the same as $25,000. Mr. Kerrey's Super
donor would likely have sacrificed this months Golf Club membership and Bar Tab fee, a trip
to Club Sapphire. The Warren donor will sacrifice their food or fuel allocation. Eat less and
walk to work. Think about the desperation people must feel, now sending their food budget to
candidates who not only have to earn a vote, but Overcome a Rigged election system influenced
by Bad Actors and countries with Unlimited Resources to destroy American Democracy. There are
too many legacy Politico's and News Organizations still trying to articulate this away, into
something that fits old time "normal" Gone With The Wind election winning narratives where we
all shake hands afterward. Those days are over, because the system is Hopelessly Rigged.
"Buckle up, It's Going to be a Bumpy Ride."
"But this "buys" elections only to the extent Mr. Sanders is claiming voters are passive
automatons incapable of discernment" And clearly *that's* not the case. I mean, just look to
the Oval Office; it's inhabited by the very avatar of discernment.
How would you describe a system that makes the vote of an American citizen from Wyoming count
3 time as much as the vote cast by a resident of California? Why does New York (with 19.5M
residents) elect 2 Senators, same as Kentucky (4.4M residents)? Why can Donald Trump become
president even though he lost the popular vote by 2.8M votes? Doesn't Citizen United allow
large corporations to buy an election, turning our democracy into a corrupt system where the
rich count more than ordinary people? Sorry Mr. Weiner, it's not shallow cynicism. The system
IS substantially rigged, and it must be changed. 4 Replies
Sorry, but when voter margins are wafer-thin, as in 2000 and 2016, then money and media
tricks make all the difference. And what about GOP voter suppression in Florida in 2000? And
gerrymandering in general, which destroys the concept of one-person-one-vote? Warren and
Sanders are spot-on with their comments. The system is rigged in favour of the rich. Last
night Fareed Zakaria emphasised the direct relationship, by juxtaposing geographical maps, of
premature death to poverty. This is yet another phenomenon that favours GOP demographics. I
frankly found the Op-Ed to be shallow and inhuman. Nothing will get changed with an
'everything's fine' attitude. Naturally, the GOP doesn't want any changes that could reduce
their wealth, power and influence. Mitch McConnell has already proven that.
Talking about shallow -- attempting to equate the influence of grandma's $25 with the
billions corporations spend to influence legislative and regulation is an absurd false
equivalence. As pointed out by Tone and others, grandma is a person and corporations are not.
Grandma whispers her interests almost inaudibly while lobbyists etch theirs permanently in
the sky and share them on stadium speakers 27/7 with the volume turned to 10. The influence
of the average voter moves toward zero while special interests purchase the government they
want. We are to the point where 90% of voters want serious gun regulation, but lobbyists pay
congress to successfully oppose it. This writer appears to be yet another well-compensated
voice of the swamp.
The thesis here is really objectionable and Pollyanna. Citizens United and the Republican
strangle-hold on electoral success through corrupt re-districting on their own amount to a
corrupted political system. The effect of the social media tampering by outside actors may
never be fully measured. To blithely dismiss the effect of massive media buying, not to
mention the thorough corruption of the information pool by a profit or ideology-driven Fox
News, and pretend that 'Gee, people are smart and can see through all that' is the really
false claim.
Interesitng article. I agree that puritanical arguments can be a bit tiresome; however, I
think you are overlooking some key elements in your analysis. The assumption of democracy is
that the candidates themselves represent the interests of the people. If the candidates are
not representative of the majority, then democracy, in fact, is bought and paid for, without
violating the principle [whoever has the most votes always wins the election]. Not violating
this principle does not require that the candidates be sufficiently representative of all or
the majority positions--and in many cases they are not. More clearly, we may have choices,
but the choices are limited to what is available to choose from. This makes the mechanism
that enables that choice important. If money or the backing of wealth or capital is required
to be or be made a choice, then money can both neglect and corrupt the ideal of democracy
without overtly corrupting voting machines or brain-washing people. It is a corruption in our
ability to choose what can be chosen from that, I believe, people are most angered by, not
the corruption that takes place after the possible choices we have has already been limited.
From this angle, the corruption can be viewed as so embedded in our current structures that
it always has probable cause for deniability, which you have so eloquently enumerated, whilst
behind the comforts of your assumptions and flawed design. 1 Reply
It doesn't seem like the "shallow cynicism" Mr. Weiner wants to criticise is so much cynicism
as it is intellectually lazy. There are many truly rigged aspects of our political system,
and many practices and conventions that are not. The two party system is an anachronism, but
it's not "rigged" by itself. The ability of corporate officers to spend hundreds of millions
of dollars of corporate money, financial resources owned by many thousands of people with no
voice in opposition, rigs our political system. It harms people every day. In most but not
all places, money itself does not buy votes and thus elections. Money's extensive use to
misinform voters with outright lies does rig elections. Its pernicious effect is amplified
when the candidate on the receiving end can't mount a counter response, even when my first
point, intellectual laziness, is involved. "Rigged" in this article is a rhetorical term that
encompasses a lot of recent standard operating procedures in our elections that win elections
and degrade our democracy by diminishing the equal value of a vote across the nation. Does
recognizing that make "shallow cynicism" seem meretricious? If it does, fix the system's
obvious flaws and leave the rhetoric for campaigners. 1 Reply
Maybe people think the system is rigged because David Koch had essentially 10 million votes
and I had one. He could get any congressperson or cabinet officer on the phone at his whim.
Do I get that? No. When every single person - and ONLY individuals - has the same political
power represented by one vote - then the system might be more fair. Until then, the rich rig
it for themselves.
Sure, the system isn't rigged any more than a trillion dollar bank heist is "rigged". But it
is organized, planned, and executed without a hitch because there are collaborators at the
bank. Personally I doubt if something as massive and meticulous as a rigged system is within
the scope of competence of the Republicans and their "Chosen One" (doesn't LeBron hold
copyright to that?). What is rigged is a white brotherhood looking out for each other as they
build invisible walls and teach the secret handshakes necessary to advance beyond merit. What
is curious -- as noted by numerous other comments -- is why Democrats and progressives
asserting their values is stigmatizing and shuts down debate while the Republicans (still "in
control" of 2.5 of the 3 branches of government) are the voice of reason and open dialogue
(as long as we live inside their contrived reality). Seizing the higher ground means
repudiating and rejecting the vocabulary of crazy that the GOP Ministry of Truth propagates.
The author's quandary really isn't one: A dialogue proceeds from shared assumptions and
premises otherwise it's futile. Also dialogue predicated on winning instead of consensus is
bad faith. Jeremy Bentham is useful here: whatever does the most good that benefits the most
people determines right or wrong. Rigging the system to enrich a few and sustain their wealth
is wrong. Rigging the system to benefit the most people -- universal health for instance --
is good.
This is a specious argument. For the typical voter, the costs of becoming educated about
public issues and actually voting itself dwarf the marginal impact of his/her vote on
elections outcomes. From the point of view of an individual, solely devoted to personal,
rather than civic, interests, it is economically irrational to vote, much less understanding
issues to inform that vote. In contrast, large corporations and other aggregated
concentrations of wealth, get huge returns for their investments in shaping legislation.
Their large expenditures permit them to bathe the electorate in a repetitive messaging stew
that uses sophisticated persuasion techniques to exploit well-understood cognitive flaws in
most people's decision-making. There's a reason that campaigns use micro-targeted messaging
individually tailored to the psychographic profiles -- because it works. Mr Weiner might
believe in some fantasy about free will and rational choice, but the advertising industry
(and the political pros who use them) have known better since the days of Edward Bernays. The
truth is that Mr Weiner knows this, too. He should walk down the hall at the AEI to ask his
colleague Norm Ornstein about it. 1 Reply
@CLletterkenny -- "'Bizarre populism'? I think the American public is savvy enough to realize
that the game is in fact rigged in favor of those who can pay..." What's bizarre is, the
near-complete media blackout of even commenting on the gaming of the Citizenry, that's what's
bizarre. It oughtta be Mainstream.
It's horrible. This mentality that everything is rigged, everyone is a racist (or sexust,
etc...) Is a hallmark of the kind of shallow cynicism that makes a society open to radical
ideologies like fascism and socialism. I agree with the author that we have to be careful. 2
Replies
" it seems to apply equally to the health insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right
to offer its product and to the grandmother who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect
Social Security. " Sorry false equivalence a corporation is not a person. Also, no matter
what the court says money is not speech; money should be limited and transparent.
Greg Weiner is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Hint, hint. It is
within his interests and indirectly, his paycheck to say that $100,000 from a corporation to
a politician buys no more influence than an individual's contribution of $25 to a candidate.
Rest assured that the opinions of the corporation will be given a lot more of an ear than
those of the individual contributor! 1 Reply
@Tone Obviously, the author agrees with Citizen's United that "Corporations are people too."
The system IS rigged. I'm not a shallow cynic, just realistic enough to know that the U.S. is
all about the golden rule-- those with the gold make the rules and there is nothing the rest
of us can do about it.
One must wonder what the problem is. Why does the claim that the system is rigged seem to
ring so true to so many? This looks like a language problem - taking issue with the actual
word used - 'rigged' - rather than with the understanding that word is used to evoke - that
things do seem to work against so many of us while those with money and status have no such
problem, whether the topic is federal policy-making or local traffic court. Political
language aimed at the common voter is not intended to win philosophical arguments; it is
intended to manipulate behavior. We know from several decades of experience that advertising
works even when its claims are not true. No one's vote will be changed by applying the
socratic method to ad copy. 1 Reply
The difference between the twenty five dollar contribution and the twenty five thousand
dollar contribution is not just one of scale. The twenty five dollar contributer has almost
certainly heard what Bernie said and is supporting his opinion. The twenty five thousand
dollar contributer is almost assuredly trying to buy influence. Big difference. As for the
system being rigged, it is more a matter of laziness and our inability to do nuance in this
country. Throwing up one's hands and just saying the entire system is rigged is one thing.
Citing specific instances is quite another. 2 Replies
Amazing. I wonder if the author is aware that some if not all of the GOP's policy choices are
not simply different ways to achieve the common good but rather different ways to extract as
much as possible firm the working and middle classes in order to feather the nests of the
very, very, very wealthy. The column shows either a total lack of awareness or a willful
blindness that is often seen in those who livelihoods depend on making those in control
happy. When a party take an all or nothing approach, where is the common ground? I assume the
author wants Democrats to say something like "we accept that billionaires should be able to
control our lives and poison us for fun and profit all we ask is that they are not so brazen
about it" and then bow politely and back out of the room. 1 Reply
I don't even know where to begin. Conflating Sanders and Trump's candidacies demonstrates
either disingenuousness or complete lack of appreciation of nuance. And writing off the
obvious fact that it is WRONG that we have $millions in dark money in politics, usually paid
by corporations that are most active in destroying our planet, by comparing it to a grandma
donating $25 to a candidate because she is likely terrified that retirement money from a
program she paid into her entire life might be taken from her, is so ridiculously far fetched
that it could have been published in The Onion. There is corruption at every level of
politics. It's pervasive, but that doesn't mean it's RIGHT. Usually, those with presidential
ambitions and good intentions dive in the "swamp" in local politics, and hope they make it to
the other end with enough remaining integrity and political capital to do something decent.
Warren and Sanders are the first serious candidates with good intentions that chose not to
jump into that swamp, but instead have fought for decades for what is right, without getting
immersed in the murky world of political donations or quid pro quo. The author tries to paint
that as sanctimonious and stubborn. What I see is uncompromising ethics and a relentless
drive to help people. It's different from what we are used to, but I truly believe that it
generally boils down to right and wrong; I really hope articles like this don't keep us from
making the right decision. 2 Replies
Creating a false equivalence between Trumps cynical dishonesty and Warren and Sanders
accurate and unremarkable description of reality is the truly shallow cynicism here. It would
be disappinting from an average op-ed author. From a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and professor at a Catholic liberal arts school where "faith and
academics are interwoven, its about average.
The author's argument is unpersuasive. Campaign contributions have a great effect. His point
that it doesn't "buy" elections, but only seeks to "persuade" voters is not a meaningful
distinction. Corporate spending on electoral candidates is money well spent. If it didn't
have the desired effect to "persuade" voters it wouldn't occur. The only debate that people
of good conscience should have is whether it should be permitted and if so how it should be
regulated.
This article would never have been published if there wasn't a lot of money behind it -
channeled through the AEI. Without such support it would be recognized as just as nonsensical
as a flat earth. In this respect it disproves itself. The main function of money in politics
is not to provide arguments that can be ignored. It is to provide noise that drowns out any
public discussion and establishes itself as a kind of fake "consensus". As such it is very
harmful to the democratic process.
@TMSquared The GOP's constituency tends to have better lawyers and lobbyists (because they
have more money). So they are better at making sure their kind of corruption is legal. Their
Supreme Court has been cooperative. Readers can probably name the cases.
Reading this, I begin to see the great chasm between those who accept the Robert's decision
on Citizens United and the majority (by polling) of Americans who are against that decision.
And I despair. Paraphrasing Weiner, he sees no difference between a health insurer donating
$25,000 to "maintain its right to offer its product" and the grandmother who donates $25 to a
candidate asking (him) to protect social security. Right off, there is the confusion of
"health insurer," which suggests a person with "its rights," "it" being the pronoun for a
"thing." So corporations and people are so intertwined in some minds, even personal pronouns
get mixed up. Also, there's an easy confusion of who this candidate is supposed to represent:
a health insurer who is an "it" or the grandmother. Weiner says corruption is difficult to
define. Wrong. The straight forward definition is a fraudulent or dishonest conduct, often in
the form of a bribe. It is fraudulent for an elected representative of the public to work for
the interests of a corporation or of individuals representing other entities than the persons
that elected this candidate. Then there's the amount: the health industry spends millions of
bucks getting on the good side of candidates. A $25 contribution doesn't even match up to
Bernie's average campaign contribution of 2016, which was $27. Prices vary, but few
politicians can be bought for $25. That is why it is honorable for candidates to refuse large
donations.
So it is ok that the corporate interest donates 25k and the grandma 25 so has 1000 times more
influence? The CORPORATION is not a person and should not have any vote at all since
corporations work in the best interests of themselves not human beings. The country is
supposed to be "by the people for the PEOPLE" not for the corporation!
Greg Weiner, 'a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute' is upset by Sanders
and Warrens take on the role of money in the governmental process. The electoral process one
that required thousands of $$ now wants millions and gets them. He injects 'the voter' as the
purifying element: "It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral
majority wanting something specific that it has not eventually gotten." Really? Elizabeth and
Bernie see the connection between money promised and given and outcomes as "politicians are
purchased" and results in the halls of congress. Weiner one suspect is opposed to the
language used, not the outcome. His employer likely pleased with such an attack; but is that
cynical?
Hmmm. The Senate Majority Leader has spent the last 30 plus years of his life working in
Washington, roughly zero net worth when he started. He is now worth somewhere north of $25
MM. But this is the cleanest government has ever been?!? I'm reminded of the song "Little Tin
Box," from "Fiorello." 1 Reply
I think pretending to see no differences between Trump and either Sanders or Warren is simply
too cute for words. I'm not a huge Sanders fan, but to pretend he has no policy notions is
getting a bit threadbare. So, for that matter, is the constant parade of Republicans claiming
it's all the democrats' fault and urging the party to nominate a republican to salve their
consciences for foisting Trump off on an innocent world.
Independent thinker Pennsylvania Aug. 26 Times Pick
Thank you, Mr. Weiner, for your thoughtful editorial. Having read many of the comments, the
one point that people seem to not have grasped is that votes win elections. That requires
someone to convince huge numbers of people to walk into a private voting booth and "pull the
lever" for them. That doesn't require money – that requires persuading people that you
will represent their interests. And in the House, that means showing up 2 years later to that
same voter and proving you did vote for their interests. The cynicism in most of the comments
is that they believe the average American is a dupe – they will vote against the things
that matter to them. In 2018 Conor Lamb, a democrat, won in my district, a district Trump won
by a landslide, by convincing voters he would defend Social Security and Medicare, as well as
our gun rights and union representation. That is apparently what matters to the people in our
district. And he has to show up in 2020 and prove to people he voted as he said he would
– and defend his ideas against a challenger who may have different ideas. That is the
beauty of American democracy. Its not rigged at all. Indeed, the mid-term 2018 elections saw
innumerable democrats win in supposedly republican gerrymandered districts. I am puzzled that
the comments here bring up the Electoral college as evidence of the system being rigged. So
the Presidential election has been rigged since the founding of the country? Now that is
cynicism. 16 Replies
I used to think that America stood for fairness and something we call democracy. But the
evidence is otherwise. Citizens United confirmed that corporations can buy elections.
Stacking the Supreme Court by denying confirmation of a justice by a duly elected President.
Mitch McConnell blocks many bills from ever coming to a vote. Oil and gas companies buying
favorable rulings on pollution. Gerrymandering not seen as an issue by the Supreme Court
(this is a complete travesty equal to Dred Scott). Etc. Rigged---yes. Hopeless, that too.
Saying that corruption is at an all time low, masks the action of making what was once
illegal or questionable, legal. Citizen's United is but one example.
@Independent thinker: "people seem to not have grasped is that votes win elections" ignores
GOP gerrymandering and big money in politics (lobbying - $3.8 billion in 2018), stacking the
judiciary with pro-business judges, campaign contributions, Citizens United, legislative
manipulation). It's a complicated mess and simplistic tropes like "votes win elections"
ignores these other contributing yet gargantuan issues. 16 Replies
First he says that money doesn't influence the vote... Then he says "Ms. Warren's ambitious
plans to remake the economy are doomed unless she is elected along with a Democratic Senate,
which will only happen if money is spent to persuade voters to dislodge entrenched Republican
incumbents" Nothing more to add. So, do we need money to get votes or not? In addition, he
compares Trump with Sanders, and 25,000$ contribution from a corporation with a 25$
cotnribution from a granma. If he cannot see the differences, he is dumbfolded by his pro
stablishment bias, or he has bad faith. I don't think he is not smart enough to see the
difference. 1 Reply
Here is your final statement: It would be healthier for politicians to make their best
arguments for their positions, let their opponents argue back and accept the realities that
defending one's own interests is normal, that honest people disagree, and that the candidate
who persuades more of them prevails. This is not possible in my district, where House
Minority Leader Kevin McConnell represents me. He tells outrageous lies to mischaracterize
and lambast any issues raised by the Democrats. Case in point: election reform. There was no
'arguing back' or stating an alternate position. He simply lied about the content of the
proposed legislation, with no counter-arguments whatsoever. And the lies were of Trumpian
dimensions. He has learned from his mentor Donald Trump and has become an obstructionist,
much like Trump has, using lies to demolish points of view he does not share.
So,you don't believe that we went from post WWII middle income prosperity to today's
staggering wealth inequality by design? Check out Jack Nichols' work on uncovering A.L.E.C.,
a platform in which corporate lawyers write templates for state laws. That is definitely an
example, on a systemic scale, of buying influence. It is legal to buy such influence in
America. In other words, corruption, at least in some forms, is legal here. And you will hear
politicians say, when caught in some quid pro quo arrangement, "I did nothing illegal."
They're right. But doing what is legal isn t always the same as doing what is ethical.
So, you are telling us that the workings of government consistently go against what the
public wants - skewed toward the rich always - and there is no corruption? Does anyone over
the age of 10 believe this?
I have tried, but have failed, to not label most of this reasoning as sophistry. All one
needs to do is study the history of the Koch Brothers with their sustained and sophisticated
propaganda program that brought ideas that should have stayed in the cold into the
mainstream. It is sophistry to try to avoid labelling their programs as "rigging the system."
As Bob Dylan and others said "money doesn't just talk, it swears"....(or "screams.") It is
not an insult to say that regular people who have been just trying to live normal
lives--turned off by politics-- are susceptible to such sophisticated manipulations....
There's an awful lot of sophistry to be dealt with, in this essay. I'll mention just one
example: the equation of "the health insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to
offer its product" with "the grandmother who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect
Social Security." The problem with that equation appears in the word "its" ("its right to
offer its product"). The grandmother, or whoever, is a human being; a citizen; an
enfranchised voter; one of the nation's people, in whom its sovereignty resides. The health
insurer is none of those things. The difference is not simply one of degree. It is, above
all, a difference in kind. 1 Reply
obviously the grandmother and the insurer are separated by kind, not degree. one votes, the
other does not, something of central significance in an electoral system. The insurer - a
legal convention - claims a voice by conflating its rights with those of voters. That is
corruption.
I have only one question: if the system is not rigged, then why do so many wealthy people and
organizations spend so much of their resources trying to rig it? 2 Replies
Professor Weiner is unable to identify a specific system that is working against the
interests of workers (to put it less colorfully than the language cited in the article). I
think I can help him. That system is capitalism. And while we can agree that
anthropomorphization is generally not helpful, there's no need for it here. Capitalism is the
initiative of real people: capitalists. The small minority of the population who own and
direct the firms, and for whom the earnings of employees are costs to be minimized. The idea
that it's an impersonal system, or mathematical necessity, as the economists teach, is
erroneous. 1 Reply
Not a word about income inequality - almost certainly the main reason that the middle and
working classes perceive a corrupt system working against them. And if course no solutions to
address income inequality, as the writer seems to assert it's all in our heads. But if
average income has not really increased, yet it's quadrupled for the very well off, well,
what's this if not a "rigged system"? 1 Reply
This article relies on the assumption that politics, as it stands in the United States, is
pursued on the basis of rational deliberation at its core. Big money (foreign and domestic,
personal, and multinational corporations) run propaganda enterprises that would put to shame
any State-run-Media on the globe.
The old Union song, "Which Side Are You On", is not as simple as it sounds. It crystalized
out of the confusion, animosity, and conflict of the last great Gilded Age and Labor
organizing era, and it did so for a reason. Corporate monopolies and chokeholds on power and
influence are very real and are more prevalent now than was the case in the decades following
the New Deal. Greg Weiner may not have heard of Rifkin's "Treadmill Of the Higher
Immorality", or may not think that the Koch Network's role in winning Citizen's United
displayed any extraordinary control over the political and economic system. He may not see a
problem with congressional representatives who spend the majority of time seeking campaign
donors (who of course expect payback and who are overwhelmingly the 1%). He doesn't mention
the possibility of other ways of organizing the electoral system. He doesn't talk about the
congressional-lobbyist pipeline. He seems to suffer from the idea that PR and advertising
don't work, as well as the idea that people can be relied upon to be rational in their
decision-making process in an economy, as well as with their votes. The claims by Sanders and
Warren of a rigged economic system are not comparable to Trump's delusional fabrications
about the integrity of The US vote gathering system, and any resemblance to Trump in their
articulations of economic injustice are superficial at best. A simple delve into Pickety
shows a slanted playing field. The Union song was right 1 Reply
Mr. Weiner claims to be a political scientist. If so, he should be at least minimally aware
of the work of Martin Gilens (of Princeton) and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, who used
quantitative methods, not pundit wisdom, to analyze legislation in Congress. The conclusion -
which I take from their abstract - is: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on
U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or
no independent influence." Or in layman's terms - politics in America is rigged for the
wealthy. Also, the sky is blue and water is wet. 1 Reply
"The Drug Industry's Triumph Over the DEA" (Washington Post article from October 17, 2017)
details precisely how powerful monied interests can indeed win elections and influence the
people ( Congress) who make our laws. In an absolutely disgraceful move, GOP congressmen,
working against the DEA and for their drug industry masters, changed the law allowing the DEA
to freeze shipments of prescription drugs where they were shown to pose an "imminent threat"
to public health and safety. The law was reworded to " immediate threat," diminishing greatly
the ability of the government to control the distribution of harmful drugs. This change in
the law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to stop the drug industry's negligent
distribution of prescription drugs, and is believed to be a major cause of the terrible Opiod
epidemic we are facing today. So yes, there is corruption in government caused by corporate
"bribery" of our elected officials.
Corporate lobbyists and PACs control the Congressional legislative process not only through
election contributions and political pressure, but through the revolving door between
politicians and corporate jobs, and close social interaction. Quid pro quo deal-making is
illegal, but selling influence is not, and is in fact the norm. Both rural white Christians
who support Trump and young people, minorities, and the multicultural working class who
support Sanders and Warren believe the system is rigged. Numerous studies have shown
legislatures at federal and state levels ignore popular opinion and support corporate
positions. The political and economic ruling elites have disagreements, but on maximizing
corporate profits and U.S. international power, they are a single group. There are so many
well-documented ways corporations and banks work with politicians to benefit the
one-percenters at the expense of the people, Weiner's commentary is ridiculous to the point
of being fake news.
Marx's analysis that capital accumulation unrestrained will concentrate wealth into an ever
smaller number of hands has never been more relevant. Assuming that most people find this
prospect untenable, Marx argued that a violent revolution was necessary to usher in the
dictatorship of the working class. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, offers the sensible
solution that we would try restraining capital concentration. That doesn't sound extremist to
me. 5 Replies
I find the whole column absurd. What characterizes American political campaigns is
corruption, never mind that the corruption is legal. To equate a $25 contribution by a grand
mother to $25000 from some wealthy individual or institution and then pretend they have equal
weight is ridiculous. Corporations give large campaign signaling the candidates that the
contribution may vanish next time if legislation they favor is nixed or one they hate is
passed. The difference is that whatever benefits the grand mother will usually benefit the
whole society, the same cannot be said for what helps the bottom line of a corporation,
particularly if the corporation happens to be in the oil business or in the weapons business.
There is no question that since Reagan much more legislation has helped corporations and
wealthy individuals than the common good and that has played an important role in producing
the gross income inequality we see today. Yes, voters have the final word but corporations
would not flood the airwaves for or against some legislation and lavishly support candidates
that will do what they want if those expenses had no impact on elections.
Money buys media time which does influence voters. But the true corruption from money comes
not from elections, but what the politicians do after elected, which serves to enrich
themselves and the already wealthy. The rising inequality in this country testifies to that.
In re to: "Critics of the campaign finance system typically warn of a rigged "quid pro quo"
arrangement, in which a donor contributes to a campaign on the assumption that the recipient
will support the donor's interests. But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to
apply equally to the health insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its
product and to the grandmother who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social
Security." The difference, as research including an exhaustive, data-driven study by
Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin Page is, as
they explain it: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups
representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy,
while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence." In short, the health insurer influences policy, while the grandmother has little
or no power. Let's not pretend otherwise.
What you need to know about the corrupting influence of money in politics can be summed up in
two numbers. The Times reports that our congresspeople spend FIVE hours of every day raising
money for their next election -- five hours courting donors, five hours convincing them they
will be worth their donors' money. And after the NRA donated $30 million to Trump's campaign
(his largest single donor, if memory serves), it only took ONE phone call from Wayne La
Pierre to change this president's stance on background checks in the wake of the El Paso
shootings. So Weiner argues that it's "cheap cynicism" to suggest elected officials pay more
attention to those healthcare insurers who donate multimillions than to the grandmothers who
donate $25? Maybe he needs a refresher course in the arithmetic of investment.
This is overreach: "It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral
majority wanting something specific that it has not eventually gotten." Universal background
checks. Limits on targeted tax preferences for established individuals and businesses.
Modifications to corporate structures that require the corporation to be responsible for its
impacts on society, rather than merely offering that option (B corp, or traditional corp with
a board that is responsible to a broadly-defined range of stakeholders, or employee-owned
business, or customer-owned business). 1 Reply
What fantasy world does Greg Weiner live in? "American politics has never been cleaner of
classic corruption -- of the cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety -- than it is now?"
Only if one views corruption that now flourishes in plain sight rather than under the table
as somehow cleaner! "(T)he candidate with the most votes, a commodity that cannot be legally
bought or sold, always wins?" Sure, why bother buying votes when purging voter registration
lists, closing polling stations where your opponents live and engaging in other entirely
legal means of voter supression will do the job? Weiner conflates self-interest with
corruption in a transparent attempt to get us to dismiss the evidence of our own eyes and
ears. There is actually surprising consensus among the electorate on sensible gun control
laws, health care delivery, taxes, social security, climate change, most of the major issues
all the way down the line. But because both parties are completely captured by their
corporate and one per cent donors and serve only their interests, the result is paralysis.
Average citizens having no fist full of cash to wave can't get an audience with their
representatives, while for monied lobbyists the door is always open. Campaign finance has
become legalized bribery. This has gone on for so long that Weiner regards it as normal. It
isn't. Corruption is not at an all time low simply because it has been institutionalized. 2
Replies
@ChristineMcM Good point. I wonder what Greg Weiner thinks the black-box SuperPACs are, if
not under-the-table? True, we know what they spend, but we don't know whose money it is. And
then there are the phony "social welfare organizations", which by law are allowed to keep
their donors secret but may not attempt to exert political influence. The IRS was long since
intimidated into letting them spend much of their money on politics, and recently was
intimidated by the GOP (and only the GOP) into giving them a free pass to spend entirely on
political influence -- that includes influencing the public by advertising for or against a
candidate. That's what passes for over-the-table at present.
Perhaps, Mr. Weiner, you can indulge me in a bit of thinking from never-never land. Suppose
for one moment that all campaign contributions to those seeking congressional seats or to
those seeking the presidency were kept confidential. Candidates were not informed who
contributed to their cause nor the amount donated. Do you think, for one minute, that policy
outcomes emanating from Washington would be no different today if our elected officials had
no clue as to where their campaign donations came from? Or, let's put it another way, if
those donating knew that their contributions must, by law, remain anonymous, do you think
campaign spending would remain unchanged? 2 Replies
"Corruption" does not necessarily take the form of "the cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome
variety". What we are witnessing under the Trump administration is regulatory capture that is
stripping government agencies of the power to control the kind of corporate greed that sees
the pollution of water as an opportunity to make more money, the pollution of air as
"collateral damage", and all taxes as confiscatory. When foxes are appointed to guard the
henhouses or incompetent hacks are appointed to key government positions the corruption is
subtler than "the cash-under-the-table"... but it is equally insidious and damaging to the
public's faith in government. But if, like the GOP, one believes that "government is the
problem" this loss of faith is not a bug in the system, it's a feature.
Or it could be that things really are 'rigged', that everything and everybody is somehow 'for
sale', particularly those in politics; and that the only people who object to this
meaningfully are those without enough money to participate in the rigged system. We have "The
Best Government Money Can Buy" - and until that changes with full public financing of
election politics, and strict spending limits (starting with disabusing the notion that
'money is political speech'), we won't be able to change it. Every special interest, every
politician, and every wealthy person looking to use the government to further increase their
wealth, will work against this. Those in favor will be divided, persuaded, and lied to to
prevent it. In the end, meaningful change may only come about after a collapse of the entire
society, as the 'divide and rule' cynicism practiced by the current political class enflames
and burns down the country.
The system is rigged, lobbyists are spreading money in Congress and politicians are doing
their bidding. If this isn't the case, please explain to me how it is that with the
overwhelming majority of Americans in favor of gun control nothing is done. The only reason I
can think of is the monetary influence of the NRA and so we move from massacre to massacre so
that the gun manufacturers can continue to make money. If we don't remove unlimited amounts
of money from elections, we will continue to have the government paid for by the special
interests.
steven from Barrytown, NY, currently overseas Aug. 26
The difference between the private insurance company that spends - $25,000 but $2.5 million
to spread their message and the grandma sending Sanders or Warren $25 is not just one of
scale. That grandma's family members are in the HANDS of the insurance company and their
lives, homes and well being depend on its willingness to pay for their health care. The
grandma is defending democracy and the company is maintaining the kind of power that is
incompatible with a republic.
"For her part, Ms. Warren thinks it is corrupt for the wealthy to defend their economic
interests, but her campaign also plays to what she believes is the self-interest of her
supporters. Why is one corrupt but not the other?" Because in the first case, it is far more
reasonable to assume that the financial interventions of the wealthy will have an effect, and
there are far fewer competing claims. In the second case, no-one genuinely believes that the
$25 will have any effect on policy, and there are hundreds of thousands of different and
competing claims. The problem is not claims on representation per se, but the outsize claims
that the wealthy can make. The problem is not the contribution of money to support campaigns,
but the outsize contributions that are reasonably assumed to have outsize effects on
considerations for the donors.
Lower capital gains tax, Hedge fund managers taxed at capital gains vs income, commercial
real estate depreciation of property, Amazon not taxed at all, enough said.
The difference in my 25 dollar donation vs a 25,000 donation is that I seek out the
candidates that already share my opinions. The 25k donor seeks to change candidates opinions
and behaviors and they do. 1 Reply
One simple experiment. Have one person donate $500000 to a campaign and a second person
donate $5 then see which one can get the candidate on the phone. My prediction is that Money
buys access, and access gives influence.
For a political scientist the author is rather naive. Take two examples for instance: gun
control and health care. In both cases big money has corrupted the system such that the will
of the majority is overridden by strong lobbies who have essentially "bought" congresspersons
to vote against the majority of people. Corruption has turned our democracy into an
oligarchy. 1 Reply
@Russell "... While both grandma's $25 for Bernie and a corporate gift of $250,000 to an
"independent" PAC supporting Trump are gifts meant to influence a political outcome " Agree
completely. I believe "false equivalency" between granny and corp gift to a PAC to buy
influence also applies in this instance also.
The president's current chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, maintained a policy while "serving" as
a House member of not meeting any constituent who had not first donated $$ to his reelection
fund. His work on behalf of predatory lenders to mothball the Consumer Protection Bureau
would render him a villain on par with Disney's Cruella if it didn't typify business as usual
among our crony capitalists.
Except that you are ignoring the fact that there is a lot of corruption, and that ending it
will make life better and fairer for a lot of people. One of the things I like about
Elizabeth Warren is that she identifies specific issues that she needs to change and the
plans for those changes. It wouldn't be easy and I doubt anyone could get it all done, but it
is a worthy goal. This is not at all how Trump uses the notion of "rigged", which for him is
anything that works against him personally. Hers is a goal to make things better for most
people. People like you (and probably Bob Kerry) are happy to let things go as they are in
this respect, since there are on the comfortable end of the current situation.
While this makes for a pleasant theoretical argument it is far from our current reality. The
flaws of our system are exploited, by both parties, to further entrench themselves at our
expense. When a district is gerrymandered to like a tentacled monster it's hard to believe
that's anything other than a party in power trying to take as many seats as they're able.
Redistricting engineers have said as much. Vote manipulation through closing polling places
or creating barriers that make it harder for people to vote do the same. Neither has anything
to do with creating a fair voting system. Nor has the elimination of the Voting Rights Act,
the void of which has been filled with laws that seek to bias the voter base. When SCOTUS
ruled on Citizens United it suggested that Congress pass something to stop outsized corporate
donations and SuperPACs with hidden donations that can invest in elections with reckless
abandon. While you SAY that money doesn't equal votes the data supporting that contradicts
you. Even if candidates are funded by corporations, the one with the biggest war-chest
typically wins. Money equals voice and the voiceless are powerless. It's one of the reasons
the Times often reports on candidate donations. They're a bellwether of more than just
grassroots support. Unfortunately the people who can change this system have all been elected
by it, so yes, there's a problem. And anyone who doesn't see that is part of it.
"That voters are not simply dupes of contributors is clear from the fact that, in the 2016
Republican primary, when Jeb Bush was a powerhouse fund-raiser and Donald Trump relied on the
cost-free device of Twitter, there was little evident correlation between money spent and
votes received." Oh, please. Networkd TeeVee was fascinated with Trump and tripped all over
themselves to "donate" tons and tons (a couple Billion'$ worth? so I've heard) of Free
Airtime. CBS said, 'he may be horrific, for America, but our Bottom Line is currently
exquisite!' or words to that effect. But, what else can one expect, from
wholly-corporate-owned TeeVee? In-kind donations do not equal zero. If Propaganda didn't
work, would they still spend Billions, on it?
@mainliner socialism is not radical. It's moderate and not nearly as ideological and
inflexible as a one party communism or other totalitarian dictatorships that are based on
cult of personality of the leader. The one's that Trump likes so much because he has the same
egomaniacal power lust mentality as those tyrants.
@Thomas Zaslavsky: Agreed. Weiner may be technically right that money isn't passing hands by
passing bags of money, but it's passing nonetheless through favored legislation, tax breaks,
outsized inauguration funding, and in the case of this president, frequenting his numerous
properties.
The most important issues of the day (e.g. re-organizing health insurance, financing
retirement, regulation of banks, energy policy, environmental protection) are inherently
complex. Corporate interests have hundreds of lobbyists who have ready access to senators and
representatives, whereas the public at large has a handful of lobbyists protecting their
interests. Corporate lobbyists often write regulatory language in complex legislation, and
bills are passed that most legislators have not read or do not understand. Consequential
legislation cannot pass in the senate without a super majority, which makes it difficult to
enact reforms that a large majority of the public supports. Legislators spend at least
one-third of their time raising money, and the people who give them a lot of money have
greater access. Right wing interests now have their own radio and television networks that
are essentially propaganda machines, with the fairness doctrine long gone. When legislators
and regulators retire, they know that they can get lucrative work from corporate
interests--and this influences their work. All of this is perfectly legal and quite corrupt.
1 Reply
Mr. Weiner you wrote, "What Mr. Sanders means to say, of course, is that money allows those
with an opinion on, or a stake in, a given issue to buy the means of persuading voters that
the spenders are right." I am not sure that is what Sen. Sanders meant. Explain to me how the
NRA is able to freeze any policy that may affect it negatively, how the Koch Bros and the oil
lobby has been able to write policy and get some subsidies. I read about this and was
baffled, these companies literally print money and they get some more from the Government?
Then we have Mr. Adelson who gave a boatload of money for the Trump election campaign and
mysteriously the U.S. move the Embassy to Jerusalem and Mr. Netanyahu is given the green
light to annex the West Bank, if he so wishes. The Palestinians and their cause have been
cast aside. I am sure there are other examples a closer observer of Washington politics can
identify but I think you have been out of politics for a while to comment authoritatively on
what is going on today.
@David I am intrigued by your statement that you "will take a pass on Elizabeth Warren," and
that her views today "are the exact opposite of what she argued forcefully some years ago."
Apparently, according to your standards, people in politics aren't allowed to change their
minds. That view tends to limit another person's freedom to grow, don't you think? I, for
one, am happy that I have changed my mind about many positions I held twenty years ago.
Rigidity can be a dangerous posture. Witness the old saying, "The tree that will not bend
will surely break." One of my many beefs with Trump is that he never considers there might be
an error in any part of his thinking. Regarding Greg Weiner, the author of this opinion
piece, I was interested to learn he is a member of the American Enterprise Institute, so I
checked the organization out on Google. The AEI is a right-wing group that "argues for lower
taxes, fewer protections for consumers, and cuts to the social safety net." Knowing this,
Weiner's stabs at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren make sense now.
"It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting
something specific that it has not eventually gotten." Well, then, could we be on the cusp of
a big change in gun laws?
You say "Anthropomorphizing economic "systems" that are actually the products of trillions of
individual choices further confuses the issue. Ms. Warren may wish to describe the results of
those choices as kicking "dirt" on workers, but there is no single identifiable system doing
the kicking." The identifiable system is the one you are busily denying in that paragraph. It
is the one that says it is the sole organizing principle and the goal of a democratic
society. It is the one that values the Market as the be all and end all. It is identifiable
and the New Deal identified it and put the people first, as a government should. But then
people like you came along and said it did not exist as a system needing regulation while at
the same time praising it as the perfect substitute for government Part of the system is its
intellectual justification; it is this column. Which is it? A market capitalist system that
has ultimate value or nothing at all?
Elizabeth Fuller Peterborough, New Hampshire Aug. 26
What planet are you living on, Mr. Weiner? If it is true that American politics has never
been cleaner than it is now, then we have had the wool pulled over our eyes by not only
politicians but also a silently compliant press, which would be enough to merit cynicism. But
it isn't true. Thank goodness for the press that points out daily not only the corruption of
our president, but also of his supporters in Congress whose corruption goes well beyond that
support. Cash-under-the-table corruption of the Teapot Dome variety does still exist, just
more cleverly laundered now. But there are things more valuable than money to people who
already have more of it than they can spend or sock away in offshore accounts. Power is now
the gold standard for those who want to be the kings of the castle -- the chosen ones --
those who need to convince not only others but also themselves that they are superior and
worthy of respect. What Warren and Sanders are fomenting is not cynicism; it is just the
opposite. They are saying that for too long we have been cynical, shrugging our shoulders at
a system that is rigged. Finally it is time to show we will no longer accept that system and
do what is necessary to make sure society works for all. It's time to move on from saying,
"Oh, well," to, "Enough is enough."
Did you notice there is no discussion in the Senate because McConnell shut it down and uses
it to railroad conservative judges through the system. Rigged or not, our government is
failing most of the people in the US and yet, are benefits get cut and our taxes are raised.
And frankly, I think Trump and some Republicans are rigging the system. Would you call
gerrymandering rigging the system? That's how the most liberal city in Ohio has far right
representative, Freedom Fighter, Jim Jordan. Would you feel you have a voice if district
borders are redone to make sure a Republican is elected? Isn't that rigging? 1 Reply
See Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites,
Interest Groups, and Average Citizens There has been some criticism of this paper and its
methodology. Anyone who reads it has a duty, of sorts, to review the criticism. But the
bottom line is that public opinion is little more than background white noise. The rich and
powerful, the corporate and CEOs determine what American policy is and what it is not. Greg
Weiner doesn't address this issue and thus says little of value.
If Trump and the powers that be are serious about squashing the fears of the american people
concerning our electoral process, they can do so by instituting fair and open voting
practices such as undo gerrymandering, increase the number of voting places, increase the
times they are open, outlaw voting machines that do not countable paper ballots and not allow
those running for office to control voting procedures ala Kemp in Alabama. And most of all
take powerful steps to stop Russian meddling, something the GOP has allowed to happen.
Shouting rigged is not wrong when there is clear evidence that the potential and practice
clearly exist. 1 Reply
@Greg Jones, I can't see this absurdity you're referring to. Sanders points to a system that
is legally corrupted with unlimited financial contributions by the 1% alongside a media
machine that is equally owned and purchased by corporate interests. The vast majority of
American dialogue is confined to a narrow sphere. The perimeters of discussion are set by the
elites, and the majority of Americans assume their dialogue is based in reality. As Chomsky
says, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of
acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...." Sander's answer is
not to deify this system but to end the corporate coup and to achieve a modicum of democracy
in the USA. Just now, the average citizen affects policy not at all. Every two years we're
given choices between corporately funded candidates, and it's rare that a voice like Sanders
even gets airtime. Campaign finance reform, the end of Citizens United and corporate
personhood, reinstating the Glass-Steagal Act, etc... can potentially give the American
citizen a seat at the table again. Only at that point should we trust the government to enact
any legislation whatsoever. It is the ONLY issue worth debating, because until this is
addressed -- we have little or no influence over the other political discussions. Let's stop
equating appeals for democracy with populism. Your elitist bias against democratic ideals is
all to plain to see.
"In fact, the constitutional system is designed to require majorities to persist in
supporting something concrete before they prevail. It is difficult to identify instances in
American history of an electoral majority wanting something specific that it has not
eventually gotten." Mr. Weiner needs to get his head out of the sand. What about gun control?
Well over 80% of the American people support much stricter gun control including universal
background checks and bans on assault rifles, and have done so for years. Yet, Trump, Moscow
Mitch McConnell, and the GOP Senators won't even let it come to a vote. What about election
reform to prevent Russia and other enemy states from intervening in our elections? Again,
Moscow Mitch McConnell has thwarted the wishes of the majority of citizens. And don't get me
started on the anachronistic Electoral College or Citizens United, which gives political
speech to corporations. They certainly do not ensure that majorities are heard. Contrary to
what Mr. Weiner says, many voters ARE robotic, easily influenced by slick adds containing
lies and half-truths, willing to believe what they are told by Fox "News." How else to
explain that Trump's approval rating remains in the high 30%s even though he lies with every
breath and openly defiles his office? And if "voters are not simply dupes of contributors,"
why do corporations and wealthy donors spend so much money influencing politicians and hiring
PR firms to mold public opinion? 1 Reply
Mr. Weiner's premise, that the belief politics are rigged is profoundly cynical, has
superficial appeal. The fallacy in his position, however, is revealed by a key statement in
his article: that Americans ultimately get what they want from politicians. In the case of
gun control this is obviously untrue. Although 79% favor background checks for private sales
and at gun shows, this is not, and probably will not be in the near future, the law.
Similarly, the majority (over 55% as of last year) prioritize the environment over economic
growth. Yet government (with the exception of some states and cities) is moving in the
opposite direction. Again, the explanation is money: the fossil fuel industry, as exemplified
by the Kochs, stands in the way. Also the in terms of "quid pro quo" the equivalence between
a large donation by an insurer intent on offering a certain type of insurance and small
contribution by an individual concerned about Social Security is false if not inane. The
individual is likely to be concerned about a variety of unrelated issues, but the insurer is
likely laser focused on a group of interrelated concerns. The insured will follow up, but the
individual will more likely never know whether the concerns were taken into account.
Unfortunately when an issue is of vital importance to well-funded special interests, this
often carries the day regardless of what the public wants. The Democratic candidates are
right to decry big money in politics.
I suppose the author is not up to date on the many policy plans Sen.Sanders has. If he did
just a little digging, he would know that Bernie is lauded for his proposals and is the first
Democrat to fight for the average person. It's sad Mr. Weiner has to lower Sanders to Trump's
level. The two are polar opposites. Bernie actually means what he says, and for him it's not
a reality tv show. 1 Reply
yes, the system was corrupted from the beginning. Why is it cynism? It is just a fact. How
you would like if the majority of your district voted for Lamb, but the victory will go to
Saccone because the few people have more than one vote? Would you consider such system
rigged?
Our republic is rigged by design but has become worse over recent years. Long before the
citizenship question, Census questions and methods have been put in place to reduce the
counts in left-leaning communities thereby diminishing their influence by expanding their
congressional districts. The house of representatives size was deliberating frozen so that as
the population increases more power proportionately is direct toward more rural states. The
senate with 40 votes from states that make up far less that 40% of the population clots the
will of the people at every turn. States, particularly those where Republican control of
statehouses use sophisticated geographic information systems to gerrymander their districts
at every level. On the scale of dictatorship to democracy, our country continues to move
toward the former. We have taxation with unequal representation. Call it what you want. I
call it rigged.
This is blind to the very obvious. There may be a lack of blatant and specific quid-pro-quos,
but it cannot be argued that larger donations do not grant greater access in influencing
political decision-making. My ten dollar contribution entitles me to exactly what? If my
contribution were half-a-million my access ( and hence influence) would be an order of
magnitude greater. Money itself may not be "speech", but it certainly gives the ability to
purchase the access that is essential to political decision-making. As long as the American
system reflects market values (i.e. buyers and sellers) this is what we can expect. It is
also worth noting that the Electoral College system is itself part of the "rigged" system.
Just how valuable is a Democratic vote in Alabama, or a Republican vote in, say, Rhode
Island? Not very I would argue. A cynic might ask -- why bother to vote?
CL: The Opinion writer, a 'political scientist' is one of those tricksters using words to
make Warren and Sanders stand-ins for Trump. Tricksters like him/her make ridiculous
arguments painting the reformers, the ones resisting oppression and with plans for change as
dangerous as the white supremacists/wielders of Dark Money/giant corporations...all the
forces against a fair and just democracy. Did he think life in the USA was fine for the vast
majority before Trump? It's not a joke.
@David - Have you make ANY effort to find out what she said at GS? You can get the highlights
at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/17/i-read-hillary-clintons-speeches-to-goldman-sachs-heres-what-surprised-me-the-most
/ Here are some: Clinton sounded more enthusiastic about trade in 2013. "I think we have an
opportunity to really actually save money in our respective regulatory schemes, increase
trade not only between ourselves but also be more effective in helping to keep the world on a
better track for a rural spaced global trading system by having us kind of set the standards
for that ... which I think is also still proceeding." Clinton is keenly aware of the link
between domestic dysfunction and foreign policy. "If we don't get our political house in
order and demonstrate that we can start making decisions again -- and that takes hard work."
Clinton presaged the rise of Trump. "We have always had this kind of streak of whether it's
know-nothingism or isolationism or, you know, anti-Communism, extremism. Whatever. We've had
it forever from the beginning. So it's important that people speak out and stand up against
it, and especially people who are Republicans, who say, look, that's not the party that I'm
part of. I want to get back to having a two-party system that can have an adult conversation
and a real debate about the future." Now tell me what is wrong with that? PS when she gave
the talks, she had NO constituents.
it's ludicrous to identify or equate the rhetoric of Bernie Sander or Elizabeth Warren with
that of Donald Trump. The former are saying, with substantial evidence supporting their
assertion in the form of vast and growing disparity in incomes and wealth between the top 1%
of the economic heap and the rest of us, that our economic system has been manipulated by the
wealthy to perpetuate and increase their own economic advantage. Trump, by contrast, has
offered us birthirism, the suggestion that Ted Cruz' father was complicit in JFK's
assasination, that climate change is a 'hoax', the claim that several million people voted
illegally in the 2016 election, &c - none of it supported by the tiniest scintilla of
evidence. I've always wondered what occupies political scientists in their reflective
moments. Apparently hairbrained ideas.
@David This doesn't hold water at all. Elizabeth Warren shifted from anti- to pro-consumer
before entering politics. When she became a Democrat, it was because she became political,
not because she suddenly decided to espouse left-wing views. This was also in 1996 - 15 years
before she announced she was running for the senate, in 2011.
@PWR The problem is that money has become the *only* source of power and the vast majority of
American voters do not have it. Let's change the distribution of power by diverse means.
Absurd equivalencies here. No 25K from a co vs $25 from an individual are not the same, in
spirit or fact, if you can do the simple math... And let's face it, it's not generally $25K
from a co, it's many many multiples of that, while the $25 is a desperate attempt by the rest
of us to somehow combat that, to keep democracy alive. And frankly, "anthropomorphizing"
corporations is at the heart of this increasingly rigged system of ours, making markets of
all kinds -- economic and political -- extremely uneven.
The author asserts that members of Congress "while far wealthier than their constituents are
aware that they hold office by permission of their voters/constituents." Has the author
listened to this past session of Congress? The past 7 sessions? Ninety per cent of the
country - an increasing per centage with the increasing number of death-and trauma-dealing
shootings- 90% of the country wants some form of regulation of firearms. Everything about the
immigration influx is in the hands of privatized companies while Congress funnels millions of
dollars into funding. Health care has been stalled in the Senate for . . . . how long? Where
IS the breakdown then?
No surprise this article was penned by a visiting scholar for a conservative think tank. Who
better to defend by debunking a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks
dirt on everyone else"? The argument that "classic corruption" has waned (After all, it is
2019.) and in its place is a collective paranoia of "political puritanism that sees
corruption around every corner" is pure rubbish. Another voice crying "witch hunt." As the
author correctly points out, all money buys some influence, but he conveniently ignores the
fact that lots of money buys lots of influence. Who does he think crafts the many laws and
regulations of this country? Not grandma. Ever hear of ALEC? This type of political science
reasoning is as dead as Boss Tweed and enables the further propagation of this nonsense,
while the new robber barons pick our pockets, exploit our labor and resources, pollute our
environment, suppress our rights, and enrich themselves further at the expense of every other
citizen. Corruption has existed in this country since its inception. It morphs and is refined
with time but it is not going to disappear with this kind of tacit equivocation. I may be a
"cheap" cynic but Mr. Weiner may want to open his eyes or revisit his undergraduate lessons.
@David: If you mention the Clinton's affinity for wealth and high finance, as a political
problem, you have to mention the obvious irony: we rejected her, and we still got a totally
Wall Street affiliated administration, even more blatant than hers would have been. Oh
well...
I agree that saying "The System Is Rigged" or "Washington is a Swamp" is an intellectual cop
out and breeds cynicism and apathy. But the author's attempts to point the finger of blame at
the individual voter who allows himself to be duped instead of at those who spend oodles of
money to do the duping are misplaced. The Trump economical use of Twitter ignores the
massive, essentially in-kind contributions in support of Trump from right wing tv, radio, and
press and, of course Russia and other foreign players. The insurance industry uses their
massive financial advantage to meet with lawmakers and their staffs, to coordinate deceptive
advertising campaigns, and to develop favorable legislation and regulations. The grandmother
with the $25.00 donation to save social security simply can't marshal the same engines of
persuasion. And, yes, it is true that individual voters bear responsibility to vote and vote
informed. But it takes a determined voter to wade through the deceptive noise on every issue
to cast an informed vote. Saying the system is rigged may be an intellectual cop out but so
also is saying the voter is responsible for casting intelligent votes, without acknowledging
the role of big money in deceptively influencing that vote.
America maybe cleaner of "classic corruption," but, it has become the victim of dark
corruption--as in dark money---that now governs a range of debates from gun to climate
control. The Koch brothers alone have bought entire state legislatures. We have poll after
poll expressing the public will on issues such as gun control and climate change--throw in
health care---and yet, the killings keep on happening, the fires/hurricanes keep coming, and
more of our citizenry lose health care. And, I will not take up space on how our tax code has
literally been written by the wealthy---It is terribly naive to deny that in our country
today, money, is a cancer eating away our democratic norms.
A $25 campaign contribution indeed supports a candidate with whom you broadly agree. A
$1,000,000 contribution to a super-PAC is a bribe that is designed to get a politician to let
him specify specific elements of the politician's agenda exactly as the "donor" specifies. It
is often even the case that the $1,000,000 donor contributes to all candidates for a
particular office, which makes it all the more clear that it is intended as a bribe.
The most corrupt times I've ever heard of, and it's all legal. Legislation is written by
lobbyists and voted on by the people that donors buy. There are some good people elected to
govt no doubt, but good or bad they spend an inordinate amount of time on the phone hustling
dollars, and the people who pay them lots of money get access, access for photos and access
to have their opinion heard. And if a senator or congressman votes contrary to how a donor
likes,,, well he's on the phone the very next day.
The rich and powerful (think Koch Bros., Mercers, NRA, agribusiness, et al) and corporations
have run this country for a very long time via their lobbyists (they spent $3.5 billion in
2018 alone) and their campaign contributions. Citizens United helped them along. They
orchestrated the tax cut and deregulation (financial, consumer and environmental) which
benefits them. They've stacked the courts with justices that are pro-business and
deregulation. They've eviscerated health care and they're on their way to lie - again - that
they need to cut Social Security and Medicare because of deficit which they created - again.
Income inequality continues to rise. Do you see a pattern here? The scoreboard is colossally
lopsided in favor of the wealthy; their efforts have paid off handsomely. I'm flummoxed how
anyone can see it any other way. 1 Reply
Translation: "Well, yes, ahem, everything Sanders says is true as a matter of empirical
observation, fortunately it's not true in terms of whatever theoretical interpretation I can
bring to bear."
Re: "But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the health
insurer that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the grandmother
who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. The two are separated by
degree rather than kind." // Health insurers are spending millions to stop Medicare-for-All
not $25K. It's already illegal for them to sell duplicative products to Medicare recipients.
It's bad for society if they succeed in stopping Medicare-for-All and people continue to die
because they can't afford insulin or other medicine. It's good for society to protect Social
Security.
There is some truth in this -- for the most part, outright bribery is rare -- but it's far
from the whole story. Big money doesn't actually buy votes directly, but in today's world it
buys the ability to propagate demagoguery through the media on a massive scale.
This would be a terrific essay except for a few minor details. The political system in the
U.S. is dysfunctional at best. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), and
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014), legitimized buying elections. The
Republican Party's unwillingness to denounce anything Trump says or does points to nothing if
not widespread corruption. The Democratic Party's reactionary socialist ideas are not the
answer. In these circumstances voters are justified in believing the system is rigged despite
Mr. Weiner's startling naiveté. 1 Reply
Methinks Mr. Weiner has never studied Probability, nor has he paid any attention to the
"Dumbing down of America" that has been the result of 40 years of education cuts, nor has he
even remotely noticed the effect of technology on our society and the push by corporate
America to replace critical thinking with web searches. (Yes, the Google CEO actually made
that claim during a speech in front of NYC Senior High School students in 2015) The
sociological and psychological tendencies of Americans has been for decades to expend as
little energy as possible on learning about a subject or person, slapping a label on those
items and never regarding it as anything else again. This is one reason why polarization has
taken hold to the extent it has; everyone's got a label on their forehead now. A simple shift
of just 1-2% is enough to win elections. Does Mr. Weiner even remotely delusion himself into
believing this has no effect? If money doesn't buy elections, then why are all political
campaigns paralleled on advertising campaigns? (Answer: because it works) As to corruption in
government and the system, all I can say to Mr. Weiner is that Teapot Dome types of bribery
are no longer necessary. The bribery is built into our contract and tax framework. I'm NOT a
political scientist, Mr. Weiner. I'm an actual Mathematician and Physicist. Real science is
data and test based, not punditry.
"It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting
something specific that it has not eventually gotten" -- 90% support universal background
checks for gun purchases, why hasn't the law caught up?
He says it's hard to think of something the majority of voters want that they don't
eventually get. "Eventually" carries a lot of water when it comes to sensible gun control.
The majority have wanted it for a long time.
This piece is certainly guilty of committing the classic "straw man" logical fallacy, in
which the author argues against a weak mischaracterization of a position rather than the
position itself. In order to actually establish that everything isn't rigged, our authors
have quite a bit more work to do! Off the cuff, here are a number of topics they ought to
address if they really want to prove their point: -Gerrymandering -The electoral college
being broken -Corporate tax loopholes, offshoring, shell corporations, etc. -The justice
system's overwhelming failure to prosecute white-collar criminals -Racial profiling by law
enforcement -Disproportionate sentencing for racial minorities -Voter suppression, voter
disenfranchisement, etc. This was a list I came up with in about one minute. I'm sure that if
we decided to sit down and think of more ways in which the system is, in fact, rigged, we
could think of plenty more. 2 Replies
Money speaks and when it does people in high places in the government listen. Money gets more
credit for wisdom, intelligence, and integrity than it deserves. Money greases the wheels of
government and those belonging to corporations as well. If money didn't matter at all
companies wouldn't spend it on lobbying Congress. The rich wouldn't object to being taxed at
a more appropriate rate, i.e. one that is higher than that of the working and middle classes
of this country. If money didn't matter we'd see one of two things: more decent affordable
housing or more luxury housing for all. We don't. That shallow cynicism has a basis in
reality. How often have we witnessed celebrities or important political figures getting off
the hook for crimes that the rest of us would serve time for: often. Things are rigged
against most of us even if 99% of us are not rich. How do you, Mr. Weiner, feel knowing that
unless you have a ton of money you cannot afford to be ill? How do you think most of us feel
when we cannot save money for every possible emergency, when corporations pay CEOs obscene
sums of money and give them more perks than God while underpaying us or cutting our jobs or
sending them overseas? Hate to say it but yes, the system is rigged against us. If it's not
why are so many Americans unable to save enough money to survive more than two weeks without
a pay check? 8/25/2019 10:40pm
After I read this opinion piece I saw at the bottom that Mr. Weiner is a "scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute". The effects of money on politics have, in my opinion,
benefited American enterprise more than American labor. It does not surprise me that the
author would think the system is just fine and that it is really just the voters making all
of the decisions that have overwhelmingly favored capital over labor in recent history. The
Koch's didn't spend all of their money for nothing. They were not just making appeals the the
voters intellects, they were appealing to their baser instincts. To the author the system is
working in his favor, no problem here.
This is a thoroughly disingenuous column. There are several policies -- most obviously gun
control -- that enjoy broad public support but which can't even get a hearing in Congress,
let alone become law, because of lobbyists. What's important is not who gives what during the
campaign, but whose interests are served after the election. They're happy to take your money
to their campaign going, and you're forgotten the minute they get elected. I stopped reading
emails from the Democratic political machine because they aim to do nothing but stoke my
indignation about something I already know about and then hit me up for donations -- my
opinion is sought only as a narrowly dictated response to a loaded question, and I am no
better informed of the issues and what the Democratic approach might be. And that's the party
I support. Not to mention that Trump is hinting that he wants to hold next year's G7
conference at one of his Florida properties. That is corrupt.
This statement was never fact checked, is misleading, and in the political context becomes
highly partisan: "... abolishing the private insurance that hundreds of millions of Americans
hold is certainly a radical proposition." First, our population is only 327 Million. Of that,
30 million are uninsured. So the total insured population is just under 300 million (so just
3 of "hundreds" of millions. Second, based on Matt Bruinig writing for The Atlantic:
"Employer-sponsored insurance covers about 159 million workers, spouses, and children." The
rest fall under Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. The first is mostly public, but has some
hybrid private providers (e.g., Medicare Advantage), the second is public, and the third is
private (in 2016 enrollment was just over 11 million), but is heavily subsidized by the the
public. Based on these general numbers, I is more likely that there are less than 200 million
Americans "enjoying" private insurance plans... far from what is implied with the phrase
"hundreds of millions of Americans that hold [private insurance]. 1 Reply
How can anyone argue that our politics are not rigged when another country literally rigged
voting machines in the last election and this President has turned away every dime intended
to stop them in 2020. The system is rigged by lobbyists and corporate political contributions
giving the business sector the leverage they want to give them every legislator's ear. A vast
advantage over the public. That's called rigged against the American people. 2 Replies
It's amazing the number of experts will be trotted out to protect the status quo. Today, it's
this guy along with Dan Glickman who tells us the health insurance crisis is all our fault
because we don't eat right and tomorrow it'll be someone else to blame global warming on
selfish consumers. None of the fault lies with those warmhearted billionaires raking in the
money. These articles show the rich and connected are scared and that's the best news. People
are finally realizing they deserve to have their needs met. The politicians need to be afraid
of the electorate and not the other way around.
Before the principles set forth in the Constitution, there is the fundamental implicit social
contract that, first and foremost, says that - for political purposes - every voter is
understood to be equal to every other voter and therefore, every vote will be - must be -
held as equal in power to every other vote. Anyone who looks at the real world can readily
see how contrary to the natural order of things those principles are. Yet, without good faith
buy in by every citizen to adhere to those principles regardless of all inherent differences,
democratic government i.e. "government of the People, by the People, and for the People "
cannot possibly exist. So, by definition, any action that seeks to unbalance the implicit
principles of the social contract is deeply, dangerously undemocratic an un-American. Calling
such actions merely "differences of opinion" is sure proof of sophistry in service to
anti-democratic ends. 1 Reply
Dismissing the small individual donation vs. the massive corporate contribution as a matter
of degree not kind ignores the entirely democratic nature of many individuals taking action.
Conversely, corporations are not citizens nor do they have the right to vote yet super packs
exist for their exploitation.
Accusing your opponents of being evil for influencing a vote in their interest may be correct
or incorrect, depending on the motives, effects, and intent. The system that is rigged is
much larger and more complicated than the process of elections alone, however. It is why for
example that Medicare cannot negotiate with drug companies, although everyone thinks it
should, gun control cannot pass, labor law has changed substantially since the Wagner Act
(1936) to favor corporations, Boeing is free of federal inspections, and much, much more.
Whether there is evil or not, bad things happen.
All my long life I've read stories about how advertising can't really change public opinion.
This begs the question why sophisticated marketing departments of our largest corporations
spend billions of dollars annually engaging in it? The mildest efforts by the FTC and
government to police the industry have failed. My favorites are the ads for the newest and
most expensive prescription drugs that saturate prime time network television, with their
sotto voce listing of the known side-effects while mothers with their children romp on the
screen in the grass with their dogs. The internet has magnified the problem a million-fold.
It's bad enough that our society cannot bring itself to come to grips with this problem, but
please let's not pretend it doesn't exist.
Greg Weiner is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Koch Bros. "think
tank" which advocates lower taxes, fewer protections for consumers and the environment, and
cuts to the social safety net. So of course he'd call legitimate concerns about a rigged
system "cynical". Deflection, false equivalencies and lies are some of many tools they deploy
to manipulate public opinion and perception.
The argument that our politics have never been cleaner is a weak one, since the American left
isn't arguing otherwise. The point that candidates like Warren and Sanders are making is that
our politics are still dirty, and still corrupt. Even if it's "better" it's still not good
enough, or free enough judged by any standards of liberty one wishes to apply. Secondly, the
author reduces free market capitalism to simply an amalgamation of individual choices, as if
it hasn't been argued a million times over that sink-or-swim unregulated capitalism is
unfair, where the burden of labor- not to mention the tax burden, falls strangely on the
poorest, most disenfranchised. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with looking into the systems
in place that lead voters to vote against their own interests, and how time and time again
the interests of the wealthy few repeatedly become the interests of the state. I agree, as do
nearly all Sanders and Warren supporters, that argument is crucial for any republic. But
shouldn't these arguments include skepticism regarding political outcomes? Even individual
motivations? Sure, cynicism has become a theme throughout political platforms. Rather than
getting upset at our extreme cynicism, however, perhaps we should be asking ourselves why
this cynicism exists. I imagine we would find no shortage of possible answers.
Basically this is a semantic argument: the bribery inherent in campaign donations, while
bribery in fact, is not bribery at law. Those that made campaign bribery legal benefit from
this legal fiction that they themselves have created It's akin to Trump using his office to
put an international meeting in his own resort thereby using his public position for private
gain. A jury-rigged judiciary will go along but this is nevertheless corruption in fact. 1
Reply
This is the pedantry of crackpot centrism. It defines corruption out of existence. Everyday
brings evidence of the power of the 1% to impose its will over the objections of the majority
on matters of life and death. From the fires in the Amazon to workers crushed by student
loans and medical debt the verdict is clear. In equating Warren and Sanders with Trump the
author reveals themselves as an apologist for an indefensible status quo.
Sometimes it is difficult to be polite. The capture of American government, or at least a
good part of it, by pro-business interests is well established. Whether it be industry
capture of regulatory proceedings (cf. Murray Edelman's "The Symbolic Uses of Politics"), or
the "revolving door" between government service and lucrative private-sector jobs, or the
immense amount of money spent on lobbyists on K Street or elsewhere (which, after all this
time, would not be spent without some evidence of success), or the effect of fundraising on
campaigns, or the effect of PACS, there are plenty of examples of how government is
influenced by business. On the other end, there are political science analyses of legislative
behavior and its relationships to the desires of various parties. The one I remember showed
the public opinion polls were less influential than the desires of the wealthy or
corporations. Granted, there are some exceptions. President Trump has now started and
accelerated this trade war. Business spokesmen (and all the ones I see quoted are men) are
objecting. And Trump's saying he has the power to order businesses to do things contrary to
their economic interests, such as getting out of China. I predict, given the general tendency
of business to win, that Trump will eventually back down. The exception will prove the rule.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and
usually that's enough. 1 Reply
@Independent thinker - Yes, the Presidential election has been rigged since the founding of
the country. But even worse is the rigging of the Senate. For example in 2018, the Democrats
received 12,000,000 more votes in Senate races than the Republicans and LOST SEATS. If that
is not rigging, I do not know what is. And it has been that way since the Constitution was
implemented in 1789. 16 Replies
This is a very well written "egghead" (a simpler term for presumptive intellectual elite)
analysis of the problem. Unfortunately, it assumes that all voters are rational and will
commit the time required to be informed on issues and then vote appropriately. Simply not
true. Weiner makes the same mistake as empirical economists who think all people make
rational economic decisions when spending their personal money. Simply not true.
Trump reliance on the cost-free device of Twitter v. the Bush fund-raising shows there is no
correlation between money and outcomes? Are you actually serious? So his campaign staff, all
those rallies, all other advertising, travel, cost, nothing? Aside from all the other
problems with this column, it ignores the real cost of money in politics; all the people who
cannot afford to run for any office- mayor, state legislator, governor, etc, without the
backing of an interest group/donors, whether corporate or union. Voices never heard, ideas
never put out for argument. Voters are not duped so much as limited. Everyone is making fun
of the 20 Dem candidates, but we get to hear more than 2 ideas- and even with this, look at
the millions necessary for the 5-10 minutes each gets in air time. There was a reason
cattlemen owned many states in the 19th century, industries in the 20th; and it wasn't duped
voters. 1 Reply
The issue is that it takes a massive amount of money to run a competitive campaign for
national office. And because politicians need these massive sums, they are necessarily
beholden to the entities that help raise those sums. If, after being elected, a politician
does not serve those entities' interests, they will withhold their contributions come the
next election. Corporations don't spend money on elections out of a sense of civic-mindedness
nor out of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. They spend that money expecting
something in return; and they nearly always get it.
Talk About Rigged: Stock futures opened sharply lower Sunday night due to tRump's latest
trade tirades, with the DOW down 300 points. The he said China talks are back on, and DOW
futures are now up 184 points. Are we supposed to believe that sophisticated investors are
betting that Donald Trump is telling the truth? I don't believe that for a second.
When I first read this piece yesterday, I was at the same time so disturbed and so baffled
that I needed to...take the rest of the day as sabbath. This morning, as I rather expected,
almost all commenters have seen through the condescending rhetoric and ludicrously empty
arguments of Mr. Weiner. I'm somewhat relieved, though in this post-Citizens United era (may
it be brief) I fear that there is actually an entire cadre of folks who could look me in the
eye as they assert that a $25 voter contribution to a political campaign is morally
equivalent to a $25,000 corporate contribution to a political campaign; that money, while
unquestionably purchasing the power to persuade (both politicians and citizens), does not
"buy votes;" that sustained opposition to the blatant forms of corruption that are endemic in
our system is intellectually stunted and puritanical. Mr. Weiner, with only the most gestural
respect I can muster, I believe your arguments are...corrupt. And corrupting. There, I said
it, and while that does not mean that I am foreclosing thought or opposed to reasoned debate,
it does mean that I intend to stand with and speak from the side that not only sees the
system as rigged, but sees your nifty false equivalencies and dissimulation as an attempt to
shore up privilege and insure the retention of power.
This article obscures and ignores the simple fact that the real problem is not who is getting
away with murder and who isn't; it is who wants to get away with murder and who doesn't. As
strategically designed with checks and balances to hamper 'corruption' as our system of
democracy is, people who want to game, or rig, the system for their own benefit will try to
do it in any way that they can. Unfortunately, no system is so well designed that it can
forever withstand calculated attacks on its integrity. It is the integrity of the players who
will make or break a system. Capitalism, the driving force in our culture, condones
selfishness and carelessness. The fear of God is less effective than it once was (if it ever
was) in suggesting that there is a reason to care about more than yourself or your tribe. The
fear of environmental collapse is having some effect on people's thinking and acting. Will we
achieve a more comprehensive awareness in time to avert ever more dire consequences of our
ignorance? I don't know. I only know that there are too many people in positions of power
whose actions are harmful because they are based in a reality-denying desire for
self-protection and self-aggrandizement. Call it rigging or don't call it rigging -- what we
are seeing everywhere we look is that people led by fear and greed do not have the vision or
will to create sustainable systems. The health of the planet and our species depends on a
critical mass of moral integrity.
Of course the system is rigged. Take federal judiciary that was not mentioned in the op-ed at
all. I had to sue the government and discovered that parties' argument does not matter --
judges simply replace it in their decision with the bogus argument of their own concoction to
decide the case the way they want to decide it, not the way they have to. We are promised
"due process of the law" but there is no such thing -- federal courts are kangaroo courts
that judge arbitrarily. I sued judges for fraud and the argument of DAs who defended them was
-- guess what? That judges gave themselves the right, in Pierson v. Ray, to act from the
bench "maliciously and corruptly." To its everlasting shame, the press refuses to cover this.
So how is the system not rigged? Or how it is cynicism -- rather than a simple statement of
the obvious fact -- to say that it is rigged?
Re: But this "buys" elections only to the extent Mr. Sanders is claiming voters are passive
automatons incapable of discernment. Actually, voters are easily manipulated to vote against
their interests by appealing to their emotions. A lot of money directed at doing precisely
that is far more effective than appealing to their reason. Big money spent on lots of media
spending is a waste if it's created without the dark talents needed to circumvent the
rational self in order to seep deeply into the irrational self. Just ask the koch brothers re
climate denialism. They've spent, along with others of their ilk, very smartly on the talents
of those who understood that instilling irrational doubt and anxiety over fundamental change
were key to overcoming the scientific -rational arguments. As a result, we cannot even talk
about, let alone institute, a carbon tax and are still having to deal with nonsense like
"junk science", expressed with full throated confidence by some in public office. What big
money affords is access to the best talent of those who know how to manipulate emotions
without revealing one's hand too overtly. The ads in the early nineties re national health
insurance offer another example of the efficacy of such dark skills. So there is a film noir
analogue here in the sense of manipulation, not just corruption. The author should spend time
watching Lang's films (Dr. Mabuse, Human Desire, Scarlet Street), as well as reading Piketty.
As long as there is corporate lobbying, the system will be rigged, i.e., the voice and power
of the people will be perpetually outweighed by the will of the corporations. Accept it or
not, this is why the US is now an oligarchy.
A hedge fund manager making $1.5B pays a lower marginal tax rate than a school teacher making
$50K. And the system isn't rigged because Greg Weiner says it isn't. Got it. Feel much better
knowing that. 1 Reply
@CL What's bizarre is the conflation of a corporation spending $25K to influence an election
and a grandmother who sends $25 to her candidate of choice. This guy Weiner says they --- an
insurance corporation and a human voter --- are the same thing. And he worked as a Democrat?
Lord help us. 10 Replies
So you were deployed and that is a rigged system? My public schools are amazing and am glad
to send my two small boys to them. I have police offers driving around my neighborhood at all
hours of the day, that's my security. "If I remember...." Classic. Sounds like you've given
up pretty much. Basically you are equating anything that is bad you've seen or "remembering"
as being proof of corruption....good luck with that!
Money buys access. Hello? MONEY BUYS ACCESS. The political system is pay-to-play and any
claim to the contrary is motivated reasoning. Second, the ad industry is not a trillion
dollar industry for the purpose of creating catchy jingles. Advertising influences behavior.
There is no more rigged system than mediation forced on consumers to prevent them from filing
claims in court where their corporate adversaries cannot use lawyers. How did a nation of
laws wrest the fundamental right to tort away from the people? By rigging the system.
"But if this is the definition of corruption, it seems to apply equally to the health insurer
that spends $25,000 to maintain its right to offer its product and to the grandmother who
sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security. " Social Security benefits
everyone. Some would argue that the wealthy don't even need the payment. But, alas, it's
clear intention is fairness. The health insurer lobbying is sitting atop a bloated system
that does not benefit everyone. That company may target many strata of the income scale but
it is not apples to apples across the board of premiums paid for benefits received. The
entire discussion of the system being rigged is just families poorer than their previous
generation waking up to capitalism.
Good heavens. The naivete in this column is breathtaking. Citizens United unleashed millions
upon millions of untraceable dollars that indeed can buy an election. How? By those dollars
being used for staff on the ground and ads on all of the airwaves, both at a scale
unsurpassable by candidates who refuse to be money launderers for lobbyists hoping to buy
influence and who rely primarily on donations from average citizens.
Is this guy living on another planet? He seems to be spouting absolute nonsense about the
influence of dark money in politics. Judges and politicians get funded to toe the special
interests. ALEC gets its funding from Koch Bros and drafts legal briefs that subsequently get
passed into laws by the Republican state legislatures that are designed to harm the interests
of the working class. The US political system in the US is corrupt and deeply rigged against
the middle/poor class. We have become another Banana Republic. The swamp is well stocked by
the Russia foisted stooge occupying the White House. The nation is deep peril.
Rising inequality, TARP, and the Citizens United decision. It's not really that hard to
figure out why the idea of a "rigged" system emerged. The author knows of these things, I'm
sure, but instead treats our current situation in the abstract.
@CL Thinly disguised "opinion" pieces like this seem to be part and parcel of the new wave of
conservative disruptive propaganda. Caveat emptor. 10 Replies
Because everything is rigged? Just a wild guess. Rig means to fix: Who writes the tax laws?
Who inserts the import loopholes for ceiling fans? Who decided to sub out our military's
kitchen services? Who subbed out the security services in the Green Zone to Blackwater? How
did Haliburton get all those government contracts? How did Merrick Garland NOT get a hearing
for the Supreme Court? Why is ALEC writing bills for state legislators? Gee, how could
anybody think our system of enacting laws and government is rigged?
I am left wondering: just what Mr. Weiner is advocating. This seeming apology for corruption
is a curious blend of common knowledge and disingenuous false equivalences. Claiming that a
health insurer that donates $25,000 to a campaign in order to affect policy is "separated by
degree rather than by kind" from a grandmother who donates $25 hoping for protection for
social security shows that you think little of your reader's awareness. You know as well as
your readers do that the scale of campaign contributions by big business is 100 times larger
than $25,000, and buys access, returned phone calls and audiences that $25 does not.
Disingenuous: pointing out that members of congress are far wealthier than their constituents
while neglecting to note that corporations are far wealthier than members of congress. This
dynamic results in some simple math that apologists for the status quo do not like to
advertise: Corporations that have billions can easily afford millions to influence
legislators that earn hundreds of thousands, to pass legislation that effectively transfers
wealth from citizens earning tens of thousands back to those same billion-dollar
corporations. This is the very definition of rent-seeking, with numbers added for clarity.
The shorthand we use in American English: corporations buy lawmakers. You close by praising
our present campaign finance flaws, quid-pro-quo negotiations and pork-barrel spending as
"invaluable tools." This is a pean to corruption.
Greg Weiner's statement "It supposedly takes the form of campaign contributions that, Mr.
Sanders says, enable corporations to "literally buy elections." This is, literally, false.
Money unquestionably influences elections. But the candidate with the most votes, a commodity
that cannot be legally bought or sold, always wins (except when it comes to the presidency, a
discussion for another day)" may be true in the singular, but is false--and extremely
obtuse-- in the plural. In state after US state, the party that gets the most votes gets
fewer representatives in congress. Generally, the Democrats get more votes than the
Republicans and fewer members of congress. Gerrymandering--achieved in many states thanks to
massive advertising campaigns by the Koch brothers and their associates--accomplished this
perverse miracle. Billionaires can finance of candidates in low attention elections ;the
non-rich cannot compete in advertising and liberal or progressive candidates simply are not
visible to most voters. How much more damage voter suppression does cannot be exactly gauged,
but Trump may owe his presidency to the suppression of votes in North Carolina, Wisconsin,
and Pennsylvania (if not some other states).
On every major issue, from gun control to universal health care, to tax policy to climate
change, policies that the voting public favors, often be large margins, are ignored in favor
of policies backed by big donors. How is that not corrupt? 1 Reply
Ok. Let's call it "corruption" in quotes. No, there is not direct manipulation, but the vast
sums of money that can be deployed thanks to Citizens United create an effect like a dark
star influences by unseen gravitational forces. Less Teapot Dome, more Death Star. 1 Reply
It is funny how we are supposed to believe that few Russian posts on Facebook could change
the course of the election, but the massive campaign by lobbyists is not. Yes, the American
system is rigged, and money contribution is the sign. Sure, the contribution of grandma's to
save SS is as corruptible as contribution of health insurance companies, but that only shows
that foundation of the system is corrupted, and because the health insurance can contribute
much more than grandma, it shows that politics is rigged in favor of the rich individuals. It
forces people to make contributions in order to be heard. The author is hinting that if
Sander with Warren think that the system is corrupt, they should not take money from small
donors, but in the corrupt system having no money means the certain loss not only for
candidates but for a lot of people who represent by this candidates. It is like Mafia
protective money, you are forced to pay even if you disagree. In the corruptive political
system donations represent whose interests the candidate represents: big businesses or
disfranchise people as grandma. And it is funny how majority has to wait for what they want,
while the wealthy minority get what they they want right way. Should we remember slavery,
abolishment of which required the Civil War. Should we remember NRA that succeeded in banning
the research of the gun violence long time ago, while majority are still waiting for
background check?
Astoundingly naïve viewpoint. Corporations and wealthy individuals do not invest in
nothing. They do not support candidates with no hope of a return on their investment. It goes
against all logic that money isn't corrupting our political system. 3 Replies
The idea that the monied don't have outsized influence on our politics is absurd. How many of
those $25 donors will ever sit with a Congressperson's staff and help write legislation? How
many of the $25,000 donors will?
Of course the then-candidate Trump beat down his opponent without nearly as much money. He
had something more valuable than cash -- widespread market recognition as a tough business
baron and exponent of the stance that our president was not actually qualified for his
office. That both of these propositions were untrue made little difference to his voters,
then as now. But the winner did prove that money's no match for a lie that many people want
to hear, some in power and many not. 1 Reply
Give me a break. Maybe, we have only legalized bribery? You want to accept that? I'd rather
we act honorably. I guess I can relinquish the "rigged" notion, but Warren Buffett remarked"
"we have been involved a class warfare,..... MY class won."
I'd be tempted to say that Mr. Weiner is massively naive, but I can't believe that anyone
involved with politics could be that clueless about what is standard operating procedure
today. Mr. Weiner's political relativism argues that the $25 Sanders donor is actually the
same as big pharma because both donate money to influence political outcomes. "The two are
separated by degree rather than kind", he says. I'm surprised he didn't compare Obama saying
you could keep your own doctor with Trump's 12,000+ lies and misstatements. Both men gave us
false information, so the difference between the two men is one of degree, not kind -- right,
Mr. Weiner? I like to read views from both sides of the political spectrum, but the Times
still needs to exercise editorial responsibility. This column could be cited as a dictionary
definition of sophistry.
Listening to each other without trying to delegitimize, would be a very civilized and
refreshing way of conducting politic, but... "In fact, the constitutional system is designed
to require majorities to persist in supporting something concrete before they prevail. It is
difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting
something specific that it has not eventually gotten."? Au contraire, the system is designed
to "protect" the republic from "the ignorance" of the popular vote. Ask Clinton or Gore.
Sometimes is not cynicism. It is just trying to keep being informed. Like last week, as
reported by the NYT: "a federal appeals court on Tuesday said members of the Electoral
College, who cast the actual votes for president, may choose whomever they please regardless
of a state's popular vote." I do not see the role of the majority. 1 Reply
This is meretricious sophistry; look around the world--democracies don't necessarily keep
themselves healthy. It is not uncommon for economic/political interests to degrade democracy
out of a desire to keep or acquire unfair advantage. This is very much a part of the current
political moment--a thing which is patently obvious. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
is paid (to the tune of $55 million/year) to carry water for plutocrats seeking to make life
ever worse for the huge majority of Americans; weaken environmental protections, and
eviscerate the social safety net. Curiously enough, AEI announced just five days ago that the
author of this piece is a new 'visiting scholar'. I ask you, what reason could there possibly
be for cynicism?
A well-made argument that's mostly convincing. Perhaps our complaint ought not be that the
system is corrupt, but rather that it enables undemocratic concentrations of power --
particularly in the form of immense injections of money by corporations and the very wealthy.
If, as the Supreme Court has said, money is speech, then those entities have much more power
to speak into the political system than I do. 1 Reply
From birth, Americans are on a virtual conveyor belt dictated by their wealth, race and zip
code. With few exceptions, even most middle-class kids float from underfunded schools to
crippling college debt to expensive health care to disappointing wages and, ultimately, to a
stressful and financially tenuous old age. Meanwhile, we're fed revered lies about "pulling
ourselves up by our bootstraps," are we're full of shame when we can't seem to make it. One
feature of today's information age is that we can quite literally see what we're being
excluded from. We know how the Zuckerbergs and the Trumps of the world live. We know that
Amazon pays not a penny in corporate tax, buoyed by incentives from our tax dollars, yet
wants to enjoy the spoils of our great cities. We can see, much more clearly, what a society
built on individualism and materialistic aspiration has led to. This author and others like
him are trying to gaslight an entire nation that (rightly, in my opinion!) is waking up to
the ravages of greed, all for political expedience. Trump may have successfully exploited the
wave of indignation sweeping across America in 2016, but it is my great hope that someone
with true compassion and enough brains to hit the reset button will take the helm in 2020.
God forbid we let our corporate overlords convince us that we're imagining all of this.
The claim that Bernie Sanders assumes voters are automatons that require a paternal overseer
from politicians is a bit disingenuous. Though of course, we are. Our political system was
designed and then evolved to serve a population much different and hardly changed until the
internet. Voters are considered automatons. The electoral system, the Senate, newspapers,
executive orders, a war powers act, the pentagon, etc., all designed to make them not
automatons. However, the current situation is that as a voter, I can hardly see what's
happening on the political stage because, I must be short and very far away, standing behind
giant corporations and billionaires and political parties who have "supposedly" (?) locked in
their season tickets. No one is buying votes, but selling access to information.
Why isn't there any mention of the 2010 "Citizens United" Supreme Court Ruling here? Dark
money makes so much of normal politics irrelevant because of the lack of discourse.
Just because the Supreme Court legitimized the money being on top of the table rather than
under it doesn't make it any less corrupt. Our corruption is totally legitimized and happens
out in front of everyone. Also, let's not forget that the corruption and system rigging isn't
just limited to the Federal Government and our ability to vote (such as we have that ability
given the Electoral College) but happens in all areas of life from school funding to college
admissions...we live in a pay to play society and the negative consequences of bad decisions
don't affect the rich as much as they do everyone else especially in criminal issues. 1 Reply
@Len Charlap Dear Mr. Charlap, As I am sure you know, the Electoral College and the Senate
were set up to ensure that NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and all the other large
population centers would not have a monopoly on how the rest of the country wishes to order
their lives. It is not perfect and certainly as fewer and fewer people in live rural areas or
states with small populations we get some unexpected and sometimes unpleasant results.
Nevertheless, it was not rigged to cheat anyone, but an imperfect attempt to prevent a purely
popular vote. As we know from reading the history of Greece, a purely popular vote led to
some very harmful decisions that eventually brought on the decline of their civilization. The
execution of Socrates for example, not to mention some very unwise military campaigns. All of
which were approved by popular vote. The fact is just being in the majority does not equal
being correct or wise. Very often it is the opposite. 16 Replies
Money doesn't buy elections, but it does buy politicians. Politicians may not take cash under
the table to directly fatten their wallets, but they do need money to finance their
campaigns, and they listen to the people who give them that money. Big donors have direct
access to politicians and their staffs that average people will never have. And of course
politicians are not immune to being tempted by the possibility of a lucrative career as a
lobbyist once they leave office. And of course there's the other problem that voting really
doesn't matter for the most part. Unless you live in a swing district, the likelihood is that
your vote, while counted, is meaningless. It has no effect at all on outcomes.
This is certainly a naive perspective. Call me cynical, but as long as elections are not
publicly funded and Citizens United remains the law of the land, our votes are increasingly
irrelevant.
If the system weren't so dysfunctional, or lshould we say, if it weren't lead by Mitch
McConnel, an evil genius, emphasis on evil, maybe we wouldn't be so cynical. Or take the
senate by itself, in what way does the Senate make any sense today? Wyoming has as many
voices as California? We should get rid of it, it's completely outdated, like the electoral
college. It's not democracy in the USA, it is indeed an oligarchy of billionaires making sure
things basically stay the same or get worse for everybody bu themselves. Oh and Jeffrey
Epstein and his "suicide" and list of friends really makes me trust the political (&
non-political) elite even more.
It's hard to know where to begin refuting this op-ed piece. Let's start with the premise of
the title--that charges of corruption and a rigged system are "shallow," nothing more than
"cheap cynicism." Mr. Weiner's writes that he sees little difference between the hundreds of
millions of dollars poured into campaigns and lobbying efforts by corporations and "the
grandmother who sends Mr. Sanders $25 and asks him to protect Social Security." It's Mr.
Weiner's comparison that seems shallow to me. Consider the Time's own articles, following
David Koch's death, detailing how the Koch brothers used vast sums to influence political
campaigns and bankroll highly influential think-tanks, academic programs, and so-called
"grass-roots" movements. The Federalist Society, for instance--funded by both the Koch and
Mercer families, among others--has, to use Politico's words, "a near-lockdown on new
appointments to the federal bench under Trump," including the last two Supreme Court
appointments. Even more important is the entire legislative system. Consider the 2014 study
by two Princeton political scientists who found that "economic elites and...business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average
citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." There are
so many other points to refute...but the Comments section has told me this is already too
long. 3 Replies
A letter that posits that those with money and power are politically equivalent to those
without. There's a lot the author is correct about, but he misses the overall lay of the the
land and how 1) the economy has turned against 'regular people' for decades and 2) how so
little of what the populace wants becomes action in congress. No, the referees in this game
are not misusing their penalty calls, but the field tips in one direction and one team
consists of 300 pound linemen while the other side's are closer to 180 lbs. But hey, the
rules are the same for both sides, right?
"American politics has never been cleaner of classic corruption -- of the
cash-under-the-table Teapot Dome variety -- than it is now." Now it's not even under the
table, thanks to Citizens United.
OK, corruption is a little strong. Would the author accept unfair. When states can
gerrymander with aplomb since Supremes won't get their hands dirty allowing 13 to 5
Congressional splits when populations are 50 -50: when voters can be required to prove
identity even though evidence of false in person voting is miniscule, when corporations are
people enabled to spend unlimited amounts on supposedly issue entities, and when donors can
hide their identities, is the system fair! OK, money is not the ultimate decider; votes are;
but don't pretend that money, lots of it, doesn't talk. Object to the use of "corrupt" but
don't pretend the present system is fair.
Wow. Mr. Weiner's rhetoric distorts what every US citizen experiences on a regular basis.
Many of our elected representatives consistently legislate in a manner that benefits the
wealthy and corporations, while ignoring the needs and values of less economically empowered
voters. Protection of the environment and public land use is a clear example-- a majority of
Americans want clean air, clean water and wilderness protection. However governments, both
local and national, license or sell our communal resources for private exploitation. At the
same time, news outlets frequently echo the talking points of politicians, eliminating the
media's key role in holding our politicians accountable to their voters. The most plausible
explanation for this situation is that money outweighs popular will in influencing both
politicians and media outlets. In the US at least, coordinated propaganda can fool a
significant fraction of the public most of the time. Finally, to lump Sanders and Warren
together with Trump as populists is hilariously ironic. Sanders and Warren both have real
records of legislating and acting in the public interest. Trump talks like a populist but
acts like a President who owes his good luck to wealthy donors and Fox News.
@Tone Absolutely correct, and another argument for public funding of elections with no
organizational contributions--be they corporate, church, union, or 50-whatevers allowed--and
a very low (three digit) limit on individual contributions per campaign. Groups don't vote.
Individual people do. And groups cannot "exercise free speech"--speech is the product of
individuals. 10 Replies
Bravo. In a similar way, politicians of all stripes dishonor our highly evolved and
restrained democratic system of government by attacking opponents for "merely playing
politics," as if there was some superior motivation for a politician's words and deeds.
Politics is not a childish game, but rather how we run this country. Being "political" should
be a badge on honor in our system, for it's the reason that we hired these people in the
first place. Being "political" means that they are worrying about getting re-elected, which
is to say, worrying about the wishes of their constituents. As it should be! 1 Reply
This is an interesting article that makes some really important points. But I have to ask, in
all seriousness, you really draw an equivalence - post Citizens United - between grandma
sending $25 to Bernie -- and Big Pharma purchasing candidates with millions of dollars?
Secondly, because unfairness is so palpable and so easily referenced (college admissions
scandal, $1.5 T tax cut, rich neighborhood = superior schools), demagogues like Trump can
invent charges of rigging, and weaponize them to attack enemies and rally the base, with
nothing provable or observable. There doesn't need to be an invasion, no 3-5 million illegal
votes - to base "rigging" on deeply held fears and emotions, and even racial hatred. As for
Bernie's hinted unfairness involving Bezos, I take it with a grain of salt, but who knows?
Life is not fair. Never was, and never will be. Although Warren's descriptive license in
using the word "rig" may be ill-advised, I think she and other Democrats are searching for a
society that reduces some of the unfairness, whether it occurs because of "rigging" or
secondary to a fallen world, in general. That's really not what Trump is doing. At all.
You were headed in the right direction until you improperly identified the cynicism with the
source of the cynicism. It is cynicism that is the enemy of democracy. It is an economy that
extolls the virtue of wealth and power that has allowed democracy to be so easily attacked.
It is not that politicians are bought and sold that is the problem only the perception that
politicians are bought and sold that is the problem. The Canadian historian, philosopher,
John Ralston Saul who Time Magazine has long said the greatest threat to democracy is
cynicism. Perhaps that is why his 1992 NYT bestseller was named Voltaire's Bastards (The
Dictatorship of Reason in the West). It was Voltaire who said, "Those who can make you
believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
@R. Law, I knew there was a word for Mr. Wiener's rhetorical gymnastics and you've found it:
sophistry. You need look no further than the Electoral College to conclude the system is
rigged, one need look no further that Mitch McConnell's op-Ed in last week's Times to know
who's doing the rigging. Mr. Wiener's objection to " rigged" as a rhetorical shortcut is of a
piece with how the NRA tries to divert the discussion of whether assault weapons should be
banned to a series of squabbles over the definition of "assault weapon ". Sophistry.
There is a gulf separating the $25,000 contribution of the health insurer and Grandma's $25.
Grandma gives her money to a candidate in the hope Social Security will be supported in her
self interest. The insurer gives the $25,000 after focus groups and marketing professionals
have greased the skids to find the use for the $25K most likely to gain ascendancy for its
position. One thousand Grandmas cannot equate to the one insurer. Why else would universal
background checks for gun sales, supported by almost 90% of respondents in the country,
languish in the halls of Congress? Or why would Big Pharma be protected from negotiating its
prices with CMS/Medicare? While these corporate actions may not be corruption de jure, they
are corruption de facto.
"Grandma's $ 25 contribution differs only in kind from a companies $25.000 contribution."
Right, that is the problem. If money has influence, more money has more influence. It negates
the basic principle one person, one vote
I have been saying for years that if voters spent as much effort researching candidates and
parties as they do picking out a brand of orange juice, we would not need to worry about
money in politics. But if voters decide based on ads either touting the benefits of a
candidate or smearing the opponent, then whomever generates the most noise wins. The main
stream media doesn't help when it covers the ads in news reporting.
@Mark Thomason Great, so now we've got tyranny of the minority (in fact, an increasingly
smaller minority that wants to impose its cultural and religious values on everyone else).
Unfortunately, we are all from well-known cognitive flaws and psychological motivations that
influence our decision-making, often to the point of irrationality. The advertising industry,
especially the micro-targeted, psychographically sophisticated surveillance-based industry to
which we are now routinely exposed, treats us like automatons without discernment. And will
continue to do so, since it works.
...even more bizarre populism of the kind associated with Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders. Each of
them deflects criticism by delegitimizing opposition. How astute, and how appropriate to lump
Sanders in with Trump since, in retrospect, Sanders' whole effort to win highest office was
built on casting unfounded aspersions on the character and honesty of Hillary Clinton - a
person who accomplished more in every single week of her distinguished career helping the
poorest and most vulnerable women and children than Bernie has accomplished in all his
decades 'serving' in the House and the Senate. 2 Replies
How convenient to not mention the revolving door of politicians and their staffs becoming
lobbyists... and the NRA's endless contributions resulting in Congress members voting again
and again against gun restrictions that the public overwhelmingly supports. But money is not
corrosive? Thanks for the morning chuckle.
"It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting
something specific that it has not eventually gotten." After the slaughter of school children
at Newtown it seemed, briefly, that meaningful steps to control access to guns, which had
substantial public support, would finally come about. Spending by the NRA and it's
"ownership" of members of Congress is the reason it didn't. As we have waited for the tide to
"eventually" turn, hundreds more people have been gunned down. The NRA is weakened at present
due to rampant internal corruption, grassroots gun control groups are proliferating, and
spending by gun control organizations is growing. Perhaps, as Mr. Weiner asserts, the view
held by the majority will eventually prevail. So, sure money works both ways. And we are
supposed to say more massacres are okay until the money race is eventually won by the side
that represents where public opinion has been all along? What utter cynicism. 1 Reply
The NRA gave 30 million alone to Trump's 2016 campaign. It has contributed for years on a
single issue to many other Congressmen. We all see after every fresh massacre that money
talks in proportion to its size. Maybe rigged is not the accurate word: BOUGHT may be. And
the honest measure of money is that for every candidate in a campaign, the second sentence
after the name and party is how much money is in their war chest. Policy? Too unimportant to
report much of the time. When our Congressmen tell us they vote for an unfair tax bill to
"pay back their donors," that really says it all (particularly since so much money comes from
out of state......not even remotely constituent donations.)
My snarky retort, "Coming from a guy who benefits from the rigged system." Can you imagine a
poor candidate? Can you imagine Jesus running for president? Of course not. The cynicism of
the Grand Inquisitor appears to spot on. If a policy will have economic consequences, those
consequences are bent to help the wealthy. No? Their interests are reenforced by lobbyists
paid for by more money. Research is funded by those with an interest in the outcome. Car
companies don't do driver safety research comparing stick with automatic. They compare
automatic with even more automatic... which supports more profitable options. Studies on the
health consequences of gun violence are off limits. The study of antibiotic use on farms?
Nope. Follow the money is almost always the most revealing path of research. Everything is
rigged. Hyperbole? Yes. But it is hard to pretend that most everything is not rigged to
benefit those who already have the most. Didn't you laugh at the recent story about the
wealthy executives wanting to prioritize customers over dividends? That's the joke. Most
people got it. Most don't even understand what a dividend is. Those with dividends didn't see
the joke. They saw what they wanted to see. Altruism. Ha. Corporate altruism. Another joke.
Our system typically gives us choices between Coke and Pepsi. Choosing water isn't
considered. 1 Reply
The author completely misses the fact that big money owns our system. Yes, "we" vote these
crooks in, but the influence of money is so huge that the noise downs out the facts,
especially when they play on tribal instincts and ideological divisions. We need to remove
the influence of big money, starting with the reversal of the Citizens United decision.
The plain fact is this, the writer tries to convey that the idea of a rigged system is
flawed, but let's fact it, the American economic and political systems are not equal, just as
the educational and health systems are not equal. Try running a presidential campaign without
massive amounts of money. Heck, American society is not based on equality, just look at the
justice system. And, let's not forget, money can easily buy a system that can rig voting
machines, that are rarely checked for accuracy, in many districts around this country.
Though legal, it is still corruption. Most recent example; trumps caving on any meaningful
gun regulation. The public overwhelmingly supports it. But the NRA, which is becoming an
anathema to most Americans, still bends his ear in its direction notwithstanding his promise
to "drain the swamp". Why? It was a largest single contributor to his campaign. And he wants
their money in the future.
The shallow cynicism lies squarely with the authors naive contention that there is no rigging
going on, or that it's ubiquitous with both political parties, when ALL evidence proves the
contrary.
It is no shallow cynicism to state that everything is in fact "rigged". It's looking reality
right in the face and recognizing this con job we call a capitalistic representative
democratic republic for what it really is. Is the justice system rigged in favor of the
wealthy and powerful? Are elections rigged to favor the minority party? Is taxation rigged to
favor the wealthy? Is government rigged to favor lobbyists and those with deep pockets making
campaign contributions? Is the news media rigged to favor anything that protects and fosters
this status quo? Is the US health care system rigged to favor insurance companies, drug
companies, and healthcare providers? If you answer "no" to any of these, you are not living
in the same world, the same reality that 70% of Americans live in. And it is not being
cynical to know it.
Greg, is it being cynical with Citizens United allowing corporations to buy legislatures and
billionaires like the Koch Brothers to control multiple state legislatures and push identical
laws through them all with ALEC. Is it being cynical when lobbyists control health care
legislation. Am I being cynical when Mitch McConnell controls legislation to protect us and
the economy but stops it all after taking millions of dollars in "contributions". Is it being
cynical when the GOP acts like kings of the kingdom because they own the courts, judges, the
Supreme Judges, the last hopes. The Constitution seems to be a suggestion to conservatives
today.
Bundling junk mortgages and selling them as triple A bonds, by banks allowed to become
commercial entities through repeal of Glass Steagall-- instituted in 1932--by Bill Clinton.
That brought us the Recession of 2008. The CFPB was established by Warren in response. Nafta,
started by W, signed by Clinton. And bringing China into the WTO. We've lost 6 million
manufacturing jobs since the 1980s. Reagan getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine of 1948. That
gave rise to politicized talk radio, Fox news, and a lot more, including Trump.
@NM The most effective tool of the NRA is the grades they issue to everyone in Congress. Many
NRA members vote based on these grades. By contrast, gun control advocates are seldom
single-issue voters. Money matters, of course. But the NRA's ability to deliver the votes
matters more. It is an unfortunate situation and I am not aware of any other issue that works
this way. I would not call it rigging.
@Tone And even if 1,000 grandmas gave 25$ each to a candidate, each of those grandmas have
different reasons for doing so. One might like the candidate's health care policy, one their
stance on social security or the environment. Maybe they are worried about debt for their
grand children or are troubled over so many mass shootings. So several different causes are
represented, not just the "need" of one corporation to maximize profit. 10 Replies
@Brian Much of the change in Mitch McConnell's net worth is probably attribute to the sizable
gift his father-in-law gave him. Elaine Chao, McConnell's second wife, is the daughter of the
founder of The Foremost Group, which has funneled revenue through a complex collection of
off-shore accounts and entities to avoid US taxation. In addition, prior to 2013, members of
the Congress and Senate were not prohibited from trading securities using information learned
in the course of their elective duties. In practice, they were permitted to legally trade on
inside information. So over the course of a long career, equipped with a significant capital
stake from his father-in-law, its quite explainable how he has been able to amass a fortune.
When polls show your position is more popular with the electorate than the other party's
positions, and you garner more votes in the election based on the issues, then you've done
what you're supposed to do in a democracy, but the institutions aren't working. When one
party is doing everything in its power to prevent those institutions from working, then the
system is corrupt.
When lobbying becomes illegal. When there is no campaign contributions for any Federal
Election and no political ads. When the only information one can get about candidates are in
debates and on public websites I will buy the argument. Money buys influence in politics. We
have to live with the fact and adjust our opinions accordingly. Fortunately, the monies spent
by candidates don't immediately translate into results. What is normal advantages and what is
corruption comes down to your definition of corruption. Its mostly academic as nobody is
actively proposing limiting the effects of wealth on politics.
Votes in Congress and other legislatures are bought. Politicians may not accept cash
personally but they get "campaign contributions" through various mechanisms, some which are
deemed to be legal only by ignoring what they actually do. If politicians vote in favor of
big businesses, they can expect lucrative employment after their time in office. Many studies
have shown that what legislatures do is not in accordance with what the public wants, but is
done at the bidding of big business, which often actually writes the laws. Appointed
officials are often drawn from the very businesses they are supposed to regulate, and return
to those business after office. Our system is corrupt and this corruption was increasing even
before Trump was elected.
The grandmother sending $25 to her preferred candidate and the Koch Brothers sending $25
million to their preferred candidates are not in any way similar. Please stop the false
equivalence games.
@mj Give me one instance of Donald Trump thinking about how to make the lives of others
better (say, in the 50 years before he was president). Now apply that to Sanders. If you
actually see no difference, I hope you are not a registered voter. 10 Replies
Not rigged? Social Security's solvency would be assured if the taxable income cap was lifted.
Why isn't that done? It wouldn't affect the vast majority of taxpayers.
The fly in this argument is that the sides don't equally respect fact and science, and one
side is much more to blame. Beginning around 1980 with the emergence of evangelical
Christians as a unified political force, the idea of reasoned debate across diverse opinions
began being replaced by a dogmatic attitude toward truth. In dogma there can't be multiple
ideas to be sussed out, there is only one truth which is espoused by an orthodoxy. The
solution to today's impasses is to get dogmatic, dare I say religious, thinking and
argumentation out of politics. The founders separated church and state for good reasons and
we are living with the result of ignoring them.
@Russell Weiner would argue that if I touch your shoulder and someone else drops a
tractor-trailer on your head, the difference is one of degree, not kind.
This smacks of whataboutism. Here's the problem. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said,
"You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts." Today, one side relies
consistently on facts and rational discourse; the other side relies heavily, if not entirely,
on dogma and ideology. Three guesses as to which is which, and your first two don't count. As
exemplars of the latter point of view, consider Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway's
famous quote about "alternative facts," and lawyer to the president Rudy Giuliani's absurd,
"Truth isn't truth." Say what? Name one person on the Left who uses similar language and
engages in equivalent gas-lighting. I'll wait for your answer. I'm happy to have intelligent
conversations with anybody, from any walk of life, any political persuasion -- if, and only
if, we can agree on a common basis of facts. Right now, that's impossible with about 40% of
Americans as they've abandoned all rational thought in blind adulation of their Chosen One.
Without a common basis for discussion and constructive argument, the result is, as the old
saying goes, "Never try to teach a pig to sing; you waste your time and annoy the pig."
@David Agree! This opinion piece is written by someone who thinks the status quo DNC
"business as usual" candidates are the only choice. It's also very dishonest to compare
Trump, Sanders and Warren as if they are the same kind of animal. Their motivations and
messages are so extremely different that this comparison is ugly. (Compare me to a liar says
I am somehow a liar by association?) Our press doesn't feel free anymore it feels as if it is
the champion of the status quo. Every time I read an oped on the nytimes.com, the writer
seems like the protector of the upper middle class's assets and anything or anyone that rocks
the boat is to be brought down. 16 Replies
"It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting
something specific that it has not eventually gotten." HUH? Is that tongue-in-cheek? How
about the 90+% of citizens that support background checks on *all* arms purchases/exchanges,
which has been the case for decades? Why hasn't that become law? I guess I need to point it
out, since you studiously avoid it. It is because of the influence of the NRA, which has
translated its truckloads of cash into political influence through donations, access, and
bullying. Which is the point you inadvertently make with your $25/$25,000 grandma example.
$25 Grandma does not get access to the politician for her donation, whereas the $25,000 NRA
(in my example) does. Always amuses me the contortions people go through to justify the
unjustifiable. I'll say it again: Money is not speech, and the people with more money
shouldn't get more speech. Yes I am aware of the absurdly undemocratic SCOTUS decisions
saying money is speech, and that corporations are people.
Also, I don't think you mean "not many people poor people pay capital gains tax." Of course
they don't. I think you mean, they don't have investments, so they can't earn capital gains,
so they don't benefit from the lower tax rate on such income.
Oh yeah, Grandma's $25 is equivalent to Charles Koch's $100,000 and a free trip to the powwow
in Palm Springs this winter. First they say 'money is speech' then deny some people's speech
is louder, and more influential. Waitaminute... Visiting Scholar at American Enterprise
Institute!! - isn't that the Koch Brothers or some such mouthpiece to put nice makeup on it's
Conservative program of systematically fleecing the average Joe while letting him think he's
a 'patriotic American' ? When a Conservative starts talking about 'reasoning', you can bet
the result is a tax cut for the wealthy and a song 'n dance for the rubes wearing MAGA hats.
Vote Blue, No Matter Who!
It is a Democrat who wrote this, "a senior Senate aide to Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska."
This is the sort of Democrat who has gotten us into this mess. They tell us never mind Bernie
or Warren or others with ideas, just go with the big money of donors (it isn't corrupt, and
its just like your grandma). If you've any doubt, he's linked ideas to Trump. People with
ideas = Trump. Why? Because they don't take the money of big Democratic donors. The
Democratic Party is the only harbor for real ideas, the only place to seek real hope for our
future. Therefore, those who pollute the harbor and extinguish its lighthouse are to be
feared as much as the storm outside.
Looking at Mr Wiener's resume piper and tunes comes to mind - as indeed it would seem it
applies to many who make the laws. Maybe a couple of changes could be valuable - firstly (as
has been done with requiring opt-in to political contributions for Trades Union Members in
the UK) to require all shareholders to opt-in so that all company money used for political
lobbying has the consent of the shareholders. Obviously this is impossible for investment
funds and other secondary holders so they should be banned from making contributions to any
party (with an automatic jail sentence - a day would do on the first occasion but should
allow dismissal for just cause with no pay-off- for those who break such a law. Repeated
breaches should attract years). Secondly if companies or corporations are to benefit from
being treated as having the properties of individuals their board members should be held as
responsible as individuals would be for such things as breaches of safety laws or causing
death. Again the prospect of jail sentences rather than fines, whose imposition could be
circumvented, might provide a reasonable incentive to behave responsibly. Might I suggest in
this context that your readers should have a look at your Sunday Review and David Koch Was
the Ultimate Climate Change Denier
"But this "buys" elections only to the extent Mr. Sanders is claiming voters are passive
automatons incapable of discernment." If 2016 taught me anything, it's that while my fellow
Americans may not be automatons, but some of them sure as heck are "incapable of
discernment".
"For her part, Ms. Warren thinks it is corrupt for the wealthy to defend their economic
interests, but her campaign also plays to what she believes is the self-interest of her
supporters. Why is one corrupt but not the other?" The answer to this: The corruption is the
huge amount of money that can instantly be spent by anethical corporations vs the tiny
amounts that come into an in issue from individuals. Think huge boulder vs many tiny pebbles.
What do you think has the most instant targeted crushing power?
I wonder what this disingenuous AEI right winger's opinion would be if it was the left and
the Dem party that had a vast advantage due to their successful lying and cheating purchased
by immense disproportionate sums of money - oops, I mean "speech." The ability to loudly
repeat a message over and over clearly has an effect where most people don't have the
interest, ability or time to investigate assorted claims. When politicians are forced to seek
large sums of money from those who have lots of it in order to be elected, the system is
rigged. Sorry Mr. Weiner, but I'm not buying your moldy baloney.
@John Brown Class overcrowding and underfunding is deliberately due to rich people wanting to
profit off of public schools by privatizing them. This is how that system is rigged. Think
about you can't say the system is rigged for unions when schools are being underfunded at the
same time. 7 Replies
@Len Charlap. "...ow much research and hard work went in to Hillary's development of the
ideas in her talks." Seriously? I'm willing to bet that there are scholars at the university
in your fair city whose expertise, built over a lifetime of hard work and skill, exceeds that
of Hillary Clinton, who I grant is a bright and accomplished woman. But I would be shocked if
any of them received $675,000 for a presentation in their field, even if it was equivalent in
significance to Newton's Principia or Einstein's On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.
Those bankers weren't paying for Hillary's information; they were paying for the opportunity
to speak with her one-on-one, and her subsequent recognition of them and Goldman Sachs as
good people. That's access that few people with far less money ever have. Don't tell me that
isn't why GS invited her. 16 Replies
You can't possibly understand voter suppression and gerrymandering in the U.S. and still
claim that elections are fair. (And what exactly is "bizarre" about the campaign of Bernie
Sanders?)
I disagree with the column. The NRA is just one example of the influence and control of
issues thru contributions. 80% of Americans strongly favor some gun control, yet we continue
to witness mass shootings with nothing done. Citizens United dilutes one person, one vote.
Partisan gerrymandering distorts popular voting and remains unchanged by a supreme court
appointed by presidents elected by big money. Voter suppression is perpetrated with laws
clearly meant to deny minority voting. War chests for senatorial and presidential candidates
have risen to levels unheard of 50 years ago. The DNC is exposed for its partisanship in the
2016 primaries. A president with flagrant conflicts-of-interest who lost the popular vote by
3 million remains in office. No hint of electoral college reform as the courts rule that
electors can vote against the candidate they were elected to support. But the author of this
column declares that it is cynical to claim the system is not rigged.
" It supposedly takes the form of campaign contributions that, Mr. Sanders says, enable
corporations to "literally buy elections." This is, literally, false." How in the world can
you claim to be a political scientist? Tom Ferguson at U Mass Amherst has published studies
that find a very direct correlation between campaign spending and successful electoral
campaigns. 1 Reply
If spending more money did not proportionately increase the spender's influence, corporations
would not do it. To argue their excess money is not over-influencing candidates is to avoid
the truth. Corporations outspend unions 16 to 1. And outspend private individuals in
campaigns too. This column is the triumph of belief over reason and is nonsense.
As John McEnroe famously said - "you can't be serious....you cannot be serious." Of course
everything is not rigged, but degrees of influence are clearly linked to money and lobbying,
and debates about critically important issues to the majority of the population can be
controlled by one Senator - who is lobbied directly by former members of his own staff.
You write: "Accusations of corruption are rooted in the assumption that one's positions are
so obviously correct that the only explanation for opposing them is that the opponent has
been bought and his or her supporters have been brainwashed." Sorry, no. Accusations of
corruption from Warren, et al. are based on facts: it is a fact that a for-profit health
insurance system is a bad idea. It is a fact that Mr. Trump did not win his election based on
votes; the election was corrupted. It is a fact that votes can even be "bought" and "sold"
when a voting machine is programmed to cheat or miscast when gerrymandering disenfranchises
us. It is a fact that corruption co-exists with power. But I agree with you that we should
not be too cynical about it. Let's start by honestly describing what we face. 1 Reply
@Mark Nuckols Bear in mind that that Harvard legacy applicant "with a 1520 SAT' (if indeed he
did get that score, and not, as in many such cases, a mere 1420 or even much lower) also "had
the luxury of not working a part time job." Bear in mind that he "had the luxury of a
Princeton Review cram course" -- or much more likely, a private one-on-one, $300 per hour
tutor to help "achieve" that score. Advantage begets advantage begets advantage begets
advantage. And he passes on to his children, and they to their children, and before you know
it you're in a caste system in many ways as rigid and hierarchical as any Indian concoction.
But ours is called "meritocracy" to deflect away from roles or luck, artificial, arbitrary
and inherited privilege. And all this not even to mention the cheating that plays such an
enormous role.
Mr Weiner, it's all in how you frame the question and how you present your findings. For
example: "...abolishing the private insurance that hundreds of millions of Americans hold is
certainly a radical proposition. Is it really impossible for anyone other than the venal or
the duped to oppose the idea?" Under M4A private insurance will not be "abolished" but rather
"phased out." Americans don't "hold" private insurance, they "pay" for it. It's certainly not
impossible for some people to oppose M4A but are they fully aware of the drag on
society/economy that the current system allows (bankruptcies, poor health among the uninsured
and the underinsured, emergency room costs, excessive pharmaceutical costs, overall cost per
person, health outcomes compared to other nations with universal health care, the stress of
dealing with insurance companies, medical bills, co-pays and deductables, etc.)
@Summer Smith -- "when another country literally rigged voting machines in the last election"
No, that did not happen. Misunderstanding what did happen is to
"I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served
in Congress," said Ocasio-Cortez. "At minimum there should be a long wait period."
"If you are a member of Congress + leave, you shouldn't be allowed to turn right
around&leverage your service for a lobbyist check.
I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in
Congress."
–AOC, as reported by NakedCapitalism on May 31, 2019
"... Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has long pushed for Kiev to investigate Vice President Joe Biden's attempt in 2016 to get the country's top prosecutor removed at a crucial moment during an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings -- the Ukrainian natural gas company advised at the time by Biden's son Hunter. ..."
"... As the The New York Times reported previously, during the final year of the Obama presidency, Vice President Joe Biden "threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine's leaders did not dismiss the country's top prosecutor" -- Viktor Shokin -- "who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite." ..."
Also interesting is that Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has long pushed for
Kiev to investigate Vice President Joe Biden's attempt in 2016 to get the country's top
prosecutor removed at a crucial moment during an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings --
the Ukrainian natural gas company advised at the time by Biden's son Hunter.
As the The New York Times
reported previously, during the final year of the Obama presidency, Vice President Joe Biden
"threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine's leaders did
not dismiss the country's top prosecutor" -- Viktor Shokin -- "who had been accused of turning
a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite."
Crucially last week Giuliani was reported to have again raised the issue with Ukrainian
officials , according to CNN
.
As CNN cynically put it in its
latest report , this suggests "the former New York mayor is making a renewed push for the
country to investigate Trump's political enemies."
But then again maybe it's as simple as the US not actually having a deep national security
interest in propping up Ukraine's military at a moment when international missile treaties with
Russian are unraveling and the war in Donbass is at a bloody stalemate.
The looming potential for a controversial cut in aid to Ukraine will make Trump's upcoming
meeting with still relatively new "political outsider" President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set for
next week all the more interesting. A final decision on the military aid is expect after this
crucial meeting.
More reason for Pappy Biden to pull out of race. Now he does not stand a chance to defeat
Trump because Hunter corruption in Ukraine and China will be center stage during election.
Obviously "lock them up " will be the battle cry. With China's latest backpedaling on tariff
retaliation, Trump can only be defeated from within Republican party by new impeachable
revelations.
Wait, so does the US still want to split China and Russia?
At G7 Macron and Trump both were talking up Putin and wanting to allow Russia back into
G8.
Then i read another interesting article about Macron inviting Putin to France:
"The dynamics of the New
Cold War might undergo a dramatic transformation if the geopolitical game-changer of a
“New Detente” between Russia and the West succeeds, which is becoming
increasingly possible as proven by recent events.
President Putin’s meeting earlier this week with his French counterpart in Paris
saw Macron repeatedly emphasizing Russia’s European
identity in a clear sign that this rapprochement is making visible progress. Macron is
motivated to play the role of mediator between the US and Russia for two main reasons, namely
that he wants to position France as a possible replacement to inevitably post-Merkel Germany
as the EU’s leading country and also to reach an accommodation with Moscow in Africa
after the completion of the country’s “
African Transversal ” earlier this summer
began to
threaten Paris’ interests in the continent. Putin responded extremely positively and reminded Macron of their
two Great Powers’ decades-long shared desire to forge “a common Europe from
Lisbon to Vladivostok”, reaffirming that Russia regards itself more as a European
country than a “Eurasian” or Asian one, which has important implications for
International Relations.
Both the Mainstream and Alternative Medias
had hitherto exaggerated the nature of the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership for their
own reasons, with the former wanting to portray it according to the paradigm of the so-called
“Russian threat” in order to justify a more muscular American military buildup
against them while the latter imagined that the two were “allies” jointly working
together without any disagreements whatsoever in order to accelerate the emerging Multipolar
World Order that would presumably be “anti-American”. The reality of their
relations is a lot less sexy and it’s that Russia was pushed into reorientating its
strategic focus as a result of the West’s anti-Russian sanctions following
Crimea’s reunification, which served as the catalyst for Moscow’s decision to
embrace Beijing. Russia probably wouldn’t have undertaken this move had it not been for
American pressure, but it felt compelled to since it didn’t want to remain a
“junior partner” in the US’ “New World Order”, instead
endeavoring to return to its historical role as a Great Power among equals.
In pursuit of this, it’s much easier for Russia to simply reintegrate into a
reformed “New World Order” than to build an entirely new one from scratch
alongside China, which is why the possibility of a “New Detente” is so enticing
to its leadership, though provided of course that the West is sincere in finally treating
Russia as an equal Great Power"
BASTARDS! If i had a DIME for every time Obama EXPLOITED vulnerable Americans for his road
and pony show I would be a rich woman.
I'll never forget Obama interview in prison with a few younger African American kids.
Talkin to then as if he knew what they were going through. His black *** raised WHITE and who
had ZERO clue what it was to live black and supporting the very oppressive system that jailed
them in the first place. All that after he bailed out banks and then QE under the Fed for his
wealthy CITI, Goldman and *** friends.
The poorest country in Asia Afghanistan has totally collapsed
under NATO occupation.
Complete BS! It is the continued Pakistani ISI influence in
Afghanistan presently though their Haqqani Taliban network plus ISIS that is terrorizing Afghanistan,
including intentional bombings of wedding parties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadahan_wedding_bombing
&
https://www.apnews.com
/b5ceb0cfb33d4d73aaaadf5eee19fe9d
The Pakistani army wants Afghanistan as "strategic depth" in case of a conflict with India.
Tony
Ah! So the US-led invasion, with it's endless stream of weak US-approved 'governments', has had
nothing to do with Afghanistan's continued instability then. Got it!!!
Pakistan is the only overland supply route available for the US military; roads via Iran and
Russia are politically out. All their fuel, ammo and food towards Afghanistan is under Pakistani
ISI control from 1978 till now, with the interruption of 2009 2015 .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_logistics_in_the_Afghan_War#History
mark
Afghanistan has been the victim and playground for Neocon intrigue for years.
A liberal, progressive left wing regime that furthered women's rights and social provision was
destroyed by Uncle Sam in its own interests to weaken Russia.
Bin Laden and his splendid chaps were put on the CIA payroll for the purpose.
The result was a long running bloodbath with 28,000 Russian and 1,4 million Afghan dead.
Followed by years of civil war, US invasion and the imposition of a narco warlord puppet government
on the country.
Tony
Hasn't Afghanistan gone from having hardly any opium production prior to the US-led invasion, to
currently being the source of something like 99% of the world's source for heroin?
mark
The Cocaine Import Agency runs the coke trade out of South America.
Might as well run the heroin trade out of Afghanistan as well.
Martin Usher
Have you considered that the Pakistan of 1980 may not be the same country with the same players as
the Pakistan of 2019? Also, when you get a weak/chaotic government then its quite likely that
different factions or forces within a country may pursue widely different goals?
"... etanyahu bet the farm on Trump and Trump failed to deliver. They were countered at every turn by patient and scrupulous opponents who read the board better and didn't respond muscularly to repeated provocations. They let events come to them and waited for the moment of over-commitment. ..."
"... "Iraqi Intelligence: 'The Israeli drones that have been attacking our nation in the past few weeks are operating out of a base in YPG/SDF held areas in Syria and these operations are co-financed by Saudi Arabia. Israeli military personnel are on the ground in Northern Syria.'" ..."
Magnier on Nuttyahoo's escalating provocations encapsulates the most recent series of
events, although he doesn't attempt to link the actions to the upcoming elections. Hezbollah
threatened direct retaliation against Occupied Palestine; Iraq chose to blame the Outlaw US
Empire; Syria remained silent; the G-7 said nothing. The recent proposal by Iran to refurbish
one pipeline and build another to Syria's coastline would certainly become a Zionist target.
So, for the project to have the proper security, Occupied Palestine needs to be liberated.
Nasrallah isn't known as a bluffer, while Nuttyahoo's prone to be too aggressive. Do the
Zionists see the current situation as possibly the final time they have some sort of an
advantage as Magnier seems to imply and attack since they know the Outlaw US Empire won't?
But, in spite of the whole US paleo-conservative spectre, along with "alt-right", always
telling us it is Israel who forces the US to wage war in the ME...now, Israeli politics and
experts, say the last attacks on Irak, Syria and Lebanon have been made only as electoral
maneuver by Netanyahu and not only, but have stated that it is the US who wants Israel doing
their dirty job in the ME...This, reported by Al Manar ....not a Jewish source....
In his speech on August 25, the secretary general of Hezbollah made a double promise: the
Resistance will now attack the drones of Israel and attack the Israeli troops not in Shebaa
but in Lebanon itself. For those Israeli generals who experienced the 2006 war and the ups
and downs of Syria, these are not just warnings. These soldiers even seem to have been
sensitive to Nasraláh's warning that Netanyahu's attacks are intended to win votes
for the next election and avoid imprisonment. "The current threat to Israel, which is even
more serious than terrorism, missiles and Iran, is the collapse of the interior of Israel,"
warned former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
"By the way, Netanyahu's air operations against Syria, Lebanon and Iraq pursue internal
political goals, which is very unfortunate", said Moshe Yaalon, a leader of the Blue and
White opposition coalition and former Israeli Minister of Military Affairs, according to
the agency Palestinian Maa.
"The threat of the collapse of the interior of Israel is even more serious than the
missiles and Iran. The destruction of democracy and corruption within government apparatus
will lead us to collapse", said Ehud Barak in a video posted on his Twitter page.
"The attack on Syria was not a preventive action and will harm Israel," Barak told
Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, having apparently understood the warning issued by
Nasralá.
Other Israeli experts share this opinion. Yaari Ehud, an Israeli journalist and expert
in the Middle East said on Channel 12 of Israeli television that Netanyahu and his security
cabinet "perpetrated these attacks on behalf of the US" and run the risk of "exposing
Israel." "In fact, the missions that Americans refuse to do, they entrust them to Israel.
We have been commissioned to do the dirty work at the risk of jeopardizing our security,
"he added before saying", Tel Aviv will pay for it."
Who is lying? The Israelis or the Americans? Or both?
Mangier writes a follow-up to his post that I criticized @29. I think that his latest post
also falls well short of his vaunted reputation.
Magnier's interpretation of events lauds Netanyahu's chess playing. He compares
inconsequential attacks with past strategic actions (almost gleefully as he describes
those past glories at some length) .
He makes broad, unsupported statements like:
It should be recognized that Israel's assessment of the reaction of Iran's allies in
Syria and Iraq is spot on.
And repeats that Israel is hitting "hundreds" of sites FOUR TIMES. Making it
seem as though the Israeli campaign is much greater than it really is. AFAICT those attacks
have actually been spread out over more than a year.
Yet it's all preliminary to this gem:
Netanyahu forced Hezbollah's leader to threaten Israel ...
Forced?Really? AFAICT the red lines in Lebanon have been clear
for a long time. Each side will defend theirs.
Which leaves me scratching my head as to why Magnier isn't using his platform to point out
Netanyahu's irresponsible, self-serving actions. Netanyahu will NOT pay a price for his
craven machinations - which could mean Israeli dead and injured and/or another war in Lebanon
- when even "critics" like Magnier dress them up as heroic acts of patriotism.
Netanyahu's widening of Israel's war with Iran and its proxies into Lebanon and Iraq -- and
perhaps beyond -- and his acknowledgement of that wider war raise questions for both
nations.
Israel today has on and near her borders hostile populations in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon,
Iran, and Iraq. Tens of millions of Muslims see her as an enemy to be expelled from the
region.
While there is a cold peace with Egypt and Jordan, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are
temporary allies as long as the foe is Iran.
Is this pervasive enmity sustainable?
As for America, have we ceded to Netanyahu something no nation should ever cede to
another, even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their choosing but not
of ours?
On a not completely different subject-that of the Empire's demise- there is a Tom Luongo
article at Strategic Culture, which is pretty good. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/27/first-many-cauldrons-form-middle-east/
It ends
"So, the cauldron around Israel is forming. With the Saudis in deep trouble, Egypt refusing
to go along with any of Trump's plans – Arab NATO, the Kushner Deal of the Century
– the game board has fundamentally shifted against them.
"N etanyahu bet the farm on Trump and Trump failed to deliver. They were countered at
every turn by patient and scrupulous opponents who read the board better and didn't respond
muscularly to repeated provocations. They let events come to them and waited for the moment
of over-commitment.
"Now the counter attack will commence, I suspect, with brutal precision"
I don't quite agree with his assessment and conclusions. He is grossly underestimating the
axis of resistance and their will to push back. Also, Israelis are overestimating the
American support, no matter what. Not if it is going to cost them American lives. Hitting a
few ammo depots in isolation is one thing, but getting Americans to die for Israeli
intransigence is another. Not much stomach for that here in US, no matter how much they push
the special relationship.
Israelis are playing backgammon while Iran and axis playing chess, being a grandmaster at
that. Check mate will be ugly.
@177 Israel shouldn't take American support for granted. According to this article some
Evangelicals are starting to have second thought...
"Why do we have pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ values, and we do not have more freedom to protect
our faith? We are persecuted now," Yanko says about evangelical Christians like herself.
"[Jews] say, 'We've got America. We control America.' That's what I know."
"Iraqi Intelligence: 'The Israeli drones that have been attacking our nation in the
past few weeks are operating out of a base in YPG/SDF held areas in Syria and these
operations are co-financed by Saudi Arabia. Israeli military personnel are on the ground in
Northern Syria.'"
Is it a feint to get SAA to cease Idlib Dawn and drive the Zionists out, or are Zionist
drones really being flown from there? Regardless, it's time to end the Kurd's games, drive
out the Outlaw US Empire and all other illegal forces and reclaim Syrian sovereignty. Iraq
must do the same.
Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian forces
and their allies by striking targets in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq.
Really? AFAIK, Israel hasn't described specific attacks that were thwarted.
Snyder then uses Iraqi and Hezbollah's anger at Israel's acts of war (cause, um ...
that's what they are) as examples of pre-crime hatred that justifies
Netanyahu's Israel's attacks.
Netanyahu's self-serving deviousness has blown up his face. Hasbara media assets are busy
trying to recover the high ground. IMO their attempt to do so will fail miserably as it's
transparent and thus digs the hole deeper. Leading to the question: Will Netanyahu accept
defeat at the polls or will he continue with the dirty tricks (at the risk of war)?
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
The above should be read in conjunction with my criticism of Magnier @29 and @148.
Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen put it best: "All wars are fought twice, the
first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." Those second fights are often
longer, if less bloody, than the initial battles. The fights for memory and legacy often begin
before the guns have even fallen silent.
America's wars are no strangers to this dynamic. From Vietnam to the present, our wars have
always been refought by participants, journalists, scholars, and politicians. As we begin to
seriously debate ending America's quixotic campaigns in the Greater Middle East, one
particularly nasty narrative will be employed by the defenders of intervention and imperialism.
It recurs like clockwork every time America loses a war: that we were stabbed in the back.
Dolchstosslegende
The modern stab-in-the-back myth got its start in Germany exactly a century ago. Imperial
Germany was conceived of, created, and led by Prussia's military caste. Prussia, in Voltaire's
bon mot, was an army with a state, not a state with an army. And Prussia, after crippling
defeats by Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt, had entered the First World War on a 50-year winning
streak.
But by the fall of 1918, Germany had lost the war. With its spring offensives failing and
fresh American troops flooding into France, final defeat was only a matter of time. While the
front lines were still on French and Belgian soil, the German Army had been decisively beaten
in the Hundred Days battles. After the Battle of Amiens, Germany's leaders, both military and
civilian, knew that the war's outcome was simply a math problem.
Germany did the only thing it could do and sued for a humiliating peace. The Kaiser was
forced to abdicate and flee, and a new civilian government signed an armistice and then the
Treaty of Versailles. Germany gave up land, people, and most of its army, and took on both
formal responsibility for the war and $5 billion in reparations.
Defeat was more than a bitter pill to swallow -- it was incomprehensible to millions,
especially those who had been at the front and had often experienced more (bloody) successes
than failures.
Germany's de facto military dictator, General Erich Ludendorff, was among the first to
embrace the idea that the country had been betrayed by communists, politicians, and most of
all, Jews. Though a wartime census showed that Jews were overrepresented in both the German
Army as a whole and in frontline units, the "Big Lie" stuck. Its propagation was aided by often
well-intentioned generals and politicians, who told the returning soldiers that "no enemy has
vanquished you."
When Adolf Hitler, a decorated veteran and budding demagogue, embraced this fiction, the
Dolchstosslegende (literally "dagger stab myth") was cemented. The German Army had not
lost. It had been betrayed by the home front and the politicians.
Vietnam
Korea, America's first war of the nuclear age, did not occasion charges of betrayal within.
Perhaps this was because outright defeat had been so close, both at the Pusan Perimeter in the
summer of 1950, and again six months later, when Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River
and drove the United Nations forces back over the 38th Parallel. A draw, especially with the
specter of nuclear war in the background, didn't seem so bad.
Vietnam was different. The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and
intercontinental bombers, lost to a Third World peasant army. Sure the U.S. won every battle,
dropping more bombs on South Vietnam than it had on either Germany or Japan in World War II,
whatever the cost. But they lost the war. The explanation: it was Jane Fonda and the hippies
that stabbed the army in the back , undermining support at home and turning the U.S.
tactical victory of 1968's Tet Offensive into a strategic defeat. As Vietnam veteran and former
Senator James Webb famously said of Fonda: "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch her slit
her wrist."
This narrative was buttressed by a wave of revisionist scholarship on Vietnam. Lewis
Sorley's A Better War posits counterinsurgency and pacification as a path to victory and
celebrates General Creighton Abrams's successes in the wake of the Tet Offensive. Mark Moyar, a
historian now working at USAID, penned Triumph Forsaken , an apology for South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Max Boot, never one to miss a chance to extol the white
man's burden, has weighed in with multiple volumes on "the road not taken."
Traditional historians make a few obvious counterpoints that are difficult to refute.
Foremost among them is this one: despite two decades of French and American partnership and
aid, the South Vietnamese state and army were unable to ever stand on their own. The Easter
Offensive of 1972, sometimes celebrated as the finest hour of the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN), was defeated only with the aid of tremendous American fire support and at the
cost of heavy ARVN casualties. Three years later, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.
North Vietnam, for all its missteps and brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and
maintained the will to fight. The South did not.
Iraq
The Iraq war revisionist narrative is perhaps less plausible than that of Vietnam. True, the
Sunni tribes of Anbar Province turned against al-Qaeda and the Sunni-Shia civil war had
temporarily abated by 2008. These tactical realities led to absurd triumphalism from the
neoconservative crowd, especially those insiders who saw themselves as the brain trust of the
2007 troop surge.
The surge, a reinforcement of only 30,000 soldiers and Marines, was hailed as one of the
signal triumphs of American military history. General David Petraeus was celebrated as a
"savior general." The language of the sycophantic press corps would have made even Douglas
MacArthur blush. "The gold standard for wartime command," said then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, describing Petraeus. America was told that its forces,
after initial missteps and much painful learning, had triumphed over terrorism in Iraq.
This victory, the story then goes, was squandered by President Barack Obama's pusillanimity
and inattention. U.S. troops marched out of Iraq as victors in 2011 and then had to march back
in three years later when the corrupt, sectarian Iraqi Army collapsed in the face of the ragtag
forces of the Islamic State: a pickup truck-borne reconnaissance-in-force of just 1,500
jihadists.
The reality is that the only thing America won in Iraq was "a decent interval," in Henry
Kissinger's infamous phrase. The surge had always been understood as merely a means to an end:
political reconciliation between Iraq's Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds. This manifestly failed to
occur. The security services became corrupt Shia fiefdoms, the Kurds intermittently plotted
their exit, and the Sunnis, feeling themselves excluded from post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, sought
new champions.
In a supremely cynical gambit, the Iraq war's architects flooded America's airwaves to blame
Obama for a squandered victory in Iraq, especially after the Islamic State's lightning
offensives of 2014. Obama and his defeatist cheerleaders in the media, we were told, had walked
away when Iraq was on the path to peace and prosperity.
Such a claim, regardless of the intricacies of intra-Shia politics and status of forces
agreements, rests on a foundation of hubris: the idea that America had the knowledge and skill
to dictate successful political outcomes to Iraqis. Nouri al-Maliki, the sectarian Shiite
leader blamed for setting conditions for the Islamic State's success, was plucked from
obscurity and installed as Iraq's prime minister under American sponsorship. Given the
inability and unwillingness of two U.S. presidents to curb or remove Maliki, and the
inescapable postwar Iranian influence in Shia-led Iraq, claims of a squandered victory are hard
to take seriously.
The late Michael Hastings put it best: the surge narrative was "perhaps the most impressive
con job in recent American history." Maybe a decent interval was worth the casualties and cost
of the surge. But deluding ourselves that "we won" is another matter.
Afghanistan
We are already seeing the new Dolchstosslegendes take shape in the debate over
Afghanistan, Syria, and once again Iraq. As both President Donald Trump and Democratic
presidential candidates make pledges about withdrawing from Afghanistan, the pushback is in
full force. Regional stability, women's rights, and terrorism are all cited as reasons to stay,
but the idea of stolen victory is also getting a workout.
Despite nearly 18 years of war and the deployment of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops at the war's
height, plus security and development assistance that far exceeds the Marshall Plan, the
Taliban today controls more of Afghanistan than at any point since their overthrow in 2002.
Opium cultivation, the primary funding source for the insurgents, sets new records year
after year. The situation has gotten so bad that in May the Pentagon stopped releasing its
district stabilization reports, which had been used to measure the security situation
throughout Afghanistan. Despite then-commander General John Nicholson's November 2017 statement
that the "most telling" metric of success is population control, the Department of Defense now
asserts that the reports are "of limited decision-making value."
Afghan security force casualties, probably the most important gauge of the war's progress,
are also unavailable, supposedly classified at the behest of the Afghan government. U.S.
Central Command's new chief, Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, Jr., recently acknowledged to the
Senate that Afghan army and police losses were unsustainable. A full third of the Afghan
security force has to be replaced every year due to casualties, desertion, and failures to
re-enlist. The trajectory of the war is pretty clear.
One could plausibly argue that America did win the Afghan war -- way back in 2002. The swift
initial campaign, fought mostly by the Afghan Northern Alliance with support from U.S. Special
Forces, CIA paramilitaries, and air power, toppled the Taliban government and shattered
al-Qaeda's network in Central Asia. Everything that came after, the argument goes, was mission
creep and utopian fantasy.
That case has its merits, but the war should be judged by America's professed goals there.
These quickly grew to include the establishment of a stable, secure, and centralizing Afghan
national government. By those lights, the war was, and is, an unwinnable quagmire.
Yet there are prominent national security professionals who will assert that Afghanistan was
never lost, and in fact can still be won. Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown professor and former
National Security Council staffer, made this case most recently in the pages of Foreign
Policy . Clinging to the life raft of the possible, however faint, Miller wrote that
"claiming the United States has failed is odd because the war is not over yet." After risibly
declaring that "Obama nearly won the war in 2012," Miller judged Afghanistan a secret success,
as a "mowing the grass" counterterrorism campaign.
After bemoaning the supposed hubris of those counseling withdrawal, Miller settled on a
maximalism that is jarring to even a casual observer of the war: "more resources, real
counterinsurgency, no deadline." Realist detractors, called out by name, are told to keep their
opinions to themselves, because their lack of faith undermines a necessary Forever War.
Syria
In Syria, unlike in Afghanistan, the insurgent enemy was decisively defeated on the
battlefield. The Islamic State's final sanctuary was destroyed in March. But after declaring a
conclusion to this successful punitive expedition, President Trump reluctantly reversed himself
and left a small residual U.S. force in place, ostensibly for counterterrorism purposes.
Trump had been relentlessly attacked by virtually the entire U.S. foreign policy
establishment for his supposed fecklessness for even suggesting a withdrawal. Senators voted
for an amendment rebuking the president by a margin of nearly 3-1. The secretary of defense,
former General James Mattis, resigned in protest. Pundits and purported experts across the
political spectrum inveighed against Trump's pullout plans.
The major U.S. papers are quick to report that the Islamic State is back, with fighters
slipping across the porous Iraq-Syria border and "seeding a new insurgency." Intermittent
attacks receive ample attention, as does the plight of Syria's Kurds, stuck between Assad's
regime and their Turkish enemies.
The Islamic State is likely to survive and return for the same reason it appeared in the
first place: victor's justice and the refusal of all parties to embrace political compromise
and power-sharing. Bashar al-Assad's forces are engaged in a campaign of repression and
violence in Sunni areas.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, under the supposedly less sectarian Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, a
similar process grinds on. As The New Yorker 's Ben Taub detailed in a December piece,
the conviction rate in Iraq's terrorism courts is 98 percent. The average trial lasts less than
10 minutes. The families of many of those on trial are themselves detained indefinitely in
squalid desert camps. Despite American advisors, American aid, and American attention, Iraq's
problems can only be solved by Iraqis. They are in no hurry to do so.
One might hope that the common-sense Middle American voter would see through this shallow
sophistry. After all, the signature moment of Trump's insurgency within the GOP primaries was
in South Carolina, where he denounced the 43rd president and the Iraq war and was rewarded with
an easy victory and the dispatch of Jeb Bush, the squishy embodiment of GOP conventional wisdom
on Iraq.
Today even recent veterans believe these wars were for naught. A new Pew survey found that
64 percent of Iraq veterans and 58 percent of Afghanistan veterans believe their wars were "not
worth fighting." These men and women realize that we cannot fix foreign lands at the point of a
bayonet, however impressive our temporary tactical victories may be.
But despite $6 trillion spent on these failed wars, American foreign policy remains largely
the prerogative of elites. The stories of triumphs forsaken and troops stabbed in the back only
need to reach and convince a small audience.
America's Dolchstosslegendes , fueled mostly by optimism and hubris, are not those of
bitter German anti-Semites, looking for someone to blame. But our myths and rationalizations
are still pernicious and consequential -- and they aren't going away.
General H. R. McMaster, formerly national security advisor to President Trump and now
ensconced at one of the most influential think tanks in Washington, recently blamed "war
weariness" and "a defeatist narrative" for challenging the ongoing American military commitment
to Afghanistan. As we near a presidential election and perhaps a chance at some realism and
retrenchment overseas, the myths of back-stabbing and lost victory must be rejected. Until
Americans, and especially elites, accept the lessons of history and the limits of U.S. power,
we will be doomed to repeat our Sisyphean wars of choice.
Gil Barndollar is the Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of
America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship. He served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry
officer from 2009-2016.
It's hard to take any analysis seriously that starts out with the politically correct
mantra
" about how the US lost Vietnam. As one of those post WWII conflicts that actually had
some veracity as an effort on behalf of others one can say with some ease, we won that war
and there's little question that the US service members who fought it were in fact
betrayed.
And that betrayal continues with the nonsense about how we lost.
"North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. North Vietnam, for all its missteps and
brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and maintained the will to fight. The South did
not."
They rolled in with the support of the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam. You sure
leave a lot out of your understanding of events at the time, Nevermind rethinking the matter
today.
Pay attention people; Prussia not Russia. Yes there was Prussia and it is not related to
Russia. I'm making this comment because one of my colleagues wanted to corrected TAC article
by claiming there must've been some misspelling. I wonder how many of my fellow homo sapiens
think as my colleague does. I also wonder how many homos are in fact sapiēns?
Syria
I thought that you were going to mention the myth that had Obama bombed Assad after his 'red
line' comment that moderate rebels would have taken over Syria and turned it into the Garden
of Eden. This bizzare narrative is passionately defended by the likes of Jack Keane and too
many others to count.
Even though Al Qaeda and ISIS were always, by far, the strongest factions, the
demonstration of U.S. force would put so much fear into their hearts that it would allow our
freedom fighters to walk into Damascus. After all that's what happened in Libya and we know
how easily cowed ISIS and Al Qaeda are by one off bombings. Those are the people who start
off battles using 1 - 3 VBIEDs (suicide vehicles).
"The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and intercontinental bombers, lost to
a Third World peasant army."
That's a myth within the myth. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was not a third world
peasant army and should not be confused with the Viet Cong. That's an insult to the the NVA.
They were highly trained and were equipped by the Soviet Union. The Viet Cong were virtually
wiped out and were no longer a factor after the 68 Tet offensive. The NVA also kicked China
back out of Vietnam in a border war in 1979, and destroyed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Germany was not decisively defeated on the battle field. Not one inch of Germany was occupied
by an allied soldier when the armistice was declared. Had the strike by the French military
been detected by the Germans the outcome would have been very different. The sacking of
Germany's wealth and infrastructure led to an economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. This
allied induced economic chaos led to the monster Hitler and his thugees. Might be worth
noting that prior to WW1 Germany and England were each other's best trading partners and the
Kaiser visited England regularly. The war party -- derided in history as the "yellow press
successfully lied about "the Hun" and got the war they wanted. Shades of 2003 Iraq;
mainstream media, a powerful foreign lobby, a spineless congress, and a compliant president.
Our decision makers have learned nothing from history except to follow the money. The neocons
have learned everything. Lies (main stream media) and political contributions will get you
endless wars. Just say NO! to Netanyahu.
I have nothing but questions after reading this article and concern about how gullible,
ignorant and loath we as a nation are when it comes to exposing the fallacy and ineptness of
your so-called anointed ones and foreign policy by the armed conflict. Why do we not learn
from our mistakes? Why do we continue to compound the mistakes we've made?
Part of the strategy in Afghanistan is nothing more than a rebranded "strategic hamlet"
strategy used in Vietnam. How well did that work out? Easy answer, it didn't, it just ceded
territory to the insurgency. Have we learned anything, not really, you still have some older
cadre teaching the new generation lessons learned from over 40 years ago and those lessons
haven't kept pace with developments in what we refer to as third world countries. We aren't
adapting militarily with the exception of the lethality of today's modern weapons. And
unfortunately should we engage in an armed conflict with a modernized advisary we'll still be
teaching the lessons learned and tactics used when fighting lesser equipped insurgencies.
I've gone off topic but watching the army I hold in esteem continue to do the same dumb s**t
is disheartening.
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed. You've done a really good job of making your point
without totally destroying the character of the perpetrators.
All true from both yourself and Paine/Plp except "Hard for the status quo to form a
consensus" which is inherently false based purely on semantics. The status quo must always be
a consensus of sorts or it would not be the status quo regardless of how sordid a sort of
consensus it represents. At the very least our status quo represents the effective majority
consensus of the political elite over matters of governing and simultaneously the effective
consensus of the governed to not overwhelmingly reject the majority consensus of the
political elite. This is not to say that the governed are happy about what they get, but if
they overwhelmingly rejected the political establishment then it would no longer be the
status quo political establishment. Elites learned since the Great Depression that if they
limited their abuse of the common man sufficiently then the combination of general public
apathy regarding politics and the bureaucracy along with the inherent fear of ordinary people
taking action to bring about uncertain change would forever preserve complete elite control
of government apparatus.
"... I have been for Tulsi because of her foreign policy and wanted her to be able to give voice to her position during the primary so as to move Bernie to improve his foreign policy positions and also the public. Tulsi was the one who quit the DNC during the 2016 primary over how Bernie was cheated, so is not afraid to stand up to power - and why they hate her ..."
"... I believe that the Democratic leadership does not want Tulsi in the debates because they do not want her to take out another candidate like she did in the second debate to Harris at -12% at around 5% now - not a top tier candidate now. ..."
"... They have given numerous hit job articles to Bernie, while all of Warrens - including today - are glowing. That should be a clue about Warren. Also in 2016 she sided with Hillary, not Bernie. ..."
Michael Tracey is the one that wrote the RCP article and also has a video on the topic.
He also does a great job calling out the Russiagate BS.
"Tulsi getting screwed by the DNC" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZMMlQNidlQ&t=440s
There is only one more qualifying poll Monmouth ( tomorrow) before the debates and she
needs two more. Even though the she has qualified in numerous polls such as the Boston
Globe that are not allowed by the DNC. Yes they screwed her.
"It's Official--Tulsi to be Screwed Out of 3rd Debate!!" https://caucus99percent.com/content/its-official-tulsi-be-screwed-out-3rd-debate
I have been for Tulsi because of her foreign policy and wanted her to be able to
give voice to her position during the primary so as to move Bernie to improve his foreign
policy positions and also the public. Tulsi was the one who quit the DNC during the 2016
primary over how Bernie was cheated, so is not afraid to stand up to power - and why they
hate her .
I believe that the Democratic leadership does not want Tulsi in the debates because
they do not want her to take out another candidate like she did in the second debate to
Harris at -12% at around 5% now - not a top tier candidate now.
I am loving now how Bernie is taking on the corporate media and their BS to their
faces.
"Bernie Sanders took a well-deserved shot at The Washington Post this week, saying that
the Jeff Bezos-owned paper doesn't like him because he routinely goes after Amazon for the
horrible treatment of their workers. NBC wasn't too happy about this, and claimed that
Bernie was assaulting "the free press," and said his attacks were just like Trump's"
The powers that be really wanted Joe Biden, but it will become obvious in the coming
months that he has serious cognitive issues - ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Q0E2dzTJw
).
The only other viable candidate against Bernie is Warren , which it appears the elite
are falling in love with. Warren didn't become a Democrat until 2011 or when she was 62. In
the 90's Warren was on the side of Dow Chemical in the breast implant cases, helping to
reduce payouts to the victims. She will be like Obama - Hope and Change during the election
and Neoliberal when president. I read the NYTimes to see what the Oligarchs are up too.
They have given numerous hit job articles to Bernie, while all of Warrens -
including today - are glowing. That should be a clue about Warren. Also in 2016 she sided
with Hillary, not Bernie.
The IMF loan seems designed to get Macri past the election. It has been used to support
capital flight: to support the peso, the Central Bank sells dollars to "importers" that then
stash the money abroad. This is illegal according to IMF loan terms but the IMF is looking the
other way. It has been granted unprecedented authority to oversee and overrule the Central Bank,
so its failure to act is really suspicious, and reeks of political pressure to crush the left in
Latin America.
Notable quotes:
"... The government also wasted more than $16 billion in unsuccessful attempts to keep the peso from falling, and greatly increased the more problematic foreign component of the public debt. The result has been near-constant recession and high inflation, enormous interest rates, peso depreciation, financial instability, and the huge run-up in public debt. The debt increase is particularly noteworthy because Mr. Macri inherited a low level of public debt. ..."
"... Ironically, the IMF is well-known in Argentina for promoting similarly unworkable policies during the deep depression of 1998 to 2002 -- comparable to America's Great Depression of the 1930s. Yes, history is repeating itself, although in this case the IMF has a stronger partnership with the government than it had 20 years ago. ..."
"... Millions of Argentines remember the last depression and the role the IMF played. Many also remember the rapid improvement in people's lives over the ensuing decade. This collective memory and consciousness may now determine the outcome of this recurring debate over the economy, and with it, the October election, and possibly much of Argentina's future. ..."
"... The IMF loan seems designed to get Macri past the election. It has been used to support capital flight: to support the peso, the Central Bank sells dollars to "importers" that then stash the money abroad. This is illegal according to IMF loan terms but the IMF is looking the other way. It has been granted unprecedented authority to oversee and overrule the Central Bank, so its failure to act is really suspicious, and reeks of political pressure to crush the left in Latin America. ..."
Who is to Blame for Argentina's Economic Crisis?
By Mark Weisbrot - New York Times
What are we to make of Argentina's surprise election results on Monday, which jolted
pollsters and analysts alike, and roiled the country's financial markets? In the presidential
primary for the country's October election, the opposition ticket of Alberto Fernández
trounced the incumbent president Mauricio Macri by an unexpected margin of 47.7 to 32.1
percent.
The Fernández coalition attributes their victory to Mr. Macri's failed economic
policies, blaming him for the current economic crisis, recession, and high inflation. Mr.
Macri, by contrast, blames the fear of a future government of Kirchnerism -- his label for
the opposition -- for both the postelection financial turbulence and also the problems of the
economy since he took office more than three and a half years ago. He argues that both the
markets and the people have everything to fear from such an outcome.
This disagreement is not just an academic argument, nor one specific to Argentina. It is a
recurring, almost archetypical debate during economic crises that spill over into political
contests. In recent years -- in the UK, Spain, France, Greece, and other countries where
failed economic policies faced left-of-center challengers -- Macri's refrain was a frequent
line of attack by incumbents.
Financial markets can move for many reasons, which can be unclear or even based on
misperceptions of reality. In the case of this week's news, we have electoral losses by a
government whose economic policies have clearly failed; and gains by challengers who hail
from a period of strong and widely shared economic growth. This is not something that is
inherently bad for the economy.
With Kirchnerism, Mr. Macri refers to the policies, followers, and presidential
administrations of the Kirchner family, which held office from 2003 to 2015 -- first
Néstor Kirchner, and then Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The latter is running
as vice-presidential candidate of Alberto Fernández, and is a prominent leader of the
opposition coalition -- although this coalition is much larger and broader than the
"kirchnerista" base.
From the point of view of an economist or social scientist, it's not clear why Kirchnerism
should inspire fear. Looking at the most important economic and social indicators, the
government of the Kirchner presidencies was one of the most successful in the Western
Hemisphere during this period.
Independent estimates show a decline of 71 percent in poverty, and an 81 percent decline
in extreme poverty. The government instituted one of the biggest conditional cash transfer
programs for the poor in Latin America. According to the International Monetary Fund, gross
domestic product per person grew by 42 percent, almost three times the rate of Mexico.
Unemployment fell by more than half, and inequality also fell considerably.
Although economic growth waned in the last few years, and the government made some
mistakes, the result of these two administrations delivered large increases in living
standards for the vast majority of Argentines, by any reasonable comparison.
Economic growth waned in the last few years of her presidency and her government was dealt
an external economic blow. A 2012 ruling of a federal appeals court in New York, widely
regarded dubious and political, took more than 90 percent of Argentina's creditors hostage in
order to force payment to a small group of "vulture funds," who refused to join the debt
restructuring of the early 2000s. The United States government blocked loans from
international lenders such as the Inter-American Development Bank, at a time when the economy
needed the foreign exchange.
By comparison, poverty has increased significantly, income per person has fallen, and
unemployment has increased during Mr. Macri's term, which began in December 2015. Short-term
interest rates, have shot up from 32 percent to 75 percent today; inflation has risen from 18
percent to 56 percent. The public debt has grown from 53 percent of GDP to more than 86
percent last year.
How much of this economic crisis and poor performance is his predecessor's fault?
In 2018 Mr. Macri signed an agreement for a $57 billion loan -- the largest bailout in
history. The loan agreement, along with the reviews since, spell out the government's
economic goals, strategy, and implementation. There is a lot of information publicly
available that details what went wrong.
The main strategy of the program was to restore investor confidence through tighter fiscal
and monetary policy. But, as has often happened, these measures slowed the economy and
undermined investor confidence. By October, the results were vastly worse than the IMF had
projected. The government and IMF doubled down by increasing both fiscal and monetary
tightening, but this did not help.
The government also wasted more than $16 billion in unsuccessful attempts to keep the peso
from falling, and greatly increased the more problematic foreign component of the public
debt. The result has been near-constant recession and high inflation, enormous interest
rates, peso depreciation, financial instability, and the huge run-up in public debt. The debt
increase is particularly noteworthy because Mr. Macri inherited a low level of public
debt.
Ironically, the IMF is well-known in Argentina for promoting similarly unworkable policies
during the deep depression of 1998 to 2002 -- comparable to America's Great Depression of the
1930s. Yes, history is repeating itself, although in this case the IMF has a stronger
partnership with the government than it had 20 years ago.
The Fernández candidates will have to outline how they would get out of this mess.
They can explain how Argentina exited from a much more severe economic crisis, with an
unemployment more than twice as high, and millions of previously middle class people having
fallen into poverty. They can assure creditors that there is no need for default on the
public debt today, as there was then, because it was completely unpayable. But, as in 2003,
the economy cannot recover under the conditions agreed upon with the IMF, and these will have
to be renegotiated.
Millions of Argentines remember the last depression and the role the IMF played. Many also
remember the rapid improvement in people's lives over the ensuing decade. This collective
memory and consciousness may now determine the outcome of this recurring debate over the
economy, and with it, the October election, and possibly much of Argentina's future.
The IMF has learned nothing since the Washington Consensus started being implemented in the
1980s but at least Argentines are quickly repudiating the neoliberals and their savage
policies, until they forget again in a generation.
The IMF loan seems designed to get Macri past the election. It has been used to support
capital flight: to support the peso, the Central Bank sells dollars to "importers" that then
stash the money abroad. This is illegal according to IMF loan terms but the IMF is looking
the other way. It has been granted unprecedented authority to oversee and overrule the
Central Bank, so its failure to act is really suspicious, and reeks of political pressure to
crush the left in Latin America.
Fernandez has already stated that under current terms the loan is unpayable and the terms
will have to be renegotiated.
The situation is similar to Greece and shows that, absent capital controls and decreased
dependency on imports, having your own currency is not enough protection against bondage to
multinational banks.
The situation is similar to Greece and shows that, absent capital controls and decreased
dependency on imports, having your own currency is not enough protection against bondage to
multinational banks....
[ This was the lesson taught and learned by a few countries in the wake of the Asian
currency crises that developed from 1996-1997. These were really Asian, Latin American
currency crises, but the lesson was indelibly learned in Asia.
There is a reason China and Japan and Korea increased foreign currency reserves from
1997-1998.
On November 30th 2015, Zerohedge reported, Russian Prosecutor General's Office issued
a statement in which it recognised George Soros's Open Society Institute and another
affiliated organisation as "undesirable groups", banning Russian citizens and organisations
from participation in any of their projects.
–prosecutors said the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open
Society Institute Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia's
Constitutional order and national security.
...
The Law on Undesirable Foreign Organisations came into force in early June this year.
It requires the Prosecutor General's Office and the Foreign Ministry to draw up an official
list of undesirable foreign organisations and outlaw their activities. Once a group is
recognised as undesirable, its assets in Russia must be frozen, its offices closed and the
distribution of any of its materials must be banned.
Isn't it about time all other countries around the world enacted similar laws and
policies against foreign-funded WMD NGOs? HK and Venezuela particularly come to mind, of
course, and Brazil could have avoided the Bolsonaro nuclear explosion through such laws if
they had been put into effect in time.
The level of "experts" is pretty dismal. While some quotes are apt, the general level is horrible for such an important
topic., Not a single one put Putin career in context of ascendance of neoliberalism from 1990 to 2007 and then crash and decline
with the USA economics entering the period of secular stagnation. not a single one.
Most of those are neocons or some king of imperialists who believe in God given right for the USA to dominate the globe. That's
another problem.
Notable quotes:
"... Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to another foreign country that he balances with China and others. ( The Atlantic, 11.10.16 ) ..."
"... Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. ..."
"... In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. ( The Washington Post, 02.05.15 ) ..."
Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in
Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally
adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America
defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to
another foreign country that he balances with China and others. (
The
Atlantic, 11.10.16 )
Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had
masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the
candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress
rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. Putin believed it was part of the United
States’ larger effort to construct a unipolar world based on its values and interests, a
world that it could dominate with little regard for other major powers. In response Putin began
working to fortify Russia against Western influence and interference. (
The Boston
Review , 09.12.17)
Steven Pifer : Putin sees Russians & Ukrainians as one people. Said so in
Kyiv in 2013. Does not understand he thereby denies Ukrainian history, culture. (
Twitter ,
05.26.17)
Roger McDermott and Stephen Cimbala : Putin’s actions in Crimea were not
entirely sui generis : They were preceded by a context of demands upon Russia from
its post-Cold War military and geostrategic setting, compared to that of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s policy is not the result of psychodrama. It is the product of his having lived
in strategic history and his (and our) understanding of that history. (
The Journal of Slavic
Military Studies , 10.14.16)
Anatol Lieven : Russia’s restraint in Ukraine shows that there is no
serious reason to fear that Mr. Putin is ready to create a new, worse international crisis by
attacking the Baltic states or Poland. (
New York Times ,
03.18.16)
Steven Pifer : A weak Ukrainian government incapable of meeting the challenges
before it ensures that the Maidan model will have little attraction for the Russian populace.
This consideration could mean that Mr. Putin wants a failed Ukrainian state. (
Testimony before U.S.
Senate , 03.04.15)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : The logic of sending weapons to Ukraine seems
straightforward and is the same as the logic for economic sanctions: to change Vladimir
Putin’s “calculus.” … We strongly disagree [with calls on the West to
provide military support to Ukraine]. The evidence points in a different direction. If we
follow the recommendations of this report, the Ukrainians won’t be the only ones caught
in an escalating military conflict with Russia. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Our problem is that we do not fully understand
Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United
States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to
weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian
armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial
sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been
transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any
concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
Trump does not want a new trade deal with China. He wants to decouple the U.S.
economy from the future enemy.
That may well be what is going on here. Something between total insanity and managed
insanity. The next president will unravel all of this in a year or so of effort. That is what
is so damaging. No business can plan on what is next. No policy is long term.
This is pure Trumpian logic unhinged. Hit them twice as hard as they hit you. I would not
dare to guess who is winding him up and pointing him in this direction. Trump has had one of
his busiest weeks yet.
I see Elisabeth Warren's crowd sizes are getting very large. I will feel better when no
one shows up to a Trump rally. China has time to wait this out and the ability to raise some
chaos on their own to help undermine Trump.
I see Elisabeth Warren's crowd sizes are getting very large. I will feel better when no one
shows up to a Trump rally.
I sympathize, but Elizabeth Warren is terrible on foreign policy. When the IDF was
slaughtering civilians in Gaza in 2014 she pushed to release a few hundred million dollars to
"help" Israel "defend" itself. The MSM loves Warren. She is a neoliberal capitalist, liberal
interventionist and splits Sanders' vote.
Nice plan, except it's too late. I don't think Russia will agree to this proposal. The
West is very antagonized both in Russian elites and common people. Even if some high
ranking officials will be happy to struck a deal common people will still perceive USA
and the west as enemies. On the contrary China's reputation and karma is not as tainted
as America's in the eyes of the majority in Russia. At this point any concession given to
West will be met with disdain.
Correct. NATO has thousands of troops on the Russian border and surrounds Western
Russia by land and sea ... meanwhile the US preparing new cruise missile programs to be
stationed in the EU... Putin would be a fool to play nice in the face of such a military
buildup... in fact, he'd be deposed if he tried. No... the die is cast... the
Russia-China Alliance is tightly cemented.
Doug Bandow gives fair and reasoned arguments. The current trend appears to be towards
war. The question of enticing Moscow away from Beijing is a logical one. But does Russia
fear China as an enemy more than it fears America? Who would benefit from hostilities
between these two – America? That would not serve Russia's strategic interests.
The challenge in the 21st century is not repeating the mistakes of the twentieth.
History shows vital interests drive nations to war: but it is in nobody's interest to
fight a third world war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
I don't think here in Russia we fear anyone. We live in an era of powerful
thermonuclear weapons. Russia has fully operational nuclear triad with thousands of
warheads. Any military scenario against us trigger a final judgement day for human
civilization. President Putin openly said that. At this point Russia is more or less
isolationist trying to sever itself from global production chains to be more independent.
The trade with US is minuscule, so basically US has the stick but lacks carrot. On the
other hand China lacks what Russia really needs, so it's more of an allie of convenience.
Basically all Russia needs is being left alone and being able to influence it's own
region. Vast natural resources and population can really provide this kind of
isolationism. But the US can't stop poking the bear, so enraged bear can really be pissed
and provide China a helping hand.
Isolated from US and vassals doesn't mean completelly isolated. As author mentioned G7
is only 1/10 of World's population. And France, Germany and Italy are eager to restore
pre-sanction relations. Also having China, power on the rise (contrary to declining West)
in your corner is a very good thing.
"However, Beijing's widespread, sometimes brutal crackdown at home, increasingly
threatening approach to both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and more aggressive stance toward
territorial disputes challenge common Western interests and values. "
What "brutal crackdown"? I presume he means HK but the response of the Chinese gov is
hardly brutal. On the contrary, the authorities there have been been far more passive and
restrained than the west would be. Try shutting down a major US airport with a
demonstration and see long it takes for US robo-cops to cover the tiled floors in
protester blood and fill jail cells with unconscious bodies. Consider the (mostly
unreported) brutality in France as M(i)cron orders his gendarmes to use force to suppress
growth of the Gilets Jaunes movement.
What "aggressive stance" to territorial disputes? Chinese aren't blockading any areas
of the SCS and are not preventing freedom of navigation. They have claimed a number of
SCS rocks and minor islands, but the fact remains that none of the largest 18 islands are
Chinese controlled yet no-one wants to level the same charges against Taiwan,
Philippines, Vietnam or Malaysia that control them. The Chinese maintain an active
military presence around their own bases in the SCS, but they don't act to stop other
traffic in the area, and no-one has any actual legitimate business with these isolated
rocks, either now or before the ChiComs claimed them.
Bandow is spinning a load of BS with these and other assertions of a fake reality. Its
just part of a superficial narrative intended to support the idea of a "benevolent and
democratic" US selflessly guarding the "free world" against an "authoritarian police
state" that is "challenging and undermining the global rules-based system". It a load of
baloney that well-expired but Bandow the organ-grinder keep turning the handle to make
the public monkies dance for the amusement and hidden agendas of Cato Institutes elites
paymasters.
"Kyiv would be left to forge whatever economic ties it desired east and west."
Really? When did the ruling elites of the US and EU change their policies? It was the
refusal of the Eurotrash to accept Ukraine accepting Russian cash and economic assistance
in 2014 that led to the Ultra-nationalist putsch with US/EU full support. Yanukovich
wanted a deal and the EU refused to give him one he could accept, then threw their weight
behind his forced removal and shut-out the possibility of Ukraine having economic
relations with its largest trading partner (Russia).
BTW in English we have always spelled the city as Kiev, not Kyiv. Bandow is clearly
pandering to the Ukropi nationalists and anti-Russia radicals.
"In return, Russia could abandon support for Donbas rebels in Ukraine, grant Kyiv full
navigational access in contested waters, and stop using natural gas as a weapon."
Russia isn't about to abandon Donbass while the Ukies show no regard for civilian
lives in their incessant shelling attacks and repeated violations of "truces". Kiev is
attacking Donbass and intent on advancing, not the other way around, so a cessation of
conflict is in their court, not Donetsk or Lugansk.
Kiev has full access to "contested waters" (presumably access to the Azov Sea) but
they need to follow protocols. It is their refusal to play by the rules (and the
deliberate provocations by the SBU) that is the crux of the problems.
Russia doesn't use natural gas as a weapon. She simply sells gas to willing customers
(who buy it from her due to good prices and a long established record as a reliable
supplier). Russia is understandably looking for alternative routes of transit to avoid
nations that are her traditional antagonists and who wish to use gas transit as leverage
over her. Why should Russia allow unfriendly nations to have the ability to shutdown her
gas exports? Ukraine was stealing gas for years which led to the cessation of gas
supplies while custody transfer violations were investigated and stopped. Why should
Russia maintain transit through unfriendly nations and allow them to gain transit fees?
If they cease their Russia-baiting BS things might change, but that is their decision to
make, and Russia will act in the meantime according to her interests.
Doug Bandow tries to play the moderate but he recycles the worst agitprop tropes about
Russia. To be expected from a minion of the Cato Institute I suppose...
I would highly recommend that Doug Bandow get a lecture in Russian Foreign Politics.
This is not just a market with a handful dollar. Bandow might be a visiting Student a
MGIMO for Russian Foreign Politics which is based on trust and reliability for years.
Besides, Peking is by far the largest economic Partner of Russia. President Putin is not
interested on G7 membership. It lacks results and is a further "bla, bla" Organisation
without any success. Economic sanctions are more an issue for western Europe. As example
Francs lost 50% of their Russian Trade about 12B USD.
US inferior Foreign Politics lacks all of it. It's an Ad-Hoc organised Ministry with
interference from the President.
Aren't these guys really stup!d? They are discussing should Russia be in G8 or not,
while Putin many times said that this organization is useless for Russia! :-)))
"... The trojan horse for the return of neoliberalism in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, stated that he's going to borrow money from the IMF to fund his government, which would make all Venezuelans indebted to this predatory institution. Guaidó spends the money, the poor and working people work to pay taxes that pay off the principal and the interest. ..."
"... The IMF was created in New Hampshire in 1945 to internationalize and standardize capitalism and its rules in an increasingly globalized and U.S.-dominated world. ..."
"... Its primary function is acting as an international lender-of-last-resort to indebted countries. IMF member states decide which countries will receive loans, but the member states with the largest say are the ones that own the largest share of the IMF's funds, which have always been the United States and its allies. ..."
"... This is why the IMF's standard "structural adjustment program" is based on the so-called Washington Consensus, a set of 10 economic policies entirely concocted by U.S. think tanks, the IMF, the World Bank and the Treasury Department. The Washington Consensus is as follows: ..."
Think about who gets rich off of the Venezuela regime-change agenda. It's the same people
that said we had to invade Iraq in order to prevent nuclear apocalypse. It's the same people
who said the world would stop turning on its axis if we didn't carpet bomb Libya and
Syria.
Transcript -- This video was produced as part of a MintPress News and Grayzone collaboration -- Of all the reasons to
plot an elaborate and risky coup, there's one reason that always stands out: profit. Money
makes the world go around and in far more ways than we might think. Here are the top five
special interest groups and institutions that seek to benefit from the U.S. backed coup in
Venezuela.
Number 1: The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which wants to saddle the
Venezuelan people with enormous debt to the IMF
The trojan horse for the return of neoliberalism in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, stated
that he's going to borrow money from the IMF to fund his government, which would make all
Venezuelans indebted to this predatory institution. Guaidó spends the money, the poor
and working people work to pay taxes that pay off the principal and the interest.
The IMF was created in New Hampshire in 1945 to internationalize and standardize capitalism
and its rules in an increasingly globalized and U.S.-dominated world.
Its primary function is acting as an international lender-of-last-resort to indebted
countries. IMF member states decide which countries will receive loans, but the member states
with the largest say are the ones that own the largest share of the IMF's funds, which have
always been the United States and its allies.
This is why the IMF's standard "structural adjustment program" is based on the so-called
Washington Consensus, a set of 10 economic policies entirely concocted by U.S. think tanks, the
IMF, the World Bank and the Treasury Department. The Washington Consensus is as follows:
In exchange for a loan, often with a high-interest rate that many would call predatory, the
IMF overhauls the protective and redistributive policies of a country for neoliberal policies,
making the target country ripe for finance capital investment and profit-making.
Number
2: The Oil Industry, out to control the oil reserves
There's little doubt that the oil industry is pushing the U.S. to overthrow the Maduro
government, especially when National Security Advisor John Bolton openly states this on
national television.
Bolton was himself once part of the oil industry, serving as the director of Diamond
Offshore Drilling, Inc. in 2007. He's no stranger to advocating for the interests of the
fossil-fuel industry.
Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves by far and Washington won't let that wealth
go unexploited, or worse, be shared among its enemies like the Maduro government, Russia,
China, or Iran.
And with so many politicians, Republican and Democratic, bought off by industry players --
companies like ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and Chevron -- it's impossible to imagine anyone in
Washington successfully advocating for Venezuela maintaining ownership over its own sovereign
natural resources.
Number 3: The Military-Industrial Complex, working to military
dominance and arm another U.S. puppet
One of the most bizarre things about America is that we've created one of the world's
largest private industries around arms dealing. And like any industry, whether it be JDAM bombs
or beef, private businesses often resort to lobbying Congress to squeeze political favors out
of the government in the form of subsidies -- or in the case of the military industrial
complex, a foreign policy of endless war, one based on elusive ideas like combating terrorism
or defending democracy.
You can see that wherever the U.S. goes, expensive construction projects follow. Behind
every multi-billion dollar base construction, some private contractor is there reaping the
profits.
Once our military presence is firmly established, the weapons sales begin. And we all know
no U.S. ally or puppet state is complete without a full fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16s -- then
they'll be able to fend off all of those pesky leftist rebels with freedom missiles.
With Venezuela's neighbors, Colombia and Brazil, growing closer to NATO and accepting U.S.
military presence in their countries, we can only assume Venezuela is Washington's next
target.
As the strategic approach of regime change evolves, new industries arise to meet these
needs.
After the massive anti-war protests following the invasion of Iraq, outright invasion and
occupation are no longer viable strategies, owing to negative public opinion. So Washington
sought to disguise war propaganda using humanitarian rhetoric.
Number 4: "Humanitarian"
NGOs to create and implement the alibi
Privately owned NGOs dedicated to human rights and promoting "American style" democracy have
played a much larger role in regime-change operations in recent years. They serve as soft-power
institutions that attempt to subtly sway a population against its own government through
propaganda laced with words like freedom, democracy, and human rights.
These NGOs are given the full blessing of the U.S. government and the two often work in
tandem. Don't believe me? Take it from former CIA case officer Phillip Agee.
The US Agency for International Development's (USAID) regime-change arm, the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded opposition groups in Nicaragua, Venezuela (during the
2002 coup), Haiti, Ukraine, and most recently China and North Korea. And whenever U.S. foreign
policy sets its sights on a certain target, private industries usually develop to help meet
that goal as well as make a quick buck along the way.
For example, Thor Halvorssen -- the first cousin of Leopoldo Lopez, the founder of Juan
Guaidó's party, Popular Will -- calls himself a human-rights activist. He founded the
notorious Human Rights Foundation (HRF) and makes a living giving speeches and TV appearances
talking about why the governments of Venezuela or North Korea are not legitimate and need to be
overthrown.
Unsurprisingly, HRF is funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is itself
funded by think tanks like the top neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise
Institute, as well as the Heritage Foundation. HRF is also funded by the Donors Capital Fund
and the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, which are also funded by the American Enterprise
Institute. It's one big web of moving money that all leads back to the same cast of
characters.
The crisis in Venezuela has been a huge gift for people like Halvorssen, who use the U.S.'s
war on Venezuela to promote themselves and their organizations.
Number 5: Think Tanks
selling reports that tell the MIC what it wants to hear
Like NGOs, think tanks also play an important role in giving regime change a sense of
legitimacy -- in their case, intellectual legitimacy. Think tanks rely on donations to operate
and many find willing donors among the capitalist class. These fat cats pay for fancy looking
reports meant to justify their desired goal, the delegitimization of socialist governments and
the legitimization of coup governments that uphold the Washington Consensus.
The Cato Institute has been deeply involved in overthrowing the Venezuelan government. In
2008, Cato awarded Venezuelan opposition leader, Yon Goicoechea, the Milton Friedman Prize for
Advancing Liberty and $500,000 for his role in disrupting a constitutional referendum in
Venezuela. That money was used to finance the political rise of Juan Guaidó, and his
clique known as Generation 2007.
These seemingly independent research groups have intimate networks that they leverage to
amplify the message their donors have given them. Here's an article in the Washington
Post written by a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute saying the U.S.'s failure to
intervene in Venezuela has caused the Maduro government to destabilize the region.
Whether it was the bank bailouts following the 2008 crisis, or the lack of action on climate
disaster, in America it seems the government always puts the interests of the rich ahead of the
poor and working class, and the situation in Venezuela is no exception.
As the U.S. continues to attack the Maduro government, keep these special interests in mind.
Think about who gets rich off of the regime-change agenda. It's the same people that said we
had to invade Iraq in order to prevent nuclear apocalypse. It's the same people who said the
world would stop turning on its axis if we didn't carpet bomb Libya and Syria.
Now they're trying to get us to support war in Venezuela. You won't be any freer or more
prosperous after the Maduro government is toppled. It's just war propaganda.
Top photo | A worker counts Venezuelan bolivar notes at a parking lot in Caracas, Venezuela
May 29, 2018. Marco Bello | Reuters
Kei Pritsker is a journalist and activist located in Washington DC. Kei focuses on
international politics and economics. He previously worked as a producer at RT America.
"... The politically minded rich, or what I call the overworld, have reason to tolerate mob violence that never occur to those of a lesser means ... in maintaining a violent status quo in our society ... of weak and failed states ..."
"... And not to leave out the ex-CIA guys who blew the whistle from Phillip Agee to John Kiriakou over the years. Phil Giraldi another, and the work David Talbot did with "The Devil's Chessboard." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and the granddaddy of them all, Col L Fletcher Prouty. https://ratical.org/ratvill... ..."
"... Two interesting if not disparate notables from the ONI: Lee Harvey Oswald and Bob Woodward. ..."
Webb and Valentine begin the interview discussing how Valentine's journalistic work on the
CIA led him to be spied on and even threatened by the agency and how being a dissident
journalist in the 1990s compares to being one now. Valentine argues that, in the present,
efforts to outlaw criticism of the state of Israel are like a gateway that will soon lead to
the prohibition of criticism of the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, the CIA
among them.
Lastly, Webb and Valentine discuss the CIA's long-standing interest in manipulating the
media and how those efforts also extend to alternative media, not just mainstream media
outlets. Valentine discusses the methods the CIA uses to target alternative, independent media
and how we are seeing its efforts take place in real time.
Follow Doug Valentine on Twitter or visit his website to learn more about his work.
MintPress donors and patrons: Stay tuned later this week for a
patron-exclusive extension of this podcast with Doug Valentine, which will discuss his work on
the War on Drugs and the Drug Enforcement Agency and how both are key to unconstitutional,
covert CIA programs. You can become a patron via Patreon or through our website.
"The politically minded rich, or what I call the overworld, have reason to tolerate
mob violence that never occur to those of a lesser means ... in maintaining a violent
status quo in our society ... of weak and failed states. [...] Even in America, one of
the more successful states, there has always been a negative space in which the
overworld, corporate power, and privately organized violence all have access to and
utilize each other, and rules are enforced by power that does not derive from the public
state."
And not to leave out the ex-CIA guys who blew the whistle from Phillip Agee to John
Kiriakou over the years.
Phil Giraldi another, and the work David Talbot did with "The Devil's Chessboard." New
Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and the granddaddy of them all, Col L Fletcher
Prouty.
https://ratical.org/ratvill...
Whitney, are you aware of the lengthy (10 hour interview) with Kay Griggs? I am sure
her observations will resonate with you. The time spent on that interview will be RICHLY
rewarding, I promise.
She makes the point that it is not the CIA but Various military intel agencies like ONI (office of naval intelligence) and DIA (Defense Intelligence
Agency) directing organized crime. Google Kay Griggs for You tube video of that long
interview.
The net result on Ukrainian independence was the dramatic rise of political influence of western Ukraine which was suppressed in
the USSR. under Yutchenko they came to power and they regained it after Yanukovich demise. And their interests and their
desire to colonize Eastern Ukraine do not correlate will with the desires of the Eastern Ukrainian population. So Ukraine
remains a divided country with the differences being patched by continuing war in Donbass. So in way continuation of the
war is in the best political interests of Western Ukrainian nationalists. Kind of insurance which simplify for them to stay in
power. While politically they lost in recent Presidential elections the presence of paramilitary formations ensure that they
still have considerable political power including the power of veto.
Whether hardship inflicted on population after EuroMaydan will eventually help to restore the balance and raise political
influence of Eastern Ukraine because Western Ukrainian nationalists are now completely politically discredited due to the dramatic
drop in the standard of living after EuroMaydan is difficult to say. In any case Ukraine now is a debt slave and vassal of the
USA with the USA embassy controlling way to much to consider Ukraine to be an independent country. Few countries manage to dig
themselves out of this hole.
For such countries rise of anti-colonial movement is a possibility, but paradoxically Western Ukrainian nationalists side
with colonial power representing in a way fifth column (and they did played the role of fifth column during EuroMaydan giving
power to rabid neoliberals like Yatsenyuk, who was essentially an agent of the USA, who wanted to privatize everything for
cents on the dollar as long as he and his circle get cramps from it, ordinary Ukrainians be damned ). Understanding that the USA is
the most dangerous partner to have, in many ways no less dangerous then Russia is still pending for the Ukrainian neoliberal elite,
part of which ( Kushma, Victor Pinchuk) clearly are plain-vanilla
compradors.
Notable quotes:
"... Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers and more recently as war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest. ..."
"... The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious (and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration ..."
"... Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty that Ukraine needs to seek a European future. ..."
"... Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east. ..."
"... "People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda," says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections here in Mariupol. ..."
"... "When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to change the names of our streets and schools, honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ... ..."
"... "If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change our customs, our language, or our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?" ..."
"... But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to date, Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group. ..."
"... The war has done great and possibly irreparable damage to Ukraine's economy , and the longer it continues, the harder it may be to ever reintegrate the former industrial heartland of Donbass with the rest of the country. ..."
"... Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia. ..."
"... "Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered, had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time." ..."
"... But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine, and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea." ..."
"... Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road ..."
Almost every conversation in Ukraine these days will touch upon the grinding, seemingly endless war in the eastern region of Donbass.
People speak of overwhelming feelings of pain and weariness. And they express near-universal hopes that the new president, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, will finally do something to end it.
Here in Mariupol, where the front line is a 10-minute drive from downtown, those conversations tend to be intense.
But depending on whom you talk to, the path to peace can look very different.
Much of the population around here speaks Russian, is used to having close relations with nearby Russia, and can't imagine any
peace that would impose permanent separation. Many people have family, friends, and former business associates living just a few
miles away on the other side of the border. More than half of voters in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk Region, of which
Mariupol is the largest city, expressed those instincts in July 21 parliamentary elections by voting for two "pro-Russian" political
parties. Both of them would like to forge a peace on Moscow's terms and return at least this part of Ukraine to its historical place
as part of the Russian sphere of influence.
But there are also many who espouse an emerging Ukrainian identity, who see the 2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" as a breaking
point that gave Ukraine the chance to escape the grasp of autocratic Russia and embrace a European future. They want nothing to do
with Russian-authored peace plans, say there is no alternative to fighting on to victory in the Donbass war, and want to
quarantine Ukraine from its giant neighbor at least until Russia changes its fundamental nature.
Despite the two groups' shared desire for peace, their starkly different visions for what that peace would entail could prove
a major obstacle for ending the war in eastern Ukraine.
Looking east, looking west
These divisions are rooted in Ukrainian history. The country's eastern regions have been part of Russian-run states for over 300
years. Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to
embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and
power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers and more recently
as
war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest.
The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War
II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious
(and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration. In 1990, living standards in Ukraine and
Poland were about equal. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, its living standards have doubled and it has become a vibrant
European state. Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty
that Ukraine needs to seek a European future.
The Party of Life, of which local businessman Maxim Tkach is a regional head, argues that peace can be achieved in eastern
Ukraine only by following a Russia-favored plan for the region.
Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions
on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east.
"People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away
from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda,"
says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections
here in Mariupol.
"When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending
oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to
change the names of our streets and schools,
honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ...
"If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change
our customs, our language, or
our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is
Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?"
"The majority who want to be Ukrainian"
Maria Podibailo, a political scientist at Mariupol State University and head of New Mariupol, a civil society group founded to
support the Ukrainian army, offers a completely different narrative. She originally came from Ternopil in western Ukraine and has
made Mariupol her home since 1991.
She says there were no separatist feelings in Mariupol, or the Donbass, until after the Maidan revolution when Russian agitators
started traveling around eastern Ukraine, spreading lies and stirring up moods that had never existed before. Local pro-Russian oligarchs
wielded their economic power to support separatist groups, while passive police and security forces allowed Russian-led separatists
to seize public buildings and hold anti-Ukrainian protests in Mariupol. It wasn't until the arrival of the Ukrainian army first
in the form of the volunteer Azov Battalion that the separatists were driven out and the front line was pushed back from the city
limits in 2014, she says.
"That is why we support the army, and only trust the army," she says.
Ms. Podibailo's university-sponsored opinion surveys in 2014, after the rebellion began, found that a three-quarters majority
of local people supported a future as part of Ukraine, not Russia. That majority was subdivided into several visions of what kind
of Ukraine it should be, but only 12% wanted to join Russia, and 8% wanted Donbass to be an independent republic a point often
overlooked in the simplistic pro-Russian versus pro-Western scheme in which these events are frequently portrayed.
"That's when we knew we were on the right track," she says. "We were not a beleaguered minority at all. We were part of the majority
who want to be Ukrainian."
But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed
by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to
date,
Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group.
"We cannot talk to the leaders of these so-called republics. How could we possibly trust them?" says Ms. Podibailo. Her view is
that, after victory, the population of the republics should be sorted out into those who collaborated with the enemy and those who
were innocent victims, as happened after World War II.
"There is no way for this war to end other than in Ukrainian victory. I have never heard of a war that ends leaving things the
same way, or just through some talks. People say it might take a long time, and the threat will last forever because we have such
a neighbor.
"But we have the United States behind us, we have the West behind us, and they are attacking Russia from the other side with sanctions.
We will win," she says.
"These are our people"
Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want
is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia.
"Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps
we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered,
had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time."
But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine,
and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done
this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea."
One of the leaders of the Party of Life which came in a distant second in the national parliamentary elections is Ukrainian
oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who has strong connections to the Kremlin and whose daughter has Mr. Putin as her godfather. Attending
the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum along with Mr. Putin this spring, Mr. Medvedchuk was introduced as "a representative
of the Ukraine that can make a deal."
Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections
and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia
that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road.
"... Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. ..."
"... As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.) ..."
"... After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy. ..."
Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq
war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which,
in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had
never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his
enthusiasm for military operations involving other people.
As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be
everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of
those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them
unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of
nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to
rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American
invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American
military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood,
treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)
After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then
picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted
mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as
those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in
Iraq had been a tragedy.
As the question settled, some of us who had grown tired of Max Boot chirping in our ears
began to wonder how he would respond. What might he say? Perhaps an abashed silence would do.
Or should he undertake a penitential retreat to an obscure college, where he might meliorate
his remorse with weed or alcohol? In less generous moments, we toyed with the idea that he
might simply walk into the surf, after leaving an abject note of apology pinned against the sea
breeze by a heavy shard of driftwood.
Our answer was a long time coming.
I am a heavy viewer of CNN, at both the airport and the barber shop, that is. One day last
year, as I was having my thinning locks trimmed, the network ran a banner headline: MAX BOOT
QUITS REPUBLICAN PARTY. I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Soon the entire shop -- the
sheeted customers, the startled barbers, the guys reading sticky magazines -- they were all
asking, along with the rest of America, who is this Max Boot? I tried to answer but I couldn't.
Each time I tried, I wound up laughing uncontrollably. CNN, which appears to have missed the
earlier and equally newsworthy story, MAX BOOT JOINS REPUBLICAN PARTY, had reached its summary
judgment: nothing had so become Max Boot's secret Republican career as the leaving of it.
(Seriously, one thing you can count on is the acuity of CNN's news judgment. By a remarkable
coincidence, both Arnold Thornbush of Ames, Iowa, and Phoebe Birdbath of Tempe, Arizona, had
quit the GOP that very same day, but the CNN desk, laser-focused, could not be distracted from
the big story.)
Ideas may or may not have consequences -- the debate rages -- but fake news most certainly
does. Shortly after CNN's blockbuster story, The Washington Post , or what used to be
The Washington Post , offered Max Boot a regular column. No, the Post
couldn't find the stones to cast him as a defense expert. The Max Boot beat is still a bit
undefined, but it seems to highlight his ad hominem attacks on former friends and
associates from his secret Republican career.
Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful.
I never really knew Max Boot's background. So, after reading this column, I looked up his
Wikipedia biography and it blew my mind. What on earth has this guy ever done to be
considered a "Defense Expert?" He did not serve in the military or even in a civilian defense
capacity. Nor does he seem to have any military related education - not a Service Academy, a
military school, or a War College. As near as I can tell, this guy has made a career out of
writing opinion pieces - jumping from a college newspaper to the Wall Street Journal to the
Weekly Standard. Essentially, he's a glorified blogger who convinced a lot people that
invading Iraq was a good idea. Unbelievable.
Have some compassion, people! When the Democratic establishment finally follows its
Republican counterpart to the oblivion, where all these poor unemployed people, these
suffering dullards representatives of the strata of society with insufficient access
to intellectual capacities go? On the other hand, ingenium mala saepe movent .
Perhaps, after that he finally gets over himself and finds that eldritch ability to say two
coherent words.
I like the last line. Max is an old fashioned imperialist who made a home with the GOP when
that seemed the most likely place for people of his views. Once Trump talked about walking
that back, he quit.
Something always missing from articles like this, is the context. Max Boot is a Zionist. That
is WHY he wants to destroy Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, ... anyone perceived as a threat to
Israel. He has not been a failure but a success, or at least a partial success, as indeed we
have destroyed Iraq, and Libya, and nearly destroyed Syria. You think he should be ashamed of
his failures. Of course he is not, because he has not failed.
That war mongering piece of filth should be loaded aboard a C 130 and sent on a one-way
flight to Ukraine, his original lair, where, parachute, bandolier, and all, he can be
jettisoned over Kiev.
As far as I can tell, neither Alfred Rosenberg nor Julius Striecher never fired a shot during
World War II, neither so much as harmed a single hair on the head of an "Untermensch",
combatant or not.
Both, however propagandized incessantly for aggressive war and genocide. Both men hanged
at Nuremberg, for crimes against peace, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity. (I think
Streicher only hanged for crimes against humanity, but the sentence was the same.)
In a group of brain dead walking/talking ziocon mouth pieces, max boot stands out as one of
most brain dead-does not have an original thought in his head.
In the recent Camp Kotok MMT discussion (recording for the public posted here https://soundcloud.com/user-529956811/mmt-discussion-raw
), two things stood out for me (believe both were stated by Samuel Rines @SamuelRines on
twitter):
– MMT is "inevitable" (although it is arguable whether his definition and understanding
is correct)
– Warren is the assumed democratic nominee (Bernie or anyone else was not mentioned at
all in ~30 min of this recording)
So, sounds like the FIRE sector is looking to get nice and comfortable while nominally
paying tribute to the plebeians (lest they revolt, that was intimated by above mentioned
Sam)
Much better than an end to Citizens' United: an end to corporate constitutional rights and
money as speech. Please take a look at HJR-48, ask your Rep. to co-sponsor if s/he hasn't
already, and urge your Senators to introduce a companion resolution in the U.S. Senate: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-joint-resolution/48/text
Oh, and if you want to join the grass-roots movement behind HJR-48, go to http://www.movetoamend.org -- check it out
and if you can, throw a few bucks their way. It's a shoe-string organization that
accomplishes a LOT.
I'm enamored with the Archdruid's idea of knocking the magical permanence off of
Corporations, reinforcing the idea that these are human constructs that humans create.
Time-limited incorporation: if your mission is that good, get all the shareholders to
reinvested in a new charter every X years. Death penalty for specific felony violations: get
caught and you are closed down and your assets sold off of to people running companies that
can go a whole day without breaking the law. Etc. If any libertarian entrepreneurs don't like
those kind of hassles, they can just stay clear of the government yoke by not
incorporating.
And is there some law preventing us from always calling them 'Limited Liability
Corporations'? A lot of Americans erroneously believe that the word Entitlement means a class
getting special treatment from the government. Yet very few understand that a Corporation is
by definition a case of a class explicitly getting special treatment from the
government.
"... Throughout, the militias reportedly have committed serious human rights abuses, including numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians. CIA sponsorship ensures that their operations are clouded in secrecy. There is virtually no public oversight of their activities or accountability for grave human rights abuses. " ..."
Been reading an interesting report from
Brown University's Watson Institute about "the CIA army and [it's] threat to human rights
and an obstacle to peace in Afghanistan."
"Afghan paramilitary forces working with the United States Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) have long been a staple in the US war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the
border region with Pakistan. The problems associated with these militias take on new
significance given the recent momentum in talks between the US government and the
Taliban about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. Whose interests do the
militias represent? How can they be integrated into a peace agreement – if at all?
Will
their use value for the US in future counterterrorist operations outweigh the case for
closing them down in the service of human rights and a sustainable peace?
The
militias
are at least nominally controlled by their CIA paymaster, but to what extent will the
operations of the CIA be monitored and streamlined with overall US policy towards
Afghanistan?
The CIA-supported militias are a particularly troublesome version of the
regionally based militias in Afghanistan that have developed over the years around
local
strongmen with external support. The present units originate in the 2001 invasion,
when US military forces and the CIA organized Afghan militias to fight Islamist
militants.
Almost two decades later, the CIA is still running local militias in operations against
the
Taliban and other Islamist militants.
Throughout, the militias reportedly have
committed serious human rights abuses, including numerous extrajudicial killings of
civilians. CIA sponsorship ensures that their operations are clouded in secrecy. There
is
virtually no public oversight of their activities or accountability for grave human
rights
abuses. "
[My emphasis]
Appears making peace with Afghanistan will be as elusive as any of the other American
regime's various 'wars' and invasions.
"Afghanistan seems doomed to suffer from factionalism long after all NATO/CIA forces are
removed as the longstanding goal for the Outlaw US Empire is to deter Eurasian unity, which
is why Afghanistan was invaded in the first place."
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 22 2019 23:32 utc | 58
I would say it is more about the drugs and minerals.
During the 1980s, the CIA's secret war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan helped
transform the Afghani-Pakistani borderlands into a launchpad for the global heroin trade. "In
the tribal area," the US state department reported in 1986, "there is no police force. There
are no courts. There is no taxation. No weapon is illegal Hashish and opium are often on
display."
By then, the process of guerrilla mobilisation to fight the Soviet occupation was
long under way. Instead of forming its own coalition of resistance leaders, the CIA had
relied on Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and its Afghan
clients, who soon became key players in the burgeoning cross-border opium traffic.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan
Ahmed Wali Karzai was a drug trafficker on the CIA payroll who happens to be the half
brother of Hamid Karzai the US puppet to lead Afghanistan
The fact that Afghanistan sits on lucrative natural resources was recognized indirectly back
in 2010 when the Afghan ministry of mines rolled out a $1b (!) estimate of what the country
might have, and The New York Times quoted a source in the US Administration as saying that
Afghanistan's list of reserves included copper, gold, cobalt, and even lithium on which the
present-day industry is heavily dependent. A Pentagon memo actually described Afghanistan's
potential lithium holdings as big enough to make it the "Saudi Arabia of lithium". Somehow,
the news flew below the radars of most watchers worldwide.
Afghanistan war was more about TAPI pipeline and securing a friendly government to sign
the contracts and then protect UNOCAL´s investment throughout. Also,ENRON at the time
had their eyes on this and had bet the farm on it before they folded, among other reasons.
That´s why as soon as the Taliban fell out of favor for one reason or another, Hamid
Kharzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, UNOCAL agents were placed in charge of the country.
It didn't come to be of course, since the Taliban had other ideas. This was also ensured
with a little help from friends in Russia and China. The article below is from 2002 but sheds
a lot of light on the actual events of the day.
Now the focus has shifted to stopping BRI. But US empire will never lose sight of their
original investment, nor the reserves in Caspian.
I agree to a degree that US will continue with their divide and conquer policies long
after they pull out. However, if the Taliban who will eventually rule the country can be
shown a different way of life by China and Russia which would lead to new roads, hospitals,
schools and normal farming as oppose to death an destruction, opium and Tribalism, we might
actually see a major change in Afghanistan.
Too optimistic? Perhaps, but the air is ripe.
TAPI might eventually be built, but not for UNOCAL. Have no doubt the Chinese will offer a
much sweeter deal all around.
Yes, is way Warren is a connuation of "Trump tradition" in the USA politics: reling of hate
toward the neoliberalism establishment to get the most votes.
...in a piece
Warren wrote for Medium in which she (rightly) warned of "a precarious economy that is
built on debt -- both household debt and corporate debt." Notably missing was the national
debt, which amounts to around $182,900 per taxpayer and which Warren's policies would only
steepen. How exactly is a government flailing in red ink supposed to make the country solvent?
And what of the fact that some of the economy's woes -- student loan debt, for example -- were
themselves at least in part caused by federal interventions?
Those objections aside, it would be wrong to dismiss Warren as just another statist liberal.
She's deeper than that, first of all, having written extensively about economics, including
her book The Two-Income Trap . But more importantly, she's put her finger on something very
important in the American electorate. It's the same force that helped propel Donald Trump to
victory in 2016: a seething anger against goliath institutions that seem to prize profit and
power over the greater welfare. This is firmly in the tradition of most American populisms,
which have worried less about the size of government and more about gilded influence rendering
it inert.
Warren thus has a real claim to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, which is
deeply skeptical of corporate power. She could even try to out-populist Donald Trump. She's
already released more detailed policy proposals than any of her Democratic rivals, everything
from sledgehammering the rich with new taxes to canceling student debt to wielding antitrust
against big tech companies to subsidizing childcare. All this is chum to at least some of the
Democratic base (old-school sorts rather than the SJWs obsessed with race and gender), and as a
result, she's surged to either second or third place in the primary, depending on what poll you
check. She's even elicited praise from some conservative intellectuals, who view her as an
economic nationalist friendly to the family against the blackhearted forces of big.
America has been in a populist mood since the crash of 2008, yet in every presidential
election since then, there's been at least one distinctly plutocratic candidate in the race. In
2008, it was perennial Washingtonian John McCain. In 2012, it was former Bain Capital magnate
Mitt Romney. (The stupidest explanation for why Romney lost was always that tea party activists
dragged him down. Romney lost because he sounded like an imposter and looked like the guy who
fired your brother from that firm back in 1982.) And in 2016, it was, of course, Hillary
Clinton, whose candidacy is what happens when you feed a stock portfolio and a government
security clearance into a concentrate machine.
If Elizabeth Warren wins the Democratic nomination next year, it will be the first time
since Bear Stearns exploded that both parties' candidates seem to reflect back the national
temperament. It will also pose a test for Warren herself. On one hand, her economic policies,
bad though they might be, stand a real chance of attracting voters, given their digestibility
and focus on relieving high costs of living. On the other hand -- this is where Fauxcahontas
comes back in -- a white woman claiming Indian status in order to teach at Harvard Law is
pretty much everything Americans hate about politically correct identity politics.
The question, then, is which image of Warren will stick: one is a balm to the country's
economic anxiety; the other is unacceptable to its cultural grievances. Right now we can only
speculate, though it seems certain that Trump will try to define her as the latter while much
of the media will intervene in the other direction.
Her entire political theory seems to have been that giant corporations should not be
allowed to utterly screw the common man. That is about it, and for this she is called a
commie radical. I like her, little afraid of foreign policy
Warren was born into a middle class family, Trump wasn't. Trump is playing the populist, he
has no idea what average Americans deal with.
Warren was raised on the family lore of having native ancestry and she does. Not much
but she does and that's all it takes to start family lore. Her Native American ancestor was
from around the time of the American Revolution and it's easy to see how that legend could
be passed down. There is no proof she ever benefited from this, she was just proud to have
Native American ancestry.
Funny how the RW is so outraged by this one thing. Maybe it would be better for her to
con people, lie and make stuff up nonstop like Trump. It seems a never ending blizzard of
lies and falsehoods renders one immune.
Let's remember that our only effective populist, in fact our only effective president, was
a rich patrician. FDR's roots went back to the Mayflower, yet he was able to break the
influence of the banks and give us 50 years of bubble-free prosperity. The only thing that
counts is GETTING THE WORK DONE.
Her economics aren't bad. She herself claims to be a capitalist, she just wants our massive
economy to also benefit regular folks instead of just the elites. And whatever economic
program she proposes is most likely further left than she thinks necessary because that's a
better negotiating position to start from. Remember every proposal has to go through both
branches of Congress to become law, and they will absolutely try to make everything more
pro-corporate because that is their donor base.
"And what of the fact that some of the economy's woes -- student loan debt, for example --
were themselves at least in part caused by federal
interventions?"
Mr. Purple might want to remind himself that 75% of federal student financial aid in the
1970's was in the form of grants, not loans, and that it was only after the intervention of
conservative Republican congressman Gerald "Jerry" Solomon and the Reagan Administration
that the mix of federal student financial aid was changed to be 75% loans and only 25%
grants. I believe the Congressman used to rail against free riding college students, which
is all well and good until one finds that the "free hand of the market" becomes warped by
so many people being in so much debt, and all of them being too small to save.
Democrats might want to ask Joe Biden about this, considering his support for
legislation that made it harder to discharge student debt in bankruptcy proceedings. They
might also ask Senator Warren about this subject.
Warren believed her family story. Trump, on the other hand, knew that his family was not
Swedish, but knowingly continued the lie for decades, including in "The Art of Deal " -
claimin his grandfather came "from Sweden as a child" (rather than dodging the draft in
Bavaria who made his fortune in red light districts of the Yukon territory before trying to
return to the Reich).
Warren made no money from her heritage claims, but the $413 million (in today's dollars)
given to Trump by his daddy was made by lying to Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn and Queens
who, understandably, did not want to rent property from a German.
Vanity Fair asked him in 1990 if he were not in fact of German origin. "Actually, it was
very difficult," Donald replied. "My father was not German; my father's parents were German
Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe and I was even thinking in the second edition
of putting more emphasis on other places because I was getting so many letters from Sweden:
Would I come over and speak to Parliament? Would I come meet with the president?"
This column was pretty much as I expected. It started out by rehashing all of the Fox News
talking points about Warren, without debunking those that were without merit.
After that it touched on Morning Joe's take on her, just to make it 'fair and
balanced'.
Then it acknowledged, briefly, that she has been correct in many areas. No comment on
how the CFPB recovered hundreds of millions of $$ from corporations that abused their power
or broke the law.
Then it mis-characterized the impact of her policies "sledgehammering the rich",
"economic policies, bad though they might be".
Dismiss Warren all you want. She could very well be the nominee, or the VP. She would
eviscerate Trump in a debate. Her knowledge of issues, facts and policies would show Trump
to be what he is. A narcissistic, idiotic, in-over-his-head clueless and dangerous buffoon.
I anticipate Trump would fall back on his favorite tropes. Pocahontas, socialist,
communist, and MAGA.
My opinion is that the average American is getting really tired of Trump's shtick. The
country is looking for somebody with real solutions to real problems. This reality tv star
act is getting pretty old....
Good article. Especially enjoyed this turn of phrase:
"And in 2016, it was, of course, Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy is what happens when
you feed a stock portfolio and a government security clearance into a concentrate
machine."
Really enjoyable.
I don't think anyone is going to care about the pocahontas thing. This election will be
squarely about Trump. I think Warren is by far the best candidate the dems can bring out if
they want to beat him. A Warren/Buttigieg or a Warren/Tulsi ticket would likely be a
winner.
Bernie's a little too far to the left for Joe Lunchbucket, Joe Biden is a crooked
Hillary wannabe, Kamala Harris is unlikeable, and the rest won't rise out of the dust.
The whole business about her supposed Native American ancestry and whatever claims she made
will make no difference to anybody other than folks like Matt Purple who wouldn't support
her under any circumstances anyway.
Consider that the best-known advocate of the "Pocahontas" epithet is of course Donald
Trump, whose entire reputation is built on a foundation of bulls--t and flim-flam.
"Thus in retrospect was it the "Obama" in "Obamacare" that was the primary driver of
opposition from conservatives, only for their concerns over federal intrusion to mostly
disappear once Trump was at the controls."
No. What disappeared was the Individual Mandate. THAT was what rankled me...the
government can do whatever stupid thing they want as long as they don't try to force me
into it.
"... EU is the power, that took part in creating narco-haven in Kosovo, murdering children of Iraq, building sex slaves markets in Libya, destroying what was left of democracy in Ukraine. EU power is diminishing? Let it crash and burn if you ask me. ..."
> Further US sanctions on Russia. Russian gdp growth is very low now, forecasts are
about mere 1,2 % per anum, and thus Russia's share of world GDP is declining.
Posted by: Passer by | Aug 20 2019 13:15 utc
You think "harming Russia" is a good answer to question "how does it boost USA the
hegemon?". Well, let's suppose it...
Problem then is, Russia does not care that much about nominal GDP and even about PPP GDP.
It is "average temperature in hospital", where some patients are in 41C fever and others in
4C morgue, but on average they all have that healthy 36,6C.
However, even for those sanctions that did hit Russia and EU hard (and those were enacted
mostly in 2015), under the "China-Russia double helix" model, economic soft power is Chinese
responsibility, so targetting EU and Russia economically was perhaps a mis-aiming, like would
be targetting China militarily.
Also, take a single line - "congress obliges Trump to enlist Russian officials for
sanctions" and do the search in both pro-Clinton Google and in DDG. first page of Google has
zero relebvant results. DDG however starts with
Trump Administration Sends Congress List of Possible Russia ...
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/politics/trump-russia-sanctions.html
Congress has tied Trump's hands on Russian sanctions - Vox
www.vox.com/2017/7/29/16061878/trump-russian-sanctions-sign
Congress Forces Trump to Sanction Russia - Fash the Nation
fashthenation.com/2018/03/congress-forces-trump-to-sanction-russia/
Trump Finally Imposes Russia Sanctions That Congress Ordered ...
www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-finally-imposes-russia-sanctions-that-congress-ordered-months-ago/
Is 2017 so far ago that we already forgot it? Trump has no freedom of choice to sanction
Russia or not. It is not his authority to make this choice. Trump is ordered to sanction and
he would do. If he has any leeway, it is to how specifically sanction, but even that choice
is framed into UIS domestic politic fuel, as a vehicle to fry Trump over being "Putin's shil"
and looking "not enough" into evil Russians.
> China postponed for overtaking the US in gdp MER to 2032 from 2024.
Estimations are just that, estimations. Guesses into the future mixed with propaganda. If
you don't buy Trump's tweets about "China begging for deal" and Obama's about "Russian
economy in tatters" - why to buy these estimations?
> Indian growth downgraded - which taken together with China means slowing down Asia's
rise.
Pro-American Modi in power of India was a definite win for USA. But I do not think Trump
did it in 2016. Such events are grown for years and years of undercover works.
Same for the Brazil fiasco, which i perceive was much heavier blow upon BRICS than Modi.
But Brazilian coup was in preparation yet before Trump's oath. May 2016 was the FINAL act,
prepared months before:
nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/americas/brazil-dilma-rousseff-impeachment.html
> Iran in recession - long term growth is low - it means that Iran's share of the world
economy is now declining. This will lower Iranian influence in the long term.
Long term? like Trump is planning for long term? Would he, like Putin, still be American
president in 2016+18=2034 ?
Well, maybe. However does it boost much US the hegemon position today?
Also notice how this pushes Iran back to Russian bucket. Before JCPOA Iran was flirting
with "Lesser Satan" a lot, promising to buy russian airliners, promising to barter Iranian
goods (oil and others) for Russian goods, thus de facto letting Russia be quasi-monopolistic
seller of Iranian goods on world market for any margin Russia would manage to extract. All
those hints and kinda-plans were squashed instantly after JCPOA. Iran rushed to trade with EU
directly, to buy Boeing and Airbis jets.... But was shot into the leg before it started. I
think China would also find their way to be "big helping brother" to Iranian economy, on some
conditions of course.
> Venezueala in deep recession
True, and this is again fitting the isolationist bill, to a degree. If Team Trump ready to
exclude USA from global trade - it would have to secure oil supply. Enslaving a nearby
oil-containing nation would do.
Additionally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Venezuela_relations
lists 2014 as start of economic sanctions against Venezuela. So, Trump has inherited "office
of Venezuelan affairs" from Cinton/Obama. And... he brought it to light and headlines by
making that idiotic wannabe-coup. The sh*t that previously USA did silently pretending
whitegloved "shining beacon", Trump exposed.
Did it really made USA position better in 2018 than it was in 2014? I doubt. To me it
seemes more like T.T. accelerated things and "threw it all on the table" making Venezuela
"hit the rock bottom". Now Venezuela can adjust to the new brave world, while USA would
probably not be in position to tighten its grip - it already burned all the reserves and in
so clumsy way, that Bolton and Co became a laughing stock. If anything, it exposed that while
most gov't there would be paying lip service to USA, none would go with something material.
France invaded with USA Libya, Germany invaded with USA Serbia, but none enlisted to invade
Venezuela with USA.
> In Latin America most governments are now US puppet governments.
Brazil was indeed a huge blow into the BRICS dream. But i see it more of that indirect,
covert "soft power" that USA secret services prepared and rushed to implement before
Trump.
> Weakened the EU, via support for Brexit and other ways - it means that the euro will
not be a viable alternative for replacing the dollar
Basically turning EU elites against USA and splitting "Western Hegemony" into rivaling
factions.
From multipolar view circa 2010, would it be much difference for, say, Russia or China or
Iran, whether USD or EUR would be "reserve currency"?
After Alexander of Macedonia died his empire split to pieces, and some of those pieces
soon started warring. Did this enhance Greek hegemony or reduced it?
When COMECOM and Warsaw Pact disbanded did it enhanced Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe
or reduced it? But it slashed exports of those lands, Bulgaria is not more agriculture
super-power it used to be, "Ikarus" bus is still often meet in Moscow street but in the
"remnants of old times still able to run" kind, Poland is no more producing ocean-grade
ships. So, was it enhancing USSR share of world economy then?
Also, didn't he kind of forced EU elites into Chinese OBOR camp? That said, similarly
Russia was forced towards China in 2013-2014 by Western lunacy, so i would not say it was
Trump's novelty to push EU eastwards.
EU was in with US in looting Libya, EU was in with US in looting Serbia, now US calls for
EU to join in "patrolling" Persian Gulf and response is... like the one about invading
Venezuela. Hegemon became stronger?
> Trade wars seem to be hitting EU's export dependent economy pretty hard.
And i wish to see more of those wars not less. Won't you? EU is the power, that took
part in creating narco-haven in Kosovo, murdering children of Iraq, building sex slaves
markets in Libya, destroying what was left of democracy in Ukraine. EU power is diminishing?
Let it crash and burn if you ask me.
> Turkey has serious economic problems - partly due to the US again - which again means
slowing down multipolarity
Wasn't in 2012 Turkey part of Hegemon entourage neck-deep in bloody ISIS affair?
Wasn't Turkey for decades be knockign into closed EU membership doors?
Wasn't Turkey send their people into Germany to intertwine and cross-influence?
Turkey as part of multipolarity? Maybe. But exactly because it was prohibited from what
they see their place in global western world. However i am not very sure that would West
offer "larger piece" to Turkey in their crippling hegemony, turkey would not turn back yet
again. Goog thing, it would be hard to do as few believe western promises today, but again,
didn't Trump (but other western politicians too, and including many pre-Trump) invested into
making West glaringly "not agreement-capable" in but everyone's view?
Trump could smash Turkey and instate Kudistan.
Trump could smash Kurds and make amends with Erdo.
Instead Trump is breaking pots with both. Neither Kurds not Turks no trust "the shining
beacon".
> Overall situation - the US share in the world economy is declining at slower rates
than before
Won't this mean Trump's economic policy is if limited success?
> the retarding of growth of everyone else, which means defacto slowing down
multipolarity and the replacement of the US dollar
That may be what some faction of Team Trump counting upon. But i have reservations.
Uni-polarity is not about economic growth. It is about trading on One True Market, hegemon's
one.
And when everything goes down, another factors start to weigh in. Like elasticity of demand
and replacement with cheaper substitutes. Like, if i need a tooling for my house, i would
perhaps want to purchase Japanese Makita or German Bosh. Those are famous brands with decades
of well earned reputation. But if i only can salivate on them, then perhaps i can go with
some cheaper Chinese knock-off? Or perhaps to blow the dust from my grandpa's old tool and
purchase nothing at all? If i can buy genuine American Levi's it is a fad, but if i can, then
perhaps i will make it in Turkey-made or China-made or Philipinnes-made or even Syria-made
jeans? You know, their cut is not that fitting as European or American, but perhaps we can
deal with it for the price? If in Russia i can no more buy Czech or German beer as before
2014, then perhaps i can sooth myself with apple cidre from semi-eastern Altai region of
Russia? And then, will my gov't still had the same need for USD for those adjusted trade
transactions, as it used to?
While the USA run the show, EU was complicit in this war.
Notable quotes:
"... The American Conservative, ..."
"... In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts ..."
"... Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites." ..."
"... a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation. ..."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes
killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could
pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were
slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million
Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton
empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and
sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts .
Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared
in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful
killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and
Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities,
and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied
by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo
have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run
deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy
high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice
President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as
"the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative
report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because
politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent
presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest
assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
"... the Iranian economy is in a free fall with oil exports down as much as 90 percent from mid-2018 levels. As far as Iran is concerned, this means that it's already at war with the United States and has less and less to lose the longer the U.S. embargo goes on. ..."
"... MBS, as he's known, celebrated by launching an air war in neighboring Yemen two months later – and then disappearing on a week-long vacation in the Maldives – and by funneling hundreds of U.S.-made TOWs (anti-tank guided missiles) to Syrian rebels under the command of Al-Nusra, the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, for use in an offensive in that country's northwest province of Idlib. ..."
"... For the Saudis, it was a neo-medieval crusade whose goal was to topple two religio-political allies of Iran, the Alawite-dominated government in Damascus and Yemen's Houthis, who adhere to a non-Iranian form of Shi'ism that is no less anathema to the Sunni Wahhabist theocracy in Riyadh. ..."
"... Just two days after the start of the Saudi air assault in Yemen, Obama meanwhile telephoned Salman to assure him of U.S. support. When asked why America would back a war by one of the Middle East's richest countries against the very poorest, another anonymous U.S. official told The New York Times (April 2, 2015): ..."
"... "If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." ..."
"... The Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers and tone down criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say yes to Saudi aggression. ..."
"... The American empire was possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible clients. Even while making peace with Iran, Obama thus green-lit Saudi wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Syria and another 100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, the 2015 nuclear negotiations, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others. ..."
"... Announcing his presidential bid in June 2015, he launched into a typical Trumpian rant against China, Japan, Mexico – and Obama's nuclear talks. "Take a look at the deal he's making with Iran," he said. "He makes that deal, Israel maybe won't exist very long." A month later, he tweeted that the agreement, just inked in Vienna, "poses a direct national security threat." Two months after that, he told a Tea Party rally in Washington: ..."
"... Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all. Under intense pressure from neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats such as Russiagate attack dog Rep. Adam Schiff demanding stepped-up opposition with Iran , Trump did an about-face. In May 2017, he flew to Riyadh, announced an unprecedented $110-billion arms deal, and proclaimed himself the kingdom's newest BFF – best friend forever. ..."
"... He echoed the Saudis by accusing Iran of funding "terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region" and backed a Saudi blockade of neighboring Qatar. When ISIS launched a bloody assault on central Tehran in early June that killed 12 people and injured 42, the only White House response was to declare that "states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote." ..."
"... It was Democrats who, in a typical attempt to outflank Trump on the right, introduced legislation in June 2017 by forcing him to impose penalties on Russia, North Korea, and Iran as well. But after repudiating the JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018, Trump upped sanctions even more in November – not only against the Iranian government but against some 700 individuals, entities, aircraft, and vessels. After Iran shot down a $130-million U.S. surveillance drone last month, Trump imposed sanctions on "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his office, and his closest associates. Two weeks ago, he imposed penalties on Mohammad Javad Zarif , Iran's U.S.-educated foreign minister. ..."
"... It was a gesture of contempt for the very idea of diplomacy. So what happens next? The problem is that re-starting negotiations would not be enough. Instead, Iran has demanded that the U.S. remove all sanctions and apologize before agreeing to a new round of talks. Since this would be tantamount to re-authorizing the JCPOA, it's unlikely in the extreme. While Trump is known for changing his mind in a flash, a course correction of this magnitude is hard to imagine. ..."
"... The pro-Israel Lobby owns both Republican and Democrat Russiagate enthusiasts and is the source of near hysterical demands for opposition with Iran. ..."
"... But in June 1914, clearly there were multiple political and military leaders in Europe for whom war was far from inconceivable. War was simply a question of timing and so it would be better to have a war when the circumstances were most propitious. "I consider a war inevitable", declared senior German generals such as Helmuth von Moltke the Younger in 1912. "The sooner the better". ..."
"... such blatant and reprehensible behavior carries risks for everyone but mostly the targets of our barbaric behavior seems never to enter the President, his neocon handlers' and his rabid supporters' minds. ..."
"... "If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." That is unmitigated nonsense. Why not be honest. We don't want to stop it. ..."
"... To "stop it", Uncle Sam would have to first cease being a part of it. The bombing of Yemen came courtesy of U.S. mid-air refueling efforts, targeting "intelligence", and "made in America" weaponry. The blockade (starvation) of Yemen is also a duel accompaniment. It's supposed to look like a Saudi "thing", but in actuality, it's just more Uncle Sam doing his thing. Obama called it "leading from behind". ..."
T raffic accidents normally take just a second or two. But the coming collision in the
Persian Gulf, the equivalent of a hundred-vehicle pile-up on a fog-bound interstate , has been in the
works for years. Much of it is President Donald Trump's fault, but not all. His contribution
has been to take an insane policy and make it even crazier.
The situation is explosive for two reasons. First, the Iranian economy is in a free fall with oil exports down
as much as 90 percent from mid-2018 levels. As far as Iran is concerned, this means that it's
already at war with the United States and has less and less to lose the longer the U.S. embargo
goes on.
Second, after Trump denounced the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord from the moment he began his
presidential run , it's all but impossible at this point for him to back down. The result
is a classic collision between the immovable and the unstoppable with no apparent way out.
How did the world bring itself to the brink of war? The answer, ironically, is by bidding
for peace.
The process began in early 2015 just as the nuclear talks were entering their final stages.
Despite last-minute
hand-wringing , it was clear that success was in sight simply because the participants
– China, France, Russia, Germany, Britain, the European Union, Iran and the U.S. –
all wanted it.
Saudi Proxy War
But other regional players felt differently, Saudi Arabia first and foremost. The kingdom's
survival strategy depends on its special relationship with America, its patron since the 1940s.
Hence, it was panic-stricken by anything smacking of a U.S. rapprochement with its
long-standing arch-enemy Iran. The upshot was a proxy war in which the Saudis set out to roll
back Iranian power by striking out at pro-Iranian forces.
The offensive began after a new Saudi monarch ascended the throne in January 2015. King
Salman, a doddering 79-year-old reportedly suffering from
Alzheimer's , immediately handed over the reins to his favorite son, 29-year-old Muhammad
bin Salman, whom he named deputy crown prince and minister of defense. MBS, as he's known,
celebrated by launching an air war in neighboring Yemen two months later – and then
disappearing on a week-long vacation in the Maldives
– and by funneling hundreds of U.S.-made TOWs (anti-tank guided missiles) to Syrian
rebels under the command of Al-Nusra, the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, for use in an offensive in
that country's northwest province of Idlib.
For the Saudis, it was a neo-medieval crusade whose goal was to topple two religio-political
allies of Iran, the Alawite-dominated government in Damascus and Yemen's Houthis, who adhere to
a non-Iranian form of Shi'ism that is no less anathema to the Sunni Wahhabist theocracy in
Riyadh.
President Barack Obama went along. With regard to Syria, an unidentified "senior
administration official"
toldTheWashington Post that while the White House was "concerned that Nusra
has taken the lead," all he would say in response to U.S.-made missiles winding up in Al-Qaeda
hands was that it was "not something we would refrain from raising with our partners." (See "
Climbing into Bed with
Al-Qaeda ," May 2, 2015.)
Just two days after the start of the Saudi air assault in Yemen, Obama meanwhile
telephoned Salman to assure him of U.S. support. When asked why America would back a war by
one of the Middle East's richest countries against the very poorest, another anonymous U.S.
official told The New York Times (April 2, 2015):
"If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been
allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were
being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." But plainly the nuclear negotations were key. The Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers
and tone down criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say
yes to Saudi aggression.
The upshot has been Saudi wars claiming hundreds of thousands of lives in Syria and another
100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest
refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, Obama's efforts to
reach a nuclear deal with Iran, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others.
Over-Extended Empire
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with King Salman bin Abdulaziz at Erga
Palace in Riyadh, Jan. 27, 2015. (White House/Pete Souza/Flickr)
The American empire was possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible
clients. Even while making peace with Iran, Obama thus green-lit Saudi wars that claimed
hundreds of thousands of lives in
Syria and another
100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest
refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, the 2015 nuclear
negotiations, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others.
The results were so devastating in a region torn by war, sectarianism, and economic collapse
that Trump could not possibly make them any worse – except that he did.
Announcing his presidential bid in June 2015, he launched into a typical Trumpian rant
against China, Japan, Mexico – and Obama's nuclear talks. "Take a look at the deal he's
making with Iran," he said. "He makes that deal, Israel maybe won't exist very long." A month
later, he tweeted that the
agreement, just
inked in Vienna, "poses a direct national security threat." Two months after that, he
told a Tea Party
rally in Washington:
"Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as
our deal with Iran . They rip us off, they take our money, they make us look like fools, and
now they're back to being who they really are. They don't want Israel to survive, they will
not let Israel survive, [and] with incompetent leadership like we have right now, Israel will
not survive."
Iran's Landmark Concession
It was all nonsense. Rather than threatening the Jewish state, the treaty represented a
landmark concession on Iran's part, since Israel, with an estimated 80 to 90 nuclear warheads in its
arsenal and enough fissile material for a hundred more, would maintain its nuclear monopoly in
the Middle East indefinitely. As for "our money," the $150 billion in various foreign accounts
were actually Iranian assets that had been frozen for years – a sum, moreover, that was
closer to $56 billion once
Iran settled its foreign debts. Once sanctions were lifted, it was hardly unreasonable that
such assets be restored.
Still there was hope. While railing against Iran, Trump also taunted the Saudis for their
role in 9/11: "Who blew up the World Trade Center?" he told
Fox & Friends. "It wasn't the Iraqis, it was Saudi [Arabia]." He repeatedly assailed the
2003 invasion of Iraq – even if he exaggerated his own role
in opposing it – and criticized Obama for supporting Saudi-backed jihadis seeking to
topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Assad is bad," he said in an October 2015
interview . "Maybe these people could be worse."
Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all. Under intense pressure from
neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats such as Russiagate attack dog
Rep. Adam Schiff demanding
stepped-up opposition with Iran , Trump did an about-face. In May 2017, he flew to Riyadh,
announced an unprecedented $110-billion arms deal, and proclaimed himself the kingdom's newest
BFF – best friend forever.
He echoed the Saudis by
accusing Iran of funding "terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread
destruction and chaos across the region" and backed a Saudi blockade of neighboring Qatar. When
ISIS launched a bloody assault on central Tehran in early June that killed 12 people and
injured 42, the only White House response was to declare
that "states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote."
But back in September 2003, some 60,000 Iranian soccer fans had observed a moment of silence
in honor of the victims of the World Trade Center while then-President Mohammad Khatami
declared on nationwide TV:
"My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation, particularly those who have suffered
from the attacks and also the families of the victims. Terrorism is doomed, and the
international community should stem it and take effective measures in a bid to eradicate
it."
Yet all the Trump administration could say was that Iran had it coming.
It was Democrats who, in a typical attempt to outflank Trump on the right, introduced
legislation in June 2017 by forcing him to impose penalties
on Russia, North Korea, and Iran as well. But after repudiating the JCPOA (the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018, Trump upped
sanctions even more in November – not only against the Iranian government but against
some 700
individuals, entities, aircraft, and vessels. After Iran shot down a $130-million U.S.
surveillance drone last month, Trump imposed sanctions on "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, his office, and his closest associates. Two weeks ago, he imposed penalties on
Mohammad
Javad Zarif , Iran's U.S.-educated foreign minister.
Crowd at Tea Party rally listening to Donald Trump denounce the Iran Nuclear Agreement,
Sept. 9, 2015. (YouTube)
It was a gesture of contempt for the very idea of diplomacy. So what happens next? The
problem is that re-starting negotiations would not be enough. Instead, Iran has demanded that
the
U.S. remove all sanctions and apologize before agreeing to a new round of talks. Since this
would be tantamount to re-authorizing the JCPOA, it's unlikely in the extreme. While Trump is
known for changing his mind in a flash, a course correction of this magnitude is hard to
imagine.
Thus, the confrontation is set to continue. Iran may respond by seizing more oil tankers or
downing more drones, but the problem is that the U.S. will undoubtedly engage in tit-for-tat
escalation in response until, eventually, some kind of line is crossed.
If so, the consequences are unpredictable. U.S. firepower is overwhelming ,
but Iran is not without
resources of its own , among them anti-ship ballistic missiles, mobile short-range rockets
that can hit naval targets, plus heavily-armed high-speed boats, mini-subs, and even "
ekranoplans ," floating planes designed to skim the waves at
115 miles per hour. Such weaponry could prove highly effective in the 35-mile-wide Strait of
Hormuz. Iran also has allies such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, which has an estimated 130,000
missiles and rockets in its own arsenal, Assad's battle-hardened military in Syria, Yemen's
Houthis, and pro-Iranian forces in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.
The upshot could be a war drawing in half a dozen countries or more. A confrontation on that
scale may seem inconceivable. But, then, war seemed inconceivable in the wake of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand's assassination in June 1914.
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs
about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com.
Jeff Davis , August 20, 2019 at 12:42
America is Israel's b*tch.
The American experiment is over. A variety of corporate/neoliberal interests and foreign
interests have hollowed it out, and soon, when every last bit of loot has been extracted, the
dried up husk of the Empire will collapse. There is no saving it because the looters are
still in control. Their control is unbreakable because buying Congress is such a minor and
manageable expense for them, and the Congressmen/women are simply incapable of setting aside
personal interest and personal ambition for the good of the country. Incapable, because if
they ever chose country over their own careers , the "owners" -- ie donors/looters -- would
find someone to replace them. There is no way out until it comes crashing down.
Don Bacon , August 20, 2019 at 11:33
Iran whipped the US in Syria, cementing the 'Shia crescent' from Tehran to Beirut, which
gives Iran the mantle of ME leadership. Washington had to respond to that fact because it
threatens the US and its Carter-Doctrine position as the predominate ME power. So don't blame
Israel.
Zhu , August 20, 2019 at 05:44
You forgot to mention pressure from Religious Right Republicans, eager for the Rapture,
the Return of Jesus, etv., etc. Christism Zionists in short.
Broompilot , August 20, 2019 at 01:19
I find it interesting that there is no mention of Netanyahu appearing before Congress or
the U.N. drawing silly looking pictures of bombs. Or Netanyahu claiming he had jacked some
new documents from Iran proving they had a nuclear weapons program. Or Netanyahu
disrespecting Obama with his appearance in Congress. Or Bibi's landing in L.A. with a
motorcade that screwed up traffic all over town to demonstrate who is really important in
this country. Reading this piece you would think this is 95% about Saudis and has very little
to do with Israel. There is no doubt that the gulf monarchies do not want successful
representative governments breaking out on their borders and giving their citizens ideas, but
I doubt they have anything resembling the Israeli lobbies and their influence operating in
the U.S. with the power to influence Iran policy.
AnneR , August 20, 2019 at 08:23
True, Broompilot. And I too awaited throughout the article for Mr Lazare to discuss the
really existing and marked part that Israel has played and is playing in all of the more
recent destruction in neighboring countries, and that illegitimate state's huge influence on
this country's politics, military actions (in the MENA countries when those actions might
benefit Israel), administration decisions (not to mention the cooperation among US and
Israeli secret services *and* electronic-internet companies which anyway themselves both
derive from the military and remain closely entwined with it).
Most US presidents – and seemingly all US Congresses – since WWII have aided
and abetted Israel and its appalling human rights record which never ends and continues with
impunity. But Trump is perhaps more so than most if only because his daughter, a convert to
Judaism, is married to an ardent Zionist, and buddy-buddy to Netanyahu. Lazare hints at
Trump's pro-Zionism (whatever its basis) but leaves it there.
Marko , August 19, 2019 at 22:50
"Trump's Persian-Gulf Car Crash"
When you view foreign policy as a Demolition Derby competition , as Trump and the neocons
do , this is called "Winning !"
Gregory Herr , August 19, 2019 at 20:44
The war of terrorism waged upon the people of Syria didn't come about because the U.S. was
"possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible clients", or because
the "Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers and tone down
criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say yes to Saudi
aggression."
Washington's Long War on Syria (Stephen Gowans) began well before Obama, Yahoo, Erdogan,
and Petraeus set up rat lines of weaponry and training for terrorists in Jordan and Turkey.
The current iteration of "topple thru terror" was in the offing, with or without Saudi
"impetus".
Syria stands in the way of Greater Israel and Wall Street/central bank dominance.
Obama "went along" alright. But it wasn't the Saudis he was "appeasing".
Obama should have normalised relations with Iran and disavowed all the b.s. rhetoric about
them. His "deal" had "made to be broken" written all over it because of his rhetoric. All
done in bad faith with the Path to Persia kept open.
Jeff Harrison , August 19, 2019 at 18:30
The big problem is that the US is convinced that it knows what it's doing when, in fact,
it is clueless. The US also is perpetually optimistic when it has nothing upon which to base
said optimism. It's not as if we've actually defeated anybody in the Middle East. Revoltin'
Bolton may think he's scaring people with aircraft carriers and B52s but you'll notice that
Iran snatched the British tanker and the Iraqi tanker after the US moved it's carrier and
bombers into the Gulf. They also shot down our drone in the same time frame.
We're playing a losing strategy.
Jeff Davis , August 20, 2019 at 12:11
We're playing a losing strategy because America is Israel's bitch.
The American experiment is over. A variety of corporate/neoliberal interests and foreign
interests have hollowed it out, and soon, when every last bit of loot has been extracted, the
dried up husk of the Empire will collapse. There is no saving it because the looters are
still in control. Their control is unbreakable because buying Congress is such a minor and
manageable expense for them, and the Congressmen/women are simply incapable of setting aside
personal interest and personal ambition for the good of the country. Incapable, because if
they ever chose country over their own careers , the "owners" -- ie donors/looters -- would
find someone to replace them. There is no way out until it comes crashing down.
Don Bacon , August 19, 2019 at 18:29
"It was all nonsense. Rather than threatening the Jewish state, the treaty represented a
landmark concession on Iran's part,. . ."
Calling the Obama agreement a treaty is nonsense, rather it was an agreement involving
only the executive branch and not the Senate as required by the Constitution for treaties.
Obama needed an achievement for his presidential library, so he waited until his term was
almost over to do what he could have done, with Brazil and Turkey, in 2010. Therefore Trump
had every right to overturn an agreement made by his hated predecessor, with the knowledge
that the Senate never would have approved it since they are all corrupted.
This is another example (Bush-43 on Iraq withdrawal was another) of what the US has come
to. This so-called "rules-based democracy" has become a stomping ground for the
"commander-in-chief" to display his executive privilege and do any damned thing he takes a
mind to, including war, with nary a peep from the so-called "checks and balance" folks who
are supposed to be looking after US democracy, but aren't.
"Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all."
It never existed.
A clueless Lazare has been repeatedly informed of the fact in the comments of his CN
articles.
Now he's feebly wondering "if".
"Under intense pressure from neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats
such as Russiagate attack dog Rep. Adam Schiff demanding stepped-up opposition with Iran,
Trump did an about-face."
The pro-Israel Lobby owns both Republican and Democrat Russiagate enthusiasts and is the
source of near hysterical demands for opposition with Iran.
Trump has never been under "intense pressure" and has not done "an about-face" because he
has always been avowedly "1000 percent" pro-Israel.
A worse than clueless Lazare has been repeatedly informed of the fact in the comments of
his CN articles.
Lazare apparently finds lots of things "hard to imagine", even "inconceivable".
But in June 1914, clearly there were multiple political and military leaders in Europe for
whom war was far from inconceivable. War was simply a question of timing and so it would be
better to have a war when the circumstances were most propitious. "I consider a war
inevitable", declared senior German generals such as Helmuth von Moltke the Younger in 1912.
"The sooner the better".
Current Israeli leadership holds such a view. The Trump administration foreign policy purchased by the pro-Israel Lobby reflects this
view.
But for the obviously very well informed but perpetually clueless Lazare, it all somehow
remains "inconceivable"
Trump has walked away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and has
performed numerous other services, including threatening war on Iran, precisely because the
Israelis wanted them done.
Don't confuse Trump's servility to the pro-Israel Lobby for "isolationism".
The arrogant aggression of the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo troika is bought and paid for by
Israel.
Depressing. Having defended Trump because attacks were directed at the President of the
United States, any president, it is hard to support a man whose every move is a political
calculation. That such blatant and reprehensible behavior carries risks for everyone but
mostly the targets of our barbaric behavior seems never to enter the President, his neocon
handlers' and his rabid supporters' minds.
One comment in this depressing article caught my eye.
"If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have
been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they
were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." That is unmitigated nonsense. Why not be honest. We don't want to stop it. The We, of
course, being our decision makers and a too large segment of our brainwashed electorate.
Gregory Herr , August 19, 2019 at 19:52
To "stop it", Uncle Sam would have to first cease being a part of it. The bombing of Yemen
came courtesy of U.S. mid-air refueling efforts, targeting "intelligence", and "made in
America" weaponry. The blockade (starvation) of Yemen is also a duel accompaniment. It's
supposed to look like a Saudi "thing", but in actuality, it's just more Uncle Sam doing his
thing. Obama called it "leading from behind".
Pat lost its touch with reality " Around the world, America is involved in quarrels, clashes
and confrontations with almost too many nations to count." That's what empires do. Why he can't
understand this simple fact?
Friday, President Donald Trump met in New Jersey with his national security advisers and
envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who is negotiating with the Taliban to bring about peace, and a U.S.
withdrawal from America's longest war.
U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, in a war that has cost 2,400
American lives.
Following the meeting, Trump tweeted, "Many on the opposite sides of this 19 year war, and
us, are looking to make a deal -- if possible!"
Some, however, want no deal; they are fighting for absolute power.
Saturday, a wedding in Kabul with a thousand guests was hit by a suicide bomber who,
igniting his vest, massacred 63 people and wounded 200 in one of the greatest atrocities of the
war. ISIS claimed responsibility.
Monday, 10 bombs exploded in restaurants and public squares in the eastern city of
Jalalabad, wounding 66.
Trump is pressing Khalilzad to negotiate drawdowns of U.S. troop levels from the present
14,000, and to bring about a near-term end to U.S. involvement in a war that began after we
overthrew the old Taliban regime for giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.
Is it too soon to ask: What have we gained from our longest war? Was all the blood and
treasure invested worth it? And what does the future hold?
If the Taliban could not be defeated by an Afghan army, built up by the U.S. for a decade
and backed by 100,000 U.S. troops in 2010-2011, then are the Taliban likely to give up the
struggle when the U.S. is drawing down the last 14,000 troops and heading home?
The Taliban control more of the country than they have at any time since being overthrown in
2001. And time now seems to be on their side.
Why have they persevered, and prevailed in parts of the country?
Motivated by a fanatic faith, tribalism and nationalism, they have shown a willingness to
die for a cause that seems more compelling to them than what the U.S.-backed Afghan government
has on offer.
They also have the guerrillas' advantage of being able to attack at times and places of
their own choosing, without the government's burden of having to defend towns and cities.
Will these Taliban, who have lost many battles but not the war, retire from the field and
abide by democratic elections once the Americans go home? Why should they?
The probability: When the Americans depart, the war breaks out anew, and the Taliban
ultimately prevail.
And Afghanistan is but one of the clashes and conflicts in which America is engaged.
Severe U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have failed to bring down the Nicholas Maduro regime in
Caracas but have contributed to the immiseration of that people, 10% of whom have left the
country. Trump now says he is considering a quarantine or blockade to force Maduro out.
Eight years after we helped to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya is still mired in civil
war, with its capital, Tripoli, under siege.
Yemen, among the world's humanitarian disasters, has seen the UAE break with its Saudi
interventionist allies, and secessionists split off southern Yemen from the Houthi-dominated
north. Yet, still, Congress has been unable to force the Trump administration to end all
support of the Saudi war.
Two thousand U.S. troops remain in Syria. The northern unit is deployed between our Syrian
Kurd allies and the Turkish army. In the south, they are positioned to prevent Iran and
Iranian-backed militias from creating a secure land bridge from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus
to Beirut.
In our confrontation with Iran, we have few allies.
The Brits released the Iranian tanker they seized at Gibraltar, which had been carrying oil
to Syria. But when the Americans sought to prevent its departure, a Gibraltar court ruled
against the United States.
Iran presents no clear or present danger to U.S. vital interests, but the Saudis and
Israelis see Iran as a mortal enemy, and want the U.S. military rid them of the menace.
Hong Kong protesters wave American flags and seek U.S. support of their demands for greater
autonomy and freedom in their clash with their Beijing-backed authorities. The Taiwanese want
us to support them and sell them the weapons to maintain their independence. The Philippines
wants us to take their side in the dispute with China over tiny islets in the South China
Sea.
We are still committed to go to war to defend South Korea. And the North has lately
test-fired a series of ballistic missiles, none of which could hit the USA, but all of which
could hit South Korea.
Around the world, America is involved in quarrels, clashes and confrontations with almost
too many nations to count.
In how many of these are U.S. vital interests imperiled? And in how many are we facing
potential wars on behalf of other nations, while they hold our coat and egg us on?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
"... Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them. ..."
"... The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best." That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history. ..."
"... As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion. ..."
"... Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before." ..."
"... The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans. ..."
"... As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq. ..."
"... Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security." He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question. ..."
"... The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes? ..."
"... Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war. ..."
Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them.
Estimates of the number of civilians who died during the war in Iraq range from 151,000 to 655,000. An additional 4,491 American
military personnel perished in the war. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, toxicologist at the University of Michigan, has organized several
research expeditions to Iraq to measure the contamination and pollution still poisoning the air and water supply from the tons of
munitions dropped during the war. It does not require any expertise to assume what the studies confirm: disease is still widespread
and birth defects are gruesomely common. Back home, it is difficult to measure just how many struggle with critical injuries and
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction,
Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best."
That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually
did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history.
As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match
its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion.
Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state
of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before."
The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement
in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans
dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When
they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the
equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans.
As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical
assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played
a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq.
Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security."
He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving
aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous,
to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question.
Far worse than the worship of Mueller is the refusal to scrutinize the abysmal foreign policy record of Joe Biden, currently the
frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the Democrats in the Senate at that time, Biden was the most
enthusiastic of the cheerleaders for war, waving his pompoms and cartwheeling in rhythm to Dick Cheney's music. Biden said repeatedly
that America had "no choice but to eliminate the threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
his blustering was uniquely influential.
The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked
into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone
who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador
to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should
ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes?
Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism
of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The
moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic
war.
Polling well below Biden in the race is the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She alone on the Democratic stage has made
criticism of American militarism central to her candidacy. A veteran of the Iraq war and a highly decorated major in the Hawaii Army
National Guard, Gabbard offers an intelligent and humane perspective on foreign affairs. She's called the regime change philosophy
"disastrous," advocated for negotiation with hostile foreign powers, and backed a reduction in drone strikes. She pledges if she
becomes president to end American involvement in Afghanistan.
When Chris Matthews asked Gabbard about Biden's support for the Iraq war, she said, "It was the wrong vote. People like myself,
who enlisted after 9/11 because of the terrorist attacks, were lied to. We were betrayed."
Her moral clarity is rare in the political fog of the presidential circus. She cautions against accepting the "guise of humanitarian
justification for war," and notes that rarely does the American government bomb and invade a country to actually advance freedom
or protect human rights.
Gabbard's positions are vastly superior to that of the other young veteran in the race, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend
recently told New York that one of his favorite novels is The Quiet American , saying that its author, Graham Greene,
"points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions."
Buttigieg's chances of winning the nomination seem low, and his prospects of becoming a literary critic appear even lower.
The Quiet American does much more than raise questions about interventions: it is a merciless condemnation of American exceptionalism
and its attendant indifference to Vietnamese suffering.
Americans hoping for peace won't find much comfort in the current White House either. President Trump has made the world more
dangerous by trashing the Iran nuclear deal, and his appointment of John Bolton, a man who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma
Gandhi, as national security advisor is certainly alarming.
America's willful ignorance when it comes to the use of its own military exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its political
culture. Even worse, it makes future wars all but inevitable.
If no one can remember a war that ended merely nine years ago, and there's little room for Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary,
how will the country react the next time a president, and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declare that they
have no choice but to remove a threat?
Norman Solomon, journalist and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, knows the answer to that question. He provides it
in the title of his book on how the media treats American foreign policy decisions: War Made Easy .
Where ae the people who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Should they be tried for lying to the American public?
4500 troops killed and over $1.1 TRILLION wasted with no good results .With hundreds of thousands of Iraq's killed. .
Where are they, indeed? They are still running US foreign policy; that's where they are. They are pundits in all the major media;
that's where they are.
I cannot even imagine what historians will say about the uncanny persistence of these charlatans' influence in this era after
a consistent record of disastrous, abysmal misadventures.
You don't have to look too hard to find them. Bolton, Pompeo, and other neocons are hiding in plain sight. The Military Industrial
Complex is embedded in our foreign policy like a tick on a dog.
Because you'd be knocking out a storm trooper instead of the emperor, at least as far as Bush goes. Same for why the focus is
on Bolton rather than simply Trump.
I CAN see an argument that Trump/Bush knew what they were doing when they brought those people in though. f you feel that way
and see it more of an owner of a hostile attack dog then yeah, you'd want to include those two too.
Here stands Tulsi. A woman, who, unlike their conventional troupe, can win this election. They reject her because... what? Moar
war? She's not the member of the Cult? Or it's simply some sort of collective political death wish?
They reject her because she had the temerity to speak truth to power and supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race. She stepped
down from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders. She has real courage, and earned their wrath. She's not perfect
but she's braver and stronger than almost the entire field. Only Bernie is on par.
And Bernie is the one they also hate, maybe a little bit less openly. Thus they reject those who can win the election. It's either
a self-destructiveness or they think that it's better to keep on losing than to rebuild the party into what it needs to be.
Democrats and the Republican establishment, both, love war. It wasn't a coincidence that Hillary Clinton chose Madeleine Albright
to be a keynote speaker at "her" party convention ("we think the deaths of a half million children are worth it"). Liberals know
that there isn't really any "free" free, and that taxing the rich won't match their dreams -- it is the blood and bones of innocent
foreigners that must pay for their lust. Establishment Republicans are more straightforward: they simply profit off the death
and destruction.
This is why Trump is being destroyed, and why Tulsi is attacked. If only "she" (the one who gloated over Khameni's murder)
had been elected, we'd be in a proxy war with Russia now! A real war with Iran! This is what the American people want, and what
they'll likely get when they vote another chicken-hawk in come 2020.
Tulsi, like Sanders is a 'danger' to everything Israel wants.
So, all...all the main 'news' networks and online sites don't like them and give more coverage to the same old Dem bull peddlers
like ignorant Booker and the lousy opportunist low IQ Kamala Harris and Gillibrand.
Manafort and his ilk can be tried and convicted for their lies. I guess if the lie is big enough we grant a pass on any need for
prosecution. Justice for all? I don't think so.
Max Blumenthal posted a powerful piece at Consortium News (7/31/2019) about Biden's central and south American mis-adventures.
Biden still extols his own policies however disastrous. The hubris of the man is worse than nauseating.
Whether one thinks Gabbard has a shot at the nomination or not, it's important to keep her on the stage in the next round of debates.
Go to Tulsi2020.com
and give her just one dollar (or more if you can)
so she has enough unique contributors to make the next round. And if you get polled,early on give her your vote.
The total US costs related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are expected to be considerably larger than $1.1 trillion, according
to this study:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu...
Try $4-$6 trillion, according to the author of the study.
Long after I, Andrew Bacevitch and Hillary Clinton have gone to our reward, there will still be thousands of wounded warriors
from these US Middle East adventures dependent on VA benefits for their survival and competing with civilian seniors for government
handouts. A war with Iran would make the US fiscal situation that much worse.
The religious folks who were so anxious to protect family values only a few years ago seem to have their heads in the sand
when it comes to the financial future of today's young Americans.
A few weeks ago, I made a token contribution to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign to help her qualify for the July Democratic debates.
She will need more new contributors to qualify for the next round of debates.
Tulsi hasn't a chance of the nomination, but she's exposing things and maybe more people will get a clue about what's really going
on with American lives and taxes being squandered for the profit of the few who benefit from these atrocities and wars abroad,
done in the name of all Americans.
Being a supporter of Tulsi Gabbard for the very reasons that the author writes, has me agreeing with everything he has promoted
in his piece.
However, to answer his own question as to why Americans are lured into commenting on such innocuous and foolish things in such
an important election such as Biden's touching of women, is answered by the author's own prose.
He states that Americans are only provided such nonsense from the press that is monitoring the election process. What else
can people talk about? And even if many Americans are clearheaded enough to understand the charade of the current Democratic debates,
what or who will actually provide legitimate coverage with the exception of online sites as the American Conservative, among others?
If most Americans were actually thinking individuals, Tulsi Gabbard would be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2020. However,
given the two factors of a highly corrupted mainstream press and too many Americans not studying enough civics to understand what
is going on around them, it is highly unlikely that Tulsi Gabbard will even get close to the possibility of being nominated...
Cheney, mentioned in the article, was pure evil. I voted for GB2 for two reasons. 1) He was a very good Texas governor. He actually
got anti-tax Texas to raise taxes dedicated to support education, in return for stricter standards for teachers. A good trade
since Texas public schools were awful. 2) Dick Cheney. I thought he was the adult in the room that would provide steady and reliable
guidance for Bush.
Boy was I wrong about Cheney. "Deficits don't matter". Just watch the movie Vice. Christian Bale does an incredible job portraying
the pure evil of Cheney and the Military Industrial Complex. The movie is chilling to watch. And it is basically true. Politifact
does a good job of scoring the accuracy of Cheney's role in the Bush administration as portrayed in the movie.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, President Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton at the NATO
Foreign Ministerial in Brussels, Belgium on July 12, 2018. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Matt Lee
reports
on the Trump administration obsessive
use of sanctions:
Call it the diplomacy of coercion.
The Trump administration is aggressively pursuing economic sanctions as a primary foreign policy tool to an extent
unseen in decades, or perhaps ever. Many are questioning the results even as officials insist the penalties are
achieving their aims.
It is true that the Trump administration is using economic coercion as its default approach to almost everything, but
there doesn't appear to be any diplomacy involved. There is such a thing as "coercive diplomacy," but there is no
evidence that Trump and his officials understand the first thing about it. An administration that genuinely wanted to
secure lasting diplomatic agreements with other states would apply pressure only as a means to a specific, achievable
goal, but with this administration they are waging purely destructive economic wars that the targeted states cannot end
without capitulating. The "maximum pressure" description implies an unwillingness to relieve pressure short of the other
side's surrender.
It is not just that it is a "combination of more sticks and fewer carrots." The Trump administration's policies are
all punishment and no reward. In the case of Iran, it could hardly be otherwise when the administration chose to
penalize Iran with sanctions for daring to comply with a multilateral nonproliferation agreement. Iran behaved
constructively and acceded to the demands of the P5+1 four years ago, and in return for their cooperation they have been
subjected to a grueling economic war despite fully complying with their commitments. When our government punishes
another state for doing what previous administrations wanted them to do, no amount of punishment could force that state
to trust our government a second time.
The administration approaches each case in the same way: they impose penalties, they make threats, they offer no
incentives, and they make outrageous, far-fetched demands that no government would ever accept. Trump handles the trade
wars in much the same way that he handles the "maximum pressure" campaigns against intransigent governments, and he
fails every time because he can't conceive of a mutually beneficial agreement and therefore refuses to compromise.
Trump's "diplomacy" is no diplomacy at all, but a series of insults, sanctions, tariffs, and threats that achieve
nothing except to cause disruption and pain. Unsurprisingly, a pressure campaign that is aimed at toppling a government
or forcing it to give up everything it has cannot be successful on its own terms as long as the targeted government
chooses to resist, and the stakes for the targeted government will always higher than they are for the administration.
In a contest of wills, the party that is fighting to preserve itself has the advantage.
Someday, when everybody in the world hates America, these economic atrocities will come
back to the USA with violence. You can't do these things to people and not expect
retaliation. When people are hungry from sanctions and can't get medicine for their
children, they will fight back. Wouldn't you? But, it won't affect Wash., just innocent
people, like the innocent people abroad suffering from Wash. policy. Americans will reap
what Wash. sows.
Late Justin
Raimondo was an astute analyst of events in Syria... This is his analysys from 2015. It is
still cogent as of August 2019.
Notable quotes:
"... "War on terrorism" turns into cold war against Russia ..."
"... By the way, according to the Pentagon's own testimony before a congressional committee, only sixty "vetted" fighters were sent into Syria to take on both Assad and ISIS. And while they denied, at first, that their pet "moderates" betrayed Washington and handed over most of their weapons and other equipment to al-Qaeda in return for "safe passage," the Pentagon later admitted it . ..."
"... [I]t is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade ..."
"... It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them. ..."
"... "I'd like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it's a big question: who's playing who here? The recent incident where the most 'moderate' opposition group handed over their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that. ..."
"War on terrorism" turns into cold war against Russia
Posted on August
19, 2019 August 18, 2019In both Yemen and Syria, the War Party has found an
ally that they can get behind, you know, one that really supports our values: al-Qaeda.
From time to time they have even managed to get President Trump to go along with this
nonsense – presumably due to the baleful influence of John Bolton. (See
Ron Paul's recent discussion of recent developments.) It is worth a look back at an
earlier high-points in this strange alliance between the West and al-Qaeda against Russia and
Syria. Justin's column from four years ago (October 2, 2015) analyzes it in depth.
Originally published October 2, 2015
As Russian fighter jets target al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, the Western media is up in arms
– and
in denial . They deny the Russians are taking on ISIS – and they are indignant that
Putin is
targeting al-Qaeda , which is almost never referred to by its actual name, but is instead
described as " al-Nusra ," or the more inclusive "
Army of Conquest
," which are alternate names for the heirs of Osama bin Laden.
And there are no ideological lines being drawn in this information war: both the left and
the right – e.g. the left-liberal Vox and the Fox News
network – are utilizing a map put out by
the neoconservative
"Institute for the Study of War" to "prove" that Putin isn't really attacking ISIS
– he's actually only concerned with destroying the "non-ISIS" rebels and propping up
the faltering regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The premise behind this kind of propaganda is that there really is some difference between
ISIS and the multitude of Islamist groups proliferating like wasps in the region: and that,
furthermore, al-Qaeda is "relatively" moderate when compared to the Islamic State. Yes,
incredibly, the US and British media are pushing the line that the al-Qaeda fighters in
Syria, known as al-Nusra, are really the Good Guys.
Didn't you know that we have always been at war with Eastasia?
There is
much whining , this [Thursday] morning, that a supposedly US-"vetted" group known as
Tajammu al-Aaza has felt Putin's wrath – but when we get down into the weeds, we
discover that this outfit is fighting alongside al-Qaeda:
"Jamil al-Saleh, a defected Syrian army officer who is now the leader of the rebel
group Tajammu al-Aaza,
told AlSouria.net that the Russian airstrikes targeted his group's base in
al-Lataminah, a town in the western Syrian governorate of Hama. That area represents one of
the farthest southern points of the rebel advance from the north and is therefore a crucial
front line in the war. An alliance of Syrian rebel factions, including both the al
Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front and groups considered by Washington to be more
moderate, successfully drove Assad regime forces out of the northern governorate of Idlib
and are now pushing south into Hama."
By the way, according to the Pentagon's own testimony
before a congressional committee, only sixty "vetted" fighters were sent into Syria to take
on both Assad and ISIS. And while they denied, at first, that their pet "moderates"
betrayed Washington and
handed over most of their weapons and other equipment to al-Qaeda in return for "safe
passage," the Pentagon later
admitted it . Furthermore, we were told that these were the only "vetted" fighters
actually in the field, but now we are confronted with "Tajammu al-Aaza," which – it's
being reported – is deploying US-supplied missile guidance systems against Syrian
government forces.
So a handful of "vetted" fighters suddenly turns into an entire armed force – one
which, you'll note, has effectively merged with al-Qaeda.
The lies are coming at us so fast and thick in the first 24 hours of the Russian strikes
that we face a veritable blizzard of obfuscation. They range from the egregious –
alleged photos of "civilian casualties" that
turn out to be fake – to the more subtle: a supposed Free Syrian Army commander is
reported killed by a Russian air strike, and yet it appears that very same commander was
kidnapped by ISIS last year . We are told that the town of Rastan, the site of Russian
strikes, isn't under the control of ISIS – except it was when
ISIS was executing gay men there .
The Russians make no bones about their support of Assad: in his speech to the United
Nations, Putin stated his position clearly: "We think it's a big mistake to refuse to
cooperate with the Syrian authorities and government forces who valiantly fight terrorists on
the ground." On the other hand, the objectives of the Western alliance in Syria aren't so
clear: on the one hand, Washington claims to be directing the main blow against ISIS, but its
claims of success have been
greatly exaggerated . Yet we have spent many millions arming and training "vetted" rebels
who have been defecting to ISIS and al-Qaeda in droves.
It's almost as if we're keeping ISIS around so as to put pressure on Assad to get out of
Dodge. As Putin put it in his UN speech :
" [I]t is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of
terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support
terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms
trade .
" It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve
your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of them or somehow
eliminate them.
"I'd like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with
are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it's a big question: who's
playing who here? The recent incident where the most 'moderate' opposition group handed over
their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that. "
The reality is that there are no "moderates" in Syria, and certainly not among the rebel
Islamist groups: they're all jihadists who want to impose Sharia law, drive out Christians,
Alawites, and other minority groups, and set up an Islamic dictatorship. These are our noble
"allies" – the very same people who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001, and against whom our perpetual "war on terrorism" was launched.
It's pretty clear. Saudi Arabia has lost, and,
notes Bruce Riedel, "the Houthis and Iran are the strategic winners". Saudi proxies in Aden
– the seat of Riyadh's Yemeni proto-'government' – have been turfed out by secular,
former Marxist, southern secessionists. What can Saudi Arabia do? It cannot go forward. Even
tougher would be retreat. Saudi will have to contend with an Houthi war being waged
inside the kingdom's south; and a second – quite different – war in Yemen's
south. MbS is stuck. The Houthi military leadership are on a roll , and
disinterested – for now – in a political settlement. They wish to accumulate more
'cards'. The UAE, which armed and trained the southern secessionists has opted out. MbS is
alone, 'carrying the can'. It will be messy.
So, what is the meaning in this? It is that MbS cannot 'deliver' what
Trump and Kushner needed, and demanded from him: He cannot any more deliver the Gulf 'world'
for their grand projects – let alone garner together the collective Sunni 'world' to
enlist in a confrontation with Iran, or for hustling the Palestinians into abject
subordination, posing as 'solution'.
What happened? It seems that MbZ must have bought into the Mossad 'line' that Iran was a
'doddle'. Under pressure of global sanctions, Iran would quickly crumble, and would beg for
negotiations with Trump. And that the resultant, punishing treaty would see the dismantling of
all of Iran's troublesome allies around the region. The Gulf thus would be free to continue
shaping a Middle East free from democracy, reformers and (those detested) Islamists.
What made the UAE – eulogised in the US as tough 'little Sparta' – back off? It
was not just that the Emirs saw that the Yemen war was unwinnable. That was so; but more
significantly, it dawned on them that Iran was going to be no 'doddle'. But rather, the US
attempt to strangulate the Iranian economy risked escalating beyond sanctions war, into
military confrontation. And in that eventuality, the UAE would be devastated. Iran warned
explicitly that a drone or two landed into the 'glass houses' of their financial districts, or
onto oil and gas facilities, would set them back twenty years. They believed it.
But there was another factor in the mix. "As the world teeters on the edge of another
financial crisis", Esfandyar Batmanghelidj has
noted , "few places are being gripped by anxiety like Dubai. Every week a new headline
portends the coming crisis in the city of skyscrapers. Dubai villa prices are at their lowest
level in a decade, down 24 percent in just one year. A slump in tourism has seen Dubai hotels
hit their lowest occupancy rate since the 2008 financial crisis – even as the country
gears up to host Expo 2020 next year. As Bloomberg's Zainab Fattah reported in November of last
year, Dubai has begun to "lose its shine," its role as a center for global commerce "undermined
by a global tariff war -- and in particular by the US drive to shut down commerce with nearby
Iran"".
An extraneous Houthi drone landing in Dubai's financial zone would be the 'final nail in the
coffin' (the expatriates would be out in a flash) – a prospect far more serious than the
crisis of 2009, when Dubai's real estate market collapsed, threatening insolvency for several
banks and major development companies, some of them state-linked – and necessitating a
$20 billion bailout.
In short, the Gulf realised MbS' confrontation project with Iran was far too risky,
especially with the global financial mood darkening so rapidly.
Emirati leaders faced off with MbZ, the confrontation ideologue – and the UAE came
out of Yemen formally (though leaving in situ its proxies), and initiated outreach to
Iran, to take it out of that war, too.
It is now no longer conceivable that MbS can deliver what Trump and
Netanyahu desired . Does this then mean that the US confrontation with Iran, and Jared
Kushner's Deal of the Century, are over? No. Trump has two key US constituencies: AIPAC
and the Christian Evangelical 'Zionists' to 'stroke' electorally in the lead up to the 2020
elections. More 'gifts' to Netanyahu in the lead into the latter's own election campaign are
very likely also, as a part of that massaging of domestic constituencies (and donors).
In terms of the US confrontation with Iran, it seems that Trump is turning-down the volume
on belligerence toward Iran, hoping that economic sanctions will work their 'magic' of bringing
the Islamic Republic to its knees. There is no sign of that however – and no sign of any
realistic US plan 'B'. (The Lindsay Graham initiative is not one).
Where does that leave MbS in terms of US and Israeli interests? Well, to be brutal, and
despite the family friendships 'expendable', perhaps? The scent of an eventual US
disengagement from the region is again hanging in the air.
The deeper meaning in the 'lost Yemen war', ultimately, is an end to Gulf hopes that
'magician' Trump would undo the earlier Gulf panic that the West would normalise with Iran
(through the JCPOA), thus leaving Iran as the paramount regional power. The advent of Trump,
with all his affinity towards Saudi Arabia, seemed to Gulf States to promise the opportunity
again to 'lock in' the US security umbrella over Gulf monarchies, protecting these states from
significant change, as well as leaving Iran 'shackled', and unable to assume regional
primacy.
A secondary meaning to Yemen is that Trump and Netanyahu's heavy investment in MbS and MbZ
has proved to be chimeric. These two, it turned out were 'naked' all along. And now the world
knows it. They can't deliver. They have been bested by a ragtag army of tough Houthi
tribesmen.
The region now observes that 'war' isn't happening (although only by the merest hair's
breadth): Trump is not – of his own volition – going to bomb Iran back to the
1980s. And Gulf States now see that if he did, it is they – the Gulf States – who
would pay the highest price. Paradoxically, it has fallen to the UAE, the prime agitator in
Washington against Iran, to lead the outreach toward Iran. It represents a salutary lesson in
realpolitik for certain Gulf States (and Israel). And now that it has been learned, it is hard
to see it being reversed quite so easily.
The strategic shift toward a different security architecture is already underway, with
Russia
and China proposing an international conference on security in the Persian Gulf: Russia and
Iran already have agreed joint naval exercises in in the Indian Ocean and Hormuz, and China is
mulling sending its warships there too, to protect its tankers and commercial shipping.
Plainly, there will be some competition here, but Iran has the upper hand still in Hormuz. It
is a powerful deterrent (though one best threatened, but not used).
Of course, nothing is assured in these changing times. The US President is fickle, and prone
to flip-flop. And there are yet powerful interests in the US who do want see Iran
comprehensively bombed. But others in DC – more significantly, on the (nationalist) Right
– are much more outspoken in challenging the Iran 'hawks'. Maybe the latter have missed
their moment? The fact is, Trump drew back (but not for the stated reasons) from military
action. America is now entering election season – and it is fixated on its navel. Foreign
policy is already a forgotten, non-issue in the fraught partisan atmospherics of today's
America.
Trump likely will still 'throw Israel a few bones', but will that change anything? Probably,
not much. That is cold comfort – but it might have been a lot worse for the Palestinians.
And Greater Israel? A distant, Promethean hope.
It's very sad that Ukraine is just a pawn in dirty geopolitical games of the USA, the EU and Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... In 3-5 years we could have an interesting scenario in Ukraine with land (its main wealth) owned by foreign investors and a large % of population with Russian or Polish and other EU passports. As always with ideology, the result is the exact opposite of what that ideology claims: the dictatorship of proletariat impoverished and killed proletariat, Nazis dramatically shrunk German lebensraum, liberals obsession with ' liberty and universal brotherhood ' is leading to censorship, suppression and group hostilities. But here we are and the ideological idiocy that Maidan-Ukrainians embraced might not be reversible. This is not good for anybody. ..."
"... For Ukraine these are all irreversible losses, but from Western perspective, these are little victories: Russia was forced to spend more. As the West does not give a hoot about Ukraine, the US and its vassals can freely celebrate these victories. ..."
"... So, it all depends on the point of view. The West never cared about aborigines, so their point of view does not come into its calculations. ..."
"... Currently prevailing mood in Russia is that Ukraine, whoever is the power there, gets nothing, nada, zilch. ..."
"... But Ukrainian authorities worked pretty hard to achieve it, and now Ukraine has to live with this new reality. It won’t be pretty. The US was simply following its standard policy: leave a pile of shit, declare victory, and leave, waiting for someone else to clean up. ..."
"... Now there is only one way Russia would clean up: if the EU pays full price for it. As this is unlikely, the aborigines are going to bear the brunt of the consequences. ..."
miscalculation that the rotten West will help them instead of use them to create a
festering sore on Russian border for just a few billion dollars in loans.
A possibly a fatal miscalculation for Ukraine, but there is also an ideology involved. In
Maidan-Ukrainians case that ideology is Ukrainian nationalism combined with a servile Western
worship of almost cargo-cult level. An odd combination that has led to odd result.
West wanted Zelensky to win, the question is why. Tactically, Zelensky neutralized large
Russia-leaning block of voters: the 70% vote would have gone somewhere and they were not
going to vote for Poroshenko or Tymoshenko. So that misdirection was successful. But what was
the point?
Let's look at what Zelensky is actually doing (not the throw-away comedy and
rhetoric): he is trying to allow sale of Ukrainian land to foreign investors. My guess is
that he will push it through and that will his main legacy. Buying up Ukrainian arable land
has been a wet dream for many in the West since 1991. Zelensky could deliver on it, and then
move on.
In 3-5 years we could have an interesting scenario in Ukraine with land (its main wealth)
owned by foreign investors and a large % of population with Russian or Polish and other EU
passports. As always with ideology, the result is the exact opposite of what that ideology
claims: the dictatorship of proletariat impoverished and killed proletariat, Nazis
dramatically shrunk German lebensraum, liberals obsession with ' liberty and universal
brotherhood ' is leading to censorship, suppression and group hostilities. But here we
are and the ideological idiocy that Maidan-Ukrainians embraced might not be reversible. This
is not good for anybody.
Why does the Saker think that Ze had any choice? He is a puppet, a stuffed shirt brought to
”power” by Kolomoisky and allied oligarchs. The only goal was to chase Porky and
allied thieves from the trough to be able to steal more.
Now, the people of Ukraine had choice. But they blew it again, like many times before:
each Ukrainian “president” is worse than his predecessor. As the saying goes,
“fool me once, shame on you…” Ukrainians let themselves be fooled six
times already, so there is no doubt where the shame goes.
It was said that the nationalism is the last resort of a scoundrel. But it isn’t the
only one. Nationalism, stupid unrealistic dreams to feed sheeple, fairy tales about
aggression, and the war create perfect smokescreen for blatant thievery. It continues
unabated, ever since 1991.
Russia does need to make its choice. But it is complicated by the role of Russian thieves
(polite word is oligarchs) in current Russian state. Putin kicked some out. The remaining
ones have enough brains to figure that they need a strong state to protect them, lest their
loot be stolen by Western thieves. So, they are a step ahead of Ukrainian thieves who did not
tumble even to this simple realization. But no more than one step ahead.
The economic reality is that Russian state does not have the resources to restore Ukraine,
even if sane forces come to power there. So, Ukraine would likely keep festering, losing
millions of working age people (like today), possibly losing chunks of territory (as the joke
has it, whoever remains in Ukraine pays off the debt). The problems of that huge Somalia can
only be solved by concerted effort of many European countries and Russia. This is not on the
cards, at least not until Ukies create yet another Chernobyl. Then the EU might decide to
send its US overlords to Hell and pay Russia to take the hand grenade away from the monkey. I
don’t think Putin will live long enough to see that happen.
…EU might decide to send its US overlords to Hell and pay Russia to take the hand
grenade away from the monkey.
How would EU go against its overlord? Even if EU would try, the existential nihilism in
Kiev will prevent compromise. Ideologues can’t admit that their ‘idea’
didn’t work, they prefer destroying everything around. West is also at this point
incapable of admitting an error – they literally can’t do it, the lying has to go
on. That means that even groundwork for any possible compromise can’t be put in place.
This is all the way down with fireworks and it won’t be pretty.
There is such a thing as a catastrophic error and the last 5 years in Ukraine comes pretty
close to it. That is not really fixable. The monkey night as well use the grenade.
Minsk agreement was an incredibly generous deal, if Poroshenko had half a brain he would
had jumped on it and today Donbas would be a remote backwater with autonomy.
That would be true if Porky was interested in Ukraine. As it is, his only interest and
loyalty was and is his personal loot. To keep stealing, he (and allied thieves) needed the
smokescreen of war, fairy tales of “aggression”, and pipe dreams of “greater
Ukraine” for the sheeple. He succeeded in his thievery for five years. Now another gang
of thieves pushed his gang from the trough. End of story.
Are you a teenager unaware of the history of the Maidan regime-change
“revolution?” Here are two most influential Ukranian parties-participants in the
“revolution:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_(political_party)
The Svoboda Party was founded in 1991 as the Social-National Party of Ukraine … It
is widely considered a fascist..party….
Time has described it [the Right Sector Party] as a “radical right-wing group
… a coalition of militant ultra-nationalists” with an ideology that
“borders on fascism”.
Die Welt, The New York Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique have described some of
Right Sector’s constituent groups as radical right-wing, neofascist, or
neo-Nazi…
You are a pessimist (or a fatalist). I agree that EU is shamefully subservient to the US,
but when some of their core interests are at stake, even slavish EU can show some teeth. Just
think of Nord Stream-2: the US is jumping out of its skin to damage this project, but Germany
stands remarkably firm.
From Western point of view, Ukie provocation was not a complete failure (even though
it’s a catastrophic failure from Ukrainian point of view): Russia had to spend a lot to
develop the production of military things it used to import from Ukraine, like ships, ship
engines, helicopter engines, spaceship control systems, etc.
Now that it acquired the
capability to produce these things, there will be no going back regardless who rules Ukraine:
it’s industries that used to export to Russia are doomed. These include such giants as Nikolaev shipbuilding plant, Motor Sich in Zaparozie, Antonov aircraft building plant in Kiev,
etc. The same goes for transit.
It is not just natural gas transit everybody talks about.
Russia used to transport ammonia to Odessa, where it was partially exported and partially
converted into fertilizers. The plant that used to do that is dead.
Ukraine tried to sell it
for $5 billion under Yanuk and got no takers, about a year ago it tried to sell it for 10% of
that price, and got no takers again.
There also used to be substantial Russian payments for
transport via the railway going across Eastern Ukraine.
Russia built an alternative bypassing
Ukraine, so they might as well dismantle the rails on their route.
For Ukraine these are all
irreversible losses, but from Western perspective, these are little victories: Russia was
forced to spend more. As the West does not give a hoot about Ukraine, the US and its vassals
can freely celebrate these victories.
So, it all depends on the point of view. The West never cared about aborigines, so their
point of view does not come into its calculations.
That’s true, when it comes to resources, there are always alternatives how to spend
them.
Currently prevailing mood in Russia is that Ukraine, whoever is the power there, gets
nothing, nada, zilch.
Considering how closely Ukrainians are related to Russians, this feat
wasn’t easy.
But Ukrainian authorities worked pretty hard to achieve it, and now Ukraine
has to live with this new reality. It won’t be pretty. The US was simply following its
standard policy: leave a pile of shit, declare victory, and leave, waiting for someone else to
clean up.
Now there is only one way Russia would clean up: if the EU pays full price for it. As
this is unlikely, the aborigines are going to bear the brunt of the consequences.
Saker is naive and badly educated. It is stupid to call Ukraine an oligarchy. All countries on Earth are oligarchies.
The real question is which group of oligarchs is in power. In case of Ukraine those are privatization sharks, the worst kind
of neoliberal financial scum. Often real criminals.
Otto von Bismarck created a powerful German state which exists to this day. While vassal of the USA it is still a state
now. And Merkel role in EuroMaidan definitely reminds Drang
nach Osten in neoliberal packaging. Neocolonialism in its pure form
Ukraine is just a pawn in a bigger geopolitical game of the USA and EU against Russia. That explains in the current state of
Ukrainian economics and the level of Ukrainian population sufferings. Ukrainian
nationalist paradoxically served as the fifth column for the neoliberal oligarchy. The phenomenon similar to the US
nationalists role under Trump.
At the same time despite dismally low standard of living Ukrainian population is showing great resilience in the current
hardships and infrastructure while completely worn out still works. But Ukraine is now completely Latin-Americanized, which was
the goal of the USA from the very beginning for all Soviet space. Ukraine now is a debt slave of the West which
is completely opposite to any nationalist movement goals.
According to
Wikipedia just
5% of population lives of less than $5.50 a day. That's baloney. In reality the percentage is probably two-three times times
higher (average monthly pension is typically less then $1500 grivna which is less then $60) so most of pensioners live on
less then $2 a day. 8 million of the approximately 12 million of Ukrainian pensioners were receiving the minimum pension of
1312 (around $50) while medium pension amounted to 1886 UAH (Pensions
in Ukraine - Wikipedia) And 12 million is 28% of Ukrainian population (around 42-43 million total down from 45.55 before
EuroMaydan ). It is declining around 200 persons daily. On average there are 462,052 births and 662,571 deaths in Ukraine
per year.
While pensioners are definitely starving the situation at least stabilized with grivna around 25 per dollar (something like
300% after the EuroMaydan). So Nuland advantures cost dearly for average Ukrainian.
Notable quotes:
"... These guys are a minority, a pretty small one even, but they have enough muscle and even firepower to threaten any nominal Ukrainian leader. ..."
As I have indicated in a recent article , the Ukraine is not a
democracy but an oligarchy : ever since 1991 the most prosperous Soviet republic
was mercilessly plundered by an entire class (in the Marxist sense of the word) of oligarchs
whose biggest fear has always been that the same "horror" (from their point of view) which
befell Russia with Putin, would eventually arrive at the Ukraine.
Here we need to make something clear: this is NOT, repeat, NOT about nationality or
nationalism. The Ukrainian oligarchs are just like any other oligarchs: their loyalty is to
their money and nothing else. If you want to characterize these oligarchs, you could think of
them as culturally "post-Soviet" meaning that they don't care about nationality, and even
though their prime language is Russian, they don't give a damn about Russia or Russians (or
anybody else, for that matter!). Since many of them are Jews, they have a network of
supporters/accomplices in Israel of course, but also in the West and even in Russia. In truth,
these guys are the ultimate "internationalists" in their own, toxic, kind of way.
Some fine specimens of "ochlocrats"
The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs. Their power is not a democracy either, but an ochlocracy .
These guys are a minority, a pretty small one even, but they have enough muscle and even
firepower to threaten any nominal Ukrainian leader.
Can you stop with the Ukronazi crap, what kind of Nazi Government has a Jewish PM and Jewish
President ?
Azov guys dying in Donbass and the street thugs in Kiev are just cannon fodder, they don't
run shit
The majority of Ukranians don't want to be in this conflict, I don't see the point in
demonizing all of them because of some fascist larpers
People need to move on from the past and stop all that hating others for some past deeds.
Polish or Western Ukrainian hatred for Russians, Russian hatred for Germans, Chinese &
Korean hatred for the Japanese, Indian hatred for the British or the Chinese, Black South
African hatred for Afrikaners. All these are counter productive for the people and are
emotions which can be whipped up by the elites to have commoners die like cannon fodder at
worst or to take away attention towards a past historic enemy to hide their own corruption/
incompetence at best.
People need to see things from the other side as well.
As far as the Satanic Zio elite pigs, they will use any ideology as long as it serves
them. Democracy, Communism, anti-Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, anti-Islam, Jingoistic
Nationalism, Anti-Nationalism/One Worldism, feminism, Hindutva, Buddhist fundamentalism (Sri
Lanka BBS and the secret Zionist hand), Neo-Conservatism, Leftism, Colonialism,
anti-Colonialism as long it suits them. They use them and discard them away when needed. But
this seems to be the most extreme case ever. For the first time the Zio elites are using
National Socialism as an ideology to serve them. The ideology which was probably the greatest
enemy and threat to the Zio elites, in human history. Freakin crazy!!!
More grist for Saker's suckers. The Galicians (and Ukro-Nazi Jews) are behind
everything. In Saker's simplistic mind the Galicians have infiltrated all of Ukrainian
society and run the whole show, when in fact this is just a bunch of nonsense. Well, at least
Saker is putting to use his favorite Ukrainian pejorative do I really need to repeat it
again, ad nauseum?
"The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs."
Where are death camps for the Jews? Where are racial laws that expel non-Ukrainians? Where
is the propaganda of eugenics and healthy lifestyle? Where are construction projects bringing
in jobs, and state-subsidized recreation tours?
Ukraine is a Jew-driven shithole that has nothing to do with National Socialism. They
don't even honour the sacrifice of the SS Galizien.
"but what they are genuinely fantasizing about is the territory, and only the territory.
As for the 2 million-plus virulently anti-Nazi people currently living on these lands, they
simply want them either dead or expelled)."
A lie. Currently, more than a half of those "expelled" have migrated inside Ukraine. A
stark contrast to Croatia where the Serbs were driven out of the country, and their land
given to Croats.
Again, Ukraine is suicidal and full of civic nationalism, nothing about it is
blood-based.
"They and their Polish supporters want Russia to break apart in numerous small state-lets
which they (or, in their delusional dreams, the Chinese) could dominate."
Why do you consider this as a negative for the Russian people? The current Russian state
is in its death throes as much as the US and France – the ethnic Russians are dying
out, fleeing and being replaced. Any alternative might prove out more hopeful.
"In contrast, the LDNR forces seem to be doing pretty well, and their morale appears to be
as strong as ever (which is unsurprising since their military ethos is based in 1000 years of
Russian military history)."
I have to remind you that the Donbass was colonized far more recently than Ukraine –
in the 18-19th centuries. What "ancient" traditions?
"but Novorussia also is a never healing wound in the side of Nazi-occupied Ukraine"
The Donbass has never been part of Novorussia which is to the west, from Dniepropetrovsk
to Odessa. Admittedly, Novorussia's colonists were mostly from Ukraine – it is clearly
seen on the language maps.
"The problem with this slogan is that there is simply no way the (relatively small)
Galician population can ever succeed in permanently defeating their much bigger (and,
frankly, much smarter) Jewish, Polish or Russian neighbors."
Khmelnitsky managed to do just that – 100k dead Jews. And he's on the Ukrainian
currency. Too bad modern "Nazi" Ukrainians have elected a Jew President. This is not the
Khmelnitsky uprising, this is Kiev under the Khazar Khaganate before Oleg came from the
North.
It's a of nonsense as usual. This piece is quickly refuted:
ever since 1991 the most prosperous Soviet republic
People who spread this myth are ignorant or liars. It's a common one, though.
In 1990 Ukraine's per capita GDP was $1570.
Russia's was $3485.
Belarus was $2124.
So in Soviet times, Ukraine was the poorest of the three Slavic Soviet Republics. It still
is, the position hasn't changed. It's just fallen further behind.
::::::::
Everything else is just as nonsensical, I won't even bother to detail it, most of the
commenters here are as dumb/ignorant/dishonest (take your pick) as the author pretends to
be.
I don't know where Saker sources his history. Lenin had nothing to do with the creation of
Ukraine.
I live in Western Canada, where Ukrainians come starting in the late 19th century. I'm not
referring to the primarily German speaking Mennonites that left South Central Ukraine, in the
1870s, fleeing religious persecution. By WWI, more than 200,000 were in Western Canada from
all parts of Ukraine. They considered themselves Ukrainians, not Russians, or Galicians. They
were, and to a great extent, still are Ukrainian nationalists. There continues to be friction
with Polish and German local populations, although prior to the "rebirth" of Ukraine, it had
largely subsided. Recent Russian immigrants are shunned as much as the "Poles" and "Germans".
Politically, they are generally left of center, and have been since their arrival, although
in recent decades more have become "conservative" (whatever that means these days). A long
ago former Russian Jewish co-worker who was a late 60s "escapee" from the USSR, told me that
he would never vote for one of our political parties, because there were "too many
Ukrainians" in the party. I asked a "Ukrainian" friend, who I had known since grade school,
what that meant. His explanation was that there had always been tensions between Jews and
Ukrainians, for centuries, because of what Ukrainians believed was exploitation by the Jews.
Other "Ukrainians" and "Jews" have confirmed this.
The reality is, that most people in most countries just want to live their lives in peace,
with a job good enough to provide a decent home and food for the family. That 70% of
Ukrainians want that is not surprising, it's normal. That doesn't mean they aren't
nationalists, and it doesn't mean they are Nazis. However screwed up they are in trying to do
so, Ukrainians are struggling to retain their identity and culture. IMO, they are up against
internationalist forces from all sides, and none are interested in letting that happen.
@Curmudgeon
The Nazi name-calling is over the top, and not just with regard to Ukraine or Galicia.
Historical grievances or revisions are not 'Nazism'. Too many people look at Ukraine and
over-interpret the nostalgia for Bandera or simple national self-assertion.
But I think Saker is right about where this is going. Russian side has local dominance and
that will not change. The only game in town for the last 5 years has been to see if the
Western squeeze of Russia will work faster than the Russian squeeze of Ukraine. By now it is
obvious that it won't.
Kiev has made some fatal mistakes. E.g. Minsk agreement was an incredibly generous deal,
if Poroshenko had half a brain he would had jumped on it and today Donbas would be a remote
backwater with autonomy . So? The state would be intact, taxes would be paid,
passports centrally issued, etc The eastern European dynamic is that any population always
ends up disliking its immediate rulers – how long before local leaders in Donbas would
be challenged by some younger corruption fighters.
The whole Maidan thing was also terribly mismanaged – at its core it was about
getting the best potential deal for Ukraine with EU (and Russia). In the middle of the
negotiation suddenly Maidanistas decided that symbols are more important than reality and
basically folded in front of EU. Consequently Russia walked. Thus Kiev got justa bout the
worst possible combination on non-EU and deep hostility with Russia. Smarter guys would had
handled it much better, playing both sides against each other – raising the stakes.
And let's not even get started on Crimea, while Ukies ate stale cookies, they lost
overnight their most valuable possession – they couldn't anticipate it? Being able to
anticipate is a key to intelligence and in playing any game.
So we can talk about what or who is driving modern Ukraine, oligarchs, Galicians, Jews,
Kiev thugs, Canadians – it doesn't matter, what matters is that they are incompetent.
From Yushenko to Zelensky they are amateurs driven by emotion and greed. There is no
state-forming force, there is no true Ukrainian nationalism that would play up Ukraine's
strengths and manage its weaknesses. Saker is basically right – they are in a no-win
cul-de-sac, at this point any move will make their situation worse. Their best (only?) hope
is a collapse of Russia. Now, how likely is that?
@Felix
Keverich Autism of this degree does not pop out of nowhere
You had Cossacks and Mercenaries from the Ukraine joining up with the Poles, Swedes,
Napoleon, Germans and others. Calling diaspora nationalists stupid is all fine and dandy but
the constant bickering between people in current Ukraine and in Russia stinks of divide and
conquer (which is what Ukraine vs Russia conflicts always were)
Calling them stupid and calling their ethnicity fake(which they make an actual effort to
preserve, such as it is) stinks of hypocrisy when so many Great Russians were willing to tear
their country, religion and people apart in 1917 and join up with the Bolsheviks in the rape
and pillaging
You'd probably get far more progress calling them a branch of Russian civilization, you
can cite Belarus and Siberian Ukraine as examples
It's easy to dogpile on some poor Hohol since they will always be on the defensive, but it's
much harder to understand him and admit your own faults while not backing down from your
standpoint that you are both one people
Serbs often made the same mistakes with Montenegro, and the result is the modern day
shitfest where both it and Ukraine are run by hostile US puppets
The Saker is correct that reality and pragmatism are essential 'when trying to figure out
what is going on and what might happen next.' It is a hard calculation to make in a world
increasingly chaotic and dark. The Minsk Accord is probably the only glimmer of light for
Ukraine, but then all the lights – across the world – are going out. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
However screwed up they are in trying to do so, Ukrainians are struggling to retain
their identity and culture. IMO, they are up against internationalist forces from all
sides, and none are interested in letting that happen.
What you posted is called a generic "to be against everything bad, for everything good".
Living in a world of unicorns and having rainbows as result of bowel movement is, of course,
a worthy aspiration but reality with Ukraine is a teeny-weeny bit more complicated than mere
attempts to "retain their identity and culture". I'll give you a hint, vast swaths of
Ukrainian population (including in the East Ukraine) believe, as an example, that Ukrainian
civilization precedes a Sumerian one. Many, very many, also still believe that valiant
Ukrainian Armed Forces still fight, for the 5th year in a row, mighty Russian Army in the
East. We are talking here about down right mental breakdown on a national level, granted, as
I always say, modern Ukraine did happen, that is coalesced, as a political nation.
In the thirteenth century, both the Ukrainians and the Russians faced more dire threats
than each other.
In the 13th century there were no Ukrainians or Ukraine. There was Russia though, Rus'.
Imagine a US state becoming independent today, from the rest of the US.. like Ohio.. and
people are going to say "the first man on the moon was an Ohioan (Armstrong), not an
American. Sorry, doesn't work like that..
You have to admit that's an impressive combination.
Yes, but it wasn't the Saker who invented it; it does seem to reflect what's going on
there. My only criticism is that he has given more prominence to the Nazis than the Jews,
unless we consider "oligarchs" as a synonym for Jews.
Like you have said in the past he is taking the Russian side. I think it's a fairly good
analysis of the situation if you go beyond his propagandistic terminology and what he leaves
unsaid. Russia really doesn't want to engage directly in the conflict but its best policy
would be to bide its time and to encourage more pro-Russian separatism in Odessa and all
other regions along the coast so as to eventually cut off Ukraine from access to the sea
altogether. That would serve Russian interests best and strengthen its position against NATO,
the EU, and the rump Ukraine, for whatever is to follow. It's a shame for any real Ukranian
nationalists but then they should have been smarter than to join all those colour revolutions
on Maidan organised by the CIA, Soros, Jewish oligarchs, etc.
That's a frozen conflict for now. Let's have another article on UR about the latest from
the US sponsored colour revolution in Hong Kong and what are the best measures that PR China
can take to quell the riots. And it's about time they took back Formosa, but it won't be as
easy as the Russian takeover of Crimea, unless they can send a million Red Army guards there
disguised as tourists to stage a silent putsch.
@Bardon
Kaldian Neonazis is a good term for the people used in the Ukrainian ZUS coup. That is
the people that was used to gain control of Ukraine for ZUS.
This coup in Ukraine, woke me up.
V. Nuland's war cry to bless the coup was "F–k The EU"
She used Neonazis to take over Ukraine.
Wait. She is Jewish. I guess the 6 million story must be bogus. She admitted it, since if
the 6 million story was real. She would have a great fear of a tidal wave of anti-S'ism
overcoming her and her people. She had no fear. Thus, the 6 million story was proved to be
false by V. Nuland. Thanks V. Nuland for freeing the world of that nightmarish propaganda
that has saddled humanity for seventy odd years.
Secondly, she told the world the reality of J. Supremacism by stating " F..k the EU". The
world thought that ZUS loved the EU as its sister in world domination. I guess not. Would V.
Nuland ever say "F..k Israel"? I think not.
Thanks V. Nuland. A new Queen Esther or Queen Victoria.
Yep, agree with Saker – I lived there before , during and now after the Maidan and he's
spot on with most of everything – he has been, since the beginning. Zelinsky has a
dozen or more bosses and he has Zero experience in what he's doing. . Zionist Bankers and
their arms dealers, Nato, Banderas gang,Washington, US Navy, Monsanto/Bayer, Royal Dutch
{shell oil }, Dupont, Lilly Pharma, Cargill, and the list could go on. He'll be lucky if he
isn't in Diapers by the time his term is up, otherwise he will be rich. I see that
Poroshanster is being called out for taking 8 billion bucks out of Ukie-Ville. I wonder how
much Trump and his family will end up stealing?. Thanks Unz Review.
Thus Kiev got justa bout the worst possible combination on non-EU and deep hostility
with Russia. Smarter guys would had handled it much better, playing both sides against each
other – raising the stakes.
As usual, you nailed it Beckow.
Also, Saker often misunderstands things but he is right that Ukraine is in a one way street
mainly because of the out-of-this-World miscalculation that the rotten West will somehow help
them instead of use them to create a festering sore on Russian border for just a few billion
dollars in loans. It is the rest of Ukraine, excluding Donbas, that will have to pay off
these war loans already stolen by the oligarchs.
@Commentator
Mike I recall that at the time of the Zionist coup (We do remember Ms Noodleman's : "fuck
the EU" don't we?) Ukrainian Nazi's were a leading force in kicking things off.
@Mr.
Hack "In Saker's simplistic mind the Galicians have infiltrated all of Ukrainian society
and run the whole show, "
This was not what I read.
The Saker said that oligarchs and Nazi militia groups have enough power to impose their will
and their agenda on the rest of the population.
When I see words like "Nazis" in relation to Ukrainians, I know that article is sh!t
& not worth reading.
This is because you don't know what Raguli(stan) is and you cannot possibly know, because
there are no "books" written yet which would encapsulate this whole phenomenon. Of course,
Ukies have no relation to Fichte and Volkskrieg. Other than that you will find an attentive
audience among local ignoramuses.
We all know the Hypocrisy of that War. Clinton had to distract the masses from MonicaGate
and Hillary had to prove to the MIC that she could be beneficial to them.
Result : Those Kosovo Albanians had a state handed to them, and instead of building
it(with uncle Sam's and EU help) as prosperous country, they used their weapons and
"expertise" in becoming the low level gangsters of Europe. Every Europol analysis points to
the direction of Kosovo Albanians as the criminal thugs in prostitution and drug trade and
protection rackets. The largest percentage of a single ethnic group in European jails is that
of Albanians.
The most unjust and illegal of wars in the late 20c.
There was only one reason to bomb white Christian brothers in Serbia thereby aiding the
Muslim of Kosovo and Albania, and that was Russia, which by that stage had got its act
together and dealt with the traitorous oligarchs who had sold their country out to the
west.
Hillary and her cronies no doubt lost a lot of money when the Russians shut their rat
lines down.
I hope I live long enough to see those fuckers swing, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campnell
and Peter Mandelson as well.
Again, your Muslims are to blame for everything. Muslims are all different. And it is
necessary to separate the faithful Muslims from the bandits who are only covered by Muslim
slogans.
NATO and your godless government are to blame!
An Afghan Freedom Fighter in Donbass - ENG SUBTITLE
It happened at the time of the Lewinsky affair and the possible impeachment of Clinton.
They needed a distraction.
Milosevic btw. agreed to all conditions imposed on the FR of Yugoslavia except for one
condition that nobody would accept: the full and unhindered access to the territory of FRY by
NATO troops. That effectively meant an occupation. Nobody would agree to that. NATO and
Albright deliberately came up with that condition for they knew it was unacceptable. Even
Kissinger said that condition was over the top. NATO and Albright wanted that war. Serbia
btw. saved Albright twice when she was still a little Slovakian Jewish girl whose family
found refuge twice in Serbia. Once they escaped the Nazis that way and the second time the
communists.
NATO thought they would need 48 hours but they needed 78 days and Milosevic only gave in
after NATO switched from hitting military targets to civilian targets: Hospitals, commuter
trains, civilian industry, an open market, random houses in random villages. After Milosevic
pulled out his troops out of Kosovo, the KLA started killing Serbs and moderate Albanians,
not to mention engage in organ trafficking (...). As the article said, well over 200k Serbs,
moderate Albanians, Roma and other minorities were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.
The US also used cluster bombs and DU weapons. Of the 4000 Italian KFOR troops that went
into Kosovo after the bombing, 700 are dead from cancer and leukemia with several hundreds
more seriously ill. The American KFOR troops wore hazmat suits. The Italians did not have
them and were not warned. Today, many people in southern Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo itself
are sick and dying.
yes just like USA tried to help Vietnam against communists... by killing 2 million
Vietnamese. and tried to help Korea by killing 20 % of the population. and by helping Iraq
get rid of "bad" Saddam Hussein by killing 2 million Iraqies.
Not disagreeing with you but lets remember that communists were killing a lot of people in
other areas not long before those wars in SE Asia. May have been a wash in the end.
Bring back the draft. On the whole Americans have no idea what the carnage of combat
produces. Combat vets do. And the ones that aren't natural psychopaths never want to
experience it again. This volunteer army we have is over loaded with a them. A military draft
will actually bring some sort civilian control.
Such ********. Do the millions we kill have any human rights? It's been going on for 4000
years. Ruthless pursuit of empire and fabricating phony justifications.
Hillary seems to enjoy killing people. If it wasn't Gaddaffi, it was all the people on her
body bag count, and now it's known she encouraged killing people in Serbia. Someone needs to
take that old cow out into the center of the town and burn her at the stake.
Partially true, otherwise as usually excellent Dr. Paul, ... The Pandora's box situation
was opened years before Clinton's bombing of Serbia, which was part of a larger scheme
started nearly a decade before.
That was when the US armed the religious extremists in Bosnia, in order to bring war,
"civil war" and chaos, and disintegration, the way they more recently tried to do with Syria,
or "succeeded" in doing in Libya, bringing chaos and open-air slave markets in a country that
was one of the most developed on the African continent under Gaddafi (a truth that was so
easily erased by propaganda).
And the whole neocon scheme started two decades before, with the Zbigniew Brzezinski
doctrine, when the US started arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan, provoking the trap for the
Soviet invasion of 1979, which was the real opening of US neocon's Pandora's box we are
regrettably so familiar with by now. We've all fallen in that old
neocon/military-industrial-congressional-complex trap by now. And there seems to be no end in
sight to those eternal wars "for civilization" (the old colonial trope dressed under new
fatigues). Unless serious societal and political changes take place in the US to put an end
to the US "imperial" death drive.
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war,
the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he
began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow
of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened
within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo,
betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have
been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union
that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two
inches to the east.
Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they
become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily,
we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia
somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous,
warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military
alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership
is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.
AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement
with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about
Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's
net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary
titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder
appears to have first
started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in
his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own
estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.
Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains
to the Clinton campaign. Putin
retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had
been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount
of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.
The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe
Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.
Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems
to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be
dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other
interests, values, and goals.
Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice
of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment.
From the Russia Insider link:
Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from
Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these
funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000,
not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.
There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate
their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.
In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media
(again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies
never happens again.
It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse
now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.
Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct
of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly
desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent
the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.
we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe
Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need
to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather
than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like
Greenwald's definition of the term :
"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek
to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.
aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites
attempting to diss apostates and heretics.
The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level.
That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points
of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we
do.
Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up
arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly
threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such
an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?
You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?
You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's
by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has,
and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?
" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and
his oligarchs?"
The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that
deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance
was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.
Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's
debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting
the death of Russia.
So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.
I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute
power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation,
the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money.
Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two
hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.
I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only
of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or
getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but
who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.
There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The
world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals
which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but
that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.
Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits
and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting
soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the
Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from
the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.
The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's
what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin
is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore
he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.
The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal
and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the
rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.
But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.
Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes
Putin a dictator.
"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe
that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about
a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"
Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support
this basic assumption.
The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by
20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of
the rest of NATO or the US.
Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need
to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging
of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself,
he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?
"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't
as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."
What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?
Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship
of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian
Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient
of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National
Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant
for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian
(UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.
Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on
television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical
questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia
hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.
It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that
they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against
American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was
for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so
fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing
dragon's teeth – it never ends well.
The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace"
would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat"
except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.
Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact.
The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable
as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to
maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was
significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially
more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made
arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.
The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of
the native population. Your comparison is invalid.
"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato
bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director
of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor
of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion
of Nato was a fault and against international law!
Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example,
the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging
of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people,
spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer
Brennan;
o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican
patriots";
o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.
"... Meanwhile, just about everybody in the airline industry, the Department of Transportation, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Justice Department (with its criminal probe), the transport unions, the consumer groups such as Flyers Rights, and the flying public are anxious to see top Boeing officials in the witness chair under oath answering important questions. ..."
"... It is not as if Boeing lobbyists are absent. The giant company has been everywhere in Washington, D.C. getting its way for years in Congress, with NASA, the Department of Defense, and of course, the hapless, understaffed FAA. Boeing gives campaign donations to about some 330 members of Congress. ..."
"... The Boeing case involves a more imminent danger. The company and its "captured" FAA want to unground the MAX as fast as possible and to get more new MAXs, under order, to the airlines. ..."
"... This haste is all the more reason why Congress has to pick up the pace, regardless of "MAX Mitch" McConnell, the Kentucky dictator of the Senate who is a ward of the Boeing complex and its campaign cash. If the 737 MAX is ever allowed to fly again, with its shaky software fixes, glitches, and stitches, the pressure will build on members of Congress to go soft on the company. They will be told not to alarm millions of passengers and unsettle the airline industry with persistent doubts about the plane's prone-to-stall and other serious safety hazards from overautomation and sloppy construction, already documented in The New York Times, the Seattle Times, and other solid media reporting. ..."
"... Moreover, retired airline Captain Chesley Sullenberger, in his brilliant testimony before DeFazio on June 19th, called for full simulator training for pilots before they fly the MAX on scheduled routes (read Captain Sullenberger's full statement here ). ..."
"... How long before the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Transportation or the Congress and the betrayed airlines themselves call for the resignation of both officers and the Board and, end the career conflict of interest these failed incumbents have with the future well-being of the Boeing Corporation itself? ..."
Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes, one in Indonesia last October and one in Ethiopia this past
March, took a combined 346 lives. Steady scrutiny by the media reported internal company leaks
and gave voice to sidelined ex-Boeing engineers and aerospace safety specialists. These experts
have revealed that Boeing's executives are responsible because they chose to use an unstable
structural design and faulty software. These decisions left the flying public, the pilots, the
airlines, and the FAA in the dark, to varying degrees.
Yet Congressional Committees, which announced investigations months ago, still have not
called on Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO of Boeing, or any member of Boeing's Board of Directors to
testify.
Given the worldwide emergency grounding of all 400 or so MAX aircraft and the peril to crews
and airline passengers, why are the Senate and House Committees holding back? House Committee
Chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) wants to carefully prepare for such action after the staff
goes through the much delayed transmission of documents from Boeing. Meanwhile, Senate
Committee Chair Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) deferred to Boeing's request to put off their
testimony before Congress until the Indonesian government puts out its report on the Lion Air
disaster, presumably sometime in October.
Meanwhile, just about everybody in the airline industry, the Department of Transportation,
the National Transportation Safety Board, the Justice Department (with its criminal probe), the
transport unions, the consumer groups such as Flyers Rights, and the flying public are anxious
to see top Boeing officials in the witness chair under oath answering important questions.
It is not as if Boeing lobbyists are absent. The giant company has been everywhere in
Washington, D.C. getting its way for years in Congress, with NASA, the Department of Defense,
and of course, the hapless, understaffed FAA. Boeing gives campaign donations to about some 330
members of Congress.
Corporate CEOs hate to testify before Congress under oath when they are in hot water. CEOs
from the tobacco, drug, auto, banking, insurance, and Silicon Valley industries have all
dragged their feet to avoid testifying. Eventually they all had to show up in public on Capitol
Hill.
The Boeing case involves a more imminent danger. The company and its "captured" FAA want to unground the MAX as fast as possible and to get more new MAXs, under order, to the
airlines.
This haste is all the more reason why Congress has to pick up the pace, regardless of "MAX
Mitch" McConnell, the Kentucky dictator of the Senate who is a ward of the Boeing complex and
its campaign cash. If the 737 MAX is ever allowed to fly again, with its shaky software fixes,
glitches, and stitches, the pressure will build on members of Congress to go soft on the
company. They will be told not to alarm millions of passengers and unsettle the airline
industry with persistent doubts about the plane's prone-to-stall and other serious safety
hazards from overautomation and sloppy construction, already documented in The New York Times,
the Seattle Times, and other solid media reporting.
With investigations underway at civil aviation agencies all over the world, and a grand jury
operating in the U.S. looking into criminal negligence, this is no time for Congress to take
its time in laying open the fullest truths and facts in public. Bear in mind, apart from the
civil tort law suits, all other investigations are not being conducted in public.
There is a growing consensus by impartial specialists that after many iterations of the
Boeing 737 series, beginning with the 737-100 in 1967, the much larger, more elaborate Boeing
737 MAX must be seen as a new aircraft requiring full certification. Certainly that is the view
of some members of Chairman DeFazio's committee and Chairman David Price's House Subcommittee
on Appropriations which holds the keys to funding a much larger FAA budget to do its job as a
regulator, not as a deregulator that abdicates to Boeing.
Moreover, retired airline Captain Chesley Sullenberger, in his brilliant testimony before
DeFazio on June 19th, called for full simulator training for pilots before they fly the MAX on
scheduled routes (read Captain
Sullenberger's full statement here ).
In a precise letter to the Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao and the acting and
incoming heads of the FAA (Daniel Elwell and Stephen Dickson respectively), dozens of families
and friends of the victims from many countries asked for full recertification and mandatory
simulator training before any decision is made about the 737 MAX. Currently 737 MAX pilots are
only given an hour of iPad training -- a clearly insufficient measure and an affront to safety
( see more
here ). The letter, which was sent on August 7, 2019, also called for the resignation of
Ali Bahrami, the abdicator in charge of safety at the FAA.
Many decisions are coming up for the FAA and Boeing. The FAA would be very foolish to
unground the 737 MAX just for U.S. airspace without the counterparts in North America, Europe,
Asia, South America, and Africa concurring.
As for Boeing, the company cannot afford another one or two crashes attributed to continued
indifference to longstanding aerodynamic standards of stability. The issue for Boeing's
celebrity, minimally experienced Board of Directors is how long it will tolerate Boeing's
management that, over the judgement of its best engineers, has brought the company to its
present predicament.
How long before the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Transportation
or the Congress and the betrayed airlines themselves call for the resignation of both officers
and the Board and, end the career conflict of interest these failed incumbents have with the
future well-being of the Boeing Corporation itself?
By all measures Clinton is a war criminal... Hilary is a female sociopath or worse.
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end
of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" ..."
"... The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom
fighters" in 1999. ..."
"... Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA
is fighting for human rights and American values." ..."
"... Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo.
After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war
had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks. ..."
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance.
Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British
professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what
it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an
attempt to terrorise the country into surrender."
Clinton's unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for "humanitarian"
warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma's bombing of Libya, and Donald
Trump's bombing of Syria.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard.
A commentator in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a
typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started
the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the
corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of
1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What
do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published
in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.
She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president
began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,
It's scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend "our
way of life." The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose
such policing. War is more social engineering, "fixitry" via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile . As a tough therapeutic
cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.
I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans
to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:
April 7, 1999: Much of the media and most of the American public are evaluating Clinton's Serbian policy based on
the pictures of the bomb damage -- rather than by asking whether there is any coherent purpose or justification for bombing.
The ultimate triumph of photo opportunities . What a travesty and national disgrace for this country.
April 17: My bottom line on the Kosovo conflict: I hate holy wars. And this is a holy war for American good deeds
-- or for America's saintly self-image? Sen. John McCain said the war is necessary to "uphold American values." Make me barf!
Just another Hitler-of-the-month attack.
May 13: This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems
within this nation.
The KLA
The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom
fighters" in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army."
The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray
himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen
eager to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand
for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values."
In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo
in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it
alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and
Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.
In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children "love the United States
because we gave them their freedom back." Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same
ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its
commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,
As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a
terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate
Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear
of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.
American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian
churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton
promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize
territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that "the [NATO]
bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed.
Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now."
U.S. complicity in atrocities
Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians.
However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively
made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group
of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised
to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new
refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that
he was "very, very proud" of what the United States had done in Kosovo.
I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled "Moralizing with Cluster Bombs" in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion
and Abuse of Government Power in the ClintonGore Years (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two
reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the
Denver Rocky Mountain News, "Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention
that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress."
As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002
USA Today article ("Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield") bashing the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq,
I pointed out, "A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill . Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed
Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag,
ethnic cleansing continued -- with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the
Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb
and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo
were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities
that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor
of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful
killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements
of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past
investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country
where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in
the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and
Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative
report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that
war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over
evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
This article was originally published in the July 2019 edition ofFuture of Freedom .
James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written
for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Playboy, American Spectator,
Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty
(2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal
(2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995);
Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of
the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom
Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the
Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book's Lysander
Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog . Send
him email .
In July 30, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported
that the Afghan government and international military forces, primarily
the United States , caused most of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan during the first six
months of 2019. That's more killings than those perpetrated in the same time period by the
Taliban and ISIS combined.
Aerial operations were responsible for 519 civilian casualties (356 deaths and 156
injuries), including 150 children (89 deaths and 61 injuries). That constitutes a 39 percent
increase in overall civilian casualties from aerial attacks. Eighty-three percent of civilian
casualties from aerial operations were carried out by the international forces.
The targeting of civilians amounts to war crimes under the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court (ICC).
... ... ...
Team Trump's deadly actions are a continuation of the Bush and Obama
administrations' commission of the most heinous crimes in Afghanistan. On April 12, the ICC's
Pre-Trial Chamber found a "reasonable basis" to
believe that the parties to the Afghan conflict, including the U.S. military and the CIA,
committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, most of them occurring between 2005 and 2015.
They include "the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity,
and rape and other forms of sexual violence pursuant to a policy approved by the U.S.
authorities."
The chamber, however, refused to open a formal investigation into those crimes, as
recommended by ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. In concluding that "an investigation
into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice," the
chamber questioned the feasibility of such a probe. An investigation would be "very wide in
scope and encompasses a high number of alleged incidents having occurred over a long time
period," the chamber wrote. It noted the extreme difficulty in gauging "the prospects of
securing meaningful cooperation from relevant authorities for the future" and found "the
current circumstances of the situation in Afghanistan are such as to make the prospects for a
successful investigation and prosecution extremely limited."
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of
the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of
Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent
book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
"... The field's distance from rebel-held territory in Yemen demonstrates the range of the Houthis' drones. U.N. investigators say the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500 kilometers (930 miles). That puts Saudi oil fields, an under-construction Emirati nuclear power plant and Dubai's busy international airport within their range. ..."
"... The outcome was a forgone conclusion. The smash, destroy, and destabilize campaign in the region could have only come from the most powerful lobby in the US. We all know who that is. ..."
Today Saudi Arabia finally lost the war on Yemen. It has no defenses against new weapons
the Houthis in Yemen acquired. These weapons threaten the Saudis economic lifelines.
This today
was the decisive attack:
Drones launched by Yemen's Houthi rebels attacked a massive oil and gas field deep inside
Saudi Arabia's sprawling desert on Saturday, causing what the kingdom described as a
"limited fire" in the second such recent attack on its crucial energy industry. ... The Saudi acknowledgement of the attack came hours after Yahia Sarie, a military spokesman
for the Houthis, issued a video statement claiming the rebels launched 10 bomb-laden drones
targeting the field in their "biggest-ever" operation. He threatened more attacks would be
coming.
New drones and missiles
displayed in July 2019 by Yemen's Houthi-allied armed forces bigger
Today's attack is a check mate move against the Saudis. Shaybah is some 1,200 kilometers
(750 miles) from Houthi-controlled territory. There are many more important economic targets
within that range:
The field's distance from rebel-held territory in Yemen demonstrates the range of the
Houthis' drones. U.N. investigators say the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent
months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500
kilometers (930 miles). That puts Saudi oil fields, an under-construction Emirati nuclear
power plant and Dubai's busy international airport within their range.
Unlike sophisticated drones that use satellites to allow pilots to remotely fly them,
analysts believe Houthi drones are likely programmed to strike a specific latitude and
longitude and cannot be controlled once out of radio range. The Houthis have used drones,
which can be difficult to track by radar, to attack Saudi Patriot missile batteries, as
well as enemy troops.
The attack conclusively demonstrates that the most important assets of the Saudis are now
under threat. This economic threat comes on top of a seven percent budget deficit
the IMF predicts for Saudi Arabia. Further Saudi bombing against the Houthi will now have
very significant additional cost that might even endanger the viability of the Saudi state.
The Houthi have clown prince Mohammad bin Salman by the balls and can squeeze those at will. There is a lesson to learn from that. But it is doubtful that the borg in Washington DC
has the ability to understand it.
The outcome was a forgone conclusion. The smash, destroy, and destabilize campaign in the
region could have only come from the most powerful lobby in the US. We all know who that
is.
I'm afraid the only lesson the Borg in Washington will learn is to continue squandering US
resources and manpower on pursuing and inflicting chaos and violence in the Middle East.
Clown prince Mohammed bin Salman will not learn anything either other than to bankrupt his
own nation in pursuing this war.
Israel has driven itself into its own existential hell by persecuting Palestinians over
70+ years and doing a good job of annihilating itself while denying its own destruction. If
Israel can do it, the Christian crusaders dominating the govts of the Five Eyes nations
supporting Israel will follow suit in propping up an unsustainable fantasy. Samson option
indeed.
I am sure that the Suads will be looking to their zionist allies to supply them with the Iron
Dome system that the US military just wasted millions of tax payer dollars and purchased
several days ago. The irony of that system is that is was overwhelmed several times when the
Palestinian freedom fighters launched a wave of home made rockets at Occupied Palestine. I
hope the Sauds learn a lesson..doubt it though.
let me throw something out there. Israel has entrenched itself in the US political and media
systems. There is no logical path to eliminate or reduce that influence, and thus perhaps the
plan that has been hatched is to strengthen Iran to the point that it can confront Israel.
I anticipated just this sort of event 2+ months ago to go along with the tanker sabotaging to
expand on b's thesis about Iran having the upper hand in the current hybrid Gulf War. The
timing of this new ability dovetails nicely with the recent Russian collective security
proposal, with the Saudis being the footdraggers in agreeing about its viability due to its
pragmatic logic. So, as I wrote 2 days ago, we now have an excellent possibility of seeing an
end to this and future Persian Gulf Crises along with an idea that can potentially become the
template for an entire Southwest Asian security treaty, whose only holdout would be Occupied
Palestine. The Outlaw US Empire is effectively shutout of the entire process. And as I also
wrote, it's now time for the Saudis to determine where their future lies--with Eurasia or
with a dying Empire.
So the U.S. bought the Iron Dome stuff from Israel? I guess that means we paid for it
twice, eh? Glad to know my tax dollars are hard at work "keeping us safe."
Wonder what they might be planning for with that one?
The Yemenese military had lots of technological capabilities remaining from the Cold War
along with factories, technicians and raw materials. For example, Yemen's aerospace forces
allied with the Houthi and are the ones producing and shooting the missiles and drones. One
doesn't need to import a complete drone; technical blueprints on a floppy, CD-ROM, DVD,
thumb-drive, are all that's required. The humanitarian crisis due to food and medicine
shortages played on the minds of people such that an image of a poor, backward,
non-industrial capable society was generated that wasn't 100% correct.
And of course, this makes the threat by Iran to hit back against military and industrial
installations on the other side of the Persian Gulf that much stronger.
It would be rich indeed if Iran were to be the entity that ultimately manages to loosen
the stranglehold that the Zionists have on the USA Congress, media, president, donors to
political parties, etc.
I can imagine the shale oil producers smiling right now...100 a barrel oil will be just
what they need! Cost-push inflation leading to a return of bell bottoms and leisure suits. No
wonder all these 70's band retreads are touring again :)
So, poor Yemen wasted via siege warfare waged by NATO since 2015 though its Saudi, UAE and
terrorist proxies that came very close to success, finds the initiative to counterattack with
what little it has at its disposal--All accusations of Iranian help have never been
proven --and thanks to the Outlaw US Empire's threats against Iran force UAE to
withdrawal and seek peace with Iran with Saudi soon to follow. And the situation is all
Iran's fault?! Note the date above--it precedes Trump's election, his illegal withdrawal from
the JCPOA and institution of the illegal sanctions regime against Iran.
Europe is on board with Russia's collective security proposal. Europe had representatives
at the meet between Khamenei and the Houthi negotiator. Europe--even the UK--still working to
salvage the JCPOA via the non-dollar trade conduit. And you conclude that the Outlaw US
Empire "might actually get European support to attack Iran."
First Afghanistan, then Yemen. Maybe the western media's imaging of these people as towel
headed, sandal wearing primatives is just a tad misguided......
There's a lot wrong here -- although Warren is a terrific story teller -- but it's really
too bad that Obama didn't say "accounting control fraud," instead of "predatory lending."
Although it's not clear that Warren would have understood him if he had.
You're damn right there's problems with Warren's Obama story: he does five minutes of
research about her career and focus before she arrives, makes sure to be backlit upon her
entrance, rings what comes across as a transparently canned bell and she swoons!
I get that that most people were taken in by that talented, fraudulent shapeshifter, but
this is painful to watch.
"The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent" [Matt
Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "Anyone who's worked in the business (or read Manufacturing Consent)
knows nobody calls editors to red-pencil text.
The pressure comes at the point of hire. If you're the type who thinks Jeff Bezos should
be thrown out of an airplane, or that it's a bad look for a DC newspaper to be owned by a
major intelligence contractor, you won't rise.
Meanwhile, the Post has become terrific at promoting Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots.
Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on
the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets
and/or simplistic partisan storylines.
Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in
newsrooms. Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn't create it. He
sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side.
The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for
one-percenters.
The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder
for politicians. Sanders wasn't the first, and won't be the last."
• Yep. I'm so glad
Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi on-board. Until advertisers black-list "the One Percent," I
suppose.
In this case the authorities voluntarily admitted to the ruse , but if they had chosen to
, and with the cooperation of a handful of family members and the like , Babchenko could have
remained "dead" , while living a long and happy life in some faraway place.
The most dangerous bit of theater involving sanctions initiated by the Trump administration
continues to focus on Iran. Last week, the White House elevated its extreme pressure on the
Iranians by engaging in a completely irrational sanctioning of Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif. The sanctions will have no effect whatsoever and they completely
contradict Donald Trump's repeated assertion that he is seeking diplomacy to resolving the
conflict with Iran. One doesn't accomplish that by sanctioning the opposition's Foreign
Minister. Also, the Iranians have received the message loud and clear that the threats coming
from Washington have nothing to do with nuclear programs. The White House began its sanctions
regime over a year ago when it withdrew from the JCPOA and they have been steadily increasing
since that time even though Iran has continued to be fully compliant with the agreement.
Recently, the US took the unprecedented step of sanctioning the entire Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps, which is part of the nation's military.
American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made clear that the sanctions on Iran are
intended to cause real pain, which, in fact, they have succeeded in doing. Pompeo and his
accomplice in crime National Security Advisor John Bolton believe that enough pressure will
motivate the starving people to rise up in the streets and overthrow the government, an
unlikely prospect as the American hostility has in fact increased popular support for the
regime.
To be sure, ordinary people in Iran have found that they cannot obtain medicine and some
types of food are in short supply but they are not about to rebel. The sanctioning in May of
Iranian oil exports has only been partially effective but it has made the economy shrink, with
workers losing jobs. The sanctions have also led to tit-for-tat seizures of oil and gas
tankers, starting with the British interception of a ship carrying Iranian oil to Syria in
early July.
Another bizarre escalation in sanctions that has taken place lately relates to the Skripal
case in Britain. On August 2 nd , Donald Trump
signed an executive order imposing a package of new sanctions against Moscow over the
alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March
2018. The order "prohibit[s] any United States bank from making any loan or providing any
credit except for loans or credits for the purpose of purchasing food or other agricultural
commodities or products." The ban also includes "the extension of any loan or financial or
technical assistance by international financial institutions," meaning that international
lenders will also be punished if they fail to follow Washington's lead.
The sanctions were imposed under the authority provided by the US
Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act adopted in 1991, which
imposes penalties for use of chemical weapons. Novichok, which was reportedly used on the
Skripals, is a chemical weapon developed in the labs of the Soviet Union, though a number of
states are believed to currently have supplies of the agent in their arsenals. Russia can
appeal the sanctions with 90 days by providing "reliable assurance" that it will not again use
chemical weapons.
Russia has strenuously denied any role in the attack on the Skripals and the evidence that
has so far been produced to substantiate the Kremlin's involvement has been less than
convincing. An initial package of US-imposed sanctions against Russia that includes the export
of sensitive technologies and some financial services was implemented in August 2018.
Venezuela is also under the sanctions gun and is a perfect example how sanctions can
escalate into something more punitive, leading incrementally to an actual state of war. Last
week Washington expanded its sanctions regime, which is already causing starvation in parts of
Venezuela, to include what amounts to a complete
economic embargo directed against the Maduro regime that is being enforced by a naval
blockade.
The Venezuelan government
announced last Wednesday that the United States Navy had seized a cargo ship bound for
Venezuela while it was transiting the Panama Canal. According to a government spokesman, the
ship's
cargo was soy cakes intended for the production of food. As one of Washington's raisons
d'etre for imposing sanctions on Caracas was that government incompetence was starving the
Venezuelan people, the move to aggravate that starvation would appear to be somewhat capricious
and revealing of the fact that the White House could care less about what happens to the
Venezuelan civilians who are caught up in the conflict.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez
condemned the move as "serious aggression," and accused the Trump Administration of trying
to impede Venezuela's basic right to import food to feed its people.
One of the most pernicious aspects of the sanctions regimes that the United States is
imposing is that they are global. When Washington puts someone on its sanctions list, other
countries that do not comply with the demands being made are also subject to punishment,
referred to as secondary sanctions. The sanctions on Iran's oil exports, for example, are being
globally enforced with some few exceptions, and any country that buys Iranian oil will be
punished by being denied access to the US financial and banking system. That is a serious
penalty as most international trade and business transactions go through the dollar denominated
SWIFT banking network.
Finally, nothing illustrates the absurdity of the sanctions mania as a recent report that
President Trump had
sent his official hostage negotiator Robert O'Brien to Stockholm to obtain freedom for an
American rap musician ASAP Rocky who was in jail after having gotten into a fight with some
local boys. The Trumpster did not actually know the lad, but he was vouched for by the likes of
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, both of whom have had nice things to say about the president.
The negotiator was instructed to tell Sweden that if they did not release Rocky there would be
"negative consequences." Who can doubt that the consequences would undoubtedly have included
sanctions?
It has reached the point where the only country that likes the United States is Israel,
which is locked into a similar cycle of incessant aggression. To be sure Donald Trump's
rhetoric is part of the problem, but the indiscriminate, illegal and immoral use of sanctions,
which punish whole nations for the presumed sins of those nations' leaders, is a major
contributing factor. And the real irony is that even though sanctions cause pain, they are
ineffective. Cuba has been under sanctions, technically and embargo, since 1960 and its ruling
regime has not collapsed, and there is no chance that Venezuela, Iran or Russia's government
will go away at any time soon either. In fact, real change would be more likely if Washington
were to sit down at a negotiating table with countries that it considers enemies and work to
find solutions to common concerns. But that is not likely to happen with the current White
House line-up, and equally distant with a Democratic Party obsessed with the "Russian threat"
and other fables employed to explain its own failings.
Mueller Dragnet Snags Ex-Clintonista, Obama Lawyer
Greg Craig took money from a pro-Russian regime, just like jailed ex-Trump aide Paul Manafort. Welcome to the
swamp.
By
Barbara Boland
August 15, 2019
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) greets White House counsel Gregory Craig (L) during an event on January 21,
2009.(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has snagged its first high-profile
Democrat: Gregory Craig, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton during his impeachment and Barack Obama's
first White House counsel.
In a trial expected to last two weeks, a jury will hear how the former partner of the
prestigious Washington firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP allegedly made false statements to the U.S.
government and concealed the extent of his work for the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. Due to a delay over jury
selection, opening arguments are
expected
to begin Friday.
The case against Craig is the latest in a series of prosecutions arising from the Department of Justice's revamped
enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires people to make fairly extensive disclosures if
they engage in political or quasi-political activities on behalf of foreign governments or officials. Almost all
high-profile cases against unregistered foreign agents in the last two years have stemmed from Mueller's investigation.
Previously, the law had been lightly enforced.
Mueller's probe led to FARA charges against Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates. The charges against Manafort
stem from work he did on behalf of President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russia party. Mueller's team convicted
Manafort, Gates, and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Manafort received a seven and a half year
sentence for conspiracy and financial crimes, some of it related to his work for Yanukovych.
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With Craig, "the Justice Department is going after some high-profile scalps,"
says
Matthew T. Sanderson, a
defense lawyer who specializes in foreign lobbying cases for the law firm Caplin and Drysdale.
Prosecutors say Craig was engaged by the Ukrainian regime to conduct an independent inquiry into the fairness of
former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's 2011 conviction, with the hopes of quelling international concerns that it was
politically motivated by then-president and rival Yanukovych.
Manafort was also working with the regime to improve Yanukovych's image. Craig's law firm received $4.6 million for
his work.
After Craig briefed American journalists on the report, Manafort effusively praised him in an email.
"Well done," wrote Manafort to Craig. Officials in Kiev "are especially happy with the way the media is playing it.
You are 'THE MAN.'"
Journalists who published stories citing Craig's work would not have known that he had been paid to write the report
by a Ukrainian operative, as prosecutors now claim. Craig insists that he only discussed the document after it had
become public to "correct misinformation," according to court filings.
"I never discussed the findings of our report with any U.S. officials and certainly did not lobby any U.S. officials
on behalf of Ukraine," Craig said in a
statement
proclaiming his innocence. "I did not help Ukraine promote its spin when it released our report."
If journalists had known that the report had been paid for by Tymoshenko's rivals, it would have affected media
coverage, points out Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for
International Policy.
According to the indictment, although the report concluded that the evidence presented at Tymoshenko's trial
supported her conviction, in a memo for his own files, Craig wrote that the evidence against her was "virtually non
existent."
Craig backdated a letter and invoice to hide who had really paid for the report, which aided the Ukrainian
government's lies about its cost, prosecutors wrote in a 22-page indictment filed in April.
"I don't want to register as a foreign agent under FARA. I think we don't have to with this assignment, yes?" Craig
wrote
to another partner in the firm on February 13, 2012, reports
Bloomberg
.
In response to a partner's suggestion that another lawyer at the firm could decide whether he should register, Craig
wrote, "I don't really care who you ask but we need an answer from someone who we can rely on with a straight face."
Firms that take clients from countries with human rights abuses and other public relations difficulties don't appear
to have trouble attracting other clients, but they do charge a premium for that work, according to Freeman.
"Normally, if a Washington firm is going to write a report about a country, they can't get $4 million for it,"
Freeman says. "But a report written for someone who is friends with Vladimir Putin is going to cost more money."
Craig flouted FARA's reporting requirements and did not register because he did not want to limit his future career
prospects, according to prosecutors.
The idea that registering as a foreign agent is a stigma, a "scarlet letter" that will prevent agents from getting
other work, certainly prevails in Washington, "but the fact of the matter is, there's nearly 2,000 registered foreign
agents walking the streets of America," says Freeman. "They're not exactly a rare breed, and a lot of the firms that
work for foreign governments also work for domestic clients. They're lobbying for big American businesses too."
A big reason companies may prefer to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, as opposed to FARA, is that the
latter requires significantly more disclosure. With FARA, agents need to list the member's offices they visited,
everyone they spoke to, the days they met, and what issues were discussed -- and that's a lot of additional work, says
Freeman.
In January, Skadden agreed to register under FARA and pay a $4.6 million fine, an amount that equals what it paid for
the Ukraine report. Craig left the firm in April 2018.
The DOJ's renewed interest in investigating and prosecuting FARA crimes may make Washington insiders think twice
about concealing what foreign interests they represent. FARA registrations jumped 46 percent from 2016 to 2017, the year
after Mueller was appointed special counsel and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's home was raided.
"I think the Craig case and the other cases like it change the calculus for folks who work for foreign entities or
are doing this type of lobbying and PR work," says Freeman. "It sends a clear message that if you're at all uncertain if
you should register under FARA, it behooves you to play it safe."
Barbara Boland is
's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her
on Twitter
@BBatDC.
KIEV: Ukraine 's gas transport company
Ukrtransgaz has upgraded several gas pumping stations so it can provide gas to eastern and
southern regions of the country if there is a disruption in supply from Russia, the company
said on Wednesday.
More than a third of Russia's gas exports to the European Union cross
Ukraine, providing Kiev with valuable transit income.
Ukraine traditionally uses some of the gas pumped by Russia to European consumers for its
own needs in eastern and central regions and then compensates for this by deliveries from gas
storage located in the west of the country.
But the Russia-Ukraine gas transit agreement is due to expire in January and Ukrainian
energy authorities are worried that Moscow could stop gas supplies
through Ukraine, leaving some Ukrainian regions without gas in winter.
"As of today, Ukrtransgaz has implemented all the necessary technical and regulatory
solutions to create a reliable reverse scheme and it is ready for regular operation and can be
activated immediately if necessary," Uktransgaz said in a statement.
It said Ukraine had already reversed gas flows in 2009 when Russian gas giant Gazprom halted gas
supplies to Ukrainian consumers because of a price dispute.
Last month, Russian energy minister and several sources said Russia wanted to strike a
short-term deal with Kiev on gas transit to Europe when the current 10-year agreement expires
to buy time to complete pipelines that will bypass Ukraine.
But Kiev and its European allies want guarantees that Ukraine will remain a transit route
for Russian gas to Europe.
In January, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic floated a proposal for the two
countries to agree a new 10-year transit contract, with a guaranteed minimum yearly transit
volume of 60 bcm and 30 bcm of additional flexibility.
Ukraine's energy firm Naftogaz said last month Kiev was still counting on Sefcovic's
proposal.
The potential for problems with the transit agreement, which brings Kiev around $3 billion
revenue per year, prompted Ukraine to increase its winter gas reserves by 18% compared with
last year to 20 billion cubic meters (bcm).
Naftogaz said this week Ukraine had stored 16.6 bcm of gas by Aug. 10, up from 13.38 bcm at
the same time last year.
Ukraine consumed 32.3 bcm of gas in 2018, 10.6 bcm of which was imported from European
markets outside Russia.
Relations between Kiev and Moscow plummeted after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea
peninsula in 2014.
Ukraine halted its own purchases of Russian gas in 2015.
'The senator had tough words for one of Joe Biden's signature laws'
by Gideon Resnick, Political Reporter...08.14.19...10:57AM ET
"Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) suggested in an interview Tuesday evening that she would
seek the repeal of the 1994 crime bill -- a historic though highly controversial measure tied
closely to one of her closest competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination.
It "needs to be changed, needs to be rolled back, needs to be repealed." Warren said of
the law, which has become widely bemoaned by criminal justice reform advocates for its
tough-on-crime measures, harsh sentencing guidelines, and general encouragement of the war on
drugs."...
"Biden just 1 point ahead of Warren in new weekly tracking poll"
By Julia Manchester...08/14/19...11:04 AM EDT
"Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by just 1
point in a new Economist–YouGov weekly tracking poll.
Biden sits at 21 percent support in the survey, while Warren is close behind at 20
percent. The next candidate is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at 16 percent support among
voters."...
Pennsylvania voters have very strong -- and mostly negative -- views about President
Donald Trump, and about half say they will vote against him no matter his opponent, according
to a new poll of registered voters across the state.
Over multiple questions and surveys, a clear portrait emerges of an electorate deeply
polarized over the president, with strongly held feelings on either side.
About half of voters had a "strongly unfavorable" opinion of the president, twice the
number who held a "strongly favorable" opinion.
And while the divisions among Democratic voters are real during this primary election,
especially across groups such as age, race, and income, the real divide is between the
parties and ideologies: Most Democrats, regardless of which candidate they support, say they
will vote against Trump no matter what. ...
MONACA, Pa. (AP) -- President Donald Trump sought to take credit Tuesday for the
construction of a major manufacturing facility in western Pennsylvania as he tries to
reinvigorate supporters in the Rust Belt towns who helped send him to the White House in
2016.
Trump visited Shell Oil Co.'s soon-to-be completed Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex,
which will turn the area's vast natural gas deposits into plastics. The facility, which
critics claim will become the largest air polluter in western Pennsylvania, is being built in
an area hungry for investment.
Speaking to a crowd of thousands of workers dressed in fluorescent orange-and-yellow
vests, Trump said, "This would have never happened without me and us."
In fact, Shell announced its plans to build the complex in 2012, when President Barack
Obama was in office.
A Shell spokesperson said employees were paid for their time attending Trump's
remarks.
Trump used the official White House event as an opportunity to assail his Democratic
rivals, saying, "I don't think they give a damn about Western Pennsylvania, do you?"
The focus is part of a continued push by the Trump administration to increase the
economy's dependence on fossil fuels in defiance of increasingly urgent warnings about
climate change. And it's an embrace of plastic at a time when much of the world is sounding
alarms over its impact.
"We don't need it from the Middle East anymore," Trump said of oil and natural gas,
calling the employees "the backbone of this country."
Trump's appeals to blue-collar workers helped him win Beaver County, where the plant is
located, by more than 18 percentage points in 2016, only to have voters turn to Democrats in
2018's midterm elections. In one of a series of defeats that led to Republicans' loss of the
House, voters sent Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress after the prosperity promised by Trump's
tax cuts failed to materialize.
Beaver County is still struggling to recover from the shuttering of steel plants in the
1980s that surged the unemployment rate to nearly 30%. Former mill towns like Aliquippa have
seen their populations shrink, while nearby Pittsburgh has lured major tech companies like
Google and Uber, fueling an economic renaissance in a city that reliably votes
Democratic.
Trump claimed that his steel and aluminum tariffs have saved those industries and that
they are now "thriving." a description that exaggerates the recovery of the steel
industry.
Trump also took credit for the addition of 600,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. Labor
Department figures show that roughly 500,000 factory jobs have been added under his
presidency. ...
(Apparently, workers' pay would be docked if they
did not attend; and they were advised to 'behave'.)
Craig Murray's sober, reflective note on Epstein begins and ends with corruption as its
main theme. I hope people find the time to read it. He doesn't delve deeply, but at base it
what is known as seigniory rights--the right of the lord to take and rape whomever he wants
with impunity, which is one of the most brutal forms of corruption imaginable. Epstein's
business was to facilitate that form of corruption. Yes, it's illegal and immoral, but the
primary fact is that its corrupt--it has no sanction whatsoever. And it's exactly that sort
of primal corruption that is visited upon the vast majority daily. Passing legislation that
will knowingly result in the poisoning of millions--stunting the brains of the young--which
was just done and signed into law by Trump is what I'm writing about. It's a different form
of rape, but it's rape nonetheless. But it seems that only bothers me, and Craig Murray.
So "it's all the fault of the Jews and the Israelis, no one else is ever involved in sex
trafficking of young "white" girls", sarcasm from me.
Why don't you drop your BS auto-anti-Semitism and look at everyone else documented to have
been involved.
/div>
For those who claim public view of Epsteins corpse,very understandably and necessary ,I
would say,that even then there's possibility of being misled.The film industry manages to
produce props that look very real,human face included.I stood once before a prop representing
the corpse of a shot down horse,even at fifty cm from it I thought it was real.There was no
smell of course,but even that can be staged.The people allowed to view Epsteins cadaver really
would need to put a knife in it,to assure its being real,and then try to pull off the mask that
could be his face.
For those who claim public view of Epsteins corpse,very understandably and necessary ,I
would say,that even then there's possibility of being misled.The film industry manages to
produce props that look very real,human face included.I stood once before a prop representing
the corpse of a shot down horse,even at fifty cm from it I thought it was real.There was no
smell of course,but even that can be staged.The people allowed to view Epsteins cadaver
really would need to put a knife in it,to assure its being real,and then try to pull off the
mask that could be his face.
willie , Aug 12 2019 11:11 utc |
84Taffyboy , Aug 12 2019 11:25 utc |
85
Interesting list, sorry about the length of copy and paste, from Zerohedge then.
In 2016 CBS Las Vegas posted a list of Bill and Hillary Clinton associates alleged to have
died under mysterious circumstances.
Here is that list.
1- James McDougal – Clintons convicted Whitewater partner died of an apparent heart
attack, while in solitary confinement. He was a key witness in Ken Starr's investigation.
2 – Mary Mahoney – A former White House intern was murdered July 1997 at a
Starbucks Coffee Shop in Georgetown .. The murder happened just after she was to go public
w:th her story of sexual harassment in the White House.
3 – Vince Foster – Former White House counselor, and colleague of Hillary
Clinton at Little Rock's Rose Law firm. Died of a gunshot wound to the head, ruled a
suicide.
4 – Ron Brown – Secretary of Commerce and former DNC Chairman. Reported to
have died by impact in a plane crash. A pathologist close to the investigation reported that
there was a hole in the top of Brown's skull resembling a gunshot wound. At the time of his
death Brown was being investigated, and spoke publicly of his willingness to cut a deal with
prosecutors. The rest of the people on the plane also died. A few days later the Air Traffic
controller commited suicide.
5 – C. Victor Raiser, II – Raiser, a major player in the Clinton fund raising
organization died in a private plane crash in July 1992.
6 – Paul Tulley – Democratic National Committee Political Director found dead
in a hotel room in Little Rock , September 1992. Described by Clinton as a "dear friend and
trusted advisor".
7 – Ed Willey – Clinton fundraiser, found dead November 1993 deep in the woods
in VA of a gunshot wound to the head. Ruled a suicide. Ed Willey died on the same day his
wife Kathleen Willey claimed Bill Clinton groped her in the oval office in the White House.
Ed Willey was involved in several Clinton fund raising events.
8 – Jerry Parks – Head of Clinton's gubernatorial security team in Little Rock
.. Gunned down in his car at a deserted intersection outside Little Rock Park's son said his
father was building a dossier on Clinton He allegedly threatened to reveal this information.
After he died the files were mysteriously removed from his house.
9 – James Bunch – Died from a gunshot suicide. It was reported that he had a
"Black Book" of people which contained names of influential people who visited prostitutes in
Texas and Arkansas
10 – James Wilson – Was found dead in May 1993 from an apparent hanging
suicide. He was reported to have ties to Whitewater..
11 – Kathy Ferguson – Ex-wife of Arkansas Trooper Danny Ferguson, was found
dead in May 1994, in her living room with a gunshot to her head. It was ruled a suicide even
though there were several packed suitcases, as if she were going somewhere. Danny Ferguson
was a co-defendant along with Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones lawsuit Kathy Ferguson was a
possible corroborating witness for Paula Jones.
12 – Bill Shelton – Arkansas State Trooper and fiancee of Kathy Ferguson.
Critical of the suicide ruling of his fiancee, he was found dead in June, 1994 of a gunshot
wound also ruled a suicide at the grave site of his fiancee.
13 – Gandy Baugh – Attorney for Clinton's friend Dan Lassater, died by jumping
out a window of a tall building January, 1994. His client was a convicted drug
distributor.
14 – Florence Martin – Accountant & sub-contractor for the CIA, was
related to the Barry Seal, Mena, Arkansas, airport drug smuggling case. He died of three
gunshot wounds.
15 – Suzanne Coleman – Reportedly had an affair with Clinton when he was
Arkansas Attorney General. Died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, ruled a suicide.
Was pregnant at the time of her death.
16 – Paula Grober – Clinton's speech interpreter for the deaf from 1978 until
her death December 9, 1992. She died in a one car accident.
17 – Danny Casolaro – Investigative reporter, investigating Mena Airport and
Arkansas Development Finance Authority. He slit his wrists, apparently, in the middle of his
investigation.
18 – Paul Wilcher – Attorney investigating corruption at Mena Airport with
Casolaro and the 1980 "October Surprise" was found dead on a toilet June 22, 1993, in his
Washington DC apartment had delivered a report to Janet Reno 3 weeks before his death.
19 – Jon Parnell Walker – Whitewater investigator for Resolution Trust Corp.
Jumped to his death from his Arlington ,Virginia apartment balcony August 15, 1993. He was
investigating the Morgan Guaranty scandal.
20 – Barbara Wise – Commerce Department staffer. Worked closely with Ron Brown
and John Huang. Cause of death: Unknown. Died November 29, 1996. Her bruised, naked body was
found locked in her office at the Department of Commerce.
21 – Charles Meissner – Assistant Secretary of Commerce who gave John Huang
special security clearance, died shortly thereafter in a small plane crash.
22 – Dr. Stanley Heard – Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care
Advisory Committee died with his attorney Steve Dickson in a small plane crash. Dr. Heard, in
addition to serving on Clinton 's advisory council personally treated Clinton's mother,
stepfather and brother.
23 – Barry Seal – Drug running TWA pilot out of Mena Arkansas, death was no
accident.
24 – Johnny Lawhorn, Jr. – Mechanic, found a check made out to Bill Clinton in
the trunk of a car left at his repair shop. He was found dead after his car had hit a utility
pole.
25 – Stanley Huggins – Investigated Madison Guaranty. His death was a
purported suicide and his report was never released.
26 – Hershell Friday – Attorney and Clinton fundraiser died March 1, 1994,
when his plane exploded.
27 – Kevin Ives & Don Henry – Known as "The boys on the track" case.
Reports say the boys may have stumbled upon the Mena Arkansas airport drug operation. A
controversial case, the initial report of death said, due to falling asleep on railroad
tracks. Later reports claim the 2 boys had been slain before being placed on the tracks. Many
linked to the case died before their testimony could come before a Grand Jury.
THE FOLLOWING PERSONS HAD INFORMATION ON THE IVES/HENRY CASE:
28 – Keith Coney – Died when his motorcycle slammed into the back of a truck,
7/88.
30 – Gregory Collins – Died from a gunshot wound January 1989.
31 – Jeff Rhodes – He was shot, mutilated and found burned in a trash dump in
April 1989.
32 – James Milan – Found decapitated. However, the Coroner ruled his death was
due to natural causes".
34 – Richard Winters – A suspect in the Ives/Henry deaths. He was killed in a
set-up robbery July 1989.
THE FOLLOWING CLINTON BODYGUARDS ARE ALSO DEAD
35 – Major William S. Barkley, Jr.
36 – Captain Scott J . Reynolds
37 – Sgt. Brian Hanley
38 – Sgt. Tim Sabel
39 – Major General William Robertson
40 – Col. William Densberger
41 – Col. Robert Kelly
42 – Spec. Gary Rhodes
43 – Steve Willis
44 – Robert Williams
45 – Conway LeBleu
46 – Todd McKeehan
And the most recent, Seth Rich, the DC staffer murdered and "robbed" (of nothing) on July
10. Wikileaks founder Assange claims he had info on the DNC email scandal.
Not Included in this list are the 4 heroes killed in Benghazi.
And now you can add multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein to the list...
Daniel Benaim and Michael Walid Hanna
explain that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East hasn't changed much at all under
Trump, but there has been a reduction in diplomatic engagement:
For all the headlines, the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is fairly consistent.
Despite the administration's intention, laid out in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, to
refocus the U.S. military on great-power competition, the U.S. footprint in the Middle East
remains relatively constant, and seemingly permanent. Instead, what has changed is the scale
of civilian effort that, in most previous administrations, would have accompanied such a
military presence. The Trump administration has left numerous vacancies for key civilian
positions unfilled for long stretches, slashed aid programs, and focused on high-level
personal relations at the expense of broader ties. Altogether, its approach has not been
typified by either retrenchment or interventionism but by what Barry Posen, writing in
Foreign Affairs, has called "illiberal hegemony" -- military superiority shorn of diplomatic
stewardship.
Benaim and Hanna are right about this, and their article is a welcome corrective to the many
false claims that Trump is "retreating" from the region. The administration's disdain for
diplomacy and aid has been impossible to miss over the last two and a half years, and they have
combined that with more or less continuing the military deployments and missions that they
inherited. What that means in practice is that the U.S. remains entangled in the affairs of the
region, but our government's involvement leans even more heavily towards the military. That
leaves every other kind of engagement underfunded, understaffed, and neglected. Since our
foreign policy is already excessively militarized, this makes a bad problem worse. Benaim and
Hanna note this later in the article:
This approach also exacerbates the long-standing problem of overreliance on the military
as the central tool of U.S. Middle East policy. Even on a diplomat's best days, regional
leaders are well aware of the "consul effect" -- the contrast between well-resourced American
military commanders and their relatively impoverished diplomatic colleagues. Further
marginalizing diplomats costs them influence, access, and bargaining power, while positioning
the military and intelligence communities as the only effective U.S. institutional actors in
the region.
Given the reality that the U.S. military presence hasn't been reduced, and has actually
increased in some places over the last two years, how is it that we keep hearing about U.S.
"retreat" and "withdrawal" as if these were happening? Client states have an incentive to whine
about possible "abandonment" no matter what the U.S. does. Either they complain about an
"abandonment" that has supposedly already happened, or they warn against a possible
"abandonment" that might take place in the future. The whining serves the purpose of putting
pressure on every administration to maintain existing commitments and then to add more. Then
there are pundits and analysts at home that constantly fret about U.S. "withdrawal" as a way of
agitating for increased involvement. Then there are the supporters of the president that want
to pretend that the "withdrawal" is really happening in order to credit the president for doing
something he hasn't done. Add them all up, and you get an unfounded consensus that the U.S. is
"retreating" when virtually nothing has changed. In the case of Trump, there is an additional
factor of taking the president's rhetoric at face value while ignoring what his administration
is doing. Trump boasts about some things that never happened and never will happen, and for
some reason he is blamed/credited for things he never does while his real policies often escape
close scrutiny.
Put simply, U.S. military engagement in the Middle East is largely unchanged and has even
escalated to some degree under Trump, but all other kinds of engagement get short shrift. Far
from disentangling the U.S. from its excessive commitments in the region, Trump has embraced
our worst clients and deepened our government's involvement in the worst way for the sake of
arms sales and whipping up anti-Iranian sentiment. This is the exact opposite of what should be
happening, and it is antithetical to a foreign policy that extricates U.S. forces from the
region.
Application of IMF policy in Argentina has brought what is in effect an economic collapse and
astonishing poverty. While this was happening over the months, business news writers were
applauding Argentinian austerity reforms. The data (as I repeatedly showed on Economist's
View) were bad to grim, but business reporting found no problem.
"We are reviewing the DoD's handing of the JEDI cloud acquisition, including the development
of requirements and the request for proposal process," said Pentagon IG spokeswoman Dwrena
Allen in a statement, adding that a "multidisciplinary team" of auditors, attorneys and
investigators are investigating JEDI matters "referred to us by Members of Congress and through
the DoD Hotline."
"In addition, we are investigating whether current or former DoD officials committed
misconduct relating to the JEDI acquisition, such as whether any had any conflicts of interest
related to their involvement in the acquisition process."
Allen said the review "is ongoing and our team is making substantial progress. We
recognize the importance and time sensitive nature of the issues, and we intend to complete
our review as expeditiously as possible."
The OG intends to write a report and notify Defense Secretary Mark Esper and DoD leaders
of the findings, as well as inform Congress, according to standard protocols, she said. "We
will also consider publicly releasing the results, consistent with our standard processes. -
Bloomberg
On August 1st, Defense Secretary Esper ordered a separate review of the Pentagon's JEDI
cloud contract after President Trump supported critics saying that Amazon was given an unfair
advantage.
In July, the
WSJ publicized new evidence showing that senior Amazon executives met with senior DoD
officials, including then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, to discuss the project before the
bidding even began, while the decision over the program was expected this month.
Meanwhile, Oracle lost out on the project after
losing a critical court case against the Pentagon and Amazon, allowing the DoD to move
forward with either Amazon or Microsoft.
After WWII most govt could be called Socialist with many Nationalized Sectors and
Industries. Italy stands out in that even by 1981 most of the sectors and industries were
still profoundly Nationalized. Creation of the EU seemed to be characterized by US Style
Privatization. Now add in Lemon Socialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism
- Bailouts of Private Companies and Nationalization in that profits were private and loses
are public... poor companies remain in industries perhaps with monopoly or oligopoly powers.
" In Icelandic
, lemon socialism is known as " Sósíalismi
andskotans ", meaning "the devil's socialism", a term coined by
Vilmundur Jónsson (1889–1971, Iceland's Surgeon General) in the 1930s to
criticize alleged crony capitalism in Landsbanki , which has gained renewed
currency in the debate over the 2008–2012
Icelandic financial crisis . [11] Lemon socialism,
or more precisely crony capitalism, is also referred to as Pilsfaldakapítalismi ,
meaning "skirt capitalism", pilsfaldur being the hemline of the skirt; and the term
referring to children hiding behind their mothers' skirts after having done something wrong
to criticize the alleged lack of transparency in dealings and reluctance to deal with bad
consequences by themselves.
@JW #40
To be fair, the US has a fantastic record of f***ing up countries with aerial bombs. The part
which the Saudis failed to understand is that the US isn't next to any of these countries...
Yemen has a population slightly lower than Texas. Imagine, Washington bombing Texas, only
filled with Texans that have more and heavier weapons(?).
The question mark is because I am not entirely certain that Yemenis are more heavily armed
than Texans, but certainly they're at least as fierce defending themselves.
Wow, that is an outstanding tour d'horizon from Magnier you linked. This is a
keeper to show others who may be amenable to learning about today's Middle East balance of
forces, and how it has been arrived at.
Succinct yet very comprehensive, the piece not only catches up the histories of recent
years, but provides an analysis of today and the near-to-mid-term future - both military and
geopolitical. It speaks of the various lessons learned along the way, including the lessons
being absorbed in real time today as the confrontation between Iran and the US has barely yet
begun and yet racked up totally instructive scores.
The new war is essentially economic; it is a war of sanctions and limiting free movement of
ship movements around the globe. It is a war of tankers and oil platforms. It is a
starvation war where no one can threaten the enemy with a return to the "stone age"
because the firepower is now universally available . Yemen is the best example: the
threat of bombing Dubai forced the Emirates to seek Iranian mediation to prevent a missile
attack against them. The Houthis, despite years of Saudi bombing of Yemen, have also
managed to bomb Saudi airports, military bases and oil stations in the heart of Saudi
Arabia, using cruise missiles and armed drones. [My emphasis]
And Hezbolllah has cemented its standing with nations in the region, expanded its skill
from guerrilla and small-theater to nation-size theater, and this:
It has run intensive courses in the use of its drones, used its precision missiles with
accuracy, produced thousands of highly trained Special Forces and it has fought an enemy
(al-Qaeda) that is much more motivated to fight to the death than any Israeli Special
Forces units. [My emphasis]
Israel is essentially paralyzed. Even to the extent, as Magnier relates, of being careful
to warn Hezbollah drivers before bombing its supply trucks, because "Israel wanted to
avoid human casualties among Hezbollah officers, fully aware of the price of
retaliation. " My emphasis again.
The bad guys have fallen behind - as we know, but as Magnier illustrates so clearly in
this appraisal, with his review of the initial western strategies just a few years ago and
how they have all been rendered null. Even the US now is an antique target for modern missile
and drone technology - and the battle-hardened skill with these weapons definitely resides
with the Levant axis rather than with the imperialists and their dogs.
The future? This:
Gaza, along with Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad, are all highly equipped by Tehran with
sufficient missiles to inflict real damage on Israel and on US forces deployed in the
Middle East. Israel is playing around by targeting various objectives tactically but with
no real strategic purpose- only for Netanyahu to keep himself busy and train his Air Force,
and to gain publicity in the media. Soon, when Syria recovers and Iraq is stronger, the
Israeli promenade will have to cease. Hezbollah in Lebanon may also find a way in the near
future to keep its irregular but organised army busy by firing anti-air missiles against
Israeli jets and imposing new rules of engagement.
Is this the end of the neoliberal counterrevolution in Argentina ? Moor did its duty moor has
to go -- Macri converted Argentina into the Debt slave again and now to get out of this situation
is nest to impossible.
Argentine president suffers crushing defeat in key primaries ahead of general election
Argentina's President Mauricio Macri suffered a crushing defeat as people voted in party
primaries on Sunday ahead of October's general election.
Given that all of the recession-hit South American country's major parties have already
chosen their presidential candidates, the primaries effectively served as a nationwide
pre-election opinion poll.
Center-left nominee Alberto Fernandez led by around 15 points after partial results were
revealed. Center-right Pro-business Macri admitted it had been "a bad election."
The first round of the presidential election will be held on October 27, with a run-off
– if needed – set for November 24.
With 87 percent of polling station results counted, Fernandez had polled 47.5 percent with
Macri on a little more than 32 percent and centrist former finance minister Roberto Lavagna a
distant third on just 8.3 percent.
Macri had been hoping to earn a second mandate, but his chances appear all but over.
If Fernandez was to register the same result in October, he would be president as
Argentina's electoral law requires a candidate to gain 45 percent for outright victory, or 40
percent and a lead of at least 10 points over the nearest challenger.
Inflation and poverty
"We've had a bad election and that forces us to redouble our efforts from tomorrow," said
Macri, whose popularity has plunged since last year's currency crisis and the much-criticized
56 billion U.S.-dollar bail-out loan he secured from the International Monetary Fund.
"It hurts that we haven't had the support we'd hoped for," he added.
Argentina is currently in a recession and posted 22 percent inflation for the first
half of the year – one of the highest rates in the world. Poverty now affects 32
percent of the population.
Backed by the IMF, Macri has initiated an austerity plan that is deeply unpopular among
ordinary Argentines, who have seen their spending power plummet.
The peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year. The Buenos Aires stock
exchange actually shot up eight percent on Friday amid expectation that Macri would do well
in Sunday's vote.
An important task now is to understand why the IMF assistance to Argentina proved damaging to
the economy from the beginning; the data showed the damage being done. However, there was
almost no mention of the problems that developed outside Argentina and there was surprise
when the failure of the economy was reflected in the serious vote against the current
president.
Of course, Joseph Stiglitz watched the same sort of problems unfold in Argentina almost 20
years ago and was severely criticized for discussing them. How did the problems recur so
readily now? Why is IMF national assistance seemingly so dangerous economically?
I'm hoping that an element within our intelligence services did the right thing and
Offed him to send a loud and clear message to the rest of the tribal members involved in
false flags against USA and world. Obviously, JE was a very high ranking mossad agent who
had strong ties with ALL the Israelis and Americans who did 9/11.
The primary mission of intelligence agencies is self-preservation, and that means
co-operation with other nation's intelligence agencies whenever possible.
As a practical matter it is highly likely that both Israeli and US Intelligence agencies
had access to the Epstein blackmail materials to use as they wish.
( and, as a practical matter it is highly likely that both Israeli and US Intelligence
agencies were behind 911, the Kennedy assassinations, etc etc etc)
They are on one team, and those outside the intelligence "community" are on the other
team.
Ever consider a rogue upper echelon CIA faction may have ran Epstein, hoping it looked
optically like the Mossad ran him?
Epstein was probably a sex criminal from his early adulthood, but knew a few people. Hell,
his handlers could have told him they were Mossad. I think our CIA/NSA has some brass who
wouldnt mind calling America's foreign policy shots from behind the scenes via blackmail info
on influential company leaders and corporate officers/assorted congresscritters. Epstein
could privide this while appearing to be Mossad.
Its hard to believ CIA would let the Mossad get kompramat on our politicians so they could
boss them around. Turf concerns and a bruised ego would lead me to believe the CIA would at
least brief new members of congress about this anyway. I think it could have been them. "He
belongs to intelligence".
@Anon Interesting
idea, but aren't the CIA and Mossad joined at the hip at this stage? How likely is it that
rogue elements within the CIA haven't been purged by now?
Ever consider a rogue upper echelon CIA faction may have ran Epstein, hoping it looked
optically like the Mossad ran him?
No. For simple reasons: "What's there for me" and "Unless having THAT clearance I'll never
know".
Re the former: if they can pull this to him what can they pull on me (or people I care
for) if/when they want it.
Gets worse.
What if they pull that just to get a kick of out of it? Like aristocrats/nobles of Rome
would pull it on a gladiator/slave? Or Middle Age noble on a serf?
I remember when Milosevic died and I'd mention that over lunch in white-collar/corporate
environment. He WAS a head of state, European, White. I remember the jokes. And I was
thinking (stupid, I know) the same: if they can do this to him, what can they do to me?
Nobody else was, of course, at least where I was moving around (senior corporate management,
that is .or so I say).
Then, there was a S.A.S. guy. Quote from Wikipedia:
He was a lance corporal in 1980, serving in Pagoda Troop, 'B' Squadron, 22 SAS Regiment,
when he led "Blue Team" in the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London during a hostage
siege on 5 May 1980. McAleese fought in the Falklands War in 1982, and in Ulster. He was
awarded the Military Medal for gallantry in action at the Loughgall ambush in Armagh on 8
May 1987,[4] and was present at the Drumnakilly ambush in County Tyrone in August 1988.[5]
He also served as a bodyguard for three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.
The last sentence could be interesting.
And, then ..
Four days after his son's funeral John McAleese was arrested by officers from West
Mercia Police on charges of accessing indecent images of juveniles on the internet via a
home computer.
So, again, if they can do that to this fellow, what can they do to me?
Etc.
Hehehe ..now the funny part: how many people reading this knew about Mr. McAleese? No need
to state it here.
Oh, BTW, how many people you know are paying attention to this? Real attention, I
mean?
Funny too.
This does significantly strain the overall credibility of the system, among those who would like nothing more than to believe
in it, but still have some conscience and working brain cells.
Yet having been raised fairly rural, with a significant respect for the natural cycles, this is nothing so much as watching
necrotic tissue decay even further. Only for those raised in fairly sterile conditions, does it seem abnormal.
this corruption in US politics and DOJ is now so so pervasive hat I think only way to clear the cancer is for trump to use the
Military to replace CIA, FBI, DOJ , clean out the Judges , clean out the Media and start again with STRICT compliance to the Laws
of the US Constitution.
The FBI /DOJ is clearly infested with the cancer of corruption.
The DC and NY offices need to be fired in entirety and replaced by mid America new blood.
I was wondering when I would see a Trump supporter explicitly promoting a military coup in the US in a Trump supportive blog with
the alibi of returning to "Constitution and Law strict compliance"...
No wonder a military coup is anti-constitutional....
I always thought all these stories of the "deep state", the "borg", "drainning the swmp", "paedophilia conspiracy theories",
"Epstein case", "white supremacism terrorism", and attacks by Trump, and his ideologues, against any US institution, were designed
to sow the enough ammount of distrust and confussion amongst the US population so that they become more rone to allow such an
outrage...
"The FBI /DOJ is clearly infested with the cancer of corruption."
Mainly since both ends of the bipartisan system try to hijack the independence of some these powers by placing their ideologically
kindred men any time they grab presidency. This includes Trump.
"The DC and NY offices need to be fired in entirety and replaced by mid America new blood."
A public officers corps which reachs its position by merits independent from political filiation is the best gurantee for a
Constitutional rule and a vaccine against authoritarian aims/intends like coup d΄etats.
"... Among the reasons why Biden, Sanders, and Warren will be difficult to topple from the top tier: a significant portion of their supporters say they have made up their minds about the race. ..."
"... This is especially the case with Sanders. Nearly half -- 48 percent -- of his supporters said they would definitely vote for him... ..."
A new poll out Tuesday on the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary shows the
outcome is anyone's guess between former vice president Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Beyond which candidate had what level of support in the first-in-the-nation presidential
primary -- scheduled for February 2020 -- a deeper dive into the Suffolk University/Boston
Globe poll provides a number of other big-picture takeaways.
The top tier is hard to crack
Biden, Sanders, and Warren are the only candidates with support in the double digits (21
percent, 17 percent, and 14 percent, respectively), and a closer read suggests that might not
change anytime soon. Much of this has to do with the fact that a significant portion of their
support is locked down. Nearly half of Sanders' and Biden's supporters in the poll say they
their mind is made up and they aren't looking at supporting anyone else in the field.
Something dramatic could occur, of course, but odds are that the status quo will remain for a
while.
Further, if there are big changes in the race, the poll found that Warren, not someone
else outside of the top three, is in the best position to benefit. Warren was the "second
choice" of 21 percent of respondents. No one else was even close to her in that category.
While Sanders has support locked down now, and Warren has the best potential to
grow , Biden, it appears, has his own lane of supporters that no other candidate is even
contesting. Biden's support is very strong among older voters, moderates, and union members.
For the most part, these voters aren't even looking at other options.
New Hampshire Democrats are moderate
For all the conversation about how far left the Democratic Party has moved in recent
years, the poll shows likely Democratic primary voters have not moved the same way. Yes, a
majority back the Green New Deal concept and Medicare for All, but more than 50 percent
describe themselves as either moderate, conservative, or very conservative. This is compared
with the 45 percent who say they are either liberal or very liberal. While this might seem
like a near tie, consider this survey polled likely Democratic voters -- the party's base --
which is the most liberal. ...
... In fourth place is Senator Kamala Harris of California at 8 percent, followed by South
Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 6 percent and Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii at 3
percent.
Among the reasons why Biden, Sanders, and Warren will be difficult to topple from the
top tier: a significant portion of their supporters say they have made up their minds about
the race.
This is especially the case with Sanders. Nearly half -- 48 percent -- of his
supporters said they would definitely vote for him...
"... India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya or Syria. ..."
"... Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America. ..."
"... America's Future Is with India and Israel: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-future-india-israel-21629 ..."
Imperial divide and conquer strategy. Global strife aids imperialists. Russia, China, Iran unity threatens global Anglo Zionists.
Consequently, the logical progression is to welcome India into Anglo Zionist alliance with more aid to their extremists (Modi)
Emboldening extremists is always the way to war.
It is not that simple as Saudi sells oil to China, and India, Saudi plus Israel are on speaking terms with Russia plus Saudi
bankrolls Pakistan and US policies might change completely if Trump loses 2020.
Of course all bets are off should Modi manage to provoke a Hindu-Moslim civil war involving Pakistan.
Since I was at the age of having a political opinion, Jammu and Kashmir were part of a collection of areas under constant
conflict.
...
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Aug 5 2019 18:13 utc | 44
Thanks for the reminder. Your use of the term 'constant conflict' reminded me of a military doctrine I stumbled upon in the
early Noughties which was called Constant Conflict. The only thing I could remember about it, today, was that it was written by
a psychopath and I did NOT like what the author was proposing.
It's dated 16.04.2016 and names the author as Retired Lieutenant Colonel of United States Army Ralph Peters and summarises
the crux of Peters' thesis and and his background/mission statement. It also provides enough info to find the original 1997 article
here... https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/97summer/peters.htm
The article concludes thus and there's a footnote...
...
"The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of
it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but
we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline."
--- Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for
future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate
of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several
years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has
published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books.
This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant
Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.
India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at
least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya
or Syria.
Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state
of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America.
So perhaps India should emulate its fellow "democratic" ally of America and adopt the same ethnic cleansing tactics in Kashmir
that the Land of the Free has deployed against Native tribes throughout the Indigenous lands that America currently occupies--from
the Trail of Tears of the past to the DAPL pipeline protests today.
"... Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. ..."
"... As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".) ..."
"... Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker. ..."
"... With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals. ..."
"... These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict. ..."
"... The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias. ..."
"... In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies. ..."
"... Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces. ..."
"... An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake. ..."
"... With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. ..."
"... Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran. ..."
In 2014 we were almost at the point of no return in Ukraine following the coup d'etat supported and funded by NATO and involving
extremist right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. The conflict in the Donbass risked escalating into a conflict between NATO and the Russian
Federation, every day in the summer and autumn of 2014 threatening to be doomsday. Rather than respond to the understandable impulse
to send Russian troops into Ukraine to defend the population of Donbass, Putin had the presense of mind to pursue the less direct
and more sensible strategy of supporting the material capacity of the residents of Donbass to resist the depredations of the Ukrainian
army and their neo-Nazi Banderite thugs. Meanwhile, Europe's inept leaders initially egged on Ukraine's destabilization, only to
get cold feet after reflecting on the possibility of having a conflict between Moscow and Washington fought on European soil.
With the resistance in Donbass managing to successfully hold back Ukrainian assaults, the conflict began to freeze, almost to
the point of a complete ceasefire, even as Ukrainian provocations continue to this day.
Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel,
France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. Russian
intervention in 2015 managed to save the country with no time to spare, destroying large numbers of terrorists and reorganizing the
Syrian armed forces and training and equipping them with the necessary means to beat back the jihadi waves. The Russians also ensured
control of the skies through their network of Pantsir-S1, Pantsir-S2, S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems, together with their
impressive jamming (Krasukha-4), command and control
information management system (Strelets C4ISR System) and electronic-warfare technologies (1RL257 Krasukha-4).
As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack
on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no
secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton
called
for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to "
pay a little price ".)
Since Trump became president, the rhetoric of war has soared considerably, even as the awareness remains that any new conflict
would sink Trump's chances of re-election. Despite this, Trump's bombings in Syria were real and potentially very harmful to the
Syrian state. Nevertheless, they were
foiled by Russia's electronic-warfare capability, which was able to send veering away from their intended target more than 70%
of the latest-generation missiles launched by the British, French, Americans and Israelis.
One of the most terrifying moments for the future of humanity came a few months later when Trump started hurling threats and abuses
at Kim Jong-un , threatening to reduce Pyongyang to ashes. Trump, moreover, delivered his fiery threats in a speech at the United
Nations General Assembly.
Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint
a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens
to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He
then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker.
With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different
results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have
had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies
were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer
has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies
have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.
The difference between the case of Iran and the aforementioned cases of Ukraine, Syria and North Korea is precisely the direct
involvement of these two lobbies in the decision-making process underway in the US.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the
cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated
by decades of conflict.
What readers can be assured of is that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and Iran, the US is unable to militarily impose
its geopolitical or economic will.
The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained
extensively
why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was
unthinkable
, bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO
somewhat refused
to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias.
In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed
in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously
contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover
and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies.
In North Korea, the country's tactical and strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence discourages any missile attack. Any overland
attack is out of the question, given the high number of active as well as reserve personnel in the DPRK army. If the US struggled
to control a completely defeated Iraq in 2003, how much more difficult would be to deal with a country with a resilient population
that is indisposed to bowing to the US? The 2003 Iraq campaign would really be a "cakewalk" in comparison. Another reason why a missile
attack on North Korea is impossible is because of the conventional power that Pyongyang possesses in the form of tens of thousands
of missiles and artillery pieces that could easily reduce Seoul to rubble in a matter of minutes. This would then lead to a war between
the US and the DPRK being fought on the Korean Peninsula. Moon Jae-in, like Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of Ukraine, did everything
in his power to prevent such a devastating conflict.
Concerning tensions between the US and Iran and the resulting threats of war, these should be taken as bluster and bluff. America's
European allies are heavily involved in Iran and depend on the Middle East for their oil and gas imports. A US war against Iran would
have devastating consequences for the world economy, with the Europeans seeing their imports halved or reduced. As Professor Chossudovsky
of the strategic think tank Global Research has so ably
argued , an attack on Iran is unsustainable, as the oil sectors of the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be hit and shut down. Exports
would instantly end after the pipelines going West are bombed by the Houthis and the Strait of Hormuz closed. The economies of these
two countries would implode and their ruling class wiped out by internal revolts. The state of Israel as well as US bases in the
region would see themselves overwhelmed with missiles coming from Syria, Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Iran. The Tel Aviv government
would last a few hours before capitulating under the pressure of its own citizens, who, like the Europeans, are unused to suffering
war at home.
Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against
the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic
resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication
of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to
withdraw from the
coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable
damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces.
An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't
want to cross, having so much at stake.
With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises.
The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its
own profits and controls global finance. And finally, US military planners do not intend to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iran
that would reveal the extent to which US military power is based on propaganda built over the years through Hollywood movies and
wars successfully executed against relatively defenceless countries. Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin
Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them
on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is telling that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh have to resort to numerous but ultimately useless
provocations against Iran, as they
can only rely on hybrid attacks in order to economically isolate it from the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, this strategy has had devastating consequences for the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency together with
the SWIFT system. In today's multipolar environment, acting in such an imperious manner leads to the acceleration of de-dollarization
as a way of circumventing sanctions and bans imposed by the US.
A reserve currency is used to facilitate transactions. If the disadvantages come to exceed the benefits, it will progressively
be used less and less, until it is replaced by a basket of currencies that more closely reflect the multipolar geopolitical reality.
The warmongers in Washington are exasperated by their continuing inability to curb the resilience and resistance of the people
in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Donbass, countries and regions understood by the healthy part of the globe as representing
the axis of resistance to US Imperialism.
America must always threaten someone with war. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, so many to choose from.
Conflicts must never be resolved; they must always kept simmering, so a hot war can be triggered quickly. All Presidents are
turned in the first three months after sworn in.
It's what happens as empires mature. Governance becomes bloated, corrupt and inept (often leading to wars). Maturity time has
become significantly reduced due to the rate of information technology advance. America is five years away from going insolvent
according to most models and forecasts. All new debt after 2024 will be used to pay the interest on existing debts and liabilities.
There is simply no stopping it. The US already pays close to 500 billion in annual interest on debts and liabilities. Factor in
a 600 billion or 700 billion dollar annual military budget, and unrestrained deficit spending clocking in at over a trillion,
and, well, it isn't going to work for long. Considering most new well paying jobs are government jobs... The end is either full
socialism / fascism (folks still don't get how similar these are), a currency crisis and panic, depression and institutional deterioration.
The only good news to libertarians I guess - if you can call it good - is that the blotted government along with the crony corporations
will mostly and eventually collapse. Libertarian governance might not be a choice by an electorate, it might simply become fact
in the aftermath.
I guess Trump eventually will understand this lesson in politics that friendship, mutual respect and helping each other accomplishes
way way more then threatening countries to be bombed back into the stoneage.
Noone likes to do a cutthroat deal enforced upon them by thuggery. Trump's got to learn that you can't run politics like you do
your bussinesses, it's not working unles that was his plan all this time, to destroy America.
"The Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy
goals.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at
the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been
devastated by decades of conflict."
America is increasingly looking like Ancient Rome towards the end. It is overstretched, nearly insolvent, fewer allies want
to be allies, it's population is sick, physically and mentally. Obesity, diabetes, drug use/addiction make it impossible for the
Pentagon to meet recruitment goal. Mental illness causes daily mass killing. The education system is so broken/broke that there
is little real education being done. Americans are among the most ignorant, least educated and least educate-able people in the
developed world.
Militarily, the USA can bomb but that's about it... defeats upon defeats over the past two decades demonstrate the US military
is a paper tiger of astonishing incompetence.
Boeing can't make planes anymore. Lockheed is not much better. Parts of the F-35 are made by Chinese subsidiaries. The most
recently built aircraft carrier cannot launch fighter jets.
Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds
ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like
parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.
I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think
of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don't want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population
is made up of children.
Seriously, why would Iran want to hijack a German ship? Iran took the UK one in retaliation for the Brits seizing the one at
Gibraltar. Had that not happened, no Brit ships in the Persian Gulf would have been touched. This is all a carefully engineered
USA provocation designed to, inter alia, increase tension in the Persian Gulf, put more nails in coffin of JCPOA...and most importantly
give UK an excuse, as remaining signatory, to call for the original UN sanctions on Iran to be snapped-back.
Federico, let me explain it simply: the U.S. is allied with Israel, and Iran hates Israel. Why, I don't know (nor do I care),
but that's why the U.S. needs to keep Iran in check.
Yet CONGRESS just passed the largest defense bill in history. The WAR industry is bankrupting us financially spiritually and
morally.
A war is coming. But upon whom this time (or STILL?), because with President Bolton and Vice President Adelson in power, China
Iran or Russia or maybe all three, are open options.
Interview with a Russian I saw 2 years ago "USA wants to create local conflicts on foreign shores, ...on our borders, we will
not allow that to happen and make the war international" I will translate: Russia will not be pulled in to some stupid small war
draining their resources while the US sits comfortable, they will throw their missiles around - no escape from nuclear winter.
If spending has reached the limit now, during peacetime....what will happen during a protracted war? Even if it stays conventional,
it would appear that a huge war effort, comparable to WWII, just won't be possible. The US seems to be in a pre-war Britain position,
but there isn't a friendly giant across the water to bail them out with both cash and resources.
Either things become insane in fairly short order, or wiser heads will prevail and the US will step back from the brink. Do
we have any wiser heads at the moment?
I keep seeing John Bolton's moustache, Andi am not filled with confidence.
I would not call this article decent. At best it is half-decent ;-) This is a typical NYT anti-Tulsi propaganda but it does make
several relent observation buried in the sea of anti-Tulsi crapola.
Notable quotes:
"... “We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton,” she says. ..."
"... While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American intervention abroad. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We're Doomed by Nellie Bowles
Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its
citizens to remember that.
She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign.
She talks about the horror.
She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point
home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed
its original atrocity.
“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.
... ... ...
But her run, and the unusual cross-section of voters she appeals to — Howard Zinn fans, anti-drug-war libertarians, Russia-gate
skeptics, and conservatives suspicious of Big Tech — signifies just how much both parties have shifted, not just on foreign
policy. It could end up being a sign that President Trump’s isolationism is not the aberration many believed, but rather a
harbinger of a growing national sentiment that America should stand alone.
To Ms. Gabbard, it is the United States that has been the cruel and destabilizing force.
... ... ...
“We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather
than with, you know, a police baton,” she says.
... ... ...
While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There
is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles
Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American
intervention abroad.
... ... ...
Ms. Gabbard says she is driven by the feeling that death could come at any moment, which she realized at age 10 but which
became more intense in Iraq.
“My first deployment was at the height of the war in 2005. We were 40 miles north of Baghdad. And there was a huge sign
by one of the main gates that just read: ‘Is today the day?’” she says. “It was such a stark reminder that my time could come
at any moment. That any day could be my last.”
She is not sure who put the sign up or why. But it was this message of potentially imminent doom that she wanted to leave
the audience with at the second Democratic debate.
“As we stand here tonight,” she told the crowd. “There are thousands of nuclear missiles pointing right at us, and if we
were to get an attack, we would have 30 minutes, 30 minutes, before we were hit.”
Ms. Gabbard continued.
“There is no shelter. This is the warmonger’s hoax. There is no shelter. It’s all a lie.”
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter:
@nelliebowles
"... As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Partyhardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crowcould go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95) ..."
"... Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling. ..."
"... The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96) ..."
Andrew Bacevich
calls for
reckoning with the consequences of American colonial empire in the Philippines:
Yet the Philippines represented an altogether different case. By no stretch of the imagination did the archipelago fall within
"our backyard." Furthermore, the Filipinos had no desire to trade Spanish rule for American rule and violently resisted occupation
by U.S. forces. The notably dirty Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902 -- a conflict almost entirely expunged
from American memory today -- resulted in something like 200,000 Filipino deaths and ended in a U.S. victory not yet memorialized
on the National Mall in Washington.
Bacevich is right when he says that the Philippine War has been "almost entirely expunged from American memory today." It is significant
that one of the only times in recent years that the Philippine War was remembered was so that it could provide fodder for the counterinsurgency
fad among pro-war pundits. Max Boot was one of the chief advocates for counterinsurgency warfare, and he has cited the brutal occupation
campaign in the Philippines as an example of how to win such wars. Greg Bankoff counted the costs of the "small war" in the Philippines
that Boot praised in his book The Savage Wars of Peace , and he
described them in this response to a positive review of the book back in 2002:
Start with the description of the war itself as "small." Granted, the United States suffered only some 7,000 casualties, dead
and wounded. But estimates of Filipino mortality range from 200,000 persons upward. This is hardly small, especially considering
that the total Filipino population at the time was around seven million. Nor is it accurate to say the war ended in 1902, unless
one accepts the terms of President Theodore Roosevelt's November 1902 Brigandage Act, which redefined any band of more than three
men as bandits and subjected them to 20 years imprisonment or the death penalty. In fact, guerrilla warfare continued until 1907,
waged by popular revolutionary leaders who refused to accept the colonial yoke anew -- men such as Luciano San Miguel (who died
on the battlefield of Corral-na-Bato in March 1903), Macario Sakay (who was hanged on September 13, 1907) and Julian Montalan
(who was sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled to Palawan until 1921). No, the war did not actually end in 1902, but the U.S.
colonial authorities conveniently branded everything subsequent to that as ladronism, simple thievery.
Bankoff warned later in the same piece that "a distorted reconstruction of that past is likely to preview an equally distorted
future." Looking back seventeen years later at our multiple protracted wars, all of them enthusiastically supported by Boot and fellow
neo-imperialists, we have to conclude that the future was horribly distorted in part by this willingness to lionize and whitewash
the Philippine War as a model for U.S. foreign policy. Like that war, our ongoing wars have inflicted horrific losses on the local
populations, they are completely divorced from the security of the United States, and the people we are fighting are fighting us
because our forces are in their country.
If Boot's distorted history has contributed to the distortion of our foreign policy, we could do worse than to begin by finding
better reconstructions of the past. Daniel Immerwahr has done some important work in studying the consequences of our colonial empire
on the people in the territories that our government took over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His book
How to Hide an Empire recounts the history of how the U.S. obtained its overseas territories, how it abused them, and how
it has created a very different kind of empire over the last seventy years.
Immerwahr recounts some of the opposition to the Philippine War from members of the Anti-Imperialist League:
As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Partyhardly a radical
organization in the age of Jim Crowcould go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic
platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic
and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95)
He also describes the tactics that U.S. forces used in the war:
Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents
could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the
north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.
The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos
not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96)
If we hope to change U.S. foreign policy and repudiate empire, we have to remember first how we acquired it and the Americans
that organized to oppose it.
P.S. Another similarity between the Philippine War and the wars of the last two decades is the length of the actual fighting.
Immerwahr writes:
Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in
Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought. (p. 107)
The war in
Afghanistan has reached new levels of insanity as a UN report shows US forces are killing more
civilians than ISIS and Taliban combined.
For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various
terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war.
It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory -- America arms bad guys
. The situation has
gotten so overtly corrupt that the government admitted in May the Pentagon asked Congress for
funding to reimburse terrorists for their transportation and other expenses. Seriously. But that
was just the tip of the iceberg. A new report from the United Nations shows the US and its allies
in Afghanistan have killed more innocent men, women, and children than the group they claim are the
bad guys, the Taliban.
The now 18-year-old quagmire in Afghanistan is raising serious questions and once again,
it appears that the civilians are taking the brunt of the hit -- not the ostensible enemy.
In the first six months of the year, the conflict killed nearly 1,400 civilians and wounded
about 2,400 more. Afghan forces and their allies caused 52 percent of the civilian deaths
compared with 39 percent attributable to militants -- mostly the Taliban, but also the Islamic
State. The figures do not total 100 percent because responsibility for some deaths could not be
definitively established.
The higher civilian death toll caused by Afghan and American forces comes from their greater
reliance on airstrikes, which are particularly deadly for civilians. The United Nations said
airstrikes resulted in 363 civilian deaths and 156 civilian injuries.
"While the number of injured decreased, the number of civilians killed more than
doubled in comparison to the first six months of 2018, highlighting the lethal character of this
tactic,"
the United Nations report said, referring to airstrikes.
Naturally, the US military calls this report by the UN anti-American propaganda.
"We assess and investigate all credible allegations of noncombatant casualties in this
complex environment, whereas others intentionally target public areas, use civilians as human
shields and attempt to hide the truth through lies and propaganda," Colonel Sonny Leggett, a
spokesman for the United States military, said.
The line between the ostensible "good guys" and the "bad guys" has gotten so blurred
that the good guys are now openly supporting the bad while simultaneously killing more innocent
people than the bad ones.
It's a story straight out of The Onion, but in real life.
While the idea of the US government paying to support terrorists or killing more civilians than
terrorists may seem like a crazed notion it has become so overt in recent years that legislation
was specifically introduced for the sole purpose of banning the the flow of money to terrorist
organizations.
However, given the insidious history of the American empire and its creation and fostering of
terrorist regimes across the globe, it should come as no surprise that the overwhelming majority of
politicians would refuse to sign on to a law that requires them to
'Stop
Arming Terrorists.'
And, in 2017, that is exactly what happened.
The text of the bill was quite simple and contained no hidden agendas. It merely stated that it
prohibits
the use of federal agency funds to provide covered assistance to: (1) Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh
al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or any individual or group that is
affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups; or (2) the
government of any country that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
determines has, within the most recent 12 months, provided covered assistance to such a group or
individual.
The only thing the bill did was prohibit the US government from giving money and weapons to
people who want to murder Americans and who do murder innocent men, women, and children across the
globe. It is quite possibly the simplest and most rational bill ever proposed by Congress. Given
its rational and humanitarian nature, one would think that representatives would have been lining
up to show their support. However, one would be wrong and in the five months after it was proposed,
just 13 members of Congress signed on as co-sponsors.
Not only is the United States refusing to stop arming terrorists, but now they are
becoming more violent than the terrorists they claim to fight. At what point do the American people
wake up to this insanity?
Sadly, it appears that the American people couldn't care less about innocent men women and
children being slaughtered with their tax dollars on the other side of the planet. They only seem
to pay attention to the area when one of these people -- whose seen their children blown to a fine
red mist by a US drone strike -- acts out in a retaliatory way. But instead of understanding that
this is blowback caused by US foreign policy, Boobus Americanus thinks these people simply "hate
our freedom."
Terrorism is necessary for the state. War, is the health of the state.
Without the constant fear mongering about an enemy who 'hates our freedom', Americans begin
questioning things. They challenge the status quo and inevitably desire more freedom. However, when
they are told that boogeymen want to kill them, they become immediately complacent and blinded by
their fear.
While these boogeymen were once mostly mythical, since 9/11, they have been funded and supported
by the US to the point that they now pose a very real threat to innocent people everywhere. As the
horrific attacks earlier this year in Sri Lanka illustrate, terrorists are organizing and
spreading.
Terrorists groups have been exposed inside the UK as well for having ties to the British
government who allowed
them
to freely travel and train with ISIS-linked groups
because those groups were in opposition to
Muammar Gaddafi, who the West wanted to snub out.
It's a vicious cycle of creating terrorists, killing innocence, and stoking war. And,
unless something radical happens, it shows no signs of ever reversing.
The radical change that is necessary to shift this paradigm back to peace is for people to wake
up to the reality that no matter which puppet is in the White House, the status quo remains
unchanged.
Trump is proving that he can lie to get into power and his supporters ignore it. If you doubt
this fact, look at what
Trump
did by calling out Saudi Arabia for their role in 9/11
and their support for terror worldwide
prior to getting elected. He now supports these terrorists and his constituency couldn't care less.
This madness has to stop.
Humanity has to stop being fooled by rhetoric
read from teleprompters by puppets doing the bidding of their masters. If Americans aren't shaken
out of this stupor by the idea that the US military and its allies are now killing more innocent
people than the Taliban and ISIS -- combined -- perhaps
But we love them anyway. They are our heroes, bravely fighting for
our freedoms in Afghanistan. Unless we kill the Afghanis over
there, they'll come here to kill us. Sure, sometimes our boys kill
innocents, but come on, we all know there are no innocent Muslims.
Even if they're kids, they'll eventually grow up to be terrorists
so better to kill them sooner than later. USA! USA! Woof! Woof!
What kind of person, really, joins the US military today?
It was
shown long ago that the Iraq war was based upon lies. Killing
civilians, bombing hospitals, air attacks on weddings, stabbing
captured and unconscious enemy in the throat (and getting away
with it), clearly there is no threat to the US to justify the
killing ...
But the actual killers are getting a bit of a surprise. Women
are being promoted past them and over them. The PC rules are
ruining the boys club and even their language is monitored. The
officers don't give a damn other than progressing to full colonel
at least, retiring with a nice pension and then working for high
pay for the private defense companies. The killers think they
will be admired, but they are just tools and may even be pushed
out.
Interestingly, through all the US bombing and killing, the
population of Afghanistan has increased from about 19 million in
2001 to about 37 million today, nearly doubling during the
senseless US attacks on their culture and people.
Sometimes much can be learned by asking simple questions. Why?
Simple questions most often have answers. Complex questions emerge
because folks can't bear to hear the answers to the simple ones. A
simple question that would be good to ask now is. Why are we
fighting in Afghanistan?
http://quillian.net/blog/your-punishment-for-believing-lies/
My suspicion is that some of these supposed "loner" white supremacist individuals have had
some contact with security forces in the past either as or through informants. I would not be
surprised if many (if not most) such individuals ended up converted to extreme forms of
fascism by joining online groups and networks infiltrated by government law and order /
security organisations (you can guess which ones in your own countries) looking for gullible
informants and patsies.
Before the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege and shoot-out in Idaho that resulted in the deaths of his
wife and son, the survivalist Randy Weaver had resisted being drawn into white supremacist
groups such as the Aryan Nations (though he personally knew some people in those groups) on
the suspicion that he was being set up by law enforcement agencies. (An informant for one
such agency met Weaver at an Aryan
Nations meeting in 1986. )
WSWS.org has published articles in the past on the close association between far-right
extremists and sections of the military and security forces in Germany (like this one , and
this
one also).
I would not be surprised if some of the mass shootings (and other supposed terrorist
incidents blamed on radicalised Muslim individuals) that have occurred in the US and
elsewhere eventually turn out to have the fingerprints of agencies that claim to be
protecting the public.
"... Wall Street bankers funded all those 'anti colonial movements' in the first place. They wanted to deal with some corrupt brown black politician over an honest White/Japanese colonial officer. ..."
"... What many people do not know is that the after the damage done by the Great Depression (the total Wall Street take over of the US Economy and the looting of independent of American business with the help of the private 'Federal' reserve ), The British Government put restrictions on trade in between the British Empire and USA to protect the economies of Britain and all of her colonies from the Wall Street pigs. ..."
http://www.unz.com/audio/gunsbutter_the-imf-and-world-bank-partners-in-backwardness-407/
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Michael Hudson discusses his seminal work of 1972, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire,
a critique of how the US exploits foreign economies through IMF and World bank debt; difference between the IMF
and World Bank; World Bank dysfunctional from the outset; loans made in foreign currency only; policy to
provide loans for countries to devote their land to export plantation crops; US food and monetary imperialism;
U.S. agricultural protectionism built into the postwar global system; promotion of dependency on the US as food
supplier; food blackmail; perpetration of world poverty preferred; no encouragement of land reform;
privatization of the public domain; America aided, not foreign economies; exploitation of mineral deposits;
bribery; foreign nations politically controlled at the top; veto power for US only.
This was planned decades ago. That is why Wall Street bankers funded all those 'anti colonial movements' in the
first place. They wanted to deal with some corrupt brown black politician over an honest White/Japanese
colonial officer.
"As far as is known "America's" anti-British policy was first given concrete expression in the brief that
General Marshall took with him to the Quebec Conference in 1943.
This was to the effect that the greatest single obstacle to the expansion of America's export-capitalism after
the war would be not the Soviet Union but the British Empire. What this meant, in practical terms, was that as
soon as the enemies in the field had been disposed of would come the turn of the British Empire to be
progressively destroyed and that means to this end would be shaped even while hostilities raged. The moment
they were over the campaign could begin in real earnest, the signal for which was to be Truman's abrupt
dropping of Lend-Lease to an ally whose economy had been so closely geared to war production that many markets
for her goods had been systematically referred to U.S producers.
The British Empire was not the only ally marked down for liquidation. The Dutch Empire in the East Indies and
the French Empire in Indo-China and Africa were also high on the list "
What many people do not know is that the after the damage done by the Great Depression (the total Wall
Street take over of the US Economy and the looting of independent of American business with the help of the
private 'Federal' reserve ), The British Government put restrictions on trade in between the British Empire and
USA to protect the economies of Britain and all of her colonies from the Wall Street pigs.
In Page 22 of the book we read
"However, as has happened time and again throughout history, the money-lenders had tended to overplay their
hand. The six million German unemployed who were the victims of the "Great Depression" resulted in a formidable
revolt against the Money Power -- the revolt of Adolf Hitler. There was also a rebellion, although of a much
milder kind, in Great Britain and the British nations overseas, whose representatives met in Ottawa in 1932 to
hammer out a system of Imperial Preferences calculated to insulate the British world against Wall St.
amok-runs. These Preferences, as we shall see, incurred the unrelenting hostility of the New York Money Power
and the only reason why a show-down was not forced was the far more serious threat to the international
financial system implicit in the economic doctrines of the Third Reich."
In other words, the Wall street greedy pigs after devouring American industry came to the conclusion that
they faced a major threat from Third Reich Germany (the barter system used by the regime) as well as to a
lesser extent from the British Empire (and other Empires). Hence the war to destroy Third Reich Germany,
Japanese Empire and Italy and then after the war the eventual slow destruction of the European Empires,
especially the British Empire. And hence we suddenly see 'independence movements' sprouting all over the world
and succeeding. Even before the war we had 'independence movements' and 'communist movements' all around the
world thanks to their pet 'Soviet Russia's' agents going all around and 'radicalisng the masses', all with the
blessings of Wall Street Banker pigs.
I'm curious do you live in Britain? I would bet you do because of your relentless protection of the
British Empire. The British Empire has been working on Economic World Domination since Cecil Rhodes established
the Round Table groups. I agree with a comment you made about British citizens not being responsible for their
government's tretment of countries in the colonial era. The same can be said about the American citizen if you
place all the blame on the political class and Wall Street. But then we have to take into consideration the
benefits that the English and American citizen receive from their government's crimminal dealings. As long as
they live better than anyone else in the world, they will not protest against the hand that feed them.
This artilce (audio) uncovers the reason why America and Britian along with their Anglo Saxon partners
Canada and Australia control other country's economies. Creating poverty in other countries keeps the Anglo
Saxon countries ecomomically superiour at the expense of the poor throughout the world. If American and British
citizens stopped their government's continued assault on third world countries the immigration crisis would
end.
America and England have been dominant over other countries with the help of their Jewish partners for a
long time Malla. As you commented to me, they have married into prominent British Society. I'm sorry Malla, but
there is a Mexican saying "Tanta culpa tiene el que mata la vaca que el que detiene la pata". Translation: "The
person that holds the cows feet is as guilty as the one that kills it". Meaning when you unknowingly
participate in a crime you are just as responsible as the one commiting it.
It's hard for decent Americans and British people to see themselves as perpitrators of such horrible
injustices because most of them are very warm and loving Christian people I'm sure. But so are the people of
the countries their government target. Until people stop looking at the problems we are all facing as a
Christian/Muslim White/Black High IQ/Low IQ problem, things will only get worse. The real problem as I see
it is a Social Class problem as we can see by this article. The Elites have no problem helping Blacks and other
races as long as they are the Rich Elites. The lower class people can starve white, black, brown, etc. it
doesn't matter just another day in the life of a parasite.
The problem as I see it, can only be solved by the "White" people that are socially below the Elites in
power and take it away from them. The reason why I say that is because history tells us that when the Social
underclass revolts against the oppressor government as so many have in Latin America, the U.S. send their
military to help the crimminal leaders and the people are murdered. The problem needs to be stopped at the
source or else nothing can change. We can talk about the Jews till we're bloe in face, but it is clear as to
who is responsible
@Malla
I am so surprised there are only 2 comments on this article! This is the most important information on this
site I like your comments Malla, you're a very smart Lady me I'm just a Rebel that hates bullies with a
passion! Some of my comments are very rough around the edges depending on the level of racism and ignorance the
commentator writes. But, always respectful to the opposite sex. Thanks for engaging Have a nice day.
Very impressive interview. Indeed, it is shocking when all piracy strategies are put together the brilliante
way Professor Hudson does. A lecture for everybody.
We can talk about the Jews till we're bloe in face, but it is clear as to who is responsible
Who do you think is behind British and American Imperialism? As per Ron Unz's findings, who was behind
Bolshevism? Regarding social and political control, there is always a Zionist element. Look at the World Bank,
the CFR, the Chabad Lubavitch presence behind Netanyahu, Putin and Trump. Look at media, music and education.
What about the Warburgs both in the United States and in Nazi Germany.
https://www.onjewishmatters.com/archives/18428
John Ruskin was the mentor of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University. Cecil Rhodes was a member of the "Society
of the Elect" along with Rothschild. ( See pg. 311
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
) Rothschild proud founder of the
state of israel. Below are photos of John Ruskin's grave. Why is there a Swastika placed between 1819 and 1900?
Also, why is there a Menorah on his headstone? "The seven branch menorah was used in the ancient temple of
Jerusalem The menorah is part of the coat of arms of the modern State of Israel."
https://www.judaicawebstore.com/7-branched-menorahs-C918.aspx
Creating poverty in other countries keeps the Anglo Saxon countries ecomomically superiour at the expense
of the poor throughout the world. If American and British citizens stopped their government's continued
assault on third world countries the immigration crisis would end.
I disagree completely. In most brown black countries, the people themselves exploit each other and cause all
the screw ups. Most people here in India (poor or rich) cheat, swindle and ruthlessly exploit others. Of course
you have the IMF gang hovering around for their loot but they are not the main factor in many third world
countries.
Thank you Bonnie for asking the perfect questions and thank you Michael for your ever
incisive and brilliantly clear answers. Together this interview is the perfect Predatory Economics 101 for
ordinary people, i.e. the Bonnie & Michael course
I write this from Athens Greece in 2019, 3 days after our US educated (Harvard & Stanford) oligarchical
class has just been voted back into power with a parliamentary majority in bone-headed but fully deserved
reaction to Tsipras the fake left traitor. Very sad and very silly since Greece is a 100% captive colony of EU
/ Washington. The only upside is that with the Trotskyists out Greeks will be able to keep our icons and our
Orthodoxy, something we shall need more than ever.
The following is a portion of an op-ed piece that appeared in the New
York Times On April 4, 1944 . It was written by Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president;
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power
ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United
States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include
only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most
American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even
in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms
after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be
so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.
American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition
among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand
for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to
us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most
Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin
American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the
way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak
and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready
to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work
out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the
United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will
be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in
World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many
South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist
concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after
the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.
The full text is quite useful in understanding that there is no question as to how and why
we find ourselves in the present predicament, it is the logical outcome of a process that was
well understood during FDR's tenure.
That understanding has since been deliberately eradicated by the powerful interests that
control our media.
Somebody in the twitterverse asked the twits this question: "Name a job that you can
completely suck at and still keep your job?" Instantly answered by Max Blumenthal "Beltway
think tank senior fellow"
One of Neoliberalism's assets as Hudson explains is "Intellectual Property" which is
another rent-seeking economic segment and part of Trump's Unilateral Pirate Ship. I think
you'll benefit from this Hudson paper detailing Cold War
2.0:
"The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade 'partners'
pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys
monopoly pricing 'rights' for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other
countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology
goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade 'partner'
surrenders."
The Empire's dilemma is it's made education costs so high it can't get the domestic talent
it requires to continue its rapidly diminishing technological superiority, thus the need for
"more allies to bypass Huawei"--note the word usage, "bypass", not compete with or surpass,
the connotation being its removal as a rival, thus continuing dependency on US-based
tech.
Not entirely unrelated is my comment to vk at 8 above. The Outlaw US Empire is most
certainly classified as a Complex Society that tries to solve its problems with ever more
complex solutions that eventually lead to negative returns that further complicate the
problem. (Listen to the podcast
here by Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies , where you
can also download a pdf copy!) With the USAF and the military as a whole, increasing amounts
of money are thrown at ever increasingly complex weapons systems yet performance in all
sectors deteriorates while the ability to recruit also degrades. The problems are widely
written about and are often cited here. And as we see with Iran and other examples, elegant
simplicity can defeat multilayered complexity. But Imperial policy makers continue to
double-down which further increases the complexity of the situation. Ouch!!
Remember all those lies Krugman, EMike and Kurt said about "Bernie Bros?" Well turns out they
are the out of touch elites, not Sanders supporters. They were projecting. Krugman won't even
go all in for Warren!!!
Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common
His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in
politics.
By HOLLY OTTERBEIN
07/12/2019 05:01 AM EDT
PHILADELPHIA -- Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are two of the most ideologically
aligned candidates in the Democratic primary -- both left-wing populists who rail against a
"rigged" economic system.
But the fellow enemies of the 1 percent have surprisingly different bases of support.
In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats
Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees. Sanders performs better with men, Warren with
women. Younger people who vote less frequently are more often in Sanders' camp; seniors who
follow politics closely generally prefer Warren.
Sanders also has won over more African Americans than Warren: He earns a greater share of
support from black voters than any candidate in the race except for Joe Biden, according to
the latest Morning Consult surveys.
For progressive activists, who are gathering this week in Philadelphia at the annual
Netroots Nation conference, it's both promising and a source of concern that the two leading
left-wingers in the primary attract such distinct fans. It demonstrates that a progressive
economic message can excite different parts of the electorate, but it also means that Sanders
and Warren likely need to expand their bases in order to win the Democratic nomination.
Put another way, if their voters could magically be aligned behind one or the other, it
would vastly increase the odds of a Democratic nominee on the left wing of the ideological
spectrum.
The fact that Warren and Sanders' bases don't perfectly overlap hasn't garnered much
public attention, but it's something very much on the minds of their aides and allies.
"It shows that the media does not base their perceptions on data that is publicly
available," said Ari Rabin-Havt, chief of staff to the Sanders campaign. "I think people
develop overly simplistic views of politics that presume that people who live in the real
world think the same way as elite media in D.C. and New York."
It's not a given that Sanders voters would flock to Warren, or vice versa, if one of them
left the race and endorsed the other. In Morning Consult, Reuters-Ipsos and Washington
Post-ABC News polls, more Sanders supporters name Biden as their second choice than Warren --
and a higher percentage of Warren voters pick Kamala Harris as their No. 2 than Sanders,
according to recent surveys.
Wes Bode, a retired contractor in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa,
illustrates the point: He said he likes that Sanders has "new ideas," such as free college
tuition, and recently attended one of his town halls in the state. But he's fond of Biden,
too, because he's "for the working man."
It might seem unusual that a voter's top picks for 2020 are the two candidates who best
represent the opposite poles of the Democratic Party. But a person like Bode is actually more
common than someone like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose favorites are Sanders and
Warren.
For Sanders, the need to grow his base is a problem that dates back to his 2016 run. He
failed to win the nomination that year in large part because he was unable to win over older
voters, especially older voters of color.
"Two places where Bernie has always struggled with is older voters and women to some
degree," said Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist to Sanders in 2016. "Warren is identifiably a
Democrat and runs as a Democrat, so I think many more establishment Democrats in the party
are more drawn to her -- whereas Bernie very intentionally ran for reelection as an
independent and identifies as an independent, and appeals to those who look inside the
Democratic Party and think it's not their thing."
During the 2020 campaign, Sanders' advisers have acknowledged that he needs to appeal more
to older voters, and he's recently been holding more intimate events in the early states that
tend to attract more senior crowds than his rallies do. His team is also trying hard to
expand the primary electorate by turning out infrequent voters.
Warren, meanwhile, is aggressively working to win African American support. Her allies
argue that her performance at events such as Al Sharpton's National Action Network convention
and the She the People conference show that she has room to grow among black voters.
"If you were looking to buy a rising stock, you would look at future market share and
indicators of strong fundamentals," said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change
Campaign Committee, which backs Warren. "Elizabeth Warren has consistently connected on a gut
level with black audiences ... getting standing ovations after connecting her inspiring plans
to her personal story of struggle growing up poor in Oklahoma and being a single mom in
Texas."
Several Democratic operatives said they believe Warren has the ability to expand her base
to include black women in particular.
"She impressed 2,000 top women of color activists at [our conference]," said Aimee
Allison, founder of She the People. "Elizabeth Warren has deepened, sharpened and made racial
justice a grounding component of her policies."
A look at their poll numbers shows how distinct the pools of support for Sanders vs.
Warren are.
Twenty-two percent of Democratic primary voters who earn less than $50,000 annually
support Sanders, while 12 percent are for Warren, according to an average of the past four
weeks of Morning Consult polling. Of those without college degrees, 22 percent are behind
Sanders; 10 percent back Warren.
Roughly the same percentage of voters with bachelor's degrees -- 16 percent and 15
percent, respectively -- support Sanders and Warren. But among those with postgraduate
degrees, 12 percent are for Sanders and 19 percent are for Warren.
There's a similar split based on age, gender and interest in politics. Sanders wins more
than one-third of the 18- to 29-year-olds, while Warren gets 11 percent of them. Warren has
the support of 13 percent of those aged 30 to 44, 12 percent of those aged 45 to 54, and 13
percent of those aged both 55 to 64 and 65 and up. Sanders' support goes down as the age of
voters goes up: He is backed by 25 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds, 17 percent of 45- to
54-year-olds, 12 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds, and 8 percent of those 65 and older.
Twenty percent of men support Sanders and 11 percent support Warren; 18 percent of women
are behind Sanders and 14 percent are behind Warren.
Warren also performs best among voters who are "extremely interested" in politics (winning
17 percent of them), while Sanders is strongest among those who are "not at all interested"
(26 percent).
As for black voters, 19 percent are behind Sanders, while 9 percent support Warren.
With Biden still atop most polls, even after a widely panned performance at the first
Democratic debate, some progressives still fear that Warren and Sanders could divide the left
and hand the nomination to the former vice president.
"There's a lot of time left in this campaign," said Sean McElwee, co-founder of the
liberal think tank Data for Progress. "But one thing that's clear is that it's very important
for the left that we ensure that we don't split the field and allow someone like Joe Biden to
be the nominee."
"Elizabeth Warren on student loans: New bill would cancel debt for millions"
By Katie Lobosco, CNN...18 hrs ago
"Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is introducing a bill Tuesday that would cancel the
student loan debts of tens of millions of Americans, a plan she first proposed on the
campaign trail in April.
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate is partnering with South Carolina Rep. James
Clyburn, also a Democrat, who will sponsor companion legislation in the House.
The bill would forgive $50,000 in student loans for Americans in households earning less
than $100,000 a year, resulting in immediate relief to more than an estimated 95% of the 45
million Americans with student debt.
For those earning more than $100,000, the bill would offer partial debt relief with the
amount getting gradually smaller until it phases out. Households that make more than $250,000
are not eligible for any debt relief.
Warren's campaign has said that she would pay for the debt relief -- as well as her plan
to make tuition free at public colleges -- with revenue from her proposed wealth tax. It
would assess a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1
billion.
The one-time debt cancellation could cost $640 billion, the campaign has said."...
Warren's campaign has said that she would pay for the debt relief -- as well as her plan
to make tuition free at public colleges -- with revenue from her proposed wealth tax. It
would assess a 2% tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3% tax on wealth above $1
billion.
The one-time debt cancellation could cost $640 billion, the campaign has said.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, another Democratic presidential hopeful, also has a student
debt cancellation proposal. But his goes further and would cancel all $1.6 trillion in
outstanding loan debt. There would be no eligibility limitations and it would be paid for
with a new tax on Wall Street speculation. Sanders has proposed making tuition free at public
colleges, as well.
As proposed, Warren's bill would ensure that the debt canceled would not be taxed as
income. Those borrowers with private loans would be allowed to convert them into federal
loans so that they could be forgiven. ...
When the United States government wants to raise money from individuals, its mode of
choice, for more than a century, has been to tax what people earn -- the income they receive
from work or investments.
But what if instead the government taxed the wealth you had accumulated?
That is the idea behind a policy Senator Elizabeth Warren has embraced in her presidential
campaign. It represents a more substantial rethinking of the federal government's approach to
taxation than anything a major presidential candidate has proposed in recent memory -- a new
wealth tax that would have enormous implications for inequality.
It would shift more of the burden of paying for government toward the families that have
accumulated fortunes in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And over time, such
a tax would make it less likely that such fortunes develop.
What is the Warren plan?
Developed by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two University of California, Berkeley,
economists who are leading scholars of inequality, the proposal is to tax a family's wealth
above $50 million at 2 percent a year, with an additional surcharge of 1 percent on wealth
over $1 billion.
Mr. Saez and Mr. Zucman estimate that 75,000 households would owe such a tax, or about one
out of 1,700 American families.
A family worth $60 million would owe the federal government $200,000 in wealth tax, over
and above what they may owe on income from wages, dividends or interest payments.
If the estimates of his net worth are accurate, Mr. Buffett would owe the I.R.S. about
$2.5 billion a year, in addition to income or capital gains taxes. The Waltons would owe
about $1.3 billion each.
The tax would therefore chip away at the net worth of the extremely rich, especially if
they mainly hold investments with low returns, like bonds, or depreciating assets like
yachts.
It would work a little like the property tax that most cities and states impose on real
estate, an annual payment tied to the value of assets rather than income. But instead of
applying just to homes and land, it would apply to everything: fine art collections, yachts
and privately held businesses.
What are the arguments against it?
They are both philosophical and practical.
On the philosophical side, you can argue that people who have earned money, and paid
appropriate income tax on it, are entitled to the wealth they accumulate.
Moreover, the wealth that individual families accumulate under the current system is
arguably likelier to be put to work investing in large-scale projects that make the economy
stronger. They can invest in innovative companies, for example, or huge real estate projects,
in ways that small investors generally can't. ...
2016 was widely recognized as the year of "populism," more adequately described as the year
of revolt against the political Establishment -- in both Parties. The Democratic Primary in
2016 was a battle of progressive forces against the Democratic Establishment, and the battle
lines were clearly drawn. Those lines remain much the same as we approach 2020.
On the Progressive or Populist side were those who opposed the endless wars in the Middle
East, and on the Establishment side those who supported those long and bloody wars. On the
Progressive Side were those who supported badly needed domestic reforms, most notably Medicare
for All, which after all is a reform of almost 20% of the entire economy and a reform that has
to do with life itself. In contrast on the Establishment side were those who supported
ObamaCare, a device for leaving our health care to the tender mercies of the Insurance
behemoths with its ever increasing premiums and ever decreasing coverage.
In 2016 the pundits gave progressives little chance of success. Hillary Clinton was a
shoo-in, we were all assured by a horde of "reliable sources." And given the control that the
Clintonites exercised over the Democratic Party apparatus, there was little prospect of a
successful rebellion and every chance of having one's career badly damaged by opposing Party
elite. Summer soldiers and duplicitous candidates were not interested in challenging the
Establishment.
In 2016 Bernie Sanders was the only politician who was willing to take on the Establishment.
Although not technically a Democrat, he caucused with them and worked with them. And he was a
lifelong, reliable and ardent advocate for Medicare for All and a consistent opponent of the
endless wars. For these things he was prepared to do battle against overwhelming odds on the
chance that he might prevail and because from his grass roots contacts he sensed that a
rebellion was brewing.
In 2016 only one among the current crop of candidates followed Bernie, supported him and
joined him on the campaign trail -- Tulsi Gabbard. At the time she was a two term Congresswoman
and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a career building position, from
which she would have to resign in order to support one of the candidates. Moreover, reports
said she bridled at the internal bias of the DNC in favor of Hillary. To express her
displeasure with the DNC and to support Bernie, she had to defy the Clinton Establishment,
which might even have terminated her political career. But she was a foe of the endless wars,
partly based on her own experience as a National Guard member who had been deployed to Iraq in
a medical unit and saw the ravages of war first hand. So she joined Bernie, introducing him at
many of his rallies and strengthening his antiwar message.
Bernie and Tulsi proved themselves in the defining battle of 2016. They let us know
unequivocally where they stand. And Bernie might well have won the nomination were he not
cheated out of it by the Establishment which continues to control the levers of power in the
Democratic Party to this day.
In 2016 these two stood in stark contrast to the other 2020 Democratic candidates. Let us
take one example of these others, Elizabeth Warren, a darling of the main stream media which
often refers to her as ideologically aligned to Bernie Sanders. Perhaps she is so aligned at
times -- at least in words; she is after all in favor of Medicare for All, although she hastens
to add that she is "open to other approaches." That qualifier is balm to the ears of the
Insurance behemoths. Translation: she has already surrendered before the battle has begun.
In 2016 a critical primary for Bernie was Masschusetts where Senator Warren wields
considerable influence. Clinton defeated Sanders there by a mere 1.5% whereas she had lost to
Obama there by 15% in 2008. Wikipedia has this to say of the
primary:
"Following the primary, Elizabeth Warren, the state's senior US senator, was widely
criticized by Sanders supporters online for her refusal to endorse him prior to the primary.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders have argued that an endorsement from Warren, whose political
positions were similar to that of Sanders's, and who was a frequent critic of Hillary Clinton
in the past, could have handed Massachusetts to him. "
One must conclude that either Warren does not genuinely share the views of Sanders or she is
loath to buck the Establishment and fight for those views. In either event she, and the others
who failed to back Bernie in 2016, are not made of the stuff that can win Medicare for All,
bring an end to the regime change wars and illegal sanctions of the last four or more
administrations, begin serious negotiations to end the existential nuclear peril, and address
the many other problems facing us and all of humanity.
“Bernie walked the walk”
When was that? The time he toured through Baltimore and called it a third world city while
assiduously not discussing how, why, and because of who it became so?
The way he openly sold out to Clinton and ducked into his new third manor house to avoid
being held to task for leaving his base out to dry the very moment they were ready to
seriously break ranks from the neolib political machine?
Is he walking the walk now as he tries to rationalize away his underpaying of his campaign
workers and cuts hours to minimize the costs of the 15 dollar floor price he demanded for
everyone other employer?
The man is a DNC stooge through and through.
And Tulsi being anti-war out of personal squeamishness doesn’t make up for the rest of
her painfully party-line-compliant platform, particularly when the Deep State has multiple
active avenues available to at the very least keep our military presence still existing
military presence trapped and held hostage. All the dove cooing in recorded world history
won’t hold up when, not if, Britain or France or whoever deliberately sinks another
navy vessel and drags her by the hair into another desert scrum.
@Tusk As with the 1960 Presidential Election, Hillary stole that election fair and
square. Had Sanders went full third party, it would’ve destroyed the Democrats
outright. Despite Clinton’s cheating, Bernie went ahead and bent the knee. Strangely
enough, Trump’s victory saved Sanders and his faction. Had Clinton won, she
would’ve purged the Sanders supporters relentlessly.
There is such a thing as a tactical retreat. Now he’s able to play again.
is that our “establishment elite” have failed the United States of
America.
How, you may ask ?
The answer is simple.
By defrauded us into multiple illegal wars of aggression they have bankrupted the entire
nation.
The iron fact is that because our “elites” lied us into illegal war we are now
22.5 trillion dollars in heinous debt.
Why is this okay ?
The answer is simple.
It is not okay, NOT AT ALL .
And it is not enough (anymore) to just demand we “end our wars”, Mr.
Walsh.
The cost in treasure has been too high and the burden on the US taxpayer too obscene.
Without demanding “accountability” from our elites, who lied us into this
catastrophe, our nation is most probably going under.
I say…. make them pay …”every penny”…. for the cost of
the wars they lied us into.
An initiative, like the “War fraud Accountability Act” (retroactive to 2002)
would do just that.
it would replenish the coffers of our nation with all the assets of the larcenous
profiteers who deceived us all….into heinous war debt.
As we witness the rise of China as the new global economic powerhouse, we can see first
hand how a nation can rise to immense wealth and global influence “precisely
because” it was never deceived by its “ruling class” into squandering all
its resources initiating and fighting endless criminal wars.
Just imagine where the USA would be today, had we chosen the same course.
Until Dems are willing to refuse to depend on Haim Saban’s “generous
donation” to the Dem candidate, none of their candidates will deserve to be the the
POTUS candidate. Ditto for the Republicans and their fetish with Shelly Adelson. Candidates
must kowtow to Israel or else there will be no dough for them and they might even be
challenged in their incumbencies next time around by ADL/AIPAC. Until we get rid of Israeli
money and political power, we are toast.
1)Both Sanders and Gabbard are onboard for going to war against Christian Russia over
Crimea..Sanders has gone so far as saying that a Military response against Russia is an
option if all else fails in getting Russia out of Crimea…
2)Both Sanders and Gabbard are waging a war of RACIAL EXTERMINATION against Working Class
Native Born White American Males….And that’s WHITE GENOCIDE!!!!
@Kronos Bernie “bent the knee” once and got to enjoy his lakeside home and
his wife protected from fraud prosecution after she stole money from People’s United
Bank for her college scam.
He is owned.
If Tulsi were a serious threat she would be neutralized one way or another.
“Progressives” are virtue signaling fools–the kleptocracy marches on and
laughs at them.
One has to wonder where Dems like Warren and their identity politics is taking the US.
Will everyone who even slightly disagrees with them be labeled a terrorist?
OK, obviously I need to weigh in on Elizabeth Warren's trade proposal. I've been a huge
fan of her plans so far. This one, not so much, although some of the critiques are overdone
1/
Last month, I released my economic patriotism agenda -- my commitment to fundamentally
changing the government's approach to the economy so that we put the interests of American
workers and families ahead of the interests of multinational corporations. I've already
released my ideas for applying economic patriotism to manufacturing and to Wall Street. This
is my plan for using economic patriotism to overhaul our approach to trade.
8:41 AM - 30 Jul 2019
The truth is that this would have been a bad and destructive plan if implemented in, say,
1980. At this point it's still problematic, but not disastrous (this is going to be a long
tweet storm) 2/
Background: the way we currently do trade negotiations is that professionals negotiate out
of public view, but with input from key business players. Then Congress gets an up or down
vote on the result 3/
This can sound like a process rigged in favor of special interests. But it was created by
FDR, and its actual intent was largely the opposite. It took away the ability of
Congresspeople to stuff trade bills with goodies for their donors and districts 4/
And while business interests certainly got a lot of input, it was set up in a way that set
different groups against each other -- exporters versus import-competing industries -- and
this served the interests of the general public 5/
Without this system we wouldn't have achieved the great opening of world markets after
World War II -- and that opening was a very good thing overall, especially for poor
countries, and helped promote peace 6/
So what has changed? The key point is that the system pretty much achieved its goals;
we're a low-tariff world. And that has had a peculiar consequence: these days "trade
negotiations" aren't mainly about trade, they're about intellectual property and regulation
7/
And it's not at all clear that such deals are actually good for the world, which is why I
was a soft opponent of TPP 8/
Not to keep you in suspense, I'm thumbs down. I don't think the proposal is likely to be
the terrible, worker-destroying pact some progressives assert, but it doesn't look like a
good thing either for the world or for the United States, and you have to wonder why the
Obama administration, in particular, would consider devoting any political capital to getting
this through.
So what Warren proposes is that we partially unravel the system FDR built, making trade
negotiations more transparent and giving Congress a bigger role in shaping the deals. This
sounds more democratic, but that's a bit deceiving 9/
Mainly it would substitute one kind of special interest distortion for another. That would
have been a clearly bad thing when trade deals were actually about trade. Today, I think it's
ambiguous 10/
Warren would also expand the criteria for trade policy to include a number of non-trade
goals, like labor rights and environmental protection. Here again there are arguments on both
sides 11/
On one side, the potential for abuse would be large -- we could be slapping tariffs on
countries for all kinds of reasons, turning trade policy into global power politics, which
would be really bas for smaller, weaker countries 12/
On the other hand, there are some cases where trade policy will almost surely have to be
used to enforce some common action. If we ever do act on climate change, carbon tariffs will
be needed to discipline free riders 13/
"President Obama on Sunday praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as
an 'extraordinary first step,' but he spoke out against a provision that would impose trade
penalties on countries that do not accept limits on global warming pollution."
And I also think the report gives a false impression of what this is about, making it seem
as if it's nothing but dirty politics...
Overall, this is the weakest Warren plan so far. (Still waiting to hear from her on health
care! Harris has taken point there, and done it well) But it's not bad enough to change the
verdict that she's the strongest contender on policy grounds 14/
He backs Harris's attempt to split difference on health care reform.
The problem with PK and Kurt and EMike is that if you don't deliver better services and
rising living standards - no matter the excuses we don't care about your excuses -
you're going to get more racism, demagogues like Trump and toxic politics.
The Dems's track record for the past 40 years is objectively awful. PK lives in a rich
man's bubble if he believes corporate trade has been good for humanity and peace.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) sparred Tuesday night
over her proposed "no first use" policy on nuclear weapons during the Democratic debate.
In defending the proposed policy, Warren argued for diplomatic and economic solutions to
conflict, saying "we should not be asking our military to take on jobs that do not have a
military solution."
But Bullock opposed that proposal, saying, "I don't want to turn around and say, 'Well,
Detroit has to be gone before we would ever use that.'"
Warren is the lead sponsor of the Senate version of a bill that would make it U.S. policy
not to use nuclear weapons first.
It has long been the policy of the United States that the country reserves the right to
launch a preemptive nuclear strike.
Former President Obama reportedly weighed changing the policy before leaving office, but
ultimately did not after advisers argued doing so could embolden adversaries.
Backers of a no first use policy argue it would improve U.S. national security by reducing
the risk of miscalculation while still allowing the United States to launch a nuclear strike
in response to an attack.
During the debate, Warren argued such a policy would "make the world safer."
"The United States is not going to use nuclear weapons preemptively, and we need to say so
to the entire world," she said. "It reduces the likelihood that someone miscalculates,
someone misunderstands."
Bullock argued he wouldn't want to take the option off the table, but that there should be
negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons.
"Never, I hope, certainly in my term or anyone else would we really even get close to
pulling that trigger," he said. "Going from a position of strength, we should be negotiating
down so there aren't nuclear weapons. But drawing those lines in the sand at this point, I
wouldn't do."
Warren shot back that the world is closer to nuclear warfare after Trump's presidency,
which is seeing the end of a landmark arms control agreement with Russia, the development of
a low-yield submarine-launched warhead and the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear
agreement.
"We don't expand trust around the world by saying, 'you know, we might be the first one to
use a nuclear weapon,'" she said. "We have to have an announced policy that is one the entire
world can live with."
Bullock said he agreed on the need to return to nonproliferation standards but that
unpredictable enemies such as North Korea require keeping first use as an option.
"When so many crazy folks are getting closer to having a nuclear weapon, I don't want them
to think, 'I could strike this country,'" he said. "Part of the strength really is to
deter."
----
Long-standing US policy has been to lump chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons in a single
category. So, our guv'mint implicitly reserves the
right to respond to a chemical attack (say) with
nuclear weapons. This was how the US got het up
about Iraq's supposed 'weapons of mass destruction',
which is how the US lumps them together under
the heading 'CBN' weapons. Iraq certainly
had chemical weapons, possibly biological ones,
and much less plausibly a nuclear weapons program.
It was all about those mysterious 'aluminum tubes',
which supposedly could be used for uranium-enriching centrifuges. (Not these tubes,
apparently.)
But I digress. Suffice it to say, the US has
quite a few self-serving policies.
Now, the real question is, how much longer
do we want to have Mr Trump in control
of the nuclear football, as the nuke-
authorizing gadget is known?
In Oct it will be 18 full years in Afghanistan. The US is not a learning organization.
If you trust the media, you trust the hugely funded propaganda machine that makes Goebbels
look stone age primitive.
I am a bit sensitive this week, I am finishing Gloria Emerson's "Winner and Losers"
scratching a lot of scars from Vietnam. Not easy reading if you changed your mind once the
blither was exposed.
Somewhere over Delong's it was recommended and amazon had a hardcover for
$1.56........
Bottomline from Winners and Losers: The blither is reminiscent and much of the news topics
the same.
Who gives a monkeys? The real issue is that the selfish, disorientated and cowardly way the
Dems are conducting this race is handing Trump a winning platform for 2020.
After long hard thinking I have come to the sad conclusion that Trump is right and that he is
indeed a genius. He has achieved what he had set out to do. He has polarised the standard
bearer for democracy in the world. He has enriched himself and his family. He has broken
American society, possibly irreversibly. He has brought about change in the worlds economies.
He has also managed to set the debate and the stage to win in 2020. Now some may say he has
been an awful president, but looking at his strategy he has been highly successful. He may
not be what we want but he has certainly been better at feeling the pulse of America and
deciding which medicine to give. A truly evil genius indeed.
Sanders and Warren are the only two with some kind of personality. The others look like they
were created by lobbyists and corporate donors in a lab on a computer like Kelly Lebrock from
Weird Science.
The point about taxes going up is a red herring and a straw man argument. If you get
insurance through your employer, you pay anywhere from $300/month to $1200/month for yourself
and family. Through a Medicare for all plan, that payment would disappear. Yes, you'd pay
more in taxes to cover your health insurance, but it would likely be lower than private
insurance, a net gain, with better coverage, no deductible or co-pays. Even if it was the
same, it's still a wash. You're eliminating an expense for a tax. Plus, you're not paying for
some executive's perks and exorbitant salary.
Personally, I'd feel better paying $50,000-$75,000/year to a government administrator than
$10M-$20M/year + perks to a CEO.
Obama was simply being honest there. By any standard, Obama, both Clinton's, Gore (except for
climate change) and Biden are at best moderate Republicans. Each would qualify as being to
the right of Richard Nixon (leaving aside the issue of integrity).
In the case of Bill Clinton, Americans had not got woken to the fact that, while a little
less by Democrats, the middle class was nontheless being screwed by both parties. Obama's
rhetoric was enough cover to fool the public into thinking he would fight for real change.
Both Gore and especially Hillary showed what the public now thinks of "moderates". Bernie
Sanders and/or Elizabeth Warren are the only chances to beat Trump in 2020.
Reparations for slavery, the elimination of private insurance, free health care for anyone
who overstays a visa or walks over from Mexico, and a crystal lady.
We are in trouble. My nightmare of a Trump re-election is more and more likely.
Warren and Sanders clearly demonstrated that a party wanting to win should nominate one of
them.
They enthralled the audience, and showed they possess a vision for the future that every
other Democratic candidate claims to eventually want, when there's time, maybe, perhaps if
they get a majority someday.
Clearly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were the clear winners of the night! They shamed
the listless other candidates, none of whom exhibited a similar energy, excitement &
vision for the future of the country. Despite a definite veneer of displeasure by your
account, both the audience at the event, and those watching at home felt the excitement of
progressive proposals won the day.
When Sanders declared he's in favor of free healthcare and free education for illegal
immigrants there was -at best - muted criticism from the other candidates.
Most Americans are likely outraged by this suggestion and this will play in Trump's
favor.
It's obvious that John Delaney is simply a plant by Big Business (which has both the centrist
Democrats and all of Republicans in its pocket) to troll and derail the candidacy of
progressives Sanders and Warren. His sole function is to throw a monkey wrench in their path
and be a "nattering nabob of negativism" (to quote Agnew) regarding their policies. That's
all he does all day and all night, and the centrist-loving moderators and journalists love
giving him infinite time to do his damage
The answer is obvious: if you want your best shot at 86-ing the orange pestilence, then it
has to be Warren/Sanders or Sanders/Warren. You're not supposed to signal your vice-president
until after you've got the nomination, I know, but surely having Trump as president has
shredded all previous norms? Go now, right now, and say that it'll be you two. You can even
keep it open and say that you don't know who'll head the ticket but it will be Warren and
Sanders. That would crush all opposition and keep churning interesting as a guessing game.
Maybe Warren should head the ticket. I know that Sanders is very sharp and he plays
basketball but if he was president then he'd be asking for a second term and to get sworn in
when he's 83 and being in one's eighties might be too much of a psychological barrier. My
suggestion, though, would be it's Sanders/Warren but on the promise that Sanders will step
aside during his first term, after two years and one day (meaning that Warren could serve out
the rest of the term and still then run for two more terms under her own steam).
That would guarantee the first female president and so quieten down the phoney-baloney
identity politics drones; better, it would mean that the US would get an excellent leader in
Elizabeth Warren, no matter her bodily organs; it would pull together the Crooked H.
adherents and get them on side, if they truly care about getting female in there and if it
doesn't it will expose them as the phonies they are. And it would keep matters on policy,
when Trump is weak, rather than personalities, which is the territory on which Trump wants to
fight.
Warren: "We beat it by being the party of big structural change." The issue is whether
"regulation" is big enough and structural enough.
Sanders: "To stand with the working class* of American that for the last 45 years has been
decimated." Then the Canada bus trip. "We need a mass political movement. Take on the greed
and the corruption of the ruling class of this country." Plugs website.
Sanders was better; working the bus trip in was good.
NOTE *
Guardian paraphrase : "Bernie Sanders pledged to stand by the US middle class , recounting his recent trip to Canada to
emphasize the high price of insulin in America." Lol.
The allergy to the phrase "working class" is not accidental. They want as many Americans
as possible thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
As someone who has spent most of my life in the working class, made it to the middle, got
knocked down again, and made my way back up to the middle again, there is most certainly a
difference.
When was the last time (if ever) that someone said the words "ruling class" in a
presidential debate? (I assume that Eugene Debs was never invited to any presidential
debate.)
Even that Bernie said "working class" won points with me. Typical of the Guardian to change
it to "middle class".
Williamson was impressive.
I liked that Warren showed fire and guts. Her policies would be a real change for the better,
especially if pushed farther. My real question about her is whether she would stand up to the
other side and fight to win.
For me, the biggest difference between Bernie and Warren is that I am starting to hope that
Warren would really fight, but I know Bernie would.
I like Bernie better, but I like Warren too, and I *DO* trust her to fight.
The big tell was when she went to Washington as a Senator and Larry Summers said don't
criticize us in public if you want to be part of the club, and she not only ignored that but
told on him publicly!
Two actually GOOD people! They were my dream team last night.
I agree. I'm highly skeptical of Warren delivering anything (especially a victory), and I
don't really trust her to try very hard to implement her plans. Watching her in this debate
opened a thin crack in my icy wall of distrust. I hope she proves me wrong.
Eh . Warren for all her sociopolitical baggage is a completely different animal to the
Blue Dog Corporatist DNC fundie or the Free Market Conservative slash Goat picked me to
administrate reality for everyone dilemma.
But yeah feel [tm] free [tm] to play curricular firing squad and then wonder why ones head
is sore from the effects of banging on an sacrilegious edifice .
I think a photo finish by Sanders and Warren, Buttigieg in the running followed by
Klobuchar, Beto fading, the centrists losing big, Williamson a dark horse coming up on the
outside.
By one key metric -- Google interest -- Marianne Willamson was the dominant figure of the debate. and that's tells a lot about
debate aorgnizers which are not interested in real political debase. Just interested in the debate as a political show. They
are too interested in promoted identity politics to devide the electorate, to allow discussion of really important for the
nation question such as rampant militarism.
Notable quotes:
"... A lot of liberals will love her for her quip, "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running to the president of the United States to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for." ..."
"... Of course, she's celebrating one of the big problems in our political system -- no presidential candidate wants to acknowledge the limits of the power of the office, the presence of the opposition party, judicial review, the inherent difficulties of enacting sweeping changes through legislation, or the limit of government policy to solve problems in society. ..."
"... One of the reasons Americans are so cynical is that they've seen plenty of politicians come and go, with almost every one of them promising the moon and very few living up to the hype. ..."
A lot of liberals will love her for her quip, "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of
running to the president of the United States to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."
Of course, she's celebrating one of the big problems in our political system -- no presidential
candidate wants to acknowledge the limits of the power of the office, the presence of the opposition party,
judicial review, the inherent difficulties of enacting sweeping changes through legislation, or the limit of
government policy to solve problems in society.
One of the reasons Americans are so cynical is that they've seen plenty of politicians come and go, with
almost every one of them promising the moon and very few living up to the hype.
Advertisement
Warren shamelessly insisted that the government could pay for quality health care for every American -- and
illegal immigrants, too! -- just by raising taxes on billionaires and big corporations. Warren made clear
tonight that she's not going to let a little thing like fiscal reality get in between her and the nomination.
... ... ...
Tonight was another night where you could easily forget Amy Klobuchar was on stage. Back when Klobuchar's campaign was in the
nascent stage, people wondered how "Minnesota nice" would play on a national debate stage. We can now declare it boring,
predictable, and forgettable.
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review
of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :
Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have
been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways:
i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United
for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to
betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;
(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"
(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;
iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its
business party duopoly.
The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic
party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public
dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.
By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity"
and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction
of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing
the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.
I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre.
Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong.
Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.
Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than
happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no
further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist
path.
In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US
finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that
the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard
core imperialists who's time has reached its end.
This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.
"... I like Elizabeth Warren, I would vote for her, . Not fond of some of her foreign policy positions, and I don't like how worked up Trump gets her. Forget about Trump, lets here what you plan on doing with the presidency E. Warren! ..."
"... Biden and Harris are both IMO DNC monsters like Clinton who will get us into nuclear war due to a combination of excessive hubris and flat out neocon/neolib stupidity. ..."
"... Warren's okay but it's hard to get past her support for Hillary in 2016 and not for Sanders whose policies reflect hers. So for me, Sanders is still the best, Warren 2nd. However, Trump will destroy him with Socialist scaremongering. ..."
"... Biden is older and will not want war (with any country) complicating his Presidency, and may choose a VP ready to succeed him if he decides not to run for a second term. He will return to the JCPOA. I don't like Biden's ingratiation with Zionists, but the reality is that Biden and Trump will be the choices, so hold your nose, because it's Biden or war and further regime change ambitions with Trump and maybe even a manipulated Trump 3rd term using war as the excuse to prolong his mandate! ..."
"... Biden has no conception of giving up office. As to war he will be as ready to start wars as he was when he and Obama and Hillary were all part of the same administration. ..."
I like Elizabeth Warren, I would vote for her, . Not fond of some of her foreign policy positions, and I don't like how worked
up Trump gets her. Forget about Trump, lets here what you plan on doing with the presidency E. Warren!
In the primaries I will support Gabbard, I believe she is as real of an anti-war candidate as there is, not perfect, but it
is all relative.
Sanders would get my vote, too, although I do fear he is a bit of a "sheep-dog" but I'd give him a shot.
If not one of those candidates, oddly, I'll vote for Trump. Biden and Harris are both IMO DNC monsters like Clinton who will
get us into nuclear war due to a combination of excessive hubris and flat out neocon/neolib stupidity.
I see a repeat of the 2016 election on the horizon, with the DNC doubling down on idiocy and losing in a similar fashion. They
haven't learnt a thing from 2016 and think hyperventilating while screaming Trump, Trump, Trump is going to win the election.
Warren's okay but it's hard to get past her support for Hillary in 2016 and not for Sanders whose policies reflect hers. So
for me, Sanders is still the best, Warren 2nd. However, Trump will destroy him with Socialist scaremongering.
My bet is that the nominee will be Biden, because Biden can beat Trump in the election and Democrats, at the last minute, will
vote out of fear of running someone who might lose to Trump.
My feeling is that there will be war in Trump's second term. Trump will be much bolder and more fascist after getting another
mandate and having nothing to lose. Trump will be a war President having invested more than any other President on military hardware
and itching to show it off. He hasn't fired his hawks for a reason. He will be more full of himself and his own importance in
history. His Zionist financiers will get their money's worth in spades. His agenda will be more hostile on Iran and China and
he'll finish what he started in Venezuela. He will lose the detente with NK, and after the election, he will no longer give friendly
lip service to Russia especially on Syria and Venezuela and will expect Russia to go along with what he has planned for Iran.
Biden is older and will not want war (with any country) complicating his Presidency, and may choose a VP ready to succeed him
if he decides not to run for a second term. He will return to the JCPOA. I don't like Biden's ingratiation with Zionists, but
the reality is that Biden and Trump will be the choices, so hold your nose, because it's Biden or war and further regime change
ambitions with Trump and maybe even a manipulated Trump 3rd term using war as the excuse to prolong his mandate!
"My bet is that the nominee will be Biden, because Biden can beat Trump in the election and Democrats, at the last minute,
will vote out of fear of running someone who might lose to Trump....."
Biden is Hillary without the feminist support. No way that he could beat Trump.
"Biden is older and will not want war (with any country) complicating his Presidency, and may choose a VP ready to succeed
him if he decides not to run for a second term. .."
Biden has no conception of giving up office. As to war he will be as ready to start wars as he was when he and Obama and Hillary
were all part of the same administration.
There is only one Democrat, among the announced candidates, who can beat Trump and his name is Sanders.
The purpose of the "Clintonized" Democratic Party is to diffuse public dissent to neoliberal rule in an orderly fashion. The
militarization of US economy and society means that by joining the war coalition, the Democratic party doesn't have to win any presidential
elections to remain in power. Because military-industrial complex rules the country.
Yes Clinton neoliberals want to stay in control and derail Sanders, much like they did in 2016. Biden and Harris are Clinton faction
Trojan horses to accomplish that. But times changed and they might have to agree on Warren inread of Biden of Harris.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. Trump campaigned on ending our stupid pointless wars and spending that money on ourselves and it looked at first like he might actually deliver (how RACIST of the man!) but not to worry, he is now surrounded by uber hawks and the defense industry dollars are continuing to flow. Which the Democrats are fine with. ..."
"... Trump campaigned on a populist platform, but once elected the only thing he really pushed for was a big juicy tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies which the Democrats are fine with (how come they can easily block attempts to stop the flow of cheap labor across the southern border, but not block massive giveaway tax cuts to the super rich? Because they have their priorities). ..."
"... So yeah, Trump is governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have. ..."
"... I think it's much more likely that a Sanders victory would see the Clintonistas digging even further into the underbelly of the Democratic Party. There they would covertly and overtly sabotage Sanders, brief against him in the press and weaken, corrupt and hamstring any legislation that he proposes ..."
"... electing Sanders can not be the endgame, only the beginning. I think Nax is completely right that a Sanders win would bring on the full wrath of all its opponents. Then the real battle would begin. ..."
"... The notion that real change could happen in this country by winning an election or two is naive in the extreme. But that doesn't make it impossible. ..."
"... Lots of people hired by the Clintons, Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cuomo, etc. will have to be defenestrated. Lose their public sector jobs, if not outright charged with crimes. No one must be left in a position to hurt you after the election. Anyone on the "other side" must lose all power or ability to damage you, except those too weak. These people can be turned and used by you; they can be kept in line with fear. But all the leaders must go. ..."
"... In order for Sanders to survive the onslaught that will surely come, he must have a jobs program ready to go on day one of his administration- and competent people committed to his cause ready to cary out the plan. ..."
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done and continue to do this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... Obama spent tens of trillions of dollars saving Wall Street at the expense of Main Street so that nothing got resolved about the problems that caused the crash in the first place. Trump's policies are doubling down on these problems so there is going to be a major disruption coming down the track. A major recession perhaps or maybe even worse. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
"... By owning the means of production, the Oligarchs will be able to produce the machinery of oppression without the resort to 'money.' In revolutionary times, the most valuable commodity would be flying lead. ..."
"... Could that be why "our" three-letter agencies have been stocking up on that substance for awhile, now? ..."
"... " The purpose of the Democratic Party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion." ..."
"... Yes, this election is starting to remind me of 2004. High-up Dems, believing they're playing the long game, sacrifice the election to maintain standing with big biz donors. ..."
"... Sadly, when Sanders speaks of a "revolution", and when he is referred to as a revolutionary, while at the same time accepting that the Democratic Party is a Party of the top 10%, puts into context just how low the bar is for a political revolution in America. ..."
"... actual democracy is an impediment to those who wield power in today's America, and in that respect the class war continues to be waged, primarily through divisive social issues to divert our attention from the looting being done by and for the rich and the decline in opportunity and economic security for everyone else. ..."
"... the Democratic Party consultant class, I call them leeches, is fighting for its power at the expense of the party and the country. ..."
"... The DLC-type New Democrats (corporatists) have been working to destroy New Deal Democrats and policies as a force in the party. The New Deal Democrats brought in bank regulations, social security, medicare, the voting rights act, restraint on financial predation, and various economic protections for the little-guy and for Main Street businesses. ..."
"... The DLC Dems have brought deregulation of the banks and financial sector, an attempt to cut social security, expansion of prisons, tax cuts for corporations and the billionaires, the return of monopoly power, and the economic squeeze on Main Street businesses forced to compete with monopolies. ..."
That 2020 existential battle, of course, is always cast as between the Democrats and the Republicans.
But there's another existential battle going on, one that will occur before the main event -- the battle for control of the Democratic
Party. In the long run, that battle may turn out to be more important than the one that immediately follows it.
... ... ...
Before mainstream Democrats can begin the "existential battle" with the forces of Trump and Republicanism, they have to win the
existential battle against the force that wants to force change on their own party.
They're engaged in that battle today, and it seems almost all of the "liberal media," sensing the existential nature of the threat,
is helping them win it. Katie Halper, in a second perceptive piece on the media's obvious anti-Sanders bias, "
MSNBC's Anti-Sanders
Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous ," writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah (
7/21/19 ) said that Bernie Sanders 'made [her] skin crawl,'
though she 'can't even identify for you what exactly it is,' she was just expressing more overtly the
anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network."
... ... ...
MSNBC is clearly acting as a messaging arm of the Democratic Party mainstream in its battle with progressives in general and Sanders
in particular, and Zerlina Maxwell, who's been variously employed by that mainstream, from her work with Clinton to her work on MSNBC,
is an agent in that effort.
Let me repeat what Matt Taibbi wrote: " [Sanders'] election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing
everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. "
Agreed. Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. Trump campaigned on ending our stupid pointless wars and spending that
money on ourselves and it looked at first like he might actually deliver (how RACIST of the man!) but not to worry, he is now
surrounded by uber hawks and the defense industry dollars are continuing to flow. Which the Democrats are fine with.
Trump campaigned on enforcing the laws against illegal immigration and limiting legal immigration, but he's now pretty much
given up, the southern border is open full "Camp of the Saints" style and he's pushing for more legal 'guest' workers to satisfy
the corporate demands for cheap labor and the Democrats are for this (though Sanders started to object back in 2015 before he
was beaten down).
Trump campaigned on a populist platform, but once elected the only thing he really pushed for was a big juicy tax cut for
himself and his billionaire buddies which the Democrats are fine with (how come they can easily block attempts to stop the flow
of cheap labor across the southern border, but not block massive giveaway tax cuts to the super rich? Because they have their
priorities).
Soon I expect that Trump will propose massive regressive tax increases on the working class which of course the Democrats
will be fine with ('to save the planet').
So yeah, Trump is governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have.
And elections are pretty much pointless. Even if Sanders does win, he'll get beaten down faster even than Trump was.
I think people have a hard time with real inflection points. Most of life uses more short-term linear decision making. But
at inflection points we have multiple possibilities that turn into rather surprising turns of events, such as Brexit and Trump.
We still have people saying in the UK "but they wouldn't do that!" The hell "they" won't. Norms are thrown out of the window
and people start realising how wide the options are. This is not positive or negative. Just change or transformation.
That is my philosophical way of agreeing with you! It is easy to point at the hostility of the mainstream media and DNC as
there being no way for Sanders to win. After all in 2004, look what the media and DNC did to Howard Dean. But people weren't dying
then like they are now. The "Great Recession" wasn't on anyone's radar. People felt rich, like everything would be fine. We are
not in that situation the facts on the ground are so wildly different that the DNC and mainstream media will find it hard to
stay in control.
I think it's much more likely that a Sanders victory would see the Clintonistas digging even further into the underbelly
of the Democratic Party. There they would covertly and overtly sabotage Sanders, brief against him in the press and weaken, corrupt
and hamstring any legislation that he proposes.
If Sanders should win against Trump expect the establishment to go into full revolt. Capital strike, mass layoffs, federal
reserve hiking interest rates to induce a recession, a rotating cast of Democrats siding with Republicans to block legislation,
press comparing him to worse than Carter before he even takes office and vilifying him all day every day.
I wouldn't be shocked to see Israel and the Saudis generate a crisis in, for example, Iran so Sanders either bends the knee
to the neocons or gets to be portrayed as a cowardly failure for abandoning our 'allies' for the rest of his term.
You've just convinced me that the American Experiment is doomed. No one else but Sanders can pull America out of its long slow
death spiral and your litany of the tactics of subversion of his presidency is persuasive that even in the event of his electoral
victory, there will be no changing of the national direction.
I'm reading a series of essays by Morris Berman in his book "Are We There Yet". A lot of critics complain that he is too much
the pessimist, but he presents some good arguments, dark though they may be, that the American Experiment was doomed from the
start due to the inherent flaw of Every Man For Himself and its "get mine and the hell with everybody else" attitude that has
been a part of the experiment from the beginning.
He is absolutely right about one thing, we are a country strongly based on hustling for money as much or more than anything
else, and both Trump and the Clintons are classic examples of this, and why the country often gets the leaders it deserves.
That's why I believe that we need people like Sanders and Gabbard in the Oval Office. It is also why I believe that should
either end up even getting close, Nax is correct. Those with power in this country will not accept the results and will do whatever
is necessary to subvert them, and the Voter will buy that subversion hook, line, and sinker.
No. The point is that electing Sanders can not be the endgame, only the beginning. I think Nax is completely right that
a Sanders win would bring on the full wrath of all its opponents. Then the real battle would begin.
The notion that real change could happen in this country by winning an election or two is naive in the extreme. But that
doesn't make it impossible.
Lots of people hired by the Clintons, Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cuomo, etc. will have to be defenestrated. Lose their public
sector jobs, if not outright charged with crimes. No one must be left in a position to hurt you after the election. Anyone on
the "other side" must lose all power or ability to damage you, except those too weak. These people can be turned and used by you;
they can be kept in line with fear. But all the leaders must go.
In order for Sanders to survive the onslaught that will surely come, he must have a jobs program ready to go on day one
of his administration- and competent people committed to his cause ready to cary out the plan.
The high ground is being able to express a new vision for the common good, 24/7, and do something to bring it about. You win
even if you suffer losses.
Without that, life in the USA will become very disruptive to say the least.
Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review
of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :
Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have
been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done and continue to do this in four key ways:
i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United
for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to
betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;
(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"
(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;
iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its
business party duopoly.
Pretty bad optics on MSNBC's part being unable to do simple numbers and I can fully believe that their motto starts with the
words "This is who we are". Jimmy Dore has put out a few videos on how bad MSNBC has been towards Bernie and Progressives lately
so it is becoming pretty blatant. Just spitballing a loose theory here but perhaps the Democrats have decided on a "poisoned chalice"
strategy and do want not to win in 2020.
After 2008 the whole economy should have had a major re-set but Obama spent tens of trillions of dollars saving Wall Street
at the expense of Main Street so that nothing got resolved about the problems that caused the crash in the first place. Trump's
policies are doubling down on these problems so there is going to be a major disruption coming down the track. A major recession
perhaps or maybe even worse.
Point is that perhaps the Democrats have calculated that it would be best for them to leave the Republicans in power to own
this crash which will help them long term. And this explains why most of those democrat candidates look like they have fallen
out of a clown car. The ones capable of going head to head with Trump are sidelined while their weakest candidates are pushed
forward people like Biden and Harris. Just a theory mind.
The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic
party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public
dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.
By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity"
and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction
of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing
the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.
I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre.
Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong.
Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.
Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than
happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no
further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist
path.
In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US
finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that
the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard
core imperialists who's time has reached its end.
This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.
By owning the means of production, the Oligarchs will be able to produce the machinery of oppression without the resort
to 'money.'
In revolutionary times, the most valuable commodity would be flying lead.
If the nation wishes true deliverance, not just from Trump and Republicans, but from the painful state that got Trump elected
in the first place, it will first have to believe in a savior.
No, no, no, no, no. No oooshy religion, which is part of what got us into this mess. Cities on a hill. The Exceptional Nation(tm).
Obligatory burbling of Amazing Grace. Assumptions that everyone is a Methodist. And after Deliverance, the U S of A will be magically
re-virginated (for the umpteenth time), pure and worthy of Manifest Destiny once again.
If you want to be saved, stick to your own church. Stop dragging it into the public sphere. This absurd and sloppy religious
language is part of the problem. At the very least it is kitsch. At its worst it leads us to bomb Muslim nations and engage in
"Crusades."
Other than that, the article makes some important points. In a year or so, there will be a lot of comments here on whether
or not to vote for the pre-failed Democratic candidate, once the Party dumps Bernie Sanders. There is no requirement of voting
for the Democrats, unless you truly do believe that they will bring the Deliverance (and untarnish your tarnished virtue). Vote
your conscience. Not who Nate Silver indicates.
Yes, this election is starting to remind me of 2004. High-up Dems, believing they're playing the long game, sacrifice the
election to maintain standing with big biz donors. The leading issue of the day (Iraq/GWOT/Patriot Act) was erased from mainstream
US politics and has been since. Don't for a minute think they won't do a similar thing now. Big donors don't particularly fear
Trump, nor a 6-3 conservative supreme court, nor a Bolton state dept, nor a racist DHS/ICE those are not money issues for them.
Sadly, when Sanders speaks of a "revolution", and when he is referred to as a revolutionary, while at the same time accepting
that the Democratic Party is a Party of the top 10%, puts into context just how low the bar is for a political revolution in America.
The candidate who would fight and would govern for the 90% of Americans is a revolutionary.
The fact that it can be said as a given that neither major Party is being run specifically to serve the vast majority of our
country is itself an admission for that the class war begun by Reagan has been won, in more of a silent coup, and the rich have
control of our nation.
Sadly, actual democracy is an impediment to those who wield power in today's America, and in that respect the class war
continues to be waged, primarily through divisive social issues to divert our attention from the looting being done by and for
the rich and the decline in opportunity and economic security for everyone else.
Sanders is considered a revolutionary merely for stating the obvious, stating the truth. That is what makes him dangerous to
those that run the Democratic Party, and more broadly those who run this nation.
Sanders would do better to cast himself not as a revolutionary, but as a person of the people, with the belief that good government
does not favor the wants of the richest over the needs of our country. That is what makes him a threat. To the rich unseen who
hold power, to the Republican Party, and to some Democrats.
I agree with the thesis here, and confess to being puzzled by comments on LGM (for example) politics threads of the ilk "I'm
with Warren but am good with Buttigieg too," or "I'm with Sanders but am good with Harris, too," etc.
I love reading Taibbi, but in
his article , that quote, " Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic
Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector ," should be the lede, and its buried
2/3 of the way down.
This primary season is about how the Democratic Party consultant class, I call them leeches, is fighting for its power
at the expense of the party and the country.
Yves writes: it is unfortunate that this struggle is being personified, as in too often treated by the media and political
operatives as being about Sanders.
I agree. Sanders represents the continuing New Deal-type policies. The DLC-type New Democrats (corporatists) have been
working to destroy New Deal Democrats and policies as a force in the party. The New Deal Democrats brought in bank regulations,
social security, medicare, the voting rights act, restraint on financial predation, and various economic protections for the little-guy
and for Main Street businesses.
The DLC Dems have brought deregulation of the banks and financial sector, an attempt to cut social security, expansion
of prisons, tax cuts for corporations and the billionaires, the return of monopoly power, and the economic squeeze on Main Street
businesses forced to compete with monopolies.
The MSM won't talk about any of the programmatic differences between the two sides. The MSM won't recognize the New Deal style
Democratic voters even exist; the New Deal wing voters are quickly labeled 'deplorable' instead voters with competing economic
policies to the current economic policies.
So, we're left with the MSM focusing on personalities to avoid talking about the real policy differences, imo.
When Bernie talks about a revolution, he explains how it must be from the grassroots, from the bottom up. If he manages to
get elected, his supporters have to make sure they get behind the politicians who also support him and, if they don't, get rid
of them.
Without continuing mass protests, nothing is going to happen. Other countries have figured this out but Americans remain clueless.
Warren's plan would overhaul the process by which the U.S. proposes, writes, finalizes and
enforces trade deals while imposing strict standards for any nation seeking or currently in a
free trade deal with the U.S.
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In a Medium post outlining the
extensive trade proposal, Warren said her approach to trade is centered on using the United
States' immense leverage to protect domestic industries and workers.
Warren argued U.S trade policy has ceded too much power to international corporations,
squandering the country's ability to defend its manufacturers, farmers and laborers.
"As President, I won't hand America's leverage to big corporations to use for their own
narrow purposes," Warren wrote. "We will engage in international trade -- but on our terms and
only when it benefits American families."
Trump has imposed more than $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, foreign steel and
aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines since taking office in 2017. The president has
used import taxes as leverage in trade talks and inducement for companies to produce goods in
the U.S., but manufacturing job gains and activity have faded throughout the year.
U.S. farmers and ranchers have also lost billions of dollars in foreign sales due to
retaliatory tariffs imposed on American agricultural goods.
Warren acknowledged that while tariffs "are an important tool, they are not by themselves a
long-term solution to our failed trade agenda and must be part of a broader strategy that this
Administration clearly lacks."
Warren said she instead would pursue deals and renegotiate current agreement to "force other
countries to raise the bar on everything from labor and environmental standards to
anti-corruption rules to access to medicine to tax enforcement."
To do so, Warren would expand the ability of Congress and noncorporate advocates to see and
shape trade deals as their being negotiated, not after they have been submitted to lawmakers
for approval
Warren proposed staffing trade advisory panels with a majority of representatives from labor
and environmental and consumer advocacy groups. She also called for special advisory panels for
consumers, rural areas and each region of the country, "so that critical voices are at the
table during negotiations."
Under Warren's plan, trade negotiators would be required to submit drafts of pending
agreements to Congress and submit them for public comment through the same process used by
federal regulators to propose and finalize rules.
Warren's plan also raises the bar for entry into a trade deal with the U.S. and seizes more
power for the federal government to enforce agreements.
Warren proposed a list of nine standards required of any country seeking a U.S. trade deal
including several international tax, climate and human rights treaties. She noted that the U.S.
"shamefully" does not comply with some of these standards, but would do so under her
presidency.
The plan also excludes any nation on the Treasury Department's currency manipulation
monitoring list from a potential U.S. trade deal. As of May, that list includes China, Germany,
Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.
Nations in trade deals with the U.S. would also be required to support subsidies for green
energy, follow U.S. food inspection standards, pay a fee on goods produced using
"carbon-intensive" processes and agree to stricter anti-trust standards.
"... Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia. The 18 or so years of war following the 9/11 attacks have seen this ostensible republic sink to new lows of behavior. ..."
"Empires in decline tend to behave badly. Indeed, whether British, French or Russian, the
twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the
suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be
they refugees or migrants.
Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed
hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia. The 18 or so years of war following the 9/11 attacks
have seen this ostensible republic sink to new lows of behavior.
Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations,
warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry...
It's all connected. The empire -- all empires -- eventually come home."
Maj. Danny Sjursen, An American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad
Regional experts had immediately suspected the possibility of an Israeli air raid after a
pro-Iranian militia arms depot in Iraq was obliterated during
a mysterious attack
on July 19
, and another reported follow-up attack this past Sunday.
The attack happened around 80 km from the Iranian border and 40 km north-east of Baghdad at Camp
Ashraf, former home to the Iranian exile group Mojahedin-e Khalq, but now reportedly in the hands
of Iranian intelligence and paramilitaries.
Speculation was rampant in the days that followed as to the source of the 'mysterious' air
strikes - or what was also initially reported as a drone strike - however, some pointed the finger
at an American operation targeting Iranian militants inside Iraq.
But now Israeli and regional media, citing western diplomats, have confirmed it was
a
nearly unprecedented Israeli operation on Iraqi soil
--
representing a major
escalation and expansion of Israel's anti-Iran operations.
Israel reportedly launched a total of two separate air strike operations on the camp using its
US-supplied F-35 stealth fighter jets.
Israel has expanded the scope of its anti-Iranian attacks and struck targets in Iraq
,
the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Tuesday.
According to the report, which cites anonymous Western diplomats,
Israel
struck Iranian warehouses storing arms and missiles at Camp Ashraf
, north-east of
Baghdad, twice in the past month.
On July 19, the base was struck by an Israeli F-35 fighter jet, the sources added. The base
was allegedly attacked again on Sunday.
The report alleges the primary target included
a shipment of Iranian ballistic missiles
which recently entered Iraq via the nearby Iranian border.
And though not confirmed, the report further claimed that "Iranian advisers" had been injured in
the series of airstrikes.
Israel has over the past couple of years conducted "hundreds" of attacks inside Syria, which
defense officials have claimed were primarily against Iranian and Hezbollah bases, but if this
month's air strikes on Camp Ashraf are confirmed Israeli assaults, it would constitute a major
widening in terms of the scope of Tel Aviv's "anti-Iran" targeting operations.
The news is also sure to enrage officials in Baghdad, who will mount protests defending Iraqi
sovereignty. Israel hasn't mounted a known significant attack on Iraqi soil since the days of
former dictator Saddam Hussein.
The New Quincy Institute Seeks Warmongering Monsters to Destroy Andrew Bacevich on his new left-right group, which is
going hammer and tongs against the establishment on foreign policy. By
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
July 30, 2019
Andrew J. Bacevich participates in a panel discussion at the U.S. Naval War College in 2016. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication
Specialist 1st Class Christian S. Eskelund/Released) For the last month, the foreign policy establishment has been abuzz over the
new kid on the block: the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft , named
for John Quincy Adams. Adams, along with our first president George Washington,
warned of foreign entanglements and the urge to go
abroad in "search of monsters to destroy," lest America's fundamental policy "insensibly change from liberty to force
. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit ."
Those in the foreign policy Blob have had different reactions to the "upstart" think tank. These are the preeminent organizations
that stand imperious in size and square footage, but have lacked greatly in wisdom and clarity over the last 20 years. Quincy will
stand apart from them in two significant ways: it is drawing its intellectual and political firepower from both the anti-war Left
and the realist and restraint Right. And it is poised to support a new "responsible statecraft," one that challenges the conditions
of endless war, including persistent American militarism here and abroad, the military industrial complex, and a doctrine that worships
primacy and a liberal world order over peace and the sovereignty of other nations.
Quincy, which is rolling out its statement of principles this
week (its official launch will be in the fall), is the brainchild of Trita Parsi, former head of the National Iranian-American Council,
who saw an opening to bring together Left and Right academics, activists, and media disenchanted by both sides' pro-war proclivities.
Together with Vietnam veteran and former Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich (also a longtime TAC contributor), the
Carnegie Endowment's Suzanne DiMaggio, Columbia University's Stephen Wertheim, and investigative journalist Eli Clifton, the group
wants to serve as a counterweight to both liberal interventionists like the Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations,
and the war hawks and neoconservatives of the Heritage Foundation and Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
They've already taken hits from both sides of the establishment, dismissed brusquely
as naive , or worse,
isolationist (that swipe from neoconservative Bill Kristol, whose now-defunct Weekly Standard once ran a manifesto headlined
"The Case for American Empire"
). The fact that Quincy will be funded by both George Soros on the Left and the Charles Koch Foundation on the Right has brought
some rebuke from unfriendlies and even some friendlies. The former hate on one or the other powerful billionaire, while the latter
are wary of Soros' intentions (he's has long been a financial supporter of
"soft-power"
democracy movements overseas, some of which have encouraged revolution and regime change).
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But Quincy's timing couldn't be more perfect. With a president in the White House who has promised to draw down U.S. involvement
overseas (with the exception of his Iran policy, he has so far held to much of that pledge), and national conservatives coming around
to TAC's long-held worldview on realism and restraint (and an increasing willingness to reach across the aisle to work with
like-minded groups and individuals), Quincy appears poised to make some noise in Washington.
According to the group's new statement of principles , "responsible
statecraft" 1) serves the public interest, 2) engages the world, 3) builds a peaceful world, 4) abhors war, and 5) is democratic.
Andrew Bacevich and Trita Parsi expanded on this further in a recent Q&A with TAC.
(Full disclosure: the author is on Quincy's steering committee and TAC also receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.)
TAC : Quincy's principles -- and thus it's name -- are rooted in the mission of "responsible statecraft." Can you give
me a sense of what that means in practical terms, and why you settled on this phrasing for the institute?
AB: With the end of the Cold War, policy elites succumbed to an extraordinary bout of hubris, perhaps best expressed in the claim
that history had designated the United States as its "indispensable nation." Hubris bred recklessness and irresponsibility, with
the Iraq war of 2003 as Exhibit A. We see "responsible statecraft" as the necessary antidote. Its abiding qualities are realism,
restraint, prudence, and vigorous engagement. While the QI is not anti-military, we are wary of war except when all other alternatives
have been exhausted. We are acutely conscious of war's tendency to produce unintended consequences and to exact unexpectedly high
costs.
TAC : Quincy is a trans-partisan effort that is bringing together Left and Right for common cause. Is it a challenge?
AB: It seems apparent to us that the myriad foreign policy failures and disappointments of the past couple of decades have induced
among both progressives and at least some conservatives a growing disenchantment with the trajectory of U.S. policy. Out of that
disenchantment comes the potential for a Left-Right coalition to challenge the status quo. The QI hopes to build on that potential.
TAC : Two of the principles take direct aim at the current foreign policy status quo: responsible statecraft abhors war,
and responsible statecraft is democratic (calling out a closed system in which Americans have had little input into the wars waged
in their names). How much of what Quincy aims to do involves upending conventional norms, particularly those bred and defended by
the Washington "Blob"?
AB: In a fundamental sense, the purpose of the QI is to educate the American people and their leaders regarding the Blob's shortcomings,
exposing the deficiencies of old ideas and proposing new ones to take their place.
TAC: That said, how much blowback do you anticipate from the Washington establishment, particularly those think tanks and
individuals whose careers and very existence depend on the wheels of militarism forever turning?
AB : Plenty. Proponents of the status quo are entrenched and well-funded. Breaking old habits -- for example, the practice of
scattering U.S. military bases around the world -- will not come easily.
TAC : There has been much ado about your two primary funders -- Charles Koch and George Soros. What do you say to critics
who suggest you will be tied to/limited by their agendas?
AB: Our funding sources are not confined to Koch and Soros and we will continue to broaden our support base. It's not for me to
speak for Koch or Soros. But my guess is they decided to support the QI because they support our principles. They too believe in
policies based on realism, restraint, prudence, and vigorous engagement.
TAC : Better yet, how did you convince these two men to fund something together?
TP: It is important to recognize that they have collaborated in the past before, for instance on criminal justice reform. This
is, however, the first time they've come together to be founding funders of a new entity. I cannot speak for them, but I think they
both recognize that there currently is a conceptual deficit in our foreign policy. U.S. elite consensus on foreign policy has collapsed
and the void that has been created begs to be filled. But it has to be filled with new ideas, not just a repackaging of old ideas.
And those new ideas cannot simply follow the old political alignments. Transpartisan collaboration is necessary in order to create
a new consensus. Koch and Soros are showing tremendous leadership in that regard.
TAC : The last refuge of a scorned hawk is to call his critics "isolationist." It would seem as though your statement of
principles takes this on directly. How else does Quincy take this often-used invective into account?
AB : We will demonstrate through our own actions that the charge is false.
TAC : Critics (including James Traub,
in his own piece on Quincy
) say that Washington leaders, once in office, are "mugged by reality," suggesting that the idea of rolling back military interventions
and avoiding others sounds good on paper but presidents like Barack Obama had no choice, that this is all about protecting interests
and hard-nosed realism. The alternative is a bit naive. How do you respond?
AB: Choices are available if our leaders have the creativity to recognize them and the gumption to pursue them. Obama's patient
and resolute pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal affirms this possibility. The QI will expose the "we have no choice" argument as false.
We will identify and promote choice, thereby freeing U.S. policy from outmoded habits and stale routines.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is e xecutive editor at . Follow her on Twitter
@Vlahos_at_TAC
QI is a welcome change from the endless, whining tirade of the old hawks.
I wish them well in gaining influence in DC.
I hope that they can give voice to the growing numbers of us who do not support illegal invasions, funding dissidents to
foment regime change and our flawed system of selecting key allies (regardless of their human rights records) and protecting
them and their interests at all cost. This has been a drain our economic resources and moral standing.
In this time, when nationalism and disaster capitalism seem to be winning on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems there
is little hope for peace, decency and diplomacy.
QI has a huge challenge to take on the parasitic organism that is the war machine, but any initiative is better than none.
If Quincy is to have any chance of success in its mission, it will have to tackle the issues surrounding Federal election campaign
financing. The current rules give a handful of American billionaires effective control over US Middle East policy. What is
good for donors like Sheldon and Miriam Edelson is not necessarily good for the American public. Donald Trump was elected president
of the US not Prime Minister of Israel.
I did read one of Mr. Basevich's books a few years ago and my take away remains valid today: The US cannot afford to be
the policeman of the world.
Ukraine became a geopolitical pawn. In signing up with the US and EU, there is one guaranteed loser the Ukrainian people.
Notable quotes:
"... His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, ..."
"... But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. ..."
"... Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. ..."
"... Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question -- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War. ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . ..."
The election of Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who won decisively throughout
most of the country, represents the possibility of peace with Russia, if it -- and he -- are
given a chance. His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters
in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the
Donbass rebels and with Moscow, notably provisions associated with the European-sponsored Minsk
Accords. Zelensky, on the other hand, has made peace (along with corruption) his top priority
and indeed spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on July 11. The nearly
six-year war having become a political, diplomatic, and financial drain on his leadership,
Putin welcomed the overture.
But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in
Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say
quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a
Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian
citizens. (Washington has previously had some shameful episodes of
collusion with these Ukrainian neo-Nazis .) As for Putin, who does not fully control the
Donbass rebels or its leaders, he "can never be seen at home," as
I pointed out more than two years ago , "as 'selling out' Russia's 'brethren' anywhere in
southeast Ukraine." Indeed, his own implacable nationalists have made this a litmus test of his
leadership.
Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his
would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now
Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary
Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point
man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over
Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their
hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it
eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence.
Our hope should be that Trump breaks with that long-standing bipartisan policy, as he did
with policy toward North Korea, and puts America squarely on the side of peace in Ukraine. (For
now, Zelensky has set aside Moscow's professed irreversible "reunification" with Crimea, as
should Washington.) A new US policy must include recognition, previously lacking, that the
citizens of war-ravaged Donbass are not primarily "Putin's stooges" but people with their own
legitimate interests and preferences, even if they favor Russia. Here too Zelensky is embarking
on a new course. Poroshenko waged an "anti-terrorist" war against Donbass: the new president is
reaching out to its citizens even though most of them were unable to vote in the election.
Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably
architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking
regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question
-- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the
views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more
important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold
War.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host of The John Batchelor
Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .
"... Evidence has emerged that the U.S. State Department is tied to a child trafficking operation involving Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. shared the tail number of his Bell Long Ranger 206L3 helicopter (tail number N474AW) with a U.S. State Department OV-10D Bronco ..."
"... . Descriptions of sex between adult males and underage females by XXX company employees in Bosnia in the 2000-2002 time frame coincides with descriptions of sex . on .. aircraft and [at] residences in Palm Beach, Florida; New Mexico; and on the island of Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Among the "Jane Does" filing suit against the U.S. government for concluding can anyone get the details of these suits? ..."
"... So so disgusting. First there was the catholic church pedophile scandal. Then there is the Epstein scandal ..."
Evidence has emerged that the U.S. State Department is tied to a child trafficking operation involving Billionaire pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein. shared the tail number of his Bell Long Ranger 206L3 helicopter (tail number N474AW) with a U.S. State Department
OV-10D Bronco. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) registration database. Descriptions of sex
between adult males and underage females by XXX company employees in Bosnia in the 2000-2002 time frame coincides with descriptions
of sex . on .. aircraft and [at] residences in Palm Beach, Florida; New Mexico; and on the island of Little Saint James in the
U.S. Virgin Islands. Among the "Jane Does" filing suit against the U.S. government for concluding can anyone get the details of
these suits?
"... A secret plea bargain and non-prosecution agreement with the federal government is what happened. It shifted the public face to the Florida state court system with Epstein pleading to two state prostitution crimes, which implied, of course, that the complainants were prostitutes. The public is now aware that the result was Epstein sleeping at the county jail and then going to his office during the day, for 13 months. Registering as a sex offender has not curtailed his travel or daily activity. ..."
"... The whole nasty business disappeared from view and would have stayed hidden in its nicely wrapped package except that two civil lawsuits have pulled some of it into the light. ..."
"... With that background, we come to the recent fascinating events, in which Epstein was arrested, and the role of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta in this whole rotten mess was revealed to some extent. He had been the U.S. Attorney for that part of Florida at that time ..."
"... There you have it: "... this case ... had input and vetting at multiple levels of the Department of Justice." The cat was out of the bag. It was a sad sight: Alex Acosta, after achieving two significant positions in the federal government, took a dive to be the fall guy. ..."
"... The non-prosecution agreement has signature dates from 24 September to 7 December 2007, and page 3 of Robert Josefsberg's lawsuit against Epstein confirms this. The Department of Justice is a bureaucracy, and even though a U.S. Attorney has significant authority and some independence, the Justice Department in Washington D.C. -- sometimes called "Main Justice" -- ultimately controls things. In the organizational chart, the U.S. Attorneys are under the Deputy Attorney General, the number two person [6] ..."
"... The U.S. Attorney General from 3 February 2005 to 17 September 2007 was Alberto Gonzales. Michael Mukasey was nominated on 17 September and became Attorney General on 8 November 2007 until Eric Holder was sworn in on 3 February 2009. ..."
"... The FBI Director from 4 September 2001 to 4 September 2013 was Robert Mueller. ..."
"... And from July 2008 into this year, the Justice Department has resisted the CVRA lawsuit in Florida. ..."
"... This material is presented here for viewing or downloading so that you can think for yourself. Mass media has reported next to nothing about the 11-year course of the Crime Victims' Rights Act lawsuit and the detail in the first 22 pages of the trial court's opinion, other than that the court found the government violated the CVRA. I am not aware of one word reported about the 2010 lawsuit brought by Robert Josefsberg against Epstein for breaching the non-prosecution agreement. ..."
"... Jeffrey Epstein was being protected. The process and communications that accomplished it, and who did it, are not yet known. ..."
"... Why nobody is above the law! Not even a President! Oh! Wait! 23 flights! And a scion of the house of Windsor allegedly involved as well? ..."
"... "The federal non-prosecution agreement Epstein's legal team negotiated with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida immunized all named and unnamed "potential co-conspirators" in Epstein's child trafficking network, which includes those who allegedly procured minors for Epstein and also any powerbrokers who may have molested them." ..."
"... Who gets a plea deal in which "all named and unnamed potential co-conspirators" get immunity? https://gawker.com/flight-logs-put-clinton-dershowitz-on-pedophile-billio-1681039971 ..."
"... Epstein's NPA was limited to the Florida district of federal courts, hence another branch of the federal courts, the Southern District of New York, was free to re-open the issue..and did. ..."
"... Acosta says he acted in accordance with his superior's wishes at the DOJ. Plausible, but lets see some corroborating evidence. If he agreed to negotiate this NPA without getting his boss's orders in writing he is a remarkable fool. ..."
"... Arkancide? Epstein is linked with E Barak, and Nicole Junkermann, per flight logs. Presumably that is the intelligence link Acosta was babbling about. https://carbyne911.com/team/ ..."
"... Doubt if Bubba Bill was involved in any of Epstein's sexual shenanigans after being burnt by Lewinsky. Clinton always had the proverbial ability to "talk a dog off a gut wagon" and could most likely find an agreeable partner elsewhere. Might be wrong but doubt it. ..."
"... If I understand correctly, Epstein broke the agreement. Would it follow that the WTF!? immunity deal is now nixed? ..."
"... Crossing the Clinton cabal in any manner is seriously dangerous. The list of those who have and died mysteriously is very long. ..."
"... The sweetheart deal that Epstein received from Acosta and the DOJ seems rather unusual for the felony that is such a social taboo as you note. Not only did he get off extremely lightly but his co-conspirators were completely let off the hook. The way the children who were raped were also treated by the courts was also shameful. ..."
"... This case epitomizes the travesty of the current state of the rule of law. Sexual predators of children are typically thrown the book and quickly taken off the streets to serve a long sentence. Not only did that not happen but even worse he was allowed to continue his despicable behavior out in the open even when he was supposed to be serving his sentence. Clearly he had some powerful friends in the Bush administration, but even with these connections when such execrable behavior is shown repeatedly there were none with a conscience. A sad testament to the state of our justice system. ..."
"... The usual plea agreement requires the defendant to plead guilty to some federal criminal offense. The Epstein agreement did not require him to plead to a federal crime. It also did not require him to debrief or provide them with information. To the contrary, it required that the federal government do nothing to him or to other people who helped him or conspired with him to commit federal crimes! ..."
16 July 2019Alex Acosta let the cat out of the bag: the Justice Department knew all about the Jeffrey Epstein Florida
plea deal
A taboo in our culture that is also a crime is sexual contact with a child or young person -- usually less than 17 or 18 years
old -- by an adult or older person. An exception is sexual experimentation during the struggle of adolescence, when the persons are
no more than around two or three years apart in age, as long as there is consent. A greater age difference creates the crime often
called "statutory rape", in which a statute (a law passed by a legislature) says that legal consent for sexual contact cannot be
given by the underage person.
This taboo is a strong one, even more so than homicide, about which there are various levels and justifications, such as self-defense.
All over the country on a regular basis, underage sex crime cases are tried to a jury, even without medical or forensic evidence.
And with just one complainant and victim.
But then Jeffrey Epstein is named as a suspect in underage sex crimes in Palm Beach County, Florida, with not one complainant,
but with at least 20.
What was the local State Attorney, Barry Krischer, going to do? Apparently, not very much. Attention shifted to the federal U.S.
Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, and the FBI. Was a federal prosecution pursued? No. Nothing.
A secret plea bargain and non-prosecution agreement with the federal government is what happened. It shifted the public face
to the Florida state court system with Epstein pleading to two state prostitution crimes, which implied, of course, that the complainants
were prostitutes. The public is now aware that the result was Epstein sleeping at the county jail and then going to his office during
the day, for 13 months. Registering as a sex offender has not curtailed his travel or daily activity.
The whole nasty business disappeared from view and would have stayed hidden in its nicely wrapped package except that two
civil lawsuits have pulled some of it into the light.
On 7 July 2008, a case under the federal Crime Victims' Rights Act (CVRA) was filed in the Southern District of Florida by lawyers
Paul Cassell, Bradley Edwards, and two others against the federal government, with case number 08-cv-80736 [1]. Around ten and a
half years later, on 21 February 2019, the trial court judge issued a 33-page opinion and order granting a request for partial summary
judgment by two victims, ruling that there was no genuine issue of material fact about the assertion that the government violated
the CVRA by failing properly to confer with the victims, and that therefore a contested trial on that issue is not necessary. The
opinion is worth reading, and the first 22 pages are a detailed statement of facts about the non-prosecution agreement and the activity
surrounding it by lawyers for the government and Epstein, giving an insight into what was going on. The beginning of the opinion
references four startling factual assertions made by the complainants in their request for summary judgment and which the federal
government admitted without qualification in its response [2]:
"1. Between about 1999 and 2007, Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused more than 30 minor girls, including Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2,
at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, located in the Southern District of Florida, and elsewhere in the United States and overseas.
"2. Because Epstein and his co-conspirators knowingly traveled in interstate and international commerce to sexually abuse Jane
Doe 1, Jane Doe 2, and other similarly situated victims, they committed violations of not only Florida law (see, e,g., Fla. Stat.
sections 794.05, 796.04, 796.045, 39.201 and 777.04), but also federal law, including repeated violations of 18 U.S.C. sections 1591,
2421, 2422, 2423, and 371).
"3. In addition to personally abusing his victims, Epstein also directed other persons to sexually abuse the girls. For example,
Nadia Marcinkova sexually abused Jane Doe 1 and other victims at the direction of Epstein.
"8. More generally, the FBI established that Epstein used paid employees to repeatedly find and bring minor girls to him. Epstein
worked in concert with others to obtain minor girls not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification
of others."
The present court activity is to figure out a procedure to determine a remedy for the government's violation of the CVRA and to
establish a remedy.
On 17 May 2010, a lawsuit revealing more of Epstein's degenerate attitude and mentality was filed in federal court in the Southern
District of Florida, with case number 10-cv-21586. It was based on parts 7 and 8 of the plea bargain / non-prosecution agreement,
that--
"7. The United Sates shall provide Epstein's attorneys with a list of individuals whom it has identified as victims, as defined
in 18 U.S.C. section 2255, after Epstein has signed this agreement and been sentenced. Upon the execution of this agreement, the
United States, in consultation with and subject to the good faith approval of Epstein's counsel, shall select an attorney representative
for these persons, who shall be paid for by Epstein. Epstein's counsel may contact the indentified individuals through that representative.
"8. [In part] If any of the individuals referred to in paragraph (7), supra , elects to file suit pursuant to 18 U.S.C.
section 2255, Epstein will not contest the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida
over his person and/or the subject matter, and Epstein waives his right to contest liability and also waives his right to contest
damages up to an amount as agreed to between the identified individual and Epstein, so long as the identified individual elects to
proceed exclusively under 18 U.S.C. section 2255, and agrees to waive any other claim for damages, whether pursuant to state, federal,
or common law."
Title 18, U.S. Code, section 2255, creates the right for an underage person (a minor) to bring a civil lawsuit in federal court
for money for personal injury suffered as a victim of certain federal crimes. The victim can seek money for the actual harm suffered,
or the fixed amount of $150,000, plus attorney fees and litigation costs. [3].
The attorney representative selected to help the females who wanted to seek compensation by that route under the non-prosecution
agreement (NPA) was Robert Josefsberg, of the Podhurst & Orseck law firm in Miami, Florida, known to have experience in litigation.
Some number over 12 of the 34 females named by the U.S. Attorney's Office as complainants against Epstein sought compensation through
the representative.
However, although Epstein agreed in the NPA to pay the attorney representative and to not contest liability in the claims the
females made under 18 U.S.C. 2255, he not only breached the agreement by contesting liability in the cases, but also he paid only
a small part of what was owed to Josefsberg, and tried to stiff the representative by not paying over $2 million dollars due for
attorney fees and costs!
For over 20 months, Josefsberg tried unsuccessfully to get Epstein to pay him under the NPA, and finally sued Epstein for breach
of contract and breach of the implied doctrine of good faith and fair dealing. Attached to the lawsuit document was a copy of the
NPA. Here are the scandalous plea bargain / non-prosecution agreement and addendum, and the informative original petition brought
by the representative for some of the victimized females:
This produced an amusing turn of events, shown by the court clerk's docket sheet. Epstein quickly settled with the attorney representative
by 8 June 2010, only 22 days after the lawsuit was filed [4]. After all, he had breached the NPA and it could have been cancelled
(and should have been) and a prosecution started in Florida.
Picking apart the NPA is in itself an interesting exercise, but looking at the agreement as a whole, you can see that it is designed
to keep his sexually abusive conduct from being disclosed, both as to criminal charges -- he pled only to state prostitution offenses
-- and as to civil cases involving females who decided to seek compensation through the NPA's representative and 18 U.S.C. section
2255. In those civil cases, Epstein agreed to not challenge his liability, so no stories would be told in court; the only issue would
be the amount of money to be paid.
With that background, we come to the recent fascinating events, in which Epstein was arrested, and the role of Labor Secretary
Alexander Acosta in this whole rotten mess was revealed to some extent. He had been the U.S. Attorney for that part of Florida at
that time. The NPA on page 2 asserted that: "On the authority of R. Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney for the Southern
District of Florida, prosecution in this District for these offenses shall be deferred in favor of prosecution by the State of Florida,
provided that Epstein abides by the following conditions and the requirements of this Agreement set forth below".
Well, not exactly. When publicity heated up, fingers were pointed at Acosta with the usual hollering by some that he should resign.
This produced a pathetic press conference on Wednesday, 10 July, in which Acosta tried to justify what the materials presented above
reveal [5]. On Friday, 12 July, when president Trump went outside the White House to talk to the press before leaving on a trip,
Acosta went with him. At around 1 minute, 40 seconds into this short video excerpt, Acosta says:
"I have seen coverage of this case, that is over 12 years old, that had input and vetting at multiple levels of the Department
of Justice. And as I look forward, I do not think it is right and fair for this administration's labor department to have Epstein
as the focus, rather than the incredible economy that we have today. And so I called the president this morning. I told him that
I thought the right thing was to step aside...."
There you have it: "... this case ... had input and vetting at multiple levels of the Department of Justice." The cat
was out of the bag. It was a sad sight: Alex Acosta, after achieving two significant positions in the federal government, took a
dive to be the fall guy.
"Multiple levels" of "input" and "vetting" at the DOJ, you say? Who might that be?
The non-prosecution agreement has signature dates from 24 September to 7 December 2007, and page 3 of Robert Josefsberg's
lawsuit against Epstein confirms this. The Department of Justice is a bureaucracy, and even though a U.S. Attorney has significant
authority and some independence, the Justice Department in Washington D.C. -- sometimes called "Main Justice" -- ultimately controls
things. In the organizational chart, the U.S. Attorneys are under the Deputy Attorney General, the number two person [6]
The U.S. Attorney General from 3 February 2005 to 17 September 2007 was Alberto Gonzales. Michael Mukasey was nominated on
17 September and became Attorney General on 8 November 2007 until Eric Holder was sworn in on 3 February 2009.
The FBI Director from 4 September 2001 to 4 September 2013 was Robert Mueller.
More research is needed to identify persons in various positions in the Department of Justice from 2005 through at least 2010,
when Epstein breached the NPA by contesting liability and failing to pay attorney fees and costs, and had to be sued by Robert Josefsberg
and the Podhurst & Orseck law firm.
And from July 2008 into this year, the Justice Department has resisted the CVRA lawsuit in Florida.
The CVRA opinion on page 3 confirmed that by May 2007, the U.S. Attorney's Office had drafted a 53-page indictment and an 82-page
prosecution memorandum about federal sex crimes committed by Epstein. The opinion on pages 5-6 quotes a letter to Epstein's counsel
that the U.S. Attorney's office did not have the power to bind the Immigration service, but that they did not plan on bringing immigration
charges against two of Epstein's female co-conspirators.
The CVRA opinion on page 7 tells us that--
"On September 21, 2007, Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer wrote the line prosecutor [Assistant U.S. Attorney] about
the proposed agreement and added: 'Glad we could get this worked out for reasons I won't put in writing. After this is resolved I
would love to buy you a cup at Starbucks and have a conversation'."
This material is presented here for viewing or downloading so that you can think for yourself. Mass media has reported next
to nothing about the 11-year course of the Crime Victims' Rights Act lawsuit and the detail in the first 22 pages of the trial court's
opinion, other than that the court found the government violated the CVRA. I am not aware of one word reported about the 2010 lawsuit
brought by Robert Josefsberg against Epstein for breaching the non-prosecution agreement.
From this information, you can see the brazen lack of a basis for the extra protection put in the plea bargain / NPA on page 5,
that--
"In consideration of Epstein's agreement to plead guilty and to provide compensation in the manner described above, if Epstein
successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute
any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross,
Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova."
Jeffrey Epstein was being protected. The process and communications that accomplished it, and who did it, are not yet known.
[1] The Crime Victims' Rights Act, Title 18, United States Code, section 3771
[2] The request (motion) for partial summary judgment by the victims (Jane Doe 1 and 2) contained a list of what they claimed
were 157 undisputed material facts. The federal government filed a response which either admitted, or admitted with a qualification,
or denied the asserted facts. The numbered facts 1, 2, 3, and 8 were admitted.
I had hoped we would learn from today's hearings more regarding Epstein's source of wealth - and exactly how much it was. Plus
more info on his doctored passport. More about the money trail between him and various Florida officials.
Anyone new calling
the tip line - especially from during his time as a teacher at that prep school in NY? And more about the Dershowitz and Starr
involvement back 12 years ago.
Unfortunately the food fight between Trump and the four frosh sucked all the air out of the media.
Came across this site with the court documents .The FBI travelled to Australia in 2011 and interviewed ms Roberts at the american
consulate in Sydney.9 years ago then in 2015 she sued Epstein and maxwell. Only now in 2019 did Epstein fly back from Paris knowing
he was going to be arrested.
Some of those girls were collecting info for him and getting paid. The whole thing stinks time
to call in the plumbers.
Many things are disposed of by plea Bargaining. With high profile crimes, it is always difficult to know if you did the right
thing. Here, it is fairly obvious it wasn't. Acosta is a Harvard College/HLS, a very able and connected guy and his error here
has damaged his life.
The part that I haven't seen being reported or discussed:
"The federal non-prosecution agreement Epstein's legal team negotiated with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District
of Florida immunized all named and unnamed "potential co-conspirators" in Epstein's child trafficking network, which includes
those who allegedly procured minors for Epstein and also any powerbrokers who may have molested them."
Thanks for the link to the NPA I didn't realize it was in the public domain, it is an astonishing read. I'm not familiar with
NPA's (having never been party to one!) so forgive me if the following questions are uninformed:
To what extent are NPA's legally binding upon the USG, are there circumstances where a court can set one aside for reasons
other than breach of contract?
The NPA appears to try and indemnify Epstein and both known and unknown co-conspirators (Ghislaine Maxwell?) in both the offenses
prosecuted and any other offenses subject to the joint USAO/FBI investigation . In fact on page 5 the indemnity given uses
the wording "the [US] also agrees it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators
of Epstein included but not limited to.." (my emphasis) i.e. scope here appears to be unlimited. This cannot be legally enforceable
surely?
I thought NPA's were used to go after people further up the food chain. This one seems to have given carte blanche immunity
to all involved at every level. I'm astonished Acosta had the authority, merely with "consultation" within DOJ to do this. This
is a travesty and is starting to make FISA abuse look like chicken feed.
Epstein's NPA was limited to the Florida district of federal courts, hence another branch of the federal courts, the Southern
District of New York, was free to re-open the issue..and did.
Acosta says he acted in accordance with his superior's wishes at the DOJ. Plausible, but lets see some corroborating evidence.
If he agreed to negotiate this NPA without getting his boss's orders in writing he is a remarkable fool.
Was Acosta making an "error"? Looks to me he was a fully paid up member of the Swamp, doing what swampians do and he will no doubt
settle back into a Swamp law firm or Professorship somewhere. Weep not for him.
Arkancide? Epstein is linked with E Barak, and Nicole Junkermann, per flight logs. Presumably that is the intelligence link
Acosta was babbling about. https://carbyne911.com/team/
yes. I con't see him living much longer. On Morning joe today, Joe and his imbecile consort went on at length about a party
in 1992 at Mar A Lago for a bunch of NFL cheerleaders. Trump, Epstein and other me stood around ogling the ladies. So what! Not
a word was said about the absent Bill Clinton.
Doubt if Bubba Bill was involved in any of Epstein's sexual shenanigans after being burnt by Lewinsky. Clinton always had
the proverbial ability to "talk a dog off a gut wagon" and could most likely find an agreeable partner elsewhere. Might be wrong
but doubt it.
Ogling NFL cheerleaders, big deal. That seemed pretty normal to me. I'm waiting for more to come out about the 1992 private party
at Mar a Lago with Trump, Epstein and 28 calendar girls. I get the feeling Trump is going tweet crazy right now primarily to change
the subject. With Trump, Clinton, the DOJ enablers who protected Epstein and probably a host of others, Epstein is bound to be
whacked as you and walrus said.
Yes, the MSM are predictably silent about Bill Clinton and other leftists who are/were buddies with Epstein. I guess with all
of his money, he could murder someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and...
If I understand correctly, Epstein broke the agreement. Would it follow that the WTF!? immunity deal is now nixed?
What a rotten underbelly oozes out. This foul beast needs to be wrestled into the light. Where is the people's champion?
There must be some good people in there somewhere.
The sweetheart deal that Epstein received from Acosta and the DOJ seems rather unusual for the felony that is such a social
taboo as you note. Not only did he get off extremely lightly but his co-conspirators were completely let off the hook. The way
the children who were raped were also treated by the courts was also shameful.
This case epitomizes the travesty of the current state of the rule of law. Sexual predators of children are typically thrown
the book and quickly taken off the streets to serve a long sentence. Not only did that not happen but even worse he was allowed
to continue his despicable behavior out in the open even when he was supposed to be serving his sentence. Clearly he had some
powerful friends in the Bush administration, but even with these connections when such execrable behavior is shown repeatedly
there were none with a conscience. A sad testament to the state of our justice system.
Do you think the current case will also just be another white wash or do you think the DOJ will pursue the investigation with
vigor to get to the bottom of his finances and all the other sexual predators of children in his orbit?
You are perceptive about the Epstein plea bargain / non-prosecution agreement (NPA). The one for Epstein is the complete opposite
of what happens in federal criminal cases. Yes, agreements between the Justice Department and defendants are often used "to go
after people further up the food chain". There will be a plea bargain with a cooperation section in it. If cooperation is not
part of the arrangement, that section is left out.
They have a standard form they use for plea bargains, and some sections may be in or out of it depending on the situation.
Classic examples are those that were used by "special counsel" Robert Mueller when he went around putting the squeeze on people.
Here is the agreement between the Mueller group and Richard Gates, who was around Paul Manafort during the Trump campaign--
The usual plea agreement requires the defendant to plead guilty to some federal criminal offense. The Epstein agreement
did not require him to plead to a federal crime. It also did not require him to debrief or provide them with information. To the
contrary, it required that the federal government do nothing to him or to other people who helped him or conspired with him to
commit federal crimes!
I'm not a Trump supporter, but you have to say this for Trump: he banned Jeffery Epstein from his properties and made him PNG
when Trump had complaints about the man's conduct on site.
I've communicated in the past with former U.S. Army unit leaders whose occasional mission
was to escort CIA teams into Laos during the Vietnam war, who were to bring back significant
amounts of heroin for placement in the body bags of killed U.S. soldiers for shipment back to
the States for distribution. I was told that in some cases, the CIA team did not make it back
with the heroin, courtesy of the accompanying U.S. military unit. I guess that saves the
trouble of making such activities public.
"... But Dean Baker, the co-founder of the liberal Centre for Economic and Policy Research, said that the increase in corporate debt has corresponded with higher profits and manageably low interest rates. "The idea that you're going to have this massive cascade of defaults - it's very hard to see," Baker said. ..."
"... Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Centre for American Progress, said that most predictions about recessions were wrong, not just those offered by politicians. ..."
"... But he interpreted Warren's essay as a broader warning about how Trump's efforts to support growth by curbing regulations and attacking government institutions might eventually be destructive ..."
"... With my total lack of understanding of world economics I predict a stock market crash sometime between May 2020 and October 2020 and a recession, including Australia (worse than the unofficial one we have really been in here in Australia for the last 10 years), over following few years. ..."
Elizabeth Warren became a household name thanks to her prescient warning of what became a global financial crisis.
Now she's staking her credentials on another forecast of fiscal trauma ahead. The Democratic presidential candidate published an
online essay this week saying that a rise in consumer and corporate debt is imperilling the longest expansion in US history.
"Whether
it's this year or next year, the odds of another economic downturn are high - and growing," Warren wrote.
Her prediction could help
her win over primary voters by tapping into anxieties about middle-class economic stability despite broad gains over the past decade.
But Warren's opponents could seize on her warning to undermine her credibility should a crash fail to materialise before next year's
election, and some economists sympathetic to her agenda say that - for the moment - her conclusion of a looming recession is overblown.
Recessions are notoriously difficult to forecast. Warren first warned in 2003 about subprime mortgage lending, yet it was roughly
five years later when the US housing market fully collapsed.
And although her dire forecast echoed in style some warnings made by
Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, Warren hasn't aligned with him in portraying her potential election to the White
House as the only way to avert disaster. "I went through this back in the years before the 2008 crash, and no one wanted to listen.
So, here we are again," Warren said on Capitol Hill last week. "I'm trying to point out where the warning signs are. I hope
our regulators and Congress listen, make changes, and that the economy strengthens."
Even economists who like her prescription are skeptical about her diagnosis. Warren rooted her concerns about
the economy in a Federal Reserve report that found a 6.8 per cent increase in household debt over the past decade, allowing the Massachusetts
senator to write that American families are "taking on more debt than ever before." But that figure is not adjusted for inflation,
nor is it adjusted for population growth - and the number of US households has risen by 9.5 per cent during the same period, meaning
that Fed data also shows debt levels have fallen on a per capita basis.
"I don't see a huge bubble on the other side of household
debt that is going to savage people's assets," said Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. At
the moment, families can afford their debt because of low interest rates, and that minimises the risks to the economy. American households
are devoting less than 10 per cent of their disposable income to debt service, down from roughly 13 per cent in 2008, according to
the Fed. This doesn't mean that Warren is wrong to conclude that families are burdened by student debt and childcare costs, just
that data suggests the debt produced by those expenses is unlikely to cause a downturn.
Part of Warren's forecast hinges on a spike
in interest rates that seems unlikely as most benchmark rates have declined since November. Warren has assembled a litany of proposals
aimed at bringing down household debt, through student loan forgiveness and affordable childcare availability as well as a housing
plan designed to lower rent costs. She touted her policy agenda - which has propelled her higher in the polls - as ways to avert
her predicted crash.
Warren's warning of a downturn is a somewhat unique maneuver for a presidential candidate. Past White House hopefuls have waited
for the downturns to start before capitalising on them. Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, for example, on a post-recession
message summed up by then-adviser James Carville's edict to focus on "the economy, stupid."
Warren also warned this week that an increase in corporate borrowing could crush the economy.
But Dean Baker, the co-founder of the liberal Centre for Economic and Policy Research, said that the increase in corporate debt
has corresponded with higher profits and manageably low interest rates. "The idea that you're going to have this massive cascade
of defaults - it's very hard to see," Baker said.
While the US economy may not be entering into a recession, many economic forecasters say growth is still slowing because of global
and demographic pressures. Evidence of this has already caused Fed officials to signal that they plan to cut interest rates at their
meeting next week. Trump has repeatedly called for the Fed to make even steeper cuts to improve his economic track record.
Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Centre for American Progress, said that most predictions about recessions were wrong, not
just those offered by politicians.
But he interpreted Warren's essay as a broader warning about how Trump's efforts to support growth by curbing regulations and
attacking government institutions might eventually be destructive. "It's hard to say what a debt-driven problem would look like until
it happens," Madowitz said.
"I think it's also reasonable to elevate concern at the moment given how politicised Trump has made apolitical economic institutions
like the Fed. That's not a free lunch. It creates real risks, so it's more important than usual to think about what happens if things
go bump in the night."
AP Mick 8 hours ago
I really have no idea about economics - seriously the mechanics of world financing, where every country seems
to in debt baffles me. But if you look at the last 40 years or so - my adult life - there seems to be a stock market crash about
each 10 years and a recession in the USA about each 10 years. From memory, stock markets in 1987, 1997, 2008 (I suppose also dot
com stuff in around 1999/2000 as well). Recessions in the US in early 90's, early 2000's, 2009 into 2010's.
With my total lack of understanding of world economics I predict a stock market crash sometime between May 2020 and October 2020
and a recession, including Australia (worse than the unofficial one we have really been in here in Australia for the last 10 years),
over following few years.
I wonder how my predictions will stand up to the experts. Gillespie 8 hours ago No facts seem to be the hallmark of your post.
"Warren first warned in 2003 about subprime mortgage lending" shshus 10 hours ago The incoming economic meltdown in a insanely indebted
global ponzi scheme is a no brainer. Despite Trump's usual bombast, the US economy is hardly growing and manufacturing is already
in recession. The lunatic policies of central banks to offer free money at almost zero interest rates has caused a greed based credit
frenzy that is simply unsustainable. The coming economic collapse will be far worse as the trade wars between US and China and rest
of the world will simply compound the problem. Australia is particularly vulnerable in both economic and strategic terms. Time to
batten the hatches, rather than pile on more consumer debt.
uh Hillary Clinton stood with Bush and lied the world into war. Hillary and Obama brought
slavery back to Libya and ISIS and the largest refugee crisis since WW2 to Syria .
Dont forget genocide in Yemen ..
Hillary also supported disastrous free trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA and {TPP that
brought back slavery} that harm workers on both sides of the borders
Hillary also toppled a democratically elected president in Honduras with Death Squads and
Obama killed 40,000 innocent t people with Sanctions in Venezuela
They are fleeing Hillary and Obama's Terror spree ..and cheer on worse WW3 with Russia
Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network's Support For Endless War
c.. Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, Emma Peele, Without a Doubt – and I absolutely adore your
"Avengers" pseudonym !
Hillary's disgusting crimes, however, seem to me to be an attempt to ingratiate herself
(and the Democrats) with the Ultra Hawkish Bush Era Republicans.
Who can ever forgive & forget her ghoulish pronouncement, "We came, we saw, He
died!!"
(in reference to the ghoulishly brutal public murder of Libya's Qaddafi. {Qaddafi's "Green
Book" was a well imagined Socio-Economic plan for for the economic liberation of Africa from
the economic and cultural strictures of US, European Absolutist Brutal Dominion.} -- As it
was, Libya, under Qaddafi, was a liberal, socialist society with free education, free health
care for all citizens, and a nation with it's own currency , free from US/EURO manipulation
and control.
-- This Is Why We Killed Him. --
This is US Command and Control World-Wide POLICY ! ! ! --
-- Anglo-Saxon Command and Control of the Whole Wide World and all it's resources Owned and
Militarily Controlled by European Bankers
-- - EUROPEAN Bankers, Rothschild Criminal Banker WarMongers/ Wall Street and American
Military Power --
These are They which Evilly Rule the World and Disparage or Murder (annihilate) All Others
at their pleasure, and Trump is an evil antagonist with the personage of a King Leopold.
Please find "KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST' By Adam Hochschild
Russia interfered on a massive scale and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how
massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a
photo with the evil mastermind!
How evil? Well do the math. $43,000 to $46,000 of that was spent during the election and
of those ads 8.4 percent were political. That's $3,684 dollars.
But the political ads were aimed in both directions so that's roughly $1,932 spent
"promoting" Trump.
And now Mueller tells us the evil mastermind is at it again -- as we sit here -- probably
spending even more this time. Let us know when he's spent a full thousand dollars Bob and
we'll start loading the bombs.
Oh, and we found all this out for around thirty million dollars.
think about it! with the myriad of problems we must contend with: growing social
inequality, huge tax breaks for the rich, government deregulation of private business, a
climate catastrophe, unending wars, nuclear annihilation spurred on especially by u.s.
imperialism, the gutting of what little social safety net we have left and so on and so so
on. and we are supposed to be outraged at supposed foreign interference with our supposed
democratic process? please, this is total insanity!!!
Of course, relatively speaking, it’s a nothing. Every knowledgeable person knows
that we in the US orchestrated both the financing and the strategy of the 1996 Yeltsin
campaign -- a political rescue so efficiently carried out that our operatives bragged
brazenly about it to Time Magazine, which made it the cover story for its July 14, 1996
edition (“Yanks to the Rescue”).
The Lamestream Corporate media always underplayed the fact that Yeltsin ordered the
execution of 1,100 demonstrators who protested the IMF backed “reforms”, and that
Clinton approved of his deadly and heavy hand in implementing a neoliberal economic order.
Clinton never threatened to suspend aid to the Russian Federation despite its numerous abuses
of human rights.
Also forgotten is that Yeltsin ordered the Russian Parliament (Duma) shelled before it
could vote on Yeltsin’s economic “reforms”, which were implemented at the
point of a gun. At various times between 1993 and 1997, it was Yeltsin who declared martial
law, suspended the Duma, and declared himself possessed of dictatorial powers.
How many Americans ever knew this? 20%? How many remember it today? Maybe 5%? That means
there is no context for gauging Muellers’ testimony.
But, it is, by MSNBC standards, Vladimir Putin who is Evil Incarnate. Has Maddow ever
mentioned Yeltsin, a tyrant of the first order? No, because at GE, Comcast, and NBC, tyranny
in the name of enforcing neoliberalism is perfectly acceptable.
This post is a bit off topic, and is a bit relativistic, as I know we should be concerned
if it is really true that Manafort was giving internal polling data to a Russian Federation
person so that the IRA could better target swing states in our Midwest.
Bob Van Noy , July 26, 2019 at 08:26
John Wolfe, your comment is not off topic at all, it’s crucial to further
understanding of the totality of the Russia did it mentality, and That is well documented in
a small but powerful book called “Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive
Dissonance” by F. William Engdahl which I will link.
The American People have been propagandized so thoroughly that they can hardly recognize
the truth any longer.
Too, I will link an article in Off Guardian this morning that is worth mentioning if one
wants to see Real Reporting On MH-17.
That bill alone makes Warren a viable candidate again, despite all her previous blunders. She is a courageous woman, that
Warren. And she might wipe the floor with the completely subservant to Israel lobby Trump. Who betrayed his electorate
in all major promises.
Notable quotes:
"... Not only would Warren's legislation prohibit some of the most destructive private equity activities, but it would end their ability to act as traditional asset managers, taking fees and incurring close to no risk if their investments go belly up. The bill takes the explicit and radical view that: ..."
"... Private funds should have a stake in the outcome of their investments, enjoying returns if those investments are successful but ab-1sorbing losses if those investments fail. ..."
"... Critics will say that Warren's bill has no chance of passing, which is currently true but misses the point. ..."
"... firms would share responsibility for the liabilities of companies under their control, including debt, legal judgments, and pension obligations to "better align the incentives of private equity firms and the companies they own." The bill, if enacted, would end the tax subsidy for excessive leverage and closes the carried interest loophole. ..."
"... The bill also seeks to ban dividends to investors for two years after a firm is acquired. Worker pay would be prioritized in the bankruptcy process, with guidelines intended to ensure affected employees are more likely to receive severance pay and pensions. It would also clarify gift cards are consumer deposits, ensuring their priority in bankruptcy proceedings. If enacted, private equity managers will be required to disclose fees, returns, and political expenditures. ..."
"... This is a bold set of proposals that targets abuses that hurt workers and investors. Most readers may not appreciate the significance of the two-year restriction on dividends. One return-goosing strategy that often leaves companies crippled or bankrupt in its wake is the "dividend recap" in which the acquired company takes on yet more debt for the purpose of paying a special dividend to its investors. Another strategy that Appelbaum and Batt have discussed at length is the "op co/prop co." Here the new owners take real estate owned by the company, sell it to a new entity with the former owner leasing it. The leases are typically set high so as to allow for the "prop co" to be sold at a richer price. This strategy is often a direct contributor to the death of businesses, since ones that own their real estate usually do so because they are in cyclical industries, and not having lease payments enables the to ride out bad times. The proceeds of sale of the real estate is usually dividended out to the investors, hence the dividend restriction would also pour cold water on this approach. ..."
"... However, there is precedent in private equity for recognizing joint and several liability of an investment fund for the obligations of its portfolio companies. In a case that winded its way through the federal courts until last year ( Sun Capital Partners III, LP v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Indus. Pension Fund ), the federal court held that Sun Capital Partners III was liable under ERISA, the federal pension law, for the unfunded pension obligations of Scott Brass, a portfolio company of that fund. The court's key finding was that Sun Capital played an active management role in Scott Brass and that its claim of passive investor status therefore should not be respected. ..."
"... Needless to say, private equity firms have worked hard to minimize their exposure to the Sun Capital decision, for example by avoiding purchasing companies with defined benefit pension plans. The Warren bill, however, is so broad in the sweep of liability it imposes that PE firms would be unlikely to be able to structure around it. It is hard to imagine the investors in private equity funds accepting liability for what could be enormous sums of unfunded pension liabilities ultimately flowing onto them. Either they would have to set up shell companies to fund their PE investments that could absorb the potential liability, or they would have to give up on the asset class. Either way, it would mean big changes to the industry and potentially a major contraction of it. ..."
"... I am surprised that Warren sought to make private equity funds responsible for the portfolio company debts by "joint and several liability". You can get to economically pretty much the same end by requiring the general partner and potentially also key employees to guarantee the debt and by preventing them from assigning or buying insurance to protect the guarantor from being liable. There is ample precedent for that for entrepreneurs. Small business corporate credit cards and nearly all small business loans require a personal guarantee. ..."
"... Warren's bill also has strong pro-investor provisions. It takes on the biggest feature of the ongoing investor scamming, which is the failure of PE managers to disclose to the investors all of the fees they receive from portfolio companies. The solution proposed by the bill to this problem is exceedingly straightforward, basically proclaiming, "Oh yeah, now you will have to disclose that." The bill also abolishes the ability of private equity managers to claim long term capital gains treatment on the 20 percent of fund profits that they receive, which is unrelated to the return on any capital that the private equity managers may happen to invest in a fund. ..."
"... We need a reparations movement for all those workers harmed by private equity. Seriously. ..."
"... It's so nice to see someone taking steps to protect the rights and compensation of the people actually doing the work at the companies and putting their interests first in case of bankruptcy. That those who worked hardest to make the company succeed were somehow the ones who took it in the shorts the worst has always struck me as a glaring inequity bordering on cruelty. ..."
Elizabeth Warren's
Stop Wall Street Looting Act , which is co-sponsored by Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, seeks to
fundamentally alter the way private equity firms operate. While the likely impetus for Warren's bill was the spate of private-equity-induced
retail bankruptcies, with Toys 'R' Us particularly prominent, the bill addresses all the areas targeted by critics of private equity:
how it hurts workers and investors and short-changes the tax man, thus burdening taxpayers generally.
"... Would it have helped to separate Madoff Securities LLC into one company per floor, or split up Enron by division? Probably not, but talking about it is Facebook's dream come true. Because the question we should really be discussing is "How many years should Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg ultimately serve in prison?" ..."
Facebook now has a market capitalization approaching $600 billion, making it nominally one
of the most valuable companies on earth. It's a true business miracle: a company that was out
of users in 2012 managed to find a wellspring of nearly infinite and sustained growth that has
lasted it, so far, half of the way through 2019.
So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, that " genius " trade secret, that
turned an over-funded money-losing startup into one of America's greatest business success
stories? It's one that Bernie Madoff would recognize instantly: fraud, in the form of fake
accounts.
Old money goes out, and new money comes in to replace it. That's how a traditional Ponzi
scheme works. Madoff kept his going for decades, managing to attain the rank of Chairman of the
NASDAQ while he was at it.
Zuckerberg's version is slightly different, but only slightly: old users leave after getting
bored, disgusted and distrustful, and new users come in to replace them. Except that as Mark's
friend and lieutenant, Sam Lessin told us, the "new users" part of the equation was already
getting to be a problem in 2012. On October 26, Lessin, wrote, "we are running out of humans
(and have run-out of valuable humans from an advertiser perspective)." At the time, it was far
from clear that Facebook even had a viable business model, and according to Frontline ,
Sheryl Sandberg was panicking due to the company's poor revenue numbers.
To balance it out and keep "growth" on the rise, all Facebook had to do was turn a blind
eye. And did it ever.
In
Singer v. Facebook, Inc . -- a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California
alleging that Facebook has been telling advertisers that it can "reach" more people than
actually exist in basically every major metropolitan area -- the plaintiffs quote former
Facebook employees, understandably identified only as Confidential Witnesses, as stating that
Facebook' s "Potential Reach" statistic was a "made-up PR number" and " fluff. " Also, that
"those who were responsible for ensuring the accuracy 'did not give a shit.'" Another
individual, "a former Operations Contractor with Facebook, stated that Facebook was not
concerned with stopping duplicate or fake accounts."
That's probably because
according to its last investor slide deck and basic subtraction, Facebook is not growing
anymore in the United States, with zero million new accounts in Q1 2019, and only four million
new accounts since Q1 2017. That leaves the rest of the world, where Facebook is growing
fastest "in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines," according to Facebook CFO David Wehner.
Wehner didn't mention the fine print on page 18 of the slide deck, which highlights the
Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam as countries where there are "meaningfully higher"
percentages of, and " episodic spikes " in, fake accounts. In other words, Facebook is growing
the fastest in the locations worldwide where one finds the most fraud. In other other words,
Facebook isn't growing anymore at all -- it 's shrinking. Even India, Indonesia and the
Philippines don't register as many searches for Facebook as they used to. Many of the "new"
users on Instagram are actually old users from the core platform looking to escape the deluge
of fakery.
The last time Mark suggested that Facebook's growth heyday might be behind it, in July 2018,
the stock took a nosedive that ended up being the single largest one-day fall of any company's
stock in the history of the United States. In about an hour,
it plunged 20% from around $220 per share to about $165. Needless to day, the loss of about
$120 billion in market capitalization in an hour provided a sufficient disincentive for Mark to
avoid a repeat performance.
Having narrowly escaped the ire of Wall Street, Mark knows he cannot get off the growth
treadmill he set in motion years ago. The only solution: lying to investors about growth in an
attempt to convince them that everything is fine.
Yet signs that Mark's fake account problem is no different than Madoff's fake account
statement problem are everywhere. Google Trends shows worldwide " Facebook " queries down 80%
from their November 2012 peak. (Instagram doesn't even come close to making up for the loss.)
Mobile metrics measuring use of the Facebook mobile app are down.
And the company's own disclosures about fake accounts stand out mostly for their internal
inconsistency -- one set of numbers, measured in percentages, is disclosed to the SEC, while
another, with absolute figures, appears on its " transparency portal. " While they reveal a
problem escalating at an alarming rate and are constantly being revised upward -- Facebook
claims that false accounts are at 5% and duplicate accounts at 11%, up from 1% and 6%
respectively in Q2 2017 -- they don't measure quite the same things, and are impossible to reconcile .
At the end of 2017, Facebook decided to stop releasing those percentages on a quarterly basis,
opting for an annual basis instead. Out of sight, out of mind.
One could argue that SEC disclosures are subject to strict regulations under the Securities
Exchange Act and that Facebook would never be so bold as to lie to investors in black and
white. That's true: it qualifies its fake account disclosures with the quizzical legal phrase "
significant judgment " and it chose the color orange instead of black (insert Netflix
joke here) for its transparency portal graph disclaimers that read, "These metrics are in
development." And one could further argue that the transparency portal metrics are reviewed by
a team of academics, known as the Data Transparency Advisory Group (DTAG), who are supposed to
vouch for their validity. But the DTAG academics -- not one of whom is a statistician, despite
Facebook's direct claim to the contrary, now erased -- fully admit that they are paid by
Facebook, and even after months of hard work, their final
report released in April mentioned fake accounts only three times, and all three were in
passing. On the accuracy or validity of Facebook's fake account numbers, the DTAG oddly had
absolutely nothing to say.
What Facebook does say is this : its measurements, the ones
subject to "significant judgment," are taken from an undisclosed "limited sample of accounts."
How limited? That doesn't matter, because "[w]e believe fake accounts are measured correctly
within the limitations to our measurement systems" and "reporting fake accounts may be a bad
way to look at things."
And how many fake accounts did Facebook report being created in Q2 2019? Only 2.2 billion,
with a " B, " which is approximately the same as the number of active users Facebook would like
us to believe that it has.
A comprehensive look back at Facebook's disclosures suggests that of the company's 12
billion total accounts ever created, about 10 billion are fake. And as many as 1 billion are probably
active , if not more. (Facebook says that this estimate is "not based on any facts," but
much like the false
statistics it provided to advertisers on video viewership, that too is a lie.)
So, fake accounts may be a bad way to look at things, as Facebook suggests -- or they may be
the key to the largest corporate fraud in history.
Advertisers pay Facebook on the assumption that the people viewing and clicking their ads
are real. But that's often not the case. Facebook has absolutely no incentive to solve the
problem, it's already in court over it, and its former employees are talking. From Mark's
vantage point, it's raining free money. All he has to do to get advertisers to spend is
convince the world that Facebook is huge and it's only getting huger.
No one in the media, let alone Congress, dares to ask potentially embarrassing questions,
and few understand the minutiae of real-time pricing auctions, cookies and user disambiguation
anyway. Everyone would rather talk about the company's dedication to " innovation " and the
laughably remote chance that Libra, a needlessly complex pseudo-cryptocurrency system will
disrupt central banking. In fact, Libra is best described as Facebook's Business Model Plan C
(Plan A having been "no privacy at all" and Plan B being "encrypt everything"), which may
actually be necessary as the scheme is starting to unravel.
Mark is smart, but he's never been smart enough to listen to those with experience. Instead,
he has prioritized growth at any cost, pulling all of the control rods out of the reactor to
achieve it, and now that those costs have caught up with him -- namely, genocide, a role in
putting a fascist, white supremacist in the White House, and severe reputational damage -- he
literally has no idea what to do. His usual go-to acronyms -- VR? AI? -- aren 't quite cutting
it, and much like Chernobyl, the resulting fallout is everywhere, impossible to clean up, and
there are dead bodies on the ground. Even his co-founder and former roommate can't fully
support him anymore, though Chris Hughes did still obsequiously refer to Mark as a "good, kind
person" engaged in "nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented
entrepreneur."
That's obviously false. Mark is not a good, kind person, as I have writtenforyears
. The only hustle he is engaged in is the usual kind: the fraudulent kind. And if I'm wrong
about any or all of this, and Facebook releases the data and methodology it is using to reach
the conclusions that it has about the strength of its platform, then I will gladly admit that
I'm wrong.
But I'm not wrong. Facebook is a real product, but like Enron, it's also a scam, now the
largest corporate scandal ever. It won't release its data about the 2016 election, about fake
accounts, or about anything material -- and because Mark knows it's a scam, he won't agree to
testify before the British parliament in a way that could require him to actually answer any
substantive questions, as I did in
June . And because Facebook is also a component of the S&P 500, countless people have
an incentive to maintain the status quo.
So should we break up the tech companies and Facebook in particular? It's already a campaign
issue for the next presidential election. Elizabeth Warren says yes. Beto O'Rourke wants
"stronger regulations." Kamala Harris would rather talk about privacy. Everyone else -- even
Donald Trump -- generally agrees that something needs to be done. Yet the unspoken issue at the
center of it all remains: Mark is running a Ponzi scheme, but Wall Street, Congress, the
Federal Trade Commission, the think tanks, and their associates haven't figured it out.
At this point it should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention that Mark is a
bad-faith actor. He has no appreciation for the rule of law, or the role of a free press, and
he has a dangerous tendency to view himself as infallible. After discovering a gaping security
flaw in his product that revealed bulk information about friends of friends, exactly like
Cambridge Analytica, I warned Mark in writing about the way his sloppy code would inevitably
lead him to cross paths with the FTC and cause massive privacy and security concerns --
in April 2005 .
His response: problems with the " Mark Zuckerberg production " were actually someone else's
responsibility and "not worth arguing about."
Clearly, Mark can no longer argue that his decisions as Facebook's CEO are immaterial (
though
he has tried ). Many have already lost their lives, whether through avoidable suicides or
avoidable genocidal acts in Myanmar, due to his string of increasingly tone-deaf and
spectacularly dishonest decisions.
Now, fifteen years and approximately as many false apologizes after my classmate started a
grand social experiment that first captivated the media, then locked it in a profitless box,
and then played a major supporting role in bringing fascism to America, the general consensus
is that the best way to handle Mark and his tech brethren is through the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act. But the consensus is wrong, based on a mountain of misapprehensions.
In a nutshell, the argument in favor of anti-trust action is that in the midst of the
longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it's the Progressive Era all over again. A recent
New York Times op-ed penned by Mark's co-founder, Chris Hughes, made essentially this
point, relying heavily on input from the Roosevelt Institute. The Open Markets Institute
agrees. In a talk at Harvard Law School, Matt Stoller argued that Facebook, Google and Amazon
were " born
as monopolists ."
It's a compelling story, so long as one is willing to ignore the reality on the ground. For
one thing, software products are not railroads, which require significant physical capital and
labor to establish. Were he determined to do so, it would take Mark a few weeks to re-build
Instagram and WhatsApp, and there really isn't any way the government could stop him. For
another, I know that on this particular issue, Stoller is incorrect, because I was there when
The Facebook was born on my hard drive on September 19, 2003, in Lowell House. It hardly
resembled a monopoly. Monopolies are what happen as the result of prolonged neglect by law
enforcement. They're not born; they're nourished by years and years of perverse incentives.
The biggest problem with treating Facebook as a monopoly, as opposed to the byproduct of
what Jesse Eisenger calls "The Chickenshit Club," is that it wrongly affirms Mark's
infallibility and fails to see through him and his scheme, let alone the reality that he's not
even in control anymore because no one is.
Would it have helped to separate Madoff Securities LLC into one company per floor, or split
up Enron by division? Probably not, but talking about it is Facebook's dream come true. Because
the question we should really be discussing is "How many years should Mark Zuckerberg and
Sheryl Sandberg ultimately serve in prison?"
_____
1 Aaron Greenspan is short Facebook stock. Think Computer Foundation made a
donation to Aurora Advisors Incorporated as part of its 2016 Naked Capitalism fundraiser.
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold Warwhich the Obama regime was so very much responsible forwill begin to find peace. ..."
Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless
the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some
efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and
say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.
A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster,
has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;
and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official
for the first time.
The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer
in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash
on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes
which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.
The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because
the airline manifest does
not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.
The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT),
against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT;
in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion
from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never
been explained.
The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and
telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution
in a Malaysian or other national or international court.
For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first
week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger
bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the
Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.
The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing
the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated
the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch
to call off the invasion on July 27.
The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and
co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full
here .
The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read
here .
Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the
first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops
to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged
Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read
this .
Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces
unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.
Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after
the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed
here and
here .
In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed
us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of
the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We
are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the
missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."
On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right)
announced agreements he had already
reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will
not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president has
pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part.
'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian
corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government
of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as
a medical team. But we must and we will find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."
The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence,
filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave
a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian
newspaper .
"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time
Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after
arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave
Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration
headed by Alexander Borodai .
With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead
of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian
state press agency ABC
reported their
military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans,
had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony
filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.
US sources told the
Wall Street
Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed
a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the
territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give
any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman
Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."
The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the
destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket
explosion." This was a fabrication the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first
reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence
revealed .
Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country
to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning,
and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian
mission."
In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source:
https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian
control.
By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian
troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.
The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added
the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.
Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site
to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source:
https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.
Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special
monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over
the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said
no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot.
We cannot allow."
The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands,
Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.
Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and
his disclosures agreed with them in advance.
Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have
included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians;
for details, read
this .
Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services
, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine
the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the
Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read
here .
The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated.
The source of the tapes, according to the
JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The
Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van
der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.
Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the
June 19, 2019 , press conference of
JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.
Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has
been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min.
17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours
on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.
Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence
against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut
conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).
Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including
a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the
missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one,
possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.
Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three
years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported
where the missile she saw had been fired from.
This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to
point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site.
She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and
garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."
According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the
Ukrainian Army were there."
Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military
aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian
aircraft she also saw at the same time.
On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of
the MH17 crash.
Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist
Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller
for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety
Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of
the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.
Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking
off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the
three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There
[they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."
Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah
Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian
Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice
for the victims," Zakaria
said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose
of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?]
"Part of the conclusions [inaudible] do not change our positions."
By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign
correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties.
Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia.
He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published
at
Dances with Bears
I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and
into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g.
here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?
(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")
Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder
pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved
airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in
tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.
Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist
masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad
before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?
Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down
Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.
If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your
questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'
Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians
have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed
false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no
interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all
any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'
It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy.
These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery
will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised
crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities
all around.
Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I
have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding
their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but
if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how
much they care about airplane crash investigations.
I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence
and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air
strike.
Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of
sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does
JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?
TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in
face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).
I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed
up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).
For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of
a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.
How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing
their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't
want hostile forces parked on its border.
Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink
and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short
of any evidence they were in charge.
Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:
That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were
seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.
This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written
that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.
Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag
operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on
board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)
Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning
of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?
I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting
down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for
you.
Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing
more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think
be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.
And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate almost in unison, right
after the shooting of the plane.
"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103
site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based
at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.
The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.
That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian
commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians.
The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the
hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians
came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got a YouTube link.
Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did
it until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down
in high summer. And so it went on.
There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite
of the efforts of our government to stop them.Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was
being shelled by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were
seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings
of aircraft that went down and there is usually something a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts but here there was nothing.
That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would
have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking
about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister
of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and
may have been entertaining such thoughts.
My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over
$5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern
Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not
rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself who benefited from this tragedy
and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations
should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.
Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they
had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a
fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the
rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.
Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as
in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the
western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting
of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News
before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".
If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired
by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's
evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.
Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't eitherthe fog of propaganda war.
The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according
to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold Warwhich the Obama regime was so very much responsible forwill
begin to find peace.
Fascism involved population mobilization in the face of the crisis. It can't emerge out of nothing. There should be a social
crisis like current gradual collapse of neoliberalism.
The second observation is that there is nothing special about fascism. It is just extension of method of controlling the economy
and population during the war into peaceful period. As such, it is not a black and white phenomenon and there can be shades of grey
in fascism too. Methods can vary between different nations considerably.
As or the USA sliding into fascism there is no need to that. Existence of super-powerful intelligence agencies makes
fascism with its methods redundant for the control of the economy and the population during the crisis. Inverted totalitarism
is the motto of the day. In a way intelligence agencies can be viewed as modern day fascist party with permanent well paid party
members (the prototype of such party was the core of Bolshevik party which consisted of "professional revolutionaries" who did not
shy from terrorist methods much like intelligence agencies like CIA) and powerful financial support from the state.
Powerful intelligence agencies are incompatible with democracy and on national level in the USA democracy is a sham. It simply a
Potemkin village hiding the rule of financial oligarchy (and associated military industrial complex and Silicon Valley perverts) via
inverted totalitarism mechanism. Only if we view inverted totalitarism as a flavor of fascism )which is questionable as
at the core of fascism is mass mobilization (think "Trump rallies" as a parody on that: "history repeats itself: first as tragedy
the second as farce") , which inverted totalitarism tries to avoid at all costs) we can talk about the USA fascism.
Inverted totalitarism is much more sophisticated method of ruling population during the crisis them classic fascism and it has
several advantages over fascism. Existence of powerful intelligence agencies makes creation of national far right nationalist
party with charismatic leader redundant: they are such a party and they are already in power. So in a way, the elections or
coup d'ιtat to bring fascist leadership in power are simply redundant.
But if we talk about forceful rejection of the current corrupt democratic system )and neoliberal globalization pushed by corrupt
neoliberal elite) by population in favor of more autocratic rule we can talk about modern fascism as a reaction of the crisis
of neoliberalism. Revival of far right movement (which actually are not national-socialist, but neoliberal-socialist -- big
difference) and far right parties in Europe attest that such elements of fascism are still in play.
Notable quotes:
"... fascist deliverables often have excellent symbolism -- graphic treatments especially -- fascism is about more than symbols, although you might not know it from the ruminations of our symbol-manipulating political class. ..."
"... Until the end of the nineteenth century, most political thinkers believed that widening the vote would inevitably benefit democracy and socialism. ..."
"... The populist leader to complete the road to fascism generally has to come out of a democratic process. They get voted into power by a disgruntled populace and by the time the populace realizes they have made a pact with the devil, power has been consolidated and there is no going back. ..."
"... The Tea Party was a warning shot across the bow where the Republican Party itself was helpless to prevent establishment candidates from being primaried. ..."
"... That leaves the door open for a Trump to come in announcing he will cut the Gordian knot with the sword of his personality "I am the only one who can .." ..."
"... Can a Trump do an end run on a paralyzed Congress to take over? Hitler did it in 1933. Is our Constitution and the defenders of it engaged and strong enough to prevent it? ..."
"... If you agree on the definition of fascism (I like the second), and you agree there are stages of fascism, the question becomes what phase are we in? I say phase two. ..."
"... Fascism is nationalist, but not all nationalism is fascism. Nor does it have to inevitably evolve into fascism. Economic protectionism also has a long history, and very little of that is fascist. I think that what we're seeing is just a bog-standard right-wing nationalist reaction to the demonstrable damage of globalization, enabled by the complete dereliction of duty by the left. Liberal cynics and ignorant useful idiots can cry 'fascism' all they want, but their whining isn't going to just magically make these nationalist movements genuinely fascist. ..."
"... Read Paxton's paper, or better yet download The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). (It's free if you Google around). It is not a challenging read, and as you progress the deja vu gets increasingly unnerving. ..."
"... Mobilized society around the State as a quasi-religious deity works, and as long as it can be sustained as long as a flow of enemies endures. What else is a soccer club after all? Below the surface, such a consolidation of power would be driven by an oligarchy, eventually yielding a Czar-like creature, but whomever will need to justify their excesses. ..."
"... Americans claim to be patriotic and hang flags in front of their houses but you don't see them lining up to join the military. ..."
"... Inverted totalitarianism is what we have now and Trump is just a bit player as are we all. When it finally breaks down we are more likely to have chaos than goose stepping regiments. ..."
"... Fascism is just rich people hiring thugs. The richer they are, the more thugs they can hire. ..."
"... That could be feudalism as well, as I'm sure Gramsci would be the first to admit. Do you actually want to move to Stage Three? ..."
The word "fascism" has been much in the news of
late. Here is a chart of the year 2019 from Google Trends:
Interestingly, usage is more or less flat until the first spike, when
President Trump put tanks on the National Mall for July 4
, and then a second, larger spike, when he gave
his Greenville, NC speech, and the crowd chanted, of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, "
send
them back
." Omar reacted as follows:
... ... ...
Omar is a serious person and that's a serious charge, so it's worth looking at. Certainly my left/work
corner of the Twittersphere was consumed by the word "fascism," to the extent that RussiaRussiaRussia was
drowned out. Notably, however, the two spikes, and the resulting moral panic, were caused by symbols: Tanks on
the mall, and a speech. (Interestingly, words about the border, like "concentration camps," and "fascism"
do
not
spike simultaneously
, even though one might expect them to. We'll see more about symbols in
the Appendices.) However, although fascist deliverables often have excellent symbolism -- graphic treatments
especially -- fascism is about more than symbols, although you might not know it from the ruminations of our
symbol-manipulating political class.
So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a deeper look at the work of
Columbia
historian
Robert O. Paxton
,
who is a scholar of fascism. Basically, this post will be the notes for the class I wish I had taken with him;
Paxton writes as lucidly as another great scholar of fascism, Richard J. Evans, author of
The Coming of the
Third Reich
and two wonderful successor volumes. I'm going to quote great slabs mostly from Paxton's
article "
The
Five Stages of Fascism
" (The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 1. Mar., 1998, pp. 1-23), but also
from his later book,
The Anatomy of Fascism
(2004). "Five Stages" is only 24 pages, and easy, so do consider reading it in
full, because I'm not really doing it justice; I'm leaving out all the historiography, for example.
And so to Paxton. I'm selecting passages partly when they contain useful ideas I just don't see in today's
discourse, but mostly to give us tools to assess the current "conjuncture," as we say.
Fascism and Democracy
From the
Five Stages of Fascism
, page 3:
The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected. Until
the end of the nineteenth century, most political thinkers believed that widening the vote would inevitably
benefit democracy and socialism. Friedrich Engels, noting the rapid rise of the socialist vote in Germany
and France, was sure that time and numbers were on his side. Writing the preface for a new edition in 1895
of Karl Marx's
Class Struggles in France
, he declared that "if it continues in this fashion, we
will conquer the major part of the middle classes and the peasantry and will become the decisive power." It
took two generations before the Left understood that fascism is, after all, an authentic mass popular
enthusiasm and not merely [1] a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or [2] by
capitalism in crisis.
I think most "hot take" analysis by liberals would fall into the bucket labeled [1]; by the left, label [2].
I think the idea that democracy is, as it were, the host body for fascism deserves some thought. Certainly
there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced.
Fascism: Made in America?
From the
Five Stages of Fascism
, page 12:
But it is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems
functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate
officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a
militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel
to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests.
In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its
conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in
the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in
interwar Europe. It is arguable, at least, that fascism (understood functionally) was born in the late 1860s
in the American South.
(As an aside: It's probably coincidence, but Civil War tactics, especially by the time of the Overland
Campaign, were also a "remarkable preview" of World War I. Intuitively, I feel that fascism does not take hold
of the body politic without a lot of organic damage, whether in the entrenchments of the Civil War, the
trenches of World War I, or -- just possibly -- the opioid crisis, deaths of despair, and falling life
expectancy.)
Hitler's American Model
shows that Nazi jurists and lawyers came to America to research Jim Crow, and
thought very highly of the legislation; they saw Jim Crow as an example of modernity -- how advanced the United
States was. Of course, by their lights, Jim Crow was misdirected.
Mutability of Fascism
From the
Five Stages of Fascism
, page 4:
[Individual cases of fascism] differ in space because each national variant of fascism draws its
legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic
elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much greater role in
an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for
contingent historical reasons. They differ in time because of the transformations and accommodations
demanded of those movements that seek power.
And page 5:
Fascists deny any legitimacy to universal principles to such a point that they even neglect proselytism.
Authentic fascism is not for export. Particular national variants of fascism differ far more profoundly one
from another in themes and symbols than do the national variants of the true "isms." The most conspicuous of
these variations, one that leads some to deny the validity of the very concept of generic fascism, concerns
the nature of the indispensable enemy: within Mediterranean fascisms, socialists and colonized peoples are
more salient enemies than is the Jewry. Drawing their slogans and their symbols from the patriotic repertory
of one particular community, fascisms are radically unique in their speech and insignia. They fit badly into
any system of universal intellectual principles.
One result of the "Lost Cause" propaganda and the historiography of
the Dunning School
--
William Dunning, ironically enough, professed at Columbia as well -- is that the notion that there might already
have been an
American
Fascism (see above) is not available to us. Hence, we often see Nazis (and
generally Nazis, not even Mussolini) as the quintessential fascists. The argument can be made that
globalization has, in fact, created fascism of export -- some in my Twitterverse had no problem believing that
Trump was simultaneously a Russian puppet
and
a fascist -- but I just don't see how that helps fascism
to root itself (see below) in any given country, which is a requirement for it to grow.
The Stages of Fascism
From the
Five Stages of Fascism
, page 11:
But one must compare what is comparable. A regime where fascism exercises power is hardly comparable to a
sect of dissident intellectuals. We must distinguish the different stages of fascism in time. It has long
been standard to point to the difference between movements and regimes. I believe we can usefully
distinguish more stages than that, if we look clearly at the very different sociopolitical processes
involved in each stage. I propose to isolate five of them:
(1) the initial creation of fascist
movements; (2) their rooting as parties in a political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the
exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term, (5) radicalization or entropy
.
And stage 2, the importance of parties, pages 12-13:
The second stage -- rooting, in which a fascist movement becomes a party capable of acting decisively on the
political scene -- happens relatively rarely. At this stage, comparison becomes rewarding: one can contrast
successes with failures.
Success depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a
liberal state, whose inadequacies seems to condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and
political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to
accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner
. Some fascist leaders, in their turn, are
willing to reposition their movements in alliances with these frightened conservatives, a step that pays
handsomely in political power, at the cost of disaffection among some of the early antibourgeois militants.
That underlined portion does seem familar, doesn't it? However, it's worth noting that there's no "seem" to
American decline; how is a nation with dropping life expectancy not in decline? It's also worth noting that
"frightened conservatives" doesn't necessarily equal Republicans; it was not, after all, the Republican Party
that painted the anti-semitism target on Ilhan Omar's back. It's worth asking, then, whether centrist Democrats
would seek a bipartisan alliance against the left.
Where is the "fascism minimum" in all this? Has generic fascism evaporated in this analysis? It is by a
functional definition of fascism that we can escape from these quandaries.
Fascism is a system of
political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in
which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline
. Its complex tensions
(political revolution versus social restoration, order versus aggressive expansionism, mass enthusiasm
versus civic submission) are hard to understand solely by reading its propaganda. One must observe it in
daily operation .
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community
decline, humiliation, or victim- hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a
mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with
traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical
or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Speaking as an amateur, I think the two definitions map to each other, and both to the present day ("liberal
democracy stands accused" v. "abandons democratic liberties," but I like the second one much better, because
the language is crisper, and is testable. For example, "redemptive violence": During Reconstruction, the states
that came under control of the former Slave Power, a process achieved by great violence, were referred to as
"redeemed."
More from the
Five Stages of Fascism
, page 23:
Can fascism still exist today, in spite of the humiliating defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, the declining
availability of the war option in a nuclear age, the seemingly irreversible globalization of the economy,
and the triumph of in- dividualistic consumerism? After ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the rise of
exclusionary nationalisms in postcommunist Eastern Europe, the "skinhead" phenomenon in Britain, Germany,
Scandinavia, and Italy, and the election of `
Mirko Tremaglia, a veteran of the Republic of Salo, as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the
Italian Parliament during the Berlusconi government, it would be hard to answer "no" to that question.
The most interesting cases today, however, are not those that imitate the exotic colored-shirt movements
of an earlier generation. New functional equivalents of fascism would probably work best, as George Orwell
reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time. An authentically popular
fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black; in Western Europe, secular and antisemitic, or
more probably, these days, anti-Islamic; in Russia and Eastern Europe, religious, antisemitic, and
slavophile.
We may legitimately conclude, for example, that the skinheads are functional equivalents of
Hitler's SA and Mussolini's
squadristi
: only if important elements of the conservative elite begin
to cultivate them as weapons against some internal enemy, such as immigrants.
Rather prescient for 1998, I must say. (And much as I loathe black bloc, it may be that they have their
place in making these "functional equivalents" less easy to form.) Nevertheless, we do not have a "mass-based
party of committed nationalist
militants
," Yet. Paxton goes on:
The right questions to ask of today's neo- or protofascisms are those appropriate for the second and
third stages of the fascist cycle. Are they becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and
feelings and wield major influence on the political scene? [TBD] Is the economic or constitutional system in
a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities? [Yes] Is a rapid political mobilization
threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look
for tough helpers in order to stay in charge? [TBD]
It is by answering those kinds of questions,
grounded in a proper historical understanding of the processes at work in past fascisms, and not by checking
the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the
opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize our own day's functional equivalents of
fascism.
And from
Anatomy
, page 218:
Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries -- not excluding the United States.
"Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to
citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does
not require a spectacular "march" on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate
lawless treatment of national "enemies" is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached
Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further
fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human
choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power.
Our immune system kills off little cancers all the time
; a metastatizing tumor takes a lot of effort to
create. Stage One fascisms are little cancers, killed off by a healthy body politic. Stage Two fascisms,
without treatment, will metastatize.
Conclusion
I think we're somewhere in Stage Two: Rooting -- or, to be optimistic,
Up
rooting. I invite the views
of readers!
APPENDIX I: "Cosmopolitan"
Stoller tweeted, of a speech by possible Trump 2.0 Josh Hawley:
Then ensued the most moralizing and banal Twitter discussion I've seen in some time, and that's saying
something. Hawley used the word "cosmopolitican" (
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry here
), which Stoller's detractors felt proved Hawley was sending an
anti-semitic dog whistle, and hence Stoller, in defending him, was an anti-semite too. (Paxton: "not by
checking the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric ."). To show how useless the entire episode
was, I'll quote The Nation's Jeet Heer:
Of course, the view that "all politics is based on a division between friend and foe" could be traced right
back to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt,
whose doctrine that was
, and so
Heer
could be said to be sending an anti-semitic dog whistle. Of
course that's absurd, because context matters. Our symbol manipulating professional friends in the political
class would do far better to look at function instead of checking their
Index Expurgatorius
of words
suitable for censure and calling out. Liberals, and the left, have been calling out "dog whistles" for twenty
years, at least. It hasn't gotten them anywhere. Yet still they do it!
The populist leader to complete the road to fascism generally has to come out of a democratic process.
They get voted into power by a disgruntled populace and by the time the populace realizes they have made a
pact with the devil, power has been consolidated and there is no going back.
The Tea Party was a warning shot across the bow where the Republican Party itself was helpless to prevent
establishment candidates from being primaried. Gerrymandering and polarization means that quite a few people
on the right and left get into Congress and State legislatures simply by winning a primary. So blockades in
Congress started with small groups of people who could control if a majority vote was possible. Since their
positions are on the extreme end, no compromise is possible and the system seizes up.
That leaves the door open for a Trump to come in announcing he will cut the Gordian knot with the sword
of his personality "I am the only one who can .."
Can a Trump do an end run on a paralyzed Congress to take over? Hitler did it in 1933. Is our
Constitution and the defenders of it engaged and strong enough to prevent it? Can Congress with Mitch
McConnell in the Senate do it? Can the Supreme Court with John Roberts as Chief Justice do it?
"Certainly there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced."
What????? "Until 1922, Italy was a constitutional monarchy with a parliament; in 1913, the first
universal male suffrage election was held. The so-called Statuto Albertino, which Carlo Alberto conceded in
1848 remained unchanged, even if the kings usually abstained from abusing their extremely large powers (for
example, senators were not elected but chosen by the king)." (wikipedia)
Thus from 1870 to 1922 Italy was a not a democracy.
Under the Monarchical Constitution the King of Italy had exclusive power over foreign policy, which he
repeatedly used to engage in misguided and stupid colonial adventures in Africa. An huge insurrection in the
south was violently put down by the Piedmontese military, who also routinely shot strikers.
From 1922, when Italy became a republic, until 1923, when Mussolini took over, doesn't seem like a
"well-advanced democracy" to me.
As for Germany, you had the Freikorps running around assassinating prominent political figures like
Rathenau -- not to mention their earlier murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 instigated by
the future Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert himself. Strikers and demonstrators were also
routinely put down with bullets.
As the first elected president of Germany (1919-1925), Ebert presided over a bloody civil war and "used
the presidency's emergency powers a total of 134 times. " (wikipedia) Seven years later Hitler was elected
to head a coalition government with substantial financial assistance from Germany's wealthiest citizens and
industrialists and also the from Catholic church. And as everyone knows one of H.'s first acts was to
suspend parliament. You could hardly call Germany an example of well-advanced democracy either.
Excuse me, but I found this post really hard to follow. And I tried.
I think there is a definite growth in a certain very conservative strain of nationalism and a rejection of
free trade across the world but I don't see a connection to the points laid out by Paxton. What we've got is
something totally new that seems like a reaction to globalization (and neoliberalism) to people on the left,
but maybe isn't that at all.
Well, they're class notes on a difficult topic. If you agree on the definition of fascism (I like the
second), and you agree there are stages of fascism, the question becomes what phase are we in? I say phase
two. (It also makes denial harder, but recognition easier, if one concedes that the Reconstruction South was
fascist, indeed the first case.)
I'm of two minds on this. I get what you're saying, that fascism is a gradient, and not simply binary.
So Trump could be seen as a step along the road to eventual full on fascism. But that seems to just be
another way of saying he, and the current right wing movements, aren't actually fascist.
Fascism is nationalist, but not all nationalism is fascism. Nor does it have to inevitably evolve into
fascism. Economic protectionism also has a long history, and very little of that is fascist. I think that
what we're seeing is just a bog-standard right-wing nationalist reaction to the demonstrable damage of
globalization, enabled by the complete dereliction of duty by the left. Liberal cynics and ignorant
useful idiots can cry 'fascism' all they want, but their whining isn't going to just magically make these
nationalist movements genuinely fascist.
The right-wing is perfectly capable of being racist and ugly (in fact right-wing politics is incapable
of *not* being ugly) while still not being fascist.
Read Paxton's paper, or better yet download
The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).
(It's free if you
Google around). It is not a challenging read, and as you progress the deja vu gets increasingly unnerving.
The one element that Paxton mentions time and again is the role played by the state's economy. Fascism in
France, for example, did not take hold because their middle class were happy campers. Of course, after
Hitler invaded, the French fascists ascended to power anyway and became the Vichy government. Because
today's .01% have not shared their wealth with the middle class, it might not take much to tip the balance.
After reading this, I'd say the issue is a lacking consensus about what "democracy" is that starts the
problems.
That lack has been manipulated. That would be key to it being a potent foe against fascism.
For instance, I don't see anything approaching "democracy" where the even concept of "royalty" still
exists but, hey, maybe that's just me.
in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective
collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence
and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion
Such as using drones to execute people?
Does that read like a definition of the CIA? Or the Current "Deep State"?
It's nice that there's a historical precedent that lends itself to academic analysis and distillation: that
there are trends and history repeats itself. But, it's all just part of the human condition, and a widespread
and inclusive Democracy is a historical aberration, and hardly something with any history of enduring.
Putting all this stuff to one side, isn't America today just experiencing a moment as the wheel of history
turns? With progress, or just the natural passage of time, people and power always stratify, and there will be
those left behind; those seeking power will mobilize those left behind by blaming their blight on some "other,"
(preferably recognizable at a glance). It is, after all, in the fundamental nature of man to seek (ever more)
power.
Mobilized society around the State as a quasi-religious deity works, and as long as it can be sustained as
long as a flow of enemies endures. What else is a soccer club after all? Below the surface, such a
consolidation of power would be driven by an oligarchy, eventually yielding a Czar-like creature, but whomever
will need to justify their excesses.
This is what it seems the Romanov family was before their demise, as the
wheel turned yet again, when they got just TOO greedy in terms of the local gini coefficient and even WWI
couldn't keep the masses sufficiently distracted.
Just a thought. As implied by Paxton, I don't think these times are exceptional any more than America is.
Arguably fascism was an outgrowth of WW1 and the extreme nationalism and imperialism that preceded it.
It's hard to see anything like that now. Americans claim to be patriotic and hang flags in front of their
houses but you don't see them lining up to join the military.
It seems to me that what happened in the 20th
century was so very much of its time. Inverted totalitarianism is what we have now and Trump is just a bit
player as are we all. When it finally breaks down we are more likely to have chaos than goose stepping
regiments. Start hoarding those canned goods.
That the times are not exceptional is hardly reassuring.
The times seem to validate that those
who are ignorant of their history are often doomed to repeat it.
The signs of rising fascism can be
seen in US militia groups and the political influence of their NRA, the rise of violent White Supremacy
groups bringing together skinheads and sweet little college boys as we saw in Charlottesville. We have seen
the growing political left-right chasm urged on by Gingrich. Polls show public support for police
malfeasance and a report that 70% of Americans oppose holding US troops accountable for war crimes. The
caging of refugees something being called out as concentration camps (which by definition they are in that
the concentrate all the immigrants in one spot) is already a fact of daily life. Members of the growing
"locker her up" police state are posting racists and sexist things on Facebook which violate their oath of
office. Yep! Nothing exceptional there.
Like pre WWI, the immoral, sex-trafficking US aristocracy is being led by a president who seems incapable
of leading and governing, but he excels at staffing his government with billionaire crooks and scoundrels.
The billionaire class has kept us in wars profitable to them, at the expense of the middle class just like
the Kaisers and Tsars that created 2 World wars. Then we have the monthly Trump rallies which mirror those
of Mussolini and Hitler. Just substitute red MAGA hats for brownshirts.
Yep, nothing exceptional, however until this week, the US press could not bring itself to use the "F"
word.
I would highlight, on the list of symptoms, the classic stereotypical element: fetishization of the
military. (With budgets to match).
And add to the list of causes/development-mechanisms (stages 2-3): circumstances of foreign relations that
make that fetishization logical.
To me this was the story of post-2001 USA, and perhaps with a politically-inverted reprise post-2016. It is
also where the role of mass media kindof stands out pushing this dangerous process forward with an enthusiasm
I find disturbing.
Also these parts of the foundation for a fascist movement were built not just in the Bush era, but non stop
ever since, and they span party lines. Perhaps I would call it a nationalist revival, rather than outright
fascism. In this sense I am thinking it is in fact at stage 2, except the rooting isn't in a specific party,
but the institutional governing networks that are common to both parties. That there is disagreement between
the 2 parties about whom to "otherize" is perhaps fortunate, but one particular danger is that future
developments may resolve this disagreement, in which case only a major setback on the foreign policy arena
would remain on the checklist before the full pattern is liable to repeat itself.
> the rooting isn't in a specific party, but the institutional governing networks that are common to both
parties.
I've been groping toward a formulation like that -- it's clear, for example, that the institutional
machinery for rooted fascism has been developed on a bipartisan basis since at least 9/11, as the camps
controversy shows -- but now I'm dubious about it. I don't see how militants would work for something as
mushy as the Beltway network. You need a party, something to
belong
to. The KKK wasn't a
professional association, after all.
> You need a party, something to belong to. The KKK wasn't a professional association, after all.
Yes, that certainly shouldn't be overlooked, trying to understand political power of fascism via
populist appeal.
The flip side, maybe, has to do with asking whether broadcast media (and social media) do answer to a
Beltway network? This includes the think tanks (their less academic side) connecting media, govt,
politics, and business the post 9/11 hyper patriotic sentiment was guided by neocon policy advocacy
network plugging into cable TV media. The effect on business did happen to align with the nationalist
interests (unlike the debate over NAFTA, as a counterexample) ..
"And much as I loathe black bloc, it may be that they have their place in making these "functional
equivalents" less easy to form."
They don't. Because these functional equivalents aren't forming to begin with. Maybe they could in the
future; we certainly have plenty of broken veterans on the streets (though they seem to mostly just be killing
themselves, over a hundred thousand suicides in the last twenty years. I'm curious why American versions of the
Stahlhelms haven't formed. Maybe Americans just not doing collective action extends even to former 'Brothers in
Arms'). But as of right now there are no Weimar paramilitaries engaging each other in bloody street warfare. US
Nazis can't manage anything more than comically small gatherings that inevitably attract far larger counter
protests that shout them down.
And should that change, it isn't going to be the combination of overzealous edgelords and undercover cops of
black bloc smashing windows that challenges it.
Did you recently observe in another post the importance of seeing "Jim Crow as an example of modernity" or
am I having a deju vu as I read this one? In any case, Jim Crow did indeed emerge and develop inside American
modernity. It never challenged modernity, but rather was designed by modernity's boldest proponents to
safeguard and advance it. The education policy of the Wallace administrations in Alabama which were
unabashedly progressive offer a notable case in point. But plenty of other cases are reviewed in the
remarkable book, Deluxe Jim Crow, by Karen Kruse Thomas. The 19th-century KKK was also part and parcel of a
modern America (at least, as the New South understood it), and by no means a rejection of it. It was during the
Progressive era, and not some period of reaction, that the link between the 19th- and 20th-century incarnations
of the KKK were forged by the politics of the Lost Cause, largely through interventions in art-culture. There
is a remarkable passage in Milton W. Brown's classic book, American Painting from the Armory Show to the
Depression (1955), pp. 85-87, in which he parallels the early 20th-century art theories of sculptor-critic F. W
Ruckstull (born Ruckstuhl) with the cultural program pursued some decades later by Nazi Germany. Ruckstull's
oeuvre included monuments memorializing both the northern and southern versions of the 'Civil War', though
arguably with more sympathy for the latter than for the former. Brown's assessment of Ruckstull's work as
"directly foreshadow[ing] the Nazi artistic credo" is as persuasive as it is disturbing. I can only fault him
for neglecting to connect that work to the ideology of Lost Cause into which it plunged some of its deepest
roots to find nourishment in the myths of "'native instincts'" and "'racial purity'" (p. 87). The issue of both
Jim Crow and his brother, the 'modern' KKK, from the Lost Cause requires no demonstration. That fascist Germany
produced not only an art almost indistinguishable from that of the Lost Cause, but also carried out social and
financial policies directly inspired by the Jim Crow models of segregation and convict-leasing, cannot be
doubted. But this line of descent is by no means extinct. I will close by mentioning that rehabilitation of the
reputation of Albert Speer, the notorious architect to the Nazi government and hence a powerful influencer of
its cultural as well as military policies, was one of the by-products of Postmodernism; which is to say, of the
decades of neoliberal hegemony and the 'new' identity politics that so far seems to have been quite successful
at underpinning it.
Just reread Nicos Poulantzas' "On the Popular Impact of Fascism" in anticipation of your post on Paxton.
Poulantzas was a Marxist political theorist with some connection to the Althusserians. Like Paxton, he wrote a
book on fascism:
Fascism and Dictatorship
. I took several things away from Poulantzas' essay on
popular impact. First, the impact of fascism wasn't uniform as far as "the people" are concerned. Fascists
infiltrated, took over, or created organizations of which some people, not others, were members, especially
political parties. Fascism, according to Poulanztas, never had much appeal among either the German or Italian
working class. It mainly appealed to members of the petty bourgeoisie (artisans, small-scale tradesmen,
relatively well-compensated employees, and state employees). Based on the above synopsis of Paxton's views, he
seems to have entirely overlooked this point. Poulantzas stresses, though, that the appeal of fascism
fluctuated wildly, gaining support until it revealed itself as an anti-popular movement, subsequently losing
popular support, and then gaining again owing to international affairs (the Anschluss, the war with Libya). I
doubt such fluctuation is reflected by Paxton's stages. Finally, Poulantzas notes a number of reasons why a
variety of different segments of the populace found fascism appealing: it offered a startlingly effective
solution to terrible levels of unemployment, it tapped into justifiable (if not justified) beliefs to the
effect that the nation was being treated as a second-class citizen in the international community, and it
offered solutions to problems attending delayed formation of a nation-state in both Germany and Italy. Perhaps
most importantly, Poulantzas closes his essay by noting that fascism had whatever popular appeal it had during
the time of its initial ascendance owing in part to failure of the left. The problem, as Poulantzas saw it, was
not that traditional right and left parties just couldn't get along, reached a stalemate, and were unable
govern (which seems to be Paxton's view). The problem was that the left in Germany and Italy were unable to
effectively organize working class people so as to bring about the fundamental changes in society that would
have benefited this class. A sort of power vacuum came about, which fascists were able to exploit. In any case,
those failures of the left also appear to go without mention in Paxton's account, which is understandable given
that his politics are likely quite different from those of Poulantzas.
I suppose an upshot of this brief comparison of accounts of fascism is that I remain a fascism skeptic. I
doubt the term currently applies to the situation in the US, even if it is qualified as 'stage two fascism.' I
doubt too that stage two or any higher stage was ever reached at any point in American history or within any
region of the US, including the post Civil War South. To the best of my knowledge, KKK activities were about
restoring the position of what amounted to a landed aristocracy by way of race-based terrorism. Horrible? Yes.
Unprecedented? Doubtful. A harbinger of 20th century fascism? Almost certainly not. For one thing (among many),
I doubt that the Italian fascists were really about restoration. The German fascists certainly were not. They
were radical revolutionaries, in their own way.
Thanks. This is a chain of logic that I can get down with.
There's something about the Paxton framework that just seems like, if one wanted to, you could drop it on
almost any contemporary society with an authoritarian bent. China if you stretched it. From there, Russia or
the Philippines follow easily enough. Then maybe Brazil, and why not all of Central America minus Costa
Rica. Etc.
In fairness, Paxton, in his " Anatomy of Fascism", does in fact discuss Fascism as practiced by Italy
and Germany in the 30s-early 40s in relation to authoritarian and totalitarian governments (Franco's
Spain, the USSR and Stalinism, Mao's China, etc.), and does indeed make sharp distinctions. My reading of
"Anatomy" points to Hitler's Third Reich and Mussolini's Italy as being quite
sui generis
, each
arising from "special" circumstances that share certain Eurocentric features, and that the concatenation
of events that solidified Fascism in each country then are so entirely different from the peculiarities
of today's advanced capitalist "democracies", that compare-and-contrast exercises, or ticking one or more
of five boxes or stages is a fool's errand. All organized societies will produce rabble-rousers and an
eager rabble to be aroused, and within those societies there classically have been a marginalized "other"
to serve as a rallying point for alleged causative agency in "national decline" or loss of status for a
majority. Don't want to minimize Trump's crude race-baiting and all, but let's remember Godwin's Law in
our attempt to fit Trump's foot into a fascist shoe.
Did the author actually swiped Orlov's idea of "The Five Stages of Collapse"? I'm not sure how relevant a
seven month graph would be when talking about fascism. Now if you have a twenty year one that might be more
impressive but Google Trends is just one narrow slice of society after all. If you want to talk about fascism,
I would be more impressed if he talked about Obama getting rid of habeas corpus in the US something that goes
back a thousand years in legal theory and practice. And why talk so much about the bogey men of American
liberals the KKK when you actually had an actual American Nazi party called the German American Bund and
which drew an audience of 20,000 at Madison Square Gardens back in 1939. To get a full picture, you cannot
limit US fascism to American shores either but must consider them in context of America's foreign empire as the
practices of what happens in the empire come back home sooner or later. The torture employed overseas has made
its way back home and if you want to a direct influence, look at the militarization of US police as they
receive military gear used overseas. Without mentioning the empire's yin of a fascist yang, you will never get
a real comprehensive understanding of this subject in my opinion.
The KKK example by Paxton is perhaps a bit of a stretch, because following the failure of Reconstruction
and eradication of the Republicans, the resulting Democratic Party in fact neatly incorporated and served
white supremacy and concomitant black suppression; the Klan was as it were an extraparlimentarian
enforcement tool, sharing membership with local and state officials and community white citizens, and in
fact was subsumed within the Party over time.
Democrats served the interests of powerful white elites, and
pitted poor whites against black people for generations in order to maintain its political hegemony, and to
resist any kind of economic reform and betterment.
Because there is always the tendency to point fascism as a failure of "democracy" instead of failure of
the establishment or the failure of fascists! it shows there is no working consensus for what a "democracy"
is.
Whether or not you think Hawley was using a dog whistle by pointing to a "cosmopolitan" elite, it strikes me
as absurd that he is actually combatting the real powers that be. Here's a longer quote from the speech:
The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things
like place and national feeling and religious faith.
They regard our inherited traditions as oppressive and our shared institutions -- like family and
neighborhood and church -- as backwards.
What they offer instead is a progressive agenda of social liberation in tune with the priorities of their
wealthy and well-educated counterparts around the world.
And all of this -- the economic globalizing, the social liberationism -- has worked quite well. For some. For
the cosmopolitan class.
In case your curious, Hawley has
raised
over $1.6 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate sector for the 2020 cycle alone. He
may not have been using an anti-Semitic dog whistle, but it's clear that to him lefty adjuncts below the
poverty line are part of this elite while the FIRE sector, which could not be more in line with this
"cosmopolitan consensus" that he's inveighing against, are not. The other top contributors according to
OpenSecrets, in order:
-Other (?) $1,606,786
-ideological/single issue $1,516,586
-Misc business $988,954
-Lawyers and lobbyists $601,553
-Agribusiness $464,414
for a grand total of $6,786,139.
That's just for 2020! Hard to see an industry that hasn't made off well in this cosmopolitan consensus.
This is relevant to the overall topic of fascism because gestures towards anti-capitalism were key to
fascist success in winning some popular support but once in power they put all their focus on breaking trade
unions, rounding up communists, and then cementing corporatist control over key industries.
His speech marks a notable shift among non-Trump people on the right, but reading the entire speech it's
clear that his real priority is acknowledging the damage done to gain votes from a primarily white base while
taking money from the people who did it. I don't know for sure but I'd bet he'd be more apt to include adjunct
professors below the poverty line in the cosmopolitan elite than companies like Cargill.
" some even doubt that the term fascism has any meaning other than as a smear word. The epithet has been so
loosely used that practically everyone who holds or shakes authority has been someone's fascist. Perhaps, the
doubters suggest, it would be better to just scrap the term." p.8
Then in footnote he writes the most credible support for this view:
Gilbert Allardyce "What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept" American Historical Review
April 1979
The IASPS conference study group leader was a Zionist named Richard Perle, who attended as a
delegate from the American Enterprise Institute; while another Jewish neocon named Douglas
Feith attended as a representative of Feith and Zell Associates.
Both these individuals then emerged as key players in the Bush administration: Perle was
Chairman of George Bush's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and Feith became Under
Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's Policy Advisor.
They were joined by a long list of similarly Israel-first Zionists in the Bush
administration:
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary and campaign advisor;
Robert Satloff, US National Security Council Advisor;
Rabbi Dov Zekheim, Under Secretary of Defense and Comptroller;
Elliott Abrams, National Security Council Advisor;
Marc Grossman, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs;
Richard Haass, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and Director of
National Security Programs;
Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, a Pentagon advisor who sat on the Pentagon's
Defense Policy Board;
James Schlesinger, another Pentagon advisor who also sat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board;
Robert Zoellick, the US's Trade Representative;
Mel Sembler, President of the Export-Import Bank of the United States;
Israeli citizen Ari Fleischer, official White House spokesman;
Joshua Bolten, Bush's Chief Policy Director;
Steve Goldsmith, Senior Advisor to the President and domestic policy advisor;
Mark Weinberger, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury;
Samuel Bodman, Deputy Secretary of Commerce;
Bonnie Cohen, Under Secretary of State for Management;
Ruth Davis, the Director of the Foreign Service Institute;
Lincoln Bloomfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs;
Jay Lefkowitz, General Counsel of the Office of Budget and Management;
David Frum, Bush's official White House speechwriter;
Ken Melman, White House Political Director; and
Brad Blakeman, White House Director of Scheduling.
The scene was now set: all they needed was an excuse to maneuver America into destroying
Iraq for the benefit of Israel, according to the plan which Perle and Feith had already helped
to map out.
"... That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential enemies. ..."
"... As Politico recently reported, "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight ..."
"... Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that DoD reform is way down on his bucket list. ..."
Like all those soon to occupy positions of power in the EU, von der Leyen did not run in the
recent European elections for the position she is about to hold. She did not participate in the
debates in front of various national electorates. But she was chosen -- after the elections --
by the political class in Brussels, ostensibly for her faith in and loyalty to the European
superstate, and personally to the German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Another
report by the Rand Corporation , a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany a month
to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States. Von der Leyen is
very unpopular in the German army , but very popular with the Eurocrats.
She's a fervent supporter of a European army and a "United States of Europe" -- the
ultimate qualification for being president of the European Commission.
But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico
recently reported , "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest
instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative
contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight, and
whether a network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."
The scent of corruption is a common element among those who are to hold key positions in the
European Union over the next few years. Josep Borrell, minister of foreign affairs for the
socialist government of Spain,
was fined 30,000 euros for insider trading. He is expected to hold the foreign policy post
in the European Commission.
Christine Lagarde, most recently chief of the IMF, was involved in the case of an
arbitration panel that awarded a massive payout to a French tycoon while she was the finance minister of
France. A special court for ministerial misconduct found her guilty of "negligence" but "waived
any punishment or criminal record, citing her 'international reputation' and role in dealing
with 'the international financial crisis.'" A marvelously L'état, C'est
Moi form of legal reasoning. Lagarde is expected to be the next president of the
European Central Bank.
The common threads of corruption, incompetence, and lack of accountability are what unites a
political class that has divorced itself from the concerns of the average European. In the last
days before her confirmation, von der Leyen pursued a charm offensive that included a commitment
to a "Green New Deal," a continuation of
an open borders policy , and a further deepening and enlargement of the European
superstate. This included the story of her having
offered hospitality to a Syrian immigrant who "now speaks German fluently."
Obviously von der Leyen would never have won the May elections running on an agenda like
that. But of course, she never had to run a campaign to win the votes of the peoples of Europe.
The campaign that she did run was premised on her having built "an extensive international
network in politics and business," as another Politico
story put it .
Von der Leyen thrived in the networking atmosphere of World Economic Forum meetings, where
she "serves on the organization's board of trustees," Politico noted, adding, "She's
also forged close ties to powerful figures outside the world of politics, most notably
Bertelsmann, Europe's largest media company, which owns RTL, the Continent's largest commercial
broadcaster, book publisher Random House and a stable of magazines."
A senior Green quoted for the article said her fluency in French has helped her establish a
rapport with the French political class that is unrivaled in Berlin.
It's clear that von der Leyen's domestic record appears to have had little effect on her
election -- what matters is that she is universally liked by the who's who. "What matters most
in these circles is the personal connection," said an adviser to the leader of one of the EU's
smaller member states.
Those who count and those who are to be ruled are not the same group of people. That seems
to be the essence of modern European politics: a political class and ideological cult that
masquerades as a competent technocratic elite, despite its long and disastrous history. Von der
Leyen's terrible record as defense minister meant nothing. Neither did Lagarde's record as head
of the IMF, where, for instance, the Greek debt crisis was transformed into a social
catastrophe. The deciding factor was their dedication to something that "those who count" are
committed to. Elections are merely a necessary, archaic ritual of legitimization.
Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.
On Monday 22 July 1940, a major meeting was held at the Reich Economic Ministry in Berlin,
under the chairmanship of Minister Walther Funk, to discuss a directive issued by Hermann
Göring on 22 June, concerning the organization of a Greater European Economic Area under
German leadership. The Germans were well advanced with their plans for a post-war settlement.
One of the difficulties of planning lay in the fact that the Führer's aims and decisions
were not yet known and the military measures against Britain were not yet concluded.
What? A techno-managerial clique ruling the rest of us Great Unwashed (see "Deplorables")? It
couldn't happen here, could it? It's OK if they went to the right schools, isn't it?
Too much use if the word disastrous. Disastrous is what Wilhelm II did to the German empire.
This is not disastrous, but it is concerning like a rudderless ship.
Don't be asinine. Russia is not going to invade anything and has no claim on any part of
western Europe. The only thing the German military is good for is for sucking up additional
budgetary funds.
Another report by the Rand Corporation, a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany
a month to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
For the sake of completeness, the Rand Corporation is actually a marketing arm of the
Pentagon fully funded by the U.S. government.
That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from
Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't
because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside
the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential
enemies.
Of course that does not dismiss the charges of cronyism and corruption associated with
Ursula von der Leyen. But re:
But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico recently reported, "an
investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers
can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her
ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight , and whether a
network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."
Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in
the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the
Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon
parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that
DoD reform is way down on his bucket list.
The real story is that taxpayers on both NATO poles are played for chumps by the Power
Elites.
The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's
Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry
Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?
Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton,
Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?
The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's
Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry
Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?
Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton,
Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?
Jeffrey D. Sachs Trump is often called
an isolationist, but he is as interventionist as his predecessors. His strategy is simply to rely more heavily on US economic power
than military might to coerce adversaries, which creates its own kind of cruelty and destabilization – and embodies its own brand
of illegality.
NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump has based his foreign policy on a series of harsh economic blockades, each designed to frighten,
coerce, and even starve the target country into submitting to American demands. While the practice is less violent than a military
attack, and the blockade is through financial means rather than the navy, the consequences are often dire for civilian populations.
As such, economic blockades by the United States should be scrutinized by the United Nations Security Council under international
law and the UN Charter.
When Trump campaigned for office in 2016, he rejected the frequent US resort to war in the Middle East. During the years 1990-2016,
the US launched two major wars with Iraq (1990 and 2003), as well as wars in Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011), and Syria (2012).
It also participated in many smaller military interventions (Mali, Somalia, and Yemen, among others). While the Syrian War is often
described as a civil war, it was in a fact a war of regime change led by the US and Saudi Arabia under a US presidential directive
called Timber
Sycamore .
None of these US-led wars (and others in recent history) achieved their political objectives, and the major conflicts have been
followed by chronic violence and instability. The attempt to force Syria's Bashar al-Assad from power led to a proxy war – eventually
involving the US, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates – that displaced over ten
million Syrians and caused around a half-million violent deaths.
While Trump has so far eschewed a new war, he has continued US regime-change efforts by other means. Trump is often called an
isolationist, but he is as interventionist as his predecessors. His strategy, at least so far, has been to rely more heavily on US
economic power than military might to coerce adversaries, which creates its own kind of cruelty and destabilization. And it constantly
risks flaring into outright war, as occurred with Iran this month.
The Trump administration currently is engaged in three attempts at comprehensive economic blockades, against North Korea, Venezuela,
and Iran, as well as several lesser blockades against countries such as Cuba and Nicaragua, and an intensifying effort to cut off
China's access to technology. The blockade against North Korea is sanctioned, at least in part, by the UN Security Council. The blockade
against Iran is in direct opposition to the Security Council. And the blockade against Venezuela is so far without Security Council
engagement for or against. The US is attempting to isolate the three countries from almost all international trade, causing shortages
of food, medicines, energy, and spare parts for basic infrastructure, including the water supply and power grid.
The North Korean blockade operates mainly through UN-mandated sanctions, and includes a
comprehensive list of
exports to North Korea, imports from North Korea, and financial relations with North Korean entities. The UN Food and Agriculture
Organization reports that ten million North Koreans are
at risk of hunger, partly owing to sanctions. "[T]he unintended negative impact sanctions can have on agricultural production, through
both direct and indirect impacts, cannot be ignored," the FAO warns. "The most obvious are restrictions on the importation of certain
items that are necessary for agricultural production, in particular fuel, machinery and spare parts for equipment."
The draconian US sanctions on Venezuela have come in two phases. The first, beginning in August 2017, was mainly directed at the
state oil company PDVSA, the country's main earner of foreign exchange; the second round of sanctions, imposed in January 2019, was
more comprehensive, targeting the Venezuelan government. A recent
detailed analysis
of the first round of sanctions shows their devastating impact. The US sanctions gravely exacerbated previous economic mismanagement,
contributing to a catastrophic fall in oil production, hyperinflation, economic collapse (output is down by half since 2016), hunger,
and rising mortality.
US sanctions against Iran have been in place more or less continuously since 1979. The most recent and by far most draconian measures,
introduced in August 2018 and intensified in the first half of this year, aim to cut Iran off from foreign trade. The US sanctions
are in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolution
2231 , which endorsed the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. The effects have been devastating. The International Monetary Fund
forecasts that Iran's economy will shrink by 10% between 2017 and 2019, with inflation reaching 30% this year. Medicines are in
short supply .
One might expect that other countries would easily circumvent US sanctions. But the US has threatened to punish foreign companies
that violate the sanctions and has used the dollar's global clout as a bludgeon, threatening to sanction foreign banks that finance
trade with Iran. European companies have fallen into line, despite the European Union's express desire to engage economically with
Iran. Over the longer term, it is likely that more ways will be found to circumvent the sanctions, using renminbi, ruble, or euro
financing, yet the erosion of US sanctions will only be gradual.
Despite the intense economic pain – indeed calamity – inflicted on North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran, none of them has succumbed
to US demands. In this sense, sanctions have proved to be no more successful than military intervention. North Korea has maintained,
and most likely is expanding, its nuclear arsenal. The Iranian regime rejects US demands concerning its missile program and foreign
policies. And Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro remains in power.
The US blockades have been carried out by presidential decree, with almost no public debate and no systematic oversight by Congress.
This has been a one-man show, even more so than in the case of president-led wars, which trigger vastly more public scrutiny. Trump
realizes that he can impose crippling sanctions abroad with almost no direct costs to the US public or budget, and with virtually
no political accountability.
Military blockades are acts of war, and therefore subject to international law, including UN Security Council oversight. America's
economic blockades are similar in function and outcome to military blockades, with devastating consequences for civilian populations,
and risk provoking war. It is time for the Security Council to take up the US sanctions regimes and weigh them against the requirements
of international law and peacekeeping. Jeffrey D. Sachs , Professor of Sustainable
Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia's Center for Sustainable
Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include
The
End of Poverty ,
Common
Wealth , The Age of
Sustainable Development ,
Building the New American
Economy , and most recently, A New
Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism .
As long as a country neither conducts a genocide, nor attacks other countries, nobody should interfere in its internal affairs.
If a country like Venezuela or Cuba goes broke due to its incompetent leadership, it should get help from the IMF etc. in exchange
for reforms as happens with any other country. Other than that it is their business whether they want to be socialist, capitalist
or whatever. That whole ideological crusade against leftist countries has to stop, it has cost millions of lives already.
And there is a simple way to stop Iran's activities in the Middle East: let's finally solve the conflict there after decades
during which the West simply looked the other way when land, water and oil were stolen from the Palestinians and others.
In my view the US has long turned into a rogue state. The rest of the world has to prune that country by working together and
isolating it. For instance, let's create a new global currency for commodities, the Com, in order to drive the dollar out.
Let's move the UN out of the US to a neutral, peaceful country, Switzerland for instance.
Sanctions are legal and based on national sovereignty and not a proper subject of scrutiny by an international body. Blockades
are subject to international law. By calling something which is legal by another term which may involve illegality one is guilty
of shedding false light.
Sachs thinks that if sanctions have the same effect as a blockade then sanctions are blockades. This is foolish. It is like
saying 'since a woman can get pregnant either through consensual sex or through rape, it follows that all fathers are rapists'.
Trump is carrying on policies previously applied. He has made no great innovation. It appears likely that no 'regime change'
will occur. That is why there is no real 'geopolitical' risk here. The effect of sanctions is to create a widening chasm between
regime 'insiders' and the great mass of the people. This has a demoralizing effect and reduces the ability of the regime to use
its brain-washed subjects for an aggressive purpose. In other words, sanctions reduce, not increase, the threat potential of a
bitter adversary.
Current sanctions attempt to effectively have jurisdiction over third parties, i.e. not the US, who would trade with Iran. ( that,
in full compliance with international law and a binding prior agreement to which the US is a party.) I am curious how you square
that with "national sovereignty", unless that is something over which the US has a higher priority than third parties.
As in all other times that are precursors to War, the laws of disparate nations mean nothing. We all have our own laws, to rule
our own geopolitical nations, which disserve the interests of other geopolitical nations.
Most recently, the WTO admits it is insufficient to resolve trade disputes among nations, and must change its hypotheses. This
is only another precursor admission that binding international laws are becoming irrelevant, and that we must "Start all over
again", i.e. the rule of the strongest, which means one state must conquer another before we can reestablish "Common Rule."
Economic sanctions are not tantamount to acts of war and should not be treated that way at the UN Security Council or anywhere
else. To do that would just leave acts of war as the only alternative in the case of serious disputes. But neither should nations
necessarily cooperate with sanctions they see as poorly motivated or poorly designed. In those cases, the best response is usually
technical -- new institutional arrangements that raise the costs or limit the effects of poorly justified unilateral sanctions.
it is the beginning of the end for the special role of the US$ in the world economy. Dethroning the US$ has now become a matter
of national security for 95% of the planet. Not that this would not have happened anyway, nothing lasts forever, but present events
accelerate the process.
This can be good for the US in the long run, if painful at first. One sometimes quips about the curse of natural resources.
US suffers from the similar curse of the Dollar, which is a natural resource of sorts, as it can be printed out of thin air, seemingly
without consequences. The dethroning of the US$ will cause a pretty significant, perhaps shocking, drop in living standards given
US social inequalities, but it may be beneficial in the long run by imposing some sobriety and discipline upon the political system.
Then, it could also break up the country for good. May you live in interesting times, as the saying goes.
Fortunately, the ability of the U.S. to do this is fading fast, as it loses its economic domination to China. So far, China has
shown rather less tendency to meddle in the affairs of other countries, with the notable exceptions of certain territories which
it regards as part of its territory. The world is slowly becoming fairer.
That Time Warren Cheered Trump. Well, this was disappointing... Elizabeth Warren stands up
and applauds Trump's promise that "America will never be a socialist country." https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=416898935744430
Ursula von der Leyen arrives clouded in scandal and ready to implement radical economic
policies that will stifle growth.
like Jean-Claude Juncker, she arrives in Brussels with a record of negligence in her country
of origin. Whereas Juncker was accused of failing in his duty to inform the Luxembourg
Parliament of illegal wiretapping by the intelligence service, von der Leyen was denounced for
mismanagement. In October 2018, when she was still Germany's minister of defense,
she admitted that her department had made mistakes in awarding contracts to external
consultants, amounting to several hundred million euros.
In 2012, Josep Borrell, former president of the European Parliament and former minister in
various Spanish socialist governments, was forced to resign from his position as president of
the European University Institute (UIE) following allegations of conflicts of interest. At that
time, he was receiving €300,000 as a member of the board of directors of the Spanish
sustainable energy company Abengoa, while at the same time promoting biofuels through the
institute.
Nevertheless, alongside von der Leyen, Borrell is about to be confirmed as the new head of
EU diplomacy. Another perfect candidate.
The scandal in Berlin is not the only reason the vote for Von der Leyen was narrow. It was
also that socialists and environmentalists weren't given sufficient trade-offs (in their eyes).
The European Union is all about distributing the large number of positions and policy
priorities between the involved parties, and in this case, the left felt shafted.
A source from the PiS party (the ruling party in Poland) told journalist Oskar
Górzyński of the media company Wirtualna Polska that it was a call from Chancellor
Angela Merkel that tipped some Polish MEPs over. What did Mrs. Merkel promise them? More
agricultural subsidies? The abandonment of the Article 7 sanction procedure against judicial
reforms in Poland? Only Merkel knows that and she won't tell.
Bill Wirtz comments on European politics and policy in English, French, and German.
His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Examiner, CityAM, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and
Die Welt.
This police-state operates also in far subtler ways. Here is one of those subtler ways,
which has global importance:
The US Constitution has become thoroughly removed from the functioning US Government -- no
restraint whatsoever upon governmental powers. For a prominent example of this: What is left of
the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech (freedom to communicate to the public)
and freedom of the press (freedom to transmit to the public) if even online
publication (and increasingly not only printed and broadcast publication) is being
censored by the government, and/or by the billionaires (such as the neoconservative Democrat
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter), the 607 individuals whose political donations collectively, and very
effectively, control the US
Government ?
If the public do not possess the means to communicate freely with one-another, then
do they possess any meaningful freedom, at all? Or would such a nation instead be
a dictatorship, no
democracy, at all (except on paper , such as the now-irrelevant US
Constitution)?
... ... ...
Billionaires' control over the US Government is so total, that they now are
so brazen as to impose their censorship even directly, by the companies and 'nonprofits' (think
tanks etc., such as Dorsey's friend and fellow-Democrat, the liberal neocon billionaire Nicholas Berggruen 's Berggruen Institute , which is
tied to the liberal Huffington Post , which such wealthy
people control even more directly than they control the USGovernment). This is how these people
pretend to be 'progressive', even while they actually are peddling their international
corporate empire, by means of hiding the corruption that stands behind and underneath this
empire. Even liberal billionaires, such as these, are neoconservatives (US imperialists),
because neoconservatism is US imperialism; and, for example, the progressive independent
Julian Assange is the world's leading investigative journalist and publisher against
imperialism itself -- against any imperialism. To him, there is no decent
imperialism: it's always international dictatorship, never international democracy; and he
(just as any progressive) is committed to democracy, not just nationally, but internationally.
Democracy is his ideological commitment. Americans call American imperialism "regime change"
operations, but it's always just raw imperialism -- the grabbing of other countries, and
WikiLeaks is against that; he's against international dictatorship. So: how can the public vote
in a truthfully-informed way, when the chief corruptors run the entire 'news' show, and thus
can freely censor-out whatever they do not like ? It's simply not possible.
How can Dempsey do this, while also being a huge supporter of liberal 'causes', such as the
ACLU ? Here is how: The ACLU and the other 'causes' that liberal billionaires contribute
to, avoid
the issue of imperialism , and avoid any other economic-class-focussed issue, and focus
instead on other types of cases (including Black versus White, Jew versus Christian, male
versus female, gay versus straight, etc.), which (whatever their own importance) pose no
real threat to billionaires' personal wealth. The ACLU wouldn't be able to get the huge
amounts of donations that they get from liberal billionaires and their corporations, unless it
excluded the basic political issue, of the super-rich versus everyone else, and so it
does this: it avoids this issue -- which is what makes it be a liberal
organization, instead of a progressive organization (which, by its very nature, focuses
on precisely issues of economic class, such as imperialism).
Imperialism has always been practiced by the aristocracy, never by the public --
never by the people who aren't agents of the aristocracy. Many billionaires are liberal.
Virtually, if not entirely, none of them are progressive, because progressivism is the
opposite of conservatism, whereas liberalism is a mixture of both. Every billionaire is
conservative, though some of them (such as Dorsey) are liberal (mixed) conservatives. Not all
of them are pure conservatives, such as the Koch brothers are. Every billionaire
benefits from imperialism, because international corporations (which are the main thing that
billionaires control) benefit from imperialism. Imperialism benefits only the
super-rich, because the super-rich have become, and remain, super-rich only because of the
military might that enforces their will when international diplomacy (the cheaper alternative)
has failed. The entire taxpaying public -- 99+% of which are NOT billionaires -- pays the tab
for this enormously expensive global military (
half of which is American). (America has emerged to become today's Sparta .) But the beneficiaries from imperialism are
exclusively the super-rich -- it's an enormous public subsidy to international corporations,
and to their investors. It's the biggest welfare-program that exists, and it is welfare for
only the super-rich, at everybody else's expense. And especially at the expense of the publics
in the lands that American billionaires want to grab -- such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, China, and Russia. It enormously transfers wealth from the
rest of the world, to the world's billionaires.
Those percentages -- the enormous inequality -- are about the same within the US as they are
globally. How is it possible for democracy to exist in such conditions? It's not. Money is
power. Corruption runs the world. And America's billionaires are the global masters of it.
...
Billionaires are disunited on lots of things -- for examples: fossil fuels,
immigration, feminism -- but they are united in favor of imperialism. And, all throughout
history, the aristocracy has been that way: imperialistic.
And America's imprisonment-rate, and the Assange case, are hardly the only indications that
the US is no democracy but only a dictatorship. Here are some other such indications.
NOTE: Although in terms of per-capita military expenditure the US is higher than any other
country (shown by MSN
as being second-highest after Saudi Arabia, but this was only because
the US systematically under-reports its actual annual military expenditures), the US is
nowhere near the top for the percentage of its population who are employed in the military:
it's
#75 out of 170 countries , with North Korea being #1 on that. What this demonstrates is the
extraordinarily high percentage of America's military expenditures that go to paying not
soldiers but the military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics,
the giant weapons-making firms. Those are the firms whose markets are virtually 100% the US
Government and its allied regimes or vassal nations (such as NATO), America's allies. The
controlling investors in those corporations are the chief beneficiaries of America's
police-state. However, extractive corporations such as ExxonMobil are close behind, because
only by means of this enormous military are they enabled to offer foreign regimes "an offer
they can't refuse." Thus, the arms contractors, and the extractors, control US foreign
policies, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Neoconservatism is America's
bipartisan foreign policy.
"... One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. ..."
"... We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. ..."
"... It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/ ..."
"... Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated" near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow, doubt it. ..."
"... This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia. ..."
"... Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat. ..."
"... Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." ..."
"... You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable. ..."
An article by Robert Berke in oilprice.com, which describes itself as "The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News," illustrates how interest
groups control outcomes by how they shape policy choices.
Berke's article reveals how the US intends to maintain and extend its hegemony by breaking up the alliance between Russia, Iran,
and China, and by oil privatizations that result in countries losing control over their sovereignty to private oil companies that
work closely with the US government. As Trump has neutered his presidency by gratuitously accepting Gen. Flynn's resignation as National
Security Advisor, this scheme is likely to be Trump's approach to "better relations" with Russia.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China. Should Putin fall for such a scheme, it would be a fatal strategic blunder
from which Russia could not recover. Yet, Putin will be pressured to make this blunder.
One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West
and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent
to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient
directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. Moreover, the West with its hegemonic impulses uses economic
relationships for control purposes. Trade with China and Asia does not pose the same threat to Russian independence.
Berke says that part of the deal being offered to Putin is "increased access to the huge European energy market, restored western
financial credit, access to Western technology, and a seat at the global decision-making table, all of which Russia badly needs and
wants." Sweetening the honey trap is official recognization of "Crimea as part of Russia."
Russia might want all of this, but it is nonsense that Russia needs any of it.
Crimea is part of Russia, as it has been for 300 years, and no one can do anything about it. What would it mean if Mexico did
not recognize that Texas and California were part of the US? Nothing.
Europe has scant alternatives to Russian energy. Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology
is superior to that in the West. And Russia most certainly does not need Western loans. Indeed, it would be an act of insanity
to accept them.
It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is
a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
The Russian central bank has convinced the Russian government that it would be inflationary to finance Russian development
projects with the issuance of central bank credit. Foreign loans are essential, claims the central bank.
Someone needs to teach the Russian central bank basic economics before Russia is turned into another Western vassal. Here is the
lesson: When central bank credit is used to finance development projects, the supply of rubles increases but so does output from
the projects. Thus, goods and services rise with the supply of rubles. When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money
supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into
its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence
of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.
Foreign capital is not important to countries such as Russia and China. Both countries are perfectly capable of financing their
own development. Indeed, China is the world's largest creditor nation. Foreign loans are only important to countries that lack the
internal resources for development and have to purchase the business know-how, techlology, and resources abroad with foreign currencies
that their exports are insufficient to bring in.
This is not the case with Russia, which has large endowments of resources and a trade surplus. China's development was given a
boost by US corporations that moved their production for the US market offshore in order to pocket the difference in labor and regulatory
costs.
Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent
of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal
debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/
Clearly, if the massive debt of the US government is not a problem, the tiny debt of Russia is not a problem.
Berke's article is part of the effort to scam Russia by convincing the Russian government that its prosperity depends on unfavorable
deals with the West. As Russia's neoliberal economists believe this, the scam has a chance of success.
Another delusion affecting the Russian government is the belief that privatization brings in capital. This delusion caused the
Russian government to turn over 20 percent of its oil company to foreign ownership. The only thing Russia achieved by this strategic
blunder was to deliver 20 percent of its oil profits into foreign hands. For a one-time payment, Russia gave away 20 percent of its
oil profits in perpetuity.
To repeat outselves, the greatest threat that Russia faces is not sanctions but the incompetence of its neoliberal economists
who have been throughly brainwashed to serve US interests.
When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia
does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues
the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does
is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.
Yes, correct. But this is an IMF rule, and Russia is an IMF member. To control its monetary policy it would have to get out.
Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important
to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"!
This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to be lifted, because this will also force
us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been expanding by leaps and bounds for the last
two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder 2-3% of the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St.
Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West, who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions
didn't work.
Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him
up?
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to
Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"! This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to
be lifted, because this will also force us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been
expanding by leaps and bounds for the last two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder - 2-3% of
the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St. Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West,
who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions didn't work.
Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say - why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him
up? ;)
I say why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?
Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated"
near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too
bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity
and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow,
doubt it.
If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign. At any
rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that fears gentile
nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.
This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But
since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.
Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main
conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really
rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged
whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.
I say why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?
Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated"
near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed.
Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against
humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine
face I, somehow, doubt it.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for.
It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom
why he hasn't done this already.
Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin a little
bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough to see
through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.
The Russians can't be flummoxed, they aren't children. Russia and China border each other so they have a natural mutual interest
in having their east-west areas be stable and safe, particularly when the US threatens both of them. This geography isn't going
to change. Abandoning clients such as Syria and Iran would irreversibly damage the Russian brand as being unreliable therefore
they'd find it impossible to attract any others in the future. They know this so it's unlikely they would be so rash as to snap
at any bait dangled in front of them. And, as pointed out, the bait really isn't all that irresistible. It's always best to negotiate
from a position of strength and they realize that. American policy deep thinkers are often fantasists who bank upon their chess
opponents making hoped-for predictable moves. That doesn't happen in real life.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for.
It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom
why he hasn't done this already.
I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.
Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block.
The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with
NATO's aggression against Yugoslaviaa strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within the
largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin adjusted
his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that many of
them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced to get down
from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a good hint on
where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but stillI personally am not convinced yet. We'll see.
In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains still being aroundpeople
who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov. Let's not forget that
despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure as a Director of FSB,
Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his career. I know for a
fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry. Enough to mention
his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main ideologue behind Russia's
military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade) but who never served a day
in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing with the consequences.
This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creationhardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy
for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot
fathom why he hasn't done this already.
He has not done it already because he just cannot let go of his dream to have it as he did in 2003, when Russia Germany and
France together blocked legality of US war in Iraq. Putin still hopes for a good working relationship with major West European
powers. Italy France and even Germany.
He still hopes to draw them away from the US. However the obvious gains from Import substitution campaign make it apparent
that Russia does benefit from sanctions, that Russia can get anything it wants in technology from the East rather than the West.
So the break with Western orientation is in the making. Hopefully.
You forgot to mention the "moderate" jihadis, including the operatives from NATO, Israel, and US. (It seems that the Ukrainian
"patriots" that have been bombing the civilians in East Ukraine, also include special "patriots" from the same unholy trinity:
https://www.roguemoney.net/stories/2016/12/6/there-are-troops-jack-us-army-donbass
). There has been also a certain asymmetry in means: look at the map for the number and location of the US/NATO military bases.
At least we can see that RF has been trying to avoid the hot phase of WWIII.
http://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/NATO-vs-Russia640.jpg
If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign.
At any rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that
fears gentile nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.
This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is Jewish Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But
since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.
Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main
conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really
rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged
whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.
On the power and privilege that really rule the US:
"Sanctions economic sanctions, as most of them are, can only stand and 'succeed', as long as countries, who oppose Washington's
dictate remain bound into the western, dollar-based, fraudulent monetary scheme. The system is entirely privatized by a small
Zionist-led elite. FED, Wall Street, Bank for International Settlement (BIS), are all private institutions, largely controlled
by the Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan et al clans. They are also supported by the Breton Woods Organizations, IMF and World Bank,
conveniently created under the Charter of the UN.
Few progressive economists understand how this debt-based pyramid scam is manipulating the entire western economic system. When
in a just world, it should be just the contrary, the economy that shapes, designs and decides the functioning of the monetary
system and policy.
Even Russia, with Atlantists still largely commanding the central bank and much of the financial system, isn't fully detached
from the dollar dominion yet."
"I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this (nationalize the "central bank) already".
I read about a rumor a few years ago that Putin has been warned that nationalizing the now private Russian central bank will
bring absolutely dire consequences to both him and Russia. It is simply a step he cannot take.
How dire are the potential consequences? Consider that the refusal of the American government to reauthorize the private central
bank in the US brought about the War of 1812. The Americans learned their lesson and quickly reauthorized the private bank after
the war had ended.
Numerous attempts were made to assassinate President Andrew Jacksons specifically because of his refusal to reauthorize the
private central bank.
Here it is in audio form so you can just relax and just listen at your leisure.
*ALL WARS ARE BANKERS' WARS* By Michael Rivero https://youtu.be/WN0Y3HRiuxo
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to
force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired
in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.
Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.
Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him),
Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.
You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted,
or destroyed.
If the Left really rules, why would this be?
Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians,
Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not
enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel?
American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans.
Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians
over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have
the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH
minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans,
Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers
flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)
So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American
can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth
Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of
the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't
discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines
the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the
main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to
be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by
Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.
We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really
about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism
is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want.
But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have
homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist
agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist
'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism
means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric
since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We
should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement.
Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?
Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind
the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal
if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!
300 Words @Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
This is rich from a Ukrainian nationalist ruled by Groysman/Kagans.
First, figure out who is your saint, a collaborationist Bandera (Babiy Yar and such) or a triple-sitizenship Kolomojski (auto-da-fe
of civilians in Odessa). If you still want to bring Holodomor to a discussion, then you need to be reminded that 80% of Ukrainian
Cheka at that time were Jewish. If you still think that Russians are the root of all evil, then try to ask the US for more money
for pensions, education, and healthcare instead of weaponry. Here are the glorious results of the US-approved governance from
Kiev: http://gnnliberia.com/2017/02/17/liberia-ahead-ukraine-index-economic-freedom-2017/
"Liberia, Chad, Afghanistan, Sudan and Angola are ahead of Ukraine. All these countries are in the group of repressed economies
(49.9-40 scores). Ukraine's economy has contracted deeply and remains very fragile."
Here are your relationships with your neighbors on the other side Poland and Romania:
"The right-winged conservative orientation of Warsaw makes it remember old Polish-Ukrainian arguments and scores, and claim its
rights on the historically Polish lands of Western Ukraine"
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/01/17/poland-will-begin-dividing-ukraine/
" the "Assembly of Bukovina Romanians" has recently applied to Petro Poroshenko demanding a territorial autonomy to the Chernivtsi
region densely populated by Romanians. The "Assembly" motivated its demand with the Ukrainian president's abovementioned statement
urging territorial autonomy for the Crimean Tatars."
https://eadaily.com/en/news/2016/06/30/what-is-behind-romanias-activity-in-ukraine
And please read some history books about Crimea. Or at least Wikipedia:
"In 1783, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic by Nikita Khrushchev (a Soviet dictator). In 2014, a 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted for integration of the region into
the Russian Federation with an 83.1 percent voter turnout." You see, the Crimeans do not like Nuland-Kagan and Pravyj Sector.
Do you know why?
100 Words @Seamus
Padraig Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin
a little bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough
to see through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.
well it depends. if putin is just out for himself, I can see him getting in bed with kissinger and co. if he is about russia,
he would not. that is how I see it. it isn't about if putin is smart or stupid. just a choice and where his royalty lies.
100 Words @Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine.
How so? #Krymnash
Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves.
If by "decline" you mean "expects this year a modest growth as opposed to previous years" then you might be right.
I've been reading about Russia's imminent collapse and the annihilation of the economy since forever. Some no-names like you
(or some Big Names with agenda) had been predicting it every year. Still didn't happen.
Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid
now.
Can I see a source for that?
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
False equivalence.
P.S. Hey, Quart how is Bezviz? Also are you not cold here? Or are you one of the most racally pure Ukrs, currently residing
in Ontario province (Canada), from whence you teach your less lucky raguls in Nizalezhnaya how to be more racially pure? Well,
SUGS to be you!
@Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
Do you have any links to verify this that Russia is down to bedrock,from everything I read and have read Russia's do pretty
damn good, or is this just some more of your endless antiRussian propaganda,,
A scandal of a EU member Poland:
http://thesaker.is/zmiana-piskorski-and-the-case-for-polish-liberation/
Two days after he [Piskorski] publicly warned that US-NATO troops now have a mandate to suppress Polish dissent on the grounds
of combatting "Russian hybrid war," he was snatched up by armed agents of Poland's Internal Security Agency while taking his children
to school on May 18th, 2016. He was promptly imprisoned in Warsaw, where he remains with no formal charges to this day."
With the Poland's entry into EU, "Poland did not "regain" sovereignty, much less justice, but forfeited such to the Atlanticist
project Poland has been de-industrialized, and thus deprived of the capacity to pursue independent and effective social and economic
policies Now, with the deployment of thousands of US-NATO troops, tanks, and missile systems on its soil and the Polish government's
relinquishment of jurisdiction over foreign armed forces on its territory, Poland is de facto under occupation. This occupation
is not a mere taxation on Poland's national budget it is an undeniable liquidation of sovereignty and inevitably turns the country
into a direct target and battlefield in the US' provocative war on Russia."
" it's not the Russians who are going to occupy us now they left here voluntarily 24 years ago. It's not the Russians that
have ravaged Polish industry since 1989. It's not the Russians that have stifled Poles with usurious debt. Finally, it's not the
Russians that are responsible for the fact that we have become the easternmost aircraft carrier of the United States anchored
in Europe. We ourselves, who failed by allowing such traitors into power, are to blame for this."
More from a comment section: "Donald Tusk, who is now President of the European Council, whose grandfather, Josef Tusk, served
in Hitler's Wehrmacht, has consistently demanded that the Kiev regime imposed by the US and EU deal with the Donbass people brutally,
"as with terrorists". While the Polish special services were training the future participants of the Maidan operations and the
ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made this official statement (02-02-2014): "We support
the hard line taken by the Right Sector The radical actions of the Right Sector and other militant groups of demonstrators and
the use of force by protesters are justified The Right Sector has taken full responsibility for all the acts of violence during
the recent protests. This is an honest position, and we respect it. The politicians have failed at their peacekeeping function.
This means that the only acceptable option is the radical actions of the Right Sector. There is no other alternative".
In short, the US has been the most active enabler of the neo-Nazi movement in Europe. Mrs. Clinton seemingly did not get a
memo about who is "new Hitler."
Do you happen to know anything about western financial giants' influence upon Russia's "Atlanticist Integrationists"?
It's low hanging fruit for me to take a pick, but I am thinking The Goldman Sachs Group is well ensconced among Russian "Atlanticist
Integrationists."
You guys are top seeded pros at uncovering Deep State-banker secrets. In contrast, I drive school bus and I struggle to even
balance the family Wells Fargo debit card!
However, since our US Congress has anointed a seasoned G.S.G. veteran, Steve Mnuchin, as the administration's Treasury Secretary,
he has become my favorite "Person of Interest" who I suspect spouts a Ural Mountain-level say as to how "Atlanticist Integrationists"
operate.
Speaking very respectfully, I hope my question does not get "flummoxed" into resource rich Siberia.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead
.
Most likely the Spirit of Anti-Christ keeping them alive to do his bidding.
@Priss Factor
Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.
Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him),
Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.
You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted,
or destroyed.
If the Left really rules, why would this be?
Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians,
Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not
enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel?
American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans.
Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians
over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have
the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH
minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans,
Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers
flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)
So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American
can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth
Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of
the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't
discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines
the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the
main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to
be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by
Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.
We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really
about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism
is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want.
But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have
homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist
agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist
'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism
means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric
since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We
should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement.
Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?
Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind
the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal
if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!
What an amazing whoring performance for the war-manufacturers! And here is an interesting morsel of information about the belligerent
Frau der Leyen:
http://www.dw.com/en/stanford-accuses-von-der-leyen-of-misrepresentation/a-18775432
"Stanford university has said Ursula von der Leyen is misrepresenting her affiliation with the school. The German defense minister's
academic career is already under scrutiny after accusations of plagiarism." No kidding. Some "Ursula von der Leyen' values" indeed.
I doubt we'll see little change from the Trump administration toward Russia.
From SOTT:
Predictable news coming out of Yemen: Saudi-backed "Southern Resistance" forces and Hadi loyalists, alongside al-Qaeda of
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), launched a new offensive against the Houthis in western Yemen on Wednesday.
This is not the first time Saudi-backed (and by extension, Washington-backed) forces have teamed up with al-Qaeda in Yemen
.
Yemen is quickly becoming the "spark that lights the powder keg". The conflict has already killed, maimed and displaced
countless thousands (thanks to the stellar lack of reporting from trustworthy western news sources, we can only estimate the
scale of Saudi/U.S. crimes in Yemen), but now it seems that elements of the Trump administration are keen on escalation, likely
in hopes of giving Washington an excuse to carpet bomb Tehran.
Apparently, we feel satisfied fighting with our old allies, al-Qaeda and Saudis.
I think that the authors may be underestimating Putin in his determination to keep Russia and the Russian economy independent.
For example, I find this rumoured offer of "increased access to the huge European energy market" very funny, for at least two
reasons:
1) US wants to sell hydrocarbons (LPG) to the European market at significantly higher prices than the Russian prices, and
2) the current dependence of EU countries on the Russian energy would have never happened if there were better alternatives.
In other words, any detente offer that the West would make to Russia would last, as usual, not even until the signature ink
dries on the new cooperation agreements. Putin does not look to me like someone who suffers much from wishful thinking.
The Russian relationship with China is not a bed of roses, but it is not China which is increasing military activity all
around Russia, it is the West. Also, so far China has shown no interest in regime-changing Russia and dividing it into pieces.
Would you rather believe in the reform capability of an addict in violence or someone who does not need to reform? Would the West
self-reform and sincerely renounce violence just by signing a new agreement with Russia?
The new faux detente will never happen, as long as Putin is alive.
Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat.
The only one stopping Trump is Putin or Russia's missile defenses.
Indeed, Putin's main inside enemy is Russia's central bank, or the Jewish oligarchs in Russia (Atlanticists). Also Russia needs
to foster and encourage small&medium enterprises, that need cheap credit, to create competitive markets, where no prices are fixed
and market shares change. These are most efficient resource users.
In the US, Wallstreet controls government = fascism = the IG Farben- Auschwitz concentration camps to maximize profits. This
is the direction for the US economy.
Meanwhile in the EU, the former Auschwitz owners IG Farben (Bayer(Monsanto), Hoechst, BASF) the EU chemical giants, who have
patented all natures molecules, are in controll again over EU. Deutsche bank et allies is eating Greece, Italy, Spain's working
classes, using AUSTERITY as their creed.
So what is new? Nothing, the supercorporate-fascist elites are the same families, who 's morality is unchanged in a 100 years.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy
for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot
fathom why he hasn't done this already.
I would really love to like Putin and I am trying but him protecting all those criminals and not reversing the history greatest
heist of 90′s makes it impossible. While I am behind all his moves to restore Russian military and foreign policy, I am still
waiting for more on home front. Note, not only the Bank must be nationalized. Everything, all industries, factories and other
assets privatized by now must be returned to rightful owner. Public which over 70 years through great sacrifice built all of it.
Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block.
The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia--a strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within
the largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin
adjusted his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that
many of them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced
to get down from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a
good hint on where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but still--I personally am not convinced
yet. We'll see. In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains
still being around--people who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov.
Let's not forget that despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure
as a Director of FSB, Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his
career. I know for a fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry.
Enough to mention his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main
ideologue behind Russia's military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade)
but who never served a day in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing
with the consequences. This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creation--hardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.
Smoothie, you seem to have natural aversion towards lawyers
Albeit, the first Vladimir, I mean Lenin also was a lawyers by education still he was a rather quick study. Remember that military
communism and Lenin after one year after Bolsheviks took power telling that state capitalism would be great step forward for Russia
whcih obviously was backward and ruined by wars at the time and he proceeded with New Economic Policy and Lenin despite not being
industry captain realized pretty well what constituted state power hence GOELRO plans and electrification of all Russia plans
and so forth which was later turned by Stalin and his team into reality.
Now, Lenin was ideologically motivated and so is Putin. But he clearly has been trying to achieve different results by keeping
same people around him and doing same things. Hopefully it is changing now, but it is so much wasted time when old Vladimir was
always repeating that time is of essence and delay is like death knell. Putin imho is away too relax and even vain in some way,
hence those shirtless pictures and those on the bike. And the way he walks a la "Я Московский озорной гуляка". As you said it
looks like he is protecting those criminals who must be prosecuted and yes, many executed for what they caused.
I suspect in cases when it comes to economical development he is not picking right people for those jobs and it is his major
responsibility to assign right people and delegate power properly, not to be forgotten to reverse what constitutes the history
greatest heist and crime so called "privatization". Basically returning to more communal society minus Politburo.
There is a huge elephant in the room too. Russia demographic situation which I doubt can be addressed under current liberal
order. all states which are in liberal state of affairs fail to basically procreate hence these waves of immigrants brought into
all Western Nations. Russia cannot do it. It would be suicide which is what all Western countries are doing right now.
Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology is superior to that in the West.
You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech
industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would
stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable.
Some home reading (sorry, they are in Russian, but one ought to know the language if one writes about the country).
Trailer Trash is exactly right about brittle supply chains. To "maximize Shareholder value"
(the Prime Directive from Wall Street), corporations are maximizing (not optimizing)
efficiency, at the expense of long-term priorities.
Summer Diaz is sorta right about what I might describe as US cultural/political obesity,
but I don't look forward to living here after the shit hits the fan. There are lotsa crazy
bastards with guns. We'll see real race war, starvation, all 4 Horsemen.
Re questions about Israel's fate in Marandi's scenario: I think it's smart that he/they
don't talk about retaliation against Israel. Everybody knows that Iran has the ability to
really hurt Israel (sans Nukes, they probably can't obliterate it); but this threat is much
better left unsaid, just hanging in the air. Threatening Israel would be bad PR, decreasing
chances that EU, Russia, & China can talk the US back from the brink of WWIII. And making
sure Israel knows they're in danger - without bragging about it - gets (non-crazy) Zionists
in USA to help prevent all-out war!
It's OK for Iran to talk about the threat to KSA, UAE, etc, because everybody hates them
anyway, and cutting off the world's energy supply is their Doomsday Bomb. They need to remind
the world that if the US attacks Iran, everybody loses.
Three main antagonists have aimed at post-revolution Iran: The Outlaw US Empire, Occupied
Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, the latter being the most recent and vulnerable, while the first
two have already waged varying degrees of war with the Empire's Economic War having existed
for 40+ years. The Levant's former Colonial powers--Turkey, France, UK--are feeble, and in
Turkey's case is allied with Iran while being spurned by NATO and EU. Lurking in the
background are Russia and China's designs for Eurasian Integration which only the Outlaw US
Empire seeks to prevent as such integration benefits Saudi Arabia, Occupied Palestine, France
and UK. Thus the only entity that might benefit from non-hybrid war with Iran is the Outlaw
US Empire--Occupied Palestine's interests actually lie with becoming part of an Integrated
Eurasia not in trying to impede it. And the same goes for the other nations occupying the
Arabian Peninsula--but they all need to come to their senses by deeply examining their actual
long term interests as Qatar seems to have done in its rapprochement with Iran.
But, just how would a non-hybrid conflict with Iran benefit the Outlaw US Empire if it
consumes its regional allies? Would it bring more riches or create greater debt atop the
human cost? Most analysts have pointed to the Empire's vulnerability upon the trashing of the
current global economic structure. Indeed, the only visible benefit might accrue from slowing
Eurasian Integration. Then there's the highly negative result to the Empire's global
credibility which is already scrapping rock bottom and the likely end of Dollar Hegemony and
the Free Lunch it's lived on for the past 70+ years. But what about the fulfillment of the
Christian Rapture Myth? Sorry, but there should be no need to answer that fantastical,
magical, thinking. Not a very good balance sheet is it as liabilities seem to vastly outweigh
assets. Unfortunately, such logic is ignored by ideologues drunk on magical thinking. And
these results don't take into consideration an escalation into global nuclear conflict that's
in nobody's interest.
But as noted, Trump's up a tree and keeps climbing higher onto ever thinner, more
precarious branches. Iran offered him a chance to climb down if he removes illegal sanctions
and returns to JCPOA, which Pompeo promptly replied to with a lie that Iran would negotiate
on its ballistic missiles, thus giving the overall goal away.
So, Trump can't/won't climb down and non-hybrid conflict would do great damage to Outlaw
US Empire interests, which is where we were at July's beginning.
Iran will respond to a limited military strike with a massive and disproportionate
counterstrike targeting both the aggressor and its enablers.
Which will be the green light for an even more violent & disproportionate counterstrike
on Iran. Make no mistake - there are plenty of gung-ho Washington & Tel Aviv power
brokers who want to trash Iran. And they will do it, given the chance. The above scenario is
precisely what the war gods are hoping for.
I don't know about that. The US and Israel would really be opening up a can of worms. Any
over reaction by the USA and Israel gives Russia, India, and China a precedent to follow.
China might it easy to settle their difficulties with Taiwan. Kiev might go up in a mushroom
cloud. The USA isn't the only country in the world with problems. If they don't play by the
rules it just leads to more rule breakers.
An Alternate Scenario
There is a saying in Persian language called "Namad Maali" translates as "feltman massag", it
means slow killing.
This proverb is very often used in contemporary Persian language but most of the people do
not know the actual origin of the proverb.
There is an interesting legend behind it. Holagu Khan, a Mongol ruler, the grandson of
Chengiz Khan conquered Baghdad on year 1258, and captured the Caliph Al-Mo'tasam, the last
Caliph of Abbasid dynasty. Holagu decided to execute the Caliph and finish the 500 years
Muslim caliphate.
Many statesmen begged him to hold on. They told him that the caliph is legitimate successor
of prophet Mohammad. Caliphate is the pillar of the world, if you remove this pillar there
will be sun eclipse, thunder storm and total darkness. Holagu, with his shamanistic believes
fearing sky revenge was yielding, but he consulted his prime minister a Persian mullah, Nasir
al-Din Tusi. Nasir told him do not worry, these are total nonsense, all of our great Shai
twelve imams were direct descendants of prophet Mohammad, they were inherently innocent,
while Abbasid are not direct descendants of prophet. See that our imams, eleven out of
twelve, were martyred, there was no sun eclipse, no thunder storm, no darkness of the
world.
Holagu was bold enough to carry out the execution. Other statesmen brought forward a group of
astrologists who searched through their horoscopes and studied signs of stars and concluded
that all the signs are catastrophic, if a drop of caliph's blood drops on earth, there will
be a devastating thunder storm, rain of bloods pours down from sky and end of world ...
Holagu consulted Nasi again. Nasir being a great humorist, told him not worry, we can devise
a pretty easy solution for your peace of mind, send the caliph to hot bath of feltman
workshop, order to be wrapped in felt, they will give him a hot water bath with soap, they
will roll him slowly over and over, as they are crafting a felt, his life will be ended
peacefully in massage, without a drop of blood, meanwhile I will assign one of my intelligent
apprentice who is familiar with sky ways ( Nasir was a great mathematician and Astronomer, he
founded a famous observatory, he was inventor of trigonometry), to sit on the roof top of the
feltman workshop, he will monitor any changes on sky if there is a minor change, he will
signal to the feltman to release the caliph.
President Vladimir Khan has been giving warnings to Ayatollah do not burn JCPOA, do not close
Strait of Hurmoz. Ayatollah is telling him do not worry we are giving a feltman massage. Just
tell Xi khan do not lean his back against the wall street pillar, clean up your hands from
future fund casino, the pillars are collapsing slowly.
the US and its allies are bluffing. don't get caught up in wars and rumors of it. the only
way it was going to happen was if syria and iraq fell and both of them didn't.
when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy.
@C I eh? #14
I don't see China as the same situation as Russia.
The Russians who have largely supported Putin despite economic ill-effects from sanctions
are, at best, 1 generation removed from 1991-1996 post-Soviet collapse privation. They
remember the bad times and how to get through them.
The mainland Chinese today are 2 generation removed from the famines in the 50s and 60s, and
furthermore there is a largely generational break due to the Cultural Revolution.
I don't see China collapsing, but I also don't see the mainstream population taking a
oil-starvation induced economic collapse well at all, because the deal is social repression
if the economy and standards of living continue to improve.
The difference is French cheese and EU fruits and vegetables - luxury goods vs. oil = energy
= everything.
There seems to be misconception about Kuwait, in particular.
Kuwaitis are fed up with the Saudis and are more Iranophile than anything. They see who is
a true regional power.
Recently, I happen to be invited to a diplomatic function, welcoming a new Kuwaiti
ambassador (Not in US). There were several businessmen associates of the new ambassador at
that function. In an impromptu conversation, they professed their love for anything Iranian
or Persian, from culture and history to food and the people, and their disdain for the Saudis
and their ruling family.
In fact, one of them, much to my shock, uttered the circulating rumor that the ruling
family in SA are actually Jews. He said everyone in the region knows about this open secret
but afraid to talk about. That was a revelation for me coming from a Kuwaiti since I never
did pay attention to those rumors.
I think in the event of a regional conflict, Kuwait will be spared by Iran. What would
happen to the ruling family will be another story.
thanks Seyed Mohammad Marandi.. i agree with your headline...
the usa is not agreement friendly.. everything is on their terms only... they rip up
contracts when a new president doesn't like it, and make endless demands of others under
threat, just like bullies do. they sanction countries and don't mind killing, starving and
subjecting people in faraway lands to their ongoing and desperate means of domination..
nothing about the usa is friendly... they spend all their money on the military not just
because it works so well for wall st and the corporations but because they think they can
continue to bully everyone and anyone indefinitely.. they get support from the obvious
suspects and all the other colonies of the usa - europe, canada and etc - turn a type of
blind eye to it all, fearful they might be next if they step out of line.. thus, all these
chattel countries fail in line with the usa regime sanctions...
basically, the prognosis isn't good.. none of the colonies are capable of speaking up to
the usa regime, largely because they lack strong leadership and independence of thought in
all this... we continue to slip towards ww3 and at present all the observing countries sit on
their hands waiting for the next shoe to drop.. that is where we are at present with regard
the ramp up to war on iran...
The Gulf states know they would be in the front lines in any conflict, Saudi and UAE
infrastructure destruction would mean Kings, Princes and Emir's scurrying from their
destroyed countries because of their inability to sell oil and feed their people, as one
Iranian General said.. the US bases in the region are not threats, "they are targets". Its
true Iran has an army of 500,000, they also have millions of military aged men who would form
militias and have the reputation of taking their shrouds with them into battle.
I think a major miscalculation by Trump, initiating this kind of scenario is unlikely, those
other whack jobs Pence, Pompeo and Bolton are a cause for concern, just hear this nutcase
Lindsey Graham threatening the Europeans....
"The United States should sanction "to the ground" European countries that continue to trade
with Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal and refuse to join America's pressure campaign against
the Islamic Republic, says top Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
"I will tell the Europeans, 'If you want to side with the Iranians, be my guest, but you
won't use an American bank or do business with the American economy,'" Graham said".
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/07/16/601067/US-Graham-Trump-Iran-JCPOA-EU-sanction-to-ground
Punitive sanctions against nations with a powerful military establishment have an incredibly
poor track record. Germany after WWI. Japan prior to Pearl Harbor. And one might add Russia
today. The more "effective" the sanctions, the closer to war.
But, of course, military planners in the U.S. and Israel have already picked out the
targets for nuclear strikes during the very first wave of attacks on Iran. It will be nuclear
first, ask questions later. Heil Trump has already said he will use nuclear weapons:
"obliterate". But will even that work? I doubt it. Iran must expect nuclear attacks in the
first wave. Yes, their urban populations will be destroyed, but their military? I doubt
it.
The folks who now are called Iranian once fought the most militaristic society ever - the
Spartans. There is likely a memory of that conflict still, and the lessons learned. They face
a military that no longer remembers Vietnam or its lessons. Sanctions are an act of war, not
military war but war against another who have been made into enemies nonetheless. Be mightily
careful who you make your enemy, one sage reminds that you become like them. Look at those
the U.S. has made enemy: Hitler and National Socialism; Mussolini and Fascism; Stalin and
State Authoritarianism; Franco and Military Repression; and the list continues substantially,
and then look at the U.S. in a distortion free mirror and what does one see?
Taking into consideration the novel Rand Paul intervention, the likely way forward is this,
and I'm sure it is what Putin (the master negotiator) has in mind: Trump blundered badly by
throwing out the JCPOA, but he needs a way out that allows him to save face and even turn it
into a partial "win". On the world stage (ie. for the public) it needs to look like Trump
accedes to reinstate the JCPOA IN EXCHANGE for Iran withdrawing from Syria! This will not
only save the nuclear deal, thereby reducing tensions, but it will force Israel to back down
and shut up. Israel can't complain and Trump can sell it as an achievement of his, "without
having to go to war". The US, of course will have to give Iran, Syria and Russia something in
exchange: Iran and Russia ultimately bolstered their forces in Syria in order to save Assad.
All things considered, Assad has won the war, so the reason for the bolstered Iranian and
Russian presence no longer applies. What the US must agree to is to suspend its efforts to
overthrow Assad (which Trump has been trying to do via the withdrawal of US troops in
northern Syria), thereby returning the country to the status quo ante. The wild card in all
of this, however, is Turkey's presence in Syria. Perhaps China can lend a helping hand on
that issue?
@35 "when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy."
I agree with that comment, though I will add that for this Administration "looking busy"
has a Keystone Cops look about it.
I mean, let's be real here: Norman Schwarzkopf did not make a single move against Iraq
until he had well over 500,000 GI's at his command, and Tommy Franks was not willing to
restart the Crash Boom Bang until he had built up his army to just shy of 500,000
soldiers.
And Iraq then was nowhere near as formidable as Iran is now.
Where are the troop buildups? Where is the CENTCOM army?
Nowhere. And no sign of it happening.
There is a real possibility that Bolton might get his way and start his dinky little war,
only to find that the USA loses a great big war before he even manages to get out of bed.
CENTCOM is not ready for war, nowhere close to it, and for that reason alone Iran is
correct to tell the USA that if Trump launches a "limited strike" then their response will be
"it's on, baby".
@ William Herschel 61. If the U.S. or anyone else uses any type of Nuclear weapons against
Iran, a declared ally of Russia, it will result in an immediate and full scale Nuclear
retaliation. This is a recent statement made by Vladimir Putin. Pompeo, Bolton et all are
well aware of this. The U.S. might talk of using tactical nukes but despite their Hubris,
even the most pro war in the Pentagon know what the results of that type of planned
anihilation will have on the U.S. mainland. People like Lindsey Graham are merely empty
vessels making a lot of noise.
Why would Iran allow any Western nation to save face through negotiations or
otherwise?
Khamenei yesterday tweeted several statements that were later posted to his website:
"At this meeting, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran stressed that Western
governments' arrogant behavior is the main obstacle in establishing ties and maintained:
Western governments' major vice is their arrogance. If they face a weak government, their
arrogance will be effective. But if that country knows the truth about them and resists, the
Western governments will be defeated.
"Referring to problems rising between Iran and the European partners of the JCPOA,
Ayatollah Khamenei said: Now, in the matters between us and the Europeans, the problems
persist, because of their arrogance.
"The Leader of the Islamic Revolution highlighted Iran's commitment to the JCPOA -- also
known as the Iran Deal -- and criticized European dignitaries of the deal for breaching it,
saying: As stated by our Foreign Minister, who works hard, Europe has had eleven commitments,
none of which it has met. The Foreign Minister, despite his diplomatic considerations, is
clearly stating that. But what did we do? We acted based on our commitments, and even beyond
that.
"Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated that Iran continued to stay within the JCPOA despite the
fact that the EU partners of the JCPOA as well as the British government violated the
international plan of action and yet demanded Iran to stay with its promises: Now that we
have started to reduce our commitments, they step forward. They are very insolent, and they
have not abided by their eleven commitments. We have just started to reduce some of our
commitments, and this process will surely continue."
The hypothetical suggestion Zarif made in his interview with NBC News was just
that--hypothetical--as it had to spell out again for the
apparently illiterate, deaf or both SoS Pompeo and BigLie Media presstitutes.
In his arrogance, Trump climbed up the tree he's now stuck within; and as I've pointed out
again and again, Iran isn't going to help him in his climb down--they'll be no face saving
for the arrogant Western nations. I mean, how clear can the Iranians make that?! They quite
well understand the very real interests at stake I put forth in my comment @32. And the Turks
on their own have upped the stakes with Erdogan
assuring :
"that his country is prepared to leave NATO during a meeting with Russian Deputy Vladimir
Zhirinovsky.
"'I met twice with Turkish President Recep Erdogan and he told me personally that Turkey
was willing to withdraw from NATO,' Zhirinovsky wrote."
Trump seems desperate for a way to climb down from his tree. Controversial Kentucky
Senator Rand Paul apparently volunteered his services as an emissary
to Iran , which Trump okayed but Paul's office is being mum about. As noted, Iran isn't
going to talk unless tangible, visible concessions are made prior to any talks
occurring--concessions Zarif and Rouhani have already stated as the minimum required: Ending
all illegal sanctions and return to JCPOA.
Iran just announced that they would be open to talk about ballistic missiles when US stops
selling arms in the Middle East.
You have to hand it to the Iranians. In the one-up-manship game, they are a formidable
opponent. Obviously, there is less than zero chance that would ever happen, but they are
super smart in driving the message of US arrogance home. I am happy to see they don't take
any shit from the Empire.
Money, Money, Money,... Old Money, Factories, Russian Mercheant, German Industrialist,
American Slave owner... Nord Deutscheland, Bremen, was heavily Communist... Family would
understand the power of Communist Equality and Serfdom.
An old Soviet General said the EU is like the old Soviets , the leaders were not
elected, they were appointed by others mostly their friends and the EU process is the same,
fat cats appoint other fat cats instead of direct elections.
Clinton was involved is not he? So was it Clinton who advised Mueller to list Epstein as an
intelligence asset.
Notable quotes:
"... As a sex trafficking survivor and advocate for others caught up in the traps set for us (sex trafficking is sexual activity instigated through fraud, force, and/or coercion) most of us would point to the privileged and fraudulent deal Epstein got as a reason to logically have zero trust in the Lord and social process. ..."
"... he trick Epstein and his lawyers used was to twist the narrative - fraudulently procured women engaged in an act of prostitution - viola - the act of prostitution (even through fraud my friends) has socially conferd the identity of prostitute.... ..."
"... This twisted reframing of identity for the exploitation of Epstein legal team was yet another crime. Then, third hit was not informing victims - how was this justice. I want to believe. ..."
"... So much truly disgusting, criminal, evil behavior. Acosta catered to a pedophile while he threw the child victims under the bus. He should be behind bars as an accomplice. A president whose "modeling" agency served as a model for Epstein's "modeling" agency. ..."
Re: the deal that Acosta cut. According to a February 2017 NYT article, "...As part of the
agreement, Mr. Acosta's office agreed not to bring federal charges against Mr. Epstein or any
of his potential co-conspirators, court papers show..." Who comes to an agreement with a
defendant promising not to charge other "potential" co-conspirators? Who else was Acosta
protecting??? This stunk to high heaven then and stinks now.
This case is local to me, live in Palm Beach, and one I've followed from day 1. The case and
the treatment of Epstein never made sense. Obviously the Feds were in charge of the deal that
was brokered, but local officials played a part as well. Former Palm Beach State Attorney
Krischer signed off on this deal. PBSO sheriff Bradshaw signed off on the sweetheart jail
deal. Both of these offices need to be investigated as well.
Epstein and his wealthy powerful covert treated girls as disposable playthings to be passed
around and used up, with no concern for their autonomy or humanity. Even when caught, he had
enough connections that he served virtually no time, and his case was sealed. And the guy
that brokered the deal, Acosta, was rewarded mightily for that. Is there any wonder we have
such and abysmal record of abuse of females and femicide? Is it any wonder that rape kits go
untested? That our full health care s up for debate and decided by panels made up of men
alone, with no female input? These abusers protect each other and continue to keep females
under their thumbs because they can and because they themselves benefit from female
oppression.
I was pretty impressed by both the NYC prosecutor and the FBI during this morning's press
conference. They seemed firmly in the corner of the young women who were sexually abused by
doing a good job explaining why this was criminal abuse by Epstein, not choice on the part of
the victims. The press conference participants also made a point of showing a display with
Epstein's photo and an FBI contact number for other victims to call. The FBI went so far as
to explain what buttons to push when victims called in. I would like to see wide
dissemination of Epstein's photo and the FBI number in the press so that victims know where
to call to lodge their complaints
@Richard This is not a Democratic or Republican issue... in spite of many political comments
to this article. This is about wealthy, well-connected men and boys who are sexual predators
with perverse predilections for girls and young women. This is about wealthy and
well-connected predators who, when caught, may never face trial... and who, if tried and
found guilty, are handled with kid gloves, usually receiving inappropriately weak sentences.
20 Replies
He was allowed to leave the Palm Beach County jail 6 days a week to work????? What kind of
sentence is that????? He is obviously not just a predator but a very bold and unconcerned
one, to have kept all this evidence showing apparently under-age girls in his Manhattan home.
When you have that much money, and you have gotten away with such filth and corruption your
entire life, you think that you will always be able to buy your way out of trouble. And most
of these kinds of people do. I do hope that this time he pays dearly for what he has done. It
is hard to imagine what kind of a mind preys on children like this. 16 Replies
"Under the agreement, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to state prostitution charges and spent
about a year in a Palm Beach jail. He was permitted to leave the facility six days a week for
12 hours a day to work." "The agreement was negotiated in part by Alexander Acosta, a former
federal prosecutor who is now President Trump's secretary of labor." As Labor Secretary,
Acosta is responsible for monitoring human trafficking. Trump placed the fox Acosta in charge
of the henhouse. Trump needs to be held accountable, for his links to Epstein and Acosta, and
we need to know what kind to backroom deals were made. Unfortunately we have a two tiered
justice system, one for the super wealthy and one for the rest.
As a sex trafficking survivor and advocate for others caught up in the traps set for us
(sex trafficking is sexual activity instigated through fraud, force, and/or coercion) most of
us would point to the privileged and fraudulent deal Epstein got as a reason to logically
have zero trust in the Lord and social process.
This action taken by New York Federal Prosecutors against Epstein challenges our logical
distrust. I want to believe in this new day. T he trick Epstein and his lawyers used was
to twist the narrative - fraudulently procured women engaged in an act of prostitution -
viola - the act of prostitution (even through fraud my friends) has socially conferd the
identity of prostitute....
And could these young corrupt prostitutes be seen as lilly white witnesses for the
prosecution? This twisted reframing of identity for the exploitation of Epstein legal
team was yet another crime. Then, third hit was not informing victims - how was this justice.
I want to believe.
So the Justice Department gets a 'do-over' after bungling their first try over a decade ago.
A slap on the wrist was administered to this predator who has continued to prey on young
women. Let's see if money, power and connections once again win the day and put him back on
the street. One would think justice will certainly prevail, but look at all the people who
are not even prosecuted due to influence and wealth. 8 Replies
So much truly disgusting, criminal, evil behavior. Acosta catered to a pedophile while he
threw the child victims under the bus. He should be behind bars as an accomplice. A president
whose "modeling" agency served as a model for Epstein's "modeling" agency. A president
who praised Epstein and winked at his penchant for girls "on the young side." Lawyers,
including Alan Dershowitz, who ran interference for Epstein so that he was free to molest so
many other children. Dershowitz stands accused, in civil suits, of being a party to the
horrors. He claims he's innocent. Whether or not he committed a felony, he committed a crime
against morality by helping to keep Epstein on the prowl for years. As yet unnamed big shots
who wallowed in the swamp with Epstein and also belong behind bars. Anyone and everyone
associated with Epstein in his felonies needs to be named and exposed to the light of day,
whoever they are. They ALL deserve punishment and universal condemnation.
Again, news that makes you wonder how deep this boys club goes. In his Playboy interview in
1987, Gore Vidal said that the genius of our ruling class is that "they're so brilliant that
no one knows they even exist." He went on to defend himself from accusations that he's a
conspiracy theorist. "'You think they get together at the Bohemian Grove and run the United
States.' Well, they do get together at the Bohemian Grove and do a lot of picking of
Secretaries of State, anyway. But they don't have to conspire. They all think alike." Don't
know what the Bohemian Grove is? Look it up.
I told my 14 yr old daughter what this monster has been accused of and she looked like she
was going to vomit. Dirty old men have been around for centuries, time to expose them and
protect our daughters!!!
@MS "In a particularly unusual provision of that agreement, Acosta agreed that prosecutors
would “not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of
Epstein” and would “suspend” the grand jury investigation. That provision
suggests that Epstein was seeking to protect others beyond himself." This stinks! Acosta
should be disbarred and indicted as an accomplice. Justice was not served here!
As an attorney, it is misleading to the public to suggest that one can be prosecuted twice
for the same crime. First, there is the issue of the scope of the Florida disposition. Rest
assured Epstein's attorneys will focus on cramming all the "new" evidence into the Florida
package. Second, Berman will have to prove the "new" evidence post-dates the Florida matters.
Third -probably most critical- Berman must convince the court that probable cause to look
into Epstein's alleged behavior arose from something OTHER than the mere fact of the Florida
matter.
Yes, great injustices occur in this country on a daily basis, now we'll have to watch and see
how many scums will be revealed... Full blown banana republic, where sexual predators flying
all over the world on their private jets, living in a most exclusive mansions in NYC, sailing
on their luxury yachts and avoiding justice for decades with non prosecution deal constructed
in hush-hush dark rooms of shadow justice. I wonder how Barr's DOJ will twist itself in
pretzels to include the question of citizenship on 2020 census. Nothing will shock me
anymore.
Secretary Acosta, now calling Epstein's crimes 'horrific", but let Epstein plead to a charge
of prostitution, carrying a much lesser sentence. Epstein was allowed to leave jail 6 days a
week for 12 hours a day. No child of the age of 14 can be a prostitute, no matter if money
was exchanged for sex. These girls were raped and abused. Secretary Acosta needs to step down
immediately. No one can give an incredibly generous plea deal to a remorseless child molester
and still expect to hold the public’s trust. He failed Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
He failed the people of South Florida. He cannot continue to serve. Why is every single
republican such a hypocrite?
Thank goodness for brave reporters. But we have all protected the Epsteins of the world for
too long. We all protect the Epsteins of the world when we show that we value riches and
status over all else. Our churches, our legal system, our colleges, our very laws, do more to
protect the rich than the vulnerable. Someone without status in our country can suffer more
for public urination than Epstein has so far for his horrific crimes. The way we, as a
culture, value status above all else, paves the way for the Epsteins of the world to thrive.
We can clutch our pearls all we want to, but when we clamor for admission to an elite school,
buy houses and cars we can't afford, buy knockoff designer goods we know were made by foreign
children, because we are desperate to show that we have status, we create a culture where
status is the only protection; we show that we value perceived status over integrity,
financial solvency, decency, justice, peace, even over the safety of our children. The fact
that status is our number one value lay the path for Trump to be elected. The fake
billionaire promised to restore status to those who felt that the little they had had been
robbed from them by minorities, women, gays. And while many of us are horrified with the
results, everything we do that shows that we, too, value perceived status over anything else,
makes us part of this problem. If we did not adore the rich and powerful, they would not have
so much power.
I’m a lifelong cynic. Poor folks, minority folks and women never get full justice.
Harvey Weinstein paid up but was there justice? Was there full restitution? I’m saying
here that the defendant—white, male, wealthy and a friend of the president—walks.
Because money talks. I dare justice to prove me wrong. Just once. These girls had mothers.
These girls had a future. Once upon a time.
@Paul Kramer you are citing textbook law but this is not a textbook case. A federal judge
ruled the 2008 deal was illegal. The NY prosecutors are NOT saying they are limited to
post-2008; stuff they are saying that deal only binds the Southern District of Florida. That
could easily be a reference to the illegality finding.
The Prosecutors in Florida may say they don't see a reason to recharge after that finding
of illegality, but since the agreement has no force or effect the NY feds could conclude
otherwise. Especially because there was always criminal conduct with SDNY and they should not
be bound by an illegal deal entered into by prosecutors elsewhere.
The Epstein saga reminds me of that long-running joke (and movie) The Aristocrats. A joke so
filthy and disgusting that it's been told, retold and embellished for decades. What's that
saying about many a truth told in jest? Epstein shows there's moral debauchery that comes
with obscene wealth. The 1 per cent have lost their ethical bearings. Good journalism has
shined some antiseptic light on this perversion of justice. Well done.
@Paul Kramer In case you didn't read the article, these are entirely New York charges. No
Florida here. He also had porn of young girls and that is also something very bad for a
registered sex offender. You seriously underestimate the league that these prosecutors have
been playing in.
News reports say that in the Florida case co-conspirators were kept secret and not charged.
Hopefully this list becomes public soon. Could there be an orange colored dude currently in
Washington on that list?
My 13-year-old just read the article in The York Times. Here are her questions: “Mommy,
is it true our president was accused of raping a teenager?” “Mommy, why would a
lawyer allow Jeff Epstein who hurt teen girls to go to work everyday instead of being in
jail?” “Mommy, what’s masturbation and sex toys?” “Mommy, what
happens to the photos of naked girls? Do they know he has them? Do their parents and friends
know? You said once a photo is on-line, it can be on other people’s computers forever.
What’s going to happen to them?” “Mommy, why would this man’s
girlfriend help him find girls to give him naked massages?” Innocent Children! This man
corrupted the innocence of children—those he directly abused—and every child
exposed to his disgusting perversions via the news. I want justice now, as does every single
adult who cares about our youth!
@Elin Minkoff said "It is hard to imagine what kind of a mind preys on children like this." A
very sick mind, one that is self-important, egotistical, unconcerned with the interests or
rights of anyone else, and has no regard for the law or for societal norms. Doesn't that
sound just like a man who has been a public servant since January 20, 2017?
The real hero here is Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. The evidence was there all the time
and law enforcement knew about it. By publishing the long piece in the Herald, she made it
impossible to ignore any longer. 1 Reply
"Seeking to detain" -- does that mean that they are considering the possibility that this man
should be let out on bail AGAIN. Poor and minority Americans languish in the mass
incarceration-industrial-complex for minor infractions for years, or for not having the
ability to pay fines or bail, but this serial pedophile might go free again because he has
money? There should be no chance that this creep receives a "get out of jail free" card
again, unless we want to highlight to the world -- over and over -- how thoroughly corrupt
and morally bankrupt our system of justice is in America.
Epstein didn't get his sweetheart deal in 2008 because he is one of those "insulated,
powerful men [who] can escape accountability." He got it because he has information, damning
information, about a slew of other powerful men, who then intervened to protect him. The US
attorney for the SDNY has unwittingly opened a can of doo-doo which will either be quickly
closed again with some clever lawyering and strained legalistic parsing or, if not, will
reveal a dark underbelly at the highest ranks of society that I think even those calling for
Epstein's scalp might wish had never been exposed.
That he would still be in possession of child pornography illustrates just how insulated and
safe he felt in his position. And why wouldn't he? Protected on all sides by powerful
political and financial connections. As E.J. Dionne said in his column today, we are in the
Age of Impunity. Well, maybe no more for this arrogant perverted abuser. Next up, Acosta's
day of reckoning. Noted in a different publication is his accomplice for over a decade, a
woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, who facilitated many of the girls' victimization. Not sure why she
is not mentioned in this article.
@Dennis W This case was not "bungled." The prosecutor made a deal behind closed doors, the
terms of which we are not privy to. It is not surprise to find this slimeball Acosta working
in te Trump administration. There was a quid pro quo we do not yet know about, and there were
co-conspirators not charged, also powerful, wealthy individuals. There is an entire iceberg
beneath this dirty tip.
Looks like Warren weakness is her inability to distinguish between key issues and periferal
issues.
While her program is good and is the only one that calls for "structural change" (which is
really needed as neoliberalism outlived its usefulness) it mixes apple and oranges. One thing
is to stop neoliberal transformation of the society and the other is restitution for black
slaves. In the latter case why not to Indians ?
I'd argue that Warren's newly tight and coherent story, in which her life's arc tracks the
country's, is contributing to her rise, in part because it protects her against other stories
-- the nasty ones told by her opponents, first, and then echoed by the media doubters
influenced by her opponents. Her big national-stage debut came when she
tangled with Barack Obama's administration over bank bailouts, then set up the powerhouse
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But she was dismissed as too polarizing, even by
some Democrats, and was passed over to run it. In 2012, Massachusetts's Scott Brown mocked Warren as
"the Professor," a know-it-all Harvard schoolmarm, before she beat him to take his Senate seat.
After that, Donald Trump began
trashing her as "Pocahontas" in the wake of a controversy on the campaign trail about her
mother's rumored Native American roots. And Warren scored an own goal with a video that announced
she had "confirmed" her Native heritage with a DNA test, a claim that ignored the brutal
history of blood-quantum requirements and genetic pseudoscience in the construction of
race.
When she announced her presidential run this year, some national political reporters
raised
questions about her likability
, finding new ways to compare
her to Hillary Clinton, another female candidate widely dismissed as unlikable. A month into
Warren's campaign, it seemed the media was poised to Clintonize her off the primary stage. But
it turned out she had a plan for that, too.
I n the tale that is captivating crowds on the campaign trail, Warren is not a professor or
a political star but a hardscrabble Oklahoma "late-in-life baby" or, as her mother called her,
"the surprise." Her elder brothers had joined the military; she was the last one at home, just
a middle-schooler when her father had the massive heart attack that would cost him his job. "I
remember the day we lost the station wagon," she tells crowds, lowering her voice. "I learned
the words 'mortgage' and 'foreclosure' " listening to her parents talk when they thought
she was asleep, she recalls. One day she walked in on her mother in her bedroom, crying and
saying over and over, " 'We are not going to lose this house.' She was 50 years old,"
Warren adds, "had never worked outside the home, and she was terrified."
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This part of the story has been a Warren staple for years: Her mother put on her best dress
and her high heels and walked down to a Sears, where she got a minimum-wage job. Warren got a
private lesson from her mother's sacrifice -- "You do what you have to to take care of those
you love" -- and a political one, too. "That minimum-wage job saved our house, and it saved our
family." In the 1960s, she says, "a minimum-wage job could support a family of three. Now the
minimum wage can't keep a momma and a baby out of poverty."
That's Act I of Warren's story and of the disappearing American middle class whose
collective story her family's arc symbolizes. In Act II, she walks the crowd through her early
career, including some personal choices that turned her path rockier: early marriage, dropping
out of college. But her focus now is on what made it possible for her to rise from the working
class. Warren tells us how she went back to school and got her teaching certificate at a public
university, then went to law school at another public university. Both cost only a few hundred
dollars in tuition a year. She always ends with a crowd-pleaser: "My daddy ended up as a
janitor, but his baby daughter got the opportunity to become a public-school teacher, a law
professor, a US senator, and run for president!"
Warren has honed this story since her 2012 Senate campaign. Remember her "Nobody in this
country got rich on his own" speech ? It was an explanation of how the
elite amassed wealth thanks to government investments in roads, schools, energy, and police
protection, which drew more than 1 million views on YouTube. Over the years, she has become the
best explainer of the way the US government, sometime around 1980, flipped from building the
middle class to protecting the wealthy. Her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance , explains how
Warren (once a Republican, like two of her brothers) saw her own family's struggle in the
stories of those families whose bankruptcies she studied as a lawyer -- families she once
thought might have been slackers. Starting in 1989, with a book she cowrote on bankruptcy and
consumer credit, her writing has charted the way government policies turned against the middle
class and toward corporations. That research got her tapped by then–Senate majority
leader Harry Reid to oversee
the Troubled Assets Relief Program after the 2008 financial crash and made her a
favorite on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart . Starting in the mid-2000s, she
publicly clashed with prominent Democrats,
including Biden , a senator at the time, over bankruptcy reforms, and later with
then–Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the bank bailouts.
Sanders, of course, has a story too, about a government that works for the "millionaires and
billionaires." But he has a hard time connecting his family's stories of struggle to his
policies. After his first few campaign events, he ditched the details about growing up poor in
Brooklyn. In early June, he returned to his personal story in a New York Timesop-ed .
W arren preaches the need for "big structural change" so often that a crowd chanted the
phrase back at her during a speech in San Francisco the first weekend in June. Then she gets
specific. In Act III of her stump speech, she lays out her dizzying array of plans. But by then
they're not dizzying, because she has anchored them to her life and the lives of her listeners.
The rapport she develops with her audience, sharing her tragedies and disappointments --
questionable choices and all -- makes her bold policy pitches feel believable. She starts with
her proposed wealth tax: two cents on every dollar of your worth after $50 million, which she
says would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. (She has also proposed a 7 percent surtax on
corporate profits above $100 million.)
Warren sells the tax with a vivid, effective comparison. "How many of you own a home?" she
asks. At most of her stops in Iowa, it was roughly half the crowd. "Well, you already pay a
wealth tax on your major asset. You pay a property tax, right?" People start nodding. "I just
want to make sure we're also taxing the diamonds, the Rembrandts, the yachts, and the stock
portfolios." Nobody in those Iowa crowds seemed to have a problem with that.
Then she lays out the shocking fact that
people in the top 1 percent pay roughly 3.2 percent of their wealth in taxes, while the bottom
99 percent pay 7.4 percent.
That "big structural change" would pay for the items on Warren's agenda -- the programs that
would rebuild the opportunity ladder to the middle class -- that have become her signature:
free technical school or two- or four-year public college; at least partial loan forgiveness
for 95 percent of those with student debt; universal child care and prekindergarten, with costs
capped at 7 percent of family income; and a pay hike for child-care workers.
"Big structural change" would also include strengthening unions and giving workers 40
percent of the seats on corporate boards. Warren promises to break up Big Tech and Big Finance.
She calls for a constitutional amendment to protect the right to vote and vows to push to
overturn Citizens United . To those who say it's too much, she ends every public event
the same way: "What do you think they said to the abolitionists? 'Too hard!' To the suffragists
fighting to get women the right to vote? 'Too hard!' To the foot soldiers of the civil-rights
movement, to the activists who wanted equal marriage? 'Give up now!' " But none of them
gave up, she adds, and she won't either. Closing that way, she got a standing ovation at every
event I attended.
R ecently, Warren has incorporated into her pitch the stark differences between what
mid-20th-century government offered to black and white Americans. This wasn't always the case.
After a speech she
delivered at the Roosevelt Institute in 2015, I heard black audience members complain about her
whitewashed version of the era when government built the (white) middle class. Many black
workers were ineligible for Social Security; the GI Bill didn't prohibit racial
discrimination ; and federal loan guarantees systematically excluded black home buyers and
black neighborhoods. "I love Elizabeth, but those stories about the '50s drive me crazy," one
black progressive said.
The critiques must have made their way to Warren. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently
toldThe New Yorker that after his influential Atlanticessay
"The Case for Reparations" appeared five years ago, the Massachusetts senator asked to meet
with him. "She had read it. She was deeply serious, and she had questions." Now, when Warren
talks about the New Deal, she is quick to mention the ways African Americans were shut out. Her
fortunes on the campaign trail brightened after April's She the People forum in Houston, where she joined eight
other candidates in talking to what the group's founder, Aimee Allison, calls "the real
Democratic base": women of color, many from the South. California's Kamala Harris, only the
second African-American woman ever elected to the US Senate, might have had the edge coming in,
but Warren surprised the crowd. "She walked in to polite applause and walked out to a standing
ovation," Allison said, after the candidate impressed the crowd with policies to address black
maternal-health disparities, the black-white wealth gap, pay inequity, and more.
G Jutson says:
July 4, 2019 at 1:00 pm
Well here we are in the circular firing squad Obama warned us about. Sander's fan boys vs.
Warren women. Sanders has been our voice in DC on the issues for a generation. He has changed
the debate. Thank you Bernie. Now a Capitalist that wants to really reform it can be a viable
candidate. Warren is that person. We supported Sanders last time to help us get to this
stage. Time to pass the baton to someone that can beat Trump. After the Sept. debates I
expect The Nation to endorse Warren and to still hear grumbling from those that think moving
on from candidate Bernie somehow means unfaithfulness to his/our message .
Kenneth Viste says: June 27, 2019 at 5:52 am
I would like to hear her talk about free college as an investment in people rather than an
expense. Educated people earn more and therefore pay more taxes than uneducated so it pays to
educate the populous to the highest level possible.
Jim Dickinson says: June 26, 2019 at 7:11 pm
Warren gets it and IMO is probably the best Democratic candidate of the bunch. Biden does
not get it and I get depressed seeing him poll above Warren with his tired corporate ideas
from the past.
I have a different take on her not being progressive enough. Her progressive politics are
grounded in reality and not in the pie in the sky dreams of Sanders, et al. The US is a
massively regressive nation and proposing doing everything at once, including a total revamp
of our healthcare system is simply unrealistic.
That was my problem with Sanders, who's ideas I agree with. There is no way in hell to
make the US into a progressive dream in one election - NONE.
I too dream of a progressive US that most likely goes well beyond what most people
envision. But I also have watched those dreams collapse many, many times in the past when we
reach too far. I hope that we can make important but obtainable changes which might make the
great unwashed masses see who cares about them and who does not.
I hope that she does well because she has a plan for many of the ills of this nation. The
US could certainly use some coherent plans after the chaos and insanity of the Trump years.
Arguing about who was the best Democratic candidate in 2016 helped put this schmuck in office
and I hope that we don't go down that path again.
Caleb Melamed says: June 26, 2019 at 2:13 pm
I had a misunderstanding about one key aspect of Warren's political history. I had always
thought that she was neutral in 2016 between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. On CNN this
morning, a news clip showed that Warren in fact endorsed Hillary Clinton publicly, shouting
"I'm with her," BEFORE Sanders withdrew from the race. This action had the effect of
weakening Sanders' bargaining position vis a vis Clinton once he actually withdrew. Clinton
proceeded to treat Sanders and his movement like a dish rag. I am now less ready to support
Warren in any way.
Robert Andrews says: June 26, 2019 at 12:17 pm
I have three main reasons I do not want Senator Warren nominate which are:
Not going all out for a single payer healthcare system. This is a massive problem with
Warren. With her starting out by moving certain groups to Medicare is sketchy at best. Which
groups would be graced first? I am sure whoever is left behind will be thrilled. Is Warren
going to expand Medicare so that supplemental coverages will not be needed anymore? Crying
about going too far too fast is a losing attitude. You go after the most powerful lobby in
the country full bore if you want any kind of real and lasting changes.
With Warren's positions and actions with foreign policy this statement is striking, "Once
Warren's foreign policy record is scrutinized, her status as a progressive champion starts to
wither. While Warren is not on the far right of Democratic politics on war and peace, she
also is not a progressive -- nor a leader -- and has failed to use her powerful position on
the Senate Armed Services Committee to challenge the status quo" - Sarah Lazare. She is the
web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for
publications including The Intercept, The Nation, and Tom Dispatch. She tweets at
@sarahlazare.
Lastly, the stench with selling off her integrity with receiving corporate donations again
if nominated is overpowering.
For reference, she was a registered Republican until the mid 1990's.
Joan Walsh, why don't you give congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard any presence with your
articles? Her level of integrity out shines any other female candidate and Gabbard's
positions and actions are progressive. I don't want to hear that she isn't a major player,
because you have included Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Gabbard's media blackout has been
dramatic, thank you for your contribution with it also.
Robert Andrews says: June 27, 2019 at 8:29 am
I was impressed with Warren on the debate, especially since she finally opened her arms to
a single payer healthcare system.
Caleb Melamed says: June 26, 2019 at 2:35 pm
Gabbard is playing a very important role in this race, whatever her numbers (which are
probably higher than those being reported and are sure to go up after tonight). In some ways,
her position in 2020 resembles that of Sanders in 2016--the progressive outlier, specifically
on issues relating to the U.S. policy of endless war. Gabbard makes Sanders look more
mainstream by comparison on this issue (though their difference is more one of emphasis than
substance), making it much harder for the DNC establishment to demonize and ostracize
Sanders. (Third Way really, really wants to stop Sanders--they have called him an
"existential threat.") Gabbard's important role in this respect is one reason the DNC and its
factotums are expending such effort on sliming her.
By the way, Nation, you have now reprinted my first comment to this article five (5)
times!
Clark Shanahan says: June 26, 2019 at 1:19 pm
Tulsi,
Our most eloquent anti-military-interventionism candidate, hands down.
Richard Phelps says: June 26, 2019 at 1:29 pm
Unfortunately EW doesn't beat Trump past the margin of error in all the polls I have seen.
Bernie does in most. The other scary factor is how so many neoliberals are now talking nice
about her. They want anyone but the true, consistent progressive, Bernie. And her backing
away from putting us on a human path on health care, like so many other countries, is
foreboding of a sellout to the health insurance companies, a group focused on profits over
health care for our citizens. A group with no redeeming social value. 40,000+ people die each
year due to lack of medical care, so the company executives can have their 8 figure salaries
and golden parachutes when they retire. Also don't forget they are adamantly anti union.
Where is Warren's fervor to ride our country of this leach on society? PS I donated $250 to
her last Senate campaign. I like her. She is just not what we need to stop the final stages
of oligarchic take over, where so much of our resources are wasted on the Pentagon and
unnecessary wars and black opps. It is not Bernie or bust, it is Bernie or oligarchy!!!
Walter Pewen says: June 27, 2019 at 10:52 am
Frankly, having family from Oklahoma I'd say Warren IS a progressive. Start reading
backwards and you will find out.
Clark Shanahan says: June 26, 2019 at 1:24 pm
You certainly shall never see her call out AIPAC.
She has since tried to shift her posture.. but, her original take was lamentable.
You really need to give Hillary responsibility for her loss, Andy
Also, to Obama, who sold control of the DNC over to Clinton Inc in Sept, 2015.
I'll vote for Warren, of course.
Sadly, with our endless wars and our rogue state Israel, Ms Warren is way too deferential;
seemingly hopeless.
Walter Pewen says: June 28, 2019 at 11:22 am
I don't want to vote for Biden. And if he gets the nomination I probably won't. And I've
voted the ticket since 1976. I DO NOT like Joe Biden. Contrary to the media mind fuck we are
getting in this era. And I'll wager a LOT of people don't like him. He is a dick.
Karin Eckvall says: June 26, 2019 at 10:50 am
Well-done article Ms. Walsh. Walter, I want to vote for her but can't because although she
has plans to deal with the waste and corruption at the Pentagon, she has not renounced our
endless militarism, our establishment-endorsed mission to police the world and to change
regimes whenever we feel like it.
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by
Larry C Johnson
In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and
Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not
offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the
Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.
The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and
Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid"
intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first
hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a
prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned
a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to
show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered
from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has
transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and
Consulting.
To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7.
That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where
"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or
otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely
publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial
statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct
of a fair trial. . . .
The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense
from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny
opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence
in the case."
In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for
example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without
presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin
Stooge.
The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant
discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as
"fact" in the Mueller report.
On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney
General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public
that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special
Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public
statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and
expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.
Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in
contempt for violating rule 57.7.
Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:
Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that
contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has
entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the
government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential
sanctions.
But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the
Mueller Report and the actual indictment:
The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the
2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the
Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several
"government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges
only private conduct by private actors.
. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord
states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016
presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by"
Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to
"Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the
activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of,
the Russian government.
Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case
during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two
main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst"
involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the
Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and
social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials
associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and
emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.
The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible
evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its
conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the
2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by
the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as
"substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about
what actually occurred.
But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's
own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although
Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's
co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.
After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence
linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that
"[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared
together in public photographs."
Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that
the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.
Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put
that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce
evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the
Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.
Minor quibble: Judge
Friedrich is a woman.
I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by
Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.
Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was
Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission,
nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute
anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.
Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let
himself become a tool.
Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i
guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed
their targets were minions of satan.
I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They
believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election
by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.
It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law
enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is
unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him
tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.
The next time the IC &
law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to
exercise that power it will be a doozie.
The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I
suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more
totalitarian sooner.
I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of
evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a
great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others
– including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.
Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'.
So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions
that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to
Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with
Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html
.)
He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired
Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the
Russians.'
And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and
puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with
Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/
)
Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov
and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief
respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had
said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he
goes on to write:
'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's
guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin
shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did
they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'
If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me
like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between
with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said
to be 'also involved.'
As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political
technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role
for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.
The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and
also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos
when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not
have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.
All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times'
follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the
interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.
'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr.
Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in
the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three
people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that
the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he
passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'
Some observations prompted by all this.
Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has
been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that
Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but
everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including
that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'
In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so
many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play
double games – often for very good reasons.
To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that
these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the
assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets
controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious
standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her
judgement is so important.)
As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is
unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely
impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American
election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay
the information to Steele.
Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about
a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker,
does not seem particularly plausible.
A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have
conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2.
people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would,
obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage,
was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.
It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent
Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given
a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence
Committee in November 2017.
Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office
of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the
Committee:
'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I
was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over
both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin
now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is
believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the
Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives
them a level of deniability.'
A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in
what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to
provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium
poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a
veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB
Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified
Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal
security'.
This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:
'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known
in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties
the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the
Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially
assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most
dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all
power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow
establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people
in Moscow going down to the low offices.'
The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an
honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a
figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the
former with polonium.
A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the
fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late
Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an
informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John
Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).
Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important
figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's
'information operations' team.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian
island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private
sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was
later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study
'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson
in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information
operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.
A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the
CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a
very long way.
And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.
Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and
can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.
The extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that is
only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that
aggressively conduct espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1987 for spying for
Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging spy in the history of the United States.
Last week I wrote about how
Israeli spies operating more-or-less freely in the U.S. are rarely interfered with, much less arrested and prosecuted, because there
is an unwillingness on the part of upper echelons of government to do so. I cited the case of Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood
movie producer who had a secret life that included stealing restricted technology in the United States to enable development of
Israel's nuclear weapons program, something that was very much against U.S. interests. Milchan was involved in a number of other
thefts as well as arms sales on behalf of the Jewish state, so much so that his work as a movie producer was actually reported to
be less lucrative than his work as a spy and black-market arms merchant, for which he operated on a commission basis.
That Milchan has never been arrested by the United States government or even questioned about his illegal activity, which was
well known to the authorities, is just one more manifestation of the effectiveness of Jewish power in Washington, but a far more
compelling case involving possible espionage with major political manifestations has just re-surfaced. I am referring to Jeffrey
Epstein, the billionaire Wall Street "financier" who has been arrested and charged with operating a "vast" network of underage girls
for sex, operating out of his mansions in New York City and Florida as well as his private island in the Caribbean, referred to
by visitors as "Orgy Island." Among other high-value associates, it is claimed that Epstein was particularly close to Bill Clinton,
who flew dozens of times on Epstein's private 727.
Alex Acosta (L) Jeffrey Epstein (R)
Epstein was arrested on July 8th after indictment
by a federal grand jury in New York. It was more than a decade after Alexander Acosta, the top federal prosecutor in Miami, who
is now President Trump's secretary of labor, accepted a plea bargain involving similar allegations regarding
pedophilia
that was not shared with the accusers prior to being finalized in court. There were reportedly hundreds of victims, some 35 of whom
were identified, but Acosta deliberately denied the two actual plaintiffs their day in court to testify before sentencing.
Acosta's intervention meant that Epstein avoided both a public trial and a possible federal prison sentence, instead serving
only 13 months of an 18-month sentence in the almost-no-security Palm Beach County Jail on charges of soliciting prostitution in
Florida. While in custody, he was permitted to leave jail for sixteen hours six days a week to work in his office.
Epstein's crimes were carried out in his $56 million
Manhattan mansion and in his oceanside villa in Palm Beach Florida. Both residences were equipped with hidden cameras and microphones
in the bedrooms, which Epstein reportedly used to record sexual encounters between his high-profile guests and his underage girls,
many of whom came from poor backgrounds, who were recruited by procurers to engage in what was euphemistically described as "massages"
for money. Epstein apparently hardly made any effort to conceal what he was up to: his airplane was called the "Lolita Express."
The Democrats are calling for an investigation of the Epstein affair, as well as the resignation of Acosta, but they might well
wind up regretting their demands. Trump, the real target of the Acosta fury, apparently did not know about the details of the plea
bargain that ended the Epstein court case. Bill and Hillary Clinton were, however, very close associates of Epstein. Bill, who flew
on the "Lolita Express"
at least 26 times , could plausibly be implicated in the pedophilia given his track record and relative lack of conventional
morals. On many of the trips, Bill refused Secret Service escorts, who would have been witnesses of any misbehavior. On
one lengthy trip
to Africa in 2002, Bill and Jeffrey were accompanied by accused pedophile actor Kevin Spacey and a number of young girls, scantily
clad "employees" identified only as "massage." Epstein was also a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation and was present at
the wedding of Chelsea Clinton in 2010.
With an election year coming up, the Democrats would hardly want the public to be reminded of Bill's exploits, but one has to
wonder where and how deep the investigation might go. There is also a possible Donald Trump angle. Though Donald may not have been
a frequent flyer on the "Lolita Express," he certainly moved in the same circles as the Clintons and Epstein in New York and Palm
Beach, plus he is by his own words roughly as amoral as Bill Clinton. In June 2016, one
Katie Johnson filed lawsuit in
New York claiming she had been repeatedly raped by Trump at an Epstein gathering in 1993 when she was 13 years old. In a 2002
New York Magazineinterview
Trump said "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy he's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful
women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
Selective inquiries into wrongdoing to include intense finger pointing are the name of the game in Washington, and the affaire
Epstein also has all the hallmarks of a major espionage case, possibly tied to Israel. Unless Epstein is an extremely sick pedophile
who enjoys watching films of other men screwing twelve-year-old girls the whole filming procedure smacks of a sophisticated intelligence
service compiling material to blackmail prominent politicians and other public figures. Those blackmailed would undoubtedly in most
cases cooperate with the foreign government involved to avoid a major scandal. It is called recruiting "agents of influence." That
is how intelligence agencies work and it is what they do.
That Epstein was perceived as being intelligence-linked was made clear
in Acosta's comments when being
cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked "Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?" "Acosta
had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he'd had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He'd cut the non-prosecution
deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had 'been told' to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. 'I was told Epstein
belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.'"
Questions about Epstein's wealth also suggest a connection with a secretive government agency with deep pockets. The New York
Timesreports that
"Exactly what his money management operation did was cloaked in secrecy, as were most of the names of whomever he did it for. He
claimed to work for a number of billionaires, but the only known major client was Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of several
retail chains, including The Limited."
But whose intelligence service? CIA and the Russian FSB services are obvious candidates, but they would have no particular motive
to acquire an agent like Epstein. That leaves Israel, which would have been eager to have a stable of high-level agents of influence
in Europe and the United States. Epstein's contact with the Israeli intelligence service may have plausibly come through his associations
with Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly served as his key procurer of young girls. Ghislaine is the
daughter of Robert Maxwell , who
died or possibly was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in 1991. Maxwell was an Anglo-Jewish businessman, very cosmopolitan
in profile, like Epstein, a multi-millionaire who was very controversial with what were regarded as ongoing ties to Mossad. After
his death, he was given a state funeral by Israel in which six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence listened while Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized
: "He has done more for Israel than can today be said"
Trump (left) with Robert Maxwell (right) at an event
Epstein kept a black
book identifying many of his social contacts, which is now in the hands of investigators. It included fourteen personal phone
numbers belonging to Donald Trump, including ex-wife Ivana, daughter Ivanka and current wife Melania. It also included Prince Bandar
of Saudi Arabia, Tony Blair, Jon Huntsman, Senator Ted Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, David Koch, Ehud Barak, Alan Dershowitz, John Kerry,
George Mitchell, David Rockefeller, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomfield, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Elizabeth, Saudi King Salman and
Edward de Rothschild.
Mossad would have exploited Epstein's contacts, arranging their cooperation by having Epstein wining and dining them while flying
them off to exotic locations, providing them with women and entertainment. If they refused to cooperate, it would be time for blackmail,
photos and videos of the sex with underage women.
It will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes. One can
expect that efforts will be made to protect top politicians like Clinton and Trump and to avoid any examination of a possible Israeli
role. That is the normal practice, witness the 9/11 Report and the Mueller investigation, both of which eschewed any inquiry into
what Israel might have been up to. But this time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the
story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum.
Senator Chuck Schumer , self-described
as Israel's "protector" in the Senate, is loudly calling for the resignation of Acosta. He just might change his tune if it turns
out that Israel is a major part of the story.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected]
aanirfan.blogspot.com in an article entitled " Epstein , Trump, 9/11 ' has identified Epstein's links not only to Mossad
but to his business relationships with CIA controlled airlines and perhaps to the false flag attacks on 9/11 .According to Aangirfan
, Epstein is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The CIA and Mossad have strong
ties resulting from the efforts , according to the Wall Street Journal no less, of former CIA chiefs William Casey and James
Angleton . As Acosta has confirmed , Epstein has links to "intelligence " .
The presence of Ghislaine Maxwell is proof of Mossad's ownership of Epstein's kompromat operation. Ghislaine's father, Robert
Maxwell, created the Neva network -- a consortium of technology companies, banks, and Russian and Bulgarian organized crime
networks -- for his Mossad masters. Keeping up the family business, Ghislaine was running Epstein for the Israelis.
Speculation or scenario: the highest levels of the CIA and Mossad have been closely allied since the late 1940s (see especially
the role of James Angleton) and are pursuing common strategic objectives.
The New York Post remarked in March 2000:
"Epstein is an enigmatic figure. Rumors abound -- including wild ones about a career in the Mossad and, contrarily, the CIA."
Perhaps Epstein has been sponsored, funded, directed and protected by both agencies working in combination.
"Those blackmailed would undoubtedly in most cases cooperate with the foreign government involved to avoid a major scandal.
It is called recruiting "agents of influence." That is how intelligence agencies work and it is what they do."
But would not a single intelligence agency typically target and trap one isolated person, not a whole set of interconnected
people? That is, this is more like the way the P2 lodge worked in Italy, that is, a society.
With all the mystery surrounding how Epstein obtained such great wealth, I can't help but think it may be a global money
laundering operation connected to the global drug trade.
Books have been written about the CIA's involvement in cocaine and heroin distribution. Whether it's HW Bush and Iran Contra(cocaine)
and Bill Clinton with Mena, AR airport complicity in same or the explosion in poppy (HW's nickname just a coincidence ) production
in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, drugs seem to connect all these dots and more.
And, let's not forget the Israeli "Art Student" operation that targeted DEA offices.
A way for Epstein to get out from under this with the CUFI crowd might be to point out Mary, mother of Jesus, was pregnant
out of wedlock at 14 so what's the big deal?
NYT and Bloomberg have been writing about the mysterious source of Epstein's wealth. Epstein's hedge fund is established
offshore and has a hush-hush list of "clients". He was once sued by a guy named Michael Stroll who said he lost all $450k of
his money investing with Epstein, and he told an interviewer that everyone thought Epstein "was some kind of genius, but I never
saw any genius, and I never saw him work. Anyone that wealthy would have to work 26 hours a day, Epstein played 26 hours a day."
Bloomberg estimated that at best his net worth is $77m, which obviously is not enough to support his lavish lifestyle with 12
homes, a private island, private jet, 15 cars.
Epstein was "let go" by Bear Sterns because of his involvement in an insider trading case involving Edgar Bronfman, whose
firm Seagram was in a hostile takeover bid of another firm. Bronfman, former president of World Jewish Congress, and his two
daughters are investors in NXIVM which was recently charged with sex trafficking and other corruptions. Bronfman and Les Wexner,
the single largest investor in Epstein's "hedge fund", were co-founders of the Zionist org. Mega. All these people are in one
way or another connected with Israel.
I suspect Epstein and Bronfman were in fact running an international sex trafficking-racketeering ring on behalf of Mossad.
That would explain his mysterious source of wealth. His little black book is rumored to include 1,500 names of who's who in
politics, business and arts, and includes royalty, several foreign presidents and a famous prime minister.
Acosta needs to show some integrity and resign. But of course, if he had any, he would never have signed that plea bargain
to begin with.
First Mueller, now Epstein, two chances for Barr to turn the Deep State inside out, upside down once and for all. Will he
do it? I have my doubts. William Barr's father, Donald Barr, was the one who recruited Jeffrey Epstein, a two time college dropout,
to be a calculus and physics teacher at the prestigious Dalton School in NYC when he was the headmaster there. Donald Barr,
born Jewish but "converted" to Catholicism, was later ousted by a group of "progressive" parents at Dalton for being too conservative.
But he was the one who gave Epstein the foot in the door. From there he got to teach the son of Bear Stern's CEO Ace Greenberg,
and was recruited by the latter to work at Bear Sterns.
I wouldn't count out the CIA here. It is telling that one of Epstein's havens was overseas, several of them. These are locations
where the CIA could legally operate. After collecting dirt, they could then funnel some of it selectively to the Israelis for
distribution so the CIA could maintain plausible deniability while having a wall of separation between themselves and the Mossad-picked
third party that leaked the info.
In fact, this is the most plausible scenario; it fits with everything we know: 1) "intelligence" reportedly told Acosta to
back off 2) Epstein has been linked to the CIA 3) some of these locations were overseas, giving the CIA a legal justification
for spying 4) these were largely American politicians and American allies 5) the CIA reportedly threatened Trump when he came
into office by implying they would leak stuff on him: the Micheal Wolfe book, Fire and Fury I believe it was, related a story
of Trump being pressured to set up a meeting with the CIA where he'd speak to them and, essentially, pledge loyalty to them
because they would be his enemies otherwise (that's treason, btw); Trump dutifully complied 6) Epstein's mysterious wealth and
property management would have attracted CIA attention long ago, meaning they should have been aware of this unless they helped
set it up, including the guy's fake wealth (a front to get close to the powerful) anyone got a tax return for this guy?
This smells like CIA-Mossad joint op. If it were solely Mossad, the CIA should have stepped in and broken up this guy's little
operation considering his targets. They should have followed up by either eliminating Epstein as a message to Mossad not to
leak any of their dirt or threatened Epstein with punishment if he leaked or continued his activities. Tellingly, they covered
for the guy.
Also, does this sorry state of affairs make it more likely that Trump will "Wag the Dog" on Iran? Would the Epstein arrest
have even happened if Trump had done Bibi's bidding and attacked Iran when the False Flag of the drone shoot down had been teed
up for him like a driver smacking a golf ball. Conspiracy Theories is all we have left in the crumbling Empire of Lust and Greed.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Milchan was involved in a number of other thefts as well as arms sales on behalf of the Jewish state
One of many apparently.
The scum described here was rewarded with becoming the mayor of Jerusalem.
We've been involved in everything we've been asked to do [re Israel].
[Dad] went and he bought all of the equipment from the plant. It ended up being shipped to Israel. Because you know at
that time, there was a complete embargo from the United States, and what little [the Israelis] got– well Most of what
they got were smuggled in.Most of them were illegal, all the arms. That's what Teddy Kollek did. That was his job before
he became a mayor [of Jerusalem]. He was a master smuggler. And he was good. Oh was he good! [laughter]
The honey trap is one of the most powerful (and legitimate) ways to compromise public officials, including heads of state.
Epstein is almost certainly Mossad.
This has been the talk and pretty obvious conclusion now for some time. Of COURSE Epstein was/is a MOSSAD asset if not agent.
What's more his usefullness to them isn't over yet, especially if Trump is one of the names he has.
I think if Trump caves next false flag and has a go at Iran, it will imply that Trump is dirty and Epstein can prove it.
I'm saying MOSSAD could be behind Epstein going down now as it makes his blakmail potential an imperitive. Hopefully Trump is
clean and there are indications he is. If not then he just lost any ability to resist whatever the zippers now want of him.
The sort of influence Zionist "Israel" needs to wield and does requires exactly such an interconnected and multilayered stable
of highly placed assets. Redundancy built in and how else do you think they manage to control so much AND avoid accountability?
They cast a wide net. But you knew that I think.
@Tired
of Not Winning deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had "been told" to back off, that Epstein was above his pay
grade. "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," he told his interviewers'
#4 Offshore Tax Schemes / Money Laundering
Deutsche Bank seems to be the Gordian Knot of financial filth and corruption. Epstein was a client of Deutsche Bank's 'special
services department' same as Trump and Kushner ..same Deutsche bank as already fined for money laundering.
Possible Epstein and whoever was behind him engaged in all of these. If congress is going to question Acosta .first question
should be who told him Epstein belonged to intelligence.
That 2002 New York piece Phil mentioned has some great tid-bits:
For more than ten years, he's been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously
deceased media titan Robert Maxwell
He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Indicative of globalism, Zionism and Jewish group interest.
those close to him say the reason he quit his board seat at the Rockefeller Institute was that he hated wearing a suit.
Obviously a falsely contrived reason, wonder what the deal was here
"I invest in people – be it politics or science. It's what I do," he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition
is the former president [Bill Clinton].
Certainly suggestive of an intelligence operative mindset.
Before Clinton, Epstein's rare appearances in the gossip columns tended to be speculation as to the true nature of his
relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. While they are still friends, the English tabloids have postulated that Maxwell has
longed for a more permanent pairing and that for undetermined reasons Epstein has not reciprocated in kind. "It's a mysterious
relationship that they have," says society journalist David Patrick Columbia. "In one way, they are soul mates, yet they
are hardly companions anymore. It's a nice conventional relationship, where they serve each other's purposes."
Friends of the two say that Maxwell, whose social life has always been higher-octane than Epstein's, lent a little pizzazz
to the lower-profile Epstein. Indeed, at a party at Maxwell's house, her friends say, one is just as apt to see Russian
ladies of the night as one is to see Prince Andrew.
Another interpretation is that his combination with Ghislaine was bringing a bit too much public attention to Epstein and
his activities and therefore it was decided to let things die down a bit.
in 1976, he dropped everything and reported to work at Bear Stearns, where he started off as a junior assistant to a
floor trader at the American Stock Exchange. His ascent was rapid.
At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options,
one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the
Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he
had his own stable of clients. "He was not your conventional broker saying 'Buy IBM' or 'Sell Xerox,' " says Bear Stearns
CEO Jimmy Cayne. "Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise
our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions.
He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well."
In 1980, Epstein made partner, but he had left the firm by 1981. Working in a bureaucracy was not for him
Obviously, important facts are being left out. He is a talented options analyst but they have him advising clients on investment
structures to save taxes? Why wouldn't they put him on principal trades for Bear if he was such an options whiz?
And why did he leave? Trading firms are notoriously NOT bureaucracies, and anyone with a talent for making money, especially
in the early 80s, would find few fetters. Whole story not given here.
In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business
today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion
or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting
clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos – just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those
with $1 billion–plus.
Getting clients in asset management is a cut-throat business. But Epstein did not even have to make a pretense of competing
for business?
His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect
of every aspect of his client's wealth – from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt
and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on.
the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat
fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client's financial cause. And he
remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the
need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.
Minimum $1b invested, no track record by the asset manager, and he claims the clients give him carte blanche? This is not
normal wealth management.
Turning down giant new stakes just because they fall short of $1b? Nonsense. The name of the game on the buy side on Wall
Street is size, because that gives you negotiating power with the sell side.
Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff – based here in Manhattan at the Villard
House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called
Financial Trust Co.) – numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work
in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls – there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just
twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants – many of them conspicuously attractive young women
– to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages)
on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein's pocket.
Epstein makes all the daily investment decisions on $15b, yet no one on the sell side knows him? In other words Epstein does
not invest in new issues. But new issues are the gravy for making money on the buy side – think IPO discount. This is not normal
asset management.
some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein's lavish life – but friends leap to his defense. "Let
me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients," says noted m&a
lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. "I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn't
take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that's Jeffrey."
You can always trust the word of an M&A lawyer. They would never mislead anyone for advantage.
he found himself spending there [in Santa Fe], talking elementary particle physics with his friend Murray Gell-Mann,
a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and co-chair of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute.
his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein's true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them
Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute
in La Jolla. "Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations," says Edelman. "He came to see
us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick."
Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslyn's laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness
an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable
of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight?
Epstein has a particularly close relationship with Martin Nowak, an Austrian biology and mathematics professor who heads
the theoretical-biology program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Nowak is examining how game theory can
be used to answer some of the basic evolutionary questions – e.g., why, in our Darwinian society, does altruistic behavior
exist?
Danny Hillis, an MIT-educated computer scientist whose company, Thinking Machines, was at the forefront of the supercomputing
world in the eighties, and who used to run R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering
An intelligence operative would certainly have no interest in cultivating, buying or blackmailing scientists in the fields
of nuclear physics, controlling human behavior or supercomputers!
And by the way, the need to explain "altruism" in terms of game theory is a tip-off that Epstein and Nowak have no spiritual
life and cannot comprehend of it in other people. No surprise to find "do what thou wilt" as his guiding principle.
Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail.
Before taking a big position, Epstein will usually fly to the country in question. He recently spent a week in Germany
meeting with various government officials and financial types, and he has a trip to Brazil coming up in the next few weeks.
On all of these trips, he flies alone in his commercial-jet-size 727.
Friends of Epstein say he is horrified at the recent swell of media attention around him
He has never granted a formal interview, and did not offer one to this magazine, nor has his picture appeared in any
publication.
The final straws. If he's not an intelligence operative, he's doing everything he can to give that impression!
He "flies alone." LOL! Poor Jeffrey, he so ronery!
When Bob Maxwell died at sea or disappeared it turned out that he had used or stolen every penny of ALL the pensions of his
employees .which were never recovered. After her father was given a state funeral in Israel (not England where he and his family
lived and worked) there followed a 2 year court case in which his 6 children were finally excused from any responsibility for
these pensions, despite inheriting his money and two of them working in his companies.
And now Ghislaine turns up as a US socialite, multi-decade pedophile procurer and international human trafficker. Nice family
.nice values! ...
Since the Little SAINT James pedo-island
that was allegedly owned by Jeffery Epstein did not have an airport (the closest one being
Curil E King airport in St. Thomas (about ten miles away)) that
means the 'guests' would either have to take a boat trip or a helicopter trip. Since Little SAINT James does have a
clearly marked helicopter landing site at the north central east part of the island (when viewed on google maps in satellite
view) one would suspect that is how these so-called 'guests' arrived at this pedo-island.
Those activities are not mutually exclusive. It could be #5: All of the above. We all know how Mossad operates. Nothing is
beyond them. The end justifies the means.
Acosta is a distraction .and possibly innocent since he did what he was told which was to go easy on an intelligence asset.
Forget the small fry and concentrate on the real criminals please.
Senator Chuck Schumer, self-described as Israel's "protector" in the Senate, is loudly calling for the resignation of
Acosta. He just might change his tune if it turns out that Israel is a major part of the story.
Schumer would already have been tipped of if is was an Israeli operation. It's an anti Trump thing.
The fact that the case has been moved to the Southern District of New York validates your cynicism.
Has the Only Democracy in the Middle East decided to sacrifice Epstein (he can be sprung later, his jig was up anyway) so
that an Epstein circus can replace Russiagate?
From renfro, the following great point:
"If congress is going to question Acosta .first question should be who told him Epstein belonged to intelligence."
, renfro! Thanks & my respect.
Because I have special enthusiasm for renfro's advice to "Congress," such will not fly with "congress."
Quote: "It will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes."
Reply: We'll get a glistening kabuki show, with lots of wailing [walls], thunder and lightening, twists and turns, but, in
the end [as this case will go on and on – Harvey Weinstein, anyone?] people will forget about it.
I fear that this is all rapidly turning into a modified limited hangout. A whole lot of dirt will be inconclusively exposed
and, even though everyone will have a pretty good idea of what happened, there won't be enough will to do anything about it.
The caveat will be when the financial system finally implodes. A horde of jobless and desperate people will rapidly lose
their patience for being governed by a bunch of incompetent pedophile oligarchs, but until then everyone will just go with the
flow.
@Rabbitnexus
ut it looks more like a millionaire club. Intelligence agencies prefer to use secretaries and other less visible people as spies.
I would look for some association of friends of Israel, something that has lots of money, wants lots of power, spies on people,
both enemies and friends, and has some special love for Israel.
I maybe wrong, but this does not seem to me to be a single intelligence agency of any country. It operates in an age old
method of a secret society, like mafia or masons. It is neither mafia nor masons, but some that especially likes to help Israel
and probably created it. I guess there are such friends of Israel organizations, several.
In social science it is often assumed that people are selfish. The attempt to show that altruism contributes positively to
the prospects for survival and reproduction is important in defeating the presumption of underlying selfishness. It's not a
very deep idea. If ten people carry a gene that causes one of them to throw himself on a hand-grenade, thereby saving the other
nine, that gives the gene a better chance of being passed along than if the grenade goes off and most or all of the carriers
are killed. If interested, see the book Evolution of the Social Contract by Brian Skyrms.
First a question: who says the telephone numbers were the sort only an intimate or ultimate insider would have? Queen Elizabeth's
would surely have had to be the Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham or Balmoral switchboard.
Then there is what a sleazy or dangerous guy like Epstein might be expected to do, namely toss in a whole lot of names (with
or without true up to date direct line numbers) to confuse and provide diversion and cover. Cute though isn't that he was supposed
still to be using an old fashioned address book in the 21st Century rather than an encrypted or at least password protected
smartphone.
The Palm Beach mansion Epstein owned was rigged with hidden cameras in some of the guest bedrooms according to an article
I read a couple of years back.
Im glad we have forums like this so the word can get out: honeypot operations are not a thing of just the KGB/Cold War past,
but of the Soros/intel orgs/globalist/Establishment present.
Future politicians and wealthy businesspersons need to be aware of this. The Bible has a great old verse that goes something
like, "Be sure your sins will find you out".
"Pedophilia"? Has anyone accused Epstein of mistreating pre-pubescent girls? I don't think so. If Mr. Giraldi wants to deplore
what Epstein is accused of, fine. But don't try to confuse us by suggesting that he attacked children rather than underage teens.
@follyofwar
even Israel understand this would not be regime change business as usual.
U.S. war gamers for years have been saying there's no way the U.S. could significantly "win" the war. It would surely drive
gas prices way up, and wake up the American public, creating a probably insurmountable political problem for Trump. Israel is
liable to get pelted from all sides -- Hezbollah has promised to attack in the event of war, and there are probably ways of
striking from Syria and Iran. Then there are the wild cards of Russia and China. No one knows for sure what Putin would do if
Iran were attacked, but he could certainly turn Israel into a parking lot very quickly if he wanted to.
Well founded scepticism. Still, now we know the extent of what Bernie Madoff got away with perhaps someone who was clever
and charming and appealed to those who wouldn't have invested with Madoff just might have put together enough billion dollar
portfolios to be able, as long as he managed his tax affairs well to become very rich during the 80s. It would be interesting
to know how he handled the October 1988 melt down.
One aspect of this entire Epstein Talmudic child abuse saga that really p*sses me off is the active participation of the
IRS. It was the same with Madoff and Maxwell. None of these talmudic ponzi's could have gotten off the ground if these gangsters
had been correctly filing all the correct tax forms like all the other goy schmucks.
Since 2012, with the Statute of Limitations retroactively extended 3 years to a total of 6 years backwards to 2006, all undeclared
foreign bank accounts of US persons or green card holders on IRS FBAR forms (Foreign Bank Account Report), and since 2012 form
8948 (Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets), which is even more intrusive, face IRS penalties of 50% of the highest
annual balance, and many tax sinners have been forced to pay more in taxes than these bank accounts ever contained. This is
the tip of the iceberg compared to jewish charity and foundation and estate fraud.
Epstein supposedly was "gifted" the NY mansion from his "mentor" at the defunct and fraudulent money changer Bear Stearns
for what must have been more than 50 Million. Rick Wiles drilled down in detail into this gift on
Thursday .
These kinds of shenanigans, like flying "friends" around the world to your various child abuse temples in your private jets,
are taxable gifts. In fact double taxed, taxed first as income and second with the gift tax. The Lolita Express could never
be declared as a business expense either.
The entire rotten affair stinks on every level and it gets more putrid at every layer of talmudic control is peeled bank.
At each level more Jews and Zionists come wiggling out and scurrying off to disappear from social and dinosaur media. But also
as each layer gets peeled bank we get closer to the core, which with ever more certainty is ritual child sacrifice used for
talmudic control.
Forget the small fry and concentrate on the real criminals please.
It's going to be difficult
Maurene Comey, one of the lead prosecutors who is handling the Epstein case, happens to be James Comey's daughter, the ex
FBI boss.
It remains to be seen if she will be giving Bill Clinton special treatment, just like her father gave to Hillary's "lock her
up".
Moreover, Judge Berman who preside the case, happens to be also a Clinton appointee (in 1998).
In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business
today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion
or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting
clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos – just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those
with $1 billion–plus.
The fly in the ointment of this carefully cultivated cover story:
"Statistics published in Forbes magazine's annual survey of America's billionaires expose this little known but shocking
reality. In 1982 there were 13 billionaires; in 1983 15″
There's no need for anything so crude as either the head of the CIA or FBI reporting directly to the Mossad when both agencies
are riddled from top to bottom with de facto Israeli espionage agents.
It's a Fool's Errand to think you can solve Epstein like a puzzle. Most, like Giraldi, are engaged in bias confirmation.
That isn't to say his speculations are entirely wrong but that we're all part of the play in one way or another.
In my view timing is rarely if ever coincidental. That seems glaringly obvious here. The Epstein scandal was resurrected
now for a reason. I suspect that like the Academic Admissions scandal the Permanent Government is throwing its weight around.
Warning (once again) that it can inflict casualties if exposing its 2016 malefactions is taken too far.
Weinstein served the same function -- with poor Meryl Streep the Sgt. Schultz headliner.
Put yourself in the mind of the various filth (e.g. Brennan) implicated in attempting to throw the election to Hillary and,
failing that, frame-up and destroy the duly elected POTUS. They think they're entitled to a pass given all they've turned a
blind eye to over the years.
Epstein's arrest strikes me as a shot across the bow in the context of the upcoming IG Report/Durham Investigation. I'm not
picking on Giraldi but all of his fans here should note he's been Mumble Mouth at best on those malefactions. Nor am I saying
that isn't the wise move for him.
The scandal that needs to be buried is that they built a global surveillance (and storage) apparatus, including of the American
people. There was widespread, systematic abuse of it during the Obama Administration ('000s of people). Whatever limitations
there were, effectively Mutually Assured Destruction with the establishment factions keeping an eye on each other, collapsed
as they all united to stop Trump.
Epstein, like Weinstein and the Academic Admissions scandal, is both distraction and a warning to the Governing and Business
Classes -- keep you heads down and mouths shut about these powerful intelligence/national security entities.
I generally think waiting to see how matters fall out is a very good idea. But when I read the information of Mr. Acosta's
interview, I sank a bit. Because it strongly suggested vested interest by the government – not to get to the truth.
That even the circus that usually comes to surround even credible cases will so muddy the waters as to avoid a rendering
of what actually took place.
And given how compromised the collusion matter is was or will continue to be – the stakes may be higher here such that muddying
the waters will be some relief for those involved.
Myth of brilliance has been created to explain origin of his wealth . But even that shit was not enough , more myths had
to be created like capacity of having brilliant discussions with Nobel laureate ( Physics) or with great educators , and with
world renowned economist .
I guess authorities can get away with saying what F lies they can say until it blows up on their faces . Jew thinks goym
are stupid , so tell them whatever come to mind like having a great autonomous brain that doesn't depend on education or training
or publicly visible job to figure out the finances , economy, hard computer , physical and cognitive sciences and earning millions
,
while busy with
1 taking nude picture and storing them in 3-4 different areas
2 ferrying big guns from 3 different continents to Orgy Islsnd
3 Getting their intimate information , charting them connecting them and storing them
4 having parties with semi nude girls but attended by celebrities
5 holding message parkour parties from girls procured from shanty , trailer park ,
6 having serial girl friends
– there are more .
Oh yeah!!! No wonder people under pressure , lack of information , from removal of connecting dots , undue respect for glory
money power , fear for being seen as ' naysayer ' or pessimist or low IQ uninformed , and fear of public ridicule can believe
or can feign to believe the wildest whoopers / lies/ plaint shit dished out by the upper echelon of the society .
( then we wonder why people believe in UFO , big foot ,
, personal angels , apparitions, or America is a force for good )
Epstein in my opinion is a mossad officer whose agenda is to compromise zio/US politicians for the benefit of Israel and
in this he is just one of many in the zio/US and in fact the zio/US gov is infested with dual Israeli citizens whose first and
only loyalty is to Israel.
Read the book Blood in the Water by Joan Mellen about the attack on the USS Liberty by Israel and the US government to see
how intertwined the mossad and the CIA are and remember the joint Israeli and zio/US gov attack on the WTC on 911, the zionists
rule America!
"CIA and the Russian FSB services are obvious candidates, but they would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like
Epstein."
This is an assertion with nothing to back it up. The CIA, in particular, has every reason to use an 'Epstein' for its nefarious
purposes as it IS the deep state or at least a major part of it.
The CIA owns the drug trade in Afghanistan and Mena, Arkansas can easily be connected to CIA activities along with gun running
in Mexico. The CIA is the official criminal organization within the US gov't and it went rogue decades ago. It can afford to
have multiple 'Epstein' clones running around to make sure it can control the US political class to not investigate its activities
too closely.
The CIA and Israel are indistinguishable from each other. Israel runs US foreign policy via the CIA and their own Mossad.
Come on, Phil Giraldi. Do you believe in an independent American justice system? What a joke. It's corrupt to the bone. Weinstein,
Epstein, Maxwell, Adelson, Saban, Koch you name it, have America in their pocket like Sharon used to say. During a furious beef
between Sharon and Shimon Peres, Sharon turned toward Peres, saying "every time we do something you tell me Americans will do
this and will do that. I want to tell you something obvious, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people,
control America, and the Americans know it."
Could anyone but an intelligence agency get away with all of the following: 1) harassing witnesses (forcing their cars off
the road public highways), 2) searching the trash of police officers in an attempt to find dirt on the officers and 3) obtaining
a sweet heart plea bargain when the police had dozens of victims (who didn't even know each other) telling the exact same story
and ready to testify – as well as photos of nude adolescents seized in a search.
Who could have done such things and got away with it.
Epstein must have been an operative. The only question is: for whom did he work?
Gasp!!! Are you suggesting sweet, innocent Monica was blowing Slick Willie for reasons other than his taking advantage
of her?
In his book Gideon's Spies the late Welsh author Gordon Thomas claimed Mossad had tapes of the same for blackmail
reasons. However, this has never been confirmed.
Epstein will "cop a plea" and avoid a trial. That is certain.
A couple of things I'd like to ask the brilliant Epstein: Why did you engage in your nefarious sexual activity in New York
State and Florida? The "age of consent" in both states is 18. In New Jersey, PA and other states, it's 16. Now US federal law
prohibits sex between people 12 to 16 if one of the participants is 4 years or more older than the other. The law says "between"
not inclusive of 16. So 16 might be OK. That's young enough.
Also Jeffrey, why didn't you take your "Lolita Express" to Tel Aviv? It's legal in Israel and no one checks up of the actual
ages of the "working girls." And most are the tall blond/blue and slim types from Eastern Europe.
"Pedophile" is incorrect, as a commenter noted. The age cutoff is 13 for pedophilia. DSM-5. These escapades comprise different
serious felonies. However, the Epstein colleagues can rest easy, if Rush's instinct about prosecuting Hillary is correct. Rush
has said that prosecuting Hillary will not happen, because it would "roil" the nation. Same here. I expect to see a lot of MSM
passive voice, and intransitive verbs, but no roiling. "The car drove off the side of the bridge."
Asimov's father once wrote a book called "The Sensuous Dirty Old Man." Hmm .
More seriously, did it ever occur to you that someone might want to know your source before accepting your claim that Mueller
"supposedly classified Epstein as an informant"? Supposed by whom?? Eh????
believes Epstein allegedly preyed on Araoz when she was 14 because she was vulnerable.
"She had just transferred to a new school and didn't know anybody," attorney Kimberly Lerner said in an interview. "She
didn't have a father. Her mother was very poor. She was from a single-parent home. She was really struggling, and she wanted
to be a model and an actress. He absolutely preyed upon the most vulnerable."
@Lou123
n Ring' which supposedly was providing child prostitutes to high level US politicians who in turn were then being blackmailed
by the existence of surreptitious recordings having been made of these incidents by US intelligence agencies.
The below newspaper article explains what ultimately happened to the lead investigator of the case. Gary Caradori had been
hired by the Nebraska state legislature to find out what had actually transpired regarding the alleged Nebraska based ring.
Needless to say his investigation was unexpectedly 'cut short'.
What if .Acostoa is just a stooge, In fact he probably insisted on SOME jail time here. Otherwise the rest of the US "justice"
system could care less. Even NYC is complicit. It's a snow job of theater, this democracy is. It's a joke. It only looks like
a democracy on tv.
Mossad, CIA, FBI, MI5, who cares? All of these are criminal enterprises, just like the governments providing them cover and
"legitimacy".
Really interesting aspect of any elite in-fighting is that it exposes an "uncomfortable truth" that there is only one elite
running the show. That there is only Republicratic party, which regularly organizes (for the benefit of sheeple still believing
in "democracy") puppet shows called elections, where ostensibly Democrats battle Republicans. In fact, both are just two hands
of the same puppet master. That's why the same criminals are prominent at all "Republican" and "Democratic" functions.
The other thing that the story of that Epstein character clearly shows is that all those "respectable people" are nothing
more than rich criminals, and the only reason they aren't in jail is that they have enough money to get away with any crime.
@Talha
refully scripted to identify girls who could be vulnerable to manipulation, have a chaotic family life, need money, need social
connections for career advancement . The female procurer would report to Epstein and receive instructions to abandon or continue
to recruit the "candidate". A female procurer is used as she will not arouse suspicion in a young girl. These are simple techniques
that have been used for centuries worldwide. A father must cultivate a close relationship with his daughter, know when she is
OK or not OK, and most importantly be an example of a quality man that his daughter will compare to every man she meets(being
overprotective merely makes her more vulnerable).
Meh. Get ready for a tidal wave of MSM articles talking about how the deranged, alt-right internet conspiracy theorists are
having a field day with the Epstein case, after which your average American moron will be programmed to just smirk and roll
his eyes whenever the facts touched on in this article are brought up.
Ms. Aroaz's father was deceased before she met the female procurer
Well, then I take back what I said – obviously can't blame a dead man for not being there.
A father must cultivate a close relationship with his daughter, know when she is OK or not OK, and most importantly be
an example of a quality man that his daughter will compare to every man she meets
I don't know if Giraldi is a plant or not. However, the first law of understanding "intelligence agents" or ex spooks is
to always be suspicious of everyone. The group he belongs too seems legitimate enough but we have been set up before. I've be
reading Giraldi a long time and he has a similar "theme" in every piece but he also leaves small things out that should be in
his articles. The Devil is in the Details and man with his experience should be "Detailed Oriented."
He should know about Epstein and Muller and a few other things since this is the stock and trade of all intelligence agencies.
The interesting thing about this case is, the left wants it exposed because they think it'll take down Trump, the right wants
it exposed because they think it'll take down Bill Clinton. My guess is, more Dems will go down than Republicans. Trump was
a Democrat and a big supporter of Clintons and Chuck Schumer before he decided to run as a GOP in 2016. He could've gone either
way.
Sex scandals tend to plague the left, especially sexual perversions like porn, prostitution, child sex or gay sex. It's coz
the left is dominated by Jews who are prone to sexual perversion, and also because liberals believe feelings and passion trump
all, anything you do is not your fault as long as you are just following your feelings.
One reason Trump is so pro-Israel and hell bent on attacking Iran could be because the Jews have something on him, which
is not too hard since he's been in business with them for a lifetime and is as unctuous and unscrupulous as any of them. They
might be getting impatient with him on Iran and wants someone who can get the job done like Mike Pence to take over. Epstein
could take down both Clinton and Trump, Clinton has outlived his usefulness to them since Hillary didn't win, he'll be the sacrificial
lamb while they take out Trump for Pence.
Republic asked the following critical question which should not be cast away:
"If Epstein worked for Mossad, why wasn't he tipped off in Paris not to return to the US?"
! Mossad deception is sophisticated & patterns of telling a lie upon another improved lie ar characteristic.
Also, Mossad's implemented practices/techniques are adaptable to circumstances which seem supportive of what dumb goyim consider
"justice served," but they actually benefit Israel.
A thought. I figure Epstein knew what fate awaited him prior to landing at Teterboro Airport tarmac.
Well, Giraldi did work there and would have heard people complaining about the presence and influence of Israeli spies. Colonel
Kiatowoski's book about the presence of Israeli spies in the Pentagon made it clear Pentagon personnel resented the Israeli
spies but could do nothing about it.
@Talha
ing to a recently divorced man whose x-wife hates him (nothing new), and who has two teenage daughters. The x has poisoned the
daughters against him, (nothing new), and because he was trying to be strident with his elder daughter vis-a-vis drugs, (nothing
new), he now is not allowed to have any contact with them via the skewed courts, (nothing new).
They're doing a Weimar regime redux. That was the apex of their heyday, when the children of Germany were their playthings,
and Berlin was a giant brothel- girls and boys for sale, especially the ones whose fathers had died in their holocaust
that was WWI.
@j2
has maybe 10 Israeli immigrants or American Jews who work for him. Each has 10-15 American Jews who can be called upon. So it's
a wide network.
You're right that clerks secretaries accountants have great access to information. But the Israeli system is widespread.
Plus, the information needn't always come from Jews.
It really does exist. There's an Israeli who hosts sabbath dinners in Los Angeles. He invites American Jews to be briefed
on what's going on in Israel. I'm positive he also recruits agents in place he spots at those dinners. Guests who have no access
to anything useful at least get to feel they're participating in the cause.
@AnonFromTN
he only reason they aren't in jail is that they have enough money to get away with any crime.
True. And this Epstein coverage is bringing out more nooks and crannies of how the really rich control systems for their
own benefit.
Like why was Epsteins tax rate on his NY mansion only 0.6% .why is Bill de Blasio tax rate on his mansion only 0.2% ..when
other NY'ers taxrate is 12%.
@ChuckOrloski
howed the original twelve members in indecent poses . At the entrance to the abbey, there was an inscription which read Fay
ce que voudras – do what thou wilt – a term which Aleister Crowley borrowed nearly 200 years later. "
Ben Franklin likely would have been a prominent visitor to Little St. James, just as he was to
West Wycombe in his day.
Thomas Paine too.
There is regular sex and "deviation", pornography, pedophilia
There is drugs, illegal and legal, hard and soft
Then there is finance, always pimping, always on exploitation, abuse of minors, as young as not yet born, globally, and to
be comitted legally. Pedophilia and drugs are soft core, barely leveling at the sock suspenders of our financiers.
A few hundred of the top tier Wall Street-ers belong in jail, as rats eating their own tail, they only can be administered
there. Starting with Mnuchin. Epstein should be let alone, so he can decoy a little longer, and await his turn, pecking order
obliges. Ah, the public sector, the ones with faces, real fungi are minding the dark.
Linked on this same site today, Michael Hudson, seems to attribute Empire and financial capitalism, debt, the demise of the
dollar, to Trump. ?. Of all men, another scripted clown gets the blame. The shredding is spoiling the carpet.
If unz.com is so willingly pointing out the third liners, as Maya sacrifices to the deities in the shades, then there you
have one more reason the rag is impervious to censorship.
Gardner's and retail store clerks have personal phone numbers of the rich and famous. For instance, clerks at high
end retail clothing stores are supposed to cultivate shoppers on a personal level so they can call them up with the great news
of items they'd like to buy.
Actors producers directors numbers and home addresses can be obtained from people who work at their agents accountants PR
and attorney offices
Police departments have access to all phone numbers. Most of the Find a Number websites don't have the private number of
celebrities. But there are plenty of people who can access all the cell phone records.
How to get away with blackmailing without blackmailing.
First, you need to recruit people in. Have lots of massive parties at your spacious home for wealthy men. Have lots of women
mostly teens and under aged.
Sooner or later there will be some mingling going on. Some billionaire will get handsy and end up in a room with a girl ..and
hidden cameras.
Epstein informs him later the girl was really 15, but offers him a nice, neat way to buy silence: a large allocation to his
hedge fund, which charges 5% ..with power of attorney for himself.
To ease the pain for the black mailee Epstein puts the money in something as safe as treasury notes or money market fund.
Then Epstein collects his 'fees' ..x millions on the interest from treasury notes or etc..
Soooo no traceable blackmail payoff checks or wire transfers from his fellow pedos.
Epstein may also try this on other important political figures, mayors, prosecutors, etc. He doesnt blackmail them to 'invest'
in his fund but has them in his pocket.
The evidence would probably be in a deposit box in his offshore Caribbean bank.
One reason Trump is so pro-Israel and hell bent on attacking Iran could be because the Jews have something on him, which
is not too hard since he's been in business with them for a lifetime and is as unctuous and unscrupulous as any of them.
They might be getting impatient with him on Iran and wants someone who can get the job done like Mike Pence to take over.
Epstein could take down both Clinton and Trump, Clinton has outlived his usefulness to them since Hillary didn't win, he'll
be the sacrificial lamb while they take out Trump for Pence.
Just what I was going to write, but you got there first.
Thank you very much. pedophilia stops at the victims 13th birthday. Then it's various degrees of molestation of a minor .
It's usually 13 and 14, then 15. Then 16 and 17. In some states the age of consent is 16. Epstein's activities weren't just
molestation of minors. They were procuring for prostitution as well.
I have been meaning to ask this for a while, Dr. Giraldi, let’s say stuff you write about Israel is all true, you are ex-CIA,
then can we assume there are many like you or is that not the case? If that’s the case, then why none of them stand up and oppose?
Or are they too afraid of standing up for their country?
There are at least nine factions in the CIA concerning Israeli politics:
1. anti-Israel for emotional reasons (instinctive hostile feelings towards Jews, Judeophobia)
2. anti-Israel for ideological reasons (reasoned opposition towards Judaism and Zionism as doctrines)
3. anti-Israel for strategic reasons (bad for long-term American interests)
4. pro-Israel for emotional reasons (warm feelings towards Jews)
5. pro-Israel for ideological reasons (for instance, Christian Zionists)
6. pro-Israel for occult reasons (the world’s most powerful secret society mandates support as part of a grand mystical scheme)
7. pro-Israel for reasons of personal self-interest (issues concerning bribery, blackmail, careerism, etc.)
8. pro-Israel for strategic reasons (good for long-term American strategic interests)
9. pro-Israel for strategic reasons AND hostile to Jews (Jewish nationalists provide a counterweight to Jewish leftists in
the Diaspora, divide and conquer tactics)
Since the late 1940s, the pro-Israel factions in the CIA have easily dominated the anti-Israel (or Israel-skeptical) factions.
By the way, most CIA employees, including many high level employees, don't have a full understanding of what is going on
in the CIA, including knowledge of the most influential players and operations and their connections.
You can bet that the likes of Rachel Maddow will never change their tune on the subject
of Russiagate.
However, with the election season heating up, it might seem wise for them to
start singing a different tune altogether, such as Sanders and Warren are too radical to have
any chance of defeating Trump.
The saddest thing of all is that the Dems' fixation on Russia
and Putin is now coming back to bite them in the ass. Trump could not have asked for a better
gift.
"... There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars." ..."
** A footnote on Larry Summers seems important here:
Harvard-trained economists have been running the US economy for a very long time, and continue
to do so. Summers began his ascent as a professor of economics at Harvard University, leaving
shortly before Bill Clinton won the Presidency. He was clearly the Neoliberal seed planted for
the New American Century.
In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United
States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted
to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In
1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.
While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American
response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the
Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International
Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states,
and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act.
At This Point the Ball is Passed to the Bush Team Republicans, while the Democrats Sit Back
and Wait for 2008.
There's now a Treasury surplus to transfer to the wealthy, and the necessary deregulation
for Wall Street empowerment is in place. The Soviet era had ended and Russia is ended forever.
The world is finally primed to be seized by the One Exceptional Power. It's 2001, and we are
standing on the threshold of the New American Century . Time to throw a flash-bang of chaos
onto the world stage and trigger the booming War Economy that will carry us directly to global
control.
There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the
Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions
concerning "lady scholars."
Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard
University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a
no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict
with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with
Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of
women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the
high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon political
correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016:
There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes
very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks
that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but
it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of
ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.
After his departure from Harvard, Summers cooled his jets on Wall Street, positioning
himself to be called back into the game when it was Team Democrat's turn in 2008.
Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a
freelance speaker at other financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase,
Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during the
Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National
Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he
emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great
Recession.
Jeffery Epstein continued to weave himself into the fabric of government like a good
psychopath would. He was by no means the only one.
This debauchery is a part of the crisis of neoliberalism. It does increases the level of de-legitimization of neoliberal elite.
As one commenter pointed out: we need the names of scum, wealthy perverts from the United States who travelled to Epstein
island-sized rape dungeon off the coast of Saint Thomas.
Notable quotes:
"... This appears to be something of a pattern. "What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it," Ward says of Epstein's pederasty. "While praising his charm, brilliance and generous donations to Harvard, those [I] spoke to all mentioned the girls as an aside." ..."
"... The Epstein case is first and foremost about the casual victimization of vulnerable girls. But it is also a political scandal, if not a partisan one. It reveals a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes ..."
"... our elites still love Epstein, even if he does rape little girls ..."
"... This is how America is. This is how our ruling class works: Democrat, Republican, whatever. As the inimitable Matthew Walther points out , there's a reason people believe in Pizzagate. The Hellfire Club is real. And for decades, we've emboldened them considerably. ..."
"... Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that the Epstein sex abuse timeline is nearly identical to the Catholic Church sex abuse timeline. Both investigations were initiated in the early 2000s. Both revealed that the exploitation of children was an open secret in the highest echelons of power. Both investigations were closed a few years later, though not resolved. We assumed justice would take its course, and slowly began to forget. And then within two years of each other, both scandals emerged again, more sordid than ever. And on both occasions, we realized that nothing had changed. ..."
"... Of course, we know where that leads us. For two centuries, conservatives have tried to dampen the passions that led France to cannibalize herself circa 1789. ..."
"... Yes: those passions are legitimate. We should feel contempt for our leaders when we discover that two presidents cavorted with Epstein, almost certainly aware that he preyed on minors. We should feel disgust at the mere possibility that Pope Francis rehabilitated Theodore McCarrick. And we should be furious that these injustices haven't even come close to being properly redressed. ..."
"... This isn't about politics. This is about common decency and respect for the most vulnerable. Clinton? Trump? Who cares? If--and that's a big "if"--it comes to pass that either or both were involved in the Epstein festivities then either or both are scum and should be punished accordingly --along with the rest of their playmates at the Epstein playground. ..."
"... Does the author have some evidence to prove that President Trump is a pedophile, as he suggests in this article? Are all persons who may have been friends with Epstein perverts and criminals? ..."
"... If our decadent elite falls at all, it will be from imperial over-reach and losing a major foreign war, not from pedophilia, which is rapidly being normalized along with the rest of LGBTQWERTYUIOP. ..."
"... The so called elites seem above reproach. Our morality has been skewed through the soul. ..."
"... I applaud the courageous outliers like Ryan Dawson and Phil Giraldi that have considerably more guts than me. Blessings ..."
"... I don't think there is going to be a revolution, whether in UK or US, at most people would be outraged for couple of weeks and then forget. ..."
"... Excellent article. But off the mark on one key point. The corruption of the elites and Ruling Class -- and they are sickeningly corrupt -- is only a reflection of, or if you will a leading indicator, of a related corruption of the body politic. ..."
"... So Trump simply makes a comment, has no record of any flights, attendance or participation and this article would have you believe that it equates as despicable as a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express? This author is no different than the fake news. ..."
"... Trump did allegedly make one flight on the plane, from the NY area to Florida. No records show him flying to the "orgy island". ..."
"... Actually, the logs don't show that he was on the plane. Epstein's brother CLAIMS he was on the plane...the most anybody else has said to support that is that Trump looked at the plane on the ground. ..."
"... It's a Trump problem insofar as he continues to defend Acosta. This is the Sec of Labor who effectively let Epstein walk and who now oversees anti-human trafficking efforts (which he has repeatedly tried to gut the funding for). ..."
"... Did you see Acosta's press conference? The local State DA wanted to let Epstein walk - on a lesser state charge through a Grand Jury. Acosta's US Attorney office stepped in to get the charges increased as much as they could so that Epstein would do SOME jail time and - more importantly - have to register as a sex offender. ..."
"... I agree. As much as I detest Trump, I don't think that he was involved with Epstein's debauchery. However, I do believe the women that claim being assaulted, because he is on tape claiming to do what they describe. And there is so many of them. And he has had multiple documented affairs while married to every one of his wives. But no evidence yet of him with underage girls. ..."
"... Right, because those Kavanaugh accusers were so credible, right? No evidence, decades later? Nope. Unlike Kavanaugh, Trump was on a big stage for decades and was a pretty easy target with the tabloids looking for dirt...but none of them came forward. ..."
"... Trump owes America an apology, reading his comments it is obvious he was aware of, and disapproved of, Epstien proclivities, but didn't have the guts to stand up. (I do not believe the stories of Trump being involved, but if it turns out I am wrong on that, fry him ) ..."
Our elites cavorted with a pedophile, almost certainly aware of what he was up to. This is how revolutions begin.
Bill Clinton (Wikipedia Commons); Jeffrey Epstein mugshot (public domain) and Donald Trump
(Gabe Skidmore /Flickr)
For once, I'm with New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg: Jeffrey Epstein is the ultimate symbol of plutocratic rot.
In her
latest column , Goldberg interviews Vicky Ward, who covered the 2003 revelations of Epstein's sex abuse for Vanity Fair
. Ward's editor, Graydon Carter, allegedly ran interference for the high-flying pervert, nixing her discussion with two women
who claimed to have been assaulted by Epstein. "He's sensitive about the young women," Carter explained to Ward.
This appears to be something of a pattern. "What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and
just blithely overlooked it," Ward says of Epstein's pederasty. "While praising his charm, brilliance and generous donations to
Harvard, those [I] spoke to all mentioned the girls as an aside."
Back to Goldberg:
The Epstein case is first and foremost about the casual victimization of vulnerable girls. But it is also a political
scandal, if not a partisan one. It reveals a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich
can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes. If it were fiction, it would be both too sordid and
too on-the-nose to be believable, like a season of "True Detective" penned by a doctrinaire Marxist.
Of course, Goldberg -- being a Democrat -- doesn't want us to think of this as a partisan scandal. Yet Nancy Pelosi's daughter
conspicuously tweeted that it's "quite likely
that some of our faves are implicated." We all know by now that President Bill Clinton was a
frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, Epstein's
private jet, which ferried wealthy perverts from the United States to his island-sized rape dungeon off the coast of Saint Thomas.
Still, a few Republicans will almost certainly be implicated, too. Now, look: I voted for President Donald Trump in 2016. If
I don't vote for him in 2020, it will be because I've lost faith in the whole democratic process and have moved to a hole in the
ground to live as a hobbit. Having said that, Trump is definitely tainted by Epstein. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine
, the president called him a "terrific guy." "It
is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do," Trump said, "and many of them are on the younger side."
Don't pretend that's an innocent remark. It's like when Uncle Steve passes out face-down on the kitchen floor at the family Christmas
party and Uncle Bill says, "I guess that one likes to drink." We still love Uncle Steve, even if he does overdo it on the
fire water. And our elites still love Epstein, even if he does rape little girls. None of us is perfect, after all.
This is how America is. This is how our ruling class works: Democrat, Republican, whatever. As the inimitable Matthew Walther
points out ,
there's a reason people believe in Pizzagate. The Hellfire Club is real. And for decades, we've emboldened them considerably.
Remember how Democrats and centrist Republicans mocked conservatives for making such a stink about Monica Lewinsky's blue dress?
The media elite competed to see who could appear the most unfazed by the fact that our sax-playing president was getting a bit on
the side. "I mean, heh heh, I love my wife, but, heh, the 1950s called, man! They want their morality police back."
Well, look where that got us. Two confirmed adulterers have occupied the White House in living memory; both are now under fire
for cavorting with a child sex slaver on Orgy Island. Go ahead and act surprised, Renault.
♦♦♦
Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that the Epstein sex abuse timeline is nearly identical to the Catholic Church sex abuse
timeline. Both investigations were initiated in the early 2000s. Both revealed that the exploitation of children was an open secret
in the highest echelons of power. Both investigations were closed a few years later, though not resolved. We assumed justice would
take its course, and slowly began to forget. And then within two years of each other, both scandals emerged again, more sordid than
ever. And on both occasions, we realized that nothing had changed.
Whew. Now I get why people become communists. Not the new-wave, gender-fluid, pink-haired Trots, of course. Nor the new far Left,
which condemns child predators like Epstein out one side of its mouth while
demanding
sympathy for pedophiles out the other.
No: I mean the old-fashioned, blue-collar, square-jawed Stalinists. I mean the guy with eight fingers and 12 kids who saw photos
of the annual Manhattan debutantes' ball, felt the rumble in his stomach, and figured he may as well eat the rich.
Of course, we know where that leads us. For two centuries, conservatives have tried to dampen the passions that led France to
cannibalize herself circa 1789.
Nevertheless, those passions weren't illegitimate -- they were just misdirected. Only an Englishman like Edmund Burke could have
referred to the reign of Louis XIV as "the age of chivalry." Joseph de Maistre spoke for real French conservatives when he said
the decadent, feckless aristocracy deserved to be guillotined. The problem is, Maistre argued, there was no one more suitable to
succeed them.
Yes: those passions are legitimate. We should feel contempt for our leaders when we discover that two presidents cavorted
with Epstein, almost certainly aware that he preyed on minors. We should feel disgust at the
mere
possibility that Pope Francis rehabilitated Theodore McCarrick. And we should be furious that these injustices haven't even
come close to being properly redressed.
"Us Democrats"??? This isn't about politics. This is about common decency and respect for the most vulnerable. Clinton? Trump?
Who cares? If--and that's a big "if"--it comes to pass that either or both were involved in the Epstein festivities then either
or both are scum and should be punished accordingly --along with the rest of their playmates at the Epstein playground.
The only question is whether or not those who participated in this apparent debauch will ever be brought to justice--so,
on that note--let the dissembling begin!
Does the author have some evidence to prove that President Trump is a pedophile, as he suggests in this article? Are all
persons who may have been friends with Epstein perverts and criminals?
You are as my grandfather told me repeatedly: "You are your associates & colleagues, their morality or lack thereof, will
in time infect you as well, despite all protests to the contrary; choose wisely."
If our decadent elite falls at all, it will be from imperial over-reach and losing a major foreign war, not from pedophilia,
which is rapidly being normalized along with the rest of LGBTQWERTYUIOP.
In France, the generation of aristocrats and especially
the royal family who were guillotined were relatively conservative in their sexual habits compared to the bloodthirsty sexual
revolutionaries who murdered them. And the libertine aristocrats of Great Britain (I believe that's where the actual hellfire
club was from) led the war against Napoleon and the temporary victory of the old order which followed his defeat.
The so called elites seem above reproach. Our morality has been skewed through the soul. Tribalism is alive and well. Wars,
diversity, erasing of our most cherished values, and a mainstream media that is in lockstep the rulers and those who see fit
to erase Freedom of Speech and make arbitrarily decisions as to what we can and cannot say. It is like living a bad dream.
I
applaud the courageous outliers like Ryan Dawson and Phil Giraldi that have considerably more guts than me. Blessings
It's the mainstream media that forced this into the light. The elites and the justice system did all they could to cover
it up, same as with the Catholic Church.
As for "our most cherished virtues", this has all been going on forever. Kings and courtiers, masters and slaves, the son
of the manor and the serving girls. Give me a break.
The only thing that is changing it is a shift in power to women.
"Paederasty" is better reserved for relationships between patrician
men, and boys, in which there was an expectation that the boy would
eventually approximate the social rank of his lover. Not to be applied
to a man running a little-girl brothel.
In UK thousands of girls were raped and nobody lost their job over it. Well, correction, people who tried to bring attention
to the horrific crimes happening lost their jobs or were prosecuted. After the scandal could no longer be contained and arrests
were finally made, there was no reckoning. No people marching in the streets, demanding heads of the goverment. I don't think
there is going to be a revolution, whether in UK or US, at most people would be outraged for couple of weeks and then forget.
Or might possibly be that upon examination, it became abundantly clear that the allegations were highly exaggerated as is
typically the case in these matters.
It might be a good idea to keep a clear head and hope that evidence "actual evidence" will determine events as opposed to
the salacious hysetria that usually surrounds these cases.
"...the decadent, feckless aristocracy deserve to be guillotined. The problem is...there is no one suitable to replace them."
100%. And I work as a psychiatric RN in a busy Emergency Room. Believe me, depravity in this country is not in the least
bit confined to 'elites'. They just make convenient scapegoats. I can tell you hundreds of stories. But conservatively, I would
estimate that anywhere from 50% to 75% of the women I care for were abused as children. And I have cared for literally thousands
of women over the years.
"This is how revolutions are born."
Not so fast. The French peasants were rioting over bread, not aristocratic decadence. In 21st Century America, no one is
starving. The poor in this country are obese, for Chr-sakes! And half the country is implicated in so-called 'aristocratic decadence',
through online porn.
And like John Lennon once wrote, "You say you want a revolution?" Be careful what you wish for...
Prosecutors will tiptoe around anything that puts them in an awkward position vis-a-vis the rich and powerful.
These are people that prosecutors want to owe you favors, and these are also people that can ruin the lives and career prospects
of law enforcement.
This explains why, to give instance, Comey engaged in comically tortured legal reasoning to justify not bringing charges
against HRC for servergate, when she would be cooling her heels in a SuperMax if she were a normie. According to conventional
wisdom, HRC was going to be the next president, already anointed practically, and that meant that she was someone that would
be in a position to do Comey big favors, and at the same time, someone that you did not want to make an enemy of.
Excellent article. But off the mark on one key point. The corruption of the elites and Ruling Class -- and they are sickeningly
corrupt -- is only a reflection of, or if you will a leading indicator, of a related corruption of the body politic.
The Clintons, for example, have been getting away with sordid and even criminal behavior for a long time. It didn't stop
a major political party from putting one of them at the top of its presidential ticket only a few years ago nor a majority of
voters from pulling the lever for her.
In fact, going back to the Lewinsky saga, it was not only the elites who pooh-poohed the whole thing; it was also the citizenry.
Check the record. Yeah, the Clintons are Exhibit A of the Real Problem. Anyway, there ain't gonna be a revolution, at least
not the kind that Michael Warren Davis warns of.
"In fact, going back to the Lewinsky saga, it was not only the elites who pooh-poohed the whole thing; it was also the citizenry.
Check the record. "
The equivalent today would have been if Mueller's replacement spent a few more years 'investigating' Trump, only to set him
up with a perjury trap over whether or not he committed adultery.
This piece at the very least is not well researched hit piece on Trump but seems more to be a rabble rousing class warfare
type click bait filler. James Patterson reports that Trump kicked Epstein out of Maro-a-Lago 15 years ago after there were complaints
that he was abusive to women and more recently has said he is not a fan of Epstein. I've seen no evidence that Trump participated
in the abuse of underage girls with Epstein. Trump is no saint but sensationalizing this story and implicating Trump to sell
your copy is not journalism.
So Trump simply makes a comment, has no record of any flights, attendance or participation and this article would have you
believe that it equates as despicable as a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express? This author is no different than the fake news.
And it was a comment made three years before the first known report to police about Epstein's behavior.
I read Trump's comment as Trump being Trump. Unless he is responding to a personal attack, Trump tends to layer on the compliments
and tries to speak positive about people.
Trump did allegedly make one flight on the plane, from the NY area to Florida. No records show him flying to the "orgy island".
Actually, the logs don't show that he was on the plane. Epstein's brother CLAIMS he was on the plane...the most anybody else
has said to support that is that Trump looked at the plane on the ground.
The author throws around "revolution" so casually... The guillotine definitely needs a resurgence; unfortunately, it's not just the aristocracy that needs it; moreover, there
are still none better suited to take over after they chopping has stopped.
And throws without not even a thought but also without care to learn or now.
It is funny that American journo is now invoking Stalin's ghost, but.... Stalinists were COUNTER-revolutionaries.
And he says he is sure he knows who they felt?
.
Inflation, words means nothing today for journos, being merely a click-bait
It's a Trump problem insofar as he continues to defend Acosta. This is the Sec of Labor who effectively let Epstein walk
and who now oversees anti-human trafficking efforts (which he has repeatedly tried to gut the funding for).
Also, Trump supposedly told a campaign aide that he barred Epstein. Perhaps that's true. Hard to know with this inveterate
liar.
Did you see Acosta's press conference? The local State DA wanted to let Epstein walk - on a lesser state charge through a
Grand Jury. Acosta's US Attorney office stepped in to get the charges increased as much as they could so that Epstein would
do SOME jail time and - more importantly - have to register as a sex offender.
Now, should the Feds have interfered in a State case is a matter for another discussion. But Actosta's office did MORE than
what they should and everything they could with the evidence at the time.
As to Trump banning Epstein - it isn't "Trump told some aide", it is in the court records of the trial. Trump was subpoenaed
and talked voluntarily to the attorney for the girls. The attorney for the girls researched it and he says, and it is in the
court record, that Trump banned Epstein.
This is not a "Trump problem" as the media is trying to make it...this is a Dem problem.
I agree. As much as I detest Trump, I don't think that he was involved with Epstein's debauchery. However, I do believe the
women that claim being assaulted, because he is on tape claiming to do what they describe. And there is so many of them. And
he has had multiple documented affairs while married to every one of his wives. But no evidence yet of him with underage girls.
Right, because those Kavanaugh accusers were so credible, right? No evidence, decades later? Nope. Unlike Kavanaugh, Trump
was on a big stage for decades and was a pretty easy target with the tabloids looking for dirt...but none of them came forward.
THAT is your biggest clue that their claims are, as the judge recently said in dismissing one of these laughable cases, ""As
currently stated, the Complaint presents a political lawsuit, not a tort and wages lawsuit,"
Then, of course, the Trump lawyers just released a video of what happened that shows he gave her a peck on the cheek during
a conversation as he was leaving. She lied.
I think some conservative, maybe Rubio, needs to stand up and simply state they are going to lead on this, and then do so.
Simply go after anyone that is involved and make the casual nature of peoples knowledge of this kind of behavior into a something
that has to be repented of.
Trump owes America an apology, reading his comments it is obvious he was aware of, and disapproved of, Epstien proclivities,
but didn't have the guts to stand up. (I do not believe the stories of Trump being involved, but if it turns out I am wrong
on that, fry him )
For a republican leader to stand up as I am suggesting, would force the left to make a decision. Either abandon their current
attitudes towards sexual permissiveness, or defend them. Either way conservatives win.
That comment was from three years before Epstein was charged. But YOUNG does not mean TOO young, always, and Trump was obviously
speaking of what OTHERS say, not what he knew for a fact.
Davis--and many TAC readers--voted for Trump even though the then-candidate sexually assaulted women and got caught bragging
about it.
While I welcome conservatives to the #metoo era, it must be acknowledged that their "outrage" didn't come to life until they
could attach the dirty deeds to Bill Clinton and other "elites" (whatever that overused term means).
No, it came with Weinstein...who proved what Trump ACTUALLY said on the bus to be true. Not that HE, Trump, HAD grabbed women,
but that young women seeking fame would LET the rich and famous grab them. Shortly after we found out that this was true when
we found out about Weinstein and what those young starlets allowed. What people knew, all good Hollywood liberals and Dems,
and LET continue while accepting Weinstein's political contributions and working with him professionally.
Essentially Epstein run a brothel for influential politicians and other stars. Girls were paid so they were hired prostitutes.
That fact that he did it with impunity for so long suggest state sponsorship.
Notable quotes:
"... In fact, the case against Epstein seems so overwhelming that it's already been reported , albeit not confirmed, that his lawyers are seeking a plea bargain. Yet even if Epstein doesn't "flip," it's a cinch that many luminaries -- in politics, business, and entertainment -- will at least be named, if not outright inculpated. ..."
"... Yet perhaps the most aching parallel to Epstein is the NXIUM sex slave case, which has already led to guilty pleas and entangled not only Hollywood stars but also heirs to one of North America's great fortunes, the Bronfmans. ..."
"... In 1944, film legend Charlie Chaplin, too, found himself busted on a Mann Act rap. Chaplin was accused of transporting a young "actress" across state lines; he was acquitted after a sensational trial, but not before it was learned that he had financed his lover's two abortions. Chaplin's career in Hollywood was effectively over. ..."
"... In fact, if one takes all these horrible cases in their totality -- Varsity Blues, NXIUM, Epstein -- one might fairly conclude that the problem is larger than just a few rich and twisted nogoodniks. ..."
"... Hardly. It merely puts it into historical perspective. Epstein is but one of a long line of serial sexual predators through the ages. ..."
"... Biological parentage is no guarantee of virtue towards children. Predatory behaviour towards children is most likely to come from within the family. ..."
"... Bill Clinton had at least 26 international trips on Epstein's private plane, including 18 to Epstein's private Caribbean island, which was reportedly staffed with dozens of underage women, mostly from Latin America. It was referred to as "Orgy Island" or "Pedo Island" by the locals. ..."
"... I disagree show me where the Progressives have any morals after all look at Clinton. Even the so called fake republicans are guilty. Our country is in the toilet . The schools are hotbeds of moral decay teaching kids LGBT sex education etc. ..."
"... Marx himself understood, capitalism is a fundamentally chaotic, disruptive, even revolutionary force that destroys everything that conservatives value the most (and want to "conserve.") The free-market fundamentalism that so many conservatives accept as gospel truth really is nothing more than a "false consciousness." ..."
"... If ever a situation called for rendition, this is it. I've been following this since 2007, and my intuition tells many more important people are involved than those we know. ..."
"... Be very skeptical. Why is DOJ suddenly resurrecting a case that was settled 10 years ago? I can't help to wonder if this isn't yet another part of the coup attempt. ..."
"... Trump also gave other evidence and information he had gleaned to prosecutors during the first Epstien trial. ..."
"... We should point this out as often as possible because liberal media is trying to smear Trump by including his name next to Epstien in every article. ..."
Jeffrey Epstein's trial may do what no other could: Bring populists and progressives together against predatory elites.
By JAMES P. PINKERTON
July 10, 2019
Jeffrey Epstein mugshot (public domain)
The legal proceedings against financier Jeffrey Epstein are going to be spectacular. The sober-minded New York Times is
already running
headlines such as "Raid on Epstein's Mansion Uncovered Nude Photos of Girls," describing the victims as "minors, some as young
as 14." So, yes, this story is going to be, well, lit .
Epstein is the pluperfect "Great White Defendant," to borrow the phrase from Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.
In Epstein's case, even the left, normally indulgent on crime, is going to be chanting: lock him up.
In fact, the case against Epstein seems so overwhelming that it's already been
reported , albeit not confirmed, that
his lawyers are seeking a plea bargain. Yet even if Epstein doesn't "flip," it's a cinch that many luminaries -- in politics, business,
and entertainment -- will at least be named, if not outright inculpated.
Which is to say, the Epstein case is shaping up as yet another lurid look at the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and powerful,
sure to boil the blood of populists on the right and class warriors on the left. In this same vein, one also thinks of the "Varsity
Blues" college admissions scandal, as well as the post-Harvey Weinstein #MeToo movement.
Yet perhaps the most aching parallel to Epstein is the
NXIUM sex slave case, which has already led to guilty pleas and entangled not only Hollywood stars but also heirs to one of
North America's great fortunes, the Bronfmans.
In that NXIUM case, it's hard not to notice the similarity between "NXIUM" and "Nexum," which was the ancient Roman word for
personal debt bondage -- that is, a form of slavery.
The Romans, of course, were big on conquest and enslavement, and such aggression always had a sexual dimension, as has been the
case, of course, for all empires, everywhere. Thus we come to a consistent theme across human history, namely the importation of
pretty young things from the provinces for the lecherous benefit of the rich and powerful.
It's believed that Saint Gregory the Great, the pope in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, gazed upon English boys at
a Roman slave market and remarked, non Angli, sed angeli, si forent Christiani ; that is, "They are not Angles, but angels,
if they were Christian." Gregory's point was that such lovely beings needed to be converted to Christianity, although, of course,
others had, and would continue to have, other intentions.
If we fast-forward a thousand years or so, we see another kind of enslavement, resulting, at least in part, from profound economic
inequality. William Hogarth's famous prints , "A
Harlot's Progress," follow the brief life of the fictive yet fetching Moll Hackabout, who comes from the provinces to London seeking
employment as a seamstress -- only to end up as a kept woman, then as a prostitute, before dying of syphilis.
Interestingly, a traditional song about descent into earthly hell, "House of the Rising Sun,"
made popular again in the '60s , also makes reference
to past honest work in the garment trade -- "my mother was a tailor."
If we step back and survey civilization's sad saga of exploitation, we see that it occurs under all manner of political and economic
systems, from feudalism to capitalism to, yes, communism. As for ravenous reds, there's the notorious case of Stalinist apparatchik
Lavrenti Beria, whom one chronicler
says enjoyed "a Draculean sex life that combined love, rape, and perversity in almost equal measure."
In the face of such a distressing litany, it's no wonder that there have been periodic reactions, some of them violent and extreme,
such as the original "bonfire of the vanities" back in the 15th century, led by the zealously puritanical cleric, Savonarola.
Yet for most of us, it's more cheering to think that prudential reform can succeed. One landmark of American reform was the
White-Slave Traffic Act , signed into law in 1910
("white slavery," we might note, is known today as "sex trafficking"). That law, aimed at preventing not only prostitution but also
"debauchery," is known as the Mann Act in honor of its principal author, Representative James R. Mann, Republican of Illinois, who
served in Congress from 1897 to 1922.
Mann's career mostly coincided with the presidential tenures of two great reformers, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And
it's hard to overstate just how central to progressive thinking was the combatting of "vice." After all, if the goal was to create
a just society, it also had to be a wholesome society; otherwise no justice could be sustainable. Thus when Roosevelt served
as police commissioner of New York City in the mid-1890s, he focused on fighting vice, rackets, and corruption.
Of course, Mann, Roosevelt, and Wilson had much more on their minds than just cleaning up depravity. They saw themselves as reformers
across the board; that is, they were eager to improve economic conditions as well as social ones.
So it was that Mann also co-authored the Mann-Elkins
Act , further regulating the railroads; he also spearheaded the
Pure Food and Drug Act
, creating the FDA. It's interesting that when Mann died in 1922, The New York Times ran an entirely admiring
obituary , recalling him as "a dominating figure in the House [a] leader in dozens of parliamentary battles." In other words,
back then, the Times was fully onboard with full-spectrum cleanup, on the Right as well as the Left.
To be sure, the Mann Act hardly eradicated the problem of sex-trafficking, just as Mann's other legislative efforts did not put
an end to abuses in transportation and in foods and drugs. However, we can say that Mann made things better .
Of course, the Mann Act has long been controversial. Back in 1913, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson was convicted according
to its provisions. (Intriguingly, in 2018, Johnson was posthumously
pardoned
by President Trump.)
In 1944, film legend Charlie Chaplin, too, found himself busted on a Mann Act rap. Chaplin was accused of transporting a
young "actress" across state lines; he was acquitted after a sensational trial, but not before it was learned that he had financed
his lover's two abortions. Chaplin's career in Hollywood was effectively over.
Cases such as these made the Mann Act distinctly unpopular in "sophisticated" circles. Of course, criticism from the smart set
is not the same as proof that the law is not still valuable. That's why, more than a century after its passage, the Mann Act is
still on the books, albeit much amended. Lawmakers agree that it's still necessary, because, after all, there's always a need to
protect women
from wolves .
Now back to Epstein. If we learn that he was actually running something called the "Lolita Express," that would be a signal that
prosecutors have a lot of work to do, rounding up the pedophile joyriders. So it was interesting on July 6 to see Christine Pelosi,
daughter of the House speaker, posting a stern
tweet : "This Epstein case is horrific and the young women deserve justice. It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated
but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may -- whether on Republicans or Democrats."
So we can see: the younger Pelosi wants one standard -- a standard that applies to all.
In fact, if one takes all these horrible cases in their totality -- Varsity Blues, NXIUM, Epstein -- one might fairly conclude
that the problem is larger than just a few rich and twisted nogoodniks.
That is, the underlying issues of regional and social inequality -- measured in power as well as wealth -- must be addressed.
To put the matter another way, we need a bourgeoisie that is sturdier economically and more sure of itself culturally. Only then
will we have Legions of Decency and other
Schlafly-esque activist groups to function as counterweights to a corrosive and exploitative culture.
Of course, as TR and company knew, if we seek a better and more protective American equilibrium, a lot will have to change --
and not just in the culture.
Most likely, a true solution will have "conservative" elements, as in social and cultural norming, and "liberal" elements, as
in higher taxes on city slickers coupled with conscious economic development for the proletarians and for the heartland. Only with
these economic and governmental changes can we be sure that it's possible to have a nice life in Anytown, safely far away from beguiling
pleasuredomes.
To be sure, we can't expect ever to solve all the troubles of human nature -- including the rage for fame that drives some youths
from the boondocks. But we can at least bolster the bourgeois alternative to predatory Hefnerism.
In the meantime, unless we can achieve such structural changes, rich and powerful potentates will continue to pull innocent angels
into their gilded dens of iniquity.
James P. Pinkerton is an author and contributing editor at . He served as a White House policy aide to both Presidents
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
"Most likely, a true solution will have "conservative" elements, as in social and cultural norming, and "liberal" elements,
as in higher taxes on city slickers coupled with conscious economic development for the proletarians and for the heartland."
Neither of which will happen with the blue megacities having political control.
"(T)here's always a need to protect women from wolves." It should be noted that boys who are sex-trafficked also fall under
the Mann Act. This may not be clear from Wikipedia.
Wow! What a wonderful article! The compassion for the young victims just jumps off the screen along with the disgust at the
corruption that has allowed this predator to damage so many lives over at least three decades.
No, the fact is that your dispassionate, detached, political assessment objectifies and dehumanizes the girls that
were abused by Epstein and by the stupidly named "justice system" and reflects the obnoxious rot at the root of our society
when it comes to the abuse of women and children.
When it comes right down to it, this doesn't really matter to you, it is just another political amusement.
"Most likely, a true solution will have "conservative" elements, as in social and cultural norming, and "liberal" elements,
as in higher taxes on city slickers coupled with conscious economic development for the proletarians and for the heartland.
Only with these economic and governmental changes can we be sure that it's possible to have a nice life in Anytown, safely far
away from beguiling pleasuredomes."
Liberal "social and cultural norming" (as in feminism, consent, discussion of sexual matters (gasp!) in the public sphere,
#MeToo, etc.) is what is making a difference more because such things are encouraging victims and giving them support. The (cough)
"justice" system needs reform so that rape kits get processed, victims are listened to instead of shamed, cases are actually
investigated, rapists aren't let off because "he comes from a good family" etc. The Nevada Legislature with it's recent legislation
is leading the way, because it has a female majority. THAT is what will change things FINALLY.
His "historical perspective" is just more of the same sh*t we have heard for millennia as are his prescriptions for solutions.
A key conclusion of the article is that Epstein and other recent scandals about the abuse of power mean "issues of regional
and social inequality -- measured in power as well as wealth -- must be addressed."
So if all regions and all social classes were equal, this would go away? First, gifts have always been and will always be
distributed unequally, so this egalitarian utopia will never be obtained -- leading to the indefinite justification "we have
more work to do" to force people and society into an unattainable intellectual ideal, and justifying endless injustices in the
process. Second, the article itself points out that the Soviets who ostensibly pursued an egalitarian state had a famous abuser
among the ranks of their political bosses (and likely had others we don't known about).
Ultimately, kids are best cared for and defended in family with their biological parents -- the very unit of society that's
been under unceasing attack for decades. Support the family and support small business which is responsible for something like
80% of new jobs created in the US. Then vigorously enforce the laws that are already on the books. A key problem with Epstein
was the law was for years or decades not enforced against him, I strongly suspect because he had very highly placed political
connections, probably several of which were sexually abusing young girls (and/or boys?) Epstein "introduced" them to. What amount
of social engineering or experimentation is going to eliminate that kind of political corruption? I highly doubt any will. Once
it's discovered, everyone involved should be prosecuted and exposed -- and any other cases of sex slavery rings discovered in
the process likewise have all their members prosecuted & exposed.
Lavrenti Beria as the prescient symbol of Soviet Babbitry v. worldwide immorality! So was Ernst Rohm! Thank god for the KGB
and SS as harbingers of true moral concern over sex abuse!
"Ultimately, kids are best cared for and defended in family with their biological parents "
LMAO. Historically the family and biologoical parents were part and parcel in many of the deals involved with these trades.
Biological parentage is no guarantee of virtue towards children. Predatory behaviour towards children is most likely
to come from within the family. I can't remember the family name but there was a family that made a big thing of their
"Proper Christian Family" even while one son was abusing his younger sister/s and the Parents protected and shielded him.
"In Epstein's case, even the left, normally indulgent on crime, is going to be chanting: lock him up." - You almost lost
me on that one. The Left is not normally 'indulgent on crime'. However, The Left is resistant to making 'immorality' (pot smoking,
sodomy, gambling, gay marriage, etc) criminal, given how driving 'vice' underground and making it illegal has unintended consequences
(such as creating the mafia and Latin American drug cartels) that are worse than 'the crime', but I decided to read on.
"That is, the underlying issues of regional and social inequality -- measured in power as well as wealth -- must be addressed."
- All in for that one. Glad to see your 'wokeness'. Please send a check to Bernie.
"In the meantime, unless we can achieve such structural changes, rich and powerful potentates will continue to pull innocent
angels into their gilded dens of iniquity" - Like Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, Roy Moore, David Vitter, Dennis Hastert, Chris
Collins, Duncan Hunter, Michael Grimm, and on and on.
The Democrats have shown they are more than willing to ostracize members of their own team (Al Franken) for alleged and actual
wrongdoing. The Republicans, not so much, since they usually overlook all kinds of deviance if a politically expedient. Such
as Tim Murphy from PA and Scott DesJarlais from TN, both married 'anti-abortion' zealots caught urging their mistresses to have
abortions.
"The Democrats have shown they are more than willing to ostracize members of their own team (Al Franken) for alleged
and actual wrongdoing."
Like Bill Clinton. The same Team D Wokemon champions who insisted that any form of sexual or romantic contact between a male
supervisor and a female subordinate was by definition sexual harassment suddenly changed their tune when Bill Clinton was the
supervisor.
Not only that, but they came up with the most hilarious tortured redefinitions of "perjury" in order to justify their hero.
For the record: I am not a Team R fan either, but I am not so naive as to think the problem is limited to one team.
It is not. Bill Clinton was a cad. No doubt. But I find it very interesting that Juanita Broaddick recanted her allegations
against Clinton when Ken Starr put her under oath.
The only outrage Democrats will actually express over Epstein is to again tar and feather Trump in the usual fashion: Nibble
at the toes of hapless political operatives and bureaucrats like Acosta, and then accuse the President of colluding in his own
purported ignorance and self-enrichment.
There is an elephant in the room I think many conservatives are ignoring right now. A real big one...
"President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old hedge fund manager charged this week with sex trafficking and
conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, were the only other attendees to a party that consisted of roughly two dozen women at
his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, according to a New York Times report."
"In 1992, the women were reportedly flown in for a "calendar girl" competition that was requested by Trump, The Times said.
"At the very first party, I said, 'Who's coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming,'" former Trump associate George Houraney
reportedly said. "It was him and Epstein."
"I said, 'Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You're telling me it's you and Epstein," he recalled saying."
"Houraney claimed to have warned Trump about Epstein's behavior and said the real estate tycoon did not heed his notice.
Houraney, a businessman, reportedly said Trump "didn't care" about how he had to ban Epstein from his events."
This is an old elephant. It raised its head during the campaign and did not make much in the way of waves. Will it come back
to bite the president today -- one hopes that its all rumor hearsay and gossip.
I am willing to grant that the president may have been a "masher" in his day. Whether that means relations with children
is another matter.
Bill Clinton had at least 26 international trips on Epstein's private plane, including 18 to Epstein's private Caribbean
island, which was reportedly staffed with dozens of underage women, mostly from Latin America. It was referred to as "Orgy Island"
or "Pedo Island" by the locals.
One is a retired politician. The other is the current POTUS. If Bill is guilty, lock him up. If Trump is guilty - we need
to know ASAP and he can no longer be the president.
If Jeffery Epstein is such a monster then what is one to make of a man who has been quoted as saying "You can do what ever
you want, grab them by the *****." and then during a presidential debate shamelessly state "I have great respect for women.
Nobody has more respect for women than I do."?
Laughing good grief --- First I have to get passed the suggestion that guys bragging nonsensically about their female conquests
is the same hiring teens to for relations.
Good grief . . . these types of issues are ripe for hysterics.
excuse my politically incorrect suggestion of making the categorical distinctions
I disagree show me where the Progressives have any morals after all look at Clinton. Even the so called fake republicans
are guilty. Our country is in the toilet . The schools are hotbeds of moral decay teaching kids LGBT sex education etc.
Cultural Marxism is at play and next they will soften up and normalize pedophile. As far as the women's movement they are bitter
progressives who on there Facebook moaning about how they make less money then men. Who is taking of the kids? There are no
real men any more they have become boys!! Sex is every where and no one cares they all going along with the new world order!
You forgot to mention our current thrice divorced President who cheats on his wife with porn stars and pays them to stay
quiet. Strong moral leadership....
If this happened, my faith in the "rule of law" and in prosecutors and law enforcement treating everyone equally might be
restored. But, alas, we all know this is not going to happen.
"...the younger Pelosi wants one standard -- a standard that applies to all."
Don't we all. But if history teaches us anything it teaches that the higher up the socioeconomic food chain we go, the more
"flexible" that standard becomes.
So we'll see about Epstein--and all the other big shots who were in on this debauch.
"...the younger Pelosi wants one standard -- a standard that applies to all."
Does she want that single standard to apply to people that flaunt our laws by having, say, a clandestine and illegal email
server that was used for classified correspondence?
Mr. Pinkerton apparently (like many) needs to learn what the definition of pedophile is (hint: It's doesn't mean any and
all sex under he legal age of consent). However illegal (to say nothing of distasteful and immoral) Epstein's actions may have
been, based on the claims I've seen, he is not a pedophile.
I also find it hard to believe that Clinton and others didn't know. Rumours of Epstein's proclivities, and his plane being
called "Lolita Express," have been around for along-time, but Epstein has been protected by his connections and wealth. Clinton
flew nearly 30 times on Epstein's private jet. Is he the only person in the world who never heard the stories about him? What
did he know and when did he know it?
If you're asking that question about Clinton- a 90s has-been politician whose own party has moved on past him, then I hope
you're also asking it about the current president who was also a bosom buddy to Epstein.
According to flight manifests, Trump flew one time, from New York to Palm Beach, on Epstein's plane. Clinton took at least
26 international trips on the Lolita Express, including 18 trips to Epstein's private Caribbean island, where he supposedly
had dozens of underage women from Latin America kept. The locals referred to it at 'Orgy Island" and "Pedo Island". We're not
exactly comparing apples to apples here, are we?
Compare the Mueller soap opera. The characters in that story were sleazy international fixers and blackmailers who worked
for everyone. Same type as Epstein. They worked for KGB, CIA, Clinton, Trump, Mossad, Saudi. Despite the universality of the
crimes, Mueller meticulously "saw" only the crimes that involved Trump and Russia. FBI always works that way. Any accusation
or evidence that doesn't fit the predefined story disappears.
Muller had a specific investigatory mission. He was not empowered to look into every government scandal since Alexander Hamilton
was blackmailed by Maria Reynolds.
Part of what doomed the post-WWII "Right" was the "fusionism" between conservatism and capitalism. While the latter got real
policy results, the former was merely pandered to during elections but otherwise ignored. As a result, leftists and centrists
mistakenly came to believe that being "right-wing" means being a corporate shill lobbying to cut taxes for the rich and pay
for it by cutting programs for the poor.
At the same time,
as Marx himself understood, capitalism is a fundamentally chaotic, disruptive, even revolutionary force that destroys
everything that conservatives value the most (and want to "conserve.") The free-market fundamentalism that so many conservatives
accept as gospel truth really is nothing more than a "false consciousness."
Many traditionalists (such as Russell Kirk) resisted fusionism for placing too much emphasis on markets and not enough on
the conservative commitment "to religious belief, to national loyalty, to established rights in society, and to the wisdom
of our ancestors." And many libertarians (such as F.A. Hayek) explicitly rejected conservatism for being too nationalistic
and hostile toward open systems.
If conservatives want any political future in this country, then they're going to have to "de-fuse," so to speak, with capitalism,
which has been exploiting their support in order to advance policies against their own interests and values. If
"Woke Capitalism" isn't the final straw, then what will it take? Conservatives could learn a lot from the Progressive Movement
of the 1890s-1920s, which despite its name was far more conservative than the David-Frenchist National Review is nowadays.
Indeed, the Progressives' reformist playbook (which recognized that the rapid changes brought by industrialization, immigration,
and urbanization had caused corruption, poverty, and vice) could and should be dusted off for today.
As far as Epstein goes, I'm rather pessimistic that he'll ever be punished and that the public will ever learn the full extent
of his crimes. While Nancy Pelosi's daughter may be principled (and good for her), the fact that so many wealthy and powerful
people may be incriminated is precisely why he'll be let off easy and the evidence will be covered up, just like last time.
I have zero confidence in our justice system, particularly in the hyper-politicized SDNY.
If ever a situation called for rendition, this is it. I've been following this since 2007, and my intuition tells many
more important people are involved than those we know. Anyone involved would be terrified; they'll have to break someone
to get the facts. As someone who was almost abducted at age 9, I say get on it.
Be very skeptical. Why is DOJ suddenly resurrecting a case that was settled 10 years ago? I can't help to wonder if this
isn't yet another part of the coup attempt.
Twisted sisters will do what they do with or without social disparities. All you can do is bury them when you catch them.
If the rich and famous get caught up, no ones fault but their own.
The Mann Act mainly served to enforce Roman Catholic ideas about marriage's being somehow special. The Bible offers no such
thing as an example of a religious marriage, whether Muslim, Catholic or Protestant, unless it be that of Job.
You expect a free pass for this term paper theory that downright American types are going to unite to stop sexual predation,
and their brains will swirl with reminiscences of St. Gregory and Sen. Mann?
I am unaware that Chaplin's career was "effectively over" after his sex trial. Chaplin made "Monsieur Verdoux" in 1947 in
good time after the modern Bluebeard of France, Marcel Petiot made headlines (this predator swindled Jews of safe passage money
out of France, poisoned them, and burned their bodies in his home. No time of reckoning for France or Francophiles here). Five
years later he released "Limelight", which could be called a loving tribute to vaudeville and silent film at the same time (Buster
Keaton appeared, and it is said that many omitted segments were his finest hour in the sound era. Note that financially and
at box office, Keaton was as ruined and burned out as countless others, but was in the end a hard working trouper who even made
it to Samuel Beckett!). Chaplin flagged thereafter, but made films at exactly the pace he wished, as characterized by the slow
linger from "Modern Times" to "The Great Dictator".
Errol Flynn on the other hand was boosted by his sex scandal as alleged with a 15 year old. His release "They Died With Their
Boots On" made reference to the allegation that Flynn was naked except for a pair of boots. And remember the original Hollywood
Confidential scandal that rounded up dozens of celebrities including Lizbeth Scott in a prostitution ring? All forgotten.
So if your going to make big analogies between Hollywood, celebrity, and yet another paroxysm of soon to evaporate Puritan
righteousness, at least know what you're talking about.
For the record, I believe that if Epstein punched 8 years above his weight in his choice of femmes, he might never have been
caught.
The article is way to long and I read the first paragraph and after the words "The sober-minded New York Times" I jumped
to the comments. The headline was enough for me...I agree, Lock Him Up.
"... Bear Stearns -- the bank that had given Mr. Epstein his start -- was still among his investments when the crisis hit. According to a lawsuit he later filed against the bank, Mr. Epstein controlled about 176,000 shares of Bear Stearns, worth nearly $18 million, in August 2007. ..."
"... Mr. Epstein sold 56,000 shares at $101 each that month. He sold the remaining 120,000 shares in March 2008 as the firm was collapsing -- 20,000 at $35 and the rest at $3.04, losing big. He also lost about $50 million in one of Bear's hedge funds. ..."
"... By the time Bear Stearns came apart, Mr. Epstein was at the center of his first abuse case. He pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in 2008, receiving a jail sentence that allowed him to work at home during the day but also required him to register as a sex offender ..."
"... The court document alleges: "Epstein also sexually trafficked the then-minor Jane Doe (a name used in US legal proceedings for people with anonymity), making her available for sex to politically connected and financially powerful people. ..."
"... "Epstein's purposes in 'lending' Jane Doe (along with other young girls) to such powerful people were to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information. ..."
"... Journalist George Webb, watch his Youtube channel, has been following Epstein 'activities' for decades, connecting him all the way back to the Bush Sr. and Jr. Boys Town White House peadophile ring. Epstein was the 'go to guy' for rat line trafficking missions, into Kosovo, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, every war zone across the world one can think of, to move dark ops in and out of, closely linked to DynCorp, which core business is 'aviation security services' and infamous for enabling and promoting underage transgressions of all of its personnel in Yugoslavia where Bill Clinton has murdered many thousands unbeknownst to the gullible and rather retarded Americuh public ..."
Jeffrey Epstein's wealth has long been a topic of discussion since becoming known as a 'billionaire pedophile' and other similar
monickers. Described by prosecuitors this week as a "man of nearly infinite means," a
2011 SEC filing has
provided a window into the registered sex offender's elite Wall Street links, according to the
Financial Times .
Epstein, who caught a lucky break tutoring the son of Bear Stearns chairman Alan Greenberg before joining the firm, left the
investment bank in 1981 to set up his own financial firm. While he reportedly managed money for billionaires for decades, most of
Epstein's dealings have been done in the shadows.
A 2011 SEC filing reveals that Epstein's privately held firm, the Financial Trust Company , took a 6.1% stake in Pennsylvania-based
catalytic converter maker Environmental Solutions Worldwide (ESW) backed by Leon Black, the billionaire founder of Apollo Global
Management .
ESW itself has a checkered past. In 2002, its then-chairman Bengt Odner was accused by the SEC of participating with others in
a $15 million "pump and dump" scheme with ESW stock. The case was settled a year later according to FT , with Odner ordered to pay
a $25,000 civil penalty. Of note, ESW accepted Epstein's investment several years after he had registered as a sex offender in a
controversial 2008 plea deal in Florida.
Epstein's connection to Black doesn't stop there - as the financier served as a director on the Leon Black Family Foundation
for over a decade until 2012 according to IRS filings. A spokeswoman for the foundation claims that Epstein had resigned in July
2007, and that his name continued to appear on the IRS filings "due to a recording error" for five years. A 2015 document signed
by Epstein provided to the Financial Times appears to confirm this.
Epstein also built his wealth with Steven J. Hoffenberg and Leslie H. Wexner, the former of whom was convicted of running a giant
Ponzi scheme, and the latter a clothing magnate.
Mr. Epstein's wealth may have depended less on his math acumen than his connections to two men -- Steven J. Hoffenberg, a
onetime owner of The New York Post and a notorious fraudster later convicted of running
a $460 million Ponzi scheme , and Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of retail chains including The Limited and the
chief executive of the company that owns Victoria's Secret.
Mr. Hoffenberg was Mr. Epstein's partner in two ill-fated takeover bids in the 1980 s, including one of Pan American World
Airways, and would later claim that Mr. Epstein had been part of the scheme that landed him in jail -- although Mr. Epstein
was never charged. With Mr. Wexner, Mr. Epstein formed a financial and personal bond that baffled longtime associates of the
wealthy retail magnate, who was his only publicly disclosed investor. -
New York Times
"I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns," Wexner told Vanity Fair in 2003. "But Jeffrey sees patterns in politics
and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends."
Those around Wexner were mystified over Wexner's affinity for Epstein.
" Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was ," said Robert Morosky, a former vice chairman of The Limited. "I checked
around and found out he was a private high school math teacher, and that was all I could find out. There was just nothing there."
As the New York Times
noted on Wednesday, Epstein's "infinite means" may be a mirage, as while he is undoubtedly extremely rich, there is "little
evidence that Mr. Epstein is a billionaire."
While Epstein told potential clients he only accepted investments of $1 billion or more, his investment firm reported having
$88 million in capital from his shareholders, and 20 employees according to a 2002 court filing - far fewer than figures being reported
at the time.
And while most of Epstein's dealings are unknown, his Financial Trust Company also had a $121 million investment in DB Zwirn
& Co, which shuttered its doors in 2008, and had a stake in Bear Stearns's failed High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced
Leverage Fund - the collapse of which helped spark the global financial crisis.
Epstein was hit hard by the financial crisis a decade ago, while allegations of sexual abuse of teenage girls caused many associates
- such as Wexner - to sever ties with him.
Bear Stearns -- the bank that had given Mr. Epstein his start -- was still among his investments when the crisis hit.
According to a lawsuit he later filed against the bank, Mr. Epstein controlled about 176,000 shares of Bear Stearns, worth nearly
$18 million, in August 2007.
Mr. Epstein sold 56,000 shares at $101 each that month. He sold the remaining 120,000 shares in March 2008 as the firm was
collapsing -- 20,000 at $35 and the rest at $3.04, losing big. He also lost about $50 million in one of Bear's hedge funds.
By the time Bear Stearns came apart, Mr. Epstein was at the center of his first abuse case. He pleaded guilty to prostitution
charges in 2008, receiving a jail sentence that allowed him to work at home during the day but also required him to register
as a sex offender. -
New York Times
In trying to determine what Epstein is actually worth, Bloomberg notes that " So little is known about Epstein's current business
or clients that the only things that can be valued with any certainty are his properties. The Manhattan mansion is estimated to
be worth at least $ 77 million , according to a federal document submitted in advance of his bail hearing."
He also has properties in New Mexico, Paris and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he has a private island, and a Palm Beach
estate with an assessed value of more than $12 million . He shuttles between them by private jet and has at least 15 cars, including
seven Chevrolet Suburbans, according to federal authorities. -
Bloomberg
Deutsche Bank, meanwhile,
severed ties with Epstein earlier this year - right as federal prosecutors were preparing to charge him with operating a sex-trafficking
ring of underage girls out of his sprawling homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, according to Bloomberg , citing a person familiar
with the situation. It is unknown how much money was involved or how long Epstein had been a client.
3 play_arrow 1
FKTHEGVNMNT , 1 hour ago
That black book is still missing, it is actually a meticulous journal. His butler who died at 60 due to mesothelioma kept
it as insurance, those snippets was just him saying " I got the goods.
Dr.Strangelove , 1 hour ago
The Feds should do what they did with Al Capone, and put him in the slammer on tax evasion charges. I'm sure Epstein has
reported all of his ill gotten billions to the IRS tax man.....NOT.
CheapBastard , 43 minutes ago
I wonder how many human assets, aka, slave girls, he owns? I guess they could value the slave child based on how much revenue
they brought in.
FKTHEGVNMNT , 2 hours ago
The court document alleges: "Epstein also sexually trafficked the then-minor Jane Doe (a name used in US legal proceedings
for people with anonymity), making her available for sex to politically connected and financially powerful people.
"Epstein's purposes in 'lending' Jane Doe (along with other young girls) to such powerful people were to ingratiate himself
with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information.
I wonder if Prince Andrew has deleted him from Facebook
marcel tjoeng , 3 hours ago
Journalist George Webb, watch his Youtube channel, has been following Epstein 'activities' for decades, connecting him
all the way back to the Bush Sr. and Jr. Boys Town White House peadophile ring. Epstein was the 'go to guy' for rat line
trafficking missions, into Kosovo, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, every war zone across the world one can think of, to move dark
ops in and out of, closely linked to DynCorp, which core business is 'aviation security services' and infamous for enabling
and promoting underage transgressions of all of its personnel in Yugoslavia where Bill Clinton has murdered many thousands unbeknownst
to the gullible and rather retarded Americuh public.
Trafficking underage girls from Ukraine back and forth to the USA to pimp out to every diplomat from every country that bought
and sold state secrets, flying underage girls to the Middle East to peddle to oil sheiks, involved with obtaining and exchanging
state secrets of for instance American DARPA, the top secret military research giant, to any 'diplomat' connected to the secretive
network of an 'Illuminati' type deep state collusion, the power brokers of war and sex.
The Irgun of Menachem Begin, the Mossad of Moshe Dayan were infamous for their poolside parties where all the jewish female
'pretty' Israeli agents were used and trained to be honey pot sex objects, with mandatory sex orgies that lasted for days, the
worst of a James Bond type environment but without the glitter.
on the contrary, the secret world of parasites that practice and trade in massive scale rape, war, torture, sex aberrations,
***********, blackmail, extortion, paedophilia, child trafficking, international orphan trafficking, drugs, trafficking underage
sex slaves to be used as dolls and much much worse,
that is who is Jeffrey Epstein is.
The front cover of rape, murder and mayhem international Inc., the go-to-boy of sick Wall Street, Washington DC, the CIA,
NSA, Dyncorp, the power brokers within the DNC and the GOP,
all the usual sick subjects whose code mantra is 'we have unlimited funding', which means the FED, Wall Street, the BIS,
the whole of the Central Bank System that originated in Europe in Venice, and then spread to Amsterdam, the Dutch House of Orange,
London, New York, the British paedophile Empire,
Epstein lives in what is reputed to be the largest private dwelling in New Mexico, on an $18 million, 7,500-acre ranch
which he named Zorro.
Jeffrey Epstein's palatial New Mexico home is relatively near to a top military base. The Epstein home is in Stanley
in New Mexico.
Albuquerque now has a variety of Jewish synagogues and a Chabad house.
Mossad sex party, according to former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky
There were about 25 people in and around the pool and none of them had a stitch of clothing on.
The second-in-command of the Mossad -- today, he is the head -- was there.
Hessner. Various secretaries. It was incredible. Some of the men were not a pretty sight, but most of the girls were
quite impressive. I must say they looked much better than they did in uniform! Most of them were female soldiers assigned
to the office, and were only 18 or 20 years old.
Some of the partiers were in the water playing, some were dancing, others were on blankets to the left and the right
having a fine old time vigorously screwing each other right there...
It was the top brass all right, and they were swapping partners. It really shook me. That's sure not what you expect.
You look at these people as heroes, you look up to them, and then you see them having a sex party by the pool.
-- Ostrovsky, Victor, By Way of Deception, (1990), pg. 96
ReflectoMatic , 2 hours ago
Because what George Webb is saying is so important in expanding the scope of understanding what is going on:
George Webb on youtube
JSBach1 , 3 hours ago
Researcher Wayne Madsen: Trump's Connection to Epstein Needs to Be Exposed
I like Miles' work a lot, but I don't always agree with the results of his studies. There are a great many fabricated events.
Events like those are cover for other very real events. The clowns will fake (or real) blow up townships just to prevent a case
from going to trial or getting news feed, OKC comes to mind. And there's always more than one reason for it behind the BS cover
story. It's tactical. Ep is just another arm of the octopus: Ep is definitely a middle man, a bag man, a front man, an intel
asset (for several agancies no doubt) and he got his cover job as a "financier" along with a client that got rich selling women's
underwear and kids clothes as whitewash. A guy who wrote a paper on how America perceives Israel and how to influence that perception.
That is the definition of magic and it's intel.
Ep definitely uses his own product... He had to be sure he could bounce those children off his clients, for one. Years of
grooming, investing in an asset, categorizing each one. It's an industry, for sure. I don't think the numbers are fabricated.
I don't think his black book was fabricated. Bloomberg was in there, btw, along with Bronfman, and Murdoch. The remoteness of
7500 acres in New Mexico, an Island, the planes, all neon signs that say "SECRET". But, you have to recruit from large population
areas to find suitable victims, er, individuals. I think it's more likely that this is real world and not a manufactured event.
Look: there are theories. I collect theories. Miles is a great researcher and he makes distinctions and observations that
are all very good. Reading him, I throw a lot of theories and music and vomit in the trash after. But when you peel back all
the fake events... the "Kansas"... One day Kansas is gone. Once and for all. What's left is this: there's some very real ****
on the down-low going on that has, until now, been permitted and some people who liked it that way are gonna be on the news
for it. Pelosi's kid tweeted it. What about, say, what might a sheriff of a certain New Mexico county know? Santa Fe is totally
compromised because it's an "Art" hub, for one. The unincorporated location is called "Stanley" which ought to ring bells. Right
by a military base, Kirtland and Los Alamos Demo Army base, god knows what else. It's the perfect M.O. of the fake events Miles
writes about. Miles sees patterns.
There is everything that is not real, and then there is everything that is real. For me it comes down to the Cartesian Brain
in a Vat theory, that, indeed, is "the Matrix" pop culture go-to of today, err, 20 years ago. Red pilled means you can't go
back. Get blue pilled you Get woke and go broke. It doesn't mean that everything is fake, but for all I know 2012 was real and
we live on this timeline now and maybe I am a brain in a vat. So cogito ergo sum. And that is kind of a statement of faith or
belief. It's the deep irony of philosophy. It's the glitch.
Ep is not the psyop. He's the guy you do the psyop to cover up. It's a better question to ask what generation MK Ultra are
we on? What subset? What might Cathy O'Brien have to say about it? Don't flame the victims, or make Miles look stupid because
you think it's all fake. Andrew Breitbart didn't think this **** was fake and he's dead. God bless him.
Theosebes Goodfellow , 3 hours ago
~Those around Wexner were mystified over Wexner's affinity for Epstein.~
Apparently those around Wexner were not familiar with the term "fourteen year-old spinner".
Lumberjack , 3 hours ago
...
Dershowitz was one of several heavy-hitters on Epstein's first legal defense team. Epstein's lead attorney in the Florida
case was Jack Goldberger, who now represents New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. His legal team also included Roy Black,
Jay Lefkowitz, Gerald Lefcourt, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis and Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated Bill
Clinton's sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Asked why he took Epstein as a client, given the unsavory nature of his alleged crimes, Dershowitz stated bluntly, "That's
what I do."
"I take controversial cases and I will continue to do so," he told Sinclair Broadcast Group in a Tuesday interview. "I defended
Jeff Epstein for the same reason John Adams defended the people accused of the Boston Massacre
On that note, Schumer said he'll give the money he received to help children and women.
I'd bet twice that amount it goes to Israeli causes. Not to real victims and the kahkzucker gets another nice write off.
Epstein's intel connections must be brought forth. My guess is when Kraft got busted that there were really big names that
are still being hidden. A long time and VERY TRUSTED ZH member that I know a bit and collaborated a bit with on the Linda Green
fiasco caught on and commented about it including providing solid evidence.
Maybe they should stop blaming Iran and Russia and look at Linda herself.
"... Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?" Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he'd had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He'd cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had "been told" to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ..."
"... "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.) ..."
Epstein's name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander
Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who'd infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea
deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a
hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and
trafficking.
" Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?" Acosta
had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he'd had
just one meeting on the Epstein case. He'd cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's
attorneys because he had "been told" to back off, that Epstein was above his pay
grade.
"I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," he told his
interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and
went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about
this.)
'Belongs to intelligence' makes a lot of sense. The question is to which one. A lot of
people will says "Mossad" but I don't believe that to be the (full) truth.
We do not know why Epstein resurfaced, there was no need to re-open the case unless 'they'
wanted it to be reopened. Thus, there is definitely a deeper political purpose behind this.
As I know the higher ups in both Democrat and Republican Party are in one way or another
involved in this (both Clinton and Trump visited his island and I am sure many more prominent
high ranking US career politicians), this could indeed be equally dangerous for either
political party.
However, I don't think Trump needs convincing with regard to Iran he has been all in on
that from day 1 of his presidency and never hesitated a moment to tear up the JCPOA. Bibi was
right when he said there was never a US president as friendly towards Israel than Donald
Trump. His actions have spoken louder than words. So for this case, we will just have to wait
and see what pieces of information they allow the MSM to publish and we will know who they
are after or what bigger political goal is at play.
Something does not smell right about this.
It's not like Epstein was some obscure issue or that Trump was uninformed about the case.
Who would allow a person with such baggage on the team?
And the issue was raised so no possibility it was over-looked.
Congress (including the now concerned repubs) had their shot at him, where was the
indignation?
Looks like people were told to disregard the issue, until now.
Now like good soldiers they are all barking alert.
Looks like this guy was a plant, an insurance policy maybe.
Now that policy has been triggered - has Trump failed in playing his role?
Trumps ex-pal Epstein linked to intelligence. Makes sense given he has Robert Maxwell's
daughter doing the procuring. His was likely a black mail operation run by the intelligence
agency
Trumps other ex-pal (partner) was also linked to intelligence. Bayrocks Felix Sater. I
imagine some of their business practices could have landed Trump in jail unless like Felix he
cooperated
Could Trump himself be a an intelligent asset? Perhaps under duress through his activities
with Jeffrey and Felix.
If so, indeed the question is if its Israels or the US agency, or is there any difference
now.
I don't pretend to know the answers.
Whats the end game?. Comeys daughter is one of the NY prosecutors.Dershowitz is an Israeli
puppet and was behind getting the sealed files opened. Is Clinton and the Dems the target or
is it meant to pressure Trump to go hard on Iran or risk something coming out? Something
else?
I cant help but wonder why nobody choses to remind us about the case filed against Trump
in 2016, where a woman claimed rape at age 13 at Epstein's apartment. Is wasn't covered much
at the time either. Apparently silently withdrawn. Curious no? Not even the so called Deep
State Media that everyone believes was against Trump. Theydon't seem to want to touch it now
either. Maybe its just BS.
Of course, maybe just more distraction as they continue fleecing the bottom 90%
Billionaire, $6 B, Les Wexner, L Brands, Victoria's Secret.
from Wiki
Wexner had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner's financial
assets. Wexner and Epstein parted when Epstein went to prison.[25] Wexner was believed to be
the primary source of Epstein's wealth. [26]
I am trying to link Wexner with the Bronfman's (Seagrams Liquor Family) via a source other
than the Mega Group (which may not be credible, IDK).Clare Bronfman and NEXIVM.
Looks like Epstein was running a high powered honey trap to ensnare Politicians, Lawyers,
Government employees for the express purpose of promoting the "Greater Israel Project".
@fastfreddy - While I hesitate to engage in the ubiquitous Israel is at the root of all
debacles conjecture, I think you might be onto something there. Sure would be interesting
(now or when whatever shakes out of this) to compare the record on votes of importance to
Israeli interests of any politician who gets implicated or indicted with who doesn't.
Protecting Epstein and his clients is secondary. The main goal is to protect his
billionaire, Jewish, sponsors and whatever state sponsored him. The pleabs cannot know that
their gov is corrupt but the bigger secret that must be kept is who is pulling the strings
and how they are doing it.
Regarding questions on Acosta by Jared at #27, here's a 2017 article showing that the
facts were out about Acosta when the Senate confirmed him: "Did Trump Labor Pick Protect
Trump, Rich Rapists, Tax Cheats, Crooked Bankers? Do We Find Out Wednesday?" March 14, 2017.
http://ow.ly/hk8b309Uerm
Regarding MSM reluctance to mention rape of 12 and 13 year olds by Trump, as several
commentators noted, here's a January 2017 wrap up of those matters with leading to other
links: "Welcome To Waterbury: The city that holds secrets that could bring down Trump," Jan.
9, 2018.
http://www.justice-integrity.org/1445-welcome-to-waterbury-the-city-that-holds-secrets-that-could-bring-down-trump.
My colleague Wayne Madsen and I filed a FOIA action today at the U.S. Justice Department
seeking further records.
Our view is that this is an intelligence / foreign policy operation and it's likely that
Epstein's time has run out, an occupational hazard in that field. Further, Madsen and I have
written separate books years ago documenting that all U.S. presidents after Carter -- but not
yet Trump as proven -- have been covert assets of the CIA or FBI before -- stress that --
they entered politics. That's the way it is, and helps explain a lot of the complaints in
comments above. Trump is in his own category of a corrupt stooge -- that's not necessarily
better.
Can recommend excellent 2008 book "Flat Earth News" by longtime UK journalist Nick Davies
that describes the deeply flawed nature of MSM from his perspective as a Guardian and other
UK journalist, who aptly describes why lies and quarter-truths get printed. That's a longer
story but the gist is what many here are suggesting.
After years of study and many many books I believe the Mossad and CIA are one and the
same. The Mossad is very useful when leaving sovereign footprints is verboten--and vice
versa.
"...'Belongs to intelligence' makes a lot of sense. The question is to which one. A lot
of people will says "Mossad" but I don't believe that to be the (full) truth ..."
At the level that Jeffrey Epstein is operating, he is loyal primarily to himself but
happily takes his reward from whichever intel agency at any time offers him the most or whose
interests might prove the most lucrative for him.
And the interests of American, British, Israeli and other nations' intelligence agencies
are surely so entwined that picking them apart is impossible. One thing for sure though: none
of them serve the interests of the nations they supposedly work for.
The function of the CIA/Mossad is to make sure the agenda and the narrative of the Deep
State gets served. In that case one could truly blame Epstein's actions on individuals, or
groups of individuals who dictate orders to the Mossad/CIA.
Epstein reminds me of the Bill Browder affair. And the statement: To know who are the
rulers not which are the ones you are not permitted to criticize. Or somethinh like that.
If indeed they are after Trump as he failed them on 'Iran', then it makes absolute sense that
Dershowitz and Cernovich had the records unsealed as both are strong, strong Zionists and
supporters of Israel. Getting a judge do the thing they need is just a formality. I agree
with some writer above who asked, why the publicity if pressure can be applied in secret
without the media being involved? But this may be the stated goal to bring Trump either
completely in line now or publicly topple his presidency.
I get why @94 Really? and others would be sceptical at this stage but I know strong
powers in the Zionist/Neo-con deep state want a direct confrontation with Iran for myriad
number of reasons (stop the BRI, deal a blow to Syria and Hizbollah, take out Israel's No 1
enemy etc, shore up the Petrodollar), and Trump was still the most likely candidate to follow
through with this, given his proximity to Zionism. So far he also has dully followed through
with everything imaginable, except for actually attacking Iran.
Interesting development indeed. B. Clinton could be collateral damage, at this stage their
power is overestimated in my opinion.
Okay, An "intelligence op," but which one? The Epstein/Mueller link was made several
months ago. I don't see any irregularities in the court judgement to order the unsealing as
it's been ongoing for almost 2.5 years and involves odd bedfellows. Was Mueller even aware of
the attempt to unseal Epstein's case? So many questions!
Arnon Milchan? He was Israeli. Should he be punished, absolutely. But you know who should
be hung? Robert DeNiro. He knew Arnon Milchan was a spy and kept his mouth shut for decades.
He is a POS of epic proportions.
Insofar as Epstein is concerned. It is all about timing. Mueller is set to testify and
probably has skeletons in his closet with regards to Epstein's case. He is likely being told
implicitly via the Epstein arrest to be on his best behavior by Barr, and Barr at this age
probably can care less that Epstein is being sacrificed so he can make his point,
particularly since Barr is probably the 2nd most powerful person in the USA right now.
Epstein was extremely likely an Israeli asset. The Israelis have through political power
and force convinced many in the US IC that their ship is sailing in the same direction, and
that they should be allowed to serve as the US's dog on a leash, and once in a while be
unleashed to do what the US won't. So while he was an Israeli asset, his resources (that is
compromising material) was often made available to the CIA, and thus Acosta was told that he
is an intelligence asset.
The fireworks will start to fly if and when Epstein realizes he is being hung out to dry
and won't be saved. But like almost every other case involving such rich and powerful people,
don't hold your breath for justice to be served in the US.
What does protecting adolescent teenagers from predatory adults have to do with
puritanism? Am I understanding this correctly that you advocate sex with minors as long as
they have reached biological puberty? Never mind their mental maturity? So sexual relations
involving young women is ok what about sexual relations with young men? This has nothing to
do with a false pretentious morality but with the fact that teenagers have not yet reached
the level of mental maturity that protects them from sexual exploitation that will haunt them
for the rest of their lives, never mind their biological functions and ability to conceive or
sire children. It is really puzzling that I even need to make these elaborations in here!
In many ways this thread is as sickening as the subject it discusses. All sorts of types left
and right competing to show that they have the most insight into the forces behind the anal
rape of a 12 year old girl See Andrew Kreig's excellent piece which does consider the horror
of the acts, rather than just whether or not it plays into the particular vision of 'power
politics' each poster invokes). In no instance does anyone express disgust at the actions of
these low life scum other than for the corruption of the pols such as Acosta.
The glee which so many have displayed jumping into this horror story because it can be
twisted and forced into their own particular theory about "how the world really works" while
totally ignoring that these humans who were abducted at age eleven or twelve & then sold
like cattle, now inhabit the netherworld of 'the great society' living in the fringes of
prosperous cities in a ramshackle 'double wide', reveals a psychic corruption not a million
miles away from that of the rapists.
This story is those young boys & girls, anyone who claims to want to use it to force
the greedy rapists and warmongering grubs to face justice, will not succeed as long as they
waste time speculating who works for who and who is really in control.
Prince Andrew still bludges off taxpayers despite being photographed with his arm around
one of his victims, if you're english & really care about stopping this scum, instead of
speculating on which shadowy 'palace spokesman suggested that the
Daily Mail include the line "There is no suggestion that the duke had any sexual contact
at the house, or knew what was allegedly going on there" you will find out how the at the
time 17 y.o. Virginia Roberts feels about her public destruction now (A child the Mail
described as an erotic masseuse - presumably to reduce the horror a normal human reacts to
that pic whilst ensuring the victim is so humiliated she causes no further problem for "the
royal family's" number one arms salesman). This victim first hung out with the andrew sleaze
when she was 17 at the pimp's Florida hell hole where the age of consent is 18.
Concentrating on the effect on victims while protecting them from further harm will bring
the creeps undone - nothing else will. It was only once people began to see past the priests
claims that "the victims led me on" and considered the huge power imbalance that the catholic
church came unstuck.
Most of all without humanity, there is no difference between any of us and the scum we
criticise.
Now, to be on topic, why the insistence that Epstein finally getting outed for real is
some mysterious intel op? The CIA has been screwing up left, right and center for years, so
is it any surprise that one of their major kompromat operations is getting exposed? Their
foolproof plan to install their tool Clinton in the White House in 2016 failed spectacularly
and blew up in their faces, so tell me again how great they are at running covert ops? The
CIA's own version of James Bond gets snuffed by the CIA's own death squads in Benghazi, but
people still think the CIA has a clue what they're doing? The CIA's operatives in multiple
embassies are being incapacitated by freakin' crickets and people think these clowns
still somehow maintain some vestigial link to reality?
No, this is simply another massive screw-up by the establishment. This blind-sided the
Deep State and so much took them by surprise that they were too late to get it clamped down
in the mass media. If Epstein dies before the real dirt starts getting exposed then it proves
me right and proves wrong all those who worship at the alter of the omnipotent Deep
State.
"... Well, one big happy family they all are. I bet there are reunion photos of them all together somewhere on an island. ..."
"... can't wait until uniCRIME Bush Clan is brought down along with uniCRIME Clinton Clan in their Epstein crime caper...oh wait, its all in the wash. ..."
"... The President of the Mukasey, Acosta, Epstein deal?: George W. Bush. "I only hire the best." MOSSAD CIA handled Donald Trump. ..."
"... Mueller was FBI Director then. Do you think he would have passed up the chance for a super informant like that? Mueller's wet dream to have such information on the Elite and Powerful. Epstein certainly was working for the FBI, at least after his first arrest. ..."
According to the Miami Herald, Acosta secretly negotiated with Jay Lefkowitz, a partner at
Kirland & Ellis. Acosta was previously a partner in that same law firm. Ken Starr is
another Kirkland attorney.
MushroomCloud2020 , 1 hour ago
Well, one big happy family they all are. I bet there are reunion photos of them all
together somewhere on an island.
June 12 1776 , 1 hour ago
can't wait until uniCRIME Bush Clan is brought down along with uniCRIME Clinton Clan in
their Epstein crime caper...oh wait, its all in the wash.
Michael B. Mukasey, Eighty-First Attorney General, 2007-2009 Department of Justice,
appointed by George W. Bush.
In 2005, Alexander Acosta appointed as the U.S. Attorney for Southern District of Florida
by George W. Bush.
In 2008 after cutting Epstein deal, Alexander Acosta was named 100 most influential
individuals in business ethics.
Alexander Acosta nominated by Donald Trump 2017, to fill the position of United States
Secretary of Labor.
Michael Mukasey is Rudy Giuliani's former law partner.
Michael Mukasey also was the judge in the litigation between developer Larry Silverstein
and several insurance companies arising from the destruction of the World Trade Center.
The DOJ & FBI operate under the EXECUTIVE; the "President" is the ultimate boss of
them both, wink wink nod nod.
The President of the Mukasey, Acosta, Epstein deal?: George W. Bush. "I only hire the best." MOSSAD CIA handled Donald Trump.
Vitam Impendere Vero
Thom Paine , 2 hours ago
Mueller was FBI Director then. Do you think he would have passed up the chance for a super informant like that? Mueller's wet dream to have such information on the Elite and Powerful. Epstein certainly was working for the FBI, at least after his first arrest.
Savvy , 2 hours ago
Top politicians, adolescent girls, what could go wrong?
Good grief.
Mouldy , 3 hours ago
Epstein - links to elites
Douchbank collapse
China defaulting
JPM/CIA coke bust
These are mostly deep state operations, is there a war going on we aren't aware of ?
"... As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... "The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country." ..."
"... Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). ..."
"... Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this. They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else. ..."
As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees
prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being
drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top
Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic
public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.
"There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI
and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that
time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.
King (image on the right), a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice
chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on
Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence
Committee.
He asserted:
"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign
– and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this
is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the
investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders It's just wrong."
The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today:
"The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous
thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy
with Russia against his own country."
According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William Barr
, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation led
by John Durham , U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to complete
his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the experience of
waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about now?
So Where is the IG Report on FISA?
That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan , former FBI Director
James Comey , former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe , former Deputy Attorneys General Sally
Yates and Rod Rosenstein , and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA
applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at
last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).
The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether
the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to
surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process.
(Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure
that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)
The Washington Examiner
reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of
potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican
congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The
report continued:
"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ
watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview,
Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz
'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of
drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made
available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much
as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will
have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,'
Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the
August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"
Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may,
in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key
witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz
(image on the left) early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have
come forward at the 11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the
Justice Department and FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was
assigned to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that
led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie
investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or
reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.
Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all
they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former
colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 ,
prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).
It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end,
even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why
are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of
counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, Lisa Page , wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president
"wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that
the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark
about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire
to provide him with "plausible denial."
It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about
the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that
Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort
to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.
Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it"
defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang.
Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that --
or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.
Reining in Devin Nunes
That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated
Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House
Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA, image on the right). On April 5,
2019, in the apparent belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes
wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous
individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be
held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."
On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send
eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged
misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified
material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be
no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to
talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.
Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed
smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new
sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the
criminal referrals?
There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State
functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr
leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded
investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious
liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to
follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and
prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however
there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this.
They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and
CIA.
Trump by now realizes these agencies can make anything up and the Jewish owned and
controlled media will do their bidding. I have to assume that Trump has come to the
conclusion that he wasn't suppose to win and that the NWO wasn't happy with that because he
stands in their way especially on World Trade and Immigration.
The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in
which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against
the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than
figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else.
I believe Trump knows he could be assassinated at any time. Obama the "God King" did his
part for NWO and that's why he gets a King's Ransom for his speeches for reading a
teleprompter and banging on his chest and saying, "I did that." What he is really saying is I
did that for you -- now where's my check!
"... US gives Israel billions each year. Israel gives some of that money to Epstein for a hedge fund front. Epstein buys island, planes, mansions, power and influence. Hires attractive under age girls for sexual acts with elites. Tapes the sexual acts. Sends tapes back to Mossad. Blackmails elites for money and favors. Sends money and favors back to Mossad. Epstein keeps the vig. Elites just **** their pants. Elites suicide rate increases dramatically over the next six months. ..."
"... Yes, the blackmailing would not just be for money but foreign policy actions too. And it isn't just the US, it's the UK too. Hence both suckers are trying to start a war with Iran. ..."
"... CCI has the goods on a third of congress and the whole msm. ..."
"... I am not holding my breath for your prediction xbkrisback. Appointing Comey's daughter as the chief prosecutor tells a sorry tale. And Comey and Mueller are best buds. ..."
"... Epstein will not give up the big names. Bubba took 26 trips to Pedo Island on the Lolita Express to refresh his tan. ..."
"... The power structure runs on pedophilia. And the horror of it is that pedophilia is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the abuse of children. Where is Carlos Danger's laptop with Huma's huge "life insurance" file on it? You know, the one that made grizzled NYPD detectives puke when they opened it. ..."
"... Epstein outdoes Berlusconi ..."
"... Have another look at Tony Podesta's art collection. http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2016/11/26/sick-lets-revisit-the-podesta-penchant-for-pedophilic-cannibalistic-and-satanic-art/#sthash.6jj0GpQo.dpbs ..."
"... I never understood why people claimed Podesta had child abuse links until I read that article. It is enough to make even a hardened Podesta supporter cringe. ..."
"... Coulter's take on this sounds very plausible, because there certainly was evidence gathering by Epstein. ..."
"... By the way, that was the favorite tactic of the old pervert that ran the FBI ... J. Edgar Hoover. He would gather evidence, then have a couple of his agents pay the offender a visit, warning them to be careful, while delivering the clear message that the Director has the goods on you. ..."
"... If Epstein goes to prison (a real prison) for any length of time, that would negate the idea of state sponsorship, would it not? Conversely, if he gets another sweetheart deal, that would confirm it. ..."
I think I figured this scam out. US gives Israel billions each year. Israel gives some of that money to Epstein for a
hedge fund front. Epstein buys island, planes, mansions, power and influence. Hires attractive under age girls for sexual acts
with elites. Tapes the sexual acts. Sends tapes back to Mossad. Blackmails elites for money and favors. Sends money and favors
back to Mossad. Epstein keeps the vig. Elites just **** their pants. Elites suicide rate increases dramatically over the next
six months.
smacker , 1 hour ago
Yes, the blackmailing would not just be for money but foreign policy actions too. And it isn't just the US, it's the UK too.
Hence both suckers are trying to start a war with Iran.
cayman , 46 minutes ago
CCI has the goods on a third of congress and the whole msm. It's why elections haven't mattered in decades. It's why congress
can have a 9% approval rating and yet nothing changes. CIA has so many offshore sources of revenue now, it is sovereign now.
RoyalDraco , 17 minutes ago
I am not holding my breath for your prediction xbkrisback. Appointing Comey's daughter as the chief prosecutor tells a sorry
tale. And Comey and Mueller are best buds.
Epstein will not give up the big names. Bubba took 26 trips to Pedo Island on the
Lolita Express to refresh his tan.
5 years at Club Fed and a list of names no one ever heard of. The power structure runs on
pedophilia. And the horror of it is that pedophilia is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the abuse of children. Where is
Carlos Danger's laptop with Huma's huge "life insurance" file on it? You know, the one that made grizzled NYPD detectives puke
when they opened it.
HideTheWeenie , 1 hour ago
Epstein outdoes Berlusconi ... Takes bunga bunga parties to the next level - and on the road - in the air - island hopping
Coulter is right ... Nobody in financial circles ever bumped into Epstein. Nobody, nobody knows the guy outside of the teenage
***** connection.
I never understood why people claimed Podesta had child abuse links until I read that article. It is enough to make even
a hardened Podesta supporter cringe.
I need some mind bleach after reading that.
RayUSA , 1 hour ago
Obviously, the more powerful people that are involved, the less chance this has of going anywhere.
Coulter's take on this sounds very plausible, because there certainly was evidence gathering by Epstein.
There would be no reason for that unless it was going to be used in the future for black mail.
By the way, that was the favorite tactic of the old pervert that ran the FBI ... J. Edgar Hoover. He would gather evidence,
then have a couple of his agents pay the offender a visit, warning them to be careful, while delivering the clear message that
the Director has the goods on you.
herbivore , 2 hours ago
If Epstein goes to prison (a real prison) for any length of time, that would negate the idea of state sponsorship, would
it not? Conversely, if he gets another sweetheart deal, that would confirm it.
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring
its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics
requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV"
badge?
Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.
Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western
world?
Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse
them..Hmmm?
Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of
politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he
spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in
Iraq?
How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?
"... "Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge. ..."
"... Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information). ..."
"... Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial." ..."
"... It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him. ..."
"... "That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)." ..."
"... It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. ..."
"... The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. ..."
"... The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful. ..."
"... Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would. ..."
"... I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal. ..."
"... Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television. ..."
"... This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused. ..."
"... I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster. ..."
"... Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders". ..."
"... This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more. ..."
"... there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people ..."
"... It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power. ..."
"... So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. ..."
The Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on Trump to
unfetter investigators, all hell may break lose, says Ray McGovern.
A s Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees
prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being
drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top
Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic
public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.
King
told a radio audience: "There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were
carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the
United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The
Hill.
King, a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House
Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and
Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.
He asserted:
"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign
– and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this
is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the
investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie
Sanders It's just wrong."
The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today: "The
media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going
that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia
against his own country."
King: Lashes out.
According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William
Barr, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation
led by John Durham, U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to
complete his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the
experience of waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about
now?
So Where is the IG Report on FISA?
That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James
Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates
and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA
applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at
last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).
The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether
the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to
surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process.
(Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure
that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)
The Washington Examiner
reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of
potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican
congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The
report continued:
"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ
watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview,
Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz
'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of
drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made
available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much
as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will
have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,'
Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the
August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"
Horowitz: Still waiting for his report
Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may,
in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key
witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz
early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the
11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the Justice Department and
FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was assigned to lead a
separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that led to Special
Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie
investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or
reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.
Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all
they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former
colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 ,
prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).
It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end,
even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why
are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of
counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI
Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president
"wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that
the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark
about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire
to provide him with "plausible denial."
It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about
the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that
Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort
to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.
Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it"
defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang.
Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that --
or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.
Reining in Devin Nunes
That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated
Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House
Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA). On April 5, 2019, in the apparent
belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes
wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous
individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be
held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."
On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send
eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged
misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified
material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be
no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to
talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.
Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed
smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new
sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the
criminal referrals?
There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State
functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr
leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded
investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious
liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to
follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and
prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
If you enjoyed this original article, please considermaking a donationto Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Joe T Wallace , July 8, 2019 at 20:24
I'm a great admirer of Ray McGovern's reporting. He exposes much that is never revealed by
the mainstream media. That said, I do have one quibble about this article. In the seventh
paragraph, just below the heading "So Where is the IG Report on FISA?" he writes:
"That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his
report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director
James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally
Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant
FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI
library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)."
My immediate reaction was: Who is Horowitz? It was confusing not to know. Further down in
the article, I learned that Ray was referring to Michael Horowitz, a DOJ watchdog who is
preparing an IG report about FISA abuse, but readers should have been informed who he was
earlier in the article.
John , July 8, 2019 at 17:10
Peter King? Devin Nunes?
At one point the article says little effort was made to cover tracks because of certainty
that HRC would win but later that the FBI et al were planting land mines to either defeat
Trump or blow up his presidency. Seemed contradictory to me.
Perhaps you have the skinny on these machinations, if indeed there were machinations by
one person or group or another for this purpose or that.
But Peter King and Devin Nunes? If either ever was credible, their track record condemns
them to be received, if at all, with extreme skepticism.
Realist , July 8, 2019 at 16:59
It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with
the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. Or will she be expected to
repudiate the Hitlery-run DNC? Where does the money and the ground game originate if the
latter?
The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump
favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly
sell out the middle class in broad daylight. I won't like it, but I can see Trump Derangement
Syndrome pulling out the chestnuts for the Dems, what with all their celebrity spokespeople
constantly running and ranting like their hair is on fire underneath those pussy hats. My
poor gullible sister from Cali embraces that whole ball of wax as revealed truth holier than
the total dry weight of all the Abrahamic scriptures rolled into one big bale for the
recycling center. Kamala Harris seems to be emerging as the new messiah anointed to lead this
country back to Obamian gridlock and more prestidigitation like mandated insurance to ensure
the health of the insurance companies. Again, it will only be the illusion of "free
stuff."
The only way such a scenario won't cause four more years of turmoil for this country
(rinse and repeat in 2024) is if the victor is Gabbard and she ends all the illegal and
unconstitutional wars by edict, telling all the sure-to-be pissing and moaning Deep State
functionaries to pick up their severance pay and go pound sand. Then shut the world-wide
spider web of military bases and bring home the troops while we can still afford the carfare.
That would be "morning in America," and Gabbard would be the most heroic chief exec since
Lincoln and FDR made their marks in the history books, though such fantasies never play out
in the real world. More likely all the criminal evidence of treason remains classified, most
Americans pop the blue pill, the actual rabbit hole continues to grow ever deeper but the
masses are contentedly oblivious to it all, satisfied to blame select scapegoats from
Russia, China and other "malign" countries for our viewing entertainment.
Deniz , July 8, 2019 at 17:50
The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful.
ML , July 8, 2019 at 20:12
You are really something, Realist. I love the way you flourish that pen of yours. Thank
you.
Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:13
Realist, well said, per usual. To add a bit the Dems probably gave Trump the gift of a
lifetime the next election. Wasting three years on Russiagate instead of hammering out a
decent platform for the party was beyond dumb. That reminds me. the Dems's next dumbest idea
choosing Joe Biden as their next candidate. Just like Hillary, he can't beat Trump. The
duopoly is dead, they just don't know it.
As for Tulsi, she's got my vote.
John Earls , July 8, 2019 at 16:55
Looks like Barry Eisler's John Rain (expert in "death by natural causes") will have a lot
of work in front of him if the investigation builds and a whole lot of "material witnesses"
begin to testify.
ricardo2000 , July 8, 2019 at 16:33
I'm supposed to feel sorry for the surveillance of a right-wing creep? OH PLEASE.
No one in government, or the right wing ReThugs, has ever suffered the intrusive, lying,
speculative 'investigations' that social justice, environmental, or human rights activists
have over the past 70 years.
When these buttheads suffer what MLK and Malcolm X have suffered then I might just wipe
away a few tears, after I stop roaring with laughter and get off the floor.
Realist , July 8, 2019 at 17:08
You prefer a race to the bottom of the cesspool?
You never win when you adopt the methods you claim to revile. The opponent who introduced
the tactics you condemn wins if you embrace them as your own. You didn't beat him, you joined
him.
LibertyBonBon , July 8, 2019 at 18:12
Must be nice to think the justice system should revolve around your particular emotions,
rather than equality and objectivity. Safe and easy.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:41
ricardo2000, nothing personal, I get the revulsion to Trump and entourage not to mention a
large portion of the Maga crowd but this right and left thing is really just an illusion, the
people doing the persecuting here regardless of how disgusting Trump is are the same ones
doing the persecuting to a large degree of everyone else from Assange to the Iranians, that
is this government deep state in combination with all of the various American alphabet soup
agencies as well as foreign deep states have cornered the market in State power, hate Trump
but don't confuse this with a good thing.
Thank you, Ray McGovern. You are a good man, Charlie Brown!
Thing is, all of this was predictable from the beginning. Many of us saw it coming.
No one really wanted an incompetent baboon running things – the song about Monkey
and the Engineer comes to mind – so Obama tried to hamstring Trump with this
investigation. I mean, Obama couldn't very well have not completed the transfer of power
because it is the most valuable thing about democracy. There is no ten year bloody hellified
civil war every time the crown changes hands from one inbred to the next.
So Obama did the next best thing on his way out the Oval Office doors, he put Brennan and
the boys on it. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I'm sure. But it backfired because he
couldn't call the dogs off once he was no longer president. Not Brennan, not anyone could
call them off after the snowball really got rolling because the spooks believed their own
story and the media made too much money off selling the mythology:
Only question left to answer now is whether or not Trump the carnival barker can milk his
opportunist Armageddon into a second term of fleecing the rubes.
This is a very serious Constitutional Law issue and MUST be pursued–and it makes no
difference the political party denomination of those breaking the law! The Current
Oligarchy–Deep State–is the adversary of the vast majority of US citizens and
humanity. With Epstein's arrest and the developments McGovern relates, some progress appears
to be happening.
Lydia , July 8, 2019 at 14:51
You summed it up perfectly, Jill.
Pablo Diablo , July 8, 2019 at 14:42
"the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him." says
it all. Trump is a loose cannon. The so called "Deep State" has been "controlling" our
Presidents since at least the Dulles Brothers. Truman even admitted giving them power was a
BIG mistake. Still question the Kennedy Assassination.
In the 70's, the FBI mailed me a box of drugs, which I refused to take from a very
incompetent fake Mail Man, and three minutes later they showed up with a search warrant for
my house that listed all the drugs in the failed mailed box signed by a Federal Judge. So
much for FISA. The bullshit continues. I could reveal more if necessary.
robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 14:32
Sam F. whether you realize it or not you got it pretty much on the nose. Except for
this.
The judiciary has been compromised by the congresses refusal to hold CIA et. al.
accountable for their actions. Why? Those in congress remember what happened to JFK.
The number one reason is because the deep state ensures that if anyone goes after CIA
officials or designees that the persons career and life are ruined. Which is something else
that needs to be investigated. Something that if explored may very well put a stop to CIA's
B.S. of lying about everything and getting away with it.
Currently no deterrent exists. None.
Anytime some one or entity gets close the Deep State ends up with their guy as AG. See the
Bill Barr story.
Barr may get his chance to prove me right and at the same time prove "Lady Justice" has
little to do with the DOJ! I think he is a cowardly blowhard. Justice would be Trump and Barr
going to jail .
Justice in this country for the true scoundrels in government or billionaires is non-
existent at this point in time. Putting Epstein in prison for life is called for and if he is
threatened with that maybe his jaw will loosen up.
Until DOJ can become a deterrent to bad actors in government, all government the country
will be controlled by the Deep State. The SWETS, super wealthy elitists.
@ "Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail ."
Are you suggesting that *any* of their living predecessors don't deserve the same? If so,
which do not and why?
Jay , July 8, 2019 at 14:18
Bif:
I agree something very suspect occurred.
And it's very likely the Obama White House knew that either the NSA or the FBI was tapping
into the communications of some of Trump's campaign team BEFORE Hillary lost in Nov.
2016.
However the xenophobic, lying, terrorist (IRA) supporting, Peter King is not a credible
messenger. (Right, Rep Steve King of Iowa is even worse than King of Long Island.)
Peter Dyer , July 8, 2019 at 14:09
Thanks, Ray.
DH Fabian , July 8, 2019 at 13:59
Actually, that deep split among the masses, and certainly within the Dem voting base, was
achieved in the 1990s -- middle class vs. poor, workers vs. those left jobless, further split
by race. The Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Russia had nothing to do
with the Democrats' 2016 defeat, nor will it be the reason for their 2020 defeat. Democrats
maintain their resistance against acknowledging the consequences of dividing and conquering
their own voting base.
EuGene Miller , July 9, 2019 at 00:24
DH, that's an interesting assessment. However, I doubt that any House or Senate Democrat
sought an advantage by "splitting their base". The elected Dems do not control the narrative.
So, who benefits by splitting the masses into rival factions?
Perhaps the narrative of social and political discourse is defined by the owners, boards,
and foundations that control the main-stream media and pop-culture.
Robert Reich wrote that an oligarchy divides-and-conquers the rest of us. I suspect that
controlling the narrative is not simply a propaganda tool; it is the basis of
divide-and-conquer strategy.
Is it possible that the DOJ, see the Sec. of Labor's problems developing with the Espstein
case, is about to have it's gloriously corrupt underbelly rolled over into the sunlight? (you
must roll the snake over to see its belly)
Please Ray tell me this is where we might be heading or instead will we end up with the
courts truncating investigation because they say it will be best for the country not to have
all this filthy laundry dragged out into the sunlight or someones bull shit sources and
methods might be exposed. The DOJ has become a really bad joke!
I'm hoping you know something I don't because Barr's past history pretty much speaks for
itself I'd say after be made sure he pardoned all of Bush 41 henchmen!
At this point I certainly do not have much faith in the DOJ doing the right thing. What
Acosta did in Florida with Epstein was hardly the right thing to do.
They all need to be locked up.
Eric32 , July 8, 2019 at 13:33
Very little "punishment" will occur, and no deep change cleanup will occur.
The US govt. is controlled by money and blackmail – not "voting" or public outrage.
So many high level people have so much dirt on other high level people that nothing major
will be done.
A series of very big events, including the JFK murder and the 9/11 charade went unexposed and
undealt with – there is no reason to think that this medium size event will wind up
making a big difference.
What will happen is that US "democracy" will continue on its downward course, but maybe
with a better facade.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:59
I personally believe that the empire will crash when it hits maximum overreach it will
also simultaneously go broke at the same time, as the money interests at that point Will
probably move east, this will partially be due to both the feds tendency to over inflate in
order to cover military acquisitions as well as the decline of swift and the ascendancy of
China in the rest. I actually think that this is what some American factions desire, it is
potentially good for all of us if we can regain a republic but it will mean the end of
American hegemony.
Gary Weglarz , July 8, 2019 at 13:22
This is the same "deep state" that assassinated a sitting president, then proceeded to
assassinate the next three most important and influential progressive leaders in the country
all over a five year period. Problem solved. And just when you thought Allen Dulles didn't
know what to do with all those oh so experienced Nazi war criminals he'd recruited to the
CIA.
When Congress investigated the CIA in the mid-1970's (before Congress became completely
"owned" by the deep state) right on cue witnesses began to "commit suicide" just before they
would be scheduled to testify. Problem solved. Hardly a raised eyebrow from the always
complicit MSM through all of this. Expecting anything more than a massive coverup of this
latest deep state corruption and abuse is beyond my abilities to even effectively fantasize
about.
herbert davis , July 8, 2019 at 14:12
Justice in the USA?
John Drake , July 8, 2019 at 13:20
The corporate Democrats strike out again. They run a corrupt, violent(war monger)
candidate, who loses to a buffoon-an election which was hers to lose. Meanwhile trying to
hedge their bets they play sleazeball with the investigative arm's authority in order to
sabotage said buffoon; which as it is revealed gives ammunition and the advantage to their
target. i.e. "They were illegally picking on me"
If Trump is smart-a very long stretch, but some advisor might suggest this- he will expose
all this slime closer to the election for maximum effect. What a distressing thought. All the
more reason to run a progressive Presidential candidate that can disavow the DNC clowns and
their corruption.
geeyp , July 8, 2019 at 12:37
It's past time for the Deep State to come up from the deep state of hell in which they
reside. At least to purgatory for some fresh air and a wee ray of light. I couldn't let the
Schumer warning keep me from giving the go ahead on this. If my coconut is shattered, someone
somewhere (not our current media) would have a clue as to what happened to me. Sic 'em,
President Trump and A.G. and Devin Nunes!
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 12:14
The US needs to solve the underlying problem of corruption of secret agencies and
judiciary, otherwise the political wrongdoing of one faction will only be matched by that of
its opponents, regardless of a few prosecutions. I know from experience the extreme
corruption of the Repubs, and little doubt that the Dems do such things at least when
desperate.
The solution includes:
1. All secrets meaningfully shared among multiparty committees;
2. All politicians and top officials monitored for corrupt influence;
3. Entire federal judiciary fired, replaced, and monitored like the politicians; and
4. Amendments to protect elections and mass media from control by money power.
Until then all government acts are tribal gangsterism and little more.
Guy , July 8, 2019 at 13:50
You forgot about dual citizenship members of the senate and congress . Elected as a
representative for the country of the US should mean just that and not another country . And
while we are at it , major reform on monetary contributions to candidates running for
re-election . There is something terribly wrong with needing millions if not billions of
dollars to run the electoral races.There is much more that needs to be done but this would be
a good start .
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:32
Yes, the proposed Amendments would restrict funding of mass media and elections to
registered individual contributions (some prefer government funding) limited to the average
day's pay annually (for example), with full reporting by candidates and all intermediaries.
We all can see the destruction of democracy that was caused by economic power controlling
elections, mass media, the judiciary, etc.
But of course we cannot get those amendments because those tools of democracy now belong
to the rich, etc. History suggests that we are in for generations of severe decline before
the people are hurting enough to turn off the tube and do something, and generations more
before they can re-establish democracy.
Ray McGovern writes:"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite
tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious
embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge"
On the matter of government reform classification there is a great need of public
discussion and radical reform. Why? Because the government is playing with an essential
right, the right to know. All the red herrings needed to be thrown in the trash and the
burden placed on the classifiers to justify why the public does not have a right to know.
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:24
Yes, the facts and their significance (especially about false flags and scandals) need to
be publicly debated, as well as policy goals, and the policies derived from facts and goals.
We have far too many government secrets to sustain a democracy.
I suggest limiting secrets to ongoing investigations (with a time limit), defensive
military plans and operations (not alleged provocations or aggressive war schemes), and
personal IDs of those at risk. Beyond that secrets disguise tyranny.
Ida G Millman , July 8, 2019 at 16:02
Another path towards a solution to government corruption could be term limits for all
federal representatives. Limiting the number of terms would curtail the opportunities for
forming the uninterrupted years of long coalitions between public servants and government
officials that result in the abuses of power that have damaged the interests of ordinary less
wealthy citizens, in favor of corporate and military interests.
In the matter of the original intentions of the men who wrote our founding documents, we
should consider one of the enormous differences that technology has made between us: that our
representatives can travel between DC and their homes with enough ease that they can continue
reasonably, or nearly reasonably, satisfactory family lives – something that could not
be done in the 18th century. The forefathers did not foresee that being a member of
government would become a career for a lifetime. They assumed, I believe, that members of
government would always be citizens who would give our country a few years of their lives and
then return to private life to share their experience and knowledge with their neighbors.
Such a change would not magically reform government corruption. There will always be those
who will find a way – but it could slow things down and it would certainly engage an
increasing number of citizens who would participate in governing, as well as the circles of
people surrounding each of them whose interest in and understanding of government would
increase because everyone would know more of their representatives. Got that, kids?
L&B&L
Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:37
Term limits are useful and we should enact more. There seems to be a sufficient supply of
puppets for the rich/WallSt/Mic/zionists to ensure that all new candidates represent only
those interests, unless we go further and control funding of mass media and elections,
monitoring of politicians and judges for life, etc.
Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:28
Ida,
Term limits wouldn't be necessary if money were out of elections and all elections were
publicly funded. Next, a law should be passed to prevent retired congress people from
lobbying for any private company of any kind. Then people wouldn't have to spend all their
time in congress lining up money for the next election, nor would they owe favors to
anyone.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:19
Sam F, all of those goals seem very nice but it would probably be better if we just
dissolved back into 50 states save for an interstate system and a very small navy for common
defense, maybe four nuclear submarines total, the American people will be best off without a
government completely working it out for themselves, if some of them work it out in
completely different ways without hurting each other so be it. Besides even a libertarians
would have to acknowledge democracy best works for smaller populations. We may never be able
to curb the will to power of evil men but we can diminish their abilities to fleece the
public if we are not subject to them.
Jay , July 8, 2019 at 11:42
Peter King?
Really now.
Not a credible source, no matter how invention filled Russia-gate is. And no matter how
clear it is that in 2016 the FBI was poking around campaign Trump and likely telling the
White House what it found.
Bif Webster , July 8, 2019 at 13:28
I agree that King isn't the best of messengers, but we can also go to others who are not
right-wing to see something fishy went on.
Those text messages convinced me something was going on. And that was before all the other
stuff came to light.
I think this will be about who has more dirt on the other side you know, leverage?
Jeff Harrison , July 8, 2019 at 11:41
Thank you, Ray. Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded
illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who
have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben
Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A
reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene
republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a
democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret
service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't
hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall
Street the way that a new Doge would.
I don't see that as necessarily much of a plus.
Steven Berge , July 8, 2019 at 11:40
I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing
happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even
before they made it legal.
Drew Hunkins , July 8, 2019 at 11:32
Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for
running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much
of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by
way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells
for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television.
Jill , July 8, 2019 at 11:15
This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows
into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has
sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would
result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that,
then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the
deaths he has caused.
I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally
supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as
a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass
surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is
lawless. It is a disaster.
Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters
doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats
meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior,
and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc.
recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders".
People won't speak to one another because of this division, all based on lies. Democrats
want Assange put to death because he exposed truthful information about Clinton. Neighbor has
turned against neighbor over this. We have stopped talking and stopped thinking about whether
claims make sense or have evidence behind them. Political parties have become cults with cult
leaders. Meanwhile, many who think it was wrong to use surveillance against Trump, accept
mass surveillance against everyone else, including themselves.
This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our
populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil
men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and
pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader
is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more.
I cannot believe what Russiagate has done to our own people. I am terrified at the wars it
has/may yet cause and the cruelty against others, both foreign and domestic, which it has
wrought.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:51
What else would you call it, there have always been nefarious agents in one government or
another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however
they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call
something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct
interest of the American people, I'm not trying to be you over the head with this but Mr.
McGovern was once upon a Time swimming in the same waters and he knows what he is talking
about. The deep state maybe several different factions but all of it at least so far is
fairly I'm Accountable, this thing must be named.
AnneR , July 8, 2019 at 14:18
First the Disclaimer: I'm not a supporter of either side of the one party two headed
monster political machine, not of either HRC or DT, both, and their "parties," making me want
to puke.
I am curious about the following: "He [DT] has sent people to die knowing full well that
his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as
our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep
state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused."
While I have no doubt that DT has been responsible for civilian deaths (I am far less
concerned about military deaths – join the military and you cannot expect not to have
to chance it, particularly in a warmongering nation state; if the recruit doesn't recognize
this reality, then they need to do some reading), *most* such deaths in those countries we
(the US and its vassal states and proxies) have been happily bombing, shelling, destroying
one way or another, even since the late 1980s (not therefore including the appalling and
illegal warring on Vietnam et al) are down, not to DT, but rather to presidents: BC, GHB,
GWB, BO. Pretty evenly divided betwixt the two heads, wouldn't you say?
That's not to excuse DT (and I wouldn't excuse HRC either – think Libya; as bad as
MA, if with different forms of warfare; but then they're buddies, like attracting like).
We – the US – need to stop killing other peoples (let's cry for the war-making
profiteers), stop destroying other countries (and for our corporate-capitalists who plunder
them); need to mind our own "shop" and business. And stop pretending that we're such a
wonderful, white-hatted, "good" nation.
Jill , July 8, 2019 at 15:15
AnneR,
We have had war criminal presidents from the legacy parties, period. Barr is a party to
war crimes so I share other's doubts that he will do anything about actual justice. He may be
in on the current winning side of the IC and they may be purging some enemies at this time.
That is the only thing I see Barr being involved in.
Speaking as someone who has done counter-recruitment in schools, I will just give you my
experience. Students are tracked from grade school. A file is kept on them with over a
thousand data points. These files are taken by recruiters and used to "pitch" the military to
young people. I don't know if you were sophisticated at 16. I was a little bit but not much.
So here's an example–they told one young woman who had a single mother that if she went
in the military she would not be a burden on her mother any longer. They understood the
family had few resources and they played on this young woman's "guilt" over being a financial
"drain" on her mother. No, recruiters do not tell the truth to those they meet. They lie and
they lie very well because they have excellent information to help them tell the correct
lies. That girl is dead and I mourn her death.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:05
AnneR, you have so much anger, I understand, it is terrible what our nation has done and
is continuing to do, it has gone on so long that many of the people currently perpetrating
the crimes against foreign populations are themselves of descendents of peoples the US has
victimized. It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize
societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have
sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel
seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your
interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just
it will to power.
Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:09
Jill that was an incredibly cogent description of the mess we are currently in,
congratulations on such clarity, peace out.
David Otness , July 9, 2019 at 00:18
With you on all that you state, Jill. It's really exposed the U.S. population for what we
unfortunately are, if not what we've become. So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold
War. A stark education has just played out to this point. I wonder how many have learned anything at all from it?
"... Let us examine U.S. interventionism past more closely. I know of four clear international instances where the United States intervened under dubious circumstances, initiating war. ..."
In the history of the United States and its history of interventionism, the recent attacks
on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman seem to be foreboding and ominous signs of what may come --
an inevitable war with the Islamic Republic of Iran? To many who are watching the region
closely, it is still unclear if Iran is behind such attacks. Moreover, and, thankfully,
President Donald J. Trump backed away from bombing Iran after the Iranians allegedly and
recently shot down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz.
Even so, the bellicose rhetoric between President Trump (threatening Iran's "obliteration")
and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (calling Trump "mentally retarded") have continued.
Watching from the sidelines, everyone hopes diplomacy will prevail.
Let us examine U.S. interventionism past more closely. I know of four clear international
instances where the United States intervened under dubious circumstances, initiating war.
The first happened just before the beginning of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
President James K. Polk sent American troops to the Rio Grande River under the command of
Zachary Taylor. The Mexicans had believed that the border had been at the Nueces River, not the
Rio Grande, the Nueces being significantly north of the Rio Grande. This move was provocative
and incited Mexican forces to attack the U.S. Army at its fortifications on the Rio Grande in
1846. As the attacks on U.S. soldiers were reported by Taylor to Polk, the U.S. Congress
promptly declared war on Mexico.
Yet, in understanding these incidents, we have to likewise understand the motivations of the
historical actors. Polk strongly believed in the Manifest Destiny of the United States to
conquer the territories west of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, Polk
initially sent U.S. Congressman John Slidell as U.S. envoy to Mexico to negotiate buying the
territories of California and New Mexico from Mexico for about $30 million. (The California and
New Mexico territories included present-day California and New Mexico plus Arizona, Utah,
Nevada, and parts of Colorado.) But Mexican legislators balked at the offer and Mexican
newspapers printed the offer as an insult to Mexican pride. The rejected buy simply became war
of territorial conquest.
At the end of the 19thcentury was the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States
made its debut as an imperialistic world power, seeking its own colonies despite rejecting
empire with the American Revolution. Congress declared war on Spain after the U.S.S. Maine was
blown up in Havana Harbor. With no evidence, the U.S. blamed Spain and the war was on -- not
just for Cuba, but for other Spanish colonies, and the U.S. thus acquired Guam, the
Philippines, and Puerto Rico.
However, in all likelihood, the ship exploded because of an accident, possibly, a spark from
the furnace setting off munitions nearby. Or, a mine in Havana Harbor planted by Cuban rebels
detonated the hull of the vessel. In total, 261 sailors lost their lives from the sinking of
the U.S.S. Maine. Yet, the causes of the war had more to do with the sensationalism of
newspapers at the time owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, called "Yellow
Journalism" -- what we call today, "fake news." Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers were publishing
stories about Spanish atrocities in Cuba. Moreover, there was the supposed "de Lôme
letter" allegedly a critical letter of President William McKinley, written by the Spanish
Foreign Minister Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. All of these events "justified" war with
Spain.
There was also the "Gulf of Tonkin incident" which began and escalated the Vietnam War under
President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The incident was allegedly a series of attacks by Northern
Vietnamese naval torpedo vessels on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, especially involving
a destroyer, the U.S.S. Maddox. These skirmishes were said to have occurred on August 2 and
August 4, 1964, with the second clash now believed to be entirely imaginary. The falsity of the
Gulf of Tonkin incidents was allegedly substantiated by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara and the former Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp. The
Gulf of Tonkin skirmishes with the U.S. Navy and the Northern Vietnamese Navy led to the U.S.
Congress passing the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." It gave President Johnson: " all necessary
measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent
further aggression."
And lastly, there is the Iraq War (2003-2011). The United States invaded Iraq on the false
pretext that Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, was actively developing a program for obtaining
alleged WMDs. The United Nations Security Council had earlier passed two resolutions (678 and
687) which allowed the United States to force Iraq into complying with its international
agreements, concerning biochemical and nuclear disarmament; both the UN head of inspections and
the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iraq had no more weapons of
mass destruction, yet the U.S. invaded. What is more, the intelligence community tried linking
the Hussein government with Al-Qaeda, patently false. As a result of the George W. Bush
Administration's War in Iraq, there were nearly 4,500 U.S. soldier deaths and almost 32,000
U.S. soldiers wounded in action.
So, this brings us to today with our military escalation with Iran under the Donald J. Trump
Administration. Currently, we have deployed an aircraft carrier to the Arabian Sea as well as
sending a Patriot missile defense system and four B-52 bombers to the region along with
ordering the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with the exception of essential
personnel. According to Middle East expert Ilan Goldenberg Iran does not want a war with the
United States. The question is whether we are forcing the situation, or unnecessarily
exaggerating the threats from Iran. Certainly, it may depend upon how much National Security
Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo advocate for war. As Goldenberg states:
"The bad news is that a war could still happen. Even if neither side wants to fight,
miscalculation, missed signals, and the logic of escalation could conspire to turn even a minor
clash into a regional conflagration -- with devastating effects for Iran, the United States,
and the Middle East."
My worry, along with many other observers, is that such a conflict may snowball into a worse
conflagration bringing in other international actors, maybe Russia. Neither the attack on these
oil tankers nor the alleged shoot-down of an unmanned US drone so far has not led to any Gulf
of Tonkin resolution. However, if another incident occurred causing Americans casualties and
Iran was the claimed culprit, then the situation may get out of control.
For now, we can only hope from a distance that cooler heads in Washington, D.C. will
prevail. We can certainly listen to diplomatic efforts of the likes of Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe that Iran does not want war with the United States and its coalition partners. We
can examine the U.S. history of interventionism and learn from our past military mistakes.
If you are concerned about this pattern of provoking war by making claims that cannot be
proven, please participate in your democracy:
Went on Kunstler's website with the tasteless name and read comment about Hannity
screaming to bomb Iran. And if Mr. Kunstler's facts are correct I imagine the Republicans
will be saving Mueller's answers for the next election. Whatever Mr. Kunstler has to say, he
says it well. What a mess. The way the bad guys have dug in and rigged the election process
and the "News" business, it is difficult to imagine anything can change.
The controls of our society have become so efficient it is tempting to say what the hell
and see if there is a good old film or an meaningful sporting event and let it go at
that.
In saying that, it brings to mind the other CN article about anti-war sentiment and
organizing against war and the war machine that has gone missing makes the point very well. I
do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests were
simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be.
Eddie S , July 4, 2019 at 10:01
"I do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests
were simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be."
Yes, I know that the whole Iraq War-crime episode was an extremely disheartening episode
to myself and millions of others who had marched in protest. It was horrible enough when the
neo-cons were able to blatantly orchestrate an illegal invasion (with the obeisance of the
long-cowed Democrats), but the RE-election of 'W' -- a year after the non-existence of the
WMDs was proven by our OWN invading military -- was in a political sense worse because it
showed that the majority of the US public was indifferent to illegal US invasions of other
countries, so there would be little resistance in the future to these 'wars'.
It was only when the media was portraying the deaths & bad injuries to US soldiers
occupying Iraq that a modest amount of public sentiment turned against the whole sordid
episode.
So the tacit message was pretty clear to powers that be -- - as long as US troops aren't
hurt, go-ahead and bomb-away those foreign men, women, and even children getting killed by
them don't matter, especially if our military leaders offer-up oh-so-sincere apologies and
state that 'these were unavoidable collateral civilian casualties because we only perform
surgical strikes on terrorists' (and said in a most serious, gravitas-laden tone, so you KNOW
they're telling the truth).
Windup , July 4, 2019 at 16:09
George wasn't 'elected' in the first place, let alone 're-elected'. I don't know if that
makes you feel better. Maybe it does- at least about the American public (at that point in
time anyway).
But it was certainly a forerunner to how we 'elect' our officials, which at this point is
more blatantly fraudulent. At least to those of us not reading/watching msm.
"... The US today is a global empire. Our country's military, ballooning to some 2.1 million in uniform at a time that there is really no significant war underway. US military spending, greater in constant dollars than at any time since WWII, represents 34% of all global military spending, and the US military budget, depending on how one counts it, is larger than the next largest eight-to-ten countries' military budgets combined. ..."
"... And remember -- US empire and militarism is and has always been supported by both political parties. ..."
"... only 32% of Americans say they are "proud" (forget "extremely proud"!) of America's vaunted political system. In a close second for popular disgust, only 37% said they are "proud" of the US health care system. ..."
"... In my view, my country has become the world's leading "rogue" nation, dismissive of all international laws and codes of conduct, actively attacking many countries on its own authority, without the support of UN Security Council resolutions, exonerating war crimes committed by its soldiers, and committed to the first use of nuclear weapons, both as a first strike against major power rivals like Russia and China, and against non-nuclear nations like Iran, and equally dismissive of all efforts, large and small, to respond to the crisis of catastrophic global heating. ..."
The US today is a global empire. Our country's military, ballooning to some 2.1 million
in uniform at a time that there is really no significant war underway. US military spending,
greater in constant dollars than at any time since WWII, represents 34% of all global military
spending, and the US military budget, depending on how one counts it, is larger than the next
largest eight-to-ten countries' military budgets combined.
To show how ridiculously huge the US military is, consider that at $220 billion for fiscal
year 2020, the US budget for Veterans Affairs alone (that's the agency that provides assistance
of all kinds, including medical, to those who served in the military, not counting career
soldiers who receive a pension that is counted separately) this one military budget line item
is larger than the entire military budget of China, and is more than three times as large as
the entire military budget of Russia, considered by many to be our primary "adversary"!
And remember -- US empire and militarism is and has always been supported by both
political parties.
... ... ...
I read that a recent Gallup Organization poll shows a significant drop in the percentage of
US Americans who are "extremely proud" of their country. True, 45% still say they are "proud"
of America, but normally that is how many say they are "extremely proud" to be Americans.
That's a significant fall-off. Even among normally super-patriotic Republicans the percentage
of those saying they are "extremely proud" this July 4 of this country was down to 76%, a 10%
drop from 2003, and close to the 68% low point reached at one point during the Obama
administration.
The main cause of the loss of patriotic ardor appears to be dismay or disgust with the US
political system. According to the poll, only 32% of Americans say they are "proud" (forget
"extremely proud"!) of America's vaunted political system. In a close second for popular
disgust, only 37% said they are "proud" of the US health care system.
So I guess I'm in pretty good company. I won't be oohing and aaahing at the local fireworks
display this year. It's basically a glorification of US war-making anyhow, and there's nothing
at all to be proud of in that regard, particularly with the US in the midst of a $1.5-trillion
upgrade of its nuclear arsenal, threatening war with Iran, pulling out of a Reagan-era treaty
banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and embarking in a new arms race both in space and
in virtually unstoppable hypersonic cruise missiles.
In my view, my country has become the world's leading "rogue" nation, dismissive of all
international laws and codes of conduct, actively attacking many countries on its own
authority, without the support of UN Security Council resolutions, exonerating war crimes
committed by its soldiers, and committed to the first use of nuclear weapons, both as a first
strike against major power rivals like Russia and China, and against non-nuclear nations like
Iran, and equally dismissive of all efforts, large and small, to respond to the crisis of
catastrophic global heating. [
At home, the US legal system has become a supine supporter of
virtually unlimited executive power, of unchecked police power, and of repressive actions
against the supposedly constitutionally protected free press.
It's tempting to hope that the decline noted by Gallup in the percent of Americans
expressing "extreme pride" and even of "pride" in the US, but support for the US among the
country's citizens still remains shamefully high in the face of all these negatives.
Anyhow, count me among those who won't be celebrating today's July 4 national
holiday.
"... "Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization." ..."
"... Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017 Department of Defense poll that found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z. ..."
"... These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right alliance between two influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months, they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. ..."
"... In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill ultimately passed the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be vetoed by President Trump. That such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy." ..."
"... And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come. ..."
"... In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this." ..."
"... It is little recognized how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC while also taking heavy casualties. ..."
"... We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South. ..."
"... Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. ..."
"... President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions. ..."
Peace activism is rising, but that isn't translating into huge street demonstrations, writes Allegra Harpootlian.
W hen Donald Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017, Americans took to the streets all across the country to protest their
instantly endangered rights. Conspicuously absent from the newfound civic engagement, despite more than a decade and a half of this
country's fruitless, destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, was antiwar sentiment, much less an actual
movement.
Those like me working against America's seemingly
endless
wars wondered why the subject merited so little discussion, attention, or protest. Was it because the still-spreading war on
terror remained shrouded in government secrecy? Was the lack of media coverage about what America was doing overseas to blame? Or
was it simply that most Americans didn't care about what was happening past the water's edge? If you had asked me two years ago,
I would have chosen "all of the above." Now, I'm not so sure.
After the enormous demonstrations
against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the antiwar movement disappeared almost as suddenly as it began, with some even openly
declaring it dead. Critics
noted the long-term absence of significant protests against those wars, a lack of political will in Congress to deal with them,
and ultimately,
apathy on matters of war and peace when compared to issues like health care, gun control, or recently even
climate
change .
The pessimists have been right to point out that none of the plethora of marches on Washington since Donald Trump was elected
have had even a secondary focus on America's fruitless wars. They're certainly right to question why Congress, with the constitutional
duty to declare war, has until recently allowed both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to wage war as they wished without
even consulting them. They're right to feel nervous when a national
poll shows that more Americans think we're fighting a war in Iran (we're not) than a war in Somalia (
we are ).
But here's what I've been wondering recently: What if there's an antiwar movement growing right under our noses and we just haven't
noticed? What if we don't see it, in part, because it doesn't look like any antiwar movement we've even imagined?
If a movement is only a movement when people fill the streets, then maybe the critics are right. It might also be fair to say,
however, that protest marches do not always a movement make. Movements are
defined by their ability to challenge the status
quo and, right now, that's what might be beginning to happen when it comes to America's wars.
What if it's Parkland students
condemning American imperialism or groups fighting the
Muslim Ban that are
also fighting the war on terror? It's veterans not only trying to take on the wars they fought in, but putting themselves on
the front lines of the
gun control
,
climate change , and police brutality debates. It's
Congress
passing the first War Powers Resolution in almost 50 years. It's Democratic presidential candidates
signing a pledge to end America's endless wars.
For the last decade and a half, Americans -- and their elected representatives -- looked at our endless wars and essentially
shrugged. In 2019, however, an antiwar movement seems to be brewing. It just doesn't look like the ones that some remember from
the Vietnam era and others from the pre-invasion-of-Iraq moment. Instead, it's a movement that's being woven into just about every
other issue that Americans are fighting for right now -- which is exactly why it might actually work.
An estimated 100,000 people protested the war in Iraq in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15, 2007 (Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia
Commons)
A Veteran's Antiwar Movement in the Making?
During the Vietnam War of the 1960s
and early 1970s, protests began with religious groups and peace organizations morally opposed to war. As that conflict intensified,
however, students began to join the movement, then civil rights leaders such as
Martin Luther King, Jr. got involved,
then war veterans who had witnessed the horror firsthand stepped in -- until, with a seemingly constant storm of protest in the
streets, Washington eventually withdrew from Indochina.
You might look at the lack of public outrage now, or perhaps the
exhaustion of having been outraged
and nothing changing, and think an antiwar movement doesn't exist. Certainly, there's nothing like the active one that fought against
America's involvement in Vietnam for so long and so persistently. Yet it's important to notice that, among some of the very same
groups (like veterans, students, and even politicians) that fought against that war, a healthy
skepticism about America's 21st century wars, the Pentagon, the military industrial complex, and even the very idea of American
exceptionalism is finally on the rise -- or so the
polls tell us.
"Arlington West of Santa Monica," a project of Veterans for Peace, puts reminders of the costs of war on the beach in Santa Monica,
California. (Lorie Shaull via Flickr)
Right after the midterms last year, an organization named Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness
reported mournfully that younger Americans were "turning on the country and forgetting its ideals," with nearly half believing
that this country isn't "great" and many eyeing the U.S. flag as "a sign of intolerance and hatred." With millennials and Generation
Z rapidly becoming the
largest voting bloc in America for the next 20 years, their priorities are taking center stage. When it comes to foreign policy
and war, as it happens, they're quite different from the generations that preceded them. According to the
Chicago Council of Global Affairs ,
"Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a
goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and
to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across
the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more
likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization."
Although marches are the most public way to protest, another striking but understated way is simply not to engage with the systems
one doesn't agree with. For instance, the vast majority of today's teenagers aren't at all interested in joining the all-volunteer
military. Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army
fell thousands of troops short
of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017
Department of Defense poll that
found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has
the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on
creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z.
In addition, we're finally seeing what happens when soldiers from America's post-9/11 wars come home infused with a sense of
hopelessness in relation to those conflicts. These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning
disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress
against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right
alliance between two
influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically
at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together
to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a
pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months,
they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Ilhan Omar.
And this may just be the tip of a growing antiwar iceberg. A misconception about movement-building is that everyone is there
for the same reason, however broadly defined. That's often not the case and sometimes it's possible that you're in a movement and
don't even know it. If, for instance, I asked a room full of climate-change activists whether they also considered themselves part
of an antiwar movement, I can imagine the denials I'd get. And yet, whether they know it or not, sooner or later fighting climate
change will mean taking on the Pentagon's global footprint, too.
Think about it: not only is the U.S. military the world's
largest
institutional consumer of fossil fuels but, according to a
new report from Brown University's Costs of War Project, between 2001 and 2017, it released more than 1.2 billion metric tons
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (400 million of which were related to the war on terror). That's equivalent to the emissions
of 257 million passenger cars, more than double the number currently on the road in the U.S.
A Growing Antiwar Movement in Congress
One way to sense the growth of antiwar sentiment in this country is to look not at the empty streets or even at veterans organizations
or recruitment polls, but at Congress. After all, one
indicator of a successful movement, however
incipient, is its power to influence and change those making the decisions in Washington. Since Donald Trump was elected, the most
visible evidence of growing antiwar sentiment is the way America's congressional policymakers have increasingly become engaged with
issues of war and peace. Politicians, after all, tend to follow the voters and, right now, growing numbers of them seem to be following
rising antiwar sentiment back home into an expanding set of debates about war and peace in the age of Trump.
In campaign season 2016, in an op-ed in The Washington Post , political scientist Elizabeth Saunders wondered whether foreign policy would play a significant role
in the presidential election. "Not likely," she concluded. "Voters do not pay much attention to foreign policy." And at the time,
she was on to something. For instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders, then competing for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary
Clinton, didn't
even prepare stock answers to basic national security questions, choosing instead, if asked at all, to quickly pivot back to
more familiar topics. In a debate with Clinton, for instance, he was asked whether he would keep troops in Afghanistan to deal with
the growing success of the Taliban. In his answer, he skipped Afghanistan entirely, while warning only vaguely against a "quagmire"
in Iraq and Syria.
Heading for 2020, Sanders is once again competing for the nomination, but instead of shying away from foreign policy, starting
in 2017, he became the face of what could be a
new American
way of thinking when it comes to how we see our role in the world.
In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk
introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the
brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill
ultimately passed
the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be
vetoed by President Trump. That
such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable
in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at
Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy."
Nor, strikingly enough, is Sanders the only Democratic presidential candidate now running on what is essentially an antiwar platform.
One of the main aspects of Elizabeth
Warren's foreign policy plan, for instance, is to "seriously review the country's military commitments overseas, and that includes
bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq." Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel have
joined Sanders and Warren in signing a pledge to end America's forever wars if elected.
Beto O'Rourke has called for the repeal
of Congress's 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that presidents have cited ever since whenever they've sent American forces
into battle. Marianne Williamson , one of the
many (unlikely) Democratic candidates seeking the nomination, has even proposed a plan to transform America's "wartime economy into
a peace-time economy, repurposing the tremendous talents and infrastructure of [America's] military industrial complex to the work
of promoting life instead of death."
And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives,
and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their
skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound
to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come.
Get on Board or Get Out of the Way
When trying to create a movement, there are three likely
outcomes : you will
be accepted by the establishment, or rejected for your efforts, or the establishment will be replaced, in part or in whole, by those
who agree with you. That last point is exactly what we've been seeing, at least among Democrats, in the Trump years. While 2020
Democratic candidates for president, some of whom have been in the political arena for decades, are gradually hopping on the end-the-endless-wars
bandwagon, the real antiwar momentum in Washington has begun to come from new members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(AOC) and Ilhan Omar who are unwilling to accept business as usual when it comes to either the Pentagon or the country's forever
wars. In doing so, moreover, they are responding to what their constituents actually want.
As far back as 2014, when a
University of Texas-Austin Energy Poll asked people where the U.S. government should spend their tax dollars, only 7 percent
of respondents under 35 said it should go toward military and defense spending. Instead, in a "pretty significant political shift"
at the time, they overwhelmingly opted for their tax dollars to go toward job creation and education. Such a trend has only become
more apparent as those
calling
for free public college, Medicare-for-all, or a Green New Deal have come to
realize that they could pay for such ideas if America would stop pouring
trillions of dollars into wars that never should have been launched.
The new members of the House of Representatives, in particular, part of the youngest, most diverse crew
to date , have begun to replace the old guard and are increasingly signalling their readiness to throw out policies that don't
work for the American people, especially those reinforcing the American war machine. They understand that by ending the wars and
beginning to scale back the military-industrial complex, this country could once again have the resources it needs to fix so many
other problems.
In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We
have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we
continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something
equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this."
A few days before that, at a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, Ocasio-Cortez
confronted executives from military contractor TransDigm about the way they were price-gouging the American taxpayer by selling
a $32 "non-vehicular clutch disc" to the Department of Defense for $1,443 per disc. "A pair of jeans can cost $32; imagine paying
over $1,000 for that," she said. "Are you aware of how many doses of insulin we could get for that margin? I could've gotten over
1,500 people insulin for the cost of the margin of your price gouging for these vehicular discs alone."
And while such ridiculous waste
isn't news to those of us who follow Pentagon spending closely, this was undoubtedly something many of her millions of supporters
hadn't thought about before. After the hearing,
Teen Vogue
created a list of the "5 most ridiculous things the United States military has spent money on," comedian
Sarah Silverman tweeted out the AOC
hearing clip to her 12.6 million followers, Will and Grace actress
Debra Messing publicly expressed her gratitude
to AOC, and according to Crowdtangle, a social media analytics tool, the
NowThis clip of her in that congressional
hearing garnered more than 20 million impressions.
Ocasio-Cortez calling out costs charged by military contractor TransDigm. (YouTube)
Not only are members of Congress beginning to call attention to such undercovered issues, but perhaps they're even starting to
accomplish something. Just two weeks after that contentious hearing, TransDigm
agreed to return $16.1 million
in excess profits to the Department of Defense. "We saved more money today for the American people than our committee's entire budget
for the year," said House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings.
Of course, antiwar demonstrators have yet to pour into the streets, even though the wars we're already involved in continue to
drag on and a possible new one with Iran looms on the horizon. Still, there seems to be a notable trend in antiwar opinion and activism.
Somewhere just under the surface of American life lurks a genuine, diverse antiwar movement that appears to be coalescing around
a common goal: getting Washington politicians to believe that antiwar policies are supportable, even potentially popular. Call me
an eternal optimist, but someday I can imagine such a movement helping end those disastrous wars.
Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at
ReThink Media , where she works with leading experts
and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies
and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the
Truman National Security Project . Find her on Twitter
@ally_harp .
"How Obama demobilized the antiwar movement"
By Brad Plumer
August 29, 2013
Washington Post
"Reihan Salam points to a 2011 paper by sociologists Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, who find that antiwar protests shrunk
very quickly after Obama took office in 2008 -- mainly because Democrats were less likely to show up:
Drawing upon 5,398 surveys of demonstrators at antiwar protests, interviews with movement leaders, and ethnographic observation,
this article argues that the antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican
sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success in ending
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Heaney and Rojas begin by puzzling over a paradox. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, but his first few years in office were
rather different: "As president, Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan. The antiwar movement
should have been furious at Obama's 'betrayal' and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies
declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.""
Rob , July 4, 2019 at 14:20
The author may be too young to realize that the overwhelming driving force in the anti-Vietnam War movement was hundreds
of thousands of young men who were at risk of being drafted and sent to fight, die and kill in that godforsaken war. As the
movement grew, it gathered in millions of others as well. Absent the military draft today, most of America's youth don't seem
to give half a damn about the current crimes of the U.S. military. As the saying goes: They have no skin in the game.
bardamu , July 3, 2019 at 20:21
There has again been some shift in Sanders' public positions, while Tulsi Gabbard occupies a position that was not represented
in '16, and HR Clinton was more openly bent on war than anyone currently at the table, though perhaps because that much of her
position had become so difficult to deny over the years.
That said, Clinton lost to Obama in '08 because she could not as effectively deny her militarism. There was at the time within
the Democratic Party more and clearer movement against the wars than there is now. One might remember the run for candidacy
of Dennis Kucinich, for example. The 8 years of the Obama regime were a consistent frustration and disappointment to any antiwar
or anticorporate voice within the Democratic Party, but complaints were muted because many would not speak against a Blue or
a Black president. More than at any prior time, corporate media spokespersons could endorse radically pro-corporate positions
and imply or accuse their opposition of racism.
That leaves it unclear, however, what any antiwar voices have to do with the Democratic Party itself, particularly if we
take "the party" to mean the political organization itself as opposed to the people whom it claims to represent. The Party and
the DNC were major engines in the rigging of the 2016 Democratic nominationand also, lest we forget, contributors to the Donald
Trump nomination campaign.
It should not escape us, as we search for souls and soulfulness among these remnants of Democratic Parties Past, that any
turn of the party against war is surely due to Hillary Clinton's loss to presumed patsy candidate Donald Trump in 2016the least
and second-least popular major presidential contenders in history, clearly, in whichever order one wishes to put them.
There is some value in realism, then. So as much as one hates to criticize a Bernie Sanders in anything like the present
field that he runs in, his is not a consistently antiwar position: he has gone back and forth. Tulsi Gabbard is the closest
thing to an antiwar candidate within the Party. And under even under the most favorable circumstances, 2020 is at best not her
year.
Most big money says war. scorched earth, steep hierarchy, and small constitution. Any who don't like it had best speak up
and act up.
I am for Tulsi, a Senator from Hawaii not a rep as this article says. Folk Music was in when the peace movement was strong
and building, the same for Folk Rock who songs also had words you could get without Google.
So my way of "hoping" for an Anti-War/Peace Movement is to have a Folk Revival in my mind.
Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 14:11
The answer to the question why anti war movement is dead is so simple and obvious but apparently invisible to most Dems/libs/progressives
(excuse my inability to discern the distinctions between labels). The answer points to our onetime "peace" president Obama.
As far as foreign interventions go (and domestic spying, among other things) Obama had continued Baby Bush's policy. Even worse,
Obama had given a bipartisan seal of approval (and legality) to most of Baby Bush's crimes. In other words, for 8 years, meaning
during the "peace" president's reign, the loyal "lefty" sheeple have held their mouth when it came to war and peace.
Obama and the Dems have very effectively killed the ant war movement
The establishment will always be pro-war because there's so much money in it. Street demonstrations will never change that,
as we recently learned with Iraq. The only strategy that has a chance of working is anti-enlistment. If they don't have the
troops they can't invade anywhere, and recruitment is already a problem. It needs to be a bigger problem.
Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 11:51
Sorry, ALL of these Democrat wannabes save one is ignorant of foreign affairs, foreign policy and its destruction of what
they blather on about domestic vote-getting sky pies. Oh yes, free everything: schools, health care, social justices and services.
It's as though the MIC has not stolen the money from the public's pockets to get rich by sending cheap fodder out there to get
killed and wounded, amputated physically and mentally.
Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't stand
the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men, because she drew a bad
one. Huma was better company. Since she didn't know anything beyond the superficial, she did whatever the "experts" whispered
in her ears: War! Obama was in the same boat. The target, via gaining total control of oil from Libya to Syria and Iran was
her Putin hate. So her experts set up the Ukraine. The "experts" are the MIC/CIA and our fearless, brainless, corrupt military.
They have whispered the same psychotic message since the Gulf of Tonkin. We've lost to everyone with whom we've crossed swords
and left them devastated and America diminished save for the few.
So I was a Sanders supporter until he backed the warrior woman and I, like millions of others backed off of her party. It's
still her party. Everyone just loves every victim of every kind. They all spout minor variations on the same themes while Trump
and his neocons quietly install their right wing empire. Except for one who I spotted when she had the independence to go look
for herself in Syria.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate to be the candidate who has a balance of well thought through, realistic foreign policy
as well as the domestic non-extremist one. She has the hurdle of being a too-pretty woman, of being from the remotest state,
and not being a screamer. Even this article, written about peace by a woman fails to talk about her.
Tulsi has the registered voter count and a respectable budget, but the New York Times which is policy-controlled by a few
of Hillary's billionaire friends has consistently shut her out, because Tulsi left the corrupt Hillary-owned DNC to back Sanders
and Hillary never forgave her.
If you want to know who is against Trump and war, take 5 minutes and listen to what she really said during the 1st debate
where the CBS folks gave her little room to talk. It will change your outlook on what really is possible.
Hi Anonymot; I also exited my Sanders support after over 100 cash donations and over a years painful effort. I will never
call him Bernie again; now it is Sanders, since Bernie makes him sound cute and cute was not the word that came into my mind
as Mr. Sanders missed his world moment at the democratic election and backed Hillary Clinton (I can not vote for EVIL). Sanders
then proceeded to give part of my money to the DNC & to EVIL Hillary Clinton.
So then what now? Easy as Pie; NO MORE DEMOCRATS EVER. The DNC & DCCC used Election Fraud & Election Crimes blatantly to
beat Bernie Sanders. Right out in the open. The DNC & DCCC are War Mongering more then the Republicans which is saying allot.
The mass media and major Internet Plateforms like Goggle & Facebook are all owned by Evil Oligarchs that profit from WAR and
blatantly are today suppressing all dissenting opinions (anti Free Speech).
I stopped making cash donation to Tulsi Gabbard upon the realization that the Democrats were not at all a force for Life
or Good and instead were a criminal organization. The voting for the lessor of two EVILs is 100% STUPID.
I told Tim Canova I could not support any Democrat ever again as I told Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi is still running as a criminal
democrat. If she would run independent of the DNC then I would start to donate cash to her again. End of my story about Tulsi.
I do like her antiwar dialog, but there is no; so called changing, the DNC from the inside. The Oligarchs own the DNC and are
not supportive of "We The People" or the Constitution, or the American Republic.
The end of Tim Canova's effort was he was overtly CHEATED AGAIN by the DNC's Election Fraud & Election Crimes in his 2018
run for congress against Hillary Clinton's 100% corrupt campaign manager; who congress seated even over Tim's asking them not
to seat her until his law suites on her election crimes against him were assessed. Election crimes and rigged voting machines
in Florida are a way of life now and have been for decades and decades.
All elections must be publicly funded. All votes must be on paper ballots and accessible for recounts and that is just the
very minimums needed to start changing the 100% corrupted election system we Americans have been railroaded into.
The supreme Court has recently ruled that gerrymandering is OK. The supreme court has proven to be a political organization
with their Bush Gore decision and now are just political hacks and as such need to be ELECTED not appointed. Their rulings that
Money is Free Speech & that Corporations are People has disenfranchised "We the People". That makes the Supreme Court a tool
to be used by the world money elite to overturn the constitution of the United States of America.
No More War. No More War. No More War.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 16:40
Absolutely spot-on, superb comment, P .Brooks.
DW
Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 18:08
I saw the light (with what the Dems are really about) after Kucinich's candidacy. That made me one of the very few lefties
in my circle not to have voted for Obama even the first time around. I hear a lot of talk about trying to reform the party from
inside. Utter bu** sh**. "You cannot reform Mafia".
Ever since Kucinich, I have been voting Green. No, this is not a waste of my vote. Besides, I cannot be complicit to war
crimes that's what it makes anyone who votes for either of the two parties.
Steven , July 3, 2019 at 13:56
Wow you said a mouthful. It's worse than that its a cottage industry that includes gun running, drug running and human trafficking
netting Trillions to the MIC, CIA and other alphabet agencies you can't fight the mark of the beast.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:01
I fully back/endorse Gabbard, but
The battering of Bernie is not fair. He is NOT a Democrat, therefore him being able to get "inside" that party to run AS
a Dem put him in a tenuous situation. He really had no option other than to support HRC lest his movement, everyone's movement,
would get extra hammering by the neocons and status quo powers. He wouldn't be running, again, had he not done this. Yeah, it's
a bad taste, I get it, but had he disavowed HRC would the outcome -Trump- been any different? The BLAME goes fully on the DNC
and the Clintons. Full stop.
I do not see AOC as a full progressive. She is only doing enough to make it appear so. The Green New Deal is stolen from
the Green Party and is watered down. Think of this as "Obama Care" for the planet. As you should know, Gabbard's Off Fossil
Fuels Act (OFF) actually has real teeth in it: and is closer to the Green Party's positions.
I support movements and positions. PRIMARY is peace. Gabbard, though not a pacifist, has the right path on all of this: I've
been around long enough to understand exactly how she's approaching all of this. She is, however, taking on EVERYONE. As powerful
a person as she is (she has more fortitude than the entire lot of combined POTUS candidates put together) going to require MASSIVE
support; sadly, -to this point- this article doesn't help by implying that people aren't interested in foreign policy (it perpetuates
the blockout of it- people have to be reeducated on its importance- not something that the MIC wants), people aren't yet able
to see the connections. The education will occur will it happen in a timely way such that people would elect Gabbard? (things
can turn on a dime, history has shown this; she has the makeup that suggests that she's going to have a big role in making history).
I did not support Bernie (and so far have not- he's got ample support; if it comes down to it he WILL get my vote- and I've
held off voting for many years because there's been no real "peace" candidate on the plate). Gabbard, however, has my support
now, and likely till the day I die: I've been around long enough to know what constitutes a great leader, and not since the
late 60s have we had anyone like her. If Bernie gets the nomination it is my prediction that he will have Gabbard high on his
staff, if not as VP: a sure fire way to win is to have Gabbard as VP.
I'm going to leave this for folks to contemplate as to whether Gabbard is real or not:
In a context in which Rio de Janeiro's evangelical churches have been accused of laundering money for the drug trafficking
gangs, all elements of Afro-Brazilian culture including caipoeira, Jango drumming, and participation in Carnaval parades, have
been banned by the traffickers in many favelas.
[end excerpt]
"caipoeria," is something that Gabbard has practiced:
"I trained in different martial arts since I was a kid including Capoeira -- an amazing art created by slaves in Brazil who
were training to fight and resist against their slave masters, disguising their training with music, acrobatics, and dance.
Yesterday I joined my friends Mestre Kinha and others at Capoeira Besouro Hawai'i for their batizado ceremony and some fun!
" Tulsi Gabbard December 9, 2018
The GOAL is to get her into the upper halls of governing power. If the people cannot see fit to it then I'll support Sanders
(in the end) so that he can do it.
Harpootlian claims to see what's going on, but, unfortunately, she's not able to look close enough.
Anonymot, thank you for leading out here with Gabbard and her message.
michael , July 4, 2019 at 08:10
If Gabbard had the MSM coverage Buttigieg has received she probably be leading in the polls. It is surprising(?) that this
supposedly anti-war author mentions corporatist Mayor Pete but not Gabbard.
David , July 4, 2019 at 19:55
She DOES (briefly)mention Gabbard, but she missed the fact that Gabbard is the most strongly anti-war candidate. She gets
it entirely wrong about Buttigieg, who is strikingly pro-war, and supports getting in to a war with Iran.
And sadly, Ms. Gabbard is mired at the 1% mark in the polls, even after having performed so well in the debate.
This seems to me an indication of the public's lack of caring about our foreign wars.
antonio Costa , July 3, 2019 at 19:06
The reason she's "mired" is because a number of polls don't include her!! However they include, Marianne Williamson.
How's that for inverse totalitarianism par excellence .
Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:05
I did see one poll that had her at 2%. And given the reputation of many polling outfits, I take any professed results with
a grain of salt. Tulsi's press coverage (what little she gets) has been mostly defamatory to the point of being libelous. If
her strong performance continues in the primary debates despite all efforts to sabotage her, I think she could make a strong
showing. That said, at some point she will have to renounce the DNC controlled democratic party and run as an Independent if
she wants to make the General Election debates for 2020.
"Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't
stand the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men "
If I were to psychologize, I would conjecture more un-gendered stereotype, namely that of a good student. He/she diligently
learns in all classes from the prescribed textbooks and reading materials, and, alas, American education on foreign affairs
is dominated by retirees from CIA and other armchair warriors. Of course, nothing wrong about good students in general, but
I mean the type that is obedient, devoid of originality and independent thinking. When admonished, he/she remembers the pain
for life and strives hard not to repeat it. E.g. as First Lady, Hillary kissed Arafat's wife to emulate Middle East custom,
and NY tabloids had a feast for months.
Concerning Tulsi, no Hillary-related conspiracy is needed to explain the behavior of the mass media. Tulsi is a heretic to
the establishment, and their idea is to be arbiters of what and who belongs to the "mainstream", and what is radical, marginal
etc. Tulsi richly deserves her treatment. Confronted with taunts like "so you would prefer X to stay in power" (Assad, Maduro
etc.) she replies that it should not be up to USA to decide who stays in power, especially if no better scenario is in sight.
The gall, the cheek!
Strangely enough, Tulsi gets this treatment in places like The Nation and Counterpunch. As the hitherto "radical left" got
a whiff of being admitted to the hallowed mainstream from time to time, they try to be "responsible".
Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:39
Yes! Thank You I was gritting my teeth reading this article #Tulsi2020
Eddie , July 3, 2019 at 11:42
The end of the anti-war movement expired when the snake-oil pitchman with the toothy smile and dark skin brought his chains
we could beleive in to the White House. The so-called progressives simply went to sleep while they never criticized Barack Obama
for escalating W. Bush's wars and tax cuts for the rich.
The fake left wing in the US remained silent when Obama dumped trillions of dollars into the vaults of his bankster pals
as he stole the very homes from the people who voted him into office. Then along came the next hope and change miracle worker
Bernie Sanders. Only instead of working miracles for the working class, Sanders showed his true colors when he fcuked his constituents
to support the hated Hillary Clinton.
Let's start facing reality. The two-party dictatorship does not care about you unless you can pony up the big bucks like
their masters in the oligarchy and the soulless corporations do. Unless and until workers end to the criminal stranglehold that
the big-business parties and the money class have on the government, things will continue to slide into the abyss.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:33
An informed awareness of imperialism must also include an analysis of how "technology" is used and abused, from the use of
"superior" weaponry against people who do not have such weapons, from blunderbuss and sailing ships, to B-52s and napalm, up
to and including technology that may be "weaponized" against civilian populations WiTHIN a society, be it 24/7 surveillance
or robotics and AI that could permit elites to dispense with any "need", on the part of the elites, to tolerate the very existence
of a laborung class, or ANY who earn their wealth through actual work, from maids to surgeons, from machine operators to professors.
Any assumption, that any who "work", even lawyers or military officers, can consider their occupation or profession as "safe",
is to assume that the scapegoating will stop with those the highly paid regard as "losers", such comfortable assumption may
very well prove as illusory and ephemeral as an early morning mist before the hot and merciless Sun rises.
The very notions of unfettered greed and limitless power, resulting in total control, must be recognized as the prime drivers
of endless war and shock-doctrine capitalism which, combined, ARE imperialism, unhinged and insane.
michael , July 3, 2019 at 11:06
This article is weak. Anyone who could equate Mayor Pete or the eleven Democrat "ex"-military and CIA analysts who gained
seats in Congress in 2018 as anti-war is clueless. Tulsi Gabbard is anti-regime change war, but is in favor of fighting "terrorists"
(created mostly by our CIA and Israel with Saudi funding). Mike Gravel is the only true totally anti-war 'candidate' and he
supports Gabbard as the only anti-War of the Democrats.
In WWI, 90% of Americans who served were drafted, in WWII over 60% of Americans who served were drafted. The Vietnam War "peace
demonstrations" were more about the Draft, and skin-in-the-game, than about War. Nixon and Kissinger abolished the Draft (which
stopped most anti-war protests), but continued carpet bombing Vietnam and neighboring countries (Operations Menu, Freedom Deal,
Patio, etc), and Vietnamized the War which was already lost, although the killing continued through 1973. The abolition of the
Draft largely gutted the anti-war movement. Sporadic protests against Bush/ Cheney over Afghanistan and Iraq essentially disappeared
under Obama/ Hillary in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Since their National Emergency proclamations
no longer ever end, we are in a position to attack Venezuela (Obama), Ukraine (Obama), South Sudan (Obama), Iran (Carter, Clinton),
Libya (Obama), Somalia (Obama), Yemen (Obama), Nicaragua (Trump) and even Burundi (Obama) and the Central African Republic (Obama).
The continuing support of death squads in Honduras and other Latin American countries ("stability is more important than democracy")
has contributed to the immigration crises over the last five years.
As Pelosi noted about Democratic progressives "there are like five of them". Obama not only failed to reverse any of the police
state and warmongering of Bush/Cheney, he expanded both police state (arresting and prosecuting Chelsea Manning for exposing
war crimes, as well as more whistleblowers than anyone in history), and wars in seven Arab Muslim countries. Black Americans,
who had always been an anti-War bloc prior to Obama, converted to the new America. The Congressional Democrats joined with Republicans
to give more to the military budget than requested by Trump. (Clinton squandered the Peace Dividend when the Soviet Union fell,
and Lee Camp has exposed the $21 TRILLION "lost" by the Pentagon.)
The young author see anti-war improvements that are not there. The US is more pro-war in its foreign policies than at any time
in its history. When there was a Draft, the public would not tolerate decades of war (lest their young men died). Sanctions
are now the first attack (usually by National Emergencies!); the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by Clinton's sanctions (Madeline
Albright: "we think it was worth it!") is just sadism and psychopathy at the top, which is necessary for War.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:38
Superb comment, michael, very much agreed with and appreciated.
DW
Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 12:06
You are absolutely right. Obama and Hillary were the brilliant ideas of the MIC/CIA when they realized that NO ONE the Republicans
put up after Bush baby's 2nd round. They chose 2 "victims" black & woman) who would do what they were told to do in order to
promote their causes (blacks & get-filthy rich.) The first loser would get the next round. And that's exactly what happened
until Hillary proved to be so unacceptable that she was rejected. We traded no new war for an administration leading us into
a neo-nazi dictatorship.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:04
Thank you for this comment!
Mickey , July 3, 2019 at 10:47
Tulsi Gabbard is the only peace candidate in the Democratic Party
Many current crises have the potential to escalate into a major confrontation between the nuclear powers, similar to the
Cuban missile crisis, though there is no comparable sense of alarm. Then, tensions were at boiling point, when a small military
exchange could have led to nuclear annihilation. Today there are many more such flashpoint Syria, the South China Sea, Iran,
Ukraine to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a gradual movement towards third world war. Condemnation
of an attack on Iran must include, foremost, the warning that it could lead the US into a confrontation with a Sino-Russian
alliance. The warning from history is states go to war over interests, but ultimately and blindly end up getting the very
war they need to avoid: even nuclear war, where the current trend is going. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:36
Many truly superb, well-informed, and very enlightening comments on this thread.
My very great appreciation to this site, to its authors, and to its exceptionally thoughtful and articulate commenters.
DW
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:20
I appreciate this author's perspective, research, and optimism.
Clearly, the young ARE far more open to embracing a future less warlike and hegemonic, while far too many of my generation
are wedded to childish myth and fantasy around U$ driven mayhem.
However, I would suggest that vision be broadened beyond opposition to war, which opposition, while important, must be expanded
to opposition to the larger issue of imperialism, itself.
Imperialism is not merely war, it includes economic warfare, both sanctions, internationally, and predatory debt loads, domestically,
in very many nations of the world, as well as privatization of the commons (which must be understood to include all resources
necessary to human existence).
Perpetual war, which profits only the few, is driven by precisely the same aims as pitting workers against each other, worldwide,
in a "game" of "race to the bottom", creating "credit" rather than raising wages, thus creating life-long indebtedness of the
many, which only benefits monopolized corporate interests, as does corporate ownership of such necessities as water, food production,
and most channels of communication, which permits corporations to easily shape public perception toward whatever ends suit corporate
purposes while also ensuring that deeper awareness of what is actually occurring is effectively stifled, deplatformed, or smeared
as dangerous foreign fake news or as hidden, or even as blatant, racial or religious hatred.
Above all, it is critically important that all these interrelated aspects of deliberate domination, control, and diminishment,
ARE talked about, openly, that we all may have better grasp of who really aligns with creating serious systemic change, especially
as traditionally assumed "tendencies" are shifting, quickly and even profoundly.
For example, as many here point out, the Democrats are now as much a war party as the Republicans, "traditionally" have been,
even as there is clear evidence that the Republican "base" is becoming less willing to go to war than are the Democratic "base",
as CNN and MSNBC media outlets strive to incite a new Cold War and champion and applaud aggression in Syria, Iran, and North
Korea.
It is the elite Democratic "leadership" and most Democratic Presidential hopefuls who now preach or excuse war and aggression,
with few actual exceptions, and none of them, including Tulsi Gabbard, have come anywhere near openly discussing or embracing,
the end of U$ imperialism.
Both neoliberal and neocon philosophies are absolutely dedicated to imperialism in all its destructive, even terminal, manifestations.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:16
Exactly!
Gabbard has spoken out against sanctions. She understands that they're just another form of war.
The younger generations won't be able to financially support imperialist activities. And, they won't be, as the statements
to their enlistment numbers suggest, able to "man the guns." I'm thinking that TPTB are aware of this (which is why a lot of
drone and other automation of war machinery has been stepped up).
The recent alliance of Soros and Charles Koch, the Quincy Institute, is, I believe, a KEY turning point. Pretty much everything
Gabbard is saying/calling for is this institute's mission statement: and people ought to note that Gabbard has been in Charles
Koch's circle- might very well be that Gabbard has already influenced things in a positive way.
I also believe that all the great independent journalists, publishers (Assange taking the title here) and whistleblowers
(Manning taking the title here) have made a HUGE impact. Bless them all.
The US government consistently uses psychological operations on its own citizens to manufacture consent to kill anyone and
everyone. Meaningless propaganda phrases such as "Support Our Troops" and "National Security" and "War on Terror" are thrown
around to justify genocides and sieges and distract us from murder. There is no left wing or in American politics and there
has not been one since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. All we have is neoconservatives and neoliberals representing the business
party for four decades. Killing is our business and business is good. Men are as monkeys with guns when it comes to politics
and religion.
One might be hard-pressed to find more outright perversions of reality in a mere two pages of text. Congratulations Congress,
you have indeed surpassed yourself.
So it's those dastardly Russians and Iranians who are responsible for the destabilization of the Middle East, "complicating
Israel's ability to defend itself from hostile action emanating from Syria." And apparently, it's the "ungoverned space" in
Syria that has "allowed" for the rise of terrorist factions in Syria, that (we must be reminded) are ever poised to attack "Western
targets, our allies and partners, and the U.S. homeland."
Good grief.
Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 08:29
Thank you Joe Lauria and Consortiumnews.
There is much wisdom and a good deal of personal experience being expressed on these pages. I especially want to thank IvyMike
and Dao Gen. Ivy Mike you're so right about our troops in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, draftees and volunteers, they fought what
was clearly an internal civil war fought valiantly, beyond that point, Vietnam was a political mess for all involved. And Dao
Gen all of your points are accurate.
As for our legislators, please read the linked Foreign Affairs press release signed by over 400 leglislators On May 20th.,
2019 that address "threats to Syria" including the Russia threat. Clearly it will take action by the People and Peace candidates
to end this travesty of a foreign policy.
Vietnam a war triggered by the prevention of a mandated election by the USA which Ho Chi Minh was likely to win, who had
already recently been Premier of a unified Vietnam.
Sorry, being courageous in a vicious cause is not honorable.
Speaking a true history and responsibility is honorable.
Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 11:07
No need to be sorry James Clooney. I did not mention honor in my comment, I mentioned valiant (courage and determination).
American troupes ultimately fight honorably for each other not necessarily for country. This was the message and evaluation
of Captain Hal Moore To General Westmorland And Robert McNamera after the initial engagement of US troops and NVA and can be
viewed as a special feature of the largely inaccurate DVD "We Were Soldiers And Young).
The veterans group About Face is doing remarkable work against the imperial militarization that threatens to consume our
country and possibly the world. This threat includes militarization of US police, a growing nuclear arms race, and so-called
humanitarian wars. About Face is also working to train ordinary people as medics to take these skills into their communities
whose members are on the front lines of police brutality.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate with a strong, enlightened understanding of the costs of our many imperial wars Costs to
ourselves in the US and costs to the people we invade in order to "save" them. I voted for McGovern in 1972. I would vote for
Tuldi's Gabbard in 2020 if given the chance.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:35
Vote for her now by supporting her*! One cannot wait until the DNC (or other party) picks the candidate FOR us. Anyone serious
about peace ought to support her, and do it now and far into the future. I have always supported candidates who are champions
for peace, no matter their "party" or whatever: I did not, though I wish that I had, support Walter Jones -of Freedom Fries
fame- after he did a 180 (Gabbard knew Jones, and respected him); it took a lot of guts for him to do this, but his honest (like
Ron Paul proved) was proven and his voters accepted him (and likely shifted their views along with him).
* Yeah, one has to register giving money, but for a lousy $1 She has yet to qualify for the third debate (need 130k unique
donations): and yet Yang has! (nothing against him, but come on, he is not "Commander in Chief" material [and at this time it
is, as Gabbard repeats, the single most important part of being president]).
Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:43
Strongly agree Only Tulsi
triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:14
Not surprising there was little or no antiwar sentiment in the newfound civic engagement after Trump's election, since the
majority of those participating were supporters of the war criminals Obama, Clinton, and their corporate, war mongering DEM
party. Those same people today, support Obama-chaperone Biden, or one of the other vetted corporate DEMs, including socialist-in-name-only
Sanders, who signed the DEM loyalty oath promising to continue austerity for the poor, socialism for rich, deregulation, militarism,
and global war hegemony. The only party with an antiwar blank was the Green Party, which captured >2% of the ~130 million votes
in the rigged election- even though Stein is as competent as Clinton, certainly more competent than Trump, and the Green platform,
unlike Sanders', explained how to pay for social and environmental programs by ending illegal wars in at least 7 countries,
closing 1000 military command posts located all over earth, removing air craft carrier task forces from every ocean, cutting
defense spending.
I believe the CIA operation "CARWASH" was under Obama, which gave us Ultra fascism in one of the largest economies in the
world, Brazil.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:02
Superb comment, trieke, and I especially appreciate your mention of Jill Stein and the Green Party.
It is unfortunate that the the Green New Deal, championed by AOC is such a pale and intentionally pusillanimous copy of the
Green New Deal articulated by Stein, which pointedly made clear that blind and blythe economic expansion must cease, that realistic
natural constraints and carrying capacity be accepted and profligate energy squandering come to an end.
That a sane, humane, and sustainable economic system, wholly compatible with ecological responsibility can provide neaningful
endeavor, justly compensated, for all, as was coherently addressed and explained to any who cared to examine the substance of
that, actual, and realistic, original, GND.
Such a vision must be part of successfully challenging, and ending, U$ imperialism.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:53
And Trump likely signed a GOP pledge. It's all superficial crap, nothing that is really written in stone.
I LOVE Stein. But for the sake of the planet we have little time to wait on getting the Green Party up to speed (to the clasp
the levers of power). Unless Gabbard comes out on top (well, the ultimate, and my favorite, long-shot would be Gravel, but reality
is something that I have to accept) it can only really be Sanders. I see a Sanders nomination as being the next best thing (and,
really, the last hope as it all falls WAY off the cliff after that). He would most certainly have Gabbard along (if not as VP,
which is the best strategy for winning, then as some other high-ranking, and meaningful cabinet member). Also, there are a lot
of folks that would be coming in on his coattails. It is THESE people that will make the most difference: although he's got
his flaws, Ro Kana would be a good top official. And, there are all the supporters who would help push. Sanders is WAY better
than HRC (Obama and, of course, Trump). He isn't my favorite, but he has enough lean in him to allow others to help him push
the door open: I'll accept him if that's what it take to get Gabbard into all of this.
Sometimes you DO have to infiltrate. Sanders is an infiltrator (not a Dem), though he treads lightly. Gabbard has already
proven her intentions: directly confronted the DNC and the HRC machine (and her direct attack on the MIC is made very clear);
and, she is indirectly endorsed by some of the best people out there who have run for POTUS: Jill Stein; Ron Paul; Mike Gravel.
We cannot wait for the Dems (and the MIC) to disarm. We need to get inside "the building" and disarm. IF Sanders or Gabbard
(and no Gravel) don't get the nomination THEN it is time to open up direct "warfare" and attack from the "outside" (at this
time there should be enough big defectors to start swinging the tide).
Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:34
Yes trieke, I voted for Stein in 2016, and I plan on voting Green Party again in 2020. I see too many fellow progressives/liberals/leftists
(whatever the hell we want to call ourselves) agonizing about which compromised Democrat to vote-for, trying to weigh their
different liabilities, etc. I've come to believe that my duty as a voter is to vote for the POTUS candidate/party whose stances/platform
are closest to my views, and that's unequivocally the Green Party. My duty as a voter does NOT entail 'voting for a winner',
that's just part of the two-party-con that the Dems & Reps run.
jmg , July 3, 2019 at 07:06
The big difference is that, during the Vietnam years, people could *see* the war. People talked a lot about "photographs
that ended the Vietnam war", such as the napalm girl, etc.
The government noticed this. There were enormous pressures on the press, even a ban on returning coffin photos. Now, since
the two Iraq wars, people *don't see* the reality of war. The TV and press don't show Afghanistan, don't show Yemen, didn't
show the real Iraq excepting for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are in prison because of this.
And the wars go on:
"The US government and military are preventing the public from seeing photographs that depict the true horror of the Iraq
war."
For example, we all know that mainstream media is war propaganda now, itself at war on truth and, apart from some convenient
false flags to justify attacks, they very rarely let the very people suffering wars be heard to wake viewers up, and don't often
even show this uncensored reality of war anymore, not like the true images of this old, powerful video:
Happy Xmas (War Is Over! If You Want It)
So this is Xmas
And what have you done
-- John Lennon
mbob -- thank you -- has already put this very well, but it is above all the Dems, especially Obama and the Clintons, who
killed the antiwar movement. Obama was a fake, and his foreign policy became even more hawkish after Hillary resigned as SoS.
His reduction of Libya, the richest state in Africa, to a feudal chaotic zone in which slavery is once more prominent and his
attempt to demonize Syria, which has more semi-democracy and women's rights than any of the Islamic kingdoms the US supports
as its allies, and turn Syria into a jihadi terrorist hell, as well as Obama's bombing of other nations and his sanctions on
still other nations such as Venezuela, injured and killed at least as many people as did GW Bush's invasion of Iraq. Yet where
was the antiwar movement? In the 21st century the US antiwar movement has gained most of its strength from anti-Repub hatred.
The current uptick of antiwar feeling is probably due mostly to hatred of Trump. Yet Trump is the first president since Carter
not to invade or make a major attack on a foreign country. As a businessman, his policy is to use economic warfare instead of
military warfare.
I am not a Trump supporter, and strong sanctions are a war crime, and Trump is also slow to reduce some of Obama's overseas
bombing and other campaigns, yet ironically he is surely closer to being a "peace president" than Obama. Moreover, a major reason
Trump won in 2016 was that Hillary was regarded as the war and foreign intervention candidate, and in fact if Hillary had won,
she probably would have invaded Syria to set up her infamous "no-fly zone" there, and she might have bombed Iran by now. We
might even be in a war with Russia now. At the same time, under Trump the Dem leadership and the Dem-leaning MSM have pursued
an unabashedly neocon policy of attacking from the right Trumps attempts at detente with Russia and scorning his attempts to
negotiate a treaty with N Korea and to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. The main reason why Trump chose dangerous neocons
like Bolton and Pompeo as advisors was probably to shield himself a little from the incessant and sometimes xenophobic attacks
from the Dem leadership and the MSM. The Dem leadership seems motivated not only by hatred of Trump but also, and probably more
importantly, by a desire to get donations from the military-industrial complex and a desire to ingratiate itself with the Intel
Community and the surveillance state in order to get various favors. Look, for example, at Adam Schiff, cheerleader-in-chief
for the IC. The system of massive collusion between the Dem party elite and the US deep state was not as advanced during the
Vietnam War era as it is now. 2003 changed a lot of things.
The only Dem presidential candidates who are philosophically and securely antiwar are Gabbard and Gravel. Even Bernie (and
even more so, Warren) can't be trusted to stand up to the deep state if elected, and anyway, Bernie's support for the Russiagate
hoax by itself disqualifies him as an antiwar politician, while the Yemen bill he sponsored had a fatal loophole in it, as Bernie
well knew. I love Bernie, but he is neither antiwar nor anti-empire. As for Seth Moulton, mentioned in the article, he is my
Rep, and he makes some mild criticisms of the military, but he is a rabid hawk on Syria and Iran, and he recently voted for
a Repub amendment that would have punished Americans who donate to BDS organizations. And as for the younger generation of Dems,
they are not as antiwar as the article suggests. For every AOC among the newly elected Dems in 2018, there were almost two new
Dems who are military vets or who formerly worked for intel agencies. This does not bode well. As long at the deep state, the
Dem elite, and the MSM are tightly intertwined, there will be no major peace movement in the near future, even if a Dem becomes
president. In fact, a Dem president might hinder the formation of a true antiwar movement. Perhaps when China becomes more powerful
in ten or twenty years, the unipolar US empire and permanent war state will no longer look like a very good idea to a large
number of Americans, and the idea of a peace movement will once again become realistic. The media have a major role to play
in spreading truthful news about how the current US empire is hurting domestic living standards. Rather than hopey-hope wish
lists, no-holds-barred reporting will surely play a big role.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:05
Absolutely superb comment, Dao Gen.
DW
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:07
Another fine example of why I think there is hope! (some very sharp commentators!)
A strong leader can make all the difference. The example gets set from the top: not that this is my preference, just that
it's the reality we have today. MLK Jr. was such a leader, though it was MANY great people that were in his movement/orbit that
were the primary architects. I suppose you could say it's a "rally around the flag" kind of deal. Just as Trump stunned the
System, I believe that it can be stunned from the "left" (the ultimate stunning would be from a Gravel win, but I'm thinking
that Gabbard would be the one that has what it takes to slip past).
I really wish that people would start asking candidates who they think have been good cabinet members for various positions.
This could help give an idea of the most important facet of an administration: who the POTUS selects as key cabinet members
tells pretty much everything you need to know. Sadly, Trump had a shot at selecting Gabbard and passed on her: as much as I
detest Trump, I gave him room in which to work away from the noecon/neolib death squads (to his credit he's mostly just stalemated
them- for a rookie politician you could say that this has been an impressive feat; he's tried to instigate new wars but has,
so far, "failed" [by design?]).
geeyp , July 3, 2019 at 01:19
"We saved more money today for the American people ." Elijah Cummings. Yea? Well then, give it to us!! You owe us a return
of our money that you have wasted for years.
mark , July 3, 2019 at 00:17
Same old, same old, same old, same old.
Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be
different.
There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel.
Honest.
Just like Dubya.
Just like Obomber.
Just like the Orange Baboon.
Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus.
And this is the "new anti war movement."
Yeah.
Tom Kath , July 3, 2019 at 00:04
Every extreme elicits an extreme response. Our current western pacifist obsession is no exception. By prohibiting argument,
disagreement, verbal conflict, and the occasional playground "dust up" on a personal level, you seem to make the seemingly less
personal war inevitable.
Life on earth is simply not possible without "a bit of biff".
An aware person may not react extremely to a extreme. USA slaughtered 5 to 10 million Vietnamese for no apparent reason other
than projection of power yet the Vietnamese trade with the USA today.
Who prohibits argument? Certainly not those with little power; it's the militarily and politically powerful that crush dissent,
(Tinamen Square , Occupy Wall Street). How much dissent does the military allow? Why is Assange being persecuted?
I believe even the most militant pacifist would welcome a lively debate on murder, death and genocide, as a channel for education
and edification.
Antonio Costa , July 2, 2019 at 20:53
Weak essay. AOC hops from cause to cause. She rarely/ever says anything about US regime change wars, and the bombing of children.
She's demonstrated no anti-war bona fides.
Only Tulsi Gabbard has forthright called for an end to regime change wars, the warmongers and reduction in our military.
The power is with the powerful. We'll not see an end to war, nor Medicare for All or much of anything regarding student debt.
These are deep systemic problems calling for systemic solutions beginning with how we live on the planet(GND is a red herring),
the GDP must become null and void if we are to behave as if plundering the planet is part of "progress". It needs to be replaced
to some that focuses on quality of life as the key to prosperity. The geopolitics of the world have to simply STOP IT. It's
not about coalitions between Russia and China and India to off-set the US imperialists. That's an old game for an empty planet.
The planet is full and exceeding it capacity and is on fire. Our geopolitics must end!
Not one of these candidates come close to focusing on the systemic problem(s) except Gabbard's focus on war because it attacks
the heart of the American Imperial Empire.
Maxime , July 3, 2019 at 09:24
I agree with you that you americans will probably not see the end of your system and the end of your problems any time soon.
BUT I disagree on that you seems to think it's inevitable. I'm not american, I'm french, and reading you saying you think
medicare for all, no student debt and end to endless wars are systemic problems linked to GDP and the current economic system
is well, amusing. We have medicare for all, in fact even better than your medicare, we have no student cost for our educating
system, and still in both cases often better results than yours, even if we are behind some of our northern neighbors, but they
don't pay for these either. And we don't wage endless wars, even if we have ourselves our own big war problems, after all we
were in Lybia, we are in Syria, we are in Mali and other parts of Africa.
We also have a big militaro-industrial complex, in fact very alike the american one. But we made clear since much longer
than we would not accept as much wars, in part because the lesson we got from WW2 and Cold War was to learn to live together
with our hated neighbor. You know, the one the other side of the Rhine. Today France is a diplomatic superpower, often the head
of the european spear onthe subject, we got feared elite military, and we are proud of that, but we would not even accept more
money (in proportion) given to our military complex.
And you know the best news (for the americans)? we have an history of warmongering going back millenias. We learn to love
Caesar and the "Guerre des Gaules", his invasion of Gauls. We learn how Franks invaded their neighbors and built the first post-roman
Empire. We learn how crusaders were called Franks, how we built our nation and his pride on ashes of european continental english
hopes and german holy empire aspirations. We learn how Napolean nearly achieved to built a new continental Empire, how we never
let them passed at Verdun, and how we rose in the face of a tyran in 1944.
All of this is still in our history books, and we're still proud of it. But today, if most of us were to be asked what we
were proud about recent wars France got into, it would be how our president vetoed USA when they tried to got UN into Irak and
forced them to invade illegally, and without us.
I think my country's revelation was Algeria's independance war. One bloody and largely filled with war crimes and crimes against
humanity. We're ashamed of it, and I think we, as a nation, learned from it that stopping wars on our soil wasn't enough. I
still don't understand how americans can still wage wars after Vietnam, but I am not american. Still, even the most warmongering
nation can learn. Let's hope you will be quicker than us, because we got millennias of bloody history before even the birth
of USA.
Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:15
Thanks Maxime for a foreign perspective! I'm often curious what people in foreign countries think of our current politics
in the US,especially when I read analysis/commentaries by US writers (even ones I respect) who say "Oh most of our allies think
this or that" -- - maybe they're right or maybe they're wrong or somewhere in-between, but it's interesting getting a DIRECT
opinion from a fellow left-of-center citizen from a foreign state.
I agree with your points that European countries like France almost all have their own bloody history including an imperial
period, but the two big World Wars that killed SO many people and destroyed so many cities in Europe were so tragic and wasteful
that I suspect they DO continue to act as a significant deterrent to the saber-rattling that the US war mongers are able to
engage-in. For too many US citizens 'war' is just something that's mentioned & sometimes displayed on a screen, just like a
movie/TV program/video-game, and there's a non-reality to it because it's so far away and seldom directly affects them. Geography
has famously isolated us from the major death & destruction of war and enables too many armchair warriors to talk boldly and
vote for politicians who pander to those conceits. In a not-so-subtle way, the US IS the younger offspring of Europe, where
Europe has grown-up due to some hard lessons, while the US is going through its own destructive stage of 'lesson-learning'.
Hopefully this learning stage will be over soon and won't involve a world war.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:48
Tulsi Gabbard is, indeed,pointing at part of a major organ of imperialism, Antonio Costa, yet habeas corpus, having the whole
body of imperialism produced is necessary for the considered judgement of a people long terrorized by fictitious "monsters"
and "demons", if they are to understand that shooting warfate is but one part of the heart, while the other is economic warfare.
Both brutally destructive, even if the second is hidden from public awareness or dismissed as "a price worth paying". Imperialism
pays no price (except "blow-back", which is merely "religious extremism" as explained by a fully complicit MSM).
And the "brain" behind it all?
That is corporate/military/political/deep state/media greed and their desperate need/ambition for total, and absolute,
control.
Only seeing the whole body may reveal the true size of the threat and the vicious nature of the real danger.
Some may argue that it is "too soon", "too early", or "too costly", politically, for Gabbard, even if she, herself, might
see imperialism as the real monster and demon, to dare describe the whole beast.
Frankly, this time, Tulsi's candidacy, her "run" for President, is not likely to see her become the Dem nominee, most likely
that will be Kamala Harris (who will happily do the bidding of brute power), rather, it is to lay the firm and solid foundation
of actual difference, of rational perspective, and thoughtful, diplomatic international behavior.
To expose the whole, especially the role of the MSM, in furthering all the rest of the lumbering body of Zombie imperialism,
would be far more effective in creating an substantial "opening" for alternative possibilities, even a new political party,
next time.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:31
I'm figuring that Warren and Harris will take one another out. Climbing to the top requires this. But, Gabbard doesn't stop
fighting, and if there's a fighter out there it is her: mentally and physically she is the total package.
Sanders' 2016 campaign was ignored, he wasn't supposed to go anywhere, but if not for the DNC's meddling he would be POTUS
right now (I have zero doubt over that). So too was Obama's climb from nowhere: of course, Obama was pushed up by the System,
the System that is NOT behind Gabbard. And then there's the clown at the helm (Trump). I refuse to ignore this history.
Gababard is by no means out. Let's not speak of such things, especially when her campaign, and message, is just starting
to burst out: the MSM is the last to admit the state of things unfavorable to the wealthy, but out on the Internet Gabbard is
very much alive. She is the best candidate (with the best platform of visibility) for peace. She has all the pieces. One comment
I read out on the internet (someone, I believe, not in the US) was that Gabbard was a gift to the Americans. Yes, I believe
this to be the case: if you really look closely you'll see exactly how this is correct. I believe that we cannot afford to treat
this gift with other than the utmost appreciation. Her sincerity when she says that she was/is willing to die for her fellow
soldiers (in reference to LBGT folks, though ALL apply) is total. She is totally committed to this battle: as a warrior in politics
she's proven herself with her support, the loyalty, for Sanders (at risk to her political career- and now look, she's running
for POTUS, she continues to come out on top!).
IvyMike , July 2, 2019 at 20:14
I burned my draft card, grew my hair out, and smoked pot and was anti war as heck. But the peace demonstrations (and riots)
in the 60's and 70's did not have much effect on how the U.S. Government prosecuted the Vietnam War. It is little recognized
how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC
while also taking heavy casualties.
We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive
with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South.
Then the politicians and Generals knew, given the super power politics surrounding the war, that we had lost. We had failed
to recognize that we had not intervened in a Civil War, in truth Vietnam as a whole was fighting for freedom from Imperialism
and we had no friends in the South, just a corrupt puppet government. Instead of getting out, Nixon made the unforgivable choice
to slowly wind the war down until he could get out without losing, Peace With Honor the ultimate triumph of ego over humanity.
Americans had a chance to choose a peace candidate in 1972, instead Nixon won with a big majority.
The military has never been able to admit they were defeated on the battlefield by North Vietnam, blaming it instead on the
Liberal Media and the Anti War movement. Believing that lie they continue to fight unwinnable wars in which we have no national
interest at stake. The media and the people no longer fight against war, but it never really made a difference when we did.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 05:17
I too hoped for a miracle and voted for George. But then I always voted for the loser in whatever state I happened to be
living in at the particular time. I think Carter was a rare winning pick by me but only once. I got disgusted with voting and
sat out the Clinton campaigns, only returning to vote against the Bush juggernaut. In retrospect, Perot should have won to make
a real difference. I sided with the winner in Obama, but the loser turned out to be America getting saddled with that two-faced
hypocrite. Nobel Peace Prize winner indeed! (What did he spend the money on?) When you listen to their campaign promises be
aware they are telegraphing how they plan to betray you.
triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:45
American people in mass need to hit reset button. A yellow vest-like movement made up of tens of millions of woke people,
who understand the democrats and republicans are the left and right wing of the oligarch party,
US elections have been and continue to be rigged, and the US constitution was written to protect the property (such
as slaves) of oligarchs from the people, the founding oligarchs feared real democracy, evident by all the safeguards they built
into our government to protect against it, that remain in tact today.
We need a new 21st century constitution. Global capitalism needs to be greatly curtailed, or ended out right, replaced by
ecosocialism, conservation, restoration of earth focussed society
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:38
And just think that back then there was also Mike Gravel. The CIA did their work in the 60s to kill the anti-war movement:
killing all the great social leaders.
Why wars are "lost" is because hardly is there a time when there's an actual "mission statement" on what the end of a given
war will look like. Tulsi Gabbard has made it clear that she would NOT engage in any wars unless there was a clear objective,
a clear outcome lined out, and, of course, it was authorized by THE PEOPLE (Congress).
All wars are about resources. We cannot, however, admit this: the ruling capitalists won't allow that to be known/understood
lest they lose their power.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 04:59
Ya got all that right, especially the part about the analysts essentially declaring the war lost after Tet. I remember that
offered a lot of hope on the campuses that the war would soon end (even though we lost), especially to those of us near graduation
and facing loss of that precious 2S deferment. Yet the big fool marched on, getting my generation needlessly slaughtered for
four or five more years.
And, yes, the 2 or 3 million dead Vietnamese did matter, to those with a conscience. Such a price to keep Vietnam out of
Russia's and China's orbit. Meanwhile they set an independent course after kicking us out of their land and even fought a war
with China. We should still be paying reparations for the levels of death and destruction we brought to a country half a world
away with absolutely no means or desire to threaten the United States. All our wars of choice, starting with Korea, have been
similar crimes against humanity. Turkey shoots against third world societies with no way to do us any harm. But every one of
them fought ferociously to the death to defend their land and their people. Inevitably, every occupier is sent packing as their
empire crumbles. Obviously, Americans have been too thick to learn this from mere history books. We will only learn from our
tragic mistakes. I see a lot of lessons on the upcoming schedule.
USA did not "intervene" in a civil war. USA paid France to continue it's imperial war and then took over when France fled
defeated. USA prevented a mandated election Ho Chi Minh would win and then continued western imperial warfare against the Vietnamese
( even though Vietnamese was/is bulwark against China's territorial expansion).
mauisurfer , July 2, 2019 at 20:12
The Watson study says: "Indeed, the DOD is the world's largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly,
the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.4"
This is a gross UNDERcount of emissions. It includes ONLY petroleum burned.
It does NOT count explosions from bombs, missiles, rockets, rifles, etc.
Perhaps someone could provide an estimate of this contribution to greenhouse gases???
Don't worry, Elizabeth Warren has a plan to operate the military on renewables! (she can continue to make sure her constituency,
which is Raytheon, is well served)
Raytheon, one of the biggest employers in Warren's state, where it's headquartered, "has a positive relationship with Sen.
Warren, and we interact with her and her staff regularly," Michael Doble, a spokesman for the company, said.
jo6pac , July 2, 2019 at 20:12
This awful news for the merchants of death and I'm sure they're working overtime to stop silliness;-). I do hope this isn't
killed by those that love the endless wars.
Thanks AH
mbob , July 2, 2019 at 20:10
Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. Rather than support President
Trump's efforts to end the Korean War, to reduce our involvement in the Middle East and to pursue a more peaceful path with
Russia, the Democratic party (with very, very few exceptions) is opposed to all these things.
The Democratic party places its hatred for Trump above its professed love of peace.
President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the
US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton
destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions.
From a peace perspective, Trump looks comparatively great (provided he doesn't attack Iraq or invade Venezuela). But, since
it's impossible to recognize Trump for anything positive, or to support him in any way, it's now impossible for Democrats to
promote peace. Doing so might help Trump. It would, of necessity, require acknowledging Trump's uniqueness among recent US Presidents
in not starting new wars.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 03:28
I agree. mbob makes perfect sense in his analysis.
The Democrats must be brought back to reality with a sound repudiation by the voters, otherwise they are of no use to America
and will have no long-term future.
Obama escalated Afghanistan when he had a popular mandate to withdraw. He facilitated the the Syrian rebellion in conjunction
with ISIS funding Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He instigated the Zalaya (primarily Hillary) and the Ukraine rebellion.
Trump supports the Yemeni genocide.
But yes citizens have been directed to hate Trump the man/symptom rather than the enduring Imperial predatory capitalistic
system.
Opps sorry; so many interventions and invasions, under Obama, special forces trained Malian general overthrew the democratically
elected president of Mali, result, more war,death and destruction.
Robert , July 3, 2019 at 10:48
You are correct in your analysis. Allegra Harpootlian is searching for the peace lobby among Democrat supporters, where it
no longer resides.
As a result of corporate-controlled mainstream media and their support for Democrat elites, Democrat supporters have largely
been brainwashed into hatred for Donald Trump and everything he stands for. This hatred blinds them to the far more important
issue of peace.
Strangely, there is huge US support to remove troops from the ME, but this support resides with the overwhelming majority
of Donald Trump voters. Unfortunately, these are not individuals who typically go to peace demonstrations, but they are sincere
in bringing all US troops home from the ME. Donald Trump himself lobbied on this, and with the exceptions of his anti-Iranian
/ pro-Israel / pro-Saudi Arabia stance and withdrawal from JCPOA, he has not only backed down from military adventurism, but
is the first President since Eisenhower to raise the issue of the influence of the military-industrial complex.
In the face of strong opposition, he is the first President ever to enter North Korea and meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss
nuclear weapons. Mainstream media continues its war-mongering rhetoric, attacking Trump for his "weakness" in not retaliating
against Iran, or in meeting "secretly" with Putin.
Opposition to Trump's peace efforts are not limited to MSM, however, but are entrenched in Democrat and Republican elites,
who attack any orders he gives to withdraw from the ME. It was not Trump, but Democrat and Republican elites who invited NATO's
Stoltenberg to speak to Congress in an attempt to spite Trump.
In essence, you have President Trump and most of his supporters trying to withdraw from military engagements, with
active opposition from Democrats like Adam Schiff, and Republican elites, actively promoting war and military spending.
DJT is like a less-likeable Inspector Clouseau. Sometimes ineptitude is a blessing. You also have a few Republicans, like
journalist Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and Democrats, like Tulsi Gabbard, actively pushing the message of peace.
Erelis , July 3, 2019 at 20:45
I think you got it. The author is right in the sense that there is an anti-war movement, but that movement is in many ways
hidden. As bizarre as it may seen counter to CW wisdom, and in some way ironically crazy, one of the biggest segments of anti-war
sentiment are Trump supporters. After Trump's decision not to attack Iran, I went to various right wing commentators who attacked
Trump, and the reaction against these major right wing war mongers was to support Trump. And with right wing commentators who
supported Trump, absolute agreement. These is of course based on my objective reading reading and totally subjective. But I
believe I am right.
This made me realize there is an untapped anti-war sentiment on the right which is being totally missed. And a lack of imagination
and Trump derangment syndrome which blocks many on the anti-war Left to see it and use it for an anti-war movement. There was
an article in The Intercept that looked research on the correlation between military deaths and voting preference. Here is the
article:
And the thing is that Trump was in many ways the anti-war candidate. And those areas that had high military death rates voted
for Trump. I understand the tribal nature of political affiliation, but it seems what I have read and this article, there may
be indeed an untapped anti-war stance with Trump supporters.
And it really just challenges my own beliefs that the major obstacle to the war mongers are Trump supporters.
mbob I couldn't have said it better myself. Except to add that in addition to destroying Libya, the Nobel Peace Prize winner
Obama, ably assisted by Hillary Clinton, also destroyed Honduras and the Ukraine.
Anarcissie , July 3, 2019 at 11:55
Historically, the Democratic Party has been pro-war and pro-imperialism at least since Wilson. The hatred for Trump on their
part seems to be based entirely on cultural issues -- he is not subservient enough to their gods.
But as for antiwar demonstrations, it's been proved in the streets that they don't accomplish anything. There were huge demonstrations
against the war in Vietnam, but it ground on until conservatives got tired of it. At least half a million people demonstrated
against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and no one important cared. Evidently more fundamental issues than the war of the moment
are involved and I think that is where a lot of people are turning now. The ruling class will find this a lot harder to deal
with because it's decentralized and widely distributed. Hence the panic about Trump and the seething hatred of Sanders.
mbob , July 3, 2019 at 18:15
I attempted to make three points in my post. First, Democrats are now pro-war. Second, solely regarding peace, Trump looks
better than all other recent Presidents because he hasn't started any new wars. Third, the inability of Democrats (or the public
as a whole) to give Trump the benefit of a doubt, or to support him in any way, is contrary to the cause of peace.
Democrats should, without reservation, support Trump's effort to end the Korean War. They should support Trump's desire to
improve relations with Russia. They don't do either of those things. Why? Because it might hurt them politically.
Your comment does not challenge the first two points and reinforces the third.
As for Yemen, yes, Trump is wrong. Democrats rightly oppose him on Yemen -- but remarkably tepidly. Trump is wrong about
a lot of things. I don't like him. I didn't vote for him. But I will vote for him if Democrats nominate someone worse than him,
which they seem inclined to do. (Gabbard is better than Trump. Sanders probably. Maybe Warren. Of the three, only Warren receives
positive press. That makes me skeptical of her.)
Trump stood up to his advisors, Bolton and Pompeo, regarding both Iran and Venezuela. Obama, on the other hand, did not.
He followed the advice of his advisors, with disastrous consequences.
>>In addition to Tuesday's sanctions, the Treasury Department issued an advisory to maritime shipping companies, warning
them off transporting oil to Syria or risking their property and money seized if kept with financial institutions that follow
U.S. sanctions law.
"The United States will aggressively seek to impose sanctions against any party involved in shipping oil to Syria, or seeking
to evade our sanctions on Iranian oil," said Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence,
in a release. "Shipping companies, insurers, vessel owners, managers, and operators should all be aware of the grave consequences
of engaging in sanctionable conduct involving Iranian oil shipments."<<
Today British marines seized a tanker near Gibraltar for the crime of transporting oil to Syria. And Trumpian peaceful military
seized Syrian oil fields. Traditional war is increasingly augmented by piracy, which is less bloody, but trades outright carnage
for deprivation of civilians. Giving "measured praise" for that makes me barf.
The problem here is that the US population is too brainwashing with jingoism and Exceptionalism to value Tulsi message. The
US army is mercenary army and unlike situation with the draft people generally do not care much when mercenaries die. That makes
any anti-war candidate vulnerable to "Russiagate" smear.
He/she need to have a strong domestic program to appeal to voters, So far Warren is in better position in this area then
Tulsi.
Notable quotes:
"... The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate. ..."
"... On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense." ..."
"... In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable." ..."
"... Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end." ..."
"... Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging ..."
"... In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. ..."
"... And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. ..."
"... Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. ..."
"... She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently. ..."
"... To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. ..."
Last Wednesday’s debate among half of the announced Democratic Party candidates to become their party’s nominee for
president in 2020 was notable for its lack of drama. Many of those called on to speak had little to say apart from the usual
liberal bromides about health care, jobs, education and how the United States is a country of immigrants. On the following
day the mainstream media anointed Elizabeth Warren as the winner based on the coherency of her message even though she said
little that differed from what was being presented by most of the others on the stage. She just said it better, more
articulately.
The New York Times’
coverage was typical, praising Warren for her grasp of the issues and her ability to present the same
clearly and concisely, and citing a comment "They could teach
classes in how Warren talks about a problem and weaves in answers into a story. She's not just
wonk and stats." It then went on to lump most of the other candidates together, describing
their performances as "ha[ving] one or two strong answers, but none of them had the electric,
campaign-launching moment they were hoping for."
Inevitably, however, there was some disagreement on who had actually done best based on
viewer reactions as well as the perceptions of some of the media that might not exactly be
described as mainstream. The Drudge Report website
had
its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of
Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing
paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search
engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the
debate.
On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced
an
article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by
Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot
to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of
Defense."
Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates,
confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously
avoided. In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has
to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had
been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers
who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will
tell you that answer is unacceptable."
At another point she expanded on her thinking about America's wars, saying "Let's deal with
the situation where we are, where this president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the
brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war
that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms' lives. The American people need to
understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything
that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee
crisis. And it wouldn't be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war.
This is why it's so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say no
war with Iran."
Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment,
saying
that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after
the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned
tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end."
Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to
"defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is
clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging. So why was there
such a difference between what ordinary Americans and the Establishment punditry were seeing on
their television screens? The difference was not so much in perception as in the desire to see
a certain outcome. Anti-war takes away a lot of people's rice bowls, be they directly employed
on "defense" or part of the vast army of lobbyists and think tank parasites that keep the money
flowing out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics,
Boeing and Lockheed Martin like a perpetual motion machine.
In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her
must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out
undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the
Vietnam War back in 1968. McCarthy was right and Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the Democratic
Party were wrong. More recently, Congressman Ron Paul tried twice to bring some sanity to the
Republican Party. He too was marginalized deliberately by the GOP party apparatus working
hand-in-hand with the media, to include the final insult of his being denied any opportunity to
speak or have his delegates recognized at the 2012 nominating convention.
And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National
Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be
marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating
from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be
at war with Russia and possibly also with China.
Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be
difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities,
leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past
twenty years. To qualify for the second round of debates she has to gain a couple of points in
her approval rating or bring in more donations, either of which is definitely possible based on
her performance. It is to be hoped that that will occur and that there will be no Debbie
Wasserman Schultz hiding somewhere in the process who will finagle the polling results.
Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is
not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal
Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also
breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning,
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren,
who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss
Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu
and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her
view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups,
but she has moderated her views recently.
To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the
mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine
antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. It is essential
that we Americans who are concerned about the future of our country should listen to what she
has to say very carefully and to respond accordingly.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a
501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is [email protected]
"... The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers ..."
"... It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States ..."
"... American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose." ..."
"... The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president ..."
"... Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency an ever-present threat in Latin America. ..."
"... The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems ..."
"... The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss ..."
"... Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style. ..."
"... When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. ..."
"... Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products. ..."
"... Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. ..."
"... This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism. ..."
"... The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland ..."
"... The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution. ..."
"... America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other. ..."
"... You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. ..."
"... This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight. ..."
"... Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors. ..."
"... But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". ..."
"The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose
tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute,
or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries
play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing
and loss of life by soldiers."
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness
. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend,
a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
His most recent books include " and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance
to the Jubilee Year "; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy , and J Is for
Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
, among many other books.
We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson's seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire
, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on
food imperialism.
... ... ...
Bonnie Faulkner : In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ,
you write: "The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset." When was the World Bank set up and
by whom?
Michael Hudson : It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent
on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries even all the rest of the world could not
dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this
veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got
to lose."
The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant
Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60).
McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick
was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.
Bonnie Faulkner : What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is
there a difference?
Michael Hudson : Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development.
"Development" was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness
opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system
on the dollar.
The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering
firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports
and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation
of European colonialism.
In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on "Imperialism in Africa" pointing out the fiasco of European railroad
investment in Africa: "Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must
open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions
of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry."
That is why, James explained "only governments can afford to operate them," while being burdened with heavy interest obligations.
[1] What was "developed" was Africa's
mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of "development" lending without
apology.
The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to
protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate
for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in
their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on
the domestic economy while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client
oligarchies from loss.
The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes
its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring
on a depression austerity and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as "rationalizing labor markets." The rationalizing
is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim and effect is to prevent countries from essentially following
the line of development that had made the United States rich by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public
subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting
and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding
heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there
were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?
MICHAEL HUDSON : When I went to work on Wall Street in the '60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan,
and we used the IMF's monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country's statistics would
be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market,
and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital
flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency an ever-present threat
in Latin America.
The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital
outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments
problems.
The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency
to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out
of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a "stabilization" program. It is never effective
in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public
infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators
have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.
When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have
to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We're talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic
currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize
capital flight when that policy "fails" to achieve its pretended objective of growth.
All hyperinflations of Latin America Chile early on, like Germany after World War I come from trying to pay foreign debts
beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange
rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.
A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: "Okay, banks
and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can't pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic
development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we're going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid."
That's what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States
stemming from World War I.
Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within
the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries.
So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don't approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency
if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its
diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression
of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.
BONNIE FAULKNER : How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you're a millionaire, and you see that your
country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos,
escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the
dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.
This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the
Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a "sovereign high-yield
fund"). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45
percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos .
Scudders' salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy
it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third
World bonds and couldn't see how these countries could pay.
Merrill Lynch was the fund's underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments
in Scudder's these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy
it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized
that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges.
In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other
Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated
in hard dollars.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they
were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Well, countries don't pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn't want
to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told
that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.
Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor's wages. Other elements of
exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary
system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.
According to the IMF's ideological models, there's no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive
in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest
creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor
needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So you're saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt
, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism . These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously
anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.
BONNIE FAULKNER : With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity
MICHAEL HUDSON : They weren't junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren't
really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest.
Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, "You banks and the IMF have
made bad loans, and you've made them under false pretenses a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity.
We're not going to pay." They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were
a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.
The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires
holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the "Legarde List." But the IMF said, in effect that its
loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the
bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and
wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF
so vicious an institution.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren't junk, because
they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?
MICHAEL HUDSON : The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of
these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds.
No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy
overrode democratic choice.
Investors didn't believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries
that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in
their own national interest. They didn't believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.
They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped
up by the United States. That's why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming
to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along
the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and
the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you
should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I've put together to ask
you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn't be written down.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their
not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would
only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.
The terms are being written down because it's obvious that Puerto Rico can't pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population
to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don't want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece
when their industry and economy was shut down, then you're going to have to provide stability or else you're going to have half
of Puerto Rico living in Florida.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?
MICHAEL HUDSON : A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It's
the antithesis of democracy, so it's never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United
States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous
waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: "We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American
war and you're an occupied country, and we're going to keep you that way." Obviously this is causing a political resentment.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You've already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary
of defense?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of
a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the
World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry,
agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic
game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.
In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages
in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia's President Putin said
that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia's population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is
the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land
to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?
MICHAEL HUDSON : One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports
and food exports. The aim is to buttress America's agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is
not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export
crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become
dependent on American farmers and political sanctions.
In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain
export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export
controls and helped feed China.
The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and
other tropical products, and they won't feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy
does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from
its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it
from growing its own grain or food crops. It's completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper,
guano and other natural resources.
The idea is to create interdependency one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being
self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, "We're going to starve
you by not feeding you." Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can't say, "We're going to let you freeze in the dark by
not sending you oil," because America's independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze
in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.
So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country
control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.
There's a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: "Don't do as we do. Do as we say." The only way it can
enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right
wing. For instance, when Hillary's State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed
the Hondurans, she said: "This person has to go." That's why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now,
because they can't live in their own country.
The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under
the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you're saying that they wouldn't,
and that's why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a concise way of putting it Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which
it is lending?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country
can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there's no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in
these foreign currencies.
Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its
own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called
back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system's interconnections
to stop payments from being made.
After America installed the Shah's dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under
the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came
due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense
Department, I don't know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was
in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah's puppet government had signed. America
simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest
under the agreement of 2016.
America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do
the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system
to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other.
This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans
to de-dollarize.
BONNIE FAULKNER : I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country's domestic currency be preferable to the country
taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you've explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would
be able to repay it.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes. You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if
U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis
in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap
in Korea and other Asian countries.
This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital
controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.
But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it's denominated
in dollars, Americans don't own most of this debt. It's their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin
America to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad
to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting
it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You say that: "While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at
its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud." How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar
global system?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops
so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring
new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity
in American agriculture from the 1930s to '50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.
But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade
and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's
called "grandfathering". The Americans said: "We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country
can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops
and growing crops that we can't grow in the United States." That's what's so evil about the World Bank's development plan.
BONNIE FAULKNER : According to your book: "Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension
services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive." Why can't infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy's
overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you're a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you're doing business in domestic currency. It doesn't
help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent
countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they're not able to give price supports or provide government marketing
services for their agriculture.
America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists
that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the
economy. So it's a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are
called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.
This is what the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency
in food, realizing that if you're going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That's why the United
States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If a country takes out an IMF loan, they're obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can't they
take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?
MICHAEL HUDSON : You don't need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency.
There's no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don't these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Their leaders don't want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of
foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It's the mentality of foreign
central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that's
how to get ahead. Essentially, they're opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won't have socialist
central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So we're back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and
the power structure in these countries so that they don't rebel.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive,
this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I've talked to people
at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: "We simply buy
them off. They do it for the money." So you don't need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist
enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that "by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail." What
is food blackmail?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you pursue a foreign policy that we don't like -- for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we're
trying to smash up to grab its oil -- we'll impose financial sanctions against you. We won't sell you food, and you can starve.
And because you've followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you're dependent on us, the
United States and our Free World Σ allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States,
as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that: "World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency
above all on the United States as food supplier." Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other
reasons as well?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I'm not sure at what point this became
thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result.
They believed the free-trade junk economics that's taught in the schools' economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.
When we're dealing with economic planners, we're dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its
unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There's something autistic about most economists, which is
why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what
it's best at not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we're in a real world of economic
and military warfare.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to
feed the peoples of developing countries?
MICHAEL HUDSON : World poverty is viewed as solution , not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced
labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World
Bank and IMF is an economic solution that's built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought
out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential
plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?
MICHAEL HUDSON : No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you
had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash
Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase
Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American.
That killed any alternative to the World Bank.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what
is the effect?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are
natural monopolies the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them
with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business
in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and
its European allies.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow
from the World Bank?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank to make
sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed
to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn't make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own
currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay
by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their
infrastructure is to export to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.
This is what John Perkins' book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was
to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more which required
breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF
encourage.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets,
so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren't.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. They'll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You've
dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution the mining slag and
what Marx called the excrements of production.
This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally,
they call their "Development," but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank's client countries.
BONNIE FAULKNER : When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in
1972, how was it received?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from
the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have
me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid
per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.
I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said
I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the
White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.
The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise,
it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese.
He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was
received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish,
and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book
has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn't understand how
their own system worked?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went
by, you had an organization called "Fifty Years Is Enough." And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz
became the World Bank's chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find
that indeed it didn't work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If
he didn't understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get
through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive
the system is.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Michael Hudson, thank you very much.
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's always good to be here, Bonnie. I'm glad you ask questions like these.
I've been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr.
Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall
Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972
book, Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies
through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today's broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com.
He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson
acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at
gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join
our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at
[email protected]. Follow us
on Twitter at #gandbradio.
"... Kolomoisky is the man who controls the recently elected Jewish president Zelensky -- a comedian. ..."
"... Let's not forget that Theresa May is the one who has worked assiduously on trying to overcome the results of the British referendum. She does not believe in democracy. ..."
"... This man most certainly made a substantial offshore payment to Largarde or her companies or her lawyers. That is how it works everywhere. ..."
She robbed the French taxpayer of some 404 billion Euros. The fact that she is not in
prison while protesters are being injured weekly by the French police tells you a lot about
why these people are protesting.
Since then, she has continued with her corrupt behaviour by greatly enriching the
Ukrainian/Israeli oligarch Kolomoisky -- who robbed his own bank.
How Christine Lagarde, Clinton and Nuland Funded a Massive Ukrainian Ponzi
Scheme
Kolomoisky is the man who controls the recently elected Jewish president Zelensky -- a
comedian.
I think the writer pays too much to the attire of May and Lagarde -- The pearls, the tweed
and gingham suits -- when their corruption is totally 21st century. Let's not forget that
Theresa May is the one who has worked assiduously on trying to overcome the results of the
British referendum. She does not believe in democracy. Replies: @Logan
, @George F.
Held
One of the functions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is imposing austerity
measures on the people of poor countries seeking bailouts, so perhaps choosing a corporate
lawyer to run it is fitting.
@Logan
ness tampering. After a high-profile case against public prosecutor Éric de
Montgolfier, he was sentenced in 1995 by the Court of Appeals of Douai to 2 years in prison,
including 8 months non-suspended and 3 years of deprivation of his civic rights.
"... All of this is "theater," distractions and moot points. No country is going to invade America or "take away our freedoms." America already is the "safest" nation on the earth due to geography and our massive nuclear deterrence. This would be even more true if America did not stir up every hornet nest is the world. Ironically, the one thing that can make our country less safe is continuing with all the "meddling" we now specialize in. ..."
"... If we stopped pursuing our "national interests," the "interests" of 99.9 percent of Americans would be enhanced. ..."
Andrew Bacevich
takes aim at the bogus hawkish "credibility" argument:
But does making threats and then dropping bombs enhance credibility? If so,
notwithstanding Obama's and Trump's own occasional qualms, the United States would have
amassed vast stores of the stuff over the past 30 years or so. Presidents since Ronald
Reagan, including Obama and Trump, have followed up threats with bombs on myriad occasions.
Targeted nations have included Libya, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia,
Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, with the punitive action episodic in some
cases and sustained in others. No nation in recent memory has dropped more pieces of ordnance
on more countries than has the United States. Indeed, no other nation comes close.
Over those same 30 years, however, America's standing as a global leader has declined. It
turns out in practice that credibility is less a function of using force than of
demonstrating prudence. Yet somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist
attacks of 9/11, those charged with formulating U.S. policy decided that the dictates of
prudence need not apply to the actions of the world's one and only indispensable nation. In
recent decades, the abiding feature of American statecraft has been grandiosity, with
military activism camouflaging a loss of strategic realism.
Resorting to force frequently over the last several decades has not made the U.S. more
respected, trusted, or reliable in its commitments. When hawks warn that a "failure" to strike
this or that country could undermine our "credibility," they want us to believe that hostile
states will think they can get away with attacking our allies and that our allies will fear
that our government won't come to their assistance. They continually confuse decisions about
whether to initiate hostilities against other states with decisions about whether to respond to
aggression in defense of allies, but this just calls attention to the fact that the military
intervention they want has nothing to do with our security or the security of our allies.
"Failing" to bomb Syria in 2013 did not put any of our allies in greater danger, and I
suspect more than a few of our allies were glad that our government refrained from committing
more illegal acts of war. Backing off from an illegal attack on Iran has not encouraged rivals
to be more aggressive, but the possibility of starting a war over a drone alarmed our allies
that our government was once again prepared to plunge into an unnecessary war because of a
crisis of Trump's own making. Other states do not believe our government to be unwilling to
back up threats, especially when it concerns something that genuinely affects the U.S. and our
allies, but many of them do worry that our government is overeager to pick fights and look for
reasons to use force when alternatives are available. Like a trigger-happy vigilante, our
government uses force all the time for any reason and frequently for no good reason at all.
"Credibility" is just the most convenient excuse.
It is significant that the "credibility"-worshipers that complain when the U.S. doesn't
attack another country have little or nothing to say about the effect on our reputation when
the president reneges on international agreements negotiated in good faith. "Credibility" fans
don't particularly care if other states don't trust our promises when it relates to anything
else, but they are livid when a president doesn't seize every opportunity to rain down death
and destruction on other countries. I submit that no one making "credibility" arguments really
believes them, but they use these arguments to stoke fear that "inaction" (i.e., not killing
people) might be more dangerous than "action" (i.e., killing those people). "Failing" to bomb
another country doesn't have negative consequences for the U.S. (how could it?), but reneging
on diplomatic commitments is likely to make other governments less likely to trust our promises
and less likely to enter into agreements with our government in the future. Hawks don't have
much of a problem with the latter because they aren't interested in making diplomatic
agreements, but they are very worried that the U.S. "misses" the chance to launch an attack
because they want to get the U.S. embroiled in new conflicts. "Credibility" is the ready-made
excuse to launch attacks when no U.S. interests are at stake, and it can be reused over and
over to sell gullible people on wars we don't need. The price of those wars is then paid by the
people in the affected countries and our military. It's time to stop buying into the incredible
"credibility" argument.
All of this is "theater," distractions and moot points. No country is going to invade
America or "take away our freedoms." America already is the "safest" nation on the earth
due to geography and our massive nuclear deterrence. This would be even more true if
America did not stir up every hornet nest is the world. Ironically, the one thing that
can make our country less safe is continuing with all the "meddling" we now
specialize in.
If we stopped pursuing our "national interests," the "interests" of 99.9 percent of
Americans would be enhanced.
With all due respect Mr. Smith things have really gone down hill after Bush Sr. I'm talking
about direct attacks on the rights of American citizens. Bush Sr. (R) with his CIA drug dealing
with the help of Noriega. He purchased weapons with the proceeds to arm terrorist guerrilla
groups in Nicaragua. Bill Clinton (D) helped Bush Sr. as governor of Arkansas by covering up
any investigation targeting the operation and laundering their money through a state owned
bank. Bush Jr. (R) secured lands in Afghanistan in order to restart athe heroine trade by
growing poppy fields to process and ship back to the US. Obama (R) made sure the Mexican drug
cartels were well armed in order to launch a drug war that supported the Merida Initiative,
which allowed armed DEA, CIA and Mercenaries into Mexican territory. Trump (R) will be the
clean up hitter that will usher in the dollar collapse.
Mr. Smith do you really believe it is a coincidence that Rep 8 yrs, Dem 8yrs, Rep 8yrs, Dem
8yrs, Rep 3 yrs are voted in? Please sir, don't fool yourself because in the next election I
will bet money the orange fool will be president for another 4 years unless the owners don't
want him there. But we can safely say that history tells us he will. All I'm saying that people
like you, waiting for someone to throw you a rope because you've fallen into deep water are
waiting on a rescue boat that doesn't care if you drown.
Your best bet for change was thrown away when Dr. Ron Paul failed to be nominated. Us dumb
asses in Mexico didn't need another election fraud this time around! The people started YouTube
channels that reported the "real" news (Chapucero – Quesadillas de Verdades –
Charro Politico – Sin Censura, etc.). Those channels made a big difference, countering
the negative reporting by Mexican and US MSM that the Presidential Candidate for MORENA as
"Leftist", "Communist", "Socialist", "Like Hugo Chavez", "Dangerous", etc.
With all of the US propaganda, Mexican propaganda, the negative MSM and Elite financing,
Mexicans knew they had to get out and vote in record numbers and they did! Otherwise a close
election was seen as another loss and the end of Mexico as a country. People were ready to
fight and die if necessary. They had seen the Energy Reforms forced down our throat by the
corrupt PRI/PAN parties (Mex version o DEM/REP), with the help of Hillary Clinton and the US
State Department. They drafting the changes needed to the Mexican Constitution to allow a vote.
Totally against the Law in Mexico and I'm sure the laws of the US.
There is a saying that goes something like, "If you're not ready to die for Freedom, take it
out of your Vocabulary"!
Wars are necessary for the maintaining and expanding the US controlled neoliberal empire. Wars is the health of military
industrial complex.
The Deep State will bury any candidate who will try to change the USA forign policy. Looks
what happened to Trump. He got Russiagate just for vey modest proposal of detente with Russia
(of course not only for that, but still...)
Notable quotes:
"... The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they lied us into. ..."
Those are interesting proposals but wishful thinking: wars are necessary for Electing Tulsi Gabbard as our next Commander in Chief will not solve our biggest problems
alone.
Her candidacy, I believe , must be augmented by two new laws which should be demanded by the
taxpayer and enforced by her administration on "day one".
The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states
that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of
aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all
assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they
lied us into.
If they lied us into war .they pay for it NOT the US taxpayer.
The second is " The Terror Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ also retroactive to 2001,
it states that any and all individuals found to have engaged in plotting, planning, or staging
"false terror events" will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any
and all of the assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit to pay down the cost of
our War on Terror.
Americans should not have to sacrifice one cent of their tax dollars to pay for their own
defrauding by "staged" or "phony" terror events.
I believe that were Tulsi to be elected, she should set up two new task forces designed
especially for these reasons, Try to think of them as the " Office of Special Plans" IN
REVERSO.!.
Moreover she should hold weekly press briefings to notify the taxpayer of her progress, and
also how much of our 23 trillion in losses , FROM THEIR LIES, she has been able to recoup.
Getting these two initiatives up and running is the most potent force the taxpayers have in
cleaning out the fraud and larceny in DC, .ending our illegal wars overseas .. and
(finally)holding our "establishment elite " accountable for "LYING US INTO THEM"
It is way overdue for the American Taxpayer to take back control of our government from
those who ALMOST BANKRUPTED OUR ENTIRE NATION BY LYING US INTO ILLEGAL WARS.
It is not enough any more just to complain or "kvetch" about our problems .put on your
thinking caps .and start coming up with solutions and initiatives .start fighting for your
freedom, your finances and your future.
Elect the leaders YOU WANT and tell them exactly what you want them to do!
Tulsi has promised us all "SERVICE OVER SELF"
There you go !
I say that means not only ENDING our ILLEGAL, CRIMINAL WARS .but GETTING AS MUCH OF OUR
MONEY BACK from those who lied us into them !
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR WAR FRAUD it is $23,000,000,000,000.00. in "heinous debt" .overdue!
Just in time for the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats have discovered that there is
real economic inequality in the United States. But they have not yet fully addressed the role
that the Democratic party and its leaders have played in creating this vast inequality that led
to the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.
The presidential candidates have been slow to fully recognize the role that former President
Bill Clinton's globalization policies (NAFTA and WTO) played in the outsourcing of American
jobs or the lowering of wages for workers.
As the Democratic presidential debates have shown, Vice President Biden is having a hard
time defending his long public record, especially as an opponent of federally mandated "forced"
busing to integrate our public schools decades after the Supreme Court's overturning of racial
segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As a Senator Joe Biden was a free
trade advocate as well.
But Senator Biden played a large role in creating inequality in two additional realms. He
was a strong backer of a 2005 bankruptcy "reform" law that made it harder for people to file
personal bankruptcy and to wipe out all of their debts. Given that perhaps as many as fifty
percent of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused by debt incurred from health care
not covered by insurance, this was an especially cruel blow to those seeking relief from their
heavy debt loads.
In "'
Lock the S.O.B.s Up: Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration ," The New York
Times documents his decades-long support of tough on criminals legislation, culminating in
the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill, signed into law by President
Clinton, has been blamed for the jailing of high numbers of African Americans and other
minorities, in particular.
Unlike the Republicans whose goal is to increase inequality by lowering taxes on the
wealthy, at least the Democrats seem sincere about reducing it. To do this, they have fallen
all over themselves to offer free college tuition and to reduce student loan debt. Sen. Bernie
Sanders recently proposed to
eliminate all student loans entirely .
Why have Democrats focused on college as a means of solving economic inequality? Statistics
have shown that in general the more education you have, the higher your lifetime earnings will
be. For example, men with bachelor's degrees earn nearly a million more
dollars in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates.
"... "Question: Mr President, you have given an extensive overview of different topics. A short time after you last met with Donald Trump, the Americans introduced new sanctions against Russia. Could you tell if you received some reassurances from Donald Trump that no new sanctions will follow this time, or do you think sanctions may be imposed again? Or are you confident that there will no more sanctions? ..."
"... "Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. This is not our business; it is up to the United States to think about how they should build relations with Russia. I think we have mutual understanding that we should somehow get out of the situation that has emerged so far. But this is the same as with our colleagues and partners from the UK. It is an abnormal situation, it must be simply rectified; we must somehow find the strength to turn the page, to move on and to look to the future. It is the same in relations with the United States. ..."
"... "Let me reiterate, I meet with US businesspeople, including at the St Petersburg Economic Forum. 550 people went there. They want to work. That means jobs, that means goals the President of the United State is trying to achieve. I actually said in that interview that after the globalisation processes led to such big growth of the world economy, even the middle class in the United States felt they were left behind. While large corporation made huge profits, their management got a lot of advantages as did their partners, the middle class did not, not very much. Wages remained the same, and the standard of living began to grow a little. Jobs are needed and conditions to raise real incomes of US citizens. To achieve that they need to expand cooperation and work with everyone, including Russia. ..."
"... "They restricted the operation of their companies in the Russian market. We made calculations across some European countries, and it really amounts to lost profits. Cutting exports (our imports are their exports) amounts to tens of billions of euros. That means jobs, either job cuts or jobs that were not created. The same applies to the United States. I hope that sanity will prevail in the end." ..."
"... That is a polite way of saying that sanity is not prevailing at the moment. Putin pointing out that there is nothing Russia can do about the current relationship between the US and Russia leaves no illusions as to who the insane party is. It is not within Russia's power to make America sane. There are no magic words they can utter to fix what ails the US. ..."
"... Globalization is simply a neoliberal economic substitute for colonialism. ..."
"... Neoliberals contrary to popular opinion do not believe in self-regulating markets as autonomous entities. They do not see democracy as necessary for capitalism. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalist world is not a borderless market without nations but a doubled world (economic -global and social- national) . The global economic world is kept safe from democratic national demands for social justice and equality, and in return each nation enjoys cultural freedom. ..."
"... Neoliberals see democracy as a real problem. Democracy means the unwashed masses can threaten the so called market economy (in fact manipulated and protected markets) with worker demands for living wages and equality and consumer demands for competitive pricing and safe products. Controlling both parties with money prevents that. ..."
"... In fact, neoliberal thinking is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes in one respect : "the market does not and cannot take care of itself". ..."
"... Neoliberals insulate the markets by providing safe harbor for capital, free from fear of infringement by policies of progressive taxation or redistribution. They do this by redesigning government, laws, and other institutions to protect the market. ..."
"... For example the stock market is propped up by the Feds purchases of futures, replacing the plunge protection teams intervention at an even more extreme level. Manipulation of economic statistics by the BLS also serve a similar purpose. ..."
"... What you described is precisely a symptom of falling profitability. Financialisation, for example, only increases when the "real economy" is not profiting enough anymore. ..."
"... "If you try to understand how so many jobs have disappeared, the answer that you come up with over and over again in the data is that it's not trade that caused that -- it's primarily technology," Eighty percent of lost jobs were not replaced by workers in China, but by machines and automation. That is the first problem if you slap on tariffs. What you discover is that American companies are likely to replace its more expensive workers with machines." ..."
"... More evidence for Marx's Law: the USA was a victim of its own success, not of its own failures, nor because of alien enemies. ..."
In case there are others aside from myself interested in the G-20 outcomes, here are a few
links to what IMO's important. Go here to get the links to the
three main documents G-20 produced: "G20 Osaka Leaders Declaration," "Osaka declaration on
digital economy," and "G20 Osaka leaders' statement on preventing exploitation of the
internet for terrorism and violent extremism conductive to terrorism (VECT)." Pepe
Escobar's recap . Transcript of Putin's post G20 news
conference.
I hoped when I added the presser link to the Putin interview thread and hinted there
were connections between them that another line of analysis would develop, but it seems
participants were way to immersed/invested in the liberalism debate to bother.
From the press conference, I'd like to point-out one of the Q&As related to the
illegal sanctions regime, economic development and how they interact with Trump's 2016
Campaign Pledges as we begin the 2020 election cycle:
"Question: Mr President, you have given an extensive overview of different topics.
A short time after you last met with Donald Trump, the Americans introduced new sanctions
against Russia. Could you tell if you received some reassurances from Donald Trump that
no new sanctions will follow this time, or do you think sanctions may be imposed again?
Or are you confident that there will no more sanctions?
"Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. This is not our business; it is up to the United
States to think about how they should build relations with Russia. I think we have mutual
understanding that we should somehow get out of the situation that has emerged so far.
But this is the same as with our colleagues and partners from the UK. It is an abnormal
situation, it must be simply rectified; we must somehow find the strength to turn the
page, to move on and to look to the future. It is the same in relations with the United
States.
"I told you that we reasserted our wish to support the business community's proposal
regarding tools for the support of business initiatives. But it shows that the incumbent
Administration has intentions to somehow continue with this abnormal situation. I spoke
about our trade with the United States and with some other partners. Obviously, $25
billion in trade does not meet our interests and does not reflect our potential.
"That is why I have no idea if they will do anything or not. At any rate, one thing is
sure – we are not going to ask for anything. No means no. And if there is interest,
we will respond in kind and will do everything we can to turn the situation around.
"Let me reiterate, I meet with US businesspeople, including at the St Petersburg
Economic Forum. 550 people went there. They want to work. That means jobs, that means
goals the President of the United State is trying to achieve. I actually said in that
interview that after the globalisation processes led to such big growth of the world
economy, even the middle class in the United States felt they were left behind. While
large corporation made huge profits, their management got a lot of advantages as did
their partners, the middle class did not, not very much. Wages remained the same, and the
standard of living began to grow a little. Jobs are needed and conditions to raise real
incomes of US citizens. To achieve that they need to expand cooperation and work with
everyone, including Russia.
"They restricted the operation of their companies in the Russian market. We made
calculations across some European countries, and it really amounts to lost profits.
Cutting exports (our imports are their exports) amounts to tens of billions of euros.
That means jobs, either job cuts or jobs that were not created. The same applies to the
United States. I hope that sanity will prevail in the end."
It appears that Trump needs to end his Trade and Sanctions Wars (although all the
illegal sanctions aren't his doing) in order to bolster his reelection chances. The
questions are, Will the sanction hawks like Mnuchin try to impede such a policy change
since it seems to be required for domestic politics and How will D-Party candidates treat
the issue, particularly as several are hooked on Russiagate Koolaid?
And do please note the question about the interview at the end, Putin's answer and how
he put in within the context of the G20!
Great quote of Putin by karlof1 @39. That final sentence says much, though:
"I hope that sanity will prevail in the end"
That is a polite way of saying that sanity is not prevailing at the moment. Putin
pointing out that there is nothing Russia can do about the current relationship between the
US and Russia leaves no illusions as to who the insane party is. It is not within Russia's
power to make America sane. There are no magic words they can utter to fix what ails the
US.
A minor correction to dh-mtl @59 where it was claimed "[The globalists] lost power from
the mid-1930s to 1980."
The globalists were never actually out of power in the US. Instead they were confronted
with a massive upsurge in radical organized labor that threatened to remove them from
power. The globalists had to make very significant concessions to buy time for that labor
uprising to subside. That happened to take almost half a century, but throughout that
period the globalists retained power, though in a somewhat weakened form. They are back at
full strength now
'But to say any one nation "produced" the current global market economic system is a bit
like saying Yahweh created all the heavens and the earth in 6 days.'
I never suggested that 'one nation' produced this global system.
What I was suggesting is that perhaps the financial elites who benefit from, as you
describe it, a 'financial system created by and for the wealthiest elites wherever they may
call home', and who controlled Reagan and Clinton and W and Obama, Blair and Cameron and
Macron and Merkel and Aznar in Spain, etc., etc., and hundreds of MEPs in the European
parliament, and who created the U.S. Deep State, control virtually all of western
main-stream media, and who place their people in control of institutions such as the World
Bank, and IMF, and UN and WTO and BIS, and who decide the fate of the world every year at
Davos and the Bilderberg conference, might have had something the do with creating the laws
and treaties that created that system.
This sounds like a pretty effective political system to me, though definitely not
democratic.
Carter agreed to appoint Volker in order to save the bondholders by destroying the
domestic economy with interest rates over 20% which is what actually cost him the 1980
election. In 1978, McNamara was sent off to the World Bank to work in tandem with IMF to
begin the imposition of the euphemized Structural Adjustment Programs--the globalized
version of Neoliberalism.
'the Trump-nationalists and Brexiteers do not offer an effective solution to problem of
wealth inequality which is your complaint'.
Wealth inequality is not my complaint. My point is that 'dictatorship', whether it be in
the hands of 'wealthy global elites', military or other, cannot achieve acceptable outcomes
for a large, complex, modern society, and that excessive wealth inequality is a sure
indicator of dictatorship.
The Trump-nationalists and Brexiteers may not have an effective solution. But they are
convinced that what has been going on in their societies over the past 30 plus years has
definitely not worked for them either. My analysis is that they are trying to return to the
conditions in which the outcomes were much better for them.
My own conviction is that acceptable outcomes for a society can only be achieved when
the political leaders are working on behalf of the society as a whole, rather than for a
narrow privileged group, and especially a group that has little or no allegiance to the
nation-state, whose boundaries define the society.
When the political leaders are truly working on behalf of the population as a whole,
there is a wide variety of policy options that can work. Trial and error over time will
ensure that the policy options that are most appropriate for a particular society and its
circumstances will eventually emerge.
Globalization is simply a neoliberal economic substitute for colonialism.
Neoliberals contrary to popular opinion do not believe in self-regulating markets as
autonomous entities. They do not see democracy as necessary for capitalism.
The neoliberal globalist world is not a borderless market without nations but a doubled
world (economic -global and social- national) . The global economic world is kept safe from
democratic national demands for social justice and equality, and in return each nation
enjoys cultural freedom.
Neoliberals see democracy as a real problem. Democracy means the unwashed masses can
threaten the so called market economy (in fact manipulated and protected markets) with
worker demands for living wages and equality and consumer demands for competitive pricing
and safe products. Controlling both parties with money prevents that.
In fact, neoliberal thinking is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes in one respect
: "the market does not and cannot take care of itself".
The neoliberal project did not liberate markets so much as protect them by protecting
capitalism against the threat of democracy and to reorder the world where borders provide a
captive market
Neoliberals insulate the markets by providing safe harbor for capital, free from fear of
infringement by policies of progressive taxation or redistribution. They do this by
redesigning government, laws, and other institutions to protect the market.
For example the stock market is propped up by the Feds purchases of futures, replacing
the plunge protection teams intervention at an even more extreme level. Manipulation of
economic statistics by the BLS also serve a similar purpose.
Another example is getting government to accept monopoly capitalism over competitive
capitalism and have appointed judges who believe illegal collusion is nothing more than
understandable and legal "conscious parallelism"
What you described is precisely a symptom of falling profitability. Financialisation,
for example, only increases when the "real economy" is not profiting enough anymore.
It's important to highlight that the tendency of the profit rate to fall doesn't
necessarily means a company is losing money, but just that the profit rate is secularly
decreasing. Since it's a tendency, it also doesn't mean this fall happens linearly: capital
still operates in cycles. However, over the long term, profit rates will fall, no matter
what.
The biggest reason Trump can't bring back home these manufacturing jobs is because they
have been lost in large part to the success of 'efficiency' in the US Over the past
three-and-a-half decades, manufacturers have shed more than seven million jobs while
producing more stuff than ever. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported in The
Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs that
"If you try
to understand how so many jobs have disappeared, the answer that you come up with over
and over again in the data is that it's not trade that caused that -- it's primarily
technology," Eighty percent of lost jobs were not replaced by workers in China, but by
machines and automation. That is the first problem if you slap on tariffs. What you
discover is that American companies are likely to replace its more expensive workers with
machines."
More evidence for Marx's Law: the USA was a victim of its own success, not of its own
failures, nor because of alien enemies.
When we speak of unadulterated capitalism and capital, we start with the most basic
capital we have, our hands. If I go and LABOUR by planting a tree and caring for it, the
fruit I consider mine. I might give those away at choice, or exchange them for something
else of value. That something eventually became known as money, a commonly recognised unit,
it's strength being that it could not be replicated, and its worth accepted in a wider
market by others. The fruit of a persons labour was transmitted to descendants and family
in tradition, in a society that respected that tradition. The whole process is very very
personal, including where extended business starts appearing.
Now, you want me to both accept taxation, where to not compete is a losing proposition,
and to accept that finance is able to conjure up replica money using that taxation as
basis, with which I have to compete with own earnings that are steadily purposefully
diluted - I take it very very very personally. What are you going to offer me, subsidy from
the pooled value now under your control ? Because it is a social and "fair" management of
reality ? Communism and socialism do not work, they remove the most natural good incentives
a person can have to actually go out and achieve anything, they dull what are otherwise
lively common understandings, they diminish societies that otherwise have open appreciation
for the effort of others. They try to own those, and they end up as dictatorships to try to
impose an own ideological dream. The same can be said of crony capitalism, which approaches
fascism.
That is why I subscribe to minarchic classical liberal notions of organisation, with
hard money and transparency of finance, as compromise. You know Iran and Saudi are gold
backed, don't you. You can figure out from that part of what is going on, maybe.
"... If her trend of seriously closing the favorability gap with Joe Biden is any indication, if her broad but incomplete acceptability to the Clinton and the Sanders wings of the Democratic party is any indication, we would have to answer that question with a fairly emphatic, "yes, she can." ..."
On the first night of the first Democratic debates, Elizabeth Warren gave a master class in
when to speak and when to keep one's mouth shut. This is a lesson former Vice President Joe
Biden could learn a ton from.
When Waren did speak, it was clear, passionate, on point, and richly factual. On health
care, she even surprised a bit by committing to eliminating private insurance where she has
previously hedged her betting.
... ... ...
Can Warren beat Biden? If her trend of seriously closing the favorability gap
with Joe Biden is any indication, if her broad but incomplete acceptability to the Clinton and
the Sanders wings of the Democratic party is any indication, we would have to answer that
question with a fairly emphatic, "yes, she can."
Whether she will depends on a number of factors, some within, some beyond her control. In my
view, the most critical tasks within her control are finding a way to a coherent foreign policy
position and pivoting to an efficient answer on the DNA testing question that simultaneously
educates regarding and firmly rejects blood quantum theories of race.
"... Sanders and Warren are not what they claim to be. They are both updating Roosevelt's New Deal and more closely resemble the Social Democrats that have governed western European democracies for years, delivering higher standards of living than that experienced by Americans. ..."
"... In May 2009, the moderate Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, said: "The banks – hard to believe when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." ..."
"... In the new book, Banking on the People , by Ellen Brown, readers can get an idea of the way large banks, insurers, and the giant shadow banking system – money market funds, hedge funds, mortgage brokers, and other unregulated financial intermediaries – speculate and shift deep risk and their failures onto Uncle Sam. These corporate predators gouge customers, and, remarkably, show a deep aversion for productive investment as if people matter. ..."
"... Control of our political economy is not a conservative/liberal or red state/blue state issue. When confronted with the specifics of the corporate state or corporate socialism, people from all political persuasions will recognize the potential perils to our democracy. No one wants to lose essential freedoms or to continue to pay the price of this runaway crony capitalism. ..."
"... The gigantic corporations have been built with the thralldom of deep debt – corporate debt to fund stock buybacks (while reporting record profits), consumer debt, student loan debt, and, of course, government debt caused by drastic corporate and super-rich tax cuts. Many trillions of dollars have been stolen from future generations. ..."
Trump Invites Debates over Omnivorous Crony Capitalism
Donald J. Trump's 2020 election strategy is to connect
his potential Democratic opponents with "socialism." Trump plans to use this attack on the
Democrats even if Senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly calls himself a "democratic socialist,"
doesn't become the presidential nominee (Sanders has been decisively re-elected in Vermont).
Senator Elizabeth Warren is distancing herself from the socialist "label." She went so far
as to
tell the New England Council "I am a capitalist to my bones."
Sanders and Warren are not what they claim to be. They are both updating Roosevelt's New
Deal and more closely resemble the Social Democrats that have governed western European
democracies for years, delivering higher standards of living than that experienced by
Americans.
The original doctrine of socialism meant government ownership of the means of production
– heavy industries, railroads, banks, and the like. Nobody in national politics today is
suggesting such a takeover. As one quipster put it, "How can Washington take ownership of the
banks when the banks own Washington?"
Confronting Trump on the "socialism" taboo can open up a great debate about the value of
government intervention for the good of the public. Sanders can effectively argue that people
must choose either democratic socialism or the current failing system of corporate socialism.
That choice is not difficult. Such an American democratic socialism could provide almost all of
the long overdue solutions this country needs: full more efficient Medicare for all;
tuition-free education; living wages; stronger unions; a tax system that works for the people;
investments in infrastructure and public works; reforms for a massive, runaway military budget;
the end of most corporate welfare; government promotion of renewable energies; and the end of
subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
In my presidential campaigns I tried to make corporate socialism – also called
corporate welfare or crony capitalism – a major issue. Small business is capitalism
– free to go bankrupt – while corporate capitalism – free to get bailouts
from Washington – is really a form of corporate socialism. This point about a corporate
government was documented many years ago in books such as America, Inc. (1971) by Morton
Mintz and Jerry Cohen.
Now, it is even easier to make the case that our political economy is largely controlled by
giant corporations and their political toadies. Today the concentration of power and wealth is
staggering. Just six capitalist men have wealth to equal the wealth of half of the world's
population.
The Wall Street collapse of 2008-2009 destroyed eight million jobs, lost trillions of
dollars in pension and mutual funds, and pushed millions of families to lose their homes.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. government used trillions of taxpayer dollars to bail out, in
various ways, the greedy, financial giants, whose reckless speculating caused the collapse.
In May 2009, the moderate Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, said: "The banks – hard
to believe when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still
the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."
Is there a single federal government agency or department that can say its most powerful
outside influence is NOT corporate? Even the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations
Board are under more corporate power than union power.
Who better than Trump, on an anti-socialist fantasy campaign kick, can call attention to the
reality that Big Business controls the government and by extension controls the people? In
September 2000, a Business Week poll found over 70 percent of people agreeing that big
business has too much control over their lives (this was before the horrific corporate
crimes and scandals of the past two decades). Maybe that is why support in polls for
"socialism" against "capitalism" in the U.S. is at a 60 year high.
People have long experienced American-style "socialism." For example, the publicly owned
water and electric utilities, public parks and forests, the Postal Service, public libraries,
FDIC guarantees of bank deposits (now up to $250,000), Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,
etc.
What the public is not sufficiently alert to is that Big Business has been profitably taking
over control, if not outright ownership, of these public assets.
In the new book, Banking on the
People , by Ellen Brown, readers can get an idea of the way large banks, insurers, and
the giant shadow banking system – money market funds, hedge funds, mortgage brokers, and
other unregulated financial intermediaries – speculate and shift deep risk and their
failures onto Uncle Sam. These corporate predators gouge customers, and, remarkably, show a
deep aversion for productive investment as if people matter.
Moreover, they just keep developing new, ever riskier, multi-tiered instruments (eg.
derivatives) to make money from money through evermore complex, abstract, secret,
reckless, entangled, globally destabilizing, networks. Gambling with other people's money is a
relentless Wall Street tradition.
The crashes that inevitably emerge end up impoverishing ordinary people who pay the price
with their livelihoods.
Will the Democrats and other engaged people take Trump on if he tries to make "socialism"
the big scare in 2020? Control of our political economy is not a conservative/liberal or red
state/blue state issue. When confronted with the specifics of the corporate state or corporate
socialism, people from all political persuasions will recognize the potential perils to our
democracy. No one wants to lose essential freedoms or to continue to pay the price of this
runaway crony capitalism.
The gigantic corporations have been built with the thralldom of deep debt – corporate
debt to fund stock buybacks (while reporting record profits), consumer debt, student loan debt,
and, of course, government debt caused by drastic corporate and super-rich tax cuts. Many
trillions of dollars have been stolen from future generations.
No wonder a small group of billionaires, including George Soros,
Eli Broad , and Nick Hanauer, have just publicly urged a modest tax on the super wealthy.
As Hanauer, a history buff and advocate of higher minimum wages, says – "the pitchforks
are coming."
The hostess at the seaside restaurant had an eastern European accent, so he asked her where
she was from. She said, "Belgrade, Serbia." He told her he was sorry for what the U.S.
government led by Bill Clinton had done to her country and that he considered Clinton a war
criminal. She said the bombing in 1999 was terrifying, and even though she was young at the
time, she vividly remembered it.
It traumatized her, her parents, and her family. Then she smiled and said that in the month
she had been in the U.S. for her summer job, all the Americans she had met had been so
friendly. He welcomed her to the U.S., and as he was walking away, he remembered that Clinton's
savage bombing of Serbia that had killed so many Serbian children and other innocents had been
code-named "Operation Noble Anvil."
He wondered what kind of "noble" people would think of innocent children as anvils: "heavy
usually steel-faced iron blocks on which metal is shaped," and did the friendly Americans
accept Clinton's sick lies when he ended his March 24, 1999 war address to the American people
with these words: "Our thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our armed
forces, who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children's future.
May God bless them, and may God bless America."
The banal, 1967 hit song, "San Francisco" (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair), which was
influential in enticing young people to come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, was
written by "Papa" John Philips, who attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and whose father
was a Marine Corps Captain. "Papa" John's wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was
involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam. His neighbor and Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles)
buddy was Jim Morrison of Doors fame, whose father US Navy Admiral George Morrison commanded
U.S. warships in Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf during the "Tonkin Gulf Incident."
Frank Zappa, the father figure of Laurel Canyon's many musicians who just happened to
converge in one place at the same time where a covert military film studio operated, had a
father who was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal.
Stephen Stills, David Crosby and many other soon to be famous musicians all came from
military and intelligence backgrounds and frolicked in Laurel Canyon. Although they were draft
age, none of them was drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock
movement whose music was catchy but innocuous and posed no threat to the establishment. But
"shit happens."
In his disturbing book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon , David McGowan raises the
question: "what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the
'movement') were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were
supposedly harassing them?
What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a
grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and
marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily
controlled and led astray . What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same
team?"
"... The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and international skepticism attests. ..."
"... Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown. ..."
"... Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something of an argument that began: ..."
"... He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out. Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf. They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share. Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. ..."
"... Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. ..."
"... There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were, they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack ..."
"... Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But he's not done with the disinformation exercise: ..."
"... The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification ..."
It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is
responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today. This assessment is based
on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation,
recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the
area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.
This is only the latest in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran
and its surrogates against American and allied interests, and they should be understood in
the context of 40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.
The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US
government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible
investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike
Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media
ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo
and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and
international skepticism attests.
Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute
appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire
amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the
Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned
Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown.
First, what actually happened, as best we can tell five days later? In the early morning of
June 13, two unrelated tankers were heading south out of the Strait of Hormuz, sailing in open
water in the Gulf of Oman, roughly 20 miles off the south coast of Iran. The tankers were most
likely outside Iran's territorial waters, but within Iran's contiguous zone as defined by the
UN Convention on
the Law of the Sea . At different times, some 30 miles apart, the two tankers were attacked
by weapons unknown, launched by parties unknown, for reasons unknown. The first reported
distress call was 6:12 a.m. local time. No one has yet claimed responsibility for either
attack. The crew of each tanker abandoned ship soon after the explosions and were rescued by
ships in the area, including Iranian naval vessels, who took the Front Altair crew to an
Iranian port.
Even this much was not certain in the early afternoon of June 13 when Mike Pompeo came to
the lectern at the State Department to deliver his verdict:
It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is
responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today.
Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who
made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something
of an argument that began:
This assessment is based on intelligence .
He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence
assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out.
Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf.
They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share.
Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had
a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that
Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first
claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US
doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had
operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. After intelligence, Pompeo continued:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used .
Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used
torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to
the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any
actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. He went on:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation
The "level of expertise needed" to carry out these attacks on a pair of sitting duck tankers
does not appear to be that great. Yes, the Iranian military probably has the expertise, as do
the militaries of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel, or others with a stake
in provoking a crisis in the region. And those who lack the expertise still have the money with
which to hire expert surrogates. The number of credible suspects, known and unknown, with an
interest in doing harm to Iran is easily in double figures. Leading any serious list should be
the US. That's perfectly logical, so Pompeo tried to divert attention from the obvious:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping .
There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were,
they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six
examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack. The one example was the May 12, 2019,
attack on four ships at anchor in the deep water port of Fujairah. Even the multinational
investigation organized by the UAE could not determine who did it. The UAE reported to the UN
Security Council that the perpetrator was likely some unnamed "state actor." The logical
suspects and their surrogates are the same as those for the most recent attack.
Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old
threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by
the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an
unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But
he's not done with the disinformation exercise:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no
proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high
degree of sophistication.
The whole proxy group thing is redundant, covered by "the level of expertise needed"
mentioned earlier. Pompeo doesn't name any proxy group here, he doesn't explain how he could
know there's no proxy group that could carry out such an attack, and he just throws word
garbage at the wall and hopes something sticks that will make you believe – no evidence
necessary – that Iran is evil beyond redemption:
Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace
and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable campaign of
escalating tension by Iran.
The attacks in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been provoked by the US and its
allies. The US has long been a clear threat to international peace and security, except when
the US was actually trashing peace and security, as it did in Iraq, as it seems to want to do
in Iran. There is, indeed, "an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension," but it's a
campaign by the US. The current phase began when the Trump administration pulled out of the
multinational nuclear deal with Iran. The US wages economic warfare on Iran even though Iran
continues to abide by the Trump-trashed treaty. All the other signatories and inspectors
confirm that Iran has abided by the agreement. But Iran is approaching a point of violation,
which it has been warning about for some time. The other signatories allow the US to bully them
into enforcing US sanctions at their own cost against a country in compliance with its
promises. China, Russia, France, GB, Germany, and the EU are all craven in the face of US
threats. That's what the US wants from Iran.
Lately, Trump and Pompeo and their ilk have been whining about not wanting war and claiming
they want to negotiate, while doing nothing to make negotiation more possible. Iran has
observed US actions and has rejected negotiating with an imperial power with a decades-long
record of bad faith. Lacking any serious act of good faith by the US, does Iran have any other
rational choice? Pompeo makes absolutely clear just how irrational, how dishonest, how
implacable and untrustworthy the US is when he accuses Iran of:
40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.
This is Big Lie country. Forty years ago, the Iranians committed their original sin –
they overthrew one of the world's most brutal dictatorships, imposed on them by the US. Then
they took Americans hostage, and the US has been playing the victim ever since, out of all
proportion to reality or justice. But the Pompeos of this world still milk it for all it's
worth. What about "unprovoked aggression," who does that? The US list is long and criminal,
including its support of Saddam Hussein's war of aggression against Iran. Iran's list of
"unprovoked aggressions" is pretty much zero, unless you go back to the Persian Empire. No
wonder Pompeo took no question on his statement. The Big Lie is supposed to be enough.
The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification. Democrats should have
objected forcefully and continuously long since. Democrats in the House should have put peace
with Iran on the table as soon as they came into the majority. They should do it now.
Democratic presidential candidates should join Tulsi Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren in
forthrightly opposing war with Iran. Leading a huge public outcry may not keep the president
from lying us into war with Iran any more than it kept the president from lying us into war
with Iraq. But an absence of outcry will just make it easier for this rogue nation to commit a
whole new set of war crimes.
Intellectually, the case for normal relations with Iran is easy. There is literally no good
reason to maintain hostility, not even the possibility, remote as it is, of an Iranian nuclear
weapon (especially now that Trump is helping the Saudis go nuclear). But politically, the case
for normal relations with Iran is hard, especially because forty years of propaganda demonizing
Iran has deep roots. To make a sane case on Iran takes real courage: one has to speak truth to
a nation that believes its lies to itself.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism,
and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from
Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an
Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first
published in Reader Supported
News . Read
other articles by William .
The New York Times is outraged, just outraged! -- that US anti-tank missiles have been found
in "unknown" Libyan rebel hands .
Of course, when tons of American military hardware was covertly sent to al-Qaeda linked
"rebels" fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and when those same weapons were later
transferred to the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria , many of them no doubt used by ISIS and
al-Nusra Front, the mainstream media didn't find much to complain about. But now the "scandal"
is being uncovered in 2019?
Currently, it's the UN-backed government in Tripoli which finds itself on the receiving end
of deadly accurate high-tech US-made weapons systems, according to
the Times :
Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles , usually sold
only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli
this week.
The four Javelin anti-tank missiles, which cost more than $170,000 each, had ended up
bolstering the arsenal of Gen. Khalifa Hifter , whose forces are waging a military campaign
to take over Libya and overthrow a government the United States supports.
Markings on the missiles' shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to
the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.
... ... ...
The Times report noted further, "If the Emirates transferred the weapons to
General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a
United Nations arms embargo ."
Gen. Haftar -- who
solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south
early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire
country, with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by
Turkey and most European countries.
Haftar has long been described by many analysts as "the CIA's man in Libya" -- given he
spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia during Gaddafi's rule.
He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi's eventual capture and field
execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011. The NYT offered further
details of the US weapons recovered this week
as follows :
Markings on the missile crates identify their joint manufacturer, the arms giants Raytheon
and Lockheed Martin , and a contract number that corresponds with a $115 million order for
Javelin missiles that was placed by the United Arab Emirates and Oman in 2008.
Again, isn't it a little late for the mainstream media to somehow only now discover and care
about the "scandal" of major US weapons systems in "unknown rebel hands" ?
For a trip down memory lane, and to review just what Obama and Hillary's original Libya war
has wrought, see Dan Sanchez's 2015 essay,
"Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?"
The CIA knows where these weapons are. All POTUS' know where these weapons are. The
Israelis know where these weapons are. The Saudis and UK know where these weapons are. What
is the problem?
" "We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously," a
State Department official
said in a statement following the Javelin anti-tank missile recovery.
"We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all
recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations," the
statement continued. "
Hilarious. Do they expect the "unknown" rebels to just return them? If they're unknown,
how do tehy know they're rebels?
But i guess they're not worried under Obama thousands of these missiles were supplied to
Islamic Terrorists in Syria. And now Trump gave the green light to supply more missiles to
Turkish Islamic Terrorists in Syria. That are slaughtering Thousands of Syrian soldiers with
these missiles.
See better discussion at
platts.com "But US LNG could face problems of its own the current low prices are forcing ever growing numbers of US producers
into bankruptcy. According to a recent report by Haynes and Boone, 90 gas and oil producers in the US and Canada have filed for bankruptcy
between January 2015 and the start of August 2016." So $2 price at Henry Hub should rise to at least $4 for companies to stay in business.
Notable quotes:
"... Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is produced domestically, the rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%. ..."
"... The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage. ..."
"... Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017. ..."
"... s mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines. This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources. ..."
"... This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe. ..."
"... Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG, a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security. ..."
"... The European countries do not appear to be dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" ..."
"... The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. ..."
One of the most important energy battles
of the future will be fought in the field of liquid natural gas (LNG). Suggested as one of the main solutions to
pollution , LNG offers the possibility
of still managing to meet a country's industrial needs while ameliorating environmental concerns caused by other energy sources.
At the same time, a little like the US dollar, LNG is becoming a tool Washington intends to use against Moscow at the expense of
Washington's European allies.
To understand the rise of LNG in global strategies, it is wise to look at a
graph (page 7)
produced by the International Gas Union (IGU) where the following four key indicators are highlighted: global regasification capacities;
total volumes of LNG exchanged; exporting countries; and importing countries.
From 1990 to today,
the world has grown from 220 million tons per annum (MTPA) to around 850 MTPA of regasification capacity. The volume of trade
increased from 20-30 MTPA to around 300 MTPA. Likewise, the number of LNG-importing countries has increased from just over a dozen
to almost 40 over the course of 15 years, while the number of producers has remained almost unchanged, except for a few exceptions
like the US entering the LNG market in 2016.
There are two methods used to transport gas.
The first is through pipelines, which reduce costs and facilitate interconnection between countries, an important example of
this being seen in Europe's importation of gas. The four main pipelines for Europe come from four distinct geographical regions:
the Middle East, Africa, Northern Europe and Russia.
The second method of transporting gas is by sea in the form of LNG, which in the short term is more expensive, complex and
difficult to implement on a large scale. Gas transported by sea is processed to be cooled so as to reduce its volume, and then
liquified again to allow storage and transport by ship. This process adds 20% to costs when compared to gas transported through
pipelines.
Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is
produced domestically, the
rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain
led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%.
The construction of infrastructure to accommodate LNG ships is ongoing in Europe, and some European countries already have a limited
capacity to accommodate LNG and direct it to the national and European network or act as an energy hub to ship LNG to other ports
using smaller ships.
"All of Europe's LNG terminals are import facilities, with the exception of (non-EU) Norway and Russia which export LNG. There
are currently 28 large-scale LNG import terminals in Europe (including non-EU Turkey). There are also 8 small-scale LNG facilities
in Europe (in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Gibraltar). Of the 28 large-scale LNG import terminals, 24 are in EU countries
(and therefore subject to EU regulation) and 4 are in Turkey, 23 are land-based import terminals, and 4 are floating storage and
regasification units (FSRUs), and the one import facility in Malta comprises a Floating Storage Unit (FSU) and onshore regasification
facilities."
The countries currently most involved in the export of LNG are Qatar (24.9%), Australia (21.7%), Malaysia (7.7%), the US (6.7%),
Nigeria (6.5%) and Russia (6%).
Europe is one of the main markets for gas, given its strong demand for clean energy for domestic and industrial needs. For this
reason, Germany has for years been engaged in the Nord Stream 2 project, which aims to double the transport capacity of gas from
Russia to Germany. Currently the flow of the Nord Stream is 55 billion cubic meters of gas. With the new Nord Stream 2, the capacity
will double to 110 billion cubic meters per year.
The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation
to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria,
Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies
like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction
of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to
derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage.
Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore
in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in
perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017.
ENI's discovery has generated important planning for the future of LNG in Europe and in Italy.
Problems have arisen ever since Donald Trump sought to oblige Europeans to
purchase LNG from the US in
order to reduce the trade deficit and benefit US companies at the expense of other gas-exporting countries like Algeria, Russia and
Norway. As mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines.
This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne
gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into
its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources.
This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports
to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant
decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe.
But Europe finds itself in a decidedly uncomfortable situation that cannot be easily resolved. The anti-Russia hysteria drummed
up by the Euro-Atlantic globalist establishment aides Donald Trump's efforts to economically squeeze as much as possible out of European
allies, hurting European citizens in the process who will have to pay more for American LNG, which costs about a fifth more than
gas from Russian, Norwegian or Algerian sources.
Projects to build offshore regasifiers in Europe appear to have begun and seem unlikely to be affected by future political vagaries,
given the investment committed and planning times involved:
"There are currently in the region of 22 large-scale LNG import terminals considered as planned in Europe, except for the planned
terminals in Ukraine (Odessa FSRU LNG), Russia (Kaliningrad LNG), Albania (Eagle LNG) Albania being a candidate for EU membership
and Turkey (FSRU Iskenderun and FSRU Gulf of Saros).
Many ofthese planned terminals, including Greece (where one additional import terminal is planned Alexandroupolis), Italy
(which is considering or planning two additional terminals Porto Empedocle in Sicily and Gioia Tauro LNG in Calabria) , Poland
(FSRU Polish Baltic Sea Coast), Turkey (two FSRUs) and the UK (which is planning the Port Meridian FSRU LNG project and UK Trafigura
Teesside LNG). LNG import terminal for Albania (Eagle LNG), Croatia (Krk Island), Cyprus (Vassiliko FSRU), Estonia (Muuga (Tallinn)
LNG and Padalski LNG), Germany ( Brunsbόttel LNG), Ireland (Shannon LNG and Cork LNG), Latvia (Riga LNG), Romania (Constanta LNG),
Russia (Kaliningrad LNG) and Ukraine (Odessa).
Nine of the planned terminals are FSRUs: Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the UK. "In
addition, there are numerous plans for expansion of existing terminals, including in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands,
Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK."
Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share
of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not
surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG,
a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security.
The European countries do not appear to be
dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been
evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" This, however, is not the case with
all allies. Germany is not economically able to interrupt Nord Stream 2. And even though the project has many high-level sponsors,
including former chancellor Gerhard Schrφder, the project constantly seems to be on the verge of being stopped at least in Washington's
delusions.
Even Eni's discovery of the gas field in Egypt has annoyed the US, which wants less competition (even when illegal, as in the
case of Huawei) and wants to be able to force its exports onto Europeans while maintaining the price of the LNG in dollars, thereby
further supporting the US dollar as the world's reserve currency in the same manner as the
petrodollar .
The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's
behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. The Europeans appear
prepared to set whatever course the US has charted them, one away from cheaper gas sources to the more expensive LNG supplied from
across the Atlantic. Given the investments already committed to receive this LNG, it seems unlikely that the course set for the Europeans
will be changed.
I live in Europe. I can honestly say that the people I know here prefer Russian gas. People are very ticked off about how the
US meddled in their gas supply and the structuring of the pipelines. Most feel that even if US LNG WAS competitive with Russian
gas price for now, that the US would in some way either increase prices or use it in some other way to control or manipulate the
EU. And sentiment towards USA tends toward resentment and distrust. That's not to say they are necessarily pro-Russia, but definitely
a wave of anti US is present.
US LNG pricing is based on Henry Hub which today is under $2.30/mmbtu.
Even adding in liquefaction and shipping costs, the price to the end user is extremely low.
Henry hub is projected to be sub $3 for DECADES!
Combine the low price with spot deliveries (pipe usually demands long term contracting commitments), and US LNG actually has
strong rationale for being accepted.
The statement above that US LNG cannot compete against Australia in Asia is preposterously false due to the VERY high buildout
costs of the Aussie LNG infrastructure.
Next year, Oz's first LNG IMPORT terminal at Port Kembla may well be supplied with US LNG.
The US has shown itself to be unreliable as a supplier of anything. Political posturing will always take precedence over any
international transaction.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia in your post can be said of the U.S.
I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to
project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary warfare , and thereby influence
events abroad. Depending on their size and infrastructure, they can be used as
staging areas or for logistical, communications and
intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have resulted in overseas military bases being established in
large numbers by world powers and the existence of
bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The U.S. has 36 listed here with none
of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
Whilst the left wants to go full throttle towards Wind and Solar, no one knows that the natural gas lobby is behind these sources
because both sources need a backup. While everyone talks "carbon footprint" they never discusses plant efficiency ( or
in the terms of engines brake specific fuel consumption and turbine specific fuel consumption ) in terms of thermal efficiency.
You know the boring stuff that plant operators stress over to make sure when your wife wakes up @ 3 in the morning to feed the
baby, the lights do go on, and they are creating that wattage in an cost affective manner. With that said, the king of thermal
efficiency i.e. burning a fuel to create electricity, is the Combined Cycle Natural Gas Power Plant. These plants combines a stationary
gas turbine buring natural gas to spin a generator and a boiler on the back side capture the waste heat to create steam to spin
a turbine to again add an input to the generator for a current state of the art of 61% efficiency . That means only 39%
going up the stack or for steam cooling to get your "Delta T" for the steam cycle to work. This 61% is vs maybe in the mid 40's
for a coal, oil plant or in the case of Nuclear just waste heat with nothing going out a stack. The greater wattage per fuel burned,
and the modularization of these Combined Cycle Plants aka have a series of 100mw turbines and bring them on line as needed, make
this a win-win IMHO for a massive refurbishing of our Utility base, with a host of benefits, before Gen 3 & Gen 4 Nuclear truly
take off again. These plants could be a great stop gap before Gen 3 & 4 are a reality. All the macinations towards wind and solar
and their disavantages aka being bird vegamatics, vistas being spoiled and huge swaths of land being used for panels make no sense
vs energy density of efficient plants. We are the Natural Gas King, lets not flare it anymore, and really, really leverage it
here, help allies, and use it for bringing bad behaving children of the world to the table ifyou will, if you want the candy,
behave....
Why do we have to treat other countries like we're the parent? We aren't. They are equal and fully functioning countries quite
capable of determining their own political and economic future...which may involve not trading or interacting with the U.S. Particularly
if we demand of them conditions we ourselves would never accede.
The Lithuanian FSRU "Independence" which was delivered from Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2014 to the port of Klaipeda drove
energy costs for heating through the roof and perhaps is one of the reasons the Prime Minister at the time only came in third
in the latest presidential elections. You can stay reasonably warm, eat or have money for medicine and other necessities. Pick
2 ONLY. Thank you USSA
Brainsick as Pompeo the US Pork without character.
As Long as Russia dlivery theier gas constantly and for a much better price then Us-Shale idiots, the ziocons only can lose.
We Europeans are not very impressed.
The biggest Capitalist economy on the planet needs to use mob tactics to push its over priced wares- seems 'long term' is not
part of their hit-and-run operation.
Now as for the article; apart from a few Eastern European Countries (The Ukraine, Poland etc.), I have seen no proof whatsoever,
that Europe is shifting to US LNG.
As for "As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?""; I am sorry,
but I think those days are over..... this can be seen in our Iranian stance, the 2 Russian pipelines - 1 being Nordstream II and
the other Turk-stream, increased trade with Russia, joining the the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and so on and
so on......
Slowly but surely the anti-Russia propaganda is dying. You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some people
all of the time (libtards), but you can't fool all the people all of the time. Europeans (the citizens) will question why they
should pay 20-30% more for their natural gas just to please America. Politicians better have an answer or change of policy if
they want to be reelected.
"... "The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the theft? How about divide and conquer? ..."
"... "Meanwhile, our ruling overlords pick their next puppet, let us all "vote" on computerized machines, and then the talking heads announce the "winner".And it all starts over. Just about covers it.. ..."
"... Do you remember that one of the first things that he did when first elected was to gather the oligarchs and make them sign in !public! that from now on they will start paying taxes, treat their workers as humans and not mess in politics. The famous moment when Deripaska forgot to give Putin back his pen, the "please, give me my pen back" by Putin and the scared look on Deripaska's face? ..."
"... How much taxes did Yukos/Khodorkovsky pay? Anyone aware of the famous scheme where crude oil was classified in accounting as "earthen liquid", then bought from subsiduaries for nothing, so no taxes were paid. And now Gazprom or Rosneft announce that they have an annual income of 100 billion USD (figures are as an example) and that they paid 50 billion of it as taxes to the state? ..."
"... The situation in Russia in Putin's early years was so dire that there was no other future but breakup and misery. You make your conclusions. ..."
"... Seems a lot of folks think these "Russian Oligarchs" just showed up out of the blue.Russia was a communist country so how did a few 20/30 year olds communists manage to become billionaire oligarchs in 10 years or less after the fall of communism? My guess is money from the west supplied to a few to buy up Russia for less than pennies on the dollar. ..."
"... This is a good video on the rise of the oligarchs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLNKqbwec0s ..."
"... It is some time since I watched it, but a big part of how the oligarchs came to control most of the state assets was in the way Anatoly Chubais went about privatisation. From memory all citizens were given paper that gave them part ownership of state assets. The wannabe oligarchs snapped these up for peanuts and owned the bulk of what were state assets. ..."
"... Putin is in the role of mediator between these power centers. He also tries to rally the population (Russians know what revolution means) by religion, "traditional values", the promise of security and stability, and yes - Make Russia Great Again - therefore - Peter the Great. ..."
"... The problem is that Russian oligarchy is without legitimacy. Most oligarchy world wide is based on historical robbery but in Russia it is within this generation . They used to be part of the Soviet nomenklatura Communist Party network. It IS conceivable to litigate the riches robbed from the people in the 1990's (and has been done to oligarchs "not close to Putin") and the only shield between "the oligarchs" and Russians considering this idea is Putin's popularity and "Russian conservatism". ..."
"The neoliberal economic plan is to suck
the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How
to keep the working class from noticing the theft? How about divide and conquer?
Absolutely
right on target..
@21 also with;
"Meanwhile, our ruling overlords pick their next puppet, let
us all "vote" on computerized machines, and then the talking heads announce the "winner".And
it all starts over. Just about covers it..
At the end of the interview, Putin is asked to name someone he admires (I might have
misremembered so do correct me if that wasn't the question). His answer surprised me - Peter
the Great. That answer surprised me as there are some things about Peter the Great that
wouldn't seem so admirable, but then I suppose much flowed from his reign.
Dostoievski did
have roots in the liberalism of the day, being a Saint Petersburg resident and all, and his
great talent was achieved thanks to the Europeanization which Peter helped bring about for
Russia. His, Dostoievski's novels draw on European literature but bring to it a quality that
is uniquely Russian. So too does their classical music, the ballet, opera - and Russian's
know full well that their own Tchaikovski and many of their great dancers were and are gay.
Do you then condemn and reject? No, you do not. They are great artists; you cannot. There's
the depth of Russian complexity - it is both east and west and its Christianity, as well as
its atheism, is too.
It was Dostoievski after all, who found solace in the belief that the Russian people were
the source of Russia's greatness, while embracing the slavic heritage; so indeed there is an
interesting mixture there of elite and not so elite, which refuses really to be categorized
as this or that 'ism'. It's like the idea of multipolarity - all fervent beliefs are to be
respected but not one dominating over all the rest.
C I eh? , Jun 29, 2019 3:58:10 AM |
112BG , Jun 29, 2019 4:18:59 AM |
113
Has everybody forgotten the mess Russia was in during the late 90s? The Russians have not.
In 1999, Shamil Basaev and his gang were on the verge of taking over Dagestan and
completely cutting Russian land connection to the Eastern parts of the Caucasus. After it
became clear how serious the situation was, Putin became Prime minister and on New Year's day
Yeltsin resigned transferring power to Putin.
The first thing Putin did as acting president was to visit the troops in Chechnya and
raise morale. In two years, the war was basically over, the rest being mop-up ops only.
Do you remember that one of the first things that he did when first elected was to gather
the oligarchs and make them sign in !public! that from now on they will start paying taxes,
treat their workers as humans and not mess in politics. The famous moment when Deripaska
forgot to give Putin back his pen, the "please, give me my pen back" by Putin and the scared
look on Deripaska's face?
Didn't Putin say in the early 2000s:"It is best for you to keep your money in Russia. Or
you may found yourself choked by dust chasing for your money fruitlessly in Western courts"?
Oh, the irony, 15 years later...
How much taxes did Yukos/Khodorkovsky pay? Anyone aware of the famous scheme where crude
oil was classified in accounting as "earthen liquid", then bought from subsiduaries for
nothing, so no taxes were paid. And now Gazprom or Rosneft announce that they have an annual
income of 100 billion USD (figures are as an example) and that they paid 50 billion of it as
taxes to the state?
The situation in Russia in Putin's early years was so dire that there was no other future
but breakup and misery. You make your conclusions.
Seems a lot of folks think these "Russian Oligarchs" just showed up out of the blue.Russia was a communist country so how did a few 20/30 year olds communists manage to become
billionaire oligarchs in 10 years or less after the fall of communism? My guess is money from
the west supplied to a few to buy up Russia for less than pennies on the dollar.
Putin described Oligarchs as people that influence the government in ways that create even
more wealth for themselves. In that regard he said there are no more oligarchs in Russia.
It is some time since I watched it, but a big part of how the oligarchs came to control
most of the state assets was in the way Anatoly Chubais went about privatisation. From memory
all citizens were given paper that gave them part ownership of state assets. The wannabe
oligarchs snapped these up for peanuts and owned the bulk of what were state assets.
I don't know about "coddling". But it is clear that - apart from the military-industrial
complex, the securitiy services and state controlled oil and gas, this is where the power is
in Russia.
Putin is in the role of mediator between these power centers. He also tries to rally the
population (Russians know what revolution means) by religion, "traditional values", the
promise of security and stability, and yes - Make Russia Great Again - therefore - Peter the
Great.
The problem is that Russian oligarchy is without legitimacy. Most oligarchy world wide is
based on historical robbery but in Russia it is within
this generation . They used to be part of the Soviet nomenklatura Communist Party
network. It IS conceivable to litigate the riches robbed from the people in the 1990's (and
has been done to oligarchs "not close to Putin") and the only shield between "the oligarchs"
and Russians considering this idea is Putin's popularity and "Russian conservatism".
These high-profile cases suggest that Russian legal outcomes, while unpredictable if one
goes by the content of the law, are entirely predictable if one knows the preferences of
the political sovereign: the Kremlin always wins.
However, this predictability is exaggerated. Outside a few very salient cases, the
Kremlin either does not reveal its preferences or simply has no preferences.
When the Kremlin's position is uncertain, lower-level political actors, the prosecution,
and judges try to guess the politically correct outcome and this guessing game introduces
significant unpredictability into the legal regime. In addition, when political actors vie
for relative power within the regime, they often seek to demonstrate that power by
influencing court decisions in politically relevant cases.
Consider the frequent conflicts between mayors of major cities and regional governors.
These conflicts are often fought vicariously through court cases, with each side attempting
to mobilize enough political resources up the power ladder to secure a victory in court.
Judges face the tough task of interpreting the signals that come from judicial superiors
and the extrajudicial actors to deliver a decision that would be acceptable to whoever
represents power (vlast') in that concrete case.
add to 132 - So the only security for Russian oligarchs is to legalize their riches abroad -
which they have done - or - if forced to keep their capital in Russia because of sanctions -
Putin.
The proposed legislation that was known as Rotenberg's Law (after Italy sanctioned Arkady
Rotenberg's properties in that country) passed a first reading in the Duma in October 2014.
That is not the same as being declared law:
there is a second reading in the Duma the legislation should have undergone and passed, and
that second reading appears not to have been done . Objections to the legislation were
raised by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the Supreme Arbitration Court, and
the Minister for Economic Development at the time (late 2014) also raised concerns.
It seems odd that every business venture that might need some government funding or
funding to develop necessary infrastructure has to undergo deliberation twice by lower houses
in a country's parliament and then passed through the senate or its equivalent before the
venture can go ahead?
If business people talk to Putin or people close to him, that does not mean their venture
can go ahead without being put to tender or subjected to scrutiny to see that it complies
with current regulations. I merely observed that it seems that business people who happen to
meet Putin or talk to him about a venture they might have, seem to get tarred with the "Putin
crony" brush.
The Moscow Times is an English-language weekly newspaper with a small circulation (about
55,000) which is given away for free. For several years it was published by a Finnish company
(Sanoma Corporation). The newspaper is currently owned by a Dutch-based owner and its CEO
runs a catering business for commercial airlines. For a leading English-language Russian
newspaper, The Moscow Times seems to have a poor business model.
"... To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D'Andrea. D'Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program, and he ran the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach. ..."
"... What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D'Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D'Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed attitude toward Iran, D'Andrea is known -- ironically -- as "Ayatollah Mike." ..."
"... D'Andrea and people like Bolton are part of an ecosystem of men who have a visceral hatred for Iran and who are close to the worldview of the Saudi royal family . These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking a war against Iran. Nothing should be put past them. ..."
"... D'Andrea's twin outside the White House is Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire who set up two groups that are blindingly for regime change in Iran. The two groups are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and Counter Extremism Project. There is nothing subtle here. These groups -- and Kaplan himself -- promote an agenda of great disparagement of Muslims in general and of Iran in particular. ..."
"... It is fitting that Kaplan's anti-Iran groups bring together the CIA and money. The head of UANI is Mark Wallace, who is the chief executive of Kaplan's Tigris Financial Group, a financial firm with investments -- which it admits -- would benefit from "instability in the Middle East." Working with UANI and the Counter Extremism Project is Norman Roule, a former national intelligence manager for Iran in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ..."
"... These men -- Kaplan and Bolton, D'Andrea and Shihabi -- are eager to use the full force of the U.S. military to further the dangerous goals of the Gulf Arab royals (of both Saudi Arabia and of the UAE). When Pompeo walked before cameras, he carried their water for them. These are men on a mission. They want war against Iran. ..."
In 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a special unit -- the Iran Mission Center -- to focus attention on
the U.S. plans against Iran . The initiative for this unit came from CIA director John Brennan, who left his post as the Trump administration
came into office. Brennan believed that the CIA needed to focus attention on what the United States sees as problem areas -- North
Korea and Iran, for instance. This predated the Trump administration.
Brennan's successor -- Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director for just over a year (until he was appointed U.S. Secretary of State)
-- continued this policy. The CIA's Iran-related activity had been conducted in the Iran Operations Division (Persia House). This
was a section with Iran specialists who built up knowledge about political and economic developments inside Iran and in the Iranian
diaspora.
It bothered the hawks in Washington -- as one official told me -- that Persia House was filled with Iran specialists who had no
special focus on regime change in Iran. Some of them, due to their long concentration on Iran, had developed sensitivity to the country.
Trump's people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group that would provide the kind of intelligence that tickled the fancy
of his National Security Adviser John Bolton .
To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D'Andrea. D'Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program,
and he ran the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach.
It was D'Andrea who expanded the CIA's drone strike program, in particular the signature strike. The signature strike is a particularly
controversial instrument. The CIA was given the allowance to kill anyone who fit a certain profile -- a man of a certain age, for
instance, with a phone that had been used to call someone on a list. The dark arts of the CIA are precisely those of D'Andrea.
What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D'Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told
me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D'Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed
attitude toward Iran, D'Andrea is known -- ironically -- as "Ayatollah Mike."
D'Andrea and people like Bolton are part of an ecosystem of men who have a visceral hatred for Iran and who are close to the
worldview of the Saudi royal family . These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking
a war against Iran. Nothing should be put past them.
D'Andrea and the hawks edged out several Iran experts from the Iran Mission Center, people like Margaret Stromecki -- who had
been head of analysis. Others who want to offer an alternative to the Pompeo-Bolton view of things either have also moved on or remain
silent. There is no space in the Trump administration, a former official told me, for dissent on the Iran policy.
Saudi Arabia's War
D'Andrea's twin outside the White House is Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire who set up two groups that are blindingly for regime
change in Iran. The two groups are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and Counter Extremism Project. There is nothing subtle here.
These groups -- and Kaplan himself -- promote an agenda of great disparagement of Muslims in general and of Iran in particular.
Kaplan blamed Iran for the creation of ISIS, for it was Iran -- Kaplan said -- that "used a terrible Sunni movement" to expand
its reach from "Persia to the Mediterranean." Such absurdity followed from a fundamental misreading of Shia concepts such as taqiya,
which means prudence and not -- as Kaplan and others argue -- deceit. Kaplan, bizarrely, shares more with ISIS than Iran does with
that group -- since both Kaplan and ISIS are driven by their hatred of those who follow the Shia traditions of Islam.
It is fitting that Kaplan's anti-Iran groups bring together the CIA and money. The head of UANI is Mark Wallace, who is the
chief executive of Kaplan's Tigris Financial Group, a financial firm with investments -- which it admits -- would benefit from "instability
in the Middle East." Working with UANI and the Counter Extremism Project is Norman Roule, a former national intelligence manager
for Iran in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Roule has offered his support to the efforts of the Arabia Foundation, run by Ali Shihabi -- a man with close links to the Saudi
monarchy. The Arabia Foundation was set up to do more effective public relations work for the Saudis than the Saudi diplomats are
capable of doing. Shihabi is the son of one of Saudi Arabia's most well-regarded diplomats, Samir al-Shihabi, who played an important
role as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Pakistan during the war that created al-Qaeda.
These men -- Kaplan and Bolton, D'Andrea and Shihabi -- are eager to use the full force of the U.S. military to further the
dangerous goals of the Gulf Arab royals (of both Saudi Arabia and of the UAE). When Pompeo walked before cameras, he carried their
water for them. These are men on a mission. They want war against Iran.
Evidence, reason. None of this is important to them. They will not stop until the U.S. bombers deposit their deadly payload on
Tehran and Qom, Isfahan and Shiraz. They will do anything to make that our terrible reality.
This article was produced by Globetrotter ,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.
"... Jeffrey Epstein's story is similarly abusive. The convicted sex offender prostituted dozens of underage girls and should have spent the rest of his life in jail. Again this is no 'one-off' abuse of an underage child, he was a serial sex predator. ..."
"... According to Joseph Recarey, the lead Palm Beach detective on the case, Epstein was essentially operating a "sexual pyramid scheme." ..."
"... The Vox writes that the girls and women who reported abuse by Epstein, meanwhile, were markedly powerless. Most of them "came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care, Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness." ..."
Jeffrey Epstein's story is similarly abusive. The convicted sex offender prostituted dozens of underage girls and should have
spent the rest of his life in jail. Again this is no 'one-off'
abuse of an underage child, he was a serial sex predator.
According to Joseph Recarey, the lead Palm Beach detective on the case, Epstein was essentially operating a "sexual pyramid scheme."
The Vox
writes that the girls and women who reported abuse by Epstein, meanwhile, were markedly powerless. Most of them "came from disadvantaged
families, single-parent homes or foster care, Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness."
In November 2017 the genius comedian Larry David was criticized in the
Jewish press for admitting on Saturday Night Live that many of those
accused of sexual harassment in Hollywood are Jewish.
... Alan Dershowitz , who was a member
of Epstein's legal team and was later accused by one of the victims' lawyers of himself participating in the
sex trafficking ring .
We’ll see how neoliberal MSM will spin this, but I would say Sanders emerged unscathed, Harris attacked and "wounded" Biden, Biden
sounded like a lightweight, Gillibrand seems to be a very unpleasant person although different form Harris...
Notable quotes:
"... as if polling on donald trump and stuff is just so interesting ..."
"... Kamala Harris got more floor time than anyone else. Harris ended Biden's campaign. The debate is rigged against Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... Did Harris get the debate questions in advance? ..."
"... Her manner of speaking is like someone who doesn’t care, doesn’t take the whole thing seriously. It’s like someone who is cheaply casually condescending on the whole thing, on her having to be there. That’s what I perceived. It is deeply disqualifying from any leadership position. “Food fight”? We at that level now? That makes her cool? My god, what garbage. ..."
"... Harris will alienate The Deplorables, the military, the White Working Class or even black people, who know her as Kamala The Cop. ..."
Pathetic, the whole scene is pathetic. What a way to run a putative democracy, bring back the league of women voters to run
the debates and that idiot with the graphs during commercial breaks while watching this online, I want to break his freaking head
sorry.
I had the idea that your sensibilities were rather more refined than that, knowing anything about or not.
Her manner of speaking is like someone who doesn’t care, doesn’t take the whole thing seriously. It’s like someone who
is cheaply casually condescending on the whole thing, on her having to be there. That’s what I perceived. It is deeply disqualifying
from any leadership position. “Food fight”? We at that level now? That makes her cool? My god, what garbage.
FWIW, Boot Edge Edge’s prehensile sincerity was masterful in my view – shows some real talent.
I’m just observing this out of academic interest and hope we’ll all have a chance to vote for Bernie in the general. But from
tonight, Boot Edge Edge to me stood out as a talent – and everyone else (besides Bernie who was reliably on message and will keep
going more or less the same after this) was garbage or unnecessary (Biden is a disgrace), and the first debate was better.
Cal2, June 27, 2019 at 11:19 pm
In that case, Donald Trump gets our votes, as well as keeping all the potential crossovers, who had supported Trump last time,
and would have voted for Sanders-Gabbard.
Harris will alienate The Deplorables, the military, the White Working Class or even black people, who know her as Kamala
The Cop.
Sanders-Harris would be political suicide for the Democrats.
It is interesting that Trump destiny now depends on geopolitical events he can't control namely actions of Iran and China.
Trump foreign policy appears to be driven by a combination of resentment and arrogance -- not a good combination for survival of
Trump and/or mankind
Was with Iran might result in high oil prices would kill the already anemic global growth and cause a recession (I guess
the volatility in oil prices will go through the roof at that point), Iran can destabilize the global economy by destroying most
of the oil production infrastructure around the gulf.
While Lyndon Johnson had chosen not running for reelection in 1968 because anti-war sentiment was high, G W Bush who was
reelected and the USA have now contractor army and casualties without draft does not matter much.
Notable quotes:
"... More likely they attack Saudi Arabia directly. Same impact, more justifiable if not outright popular. No one likes Prince Bone Saw. ..."
"... Iran could take those 10 million barrels a day away in 15 minutes. ..."
China will play a large roll in whether trump get re-elected.
If they decide they prefer his dysfunctional governance to his opponent, then they will engage
in a trade deal that will allow to trump to declare victory. It will likely be a very
superficial victory.
If they decide they would prefer to engage with a different administration, they will likely
refrain from a trade deal until after the election.
Have you asked yourself why Putin preferred trump? The answer is not pretty (for trump, or the
USA).
This is probably an absurd point of view. But in my opinion, it might be in Iran's interest
to drag the U.S into war, probably as indirectly as possible. That way they might
significantly reduce the chance of Trump being re-elected. (Obviously lives will be
sacrificed in this scenario)
The question is if it would work and would a Democrat president stop the war and go into the
same JCPOA deal again. Who knows. Very unpredictable.
Well, Mike, as absurd IMO is that Iran would risk self-destruction to get rid of Trump. He's
certainly a PITA for them, but closing the Strait of Hormuz to crash the global economy and
to blame it on Trump wouldn't work: Trump could blame it all on Iran while keeping on cooking
a controlled conflict with them, showing the world that the US doesn't depend on oil from any
other continent.
This would be a very difficult situation for a Democrat to step in and to
promise a better solution. The US would be relatively well off compared to Asia and Europe
and even could emerge out of such a constellation relatively more powerful.
But it could also
end up in a terrible mess. As you wrote: Who knows. Very unpredictable.
I'm about halfway through Putin's financial Times interview and suggest it be read by
all. There is much to be gleaned from it with a view to the 2020 Election Cycle and
candidate's positions. Just consider the following very small excerpt and its implications
for policy formulation by candidates:
"What we should be talking about is not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure
the unconditional security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea
feel safe and protected by international law that is strictly honoured by all members of
the international community . This is what we should be thinking about." [My
Emphasis]
Putin's insights into Trump's 2016 election strategy, IMO, is very enlightening and
essential reading as the conditions that contributed to Trump's victory have worsened under
his tenure and can be used against him if wisely pursued.
Over the course of US History, two methods have been employed to staff the federal
government's executive branch--what was known as the Spoils System, which was replaced by
the current, purportedly merit-based civil service system.
This brief article describes both and may
help your further understanding. Neither system's ideal, as the current system's plagued by
what's known as the revolving door between
corporations and regulatory agencies the linked article helps to explain while noting its a
problem plaguing many governments.
One of the reforms to the structure of our governing system I've proposed is a 4th
Branch--the Regulatory Branch--whose directors would be subject to direct election instead
of nomination/confirmation and reduce the opportunity for corruption to overwhelm the
Executive. It in turn would be overseen by both Houses of Congress. Many think my proposal
has merit. But the current level of corruption serves the interests of the Current
Oligarchy and related groups such that making the required changes to the Constitution
would be quite difficult given the mechanisms available to generate such change.
I don't know either. But it's been the main stream party line for a while now. "Bernie
should drop out because he's old, white, male, and his opinions are not unique. He's not even
a real Democrat. And he doesn't support the party. So why is he running for president as a
Democrat and picking fights with Biden/Warren/Beto?"
The one that gets me is Bernie the Bomber. Somehow when the pundit class talks about
Bernie and Tulsi, it's only to mention how they coddle dictators.
Coddle (the wrong) dictators. Real Dems coddle our CIA approved dictators. Bernie and
Tulsi coddle those filthy democratically elected "dictators" that want to retain natural
resources for the benefit of their own nations and not for the enrichment of multinationals.
They're monsters!
Seriously though, only the Dems would have a superstar like Bernie and put all their
efforts into sabotaging him. Even the RNC and right wing media was willing to suck it up and
get behind Trump when it was clear he was going to win and had a huge base of support. But,
as is said often now, "the Dems would rather lose to a Republican than win with a
progressive".
Is the CIA's purpose to protect national security or financial security? They seem
confused at times on their purpose and if they were disbanded would the country notice?
Doesn't the Defense Intelligence Agency do most of the heavy security lifting?
Looking at the CIA actions from the Dulles Brothers onwards, I would say that it is to
protect and support all members of the Oligarchy of Money from the 1% to Big Oil to Big
Finance from that pesky Democratic Government and the troublesome Rule of Law.
Actually protecting the United States and never mind Americans themselves is like #47 on
its to-do list.
Did you notice the shift in Bernie's message tonight? He said they needed to have the guts
to take on Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Pharma. I didn't hear him
complain about big banks. I think he's been compromised!
"...as Stratfor, put it, "Trump, fearing a much bigger escalation, got cold feet."
One is reminded of the scene from Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a General in the Joint
Chiefs comments disparagingly about Kennedy for keeping his finger "on the chicken switch"
with regard to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Lyndon Johnson in the White House with Henry Cabot Lodge in 1963 declares: "Gentlemen, I
want you to know I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way China did. I'm personally committed.
I'm not going to take one soldier out of there 'til they know we mean business in Asia (he
pauses) You just get me elected, and I'll give you your damned war ."
Another question exists: should the US resist the allure of military action against Iran,
what can Iran do?
US sanctions against Iran amount to an act of war. Iran can bust sanctions up to some point
-- but for how long? Will Iran suffer half a million dead children & elderly people as
Iraq did in the 90's ? SHOULD Iran have to suffer such a criminally imposed loss of life?
Where is the way out of this insanity?
Iran won't negotiate with the US for the very good reason that the US clearly wants to
sterilize Iranian sovereignty (ie the US won't accept ANY Iranian missiles -- that is, Iran
has no right to self defense).
Sad to say, Trump does not need to launch military action against Iran, merely continue to
economically terrorise Iran until it has NO choice but to initiate military action against
its tormentors.
The war on Iran will continue till kingdom come, until it falls. Its clear as day that both
Russia and China back their Iranian allies against US provocations. China hasn't flinched
under US threats to embargo Iranian crude, and continues to purchase it, and Russia has an
oil swap agreement with Iran, where it buys Iranian oil and sells it as Russian on the
international market. This must be a severe irritation to the imperialists in Washington and
London as it renders their Iran sanctions regime practically toothless.
The imperialists are not backing down in their quest for subduing Iran. Seems like the idea
here is to put as many large ships in harms way as possible....and provoke Iran to attack one
of these......This will ensure the probability of miscalculation and/ or accidents becomes
almost unavoidable. There must be regime change in Tehran, on the road to Beijing and Moscow:
Iran has every right to defend itself from US imperialisms constant violence, as is the case
with China and Russia. It is also pleasing to see the almighty war machine get a bloody nose.
But we should never lose sight of the fact that it is always the working class that
suffers the most in terms of death, injuries and destitution.
End all wars!
End production for profit and the Nation state upon which it is built!
America's history demonstrates that loss of (foreign) life is of little concern to those in
power.
The Manhattan Project was established, and mightily financed because of reasonably well
established fears that Nazi Germany was on track to build its own A-bombs.
With the defeat of Germany that fear was gone. Nevertheless, knowing full well that Imperial
Japan had no such program, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vapourised. A clear demonstration that
they, atomic weapons, WMD, worked and a warning to the Soviet Union that it too could be
annihilated.
Robert Oppenheimer and others refused to take part in building an H-bomb for class and humane
reasons. This fell on Truman's deaf ears.
American Imperialism is indifferent to death and destruction of billions.
As WSWS has stated, Trumps announcement that the loss of 150 Iranian lives is the the reason
he pulled backs so much bilge.
Trump is in a catch 22. When push has come to shove , he simply cannot sell another war to
the US working class, and he knows it , and he's been well and truly spooked by the Iranian
response.
All the US garbage of itself as ''victim'', all the 'good cop bad cop' routines are
wearing thin. Nobody is buying it anymore , especially from a gangster.
Perhaps a predicted massive spike in global temperatures will clear out the collective
cobwebs further.
Good point about the possibility of Iran sinking a carrier. The Chinese have developed
advanced anti-ship weapons that, if the results of a RAND corporation war game can be
believed, will be able to neutralize carriers. This highlights the fact that, whatever the
salesmen of advanced weaponry might say, it will not win wars alone. All of the smart weapons
in the world have not ended the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in the favour of American
imperialism.
We can see an historical precedent in the British development of the dreadnought, the
modern battleship, in the arms race that preceded WWI. Dreadnoughts were supposed to be the
decisive super weapons of the day, but the British and German battle fleets remained in their
moorings for most of the war for fear that these expensive ships would fall prey to torpedos.
The sinking of the HMS Formidable in 1915 is a case in point. The only major engagement
between dreadnoughts was at Jutland and it was inconclusive.
For all of the contemporary bluster about super weapons and the fetishism of smart bombs
and cyber weapons, they will not decisively win a war alone. As in the world wars of the last
century, the bourgeoisie will be forced to mobilize society for a war. This will mean
bringing the working class - against its will - into the maelstrom.
Yet again the WSWS demonstrates the incredible foresight and clarity of Marxist analysis. I
would like to extend my thanks to Comrade Andre and the editors of the WSWS for their
indefatigable efforts to impart Marxist consciousness to the masses. For all of the naysayers
who have attacked the WSWS as "sectarian" or as not involved in "practical work," need we
point to anything other than the WSWSs explanation of the connection between eruption of
American imperialism and the decline of the productive forces of that nation state? That
analysis has placed the WSWS in the position of being better prepared politically for the
consequences of war than the imperialists, as the latest farce in the Middle East
demonstrates.
A quote from Trotsky will further emphasize my point:
"We will not concede this banner to the masters of falsehood! If our generation happens to
be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to
our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of
individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind."
The official story, as usual, is a bunch of hooey. Trump wouldn't bat an eye over the death
of 150 Iranians. In addition to the worries about losing an aircraft carrier: the military
high command probably let him know that the much vaunted, and outlandishly expensive, force
of F-35s, will quickly lose its effectiveness if exposed to probing by the high tech radars
the Russians have developed, and that are used in conjunction with at least the S-400
antiaircraft and antimissile defense system. So the question is, if the stealth advantage of
the F-35 is only good for a limited time, is this particular geostrategic confrontation worth
using up that particular asset??
Then there is the whole question of whether the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz
in response to a major air raid on their nuclear facilities; this leads to some much more
important issues. Despite the blathering about "international waters" and "freedom of
navigation" the facts are that the Straits of Hormuz are only 21 miles wide. So all the water
in them is either in Iranian territory to the north or Omani to the south. They would be
entirely within their rights, as elucidated in the International Law of the Sea, to close the
straits after some sort of military strike against them (for what that is worth, which is
something at least as far as public opinion outside of the U.S. is concerned). The Iranians
have stated that if and when they close the straits they will announce it publicly, no
subterfuge or secret operations will be involved.
Since nearly 30% of the World's oil moves through those straits cutting them off will
cause an immediate spike in oil prices. Prices of $100 - $300 a barrel would be reached
within a few days. If the Straits of Hormuz were closed for a longer period we could easily
see prices rise to $1,000 a barrel according to Goldman Sachs projections (see Escobar
article cited below). Anything over $150 a barrel would trigger an economic, industrial, and
financial crisis of immense proportions around the world. The financial and speculative house
of cards, that the ruling classes of the U.S.-led Finance Capital Bloc depends on for their
dominance of world capital and markets, would likely come tumbling down. The amount of
derivatives that are swirling about the planet and that are traded and created constantly is
estimated to be from $1.2 - $2.5 Quadrillion. That's right from $1,200 - $2,500 Trillion or
$1,200,000 - $2,500,000 Billion {remember Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who once said "a
billion here and a billion there and first thing you know, You're talking BIG MONEY!!} (See
"World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As $1.2 Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight
Efforts to Rein It In", March 26, 2013, Yves Smith, "Naked Capitalism", at <
https://www.nakedcapitalism... >, and "Iran Goes for 'Maximum Counter-pressure' ",
June 21, 2019, Pepe Escobar, "Strategic Culture Foundation", at <
https://www.strategic-cultu... >, and "Global Derivatives: $1.5 Quadrillion Time
Bomb", Aug 24, 2015, Stephen Lendman, Global Research, at
<
https://www.globalresearch.... >). Just like during the 2007 - 2008 crisis the various
elements of shadow banking, and speculation would collapse. Remember that total world
production of and trade in actual products is only about about $70 - $80 Trillion, or perhaps
less than 1/31st the size of the Global Derivatives markets.
All the world's elite capitalists, be they Western or Asian or from elsewhere, maintain
homes in numerous places. One reason for this is so they have somewhere to go, if they need
to flee from environmental and/or socioeconomic disaster and the resultant chaos in their
primary place of residence. As we move ever deeper into this extremely severe and ongoing
Crisis of Capitalism, these issues will continue to become more acute.
So we can rest assured that; in addition to the crazed war-mongers Bolton and Pompeo (and
their supporters and backers) whispering in Trump's ear to "go ahead and attack the
Iranians"; and in addition to the somewhat more sober counsel of General Dunford and other
members of the top military command; that titans of finance capital were undoubtedly on the
phone warning "Bone-Spur Don" that his digs in Manhattan and Florida might not be entirely
safe if the worst were to happen in response to a military strike. The absurd story of Don
worrying about 150 Iranians is so ludicrous that it did not even pass the smell test with the
corporate controlled media for very long.
"Thirty years of endless war have created a veritable cult of militarism within the American
ruling elite, whose guiding assumption seems to be that wars can be waged without drastic
global consequences, including for the United States itself."
The military/security surveillance state is a trillion dollar enterprise that instigates
conflicts to expand its profits. Militarism works hand-in-hand with the neoliberal
corporatists who deploy the military to secure natural resources, wage slaves, and
geostrategic hegemony. It should be noted, that the US imperialist agenda left unhindered
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only intensified.
However, in order for the US ruling class to achieve the "ultimate goal" of unilateral
hegemony in the Middle East the military must confront Iran a powerful sizable country with
economic and political ties to China and Russia. This is the dilemma confronting the
warmongering psychopaths
who are influenced by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
A significant military attack against Iran will NOT go unanswered and if the Iranian
Military destroys a US warship and kills hundreds of sailors it would unleash another major
war in the Middle East igniting the entire region and possibly leading to a world war.
What should traumatize the US population and awaken them from their hypnotic warmongering
stupur created by propaganda proliferated on FOX, MSNBC, and CNN is that the United States
came within minutes of launching a war whose military consequences it had NOT seriously
examined.
In light of these dangerous events it is obvious that a faction of the American ruling class
circles including Trump were not prepared to face the consequences of a strike against Iran.
That is precisely why Trump aborted the mission last Friday. Just yesterday Trump himself
admitted for the first time that if it was up to John Bolton then we would be fighting the
whole world. Today Pompeo has been sent to Middle East to broaden his alliance with Gulf
Monarchical regimes most notably Saudi Arabia and UAE. It is aimed to prepare the ground for
possible confrontation with Iran.
Trump's comment re Bolton that the US "would fight the whole world" sums up what the US is
really about. Take it from me, The US hates virtually every country save one: Israel. Illegal
US Sanctions regimes now extend to almost 50% of the world's population. The US does not even
like the advanced countries such as Europe and Japan. They tolerate them because of
diplomatic support and large investment and trade ties. Outside that they have no affinity or
connection. Until we all realise the true nature of The US and its exclusive cultural mindset
[NFL, NBA, MLB etc etc], populations will merely continue to enable the US to attack and
sanction everybody and anyone of their demented choosing. The tragedy is that if the other
countries became united and were committed to ending this US terror by eg dumping the US
Dollar as international reserve currency and sanctioning all US corporations, the US would
face severe turmoil and its reign of endless terror brought to a sudden end.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
I believe things simple didn't go as planned as an airplane was threatened to be taken
down. Bolton was in Israel after that to most likely assure Netanyahu that a new attack would
be conducted, Bolton Warned Iran Not to 'Mistake U.S. Prudence and Discretion for
Weakness'...
There needs to be a correction in the article on the older Raad system not having been used
but instead the newer, 'Third of Khordad' system which brought down the MQ-4C Triton.
Pictures/ Info on the Third of Khordad reveals that it is in effect an Iranian version of the
Soviet Buk-M2 of the MH-17 downing fame which the western backed Kiev junta used from its
hand me down Soviet weapons arsenal, to shoot down the ill fated Malaysian Airliner over the
Ukraine. The system also is stark evidence of the close defense relationship between the
Russians and the Iranians, confirming the suspicions in the west that whatever weaponry Putin
transfers to Syria or Iraq is by default also available to Iran.
Not to be outdone by his failure to bring Iran to its knees, Trump ordered a massive cyber
attack on Iran's missile batteries and its command and control centers after rescinding the
military order to physically attack Iran for downing the drone. The Iranians today announced
the failure of this desperate US cyber attack:
This is in addition to the CIA placing an agent within the Iranian oil ministry for
conducting sabotage. She has been arrested and faces the death penalty for espionage:
The deep State in the US will not stop trying to subdue Iran until it capitulates. Iran
must fall to Washington in order for the US to effectively counter and sabotage both Putin's
Eurasian Integration and president Xi's BRI projects.
Trump's alterration at this moment can be due to Iran's internal coherence against American
imperialism. With santions being reinforced, one can anticipate more and more impovershment
and quality of life geting lower unabated to the point that the basis for internal coherence
gets eroded substantially. We saw working class uprisings in Iran recently and leadership
accused imperialist as rabble-rousers to find a way out.That is why we need building
SEP/IYSSE in Iran to hatch revolutionary force in Iran for Iran to join the peer in the rest
of the world. Morsi in Egypt was overthrown by Sisi with the backing of US imperialism headed
by Obama at that time. So is the imperialism and it will continue to work to weaken Iran as a
force successfully confronting imperialism in the middle east currently. Let us therefore
empower international working class to empower it to overthrow imperialism on one hand and
Stalinism on the other hand. Russia too depend largely on its arms sale to maintain its
economy. But human needs, not wepons, but basic needs including clean environment. Long live
the socialist revolution in Iran and internationally. Death to imperialism. Thank you comrade
Andre Damon.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
Economically it would be Armageddon. Although some think America does not rely on Mideast
oil, the world economy does and America is a part of that despite what nationalists dream.
Bolton is making threats from Israel and clearly some believe they stand to gain from war but
militarily too it would be Armageddon. The Pentagon would answer the sinking of a carrier by
nuking Iran to preserve American "credibility" i.e. fear. China and Russia would have to
react, China at least to keep its oil supplied. India pushed against China could add more
mushroom clouds not to mention Pakistan. Israel itself with Tel Aviv bombarded from Lebanon
and maybe invaded unable to stop this might nuke Lebanon and maybe Tehran if any of it
remains and Damascus besides. Just as ww1 started because military train timetables had to be
followed there are nukewar plans in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing that won't take long. So
world workers need to start our plan before others begin. Preemptive general strikes, antiwar
and socialist revolutionary agitation and propaganda within imperialist rank and files and
human blockades of war material networks should happen at an early date like now. Now also
WikiLeaks should put out whatever it hasn't while people exist to read it. The rich are
determined to kill Assange anyway and full wartime censorship is not far off.
Some people have speculated that if the U.S. does attack Iran then Iran will launch missiles
at Saudi Arabia's oil fields which will then send oil prices skyrocketing to $130 dollars a
barrel. The article also notes that:
"While Trump's foreign policy team -- headed by National Security Advisor John Bolton and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- 'unanimously' supported the attack, General Joseph Dunford,
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 'cautioned about the possible repercussions of a
strike, warning that it could endanger American forces,' the Times wrote."
Apparently the good general cannot get too worked up at the sight of thousands and
thousands of Iranian children, women, and old men who would be slaughtered and grievously
wounded by U.S. bombs and the water supply which would be contaminated when those bombs would
land at a nuclear power plant. But these horrific actions by the United States are of no
consequence because, as Madeline Albright observed on a television a few decades ago, the
deaths of a half million Iraqi children by the U.S. was worth it. It would appear that the
lives of foreigners are of little consequence to those who are in power. Threatening to start
a war against another country for the most specious of reasons is simply another reason why a
malignant narcissist like Trump needs to be removed from office as quickly as possible. Or
perhaps Trump believes that the best way to improve his low poll numbers is to start dropping
500 lb. bombs on a country which does not in any remote way pose a threat to the United
States.
"Almost all propaganda is designed to create fear. Heads of governments and their
officials know that a frightened people is easier to govern, will forfeit rights it would
otherwise defend, is less likely to demand a better life, and will agree to millions and
millions being spent on 'Defense'."-John Boynton Priestly [1894-1984], English writer
"Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill
everyone, and you are a god."-Jean Rostand [1894-1977], French philosopher and biologist
After Hezballah had booted Zionist colonizers out of Lebanon, Zionist apartheid had lost its
image of "invincibility".
Now even ghetto Gaza is fighting back.
The CIA payrolled press whores like CNN's Christiane Amanpour for example a prime warmonger
and there are countless others embedded in every western media source.
Ironically, Amanpour is Iranian background, an avowed revolution hater and a devoted Iranian
Pahlavi monarchist. She's on the record for saying that she wants to see the Shah's exiled
son back on the throne in Iran, serving US imperialism for the 'benefit of the Iranian
nation'.
The sinking of an aircraft carrier, especially one as well known as the USS Lincoln, would
have been one of the biggest PR disasters for both Trump and the military. It probably would
have sparked demands from the people to know how, despite pouring trillions of dollars into
the mouths of greedy defense contractors for decades, a supposedly inferior military could so
easily take down one of our ships.
Khrushchev once said of the Sverdlov class cruisers built in the early 1950's that their only
practical purpose was as targets for anti ship missile training because of how outdated they
where considering they where armed with guns.
Maybe the anti-ship missile now stands at the point where it can make carriers obsolete
similar to how the battleship was made obsolete by the carrier.
There are some who argue that surface navies became obsolete in the 1950's with the advent of
long range missiles. For many years now, China has been helping to build up Iranian area
defences...
Cold war weapons are unsuitable for countering Iran's asymmetric warfare doctrine. A dozen or
two highly advanced US warships are no match for a thousand missile boats and thousands of
Iranian anti-ship missiles in the narrow confines of the shallow gulf.
Minutes or hours, or Trump never signed on to them, as the accounts from different US media
outlets and Trump have differed at several points. Fog of war indeed.
From the little I know about Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, Yemen is still subject to a land
/ sea / air blockade. Saudi warships are patrolling Yemeni maritime territory. So that would
probably nix any possibility of Iran sending any kind of support, humanitarian as well as
military.
The war has lasted over four years and the blockade has lasted almost as long. The Saudis
are relying on mercenaries from as far away as
South America ,
Nepal and parts of Africa. Yet not only are the Houthis still holding out but as you say,
there are signs of
Saudi collapse in Yemen.
My hunch is that huge numbers of soldiers are defecting from the Saudi forces and bringing
with them equipment, vehicles, ammunition, advice and logistics support to the Houthis. Among
other things, this would account for large losses of Saudi military equipment and the
enormous wastage. Perhaps some mercenaries have also switched sides. But as I have said here
in past MoA comments forums, I can't prove that defections are occurring. Maybe I'm not using
the "right" keywords on Google Chrome, DuckDuckGo or other search engines to find the
information, or perhaps this particular narrative is a no-go zone.
@ Jen 74
Thanks for your concern for Yemen, and reports from the area.
Please be aware that the outcome of military conflicts are more dependant upon the people
affected than anything. It took the US three years to "pacify" Baghdad, because Iraqis didn't
want Americans there, and they still don't as a matter of fact.
Yemenis don't want Saudi control of their land and that has more meaning than the Saudi
mercenaries can bring to the conflict.
In the US Army, the infantry is "the Queen of battle." That's a fancy way of saying that the
men engaged in the endeavor, on the ground, are the most important variable. That's why the
Houthis in their flip-flops can destroy so many Saudi units. They care. The human element.
"... Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book The Nationalist Revival , "is an essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity, and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different backgrounds from theirs." ..."
"... Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion." It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism in the proper direction. ..."
"... The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism: propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign policy. ..."
"... The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words, it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power. ..."
"... But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet famously denounced it in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. ..."
"... Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class. It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes. Stay tuned. ..."
Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an
important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book
The Nationalist Revival , "is an
essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity,
and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial
responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different
backgrounds from theirs."
Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion."
It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism
in the proper direction.
Judis points out that while "globalism" is a force that nationalists understandably oppose,
"internationalism" need not clash with nationalist sentiment. In a op-ed
in TheNew York Times last October, Judis praised his kind of nationalism as
being beneficial to a successful and growing welfare state and a happier world. It can
also be, he said, a stepping stone that leads beyond itself to international cooperation
.
For those who study European socialism, it is clear that Judis is reprising the position of
French sociologist Pierre
Bordieu , who argued for decades that a socialist regime must create some kind of social
glue to hold its subjects together. Judis is now transferring Bordieu's view to the American
political scene.
Advertisement
Now, a conference on "conservative nationalism," which will take place in Washington in July , may be
pushing a "nationalism" that is at least as adaptable as Judis's.
One featured speaker , Claire Lehmann, the founder of Quillette, will be talking about how
nationalism "is
the antidote to racism." Presumably the more inclusive the operative term, the less likely
will be the Left's attack on those wielding it.
The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests
that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism:
propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both
cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign
policy.
Nationalism, in any case, means different things for different peoples. It doesn't hold the
same meaning for Estonians or Hungarians, who belong to ethnic, historic communities, as it
does for a pluralistic country with hundreds of millions of people and a constantly expanding
immigrant population.
In the latest issue of the Rassemblement National monthlyL'Incorrect ,
Steve Bannon speaks of the natural fit between European nationalism and the nationalist
movement that he has been promoting in the United States. Both these ideologies, Bannon says,
derive from the same national principle. In an interview with me in the same publication, I
treated Bannon's contention as wishful thinking. The United States has become too diverse and
too culturally disunited to fit a traditional national model. Our use of nationalism will
likely lead to something less quaint and less organic but more explosive than what comes from
the Baltic nationalists or Viktor Orbán.
The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which
has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words,
it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power.
The same protean label is also likely to wander onto the Left, given the nontraditional and
very pliable nature of our "nationalism." John Judis may in fact be the harbinger of a new
American Left that celebrates nationalism, provided that Left is allowed to define that term
for the rest of us. Indeed, it may be possible to frame LGBT rights and reparations for blacks
as "nationalist" issues. Nationalism also need not hinder us from letting in lots of
undocumented immigrants who are only trying to join our team and learn our values.
Men and women of the interwar Right, down to such later figures as Russell Kirk and Robert
Nisbet, were understandably critical of American nationalism. They identified it with social
engineering and centralized government and preferred localism and regionalism to any
justification for an expansionist administrative state.
But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet
famously denounced it in The Present Age:
Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves
different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. The hope once entertained
by Pat Buchanan that a nationalist cause would help slow down immigration and preserve
America's traditional moral and cultural identity has not worked out as planned. Those who
control our politics and culture determine the meaning of terms, which is as true of
nationalism as it is of other political labels like "freedom" and "equality."
Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class.
It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all
changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes.
Stay tuned.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at
Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale
Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .
"... Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?" ..."
"... Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." ..."
"... Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune. ..."
"... However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." ..."
"... These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state. ..."
The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government
before publication, to make sure "national security officials" have "no concerns."
By Ben Norton
June 25, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The New York
Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for
approval from "national security officials" before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The
American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing
reporting that top officials don't want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber
attacks on Russia's power grid . According to the article, "the Trump administration is
using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively," as part of a larger "digital
Cold War between Washington and Moscow."
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the
Times on Twitter, calling the article "a virtual act of Treason."
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending
the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being
printed.
"Accusing the press of treason is dangerous," the Times communications team said. "We
described the article to the government before publication."
"As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no
concerns," the Times added.
NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with
the government'
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known
for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using
it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance
Washington's interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in
The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
Risen
detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a
top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was,
"How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?"
There is an "informal arrangement" between the state and the press, Risen explained, where
US government officials "regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop
the publication of sensitive national security stories."
"At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations," the former New York Times
reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to
the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and
asked him to kill the story.
"He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,"
Risen said. "I agreed."
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. "If I had
reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a
public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,"
he wrote. "That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden
more seriously."
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories.
"And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times," he
said.
"After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more
frequently," Risen continued. "They did it so often that I became convinced the administration
was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing." In
the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently "clashed" with Times editors because he raised
questions about the US government's lies. But his stories "stories raising questions about the
intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda,
were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether."
The Times' executive editor Howell Raines "was believed by many at the paper to prefer
stories that supported the case for war," Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a
botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House,
where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him "to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make
another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone."
"The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national
security stories," Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated
the "war on the press."
CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent
In their renowned study of US media, "
Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Edward S. Herman and
Chomsky articulated a "propaganda model," showing how "the media serve, and propagandize on
behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them," through "the
selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists'
internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the
institution's policy."
But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media
is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one
of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it
surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in
order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international
communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover
the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled "
The CIA and
the Media : How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central
Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in
the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence
Agency."
Bernstein wrote:
"Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit.
There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of
clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with
spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared
their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who
considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less
exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their
work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy
business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees
masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were
engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading
news organizations."
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including
ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday
Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA
officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc."
These layers of state
manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they
claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto
spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer
of the Moderate Rebels podcast,
which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .
This article was originally published by " Grayzone
"
Arms Dealers and Lobbyists Get Rich as Yemen Burns See the Top 4 U.S. contractors' profits explode, all while their
weapons have been used against civilian targets for years.
June
25, 2019
And make no mistake: U.S. defense contractors and their lobbyists and supporters in government are getting rich in the process.
"Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International,
said
to CNBC in February. But his statement vastly understates the role that defense contractors and lobbyists play in Washington's
halls of power, where their influence on policy directly impacts their bottom lines. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates have waged war against Yemen, killing and injuring thousands of Yemeni civilians. An estimated
90,000 people have been killed, according
to one international tracker.
Nearly 90
coalition airstrikes have hit
homes , schools, markets,
hospitals, and mosques since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2018, the coalition bombed a wedding, killing 22 people, including
eight children. Another strike hit a
bus , killing at
least 26 children.
American-origin munitions produced by companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon were identified at
the site of over two dozen attacks throughout Yemen. Indeed, the United States is the single largest arms supplier to the Middle
East and has been for decades, according to a report by
the Congressional Research Service. From 2014 to 2018, the United States supplied 68 percent of Saudi Arabia's arms imports, 64 percent
of the UAE's imports, and 65 percent of Qatar's imports. Some of this weaponry was subsequently stolen or sold to
al-Qaeda linked groups in the Arabian Peninsula
, where they could be used against the U.S. military, according to
reports . The Saudi use of
U.S.-made jets, bombs, and missiles
against Yemeni civilian centers constitutes a war crime. It was an American laser-guided
MK-82 bomb that killed the children
on the bus; Raytheon's technology killed the 22 people attending the wedding in 2018 as well as a family traveling in their car;
and another American-made MK-82 bomb
ended the lives of at least 80 men, women, and children in a Yemeni marketplace in March 2016. Yet American defense contractors
continue to spend millions of dollars to lobby Washington to maintain the flow of arms to these countries.
"Companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other defense contractors see countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE as huge
potential markets," Stephen Miles, director of Win Without War , told
TAC . "They see them as massive opportunities to make a lot of money; that's why they're investing billions and billions of dollars.
This is a huge revenue stream to these companies." Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics have all highlighted business with Saudi
Arabia in their shareholder reports.
"Operations and maintenance have become a very profitable niche market for U.S. corporations,"
said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president at Teal Group. He added that defense contractors can make as much as 150 percent more profit
off of operations and maintenance than from the original arms sale. U.S. weapons supply
57 percent of the military aircraft used by the Royal
Saudi Air Force, and mechanics and technicians hired by American companies repair and maintain their fighter jets and helicopters.
In 2018 alone, the United States made $4.5 billion worth of arms deals to
Saudi Arabia and $1.2
billion to the United Arab
Emirates , a report by William Hartung and Christina Arabia found.
From the report
: "Lockheed Martin was involved in deals worth $25 billion; Boeing, $7.1 billion in deals; Raytheon, $5.5 billion in deals; Northrop
Grumman had one deal worth $2.5 billion; and BAE systems had a $1.3 billion deal." "Because of the nature of U.S. arms control law,
most of these sales have to get government approval, and we've absolutely seen lobbyists weighing in heavily on this," Miles said.
"The last time I saw the numbers, the arms industry had nearly 1,000 registered lobbyists.
They're not on the Hill lobbying Congress about how many schools we should open next year. They're lobbying for defense contractors.
The past 18 years of endless wars have been incredibly lucrative for the arms industry, and they have a vested industry in seeing
these wars continue, and not curtailing the cash cow that has been for them." The defense industry
spent $125 million on lobbying
in 2018. Of that, Boeing spent
$15 million on lobbyists, Lockheed Martin spent
$13.2 million , General Dynamics
$11.9 million , and Raytheon
$4.4 million ,
according to the Lobbying
Disclosure Act website.
Writes Ben Freeman:
According to a new report firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act have reported receiving more than $40 million
from Saudi Arabia in 2017 and 2018. Saudi lobbyists and public relations professionals have contacted Congress, the executive
branch, media outlets and think tanks more than 4,000 times. Much of this work has been focused on ensuring that sales of U.S.
arms to Saudi Arabia continue unabated and blocking congressional actions that would end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition
in Yemen. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms working for the Saudis have also reported doling out more than $4.5 million
in campaign contributions in the past two years, including at least $6,000 to Trump. In many cases, these contributions have gone
to members of Congress they've contacted regarding the Yemen war. In fact, some contributions have gone to members of Congress
on the exact same day they were contacted by Saudi lobbyists, and some were made to key members just before, and even on the day
of, important Yemen votes.
Over a dozen lobbying firms employed by defense contractors have also been working on behalf of the Saudi or Emiratis, efficiently
lobbying for both the arms buyers and sellers in one fell swoop .
One of these lobbying firms, the McKeon Group, led by former Republican congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee
Howard McKeon, represents both Saudi Arabia and the American defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK,
MBDA, and L3 Technologies. Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman are the biggest suppliers of arms to Saudi Arabia. In 2018, the McKeon
Group took $1,697,000 from 10 defense
contractors " to, among
other objectives, continue the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia," reports National Memo. Freeman
details multiple examples where lobbyists working on behalf of the Saudis met with a senator's staff and then made a substantial
contribution to that senator's campaign within days of a key vote to keep the United States in the Yemen war.
American Defense International (ADI) represents the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia's coalition partner in the war against
Yemen, as well as several American
defense contractors, including General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, L3 Technologies, and General Atomics.
Not to be outdone by the McKeon Group, ADI's lobbyists have also aggressively pursued possible swing votes in the U.S. Senate
for the hefty sum of $45,000 a month, paid for by the
UAE . ADI lobbyists discussed
the "situation in Yemen" and the "Paveway sale to the UAE," the same bomb used in the deadly wedding strike, with the office of Senator
Martin Heinrich, a member of the Armed Services Committee, according to FARA
reports .
ADI's lobbyists also met
with Congressman Steve Scalise's legislative director to advise his office to vote against the congressional resolution on Yemen.
For their lobbying, Raytheon paid ADI
$120,000 in 2018. In addition to the
overt influence exercised by lobbyists for the defense industry, many former arms industry executives are embedded in influential
posts throughout the Trump administration: from former Airbus, Huntington Ingalls, and Raytheon lobbyist Charles Faulkner at the
State Department, who pushed Mike Pompeo
to support arms sales in the Yemen war ; to former Boeing executive and erstwhile head of the Department of Defense Patrick Shanahan;
to his interim replacement Mark Esper, secretary of the Army and another former lobbyist for Raytheon.
The war in Yemen has been good for American defense contractors' bottom lines. Since the conflict began, General Dynamics' stock
price has risen from about $135 to $169 per share, Raytheon's from about $108 to more than $180, and Boeing's from about $150 to
$360, according to In
These Times. Their analysis found that those four companies have had at least $30.1 billion in Saudi military contracts approved
by the State Department over the last 10 years. In April, President Donald Trump vetoed a resolution that would have ended American
support for the Saudi-UAE coalition war against Yemen. Such efforts have failed to meet the 60-vote veto-proof threshold needed in
the Senate. There are a few senators who didn't vote for the War Powers resolution "that will probably vote for the Raytheon sales,"
Brittany Benowitz, a lawyer and former adviser to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told TAC. "I think you'll
continue to see horrific bombings and as the famine rages on, people will start to ask, 'Why are we a part of this war?' Unfortunately,
I don't think that will start to happen anytime soon." Barbara Boland is TAC's foreign policy and national security reporter.
Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC
Yes indeed, we are the #1 arms exporter and very proud about it. Meanwhile, Rubio, Pompeo, et. al. are also proud about how they
are finally clamping down on the nefarious arrangement that Venezuela and Cuba have to prop up their regimes.
Venezuela gives Cuba low cost oil and Cuba sends them about 25,000 doctors for free medical care to help prop up Maduro. Hmm
... sounds like one is exporting medical services in return for energy, pure, unabridged evil. Our second best export is misinformation
and lies.
I know, someone will give the State Dept line that the doctors are underpaid and the oil is below market price. The point is
that both countries export what they have more of in order to get what they need. This is the basics of any trade relationship.
Both countries are better off after the transaction and now both countries are suffering because of our benighted intervention.
I keep wondering when God is going to punish us for our appalling arrogance, pride, and our unwavering faith in our own righteousness.
God is certainly punishing me. I wish I was one of the blissfully ignorant.
The biggest business of America is war. The symptom of how all pervasive this has become is there is a new definition of defeat:
the only war that is lost, is one that ends. The new victory is now war without end.
If the Saudis have not yet routed the Houthis, I am doubt they ever will. Without invading the country and holding ground, I am
unclear of the point of constantly bombing.
The Houthis won their civil conflict, best allow them to constitute a government and deal with it.
The Saudis have invaded Yemen, but they and their mercenaries keep getting ambushed and ganked. The Yemeni tribes have a very
long and successful history of guerrilla warfare.
Admittedly, it's mostly the mercenaries, as the Saudis don't like a centralized military in particular and don't like fighting
opponents who can shoot back in general.
"Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International,
said to CNBC in February.
Yeah and Wells Fargo were just practicing "innovation" that the financial companies have told us they need to do.
The Republic is a total failure. It cares nothing for the Constitution the representatives are sworn to uphold and abide by. It's
all about the symbiosis of power in gov. and money in business. Those two factions exchange what they other needs to gain more
power and money at the expense of the taxpayers and countries abroad being destroyed. It's pretty simple if you ask 'cui bono'
and then follow the money. This time following the money may take the USA/world to thermo-nuclear war which psychos like Bolton,
Pompeo, Pence, Netanyahu, the MIC and all the other neo-cons want. Currently the war policy against Iran seems to be tied up in
Christian-Zionist eschatology to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Does it get any more loony than this? Metaphysics
driving political and foreign policy is really a recipe for a disaster and may actually bring about loosing the Four Horseman
of the Apocalypse on the world, but that's OK I guess because Wash. sees the 'big picture.'
"... Warren's announcement of her presidential candidacy made clear that she considers Trump to be merely a symptom of this larger problem – the detritus of a crumbling democracy. Just cleaning up the garbage is not going to solve the systemic problem of plutocracy from which he emerged. If not systemically fixed today with more than cosmetics, Warren understands, the corrupt plutocracy is capable of generating even more toxic products tomorrow. ..."
Sanders, by contrast, was not a troublemaker at all. He talked about his blue-sky political
ideals as something he believed in passionately, but he separated that idealism from his
practical legislative work, which was grounded in vote counts." In other words Warren put
principles over party in the interest of advancing the issues she cared about, like a true
progressive. Sanders' messaging "revolution" was all talk and bluster but no show. Warren has
been praised
for "picking strategic battles she won with a specific set of political skills. 'I would say
she's the best progressive Democratic politician I've seen since Bobby Kennedy,'" reports the
political writer Robert Kuttner. Before she went into electoral politics Warren had already
received credit from Obama and others for establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB) a progressive half-billion dollar New Deal-type agency. Can another person be named who
has been responsible for establishing a comparable key regulatory agency in recent decades? By
contrast the not easily dismissed explanation about
Sanders' lack of such accomplishments is "in a business where personal relations count, Sanders
is viewed as a brusque and inflexible loner."
Which then is the true WaPo "Revolutionary?" The tame lion who talks a good game or the
principled brinkswoman who plays a good game? It is Warren who complained to the NYT: " Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight." Warren did fight during
her campaign for and service in the Senate, even acquiring a reputation
(among
males , at least) for "stridency" as she was learning the ropes for coping with a
systemically corrupt political order. We should doubt anyone within such a system who is not as
strident or angry as Warren. That stance tended to enhance her power to change the system, at
least until she decided to campaign for president as a way to acquire more power to reform it.
She then appropriately revealed
"a folksier, more accessible side that wasn't always apparent in her role" in the Senate.
Former congressman Barney Frank, always a sharp observer of such matters, said of Warren,
after she had barely completed two years of her brand new "strident" career in electoral
politics: "Right now, she's as powerful a spokesperson on public policy as you could be in the
minority . She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues, because Democrats are
not going to cross her . Democrats are afraid of Elizabeth Warren." Can anything remotely
similar be said of Sanders after his 30 years in Washington? Indeed, Frank expressed what
Politico reported as a consensus view
that "[Sanders'] legislative record was to state the ideological position he took on the left,
but with the exception of a few small things, he never got anything done . He has always talked
about revolution, but on Dodd-Frank and Obamacare, he left the pitchfork at home and joined the
Democrats."
Warren acquired power to make change. After two more years she was so powerful that the
Clinton establishment unsuccessfully pressured her to endorse Clinton in the primaries, and
Sanders' acolytes would blame her for not making Sanders the victor by performing as his
unsolicited super-endorser. It takes exceptional strategic and other political skills, focus
and commitment to gain such power in such a short time. Unlike Sanders, even Warren's enemies
do not claim she is ineffective.
Warren, no less than Sanders, has clearly stated that the reason for her candidacy is to
fight "against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy, but also
in our democracy." She says her purpose is not "to just tinker around the edges --
a tax credit here, a regulation there. Our fight is for big, structural change" of
plutocracy, "a rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and kicks dirt on everyone
else." WaPo must have missed these parts of Warren's presidential
announcement speech which promised this challenge to the power of the systemically corrupt
plutocracy. It is the central motif of her campaign. And of course, "she has a plan for that"
– her first plan. It is her
bill S.3357. 15 th Cong. – the "Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity
Act."
Warren's announcement of her presidential candidacy made clear that she considers Trump to
be merely a symptom of this larger problem – the detritus of a crumbling democracy. Just
cleaning up the garbage is not going to solve the systemic problem of plutocracy from which he
emerged. If not systemically fixed today with more than cosmetics, Warren understands, the
corrupt plutocracy is capable of generating even more toxic products tomorrow.
Therefore, from the very start of her highly effective campaign Warren positioned herself in
opposition not just to Trump but to the economically "rich and powerful [who] have rigged our
political system as well. They've bought off or bullied politicians in both parties to
make sure Washington is always on their side." Like Sanders at his best , she calls this system by its proper name. "When
government works only for the wealthy and well-connected, that is corruption --
plain and simple. Corruption is a cancer on our democracy. And we will get rid of it
only with strong medicine -- with real, structural reform. Our fight is to
change the rules so that our government, our economy, and our democracy work for
everyone." She emphasized to Emily Bazelon, writing for the NYT: " It's structural change that interests me." She
toldTIME "If we want to make real change in this country, it's got to be systemic
change."
Ignoring the fetid distraction of Trump to focus her advocacy instead on the necessary
systemic reforms is a winning progressive strategy. Establishment Democrats will again
predictably
ignore this strategy, as they did in 2016, at their peril. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already
accurately
predicted the result of sending what Naomi Klein calls ,
"tepid centrists carrying the baggage of decades of neoliberal suffering" to battle against
mobilized totalitarians: "We have a very real risk of losing the presidency to Donald Trump if
we don't have a presidential candidate that's fighting for true transformational change in
lives of working people in the United States."
Warren has taken on the task of defeating, not appeasing, the corrupt establishment which is
willing in 2020 as it was in 2016 to take just that risk in order to preclude a progressive
revival. Warren's plan is, "First: We need to change the rules to clean up Washington. End the
corruption." This is not an opportunistic aspersion by a political con-artist, like Trump's
totally phony "drain the swamp" slogan, soon belied by his own most corrupt administration in
recent history. With Trump second to none in pandering to plutocrats, even a broad section of
his own base has abandoned the remaining mere 23% of
Americans who think he has made any progress on this central campaign promise. In Warren's
case, according to a New Yorkerprofile , "her agenda
of reversing income inequality and beating back the influence of corporate power in politics .
are issues that Warren has pursued for three decades." Her mission has nothing to do with
political calculation. It constitutes hard-earned strategic wisdom about priorities.
Once the systemic corruption is ended all the other crises from climate change and energy to
health and food policy and much more can finally all respond to currently disempowered
majorities. Systemic anti-corruption reform sustains itself first through the watchdog agencies
it creates; solutions for these other issues are not similarly sustainable once the corrupt
plutocracy refocuses its purchased influence on any modest measures that may filter through its
defenses in singular and usually highly constricted moments of reform. For example Obama's
singular unambiguous reform – the Iran nuclear deal – and other more modest Obama
reforms have been killed or wounded by Trump, because Obama left the MIC, Big
Pharma, Wall Street and the other components of the corrupt plutocracy with even
more power than he found them. Through his strategic malfeasance, for motives that
historians will need to pick over, Obama's 8 years were therefore not just unproductive, but
counterproductive for democracy and social justice.
For Warren this issue of the corrupt plutocracy is not just a majoritarian favorite adopted
to boost a political campaign. Obama campaigned
as one "tired of business as usual in Washington" who would "overcome all the big money and
influence" there and get the "lobbyists [who] dominate our government system in Washington" and
their "undue influence" out of "our way." But he woke up president not so "tired of business as
usual in Washington"after all. Refreshed by record-setting campaign cash from the Wall Street
plutocracy he did the opposite
of what many thought to be his central campaign promise. Roger D. Hodge, Mendacity of Hope:
Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (2010) ( Obama
"the best friend Wall Street could hope for").
Warren does not seem to be just another mendacious politician on this priority issue of the
day. It is one for which Warren's prior expertise and activism drew her into politics. This is
uniquely her
own issue, emergent from a highly successful academic and policy career which brought her
into contact with the corruption which then shaped her views about its centrality. It is less
that Warren needs to be president in the mode of the usual megalomaniacal career politician
than that this paramount issue calls her to bring to the presidency her unique skills acquired
during an extraordinarily successful career outside of electoral politics. Warren herself
confides : "I know why I'm here. I have ideas for how we bring systemic change to this
country. And we're running out of time." As a University of Chicago economist told the
NYT ,
"Wall Street and its allies are more afraid of her than Bernie because when she says she'll
change the rules, she's the one who knows how to do it." Such knowledge is a relevant strategic
distinction, unlike WaPo's "Revolution versus Reform" nonsense, for the very reason that
progressive failure has for two generations been driven by lack of competent strategy not lack
of motivational ideology.
Zach Carter's
argument quoted above can be interpreted to suggest another answer than WaPo's misguided
theory for this key question of the difference between Sanders and Warren. Some claim their
differences are merely symbolic, "differences of temperament, style," " and
world views," much in the same manner as the other candidates who are mining the plutocratic
wing's war-chest of symbolic and diversionary identity politics, and single issue politics,
while at the same time they raise
money from plutocrats to seed and foster those divide and conquer divisions and strategic
errors among progressives. That argument goes that these are just different flavors of
progressivism, wholly unrelated to strategic success. But to deny the existence of objectively
important – indeed decisive strategic – differences between the two progressives in
the race would also be just as wrong as the ridiculous and disputable subjectivity of the
"Revolution versus Reform" distraction marketed by WaPo and others. It invites progressives to
distribute themselves randomly according to the subjective appeal of various styles and smiles
rather than be guided by disciplined thoughtful strategic choice which has become the decisive
factor for recovering democracy.
In the face of such distracting theories of difference, it is important for progressives to
debate and answer this question for themselves, well before the primaries, so as not to
squander their resources of time, finances and conviviality fighting
among themselves over largely subjective triggers during the important lead-up to the primary
elections. For the primaries they must be strategically united in order to win against a
plutocracy which rarely finds itself strategically impaired. I have argued at length
elsewhere that the contemporary uniquely extended failure of democracy in America since
Buckley – which can be quantified by the metric of rising economic inequality
– is fundamentally due to the failure of progressives over two generations to unite
behind effective strategy to fight the corrupt plutocracy as their priority. At those times of
similarly profound crises in the past, progressives have successfully formulated and united
behind effective strategy. In the United States, due to its own systemic cultural legacy of
racist slavery, genocide, and imperialism, joined by more universally shared issues of
patriarchy and plutocracy, there will always be fertile soil for the emergence of latent
anti-democratic elements into a totalitarian mobilization when an authentic and competent
opposition is laking. This was understood from early days, such as Franklin's famous
qualification "if you can keep it."
Trump is the direct and predictable product of the progressive failure to have forged an
effective opposition to corrupt plutocracy by the time of that strategic moment when popular
trust has been lost in the plutocratic "
center ." Lack of a unifying progressive strategy meant that volatile and highly
manipulable proto-totalitarian element would look elsewhere. As Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in
Paradise (2014) 115, posits: "The rise of Fascism is not only the Left's failure, but also
proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able
to mobilize." Proto-totalitarian Trumpism is what arises when progressives are unable to unite
strategically.
The Plutocracy and its propagandists take a keen and well-financed interest in prolonging
this division among progressives. They now back Biden, or Trump. Recent reliable polling shows
Biden 30% – Sanders 19% – Warren 15%. This current data shows that supporters of
the two progressives, if united, would defeat the
plutocracy 's
status quo candidate. As the progressive choice between Sanders and Warren lingers through
the summer of 2019 in a mere contest of subjective tastes it will aggravate yet another in a
series of historical failures by progressives to unite strategically and competently at a time
when the stakes are now the highest. Continued progressive failure to act strategically for
decisively wresting control of the Democratic Party from its corrupt plutocratic establishment
will only move the country further in the direction of totalitarianism. Sanders failed at this
task in 2016 though progressives provided him resources and support to do the job. Yet another
progressive failure to organize strategically behind a competent progressive in the 2020
primaries could be terminal. The likes of WaPo will not do it for them. The necessary exercise
of their own strategic judgment in this choice needed to prevail in 2020 will be a useful
exercise of an unexercised muscle by progressives. To elect a strategist progressives must
master the strategy.
The purpose of this article is to discuss four issues for which there is evidence of an
objectively salient strategic difference between these two leading alternatives to Biden beyond
those already discussed. Though the " eminently
beatable" Biden currently leads the plutocracy's large stable of compromised candidates, it is
difficult to imagine Biden not tripping fatally over his own serial, legendarily tone-deaf and
unrepented gaffes. The plutocracy may need to draw on its deep bench in later innings.
Progressives need be prepared. The objective evidence below can assist progressives in making
the necessary early strategic choice between the two progressives for opposing the plutocracy's
eventual candidate which will help them to resist predictable distractions. The alternative to
such a strategic decision is bickering over subjective, standard-free, factually contested
assertions that too often seem to belie unattractive motivations if not actual bot
provocateurs.
Some might object that 2019 is too early for progressives to rely on polls or even to make
such a choice. My own experience in authoring a long 2015 Huffington Post article strongly
supporting Sanders is that discerning use of early polling data can provide a reliable guide to
what will remain as the decisive factors through to the end of the campaign cycle, and even
beyond. The present piece is offered in the same spirit as my 2015
article which remains relevant as an example of how early the disastrous outcome of the
establishment Democrats' 2016 status quo approach could be predicted. Since the decisive
factors are now discernible there is no advantage and great risk in delaying the inevitable
choice that progressives will make.
I disclose my personal views at the outset, if they are not already clear. Though I
supported Sanders extensively through advocacy and as a state delegate for Sanders in 2016,
lending a good deal of my time and even some money to the effort, my experience produced high
regard for self-organizing Sanders supporters but quite the opposite for the man himself.
Certainly by the time of his craven speech
at the Democratic Convention in July, if
notearlier , I had
concluded he was an incompetent
betrayer of the important role and opportunity he had been granted by his supporters, which
he wasted at a crucial moment in American history. When he is compared to Elizabeth Warren, I
now find Sanders to be
unreliable , inauthentic, and wrongly motivated as a career politician with no other
relevant skill base. This perspective has been elaborated at greater length by Jeffrey St.
Clair (2016), as referenced below.
Sanders is concededly good at expounding majoritarian policies and his nominal independence
allows him rhetorical distance from the plutocratic wing of the Democrats, which creates guilt
by association and a fat target
for the proto-totalitarian (also called "populist") right-wing. I do not deny the sincerity of
his progressive views. He has a role. That role is not a leadership role. The problem with
Sanders is execution. Chris Smith
makes a similar point in Vanity Fair when he observes that Sanders "is very good at
raising money .what Sanders was less good at in 2016 was spending his large pile of money to
win votes. Particularly the crucial Democratic primary votes of women and African-Americans.
Sanders is showing little sign that he's going to get it right this time around." Marketing
strategy is not political strategy. Sanders ran a both lucrative and wasteful 2016 campaign in
these respects and also in his failure to elaborate detailed strategy to support his big
themes, which also drew justifiable criticism of his competence.
If Bernie Sanders has not, Elizabeth Warren clearly has learned each of these lessons from
Sanders' flawed campaign. She has been generating detailed policy at such a fast pace it is
difficult to see anyone catching up to her, though Sanders has tried by feebly issuing a less
nuanced version of Wilson's college debt plan. Warren has demonstrated her ability to run a
highly effective campaign on limited funds. Spending money effectively is a strategic skill.
There do not seem to be any third-string cronies around her siphoning off funds into useless
sideshows. One imagines that if Warren possessed Sanders' 2016 mostly wasted pile of loot she
would already have reorganized the Inauthentic Opposition party – as Sheldon Wolin described the Democrats
in 2008 – into a true opposition party that it was designed by Martin Van Buren
to be at its inception.
As for Sanders' problem with reaching African-Americans, according to Rev. Al
Sharpton his progressive rival has no such problem. Of course, "Kamala [Harris] connects
with black-church audiences. Cory Booker, too," says Sharpton. "And I'll tell you who surprised
me: Liz Warren. She rocked my organization's convention like she was taking Baptist preacher
lessons." Warren thus readily solves the biggest demographic problem Sanders had and still has:
black women, particularly in the south. And this Oklahoma woman might also surprise with her
ability to use "
southern charm " to flip the script for white women still living under the South's
unreconstructed patriarchy. Her primary-election campaign strategy has been preparing her with
the experience to play an unprecedented role in American political history in the 2020 general
election.
An establishment Democratic Congressman offered
a similar observation about Warren's potential: "If she can make the leap to being a candidate
that played in the rural Midwest it could be really interesting to watch." By comparison
Sanders, used to "giving the same stump speech at event after event, numb to the hunger of the
beast he had awakened," St. Clair (2016) 8, brings a known and dated turn to the stage, which
like Biden's has little potential to surprise on its up side potential among new demographics
in this manner. The sooner Warren becomes the acknowledged front runner in the party, the
sooner she can use her proven networking skills within the party to bring some order to the
crowded primary field for purposes of deploying them effectively to reach various such
disaffected demographics. She is the person most capable of turning the lemon of an overcrowded
field of contenders into lemonade. Organizing such cooperation is something foreign to Sanders'
experience, which was demonstrated in his shutting out potential allies from his campaign. Yet
it is a significant potential strategic factor that Warren can uniquely bring for the essential
redefinition of the Democratic Party in 2020.
We already know Sanders capitulated to the plutocracy in 2016 for no
reason that he could credibly
explain . After promising his supporters to carry the fight to the Convention floor he
folded long prior to the Convention. What exactly is to be gained by progressives in trusting
Sanders not to do the same thing again? We now have the alternative of Warren who gives us no
reason to doubt and some reason to trust that she will " persist " with strategic intelligence rather
than capitulate under similar circumstances. She combines the unique qualities of a true policy
expert with the ability to communicate. But most important she is someone who has not been a
career politician, and therefore is not, like Sanders, "year after year: a politician who
promises one thing and delivers, time and again, something else entirely." St. Clair (2016) 18.
In 2016 this habit, in the form of deference to the plutocracy he campaigned against, delivered
Trump.
Having disclosed this general point of view toward the two progressives, I try to remove
these subjective understandings largely derived from my involvement in 2016 on behalf of
Sanders' effort from the analysis below of four objective factors that distinguish Sanders'
from Warren based on opinion polling of their supporters. Those with a different experience
than mine can nevertheless use these objective factors to make a strategic progressive choice.
The issue raised here is not so much about the contested fact-based considerations above, but
about the necessity for progressives to made a strategic decision based on uncontested
objective facts. The argument is that there is no reason to delay making that strategic
choice.
... ... ...
If it is true that Warren is attracting support on her merits and not for her
gender, the men who are supporting Sanders in excess numbers and at the same time prioritized a
progressive victory in 2020 should make a primary choice only after they a) get better informed
about Warren, b) read the writing of polling trendlines on the wall, c) not be fooled by
Sanders' "socialism" gambit, and d) eschew even the appearance of gender bias by immediately
unifying progressive support behind Warren.
2016 was then, 2020 is already now. Warren is not remotely a Clinton.*
* This article is based in part on the author's book, "Strategy for Democracy: From
Systemic Corruption to Proto-Totalitarianism in the Second Gilded Age Plutocracy, and
Progressive Responses" which is currently available as a free ebook .
Rob Hager is a public interest litigator who filed an amicus brief
in the Montana sequel to Citizens United and has worked as an international consultant on
anti-corruption policy and legislation.
"... The Democratic Party, thanks largely to the Clintons and their DLC nonsense, has certainly moved to the right. So far right that I haven't been able to call it the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Every Democrat should sign on to FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech. It is hardly radical, but rather the foundation of the modern Democratic Party, or at least was before being abrogated by the "new Democrats." Any Dem not supporting it is at best one of the "Republican-lights" who led the Dem party into the wilderness. It would also behoove the party to resurrect FDR's Veep Henry Wallace's NY Times articles about the nature of big businesses and fascism, also from '44. Now that was a party of the people. 7 Replies ..."
In its most recent analysis, Gallup
found that from 1994 to 2018, the percentage of all Democrats who call themselves liberal more
than doubled from 25 percent to 51 percent.
Over the same period, the percentage of Democratic moderates and conservatives fell
steadily, with the share of moderates dropping from 48 to 34 percent, and of conservatives
dropping from 25 to 13 percent. These trends began to accelerate during the administration of
George W. Bush and have continued unabated during the Obama and Trump presidencies.
... ... ...
The anti-establishment faction contributed significantly to the large turnout increases in
Democratic primaries last year.
Pew found that from 2014 to 2018, turnout in House primaries rose from 13.7 to 19.6 percent
of all registered Democrats, in Senate primaries from 16.6 to 22.2 percent and in governor
primaries from 17.1 to 24.5 percent.
... ... ...
The extensive support among prospective Democratic presidential candidates for
Medicare for All , government-guaranteed jobs and a higher minimum wage reflects the
widespread desire in the electorate for greater
protection from the vicissitudes of market capitalism -- in response to "increasingly
incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change," as the political scientist
Jacob Hacker put it in "
Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy
Retrenchment in the United States ." Support for such protections is showing signs of
becoming a litmus test for candidates running in the 2020 Democratic presidential
primaries.
... ... ...
Sawhill looks at the ideological shifts in the Democratic electorate less from a historical
perspective and more as a response to contemporary economic and social dislocation. Among both
conservatives and liberals, Sawhill argued, there is "an intellectual awakening about the flaws
of modern capitalism" -- a recognition of the failings of "neoliberalism, the idea that a
market economy with a few light guardrails is the best way to organize a society." This
intellectual climate may result in greater receptivity among voters to more radical
proposals.
These "big, bold leftist ideas" pose a strategic problem for liberals and the Democratic
Party," (sigh). Here we go again. I am an older guy (Caucasian). I attended Texas A&M
University from 1978 to 1982. My tuition payments during that entire time was $4 per credit
hour. Same for every Texas resident during that time. Roughly $128 per year. Had Texas
A&M not offered education at this modest entry point financially, I would still be
working in the Holiday Inn kitchen washing dishes. Like I was in high school. So, I don't
understand why older guys who went to school on the cheap, like me, and probably like Mr.
Edsall, are writing articles about "radical" proposals like "free" or at least "affordable"
education for Americans. We could achieve this very easily if America refocused on domestic
growth and health and pulled itself out of its continuous wars. America has spent $6 Trillion
dollars on war since 2001. For what? Nothing. Imagine how much college tuition we could have
paid instead. Imagine how that would change America. What is radical is killing people of
color in other countries for no goal and no reason. Let's refocus on domestic USA issues that
are important. Like how to get folks educated so they/we can participate in the US economy.
Mr. Edsall, what did you pay to
go to school per year? Was that "radically" cheap? For me, it was not radical to pay $128 per year. It was a blessing.
Bruce Rozenblit Kansas City, MO
Jan. 23 Times Pick
To the conservative, liberal means socialist. Unfortunately, they don't know what socialism
is. They think socialism is doing nothing and getting paid for it, a freeloader society.
Socialism is government interference in the free market, interference in production.
Ethanol
is socialism. Oil and gas subsidies are socialism. Agricultural price supports are socialism.
Tax breaks and subsidies are socialism. The defence industry is socialism. All of these
socialist policies greatly benefit big business. What liberals want is socialism of a similar
nature that benefits people. This would include healthcare, education, public transportation,
retirement, and childcare. Currently, people work their tails off to generate the profits
that pay for corporate socialism and get next to nothing in return. Daycare costs as much as
many jobs pay.
Kids graduate from college $50,000 in debt. Get sick and immediately go
bankrupt. They have to work past 70. Pursuing these policies is not some far out leftist
agenda. They are the norm in most industrialized nations.
It's hard to live free or die if
you don't have anything to eat. It's easy to be a libertarian if you make a million bucks a
year. Liberals are not advocating getting paid for doing nothing. They want people to have
something to do and get paid for it. That is the message that should be pushed. Sounds pretty
American to me. 27 Replies
This old white (liberal) man regrets that I was born too late for the FDR New Deal era and
too early to be part of this younger generation taking us back to our roots. I lived in
America when we had a strong middle class and I have lived through the Republican
deconstruction of the middle class, I much preferred the former.
Economic Security and FDR's second bill of rights is a very
good place for this new generation to pick up the baton and start running. 4 Replies
Are these really moves to the left, or only in comparison to the lurch further right by the republicans. What is wrong with
affordable education, health care, maternal and paternal leave, and a host of other programs that benefit all people? Why
shouldn't we have more progressive tax rates? These are not radical ideas. 6 Replies
As a senior, who has been a healthcare provider for decades, I hope that people will not be
afraid if they get sick, that people will not fear going bankrupt if they get sick, that they
do not have to fear they will die needlessly if they get sick, because they did not have
proper access to haeathcare treatment. If a 29 year old woman from Queens, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, can fulfill my hopes and dreams, and alleviate these fears, just to get humane
healthcare - then I say "You Go Girl!" What a wonderful world that would be..... 9 Replies
Moving to the left??? I'm 64 years old. I started out on the left and haven't moved leftward
in all these years. I'm just as far left now as when I registered to vote as a Democrat when
I was 18. We called it being liberal and the Democratic Party reflected my beliefs.
The
Democratic Party, thanks largely to the Clintons and their DLC nonsense, has certainly moved
to the right. So far right that I haven't been able to call it the Democratic Party. So far
right that I have seriously considered changing my party affiliation. Right now, the only
think keeping me in the party is this influx of vibrant new faces. One thing that will make
me leave is any ascendancy of the corporate lapdog "New Democrat Coalition" attempting to
keep my party in thrall to the Republicans. No. The electorate has not shifted sharply
leftward. We've been here all along. Our party went down a wrong path. It had better get back
on track or become a footnote. 12 Replies
I work with young adults in a university setting. The university I work for used to be really
inexpensive. It is still relatively inexpensive and still a bargain. Most of the students
have student loans. They can not make enough money in the summer or during the term to pay
for tuition, fees, housing, and food. They need jobs that will pay enough to pay for those
loans. They also need portable health care. As the employer based health insurance gets
worse, that portable health care becomes a necessity so they can move to where the jobs are.
So if a livable wage and universal health care are far left ideas then so be it. I am a
leftist. 1 Reply
Every Democrat should sign on to FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech. It is hardly
radical, but rather the foundation of the modern Democratic Party, or at least was before
being abrogated by the "new Democrats." Any Dem not supporting it is at best one of the
"Republican-lights" who led the Dem party into the wilderness. It would also behoove the
party to resurrect FDR's Veep Henry Wallace's NY Times articles about the nature of big
businesses and fascism, also from '44. Now that was a party of the people. 7 Replies
@Michael. Pell grants and cheap tuition allowed me to obtain a degree in aerospace
engineering in 1985. I'd like to think that that benefited our country, not radicalized it.
I don't think that's entirely accurate, and even if true, leaving students to
the predations of private lenders isn't the answer. Although I'm willing to entertain your
thesis, soaring tuition has also been the way to make up for the underfunding of state
universities by state legislatures.
At the same time, there's been an increase since the 70s
in de luxe facilities and bloated administrator salaries. When administrators make budget
cuts, it isn't for recreational facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and
history departments, and it's to faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an
unconscionable share of courses. So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal
division between the people who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate
salaries (administrators) -- so too as in the business world, as you say.
I have a friend who lives on the West Coast and is constantly posting on social media about
"white privilege" and how we all need to embrace far left policies to "even the playing
field" for minorities. I always bristle at this, not because I don't support these policies,
but because this person chooses to live in a city with actually very few minorities. She also
lives in a state that's thriving, with new jobs, new residents and skyrocketing real estate
values. I, by contrast, live in a state that's declining....steadily losing jobs, businesses
and residents....leaving many people feeling uneasy and afraid. I also live in a city with a
VERY high minority crime rate, which also makes people uneasy and afraid. Coastal liberals
like my friend will instantly consider anyone who mentions this a racist, and hypocritically
suggest that our (assumed) racism is what's driving our politics. But when I look around here
and see so many Trump supporters (myself NOT included), I don't see racists desperately
trying to retain their white privilege in a changing world. I see human beings living in a
time and place of great uncertainty and they're scared! If Dems fail to notice this, and fail
to create an inclusive message that addresses the fears of EVERYBODY in the working/middle
class, regardless of their skin color, they do so at their own peril. Especially in parts of
the country like mine that hold the key to regaining the WH. Preaching as my friend does is
exactly how to lose. 5 Replies
A majority of Americans, including independent voters and some Republicans favor Medicare for
all, a Green New Deal, and higher taxes on the rich. While Trump has polarized voters around
race, Ocasio-Cortez is polarizing around class -- the three-fourths of Americans working
paycheck to paycheck against the 1 percenters and their minions in both parties. Reading the
tea leaves of polls and current Democratic Party factions as Edsall does, is like obsessing
about Herbert Hoover's contradictory policies that worsened the Depression. If Ocasio-Cortez
becomes bolder and calls for raising the business taxes and closing tax incentives,
infrastructure expansion, and federal jobs guarantee, she'll transform the American political
debate from the racist wall meme to the redistribution of wealth and power America needs. 1
Reply
Labels such as 'liberal" fail to characterize the political agenda articulated by Bernie
Sanders. By style and substance, Sanders represented a departure from the hum-drum norm. Is
something wrong about aspiring to free college education in an era when student debt totals
$1.5 trilliion? His mantle falls to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her followers. One hundred
years ago, American progressivism was spawned by Robert La Follette. As governor and senator
from Wisconsin, and as failed third party candidate for president, La Follette called for
laws to protect youth from horrendous labor practices. He called for laws to protect civil
rights. In time, many of La Follette's positions became mainstream. Will history repeated
itself? Maybe. The rise of "liberalism" in the Democratic Party is therapeutic, as evidenced
by youthful audiences who attended the Sander's rallies. Increasing voter turnout will take
back government from a minority that undermines the essence of a democratic system. A
Democratic counterbalance to the Republican "Freedom Caucus" may appear divisive to some. To
others, it offers a path to the future. 4 Replies
Ok, from the perspective of a rural white midwest retiree independent with post graduate
education, the issues weren't the democrats moving to the left, it was the Republican party
turning right (and they show no signs of stopping). Who is against an equal opportunity for
an equal quality education for everyone? My college costs years ago could be met with a
barely minimum wage job and low cost health insurance provided by the school and I could
graduate without debt even from graduate school. Seeing what years of Republican rule did to
our college and university systems with a raise in tuition almost every year while
legislative support declined every year, who is happy with that? Unions that used to provide
a majority of the apprenticeships in good jobs in the skilled were killed by a thousand tiny
cuts passed by Republicans over the years. The social safety net that used to be a hand up
became an ever diminishing hand out. What happened is those that had made it even to the
middle class pulled the ladder up behind them, taking away the self same advantages they had
in the past and denying future generations the opportunity. The young democrats and
independents coming along see this all too clearly. 1 Reply
These so-called liberal and progressive ideas aren't new. They work now in other countries
and have so for many, many years, but the rich keep screaming capitalism good, socialism bad
all the while slapping tariffs on products and subsidizing farmers who get to pretend that
this is somehow still a free market. It's fun to watch my neighbors do mental gymnastics to
justify why subsidizing soy bean farmers to offset the tariffs is a strong free market, but
that subsidizing solar panels and healthcare is socialism AKA the devil's work. All of this
underscores the reality that, much like geography, Americans are terrible with economics.
The tensions between progressive and moderate positions, liberal and conservative positions
in the Democratic Party and in independents, flow from and vary based on information on and
an understanding of the issues. What seems to one, at first glance, radically
progressive/liberal becomes more mainstream when one is better informed. Take just one issue,
Medicare for all, a progressive/liberal objective. At first glance people object based on two
main points: costs and nefarious socialism. How do you pay for Medicare for all? Will it add
to the debt? Will socialism replace our capitalist economy? People who have private medical
insurance pay thousands in premiums, deductibles, co-pays each year. The private insurance is
for profit, paying CEO's million dollar salaries and returns to stockholders. People paying
these private insurance premiums would pay less for Medicare and have more in their own
pockets. Medicare for all is no more nefariously socialistic than social security. Has social
security ended capitalism and made America a socialist country? I think not. Is social
security or Medicare adding to the national debt? Only if Congress will continue to play
their tribal political games. These programs are currently solvent but definitely need
tweaking to avoid near term shortfalls. A bipartisan commission could solve the long term
solvency issues. The more we know and understand about progressive/liberal ideas, the less
radical they become. The solution is education. 17 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit Absolutely correct. According to the Bible of Saint Reagan, Socialism for
corporations and the rich: Good. Socialism for the poor and working class: bad.
@Michael - cheaper tuition starts with getting the Federal Govt out of the student loan
business, it's as simple as that. Virtually unlimited tuition dollars is what drove up
tuition rates. Higher Ed is a business, make no mistake.
@Bruce, have you ever considered creating a new "reality" network where the truth about
things could be told? You're quite good at articulating and defining how the world works,
without all the usual nonsense. I really appreciate your comments.
Can we please, please stop talking about AOC? Sure, she's young and energetic and is worthy
of note, but what has she accomplished? It's easy to go to a rooftop- or a twitter account-
and yell "health care and education for all!' But please, AOC, tell us how you are going to
not only pay for these ideas but actually get them through Congress and the Senate? It's just
noise, until then, and worse, you're creating a great target for the right that will NOT move
with you and certainly can label these ideas as leftist nutism- which would be fine, if we
weren't trying to get Trump out of office ASAP.. Dreams are great. Ideals are great. But
people who can get stuff actually done move the needle...less rhetoric, more actual plans
please.. 10 Replies
Its ok for a far right bigoted clown to be elected to the president and a tax cut crazy party
that wants to have a full scale assault against the environment and force more medical
related bankruptcies to be in charge? The safe candidate protected by 800 superdelegates in
2016 was met with a crushing defeat. The Democratic establishment wants a safe neo con
corporatist democrat. Fair taxation and redistribution of wealth is not some far out kooky
idea. The idea that the wealthiest Americans getaway with paying tax at 15%, if at all, is
ruinous to the country. Especially since there is an insane compulsion to spend outlandish
trillions on "national security". Universal health care would save the country billions of
dollars. Medicare controls costs much more effectively than private insurers. As with defense
the US spends billions more on health care than other countries and has worse medical
outcomes. Gentrification has opened fissures in the Democrats. The wealthy price out other
established communities. The problems of San Francisco and Seattle and other places with
gentrification need to be addressed before an open fissure develops in the party. 2 Replies
@Midwest Josh It's time for higher education to stop being a business. Likewise it's time to
stop electing leaders who are businessmen/women. 38 Replies
One could argue that many of these ideas are not that far left - rather it's a result of more
and more Americans realizing that WE are not the problem. Clean water and air, affordable
health care and affordable education are not that radical.
@Midwest Josh Hmmm, how old are you Midwest Josh? There were student loans back in the 1970s
when college cost me about $400 a year. Maybe something happened when that failed Hollywood
actor spouted slogans like "Government is not the solution, government is the problem" (and,
no, it was not taken out of context, he most definitely DID mean that government is the
problem - look it up) www.remember-to-breathe.org 38 Replies
You are studying this like it represents some kind of wave but in fact it is just a few
districts out of 435. These young women seem extraordinarily simply because the liberal media
says they are extraordinary. If the media attention on these new representatives were to
cease, no one except their families, their staff, and maybe Stephen Colbert would notice. 9
Replies
Finally, the left came out of its hibernation. We have spent the last decade or more either
sleeping or hiding, while at the same time, the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, Trump, and his
minions were taking over our government---It is such a breath of fresh air to finally listen
to airwaves filled with outrage over CEO's making millions of dollars an hour, of companies
that have become monopolies, of tax plans that bring back the middle class---it took us a
while, but we are back. 2 Replies
For so long (40+ years) the political spectrum has been pulled wildly and radically to the
right across so many issues. The Democratic party has for the most part ''triangulated''
their stances accordingly to essentially go along with republicans and corporate interests
for a bargain of even more tax/corporate giveaways to hold the line on social issues or
programs. It has now gotten to the point that continuous war has been waged for two (2)
decades and all the exorbitant costs that go along with that. There has been cut, after cut
after cut whereas some people and businesses are not paying any taxes at all now.
Infrastructure, social spending and education are all suffering because the cupboard is now
bare in the greatest and most richest country in the world. It just came out the other day
that ONLY (26) people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire world's
population. That amount of wealth in relation to dwindling resources of our planet and
crushing poverty for billions is abjectly obscene on so many levels. Coupled with all of the
above, is the continued erosion of human rights. (especially for women and dominion over
their own bodies) People are realizing that the founding fathers had a vision of a secular
and Progressive nation and are looking for answers and people that are going to give it to
them. They are realizing that the Democratic party is the only party that will stand up for
them and be consistent for all.
Democrats just don't like to win presidential elections. Go ahead. Move left. But remember,
you are not taking the rest of the country with you. As a NeverTrump Republican, I'll vote
for a moderate Democrat in 2020. No lefties. Sorry. Don't give the country a reason to give
Trump four more years. Win the electoral college vote instead of complaining about it. The
anti-Trump is a moderate. 5 Replies
"These "big, bold leftist ideas" pose a strategic problem." No they don't. The Real Problem
is the non-thinking non-Liberal 40% of Democrats and their simpatico Republicans who are
programmed to scream, "How will we pay for all that?" Don't they know all that money will
just be stolen? They were silent when that money was stolen by the 0.1% for the Tax Giveaway
(they're now working on tax giveaway 2.0) and by the military-industrial complex (to whom
Trump gave an extra $200,000,000,000 last year), various boondoggle theft-schemes like the
Wall, the popular forever Wars (17 years of Iraq/Afghanistan has cost $2,400,000,000,000 (or
7 times WW2)), and the Wall Street bailouts. Don't those so-called Democrats realize whose
money that was? First of all, it's our money. And second, our money "spent" on the People is
a highly positive investment with a positive ROI. Compare that to money thrown into the usual
money pits which has no return at all - except more terrorists for the military, more income
inequality for the Rich, and Average incomes of $422,000 for Wall Street. When the People's
money is continually stolen, how can anyone continue to believe that we're living in a
democracy?
Bruce, a succinct summary of your post is this: What we have now is socialism for the wealthy
and corporations (who, as SCOTUS has made clear, are people, too) and rugged individualism
for the rest of us. What we're asking for is nothing more than a level playing field for all.
And I hope that within my lifetime SCOTUS will have an epiphany and conclude that, gosh,
maybe corporations aren't people after all. We can only hope. 27 Replies
Edsall writes with his normal studious care, and makes some good points. Still, I am growing
weary of these "Democrats should be careful and move back to the center" opinions. Trump
showed us that the old 'left-right-center' way of thinking is no longer applicable. These
progressive policies appeal to a broad majority of Americans not because of their ideological
position, but because so many are suffering and are ready to give power to representatives
who will finally fight for working families. Policies like medicare for all are broadly
popular because the health insurance system is broken and most people are fed up and ready to
throw the greedy bums out. We've been trying the technocratic incrementalism strategy for too
long, with too little to show for it. Bold integrity is exactly what we need. 1 Reply
@Bruce Rozenblit Thank you; as others have commented already, this is so well said. To build
on your point: just yesterday, a commenter on a NYT article described AOC as a communist.
Incredible. The extent to which decent, pragmatic and, in a bygone era, mainstream, ideas are
now painted as dangerous, extreme, and anti-American is both absurd and disturbing. 27
Replies
If Hillary were President, there would never have been a shutdown. That is the lesson that
Mrs. Pelosi, AOC and Democrats should carry forward to 2020. 5 Replies
@LTJ No one is promoting ''free stuff'' - what is being proposed is that people/corporations
pay into a system Progressively upwards (especially on incomes above 10,000,000 dollars per
year) that allowed them and gave them the infrastructure to get rich in the first place. I am
sure you would agree that people having multiple homes, cars, and luxury items while children
go hungry in the richest nation in the world is obscene on its face. Aye ?
@Ronny Respectfully, President Clinton had a role in the deconstruction of the middle class.
My point is many of the folks in the news today were in congress that far back. Say what you
will about President Trump and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez,I believe they both have exposed
the left,the right,the press for what they are. Please choose your own example. I don't agree
with all of her positions, but I can't express how I enjoy her making the folks that under
their watch led us to where we find ourselves today squirm and try to hide their anger for
doing what she does so well. I've been waiting 55 years for this. Thank you AOC.
@Bruce Rozenblit Bruce, spot on. The point of the New Deal was not to replace capitalism with
socialism, but to save capitalism from itself by achieving the balance that would preserve a
capitalist economic system but one in which the concerns of the many in terms of freedom from
want and freedom from fear were addressed. In other words, the rich get to continue to be
rich, but not without paying the price of not being hung in the public square - by funding an
expanding middle class. A middle class that by becoming consumers, made the rich even richer.
But then greed took over and their messiah Saint Reagan convinced this large middle class
that they too could be rich and so cutting taxes for the wealthy (and in the process
redistributing the wealth from the expanding middle class to the wealthy) would one day
benefit them - when they were wealthy. Drunk on the promise of future wealth, and working
harder than ever, the middle class failed to notice whose ox was being gored and voted
Republican. And now finally, the pendulum swings. Amen. 27 Replies
@Socrates I'm reminded of a poll I saw several years ago that presented positions on issues
without attaching them to any individual politician or affixing labels of party or ideology.
The pol aimed to express the issue in neutral language without dog whistles or buzzwords.
When the pollsters had the data, they looked for the member of Congress whose positions best
reflected the view of the majority of respondents. It was Dennis Kucinich, the scary liberal
socialist bogeyman of his day.
I lived in Europe for a long time. Not even most right wing parties there wish to abolish
universal healthcare, replace low or tuition-free colleges with college debt, etc. The US has
politically drifted far to the right when the center Democrats were in charge. Now Trump is
lurching the country to extreme raw capitalism at the cost of national debt, even our
environment and climate, Democrats need to stop incrementalism. Simple as that. 1 Reply
@Michael Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was opposed to the eternal triumvirate axis of inhumane
evil aka capitalism, militarism and racism. King was a left-wing socialist community
organizer. In the mode of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. And the Nazarene of Matthew 25:
31- 46. America's military and prison industrial complexes are the antithesis of America' s
proclaimed interests and values. America is number one in arms, money and prisoners. MAGA? 38
Replies
Bernie and AOC don't seem all that radical to me for the reason this op-ed points out -- I
grew up in a New Deal Democratic family. My Grampa was an electrician supervisor for the City
of Chicago and my Granma was a legal secretary. They wanted universal health care and free
education and jobs for all. Those things made sense then, and they make sense now. They
provide solutions to the deep problems of our society, so who wouldn't want them? We've had a
lab test -- other than actual jobs for all Northern Europe has these things and we don't.
Neo-liberalism, its Pay-Go formula for government, and its benefits for the rich fails on
most counts except producing massive inequality and concentrated wealth. Bernie voters want
solutions to inequality and climate change, and they are readily available if government can
be wrested from the hands of Republicans like Trump and neo-liberals.
@Michael To me, the key sentence in your excellent post is that American needs to "refocus on
domestic growth and health and pull itself out of its continuous wars." All policiticians
hoping for our votes in the future need to make clear where they stand on this. As to those
who say that making all those weapons creates jobs, is there any reason that we couldn't
instead start producing other quality goods in the U.S. again? 38 Replies
@chele Me too! I am 72 y/o, retired, college educated at a rather tough school in which to
gain entrance. Lived below my means for over 40 years. Parents are both WW2 Marine Corps
officers(not career), who voted Republican and were active in local elections. They would be
shocked and disgusted at what that "party" represents now.
I think you look at all this in a vacuum. Democrats veered left because there was a need to
counterbalance what was happening on the right. They see Republicans aggressively trying to
undo all the gains the left had achieved the previous several decades. Civil rights, Womens'
rights, anti-poverty efforts, and so on all not just being pushed to the right, but forced to
the right with a bulldozer. It got to a tipping point where Democrats could clearly see the
forest for the trees. A great deal of this was a result of Republicans inability to candy
coat their agenda. Universal healthcare....not being replaced by affordable alternatives, but
by nothing. Tax cuts that were supposed to help the middle class, but, as evidenced by the
government shutdown, giving them no economic breathing room. And, in fact, making their tax
cut temporary, something nearly impossible to reverse with such a high deficit. Attacking
immigrants with no plan on who, actually, would do the work immigrants do. The list goes on
and on. In the past, many social programs were put in place not so much to alleviate
suffering as to silence the masses. Now Republicans feel the time has come to take it all
back, offering easily seen through false promises as replacements. That the left should see
the big picture here and say "Not so fast" should come as absolutely no surprise. All they
need now is a leader eloquent enough to rally the masses.
I think the Democratic Party is finally returning to its roots. We are now engaging in the
same politics which gave us control of the House for about fifty years. I went to my first
International Union convention is 1972 at which Ted Kennedy was one of the featured speakers.
One of the themes of the convention was healthcare for all. Now it treated as some sort of
radical proposal from the left. I am not certain why clean air and water, affordable health
care and housing, combating climate change, raising wages, taxing the highest income
brackets, updating our infrastructure, solving the immigration issue, and providing aid not
weapons to other nations, are considered liberal or socialistic. I think it represents the
thinking of a progressive society looking to the future rather than living in the past. 1
Reply
@David G. I would also say that many people think a cooperative economic enterprise, such as
a worker owned factory, is Socialism. But this is blatantly wrong and is pushed by the rich
business and stock owners to denigrate these types of businesses. Cooperatives have often
proven themselves quite successful in navigating a free market system, while simultaneously
focussing on workers rights and ownership. We need more if this in North America. 27 Replies
@Samuel She's been in office less than a month. You want to shut down the conversation that
is finally bringing real hope & passion to average people, & is bringing a new set of
goals (& more integrity) to the Democratic Party? Paying for single-payer has been
rehashed many times; just look at all the other 'civilized' countries who have it. For once,
try putting the savings from ending co-pays, deductibles, & premiums into the equation.
Think about the savings from large-group bids, & negotiations for drug prices, & the
savings from preventative medicine heading off more expensive advanced treatment. Bernie
Sanders has been explaining all this for years now. 'Less rhetoric'? The conversation is
(finally) just now getting started! You start by explaining what is possible. When enough
people understand it, the needle will start to move. Watch.
@JBC, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was voted into congress and then the media took notice. It wasn't
the other way around. My only hope is that she stays the course.
@Bruce Rozenblit And don't forget the biggest socialist project of our time - the wall! And
withholding 800k employee checks to do so? That's socialism at gun point. 27 Replies
There are two points left out of all of the analysis of both Pressley's and Ocasio-Cortez's
campaigns. First of all, both women did old fashioned retail politics, knocking on doors,
sending out postcards, gathering as many volunteers as they could and talking about the
issues with voters face to face. They took nothing for granted. This is precisely what
Crowley and Capuano did not do. Second, they actually listened to the voters regarding what
they needed and wanted in Congressional representation. What both of the stand for is neither
Liberal or Conservative. What they stand for human values. This is not to say that Capuano
and Crowley did not stand for these same values, but they took the voter for granted. That is
how you lose elections. The Democrats are going back to their roots. They have found that the
Mid-terms proved that issues of Health Care, minimum wages, good educations for all despite
economic circumstances, and how important immigration is to this country really matter to the
voters. They need to be braver in getting this across before the next election And the press
might want to start calling the candidates Humane, period. 1 Reply
@MIMA Yes, absolutely. I'm retired from the healthcare field after practicing 38 years. It is
unconscionable that we question the access of healthcare to everyone. The complaint usually
heard from the right is about "the takers." Data I've seen indicates that the majority on
"the dole" are workers, who can't make ends meet in the gig economy or the disabled. That
some lazy grubbers are in the system is unavoidable; perfection is the enemy of the good.
@Stu Sutin I agree, "Liberal" is too broad a term, as so-called liberals do not agree on
everything, especially the degree. We can be socially liberal, while economically
moderate--or vice versa. Some believe in John Maynard Keynes economics, but appose abortion.
Some want free college tuition, while others support public schools but do not support the
public paying for higher education. Our foreign policy beliefs often differ greatly. What
joins us is a belief in a bottom up economy, not top down--and a greater belief in civil
liberties and a greater distribution of wealth. Beyond that, our religious and cultural
beliefs often differ.
I think the Internet has provided an influx of new understanding for the American left.
They've learned that things considered radical here are considered unexceptional in the rest
of the developed world. There is a realization that the only reason these are not normal here
is because of a lack of political will to enact them. That will is building as the ongoing
inequities are splashed across the front pages and the twitter feeds. It is the beginning of
the end for American exceptionalism (a term coined by Stalin as America resisted the wave of
socialism spreading around the world in the early 20th century). Unbridled capitalism lasted
longer than communism but only because its costs were hidden longer. We need to find the
sustainable middle path that allows for entrepreneurship along with a strong social safety
net (and environmental protection). This new crop of progressive Democrats (with strong
electoral backing) might lead the way.
at 63, I was there. I don't want second Trump administration either, but the route to a
Democratic victory is not cozying up to the corporations and the wealthy, but by stating
clearly, like FDR, "they are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." We
need people who are willing to say that the rich deserve to be taxed at a higher rate,
because they have benefited more from our society, that no income deserves to be taxed at a
lower rate than the wages paid to working people, and that vast wealth needs to be earned,
not inherited. Emmanuel Saez makes persuasive arguments, but they need to be made in the
language of the working people. 12 Replies
@Michael Your $128 a year would be more like $414 or so in today's dollars. Still . . . I
went to Brooklyn College, part of the tuition-free City University of New York from
1969-1973. We paid a $53 general fee at the start of every semester ($24 for a summer
semester), and that was it. Wealthy or poor, everyone paid the same amount (about $334 in
today's dollars). 38 Replies
@JRS Democratic party leaders have been in favor of more border security and an overhauled
immigration system for as long as I've been alive. The suggestion (clearly this comment's
intention) that Democrats favor "open" borders, ports, etc., is a myth propagated by an ever
more influential right wing. And it's working: it's been repeated so often that it's now
virtually an assumption that Democrats favor open borders, despite that fact that any
critical thought on the subjection indicates the opposite is true.
I'm a very moderate Democrat -liberal on social issues and very supportive of free global
trade- who would vote for any of the current Democrats over Trump, but would leave the party
if AOC's ideas became the norm. I don't have a problem in principle with a 70% top marginal
tax rate or AOC's Green New Deal- Meaning, these aren't moral issues for me per se. I just
believe they would bankrupt the economy and push us into a chaos far worse than what we're
seeing under Trump. 5 Replies
@Michael The increase in fees for education to include the books along with the lowering of
standards for the classes taken is part and parcel of the reagan revolution to remake
American society. One of the most problematic things for those seeking to undo what FDR did
was the plethora of well educated and well read people American had managed to create. How
were they going to be able to overcome this? You can deduce whatever methods you may know but
I saw them tank the economy on purpose and prey on the fear that it created with more and
more radical propaganda. Once they got into office they removed the best and brightest of our
Civil Service and began making legal the crimes they wanted to commit and changing laws and
procedures for how things were done so that people would eventually come to think of this as
the "right" way when it was in fact purpose designed to deny them their due. 38 Replies
Younger candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appeal to younger voters. John Kennedy
appealed to WWII veterans, most of whom were in their 30s when they elected him. One of the
reasons for Barack Obama's support in 2008 among younger voters is that he was a younger
candidate and they identified with a younger candidate. That appeal to a younger electorate
will play a larger role in future elections. Don't focus too strongly on issues. Democrats
will win by a landslide in 2020 if they nominate a younger candidate that can inspire younger
voters. November 3, 2020. 1 Reply
@Samuel Actually, running a campaign and getting elected is a significant accomplishment.
Before anyone decides about what bills to promote and means of paying for them, we need a
momentum of discourse, and promoting that discourse is another major accomplishment. You and
many millions of others, also, have good reasons to be frustrated. Let's just try to actually
"work" at talking the talking and walking the walk, and maybe we will--or maybe we
won't--arrive some place where we can see some improvement.
The interesting part of this piece is the statement about politicians moving unwillingly. So
some Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen are allowing their personal beliefs to be
compromised for the glory of being elected or re-elected? Sounds like someone I would not
care to support. 2 Replies
A great essay! The wild card in all this analysis, of course, is what happens when these
(now) young voters, age, eventually partner, and have kids. As every generation has shown,
the needs of a voter changes as they age. I'm surrounded by many new neighbors with little
kids who moved out of Brooklyn and Jersey City who suddenly find themselves concerned about
rising property taxes- they now see the balance between taxes and services. Not something
they worried about a few years ago. 2 Replies
@Tracy Rupp I am a senior citizen heterosexual white male. I do not apologize for my race,
gender, etc. In fact, I am proud of our accomplishments. I do apologize for my personal
wrongs, and strive to improve myself.
"This will be difficult, given the fact that what is being proposed is a much larger role for
government, and that those who are most in need of government support are in the bottom half
of the income distribution and disproportionately minority -- in a country with a long racist
history." True enough, but if progressives want actual people in that bottom half to lead
happier lives, the focus of any programs should not be to employ armies in left-leaning and
self-perpetuating "agencies," but rather to devise policies to help people develop the
self-discipline to: A) finish high school, B) postpone the bearing of children until marriage
(not as a religious construct but as a practical expression of commitment to the child's
future), and; C) Find and get a regular job. These are supported by what objective, empirical
data we have. These have not struck me as objectives of the rising left in the Democratic
party. Mostly, I see endless moral preening, and a tribal demonizing of the "other," just
exactly as they accuse the "other." In this case the "other" is we insufficiently "woke" but
entirely moderate white folks who still comprise a plurality of Americans. I see success on
the left as based primarily on an ability to express performative outrage. But remember, you
build a house one brick at a time, which can be pretty boring, and delivers no jolt of
dopamine as would manning the barricades, but which results in a warm, dry, comfortable place
to live. 4 Replies
@Concerned Citizen For your information, Holiday Inns typically had a restaurant in the hotel
in the days Michael is talking about so... whatever! 38 Replies
My father fought in Germany during WWII, then came home and went to college on the GI bill.
Both my parents received federal assistance for a loan on their first house. Later, during
retirement, they were taken care of by Medicare and given an income by Social Security. They
worked hard, kept their values, lived modestly, and voted for Democrats. Apparently, they
were wild-eyed, leftist-socialist radicals, and I never knew it.
@Bruce Shigeura AOC in some ways is doing what Bernie was doing -- mobilizing people around
class as you say -- but the difference is that AOC doesn't shy away from issues of racial
justice. Bernie seemed to want to unite people by ignoring issues of race, as if he was
afraid that mentioning race too much might drive Whites away. AOC seems able to hold whites
on the class issue while still speaking to the racial justice issues that are important to
non-Whites. She's an extraordinary phenomenon: smart, engaging, articulate and with personal
connections to both the White and Non-White worlds, so she threatens neither and appeals to
both.
@Stu Sutin "Is something wrong about aspiring to free college education in an era when
student debt totals $1.5 trilliion?" Yes. If you're the Congressperson who gets his/her
funding from the lenders.
A O-C has yet to open a district office. A O-C is more interested in "national" issues and
exposure than those of her district. What A O-C may have forgotten is that it is her district
and constituents that have to re-elect her in less than 2 tears (or not): "Would you rather
have a Congress member with an amazing local services office, or one that leads nationally on
issues?" she queried her 1.9 million followers on Instagram -- a number that is well over
twice the population of her district. The results strongly favored national issues."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/aoc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-district-office.html
As Mr. Edsall points out, her district is not necessarily progressive and liberal and while
there may be national issues, at the bottom line, many of her instagram groupies are not her
constituents. Democrats like to constantly point out that Ms. Clinton won the popular vote,
and she was the non-liberal-progressive Democrat. I am sure that the Republicans pray for the
success of the Democratic left. They seek to give voice to that left. That will bring the
swing votes right back to or over to the Republicans, without, but possibly even with Mr.
Trump (if the Democrats cross a left-wing tipping point). Bottom line, instagram is fine and
likes are great, twitter is good for snappy answers, but representatives to the House have to
deliver to their district and constituents. A O-C leads, but to the salvation of the
Republican party. 6 Replies
@Joshua Schwartz M. Ocasio-Cortez explained on The Late Show the other night that the reason
she has not opened her district office is due to the Government Shutdown. The people charged
with setting up the office are on furlough, the money for the office is being held up and she
staff or furnish the office.
Isn't this somehow the natural swing of things? Years of heavy-handed politics benefitting
small minorities on the right have taken their toll, so now new ideas are up at bat. By the
way, these ideas aren't really that bold at all - many countries have living minimum wages or
mandatory healthcare, and are thriving, with a much happier population. Only in the context
of decades-long, almost brainwash-like pounding of these ideas as 'Un-American' or
'socialist' can they be seen as 'bold'. American exeptionalism has led to a seriously
unbalanced and dangerously threatened social contract. Tell me again, Republicans: why is a
diverse, healthy and productive population living under inspiration instead of constant fear
so bad?
The "experts" offering advice here seem to have forgotten that Hillary Clinton listened to
them in 2016: the party decided that appealing to suburban Republicans and Jeb Bush voters
was more important than exciting the Democratic party base. The other hazard of calculated
politics is that the candidate is revealed to be a phony, believing in nothing but power or
that it's simply "her turn" -- an uncompelling program for a voter. 1 Reply
They will all face primary challengers in 2020. Tlaib and Omar didn't even win a majority of
the primary vote. There were so many candidates running in those primaries, they only managed
a plurality. And let's be honest about the demographic changes in the districts Pressley and
Ocasio Cortez won. They went from primarily ethnic White to minority majority. Both women
explicitly campaigned on the premise that their identity made them more representative of the
district than an old White male incumbent. Let's not sugarcoat what happened: they ran
explicitly racist campaigns. They won with tribalism, not liberal values. Democrats actually
need more candidates like Lucy McBath, Antonio Delgado, and Kendra Horn if they want to
retain Congressional control and change policy. And many minorities and immigrants aren't
interested in the far left faction. We don't have a problem with Obama and a moderate
approach to social democracy.
@JABarry - Some data: Canada has a program like Medicare for All, and its bottom line health
care statistics are better than ours in spite of a worse climate. We paid $9506.20 per person
for health care in 2016. In Canada, they paid $4643.70. If our system we as efficient as
Canada's, we would save over $1.5 TRILLION each and every year. This is money that can be
used for better purposes. If one uses the bottom line statistics, we see that both Canada and
the UK (real socialized medicine) do better than we do: Life expectancy at birth (OECD):
Canada- 81.9, UK - 81.1, US - 78.8 Infant Mortality (OECD)(Deaths per 1,000): Canada - 4.7,
UK - 3.8, US - 6.0 Maternal Mortality (WHO): Canada - 7, UK - 9, US - 14 Instead of worrying
how we would pay for it, we will have the problem of how to spend all the money we would
save. BTW can you point to a period where too high federal debt hurt the economy? In 1837 the
federal debt as a percentage of GDP was 0%; it was 16% in October of 1929. Both were followed
horrendous depression. It was 121% in 1946 followed by 27 years of Great Prosperity.
Best comment in some time. I work and live too much in the'big flat'. I am a very hard core
Chicago Democratic Liberal from birth, but the distressed towns and small cities are facing
extinction. then what?
@In the know I'm formerly Republican, and female. I'm on the ACA, and while premiums were
going up slowly, they've exploded in the past two years due to Republican sabatoge. They are
certainly no reason to vote for Trump.
@Midwest Then the rich will only be eligible for college. Give me government intervention any
time. I am retired military . Off base in Lewes De a mans hair cut is now 20.00 plus tips.
Just a plain cut. On base with gov intervention it 12.00 . Capitalism you support is only for
the 1 percent the 99 percent never gets ahead. 38 Replies
She has a massive throng of twitter followers, is completely unconcerned with facts, uses
publicity to gain power and seems unwilling to negotiate on her positions. Remind you of
anyone else? 3 Replies
The establishment is trying so hard to spin the progressives push on the issues of Medicare
for All, free state college and university tuition, a livable wage of $15/hr as ponies and
fairy dust and an extreme "socialist" makeover/takeover of America. But from all the polls
that I've seen, these policies are actually quite popular even with a majority of
Republicans. Yes, a majority of Republicans. A Medicare for All would cover everybody,
eliminate health insurance premiums for individuals and businesses ( which by the way are
competing with businesses in other countries that have a single-payer system) and would save
$2 trillion over ten years (Koch bothers funded study). The result would be a healthy and
educated populace. But how to pay for this? Well, we spend over $700 billion on our military
while Russia spends $20 billion and China spends $146 billion, so there seems to be plenty of
money that is already being spent to be redirected back to us without compromising national
security. A Medicare for All system supports a private healthcare system just as it is now,
except instead of giving some insurance company our premium who then skims off a big chunk
for their profit, we pay it to our government who then administers the payments to the
healthcare provider(s). The system is in place and has been for people 65 years and older and
works very well with high satisfaction rates. Just expand it to all. 2 Replies
@Midwest Josh Wrong!!! Tuition's have skyrocketed because for past 35 years States have
slashed support for public universities. The Federal Government took over student loan
business from predatory banks which was a very good thing but unfortunately have kept
interest rates high ... Student loans is a profit center for Federal Government 38 Replies
@Concerned Citizen Go ahead and check the holiday inn in Palestine Texas. It had a small
restaurant in 1978. I was their dishwasher. There was no ford plant nearby. 38 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit Well put. As Martin Luther King Jr. said: "We all too often have socialism
for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor." 27 Replies
@stuart They used to call it the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party". I was glad when
Thomas Edsall finally got around, in this piece, to mentioning that what is often thought of
as a radical leftist turn today, due to just how far to the right our general political
discussions had gone, was actually pretty much mainstream Democratic policy for much of the
middle 20th century.
@Len Charlap Quite simply Canada's healthcare quality is ranked 16th in the world, while ours
is lower ranked at 23rd. And we pay twice as much. That indicates some funny business going
on.
It is remarkable that "big, bold leftist ideas" include - preserving the historical
relationship between the minimum wage and the cost of living - lowering the cost of college
to something in line with what obtained for most public colleges and universities in the 50s,
60s and 70s and exist in the rest of the Western world today - adapting our existing Medicare
system to deliver universal coverage of the kind generally supported across the political
spectrum in Canada and the UK Democrats should reject the "leftist" label for these ideas and
explain that it is opposition to these mainstream ideas that is, in fact, ideological and
extreme. 2 Replies
@Marc Except that's outright false. Offices are open. All the other new Congress members from
New York are setup and taking care of people. She doesn't care about constituent service. She
revels in the media attention, but isn't getting anything done even in the background. NY has
three Congress members (Lowey, Serrano, Meng) whose under-appreciated work on the
appropriations committee actually helps ensure our region's needs and liberal priorities are
reflected in federal spending. Meanwhile Ocasio Cortez is working on unseating Democrats
incumbents she deems insufficiently leftist e.g. Cuellar, Jeffries. Who needs Republicans
when you have Socialists trying to destroy the Democratic Party.
The NYT should consider getting some columnists who reflect the new (FDR? new?) trends in the
country and in the Democratic party. The old Clinton/Biden/Edsall Republican lite approach --
all in for Wall Street -- is dying. Good riddens. BTW I'm a 65 year old electrical engineer.
1 Reply
You're missing something big here, sir. Capuano was a Clinton superdelegate in 2016 who
declared well before the primaries (like all other Mass superdelegates, save for Warren who
waited until well after the primaries.) Thereby in effect telling constituents that their
vote was irrelevant, as they were willing to override it. Somerville went for Sanders 57% to
42%. Putting party over voters maybe isn't a great idea when 51% of voters in Massachusetts
are registered Unenrolled (Independent) and can vote in primaries. Bit rich to signal that
our votes don't matter, but then expect it later as it maybe actually does matter after all.
Pressley was all in for Clinton, which is of course suspect. But like me, she had only one
vote.
@C Wolfe Wow. Funky Irishman has been, for many months, writing about and presenting
excellent data showing that the US is actually a center-left (if not strongly progressive)
country. I used to present this evidence to Richard Luettgen (where has he gone??) who kept
insisting we are center-right (but never, as was his custom, presented any evidence for
this). your example is the best I've ever seen. I'm a member of a 4000-strong Facebook group,
the "Rational Republicans" (seriously - a local attorney with a decidedly liberal bent
started it and almost beat regressive Patrick McHenry here in Asheville). I've been making
this point on the FB page for the past year and people are stunned when they see the numbers.
I'm going to post your example as well. Excellent!
It's funny to watch people shocked when she makes her proposal. Her ideas are very old and
have worked in the past in various cultures. But the point that she can voice them is because
she can. Her people put her there because she said those things with their approval. She
reflects her community ideals. Just like Steve King.
I'm already tired of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I'm a liberal and Hispanic...its constant
overkill, everybody falling over her, total overexposure. The news media has found their
darling for the moment. Let's see what she accomplishes, what bills she proposes and passes
that is the work to be done not being in the news 24/7.
Until the left figures out that every single one of their most desired Policy Implementations
are only feasible with controlled immigration and secured borders doesn't matter who the
messenger is. Want Single Payer Healthcare? Can't have it and Open Borders too. Want free
College? Can't have it and Open Borders too. Want Guaranteed Basic Income? Cannot have it in
any form without absolutely controlling the Border. So, either you want that influx of new
voters to win elections or you want to see new policy changes that will benefit all
Americans. Pick one and fight for it. You seem to have chosen the new voters. 3 Replies
@Matt Williams But they are extraordinary, relative to their bought and paid for colleagues.
That came first and the media is reporting it. Their authenticity is naive, but it shouldn't
be, and that's the story. It's a glimmer of hope for democracy that may be extinguished -
let's celebrate this light in the darkness, while it lasts.
@Bruce Rozenblit This is. Spot. On. The socialism of: Privatize the profits, socialize the
losses. It's defined American economic and social policy for the last 30+ years and we can
see the results today. 27 Replies
@shstl I agree and as a moderate Democrat, I already feel like an outsider, so imagine what
independents are thinking. AOC stated that she wants to primary Hakeem Jeffries, who is a
moderate. With statements like these, made before spending a day in congress, who needs the
GOP to tear apart the Democratic party? Sanders didn't even win the primary and his
supporters claim the primary was stolen. We lost the house and senate all by ourselves. I
already have AOC fatigue and my rejoice for the blue wave is still there but fading.
The Democratic party was shoved to the right with Bill Clinton's Third Way ideology that made
its focus the same wealthy donor class as the Republicans, while breaking promises to its
former base, the middle and working class. This led to the unchecked capitalism that produced
the Crash of '08, and the subsequent bail out to Wall St. The powers running the DNC - all
Third Way disciples, like Hilary - refused to take up any of these "socialist" causes because
their wealthy donors didn't want to have their escalating wealth diminished. Meanwhile these
Democrats In Republican Clothing were banking on continued support from those they had
abandoned. And they got it for years...until now. Now, finally, we're getting candidates who
represent those abandoned, and who are refusing to hew to the poobah's Third Way agenda. But
the Old Guard is trying to retain their power by labeling these candidates as "socialists",
and "far left". Well, if that's true, then FDR was a "socialist" too. Funny though how all
those "socialists" who voted for FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ enjoyed such capitalistic benefits
like good paying jobs, benefits, home ownership, good education, and the fruits of Big
Guv'mint like the Interstate Highway system, electricity, schools, the Space Program and all
the benefits that produced. It was only when we turned our backs on that success and relied
on unchecked capitalism that most of America began their slide backwards. We need to go left
to go forward.
Why is the media lionizing this ignorant, undisciplined child? She should shut up, sit down,
learn how to listen and learn from her elders in government. She is acting like a college
student, who has no one to hold her accountable for her reckless, stupid behavior. Why does
the media seem to be enamored of her?????
@Michael Lucky for you. I went to the University of Michigan at roughly the same time and it
was no where near that cheap--not even close. And housing? Don't get me started on that. Even
then it took my breath away. 38 Replies
@chele That which you are pleased to call the DLC nonsense originated not with the Clintons,
but with one of the worst presidential defeats the Democratic party ever suffered: the 1972
campaign of George McGovern. That debacle resulted in a second Nixon administration and I
hope that the current trends within the Democratic party do not result in a second Trump
administration.
It is exceeding strange to me that "Conservatives" in the US consider Medicare for all and
universal access to higher education as being radical, pie-in-the-sky, proposals. Here in
Canada we have had universal medicare for a half a century and it has proven itself to be
relatively effective and efficient and has not driven us into penury. As for free access to
education beyond high school, I remember learning a while ago that the US government
discovered that it had earned a return of 700% on the money spent on the GI Bill after WWII
which allowed returning GIs to go to colleges and universities. The problem with American
conservatives is that they see investments in the health, welfare and education of the
citizenry as wasteful expenditures, and wasteful expenditures such as the resources going to
an already bloated military, and of course tax cuts for themselves as investments.
@chele Amen to you! I too am old guy (79) and think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a savior of
the Democratic Party! She is young and has great ideas. I agree with you about the Clintons,
they led the party down a sinkhole. I agree with just about everything I have heard
Alexandria espouse. She is refreshing. Glad she is kicking the butts of those old guard
Democrats that have fossilized in place--they are dinosaurs. 12 Replies
@Tracy Rupp The problem with blaming a group based on demographics, rather than behavior or
ideology, is that you are likely to be disappointed. There are a lot of people who are not
old white men who are just as seduced by money, power, and local privilege as was the old
guard. Feminists writing letters to condemn a male student who made charges of being sexually
harassed by his female professor; African American activists who refuse to reject the
antisemitism of charismatic cult leaders. Human beings in charge will be flawed, regardless
of their race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. As the balance of power changes hands,
corruption too will become more diverse. 6 Replies
Money is the mother's milk of politics, so let me comment on "many of whom did not want the
Democrats to nominate a candidate with deep ties to party regulars and to the major donor
community." Include me. Because the major donor community is Charles E Schumer, Leader
Democrats, House Top Contributors, 1989 - 2018 1 Goldman Sachs 2 Citigroup Inc 3 Paul, Weiss
et al 4 JPMorgan Chase & Co 5 Credit Suisse Group That is Wall Street Nancy Pelosi,
leader Democrats, House Top Contributors, 2017 - 2018 1 Facebook Inc 2 Alphabet Inc (Google)
2 Salesforce.com 4 University of California 5 Intel Corp $13,035 That is Silicon Valley . The
U of CA should spent its money on students What is the interest of these donors ? For Wall
Street, it is maximizing profits by suppressing wages, outsourcing to of enterprises it owns
to low wage countries, and immigration of people willing to work for less For Silicon Valley
it is Mining your data, violating your privacy, and immigration of people willing to work for
less via H1B To win general (not primary) elections you need large amounts of money. At in
return for this money, you need to take care of your donors, lest you find you without money
in the next election Until the Democratic Party frees itself of this system, it will spout
liberal rhetoric, but do little to help average Americans As Sanders showed, it can do so,
running on small donations. DNC, eye on frightened donors, killed his attempt. 1 Reply
"The most active wing of the Democratic Party -- the roughly 20 percent of the party's
electorate that votes in primaries and wields disproportionate influence over which issues
get prioritized -- has moved decisively to the left." Yet it seems that you feel that the
party should ignore them and move to the center right in order to capture suburban Republican
women, who will revert back to the Republican party as soon as (and if) it regains something
resembling sanity. Do you seriously think that its worth jettisoning what you describe as
"the most active wing of the party" for that? 2 Replies
@David G. See Norway, Denmark, Germany, England and Finland. Citizens have jobs and health
care; education is affordable and subsidized. Not all young people attend universities; many
go to vocational schools which prepare them for good jobs. We could do the same. 27 Replies
@Midwest Josh That is so NOT true Midwest Josh. The unattainable loans and interest problems
are because the private sector has been allowed into the student loan game. The government
should be the underwriter for all student loan programs unless individual schools offer
specialized lending programs. Whenever the government privatizes anything the real abuse
starts and the little guy gets hurt. 38 Replies
@Bruce Rozenblit, at the end of a long line of commenters, I add my congratulations for a
well-articulated overview of our political dilemma. Both "trickle-down"economics and
"neo-liberalism" have brought us to this pass, giving both Democrats and Republicans a way of
rewarding their corporate masters. I believe both Cinton and Obama believed they could find a
balance between the corporate agenda and a secure society. We see with hindsight how this has
hailed to materialize, and are rightly seeking a more equitable system – one that
addresses the common sense needs of all of us. I, for one, am overjoyed that the younger
generation has found its voice, and has a cause to support. My recollection of demonstrating
against the Viet Nam war (and the draft), marching for civil rights, and even trying to
promote the (then largely inchoate) women's rights movement, still evokes a passionate
nostalgia. We have witnessed an entire generation that lacked passion for any cause beyond
their individual desires. It's good to have young men and women reminding us of our values,
our aspirations, and our power as citizens. As the bumper sticker says, "If you think
education is expensive – try ignorance." Thanks again for a fine post. 27 Replies
@Quiet Waiting That was FIFTY YEARS AGO. People who fought in the Spanish-American War were
still casting ballots, for heaven's sake. McGovern has been used by Third Way apologists as a
cautionary tale to provide cover for doing what they clearly wanted to do anyway. The other
reality is that the McGovern/Nixon race took place in a time when there was broad consensus
that many of the social programs Republicans are now salivating over privatizing weren't
going anywhere. 12 Replies
Abolishing ICE is tantamount to having open borders. No modern country can allow all people
who are able to get to its borders to just move in, and take advantage of its government
services. If a country were to start offering Medicare for All, no or reduced college
tuition, a universal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage, and wage subsidies to the entire
bottom half through an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, paid maternity/paternity
leave, and free child care, it would need tax-payers to support these plans. It could not
afford to support all of the poor, uneducated migrants who have been illegally crossing our
borders, let alone all of those who would run here if ICE were to be abolished. Look at
Canada which has more of a social safety net than is offered in our country. It has
practically no illegal immigrants. (A long term illegal immigrant had to sue for the
government to pay for her extensive medical care, and the court decisions appear to have
limited government payment of her medical bills just to her and not to other illegal
migrants.) It picks the vast majority of its legal immigrants on a merit system that
prioritizes those who would contribute a special needed skill to the Canadian economy, who
are fluent in English and/or French, and who could easily assimilate. Thus, most of Canada's
immigrants start paying hefty taxes as soon as they move to Canada, helping to support the
country's social safety net. 1 Reply
@Samuel To pay for universal health care you capture all the money currently being spent for
the health care system. That includes all the employer insurance premiums, VA medical care
costs, military medical costs, all out-of-pocket expenses, everything. That provides plenty
of money for our health care needs as exemplified by the costs in other advanced countries
with better systems. Also re-activate parts of the ACA that were designed to control and
reduce costs but that have gone unfunded. Reduce hospital and hospital administration costs,
which are exorbitant and provide little real health care benefit. There will be plenty of
funds for actual provider salaries (physicians, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, etc). 10
Replies
You have to accept some of this polling data with a grain of salt. Most of the population has
no idea what "moderate," "slightly liberal," or extremely liberal mean. These tend to be
labels that signify how closely people feel attached to other people on the left side of the
ideological spectrum. The same is true, btw, of people on the right. The odd thing is that if
you ask Trump voters about the economic policies they favor, they generally agree that social
security ought to be expanded, that the government has an obligation to see that everyone has
medical care, that taxes on the rich should be higher and that we ought to be spending more
money, not less on education. Where you see a divergence is on issues tightly aligned with
Trump and on matters that touch on racial resentment. Trump voters do not favor cuts in
spending on the poor, though they do support cuts in "welfare." The moral of the story is
that a strategic Democratic politician who can speak to these Trump voters on a policy level
or at the level of values -- I'm thinking Sharrod Brown -- may be able to win in 2020 with a
landslide.
I saw AOC on the Colbert Show recently and one of her first statements was in regards to
wearing red nail polish. I turned it off. Enough of the red lipstick as well. Please. Next
she'll discuss large hoop earrings. 1 Reply
O'Cortez is a "Fantasy Socialist. She says the stupidest and most outlandish things so the
media puts a microphone in front of her face. She hates when folks fact check her because
nothing she is saying adds up. O'Cortez has all of the same "spread the wealth" tendencies as
the previous president who was much more cunning and clever at hiding his true Socialist
self.
@chele Right on. I expect there is a very large contingent of us. It is disheartening to be
associated by age and ethnicity with the corporatist financial elite power mongers who
control both parties and the media. But we can still continue vote the right way and spread
the word to fight corruption and corporatism. Eschew New Democrats like ORourke. The first
commitment to find out about is the commitment to restore democracy and cut off the power of
the financial elite in politics. All the other liberal sounding stuff is a lie if that first
commitment is not there. Because none of it will happen while the financial elite are
controlling votes. There will always be enough defectors against, for example, the mainstream
support for medicare for all national health care to keep it from happening if New Democrats
aren't understood as the republican lite fifth column corrupters they really are. 12 Replies
Chock full of very interesting data, but we tend to to believe Zeitz's conclusion that Dems
are just returning to their roots, following the spectacular 2008 failures that saw no
prosecutions - in starkest contrast to the S&L failure and boatload of bankers charged:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html
To the extent this primary voter data is replicated across the country in Dem primaries, and
not just the AOC and Ayana Pressley races, we could be convinced some massive swing is
occurring in Dem primary results. Until then, we tend to believe that the cycle of 30-50
House seats which swing back and forth as Dem or GOP from time to time (not the exact same
30-50 districts each cycle, but about 30-50 in total per election cycle or two) is a
continuation of a long-term voting trend. Unpacking the egregious GOP'er gerrymandering, as
is the goal of Eric Holder and Barack Obama: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/politics/voting-gerrymander-elections.html
which has blunted Dem voter effects, will be of far more consequence - get ready !
@Michael Gig'em dude. Class of '88, and I feel the same way. And as far as I can tell, the
increase has been almost totally because state support has fallen in order to fund tax cuts
for the people, like us, who got the free education. Who says you can't have your cake and
eat it too? You just have to raid everyone else's plate. 38 Replies
I understand the Andy Warhol concept of everyone having 15 minutes of fame. But it's absurd
that AOC's 15 minutes of fame coincide with her first 15 minutes in office.
Ocasio-Cortez and the rest haven't been in Congress a month. Get back to me when anyone of
them even gets a bill passed naming a Post Office. Until the, maybe you ought to learn your
jobs?
@In the know, Your party invented the fundamental ACA program. It was the brainchild of the
Heritage Foundation that started this fiasco that you'd like to blame on Dems. Also, you
simply cannot argue that the Republicans attempted to implement the program in good faith.
They have done everything they can to sabotage it. In the end, Republicans don't want people
to have affordable health care. It doesn't fit their "family-unfriendly" philosophy.
Furthermore, the only real business-friendly ideas Republicans embrace are a) eliminate
taxes, b) remove regulations, c) pay employees nothing. If you as a woman believe these are
notions that strengthen you or your family, I'm at a total loss in understanding your
reasoning.
@Matt Williams - You are ignoring the many statistics in the article that apply to the
Democratic party as a whole. For example: "From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of Democrats who
said the government should create "a way for immigrants already here illegally to become
citizens if the meet certain requirements" grew from 29 to 51 percent, while the share who
said "there should be better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws"
fell from 21 to 5 percent." There are many others.
"...as millennials and minorities become an ever-larger proportion of the party, it will have
a natural constituency..." I would counter that as they start to actually pay taxes then the
millennials will adopt the standard liberal plaint, 'raise the taxes on everybody except me'
@D I Shaw I think the precise point is that would much easier to do A,B, and C if there were
universal health care, job guarantees, and clean water to drink. It is much easier to make
good long-term decisions when you aren't kept in a state of perpetual desperation.
These 'new' ideas are not new, nor are they 'progressive democrats'', nor are they even the
democratic party's per se. More importantly, the 'issue', for which no one has come up with a
solution, is the same -- how are we going to pay for this all? The GAO reported in '16 that
Sander's proposal for payment was completely unsustainable. Similarly, Cortez's plan for a
tax rate of 70% of earnings (not capital gains) over $10mm per annum does not come close to
funding 'medicare for all', 'free collage/trade school', and 'the New Green Deal'. Our
military is a 'jobs program' rooted in certain state's economy -- it is going to be very
difficult to substantially reduce those expenditures any time soon. The purpose of government
is governance -- what politician is going to have the integrity and cujones to tell the
American people that we need these 'liberal' policies, but that every single one of us is
going to have to contribute, even those at the far lower income strata? Are we all willing to
work longer in life and live in much smaller houses/apartments to do what is necessary? If
the answer is yes, then and only then can any of us claim the moral high ground. Until then,
it's just empty rhetoric for political gain and personal Aggrandizement of so-called
progressives. 5 Replies
@chele I'm an "elder millennial" in my 30s. The first US election I really paid attention to
was in 2000. Remember how all of the Democrats would gripe about, "oh I really *like* Nader,
but the Green Party candidate is never going to win..." It's a party in dire straights when
the ideological base doesn't even particularly love its candidates on the issues. Repeat in
2004 with Kerry. Obama managed to win based on charisma and the nation's collective disgust
with the neocons, but then we did it again with Hillary. 12 Replies
Sorry libs, but with the exception of the Left Coast, and Manhattan, there is not alot of
attention given AOC and her silly class warfare 70% tax nonsense, that goes with the Dem/Lib
territory--nothing new or exciting with her. Being a certain ethnicity or gender is not
exciting or inherently "good" as Progressives attempt to convince others. Identity politics
is nonsense. When she does something of merit, not simply engage in publicity stunts and
class warfare nonsense then maybe she will get some attention outside of Lib/Wacko world.
"With all the attention that is being paid to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley,
Rashida Tlaib" Other than these opinion pages and the Lib coasts, not so much. 2 Replies
Since Reagan there has been a steady drumbeat to the right and far-right policies. We've
lived so long in this bubble that we've normalized these For-the-Rich policies as centrist.
So I don't accept the writer's premise that the Democratic party is moving to a radical left.
The Democratic party is simply embracing pro middle class policies that were once the norm
between 1935-1979. And I welcome the shift of the pendulum. 1 Reply
@Giacomo That's right, this country can afford trillions for the Pentagon system--the
military-industrial complex, to coin a phrase--and foolishly criminal wars, but it can't
afford national health insurance, something that some industrialized countries have had since
the late 19th century. Anybody who thinks these ideas are "radical" or "leftist" clearly
understands nothing about politics.
The shift claimed by Mr. Edsall among democratic voters who claim to be liberal or
progressive is more illusion than reality. With President Obama more democrats are willing
and indeed proud that our party represents the cutting edge principle that we protect the
needs and interests of those struggling to find a place in our society. For a long time
Democrats bought into the notion that the word liberal was some how shameful. But now with
the machinations of a McConnell and Trump it becomes obvious that Democratic principles of
justice for all and fighting for economic equality are not outside ideas, but actually
central to the growth of our country. No longer will we kow tow to a false stilted opinion,
but stand up proudly for what we believe and fight for.
AOC behaves like a sanctimonious know-it-all teenager....entertaining for about 5 minutes,
then just plain annoying and tiresome. Does not bode well for the Democratic Party,...
Actually, people like AOC or Bernie aren't that far left at all. Internationally, they'd be
considered pretty centrist. They're simply seen as "far left" because the Overton window in
DC is far to the right. Even domestically, policies like universal healthcare and a living
wage enjoy solid majority support, so they're perfectly mainstream
I understand what you are saying, but please remember- half of this country thinks- rightly
or wrongly- that AOC and many of her ideals are unobtainable and socialist. Whether they are
or are not is NOT the point. We need ideas that are palatable to the mainstream, average
American- not just those of us on the liberal wings. And I AM one of those. Since you bring
up Bernie- how well did that work out? The country isn't ready for those ideas. And rightly
or wrongly, pursuing them at all cost will end up winning Trump the next election.
@Jose Pieste Well here in Australia its 10 minute waits for appointments made on the same
day. I have MS and see my specialist without a problem. And the government through the PBS
prescription benefit scheme pays $78 of my $80 daily tablets. We are not as phenomenally
wealthy a country as the USA and we mange it with universal health care. I pay about $30
Australian for each doctor's visit and sometimes with bulk billing that is free too. You
reflect a uniquely American attitude about social services that is not reflective of what is
done in other modern democracies. I really do feel for you my friend and for all Americans
who have been comprehensively hoodwinked by the "can't afford it" myth. You can pay for
trillion dollar tax cuts for people who don't need it. Honestly mate - you have been conned.
@Samuel Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has sponsored or co-sponsored 18 bills in the House, including
original co-sponsor with Rep. Pressley of H.R.678 -- 116th Congress (2019-2020) To provide
back pay to low-wage contractor employees, and for other purposes. 10 Replies
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, as is well documented here and throughout world media, prefers spotlights
and baffling interviews to opening her district office and serving her electorate. As with
every other media creation, the shiny star that it has made of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will fade
soon. The arc of her House career will as well. 4 Replies
"What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds
its antecedents in 1944." This quote in the article should have been the lede. Instead, it
appears 66 paragraphs into the article. What is now being called "left" used to be called
"center." It used to be called the values and the core of the Democratic party.
@Derek Flint There was a reason for the DLC's decision to be more center left. The Democrats
were losing and this gave them a chance to win, which they did with Clinton, almost Gore, and
Obama. 12 Replies
@Jason A. Representatives should represent their constituents. For example, if most of the
voters one represents want Medicare, perhaps that's a sign that one should reconsider their
anti-Medicare views. And think about why constituents want Medicare.
The leftward swing of the Democrats is in direct proportion to the rightward swing of the
Republicans and a gut reaction to the GOP's failure to do anything constructive while in
power -- i.e. failure to replace Obamacare with Trump's promise of "cheaper and better;"
failure to repair our crumbling infrastructure, and yet another failed attempt at
trickle-down economics by robbing the U.S. Treasury with a massive tax cut for the rich that
provided absolutely no benefits for the middle class and the poor. As always, what the
Republicans destroy the Democrats will have to fix.
@Quiet Waiting, the DLC was officially formed after Mondale's loss, in '85. the DLC's main
position is that economic populism is not politically feasible. But I don't recall either
McGovern or Mondale's losses being attributed to being too pro-worker, too pro-regulation of
capitalism, or making tax rates progressive again. Further, the idea that economic populism
has no political value was just disproved by a demagogue took advantage of it to get elected.
The RP's mid-term losses and other data points show that people in the middle are realizing
Trump's not really a populist. Those economic Trump voters, some of whom voted for Obama
twice, are up for grabs. Why would you be afraid that the DP's shift to raising taxes on the
wealthy and being pro-worker will result in a Trump victory? 12 Replies
@Michael The cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security has increased as a fraction of
tax receipts. Twice the as many people go to college as when you went, so the subsidies are
spread more thinly. Colleges have more bureaucrats than professors because of multiple
mandates regarding sex, race, income, sexual preference, etc. People have not been willing to
see taxes raised, so things like college subsidies get squeezed. The US decided in the 1940s
that the only way to avoid a repeat of WW1 and WW2 was to provide a security blanket for
Western Europe and Japan (and really, the world), and prevent military buildups in either
region while encouraging economic development. The world is as a result more peaceful,
prosperous, and free than ever in human history, despite "its continuous wars" as you put it.
For the US to pull back would endanger the stability that gave us this peace and prosperity,
but Trump is with you all the way on that one, so it must be a good idea. Liberal reforms
will mean tax increases, especially Medicare for all, but also more college subsidies, which
largely benefit the middle class and up. Liberal reformers need to convince the public to
send more money to the IRS, for which there is no evident support. Let's not confuse
opposition to Trump with a liberal groundswell. 38 Replies
Why do Political Commentators and Analysts keep operating under the delusion that people vote
their skin colour ? People vote their economic interests. I am all in favour of National
Health Care Letting Immigrants who have not committed a crime stay and become citizens. But I
am also in favour of stricter Border Control as I feel our duty is to the poor citizens of
America. Send Economic aid to poorer countries, help them establish just governments. As for
Ocasio-Cortez, she is aiming too high and has too many lies about her past to go much higher.
The meanings of these labels--liberal, left, center, conservative--, and of the spectrum
along which they supposedly lie, changes year to year, and most pundits and politicians seem
to use them to suit their own purposes. When you realize that a significant group of people
voted for Obama and then for Trump, you realize how radically the politics of the moment can
redefine the terms. The Democrats could create a narrative that unites the interests of all
economically disadvantaged people, including white people. Doing so would create a broad
majority and win elections, but it would arouse the fury of the oligarchs, who will demonize
them as "socialists." But as Obamacare proved, if actually you do something that helps people
across the board even the Republicans and the media will have a hard time convincing people
that they are oppressed, for example, by access to health insurance. For the oligarchs, as
for the Republicans, success depends on creating a narrative that pits the middle class
against the poor. In its current, most vulgar form, this includes pitting disadvantaged white
people against all the rest, but the Republicans have an advantage in that their party is
united behind the narrative. Democratic politicians may be united against Trump, but that
means nothing. The challenge will be uniting the politicians who run on economic justice with
the establishment Democrats who have succeeded by hiding their economic conservativism behind
identity politics.
I applaude AOC. I am 72 white male. I have been waiting for someone like AOC to emerge. I
wish her the best and will work for her positions and re-elections and ultimate ambitions.
She is a great leader, teacher, learner, whip smart, and should not be taken likely. Go for
it AOC! Realize your full potential.
Someone as thoroughly imbedded in the establishment as this Op-Ed writer is necessarily going
to need to be educated on what the political center of gravity really is. The Democrats have
shifted RIGHT over the past few decades. Under Bill Clinton and Pelosi, Schumer, Feinstein
and Obama. They are not left, not center-left, not center, but instead center-right. They
have pursued a center-right agenda that does not engage with the rigged economy or widening
inequality, or inadequate pay, or monopolist abuse of power, or adequate regulation and
punishment of corporate crime. They have enthusiastically embraced our deeply stupid wars of
choice, and wasted trillions that could have been put to productive use at home. The new
generation of progressive Democrats seek to move the debate BACK TO THE CENTER or Center-Left
if you will. Not the Left or Far-Left. They want to address the issues the current Democrat
Establishment have ignored or exacerbated, because they are in essence, the same rarified
rich as the lobbyists and donors they mingle with. The issues that affect MOST of us, but not
the FEW of them. The endgame of this shift is that Obama engineered a pseudo-recovery that
saw the very rich recover their gains, but the poor become MORE impoverished. Such is the
rigged economy, 21st Century style. Things have to change, the old guard have to be neutered.
Too much wealth and power is concentrated in too few hands, and it's too detrimental to our
pseudo-democracy.
This is the difference between R & D's. OAC may get her support from well-to-do, educated
whites, but her platform focuses on those left behind. Even her green revolution will provide
jobs for those less well off. R's, on the other hand, vote only for candidates that further
their selfish interests.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her legislative cohorts are a much needed breath of fresh, progressive
air for the U.S. Congress. And I say that as someone going on age 70 who was raised and
educated in the conservative Deep South. Go left, young people!
@Bruce Rozenblit Unfortunately, the hot button on fox is the word socialism. so undo the
negative press there and have a chance of implementing fairer policies. 27 Replies
@Samuel "It's easy to go to a rooftop- or a twitter account- and yell "health care and
education for all!'" Its not easy to get anyone to listen. The moral impetus precedes the
"actual plans," which come out of the legislative process, Why would you be against this
getting attention?Unless, of course, you oppose health care and education for all. 10 Replies
The further the Democrats go Left with all the cultural politics including white people
bashing and calling Men toxic, the further I am heading towards the right. I personally can't
stand what the Democratic Party has turned into. We'll see who wins in 2020. I think a lot of
people forget what happens in mid term elections. People vote for change and then, after
seeing what they wrought, switch back.
I am a old white male geezer and lifelong liberal living in complete voter disenfranchisement
in Florida due to gerrymandering, voter suppression and rigged election machines (how else
does one explain over 30,000 votes in Broward County that failed to register a preference for
the Senate or Governor in a race where the Republican squeaked in by recount?). I am pleased
to finally see the party moving away from corporatist and quisling centrists to take on
issues of critical import for the economy, the environment and the literal health of the
nation. As "moderate" Republicans come to a cognitive realization that they too are victims
of the fascist oligarch billionaire agenda to end democracy; they too will move to the left.
So, I for one am not going to worry an iota about this hand-wringing over something akin to
revolution and instead welome what amounts to the return of my fellow New Deal Democrats.
Too much attention here to this new cohort of self important attention seekers presenting as
civil servants. Not one of them has had any legislative experience in their lives how can
they do all they say they want. They have no grasp of policy economics and politics. Are they
too good to recall the wise words of Sam Rayburn - "Those who go along get along" or is that
too quaint outdated and patriarchal for them? Why dont journalists and other pols call them
out. Example, AOC calls for 70% marginal tax rate - saying we had it before, ha ha. Yes but
only when defense spending as percent of gdp was 20-40 percent, in the depth of WW2 and the
cold war, life and death struggles - it is now 5%, no one has the stomach for those rates
now, and no need for them to boot. Free school, free healthcare, viva la stat! yeah ok who
will pay for it? Lots of ideas no plans, flash in the pan is what it is, it will die down
then settle in for a long winter.
There is a difference between posturing as a leader and actually leading. So, there is
another, and very direct, way for real Americans to end the shutdown: Recall petitions. With
very little money, why not target Mitch McConnell. Laid off federal workers could go
door-to-door in Kentucky. The message, not just to the Senate majority leader, would be
powerful. And this need not be limited. There are some easy targets among GOP senators.
Perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can achieve greater national standing with a clipboard and pen down
on the hustings.
All this fuss over a bright young person who stopped complaining and ran for office. She has
a platform. Time will tell how effective she will be. Right now, she's connecting to those
young and old who believe we can do better. If you had a choice who would you rather share a
beer with?A Trump supporter who has no interest beyond building an ineffective wall or an
Ocasio-Cortez supporter, full of ideas, some fanciful, some interesting but most off all
energy and light versus fear and hate?
I'm a liberal Democrat and I remain very skeptical regarding the platforms of these new
members of Congress. Youthful exuberance is admirable, but it's not sufficient to address
complicated issues related to fairness. Fairness does not always mean equity of wealth. Some
people have more because they have worked more, worked longer, or took more risks with their
money. Should the nurse who worked three jobs to make $150,000/year be made to sacrifice a
significant portion for those who chose to work less? Such an anecdotal question may seem
naive, but these are the kinds of questions asked by regular Americans who often value social
programs, but also value fairness. The claim that only some tiny fraction of the 1% will bear
the cost of new programs and will alone suffer increased taxation is simply untrue, and those
who are making this claim know it. This tiny group of wealthy knows how to hide its money
off-shore and in other ways, as documented in the Times last year. Everyone knows the
low-lying fruit for increased taxation is the upper middle class: Those who work hard and
save hard and are nowhere near the top of the wealth pyramid. It's that nurse with the three
jobs, or the small business owner who now clears $200,000 a year, or the pair of teachers
who, after 25 years of teaching, now bring home $150,000 combined. Those are the targets of
the proposed "new" taxes. Don't believe the hype. I'm a liberal, and I know what's up with
these people. 4 Replies
Ocasio-Cortez represents the success of a progressive in ousting a white liberal in a safely
Democratic district. While interesting, that doesn't provide much of a blueprint for winning
in 2020 in districts and states that voted for Trump. As noted elsewhere in this newspaper,
of the roughly 60 new Democrats in Congress elected in 2018, two-thirds, were pragmatic
moderates that flipped Republican seats. Progressives were notably less successful in
flipping Republican seats.
Just keep in mind that what the author deems "radical" ideas are considered mainstream in the
rest of the developed world. We are an extreme outlier in lacking some form of universal
health care, for example. Also, while the NYT clearly saw Bernie's 2016 campaign as
shockingly radical, the very people Edsall says we must court were wild about Bernie. His
message about income inequality resonates with anyone living paycheck to paycheck and the
only thing "radical" about it is that he said the truth out loud about the effects of
unbridled capitalism. The neoliberal types that the NYT embraces are the milquetoast people
who attract a rather small group of voters, so, I am not too eager to accept his analysis. I
fully expect the Times to back Gillibrand and Biden, maybe even that other corporatist,
Booker. They don't scare the moneyed class.
The Dems have been drifting to the right for decades, egged on by pundits who keep telling
them to move to the center. Do the math: moving to the center just moves the center to the
right. Frankly, Nixon was more liberal than most of today's Dems. A move to the left is long
overdue.
The rumblings in the Democratic party may represent a realization that WE THE PEOPLE deserve
a bigger slice of the pie. Democrats such as Sanders, Warren and AOC are tapping into a
reservoir of voters who have been excluded from the American Dream by design. The new message
seems to be "fairness". I think that translates into government which does the most good for
the greatest number of people. Candidates who embody that principle will be the new leaders.
Ignore at your peril.
@Quiet Waiting: if voters believe republicans are helping them economically then follow them
off the cliff. Hopefully enough voters will try a more humane form of capitalism. 12 Replies
Ms Ocasio Cortez is a partial illustration of Reagan's dictum that "The trouble with our
liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so". In
the case of AOC she is not only very ignorant but she believes many things that are actually
not true. For her to actually believe that the "world will end in 12 years" and
simultaneously believe that, even if true, Congress could change this awful fact is so
breathtakingly ignorant one hardly knows where to start.
Maybe it's worth considering that a lot of those spooky millennials, the stuff of campfire
scare stories, themselves grew up in the suburbs. They are the children of privilege who have
matured into a world that is far less secure and promising than that of their swing-voter
soccer moms. Health care, student debt, secure retirement, and the ability to support a
family are serious concerns for them. And don't even get me started on climate change and the
fossil fuel world's stranglehold on our polity.
@dudley thompson, if you are one of those elite moderate liberals against the "lefties"
concern about college and medical costs, protections for workers and the environment, and
progressive taxation, then in the end getting your vote isn't worth sacrificing the votes of
all the other people who do care about those things. Your "moderate" way may calm those swing
voters who fear change, and allow them to vote for the Democrat, but it also demoralizes and
disappoints the much larger group of potential Democratic voters that craves change.
@Jessica Summerfield ..."article described AOC as a communist." And I saw an article describe
Ross Douthat as a "columnist"... equally misleading. Will the calumny never cease? 27 Replies
Thomas, this "left" used to be known as the middle. A commitment to housing instead of an
acceptance of homelessness. Dignity. A tax system designed to tax wealthy people, not, as we
have now, a tax system designed to tax the middle class and poor. Can we all just take a look
at what is being promoted -- look at what AOC is proposing compared to Eisenhower era tax
rates. We have lurched right so that event center-right is now considered left.
Rage is the political fuel that fires up the Left. Rage also is the source of some very bad
ideas. Having bad ideas is the reason people don't vote for a political party in a
presidential election. The democrats are now the party of socialism, open borders, very high
taxes, anti-religious bigotry, abolishment of free speech, rewriting the constitution,
stuffing the Supreme Court, impeachment of the President, and being intolerance of other
views. They have also alienated 64 million Americans by calling them deplorables, racist and
a host of other derogatory terms. Not a good strategy to win over voters in swing states.
They also have attacked all men and white men in particular. They think masculinity is toxic
and that gender is not biological but what a person believes themselves to be (noticed that I
used the plural pronoun?). So far a long list of bad ideas. Let's see how it plays out in
2020. 1 Reply
We need to be careful what we refer to as left. Is the concept that we have access to
affordable housing, healthcare, and decent jobs really a position of the far left? Not
really. The 1944 progressives saw access to basic life as a right of all people. This is why
young educated progressives support policies that encourage success within the unregulated
capitalist economy that has been created over the last 40 years. The evidence illustrates
that federal and state governments need to help people survive, otherwise we are looking at
massive amounts of inequality that affect the economy and ultimately affect the very people,
the extremely rich, who support deregulation.
@Bruce Rozenblit The Republicans great skill has been selling lies to the socially
conservative to get their greedy financial agenda through. They have never cared about their
voters other than how best to spin their rhetoric. 27 Replies
Moving left takes a twitter account, a quixotic mentality and the word free. Its sedition
arousing rhetoric is blinkered by the lack of a viable strategy to support and move it
forward. Liberals thrive on the free media attention which feeds their rancor and aplomb.
Liberals are the infants of the Democratic Party. They're young, cute and full of amusing
antics. They have an idyllic view of what the world can be but without efficacy. When they
are challenged, or don't get enough attention, they revert to petulance. As all mammals do,
most liberals eventually grow up to join the Democratic median. Those that don't become the
party regalers brought out when the base needs energized. They grow old and fade away,
remembered only for their flamboyance and dystopian view of the world. The Democratic Party
has never been more fractured since its inception. With close to thirty potential candidates
for President, it is going to take a coalition within their party in order to put forth a
viable nominee. Then the party infighting will commence which will lead the party into
defeat. Democrats must focus on a untied party platform which is viable and will produce
results for the American people. Enough of the loquacious hyperbole and misandrous language;
it's time to stop reacting and start leading.
If it looks like the Democrats are moving strongly to the left, it's because they have
stopped chasing the GOP over the cliff in a vain effort to meet them in some mythical middle.
That's why the gap is widening; Republicans have not slowed in their headlong rush to
disaster. In truth it is the Republican Party and its messaging machine that has been doing
its best to drag America to the extreme right by controlling the narrative and broadcasting
talking points picked up and amplified by the Mainstream Media. The Mainstream Media has its
own issues. Increasingly consolidated under corporate ownership into fewer and fewer hands,
it has developed a reflex aversion to anything that looks too 'left' and a suspicion of
anything that looks progressive. The desperate battle for eyeballs in a fragmenting market
has also taken a toll; deep journalism or reporting that risks alienating any part of the
shrinking audience for traditional news is anathema to the bean counters who have
financialized everything. Deliberate intimidation by the right has also taken a toll.
Republicans have no answers; Democrats do - and that's the gist of it. The real challenge is
to prevail against a party that has embraced disinformation, the politics of resentment and
destruction - and the Mainstream Media that has failed to call them out on it.
We are looking at a future Speaker of the House. Watch out Republicans, this woman is not
afraid of you white, stodgy, misogynistic and racist haters. Your party, once a viable and
caring party, is dead.
The Republican Party used to be a moderate political party that was fully capable of
governing. Over the years, the right wing of the party assumed control and they became a
radically conservative party that basically hated government and did nothing for the benefit
of average Americans. As a result, many voters came to believe that a more liberal stance was
preferred to what the Republicans had become. Basically, the Republican Party veered sharply
to the right and went off and left a lot of their earlier supporters, like me.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect foil to the Trump twitter fest we've been subjected
to for the past 2 years. However, enough of the tit for tat -- I would still like to see the
freshman representative put forth some legislation for a vote.
In terms of policies, this "sharp shift to the left" represents a return to the New Deal and
the Great Society and a renewed commitment to civil rights. It is a return to things we never
should have turned away from.
@Tracy Rupp Don't be so quick to condemn. The really old white men of today defeated Germany
and Japan. Then those same old white men went into Korea and then Vietnam. Ok so maybe you
have a point.
Shifted to the LEFT? After decades of movement to the Right, by the GOP and even assisted by
Dems such as the Clintons, etc., this political movement is merely a correction, not a
radical shift as your article contends.
Just as the reader comments from yesterday's opinion piece on the Covington School story by
David Brooks reveal rampant confirmation bias, the comments here reveal an equally relevant
truth: nobody, but nobody, eats their own like the left. The "Down With Us" culture in full
effect.
I am confused about what message, what issues resonate with the "moderate" people who are
disaffected from the liberal message of the Democrats on the left. What policies would bring
them to vote Democratic, what is it about health care for all, a living wage and opening the
voting process to all people are they opposed to. Is it policy or message that has them
wavering?
@dudley thompson Do you consider Eisenhower leftist? (highest tax rates ever). How about
Nixon? (established the EPA). We have lurched so far right in this country that the middle
looks left. I'm sick of the labels -- listen to what these leaders are actually proposing. If
you don't understand how the marginal tax rate works, look it up. If you don't realize we
once didn't accept mass homelessness and mass incarceration as a fact of life in America,
learn some history. We're living in a myopic, distorted not-so-fun-house where up is down and
center is left. We need to look with fresh eyes and ask what our communal values are and what
America stands for. 5 Replies
Here is a thought I would like to share with the New York Times: Thomas Edsall's article is
excellent. The corollary I draw from it that the paper that projects itself as the voice of
the liberals in this county has to understand that it has fallen behind times. If the
statistics and commentary accompanying it is a criteria to consider, The Times should move to
a more progressive editorial platform. The sooner, the better! The support given by this
paper to Hillary Rodham Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 is unforgivable. The attitude
exhibited towards Elizabeth Warren is hardy different. This has to change if you want to keep
your relevance unless you believe publishing Edsall's essay is just part of your "diversity"
policy. What the followers of AOC and other progressives are clamoring for are very basic
human needs that have been delivered in affluent (and not so affluent) societies all over the
globe. No need to name those countries, by now the list is well known. What do we need
delivered: Universal Healthcare, Free Public Education K through College, No Citizens United,
Total Campaign Finance Reform, Regulation of Wall Street, Regulation of Pharma, Regulation of
Big Tech, Gender Equality, 21st Century Infrastructure. All paid for by cutting the Military
and Defense Budget Waste (cf Charlie Grassley, a buddy of Karl Marx) and taxing the top
percent at levels AOC cites and Professors Suez and Zucman concur with in their Times OpEd.
Democrats need to win elections first. Progressive ideas may have support on the coasts and
cities but fall flat in red states where there is still widespread dislike for immigrants and
minorities and strong opposition to "having my hard-earned tax money supporting free stuff
for the undeserving who can't/won't take care of themselves." Because the Electoral College
gives red states disproportionate representation the Democrats must win some red states to
win a presidential election. Running on a strong progressive platform won't work in those
Republican-majority states. What Democrats need is a "Trojan Horse" candidate. Someone who
can win with a moderate message that has broad appeal across the entire country but who will
support and enact a strong progressive agenda once he/she is elected. And on a local election
level, Democrats need to field candidates whose message is appropriate for their local
constituency -- progressive in liberal states, more moderate in conservative areas. Winning
elections comes first. Let's do what it takes to win and not let our progressive wish list
blind us to the importance of winning elections.
@Westchester Guy: Leftists want amnesty and, eventually, open borders. This is utterly and
totally incompatible with their push for "free" college, universal health care, and so forth.
The fiscal infeasibility is so obvious that one could only believe in these coexisting
policies if they were blinded by something, like Trump hatred, or just plain dishonest. The
"leftist" label for the new Democrat party is entirely appropriate. You also have your own
bigots to counter Trump. The difference is that their bigotry is sanctioned by most of the
mainstream media.
Has AOC or any other liberal offered any feasible policy to improve the lives of the people
they claim to help? Just take a good hard look at NYC where AOC is from which for many years
the Public Housing Authority cannot even provide adequate heat in the building the city owns.
So while AOC dreams of taxing the wealthy 70% perhaps she needs to slow down and catch up to
reality to realize what she offers is only building towards another Venezuela.
This article is half poison pill. By reading it, you learn a lot about Democratic Party
voting patterns, but you also have to endure a number of false ideas, the worst of which is
Edsall's warning that radical Democrats will foment internal chaos leading to electoral loss.
The fact is, it is the corporate democrats, who in the last 40 years abandoned the base of
working, blue collar democrats in favor of their Wall Street overlords. It is the corporate
democrats who created the billionaire class by reducing corporate tax rates. It is the
corporate Democrats who by reducing marginal tax rates created the plutocracy. It is the
corporate democrats who gave *Trillions of Dollars* to Bush and Obama's perpetual wars and
$70 Billion more than the defense department asks. This impoverishing the citizenry with debt
is their legacy as much as the Republicans. This shoveling of money to the 1% who abandoned
the middle class has been a train ridden by Corporate Democrats. It is the Corporate
Democrats who caused all this friction by letting the middle class fall off the edge of the
economic cliff -- all the while proclaiming how much they care. They show up on MLK day and
read flowing speeches from the podium when what we really need is activism and changes in
marginal tax rates, defense spending and the Medical Insurance and care oligopoly. So now
there is revolution brewing in response to the Corporate Democrats' appeasement of the
Oligarchy? Good. Bring it on.
Honestly, it is the centrist, neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that gave up on talking
to the Midwest and focused on the coasts. That was the Clinton strategy and it didn't work.
Although AOC comes from an urban area, her message is broad: she is for the struggling,
working person. Edsall underestimates AOC's basis in economic thinking and her appeal to
flyover country. She speaks carefully and justly to social issues, but she also speaks to the
"kitchen table" issues that middle America is concerned with--in a much more real way than
the neoliberal Dems have figured out how to.
Please end you outsized coverage of AOC. I really don't know how you justify all the news
coverage. She is one of 435 representatives, and a new one at that. No accomplishments, just
a large Instagram following.
@John Patt Everybody over the age of 50 should apologize for giving our young people
catastrophic climate change, endless wars, broken healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, ever
widening income and wealth disparates, unaffordable post-secondary education, rampant gun
violence, no voice for labor. We over 50 didn't care enough to vote and to make enough
political noise to keep these things from happening. We over 50 all have personal
responsibilities for this messed up world we're leaving the young. 6 Replies
@Zor The answer is no. Remember Schumer saying that for every urban vote Democrats lost by
running Hillary, they would gain 2 suburban votes. It didn't turn out that way. The centrist,
corporatist Democrats (including Hillary and Biden) have no clue how to reach the working
class of any race. The working class focus of AOC is the Democratic Party's best chance at a
future. But of course the establishment, centrist, corporatist Democrats are still focused on
helping their big money donors. Here's another question: Just how are establishment,
centrist, corporatist Democrats different from Republicans?
Here's my thing- though I'm a deeply liberal person who shares a lot of political beliefs
with Ocasio-Cortez, I'm am not the least bit interested in her. Why? Because she's one
representative of a district all the way across the country from where I live. I care about
about my newly flipped district in Sherman Oaks. I care about my solidly Democratic district
in Santa Rosa. Just because one charismatic representative from Brooklyn has a good Twitter
feed doesn't mean that I have to care or that she deserves a highly-placed role on an
important committee. She's a freshman. Let her learn. And then, go ahead and tell me she
deserves a seat.
There really is not a far left in America. You guys have this weird aversion to moderate
sensible socialism that -as the saying goes- is only in America. Our conservative government
in Australia accepts it as a given the things AOC is fighting for. There is nothing weird
about universal health care in modern advanced countries. The conservatives have a magic word
in the USA that they us as a bogeyman and the word is socialism. Ironically they don't mind
Trump snuggling up to extreme left dictators like Kim and ex KGB Soviet operatives like Don's
supervisor Vlad Putin who by definition had to be a card carrying communist to get to his
position. But moderate socialism is all over northern Europe, NZ, UK and Australia. You
people are oppressed by conservatives playing the "that's socialism" card at every turn. We
never ask where does the money come from? here. The money seems to be there in all the
countries that take care of the health of their citizens. America is a wonderful country with
fantastic people- I love visiting... but to use an Aussie word - crikey I wouldn't want to
live there. 1 Reply
A.O.C. Alexandria "Overexposure" Cortez. This young woman is talented but should pace herself
a bit. It's not a marathon but it's not a sprint either. Let's call it "middle distance" in
track terms. You need to save some breath for when it's really needed. Pace for long term
influence on policy. Or be a "one hit wonder".
@Matt Williams Exactly. I'm a Democratic in a conservative area, and all my Democrat friends
think this woman is nuts. Our Senator Jon Tester is wonderful. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Hard
pass. 9 Replies
@Cass You may self-identify as a moderate but you sound like a conservative. Please go join
the other party of no ideas if AOC strikes you as radical. The majority of Democrats don't
agree with you.
Ideology fails when it meets reality. Trump and McConnell are busy teaching the American
middle class what it is to be reduced to poverty - health care they can't afford, rising
taxes on those who have had some economic success, elimination of well paying jobs, and on
and on. Those voters are understandably interested in pocket book issues, the resurgence of
progressive candidates meets this newly emphasized need. In addition, look at the population
demographics. The baby boomers were a "bump" in population, they in turn have produced a new
bump in their children, who are now adults. The boomers were quite left, their children have
inherited some of this belief system - equal rights and protection and support of those with
less opportunity. The voters in general are also completely fed up with politicians lying to
them and taking away their benefits. They generally have a mistrust both of the right wing
destruction of our norms, and the Democrats failure to fight back (Garland should have been
appointed even in the face of McConnell's calumny). The new face of the Democratic party
feeds pocketbook issues, a belief that America is, in fact, a melting pot, and the need for
restoration of our Democracy. This pretty much covers all the bases, the Democrats just need
to get better at educating the populace.
By and large, the majority of 2600+ counties that Trump carried are not economically well
off. However, they are socially very traditional. Do the Democrats have a message that will
resonate with millions of these traditional white middle/lower middle class voters in the
hinterland? 1 Reply
have you listened to her interviews? she doesn't say much of anything. all political about
all these socialist ideas with no means or method of how to get there. and thank goodness she
has no clue how to get there
I used to be friends with a very high-achieving guy I met as a 15-year-old on a teen summer
tour in Israel, run by the national Reform synagogue movement, in 1985. In the course of our
frienship spanning the final years of high school through the beginning of college, gradually
fading to an email or 2 once every couple years; our different paths & outlooks became
very stark, though we'd both call ourselves liberals. My friend left no stone unturned in his
unambivalent achievement orientation, embracing w/religious fervor the absolute virtue of
success, the unimpeachable morality & integrity of our meritocracy, & meritocratic
ideals/ethos. Naturally, he wound up at Harvard, majoring in government, followed by Harvard
Law. What struck me throughout was the unvarnished "empiricism" of his outlook: rarefied,
lofty principles or romantic ideals seemed alien: the nitty gritty of practical &
procedural realities were the whole picture. The one time we explicitly discussed comparative
politics, he only gravitated toward the topic of Harold Washington's coalition-building
prowess. He was an ardent Zionist ("Jewish homeland!"), with little apparent interest in
theology or spirituality for that matter. Eventually he went into corporate law, negotiating
executive compensation. I think he epitomized the Clinton Democrat: A "Social justice," equal
opportunity for all, meritocracy "synthesis." In a word, that peculiarly "practical,"
pragmatic liberalism was *ultimately conservative*.
Let us all remember that since Reagan the "center" has moved decidedly right. So when we talk
about a move left, we are moving back to where we were in the 1950s-1970's. For example take
AOC's tax proposal. Right out of that time period. Look at the GOP platform in the 1950's. It
reads like a progressive platform today. So let's put this in perspective. Everything is
relative and we have adjusted to right wing dominant politics today.
Edsall looks at the fact the Democrats (and, indeed, the whole country) are moving in a
progressive direction. He does not look at the question of why. I maintain that with an
increase in educated voters, the country is moving towards policies that work, that are good
for the country as a whole, not just for a minority. The other wealthy countries, all with a
universal government health care system such as an improved Medicare for all, get BETTER
health care as measured by all 16 of the bottom line public health statistics for ALL of
their people at a cost of less than HALF per person as we pay. High inequality has been bad
for the economy and governance of this country. Look at what happened in 1929 and 2008 both
preceded by periods of high inequality. Compare that with the long period of low inequality
after WWII of Great Prosperity. Today as a result of terrible SCOTUS decisions, the Super
Rich pushing the country towards oligarchy. The situation at our borders was actually better
before 2003 when ICE was created. It has perpetrated so many atrocities, rightly garnered
such a terrible reputation, why isn't it time to abolish the thing and start over with a new
more humane organization. After all, the Germans did not keep the Gestapo after the war. I
running out of space, but let me end by saying we are now getting more progressive voters
that say that 2 + 3 = 5, and fewer conservative ones who say 2 + 3 = 23 and fewer moderates
who want to compromise on 2 + 3 = 14.
@Concerned Citizen, likewise, public education is funded largely by property taxes, even on
those who do not have children in school, or whose children are out of school. This is not
"someone else's" money! It is all our money, and this is the way we choose to employ it
– to educate all our children, realizing, I hope, that educated children are a major
asset of a developed country. 38 Replies
Until AOC starts to achieve some actual LEGISTATIVE VICTORIES, I'm not prepared to follow her
ANYWHERE. I'm willing to listen to what she has to say, some of which I agree with and some I
question. I lean Left on most issues but I'm not a fanatic, and fanatics exist on BOTH sides
of the political spectrum. I believe that one must PROVE themselves before being beatified.
In substance, I'm open to the "new wing" of the Democratic party which I am, officially, a
member of. Let me add that I will NEVER cast a vote for anyone calling themselves a
Republican because that very label is forever tainted in my book. But I don't much care for
the 'tit for tat' Tweeting from AOC either, writing about Joe Lieberman (whom I do not like)
"who dat"? What is "dat", Miss AOC?
The insane part of this never gets addressed. Why should Americans political interests and
aspirations be controlled by two monopolistic parties? 1 Reply
The country may be in a need of a more social agenda, but this agenda must perceptible help
the depressed white rural folk first. Nothing will work what make those, who are already
falling behind feel like a "basket of deplorables". I hope AOC will find a way not just to
become a poster star of the progressive urban left, but also understand the ailing of the
depressed rural right.
The Democratic Party needs to do a very good job of educating an electorate (and possibly
some of its own members) that has for more than 30 years drunk the kool-aid of the "lower our
taxes," small government, and deregulation gurus. We have such a predatory capitalism now,
with government failing over and over again to reign in huge corporations headed by those who
think they should be determining everything from economic to housing to health to foreign
policy. Enough already. Most of the young members of Congress need a lot more experience and
more immersion in the nitty gritty of creating legislation before they can take the reins,
but they can educate their constituents. And maybe they can convince others that everyone
gains through a more level playing field.
Calling these ideas left is a joke. AOC and Bernie Sanders would practically be conservatives
in Canada and Europe. What we have are 3 unofficial parties: 1. The party of people with good
ideas who aren't afraid to speak about them because they aren't beholden to big donors 2. The
party of watered down, unpopular ideas that are vetted by 20 pollsters and donors before
seeing the light of day 3. The party that gets into office by tapping into people's primal
fears, and avoids policy altogether Republicans have been moving the goalposts for decades
now, how can you even tell left from right anymore?
@A. Stanton Since 1990, there have been funding gaps, shutdowns or serious threats of
shutdowns almost every year. The have become routine tactics in the effort of each party to
drive a hard bargain.
Running up the Democratic vote in Blue states by pandering to left leaning views will not
unseat DJT in 2020. Winning the popular vote by 3 or 3 million yields the same results.
Unless or until we adopt the Nation Popular Vote Intrastate Compact or reapportion the House
more equitably, Republicans will continue to exploit the Electoral College's
antimajoritarianism. Courting the minority of lefties mimics DJT's courting of his base; last
November proved that elections are won in the middle. Appealing to moderates in purple states
is the only path to 270. If you have any doubt, ask private citizen HRC how much good the
Democratic over-vote did for her.
@Bruce Rozenblit What is exceedingly strange to me is that those who rail against socialism
completely misread socialism at it's very roots; Family. 27 Replies
Yes, because all these pundits got 2016 so right. They are people with their own opinions,
just like everyone else, except the punditry has a vested interest in maintaining the status
quo that has been so good to them for so long. Enough already! Times, you're as much to blame
as these pundits for 2016!
When progressive solutions are proposed, the opposition yells "socialism" while others bring
up the cost of progressive solutions. No one talks about the significant portion of our
nation's wealth spent on the military. We don't audit the Pentagon or do due diligence on the
efficiency of huge projects undertaken by the military nor do we question the profits of the
industrial-military complex. Meanwhile, Russia manipulated our latest presidential race,
underscoring the worry over cyber attacks. Climate events in the country mean our citizens
experience life changing events not brought on by terrorists or immigrants. A medical event
in a family can initiate bankruptcy; we all live on that edge. Our infrastructure projects
have been delayed for so long that America looks like a second rate country. Income
inequality is ongoing with no sign of lessening. Suicide is on the increase while death by
drugs is an epidemic. An education for students can mean large debt; efforts to train the
workforce for the technological world are inconsistent. For many of us, the hate and fear
promoted in this country is repulsive. Because our society works for an ever smaller number
of us, Americans are increasingly understanding that a sustainable, just society works for
all it's citizens. We are exhausted by the stalemate in Washington leaving us caring very
little about the labels of progressive, moderate, or conservative. We just know what needs to
change.
Edall's final point that thsese are Democrats returning to Democratic roots and not a wave of
radicalism. I along with a lot of other older voters was infected with a kind of gradualism.
I voted for Hilary, much now to my dismay. AOC among others is stating what she, and what
many of us want. The old Democratic party was a mirror image of Republicans, with taking the
same money, voting for the same wars, and within it all a kind of shame,liberal as a kind of
curse, where we were afraid to make our own agenda, make our own plan for America. taking the
burden, in health care, college education, immigration, is an investment in the future
The New Democratic approach in essence is taking wealth and redistributing it, along with
promising free goods and services. Is that high-minded or simply a Brave New World. The
underlying assumption seems to be the rest of America will not find that worrisome, and that
what happened in MA and NY represents a nationwide trend. 3 Replies
These voters are not moving to the left. They are correcting a trend to the right that
accelerated with Reagan: the rise of corporate dominance and societal control; the loss of
worker rights, healthcare and protections through destruction of our unions; and the mass
incarceration of our nation's young African American men for minor drug offenses, thus
destroying their futures and communities. These "left" liberals are fighting to bring back
democratic norms and values that were once taken for granted among those of all political
stripes.
I have always voted in every primary. I have always voted for the most "leftist" available.
So did my whole family, and all the people with whom I discussed our voting. The issue was
always "most leftist available." That often was not very leftist at all. That is what has
changed. Now the option is there. It isn't because we vote for it. We vote for it now because
now we can, now the choice is there. What has changed is not so much the voters as the
invisible primary before anyone asks us voters. What changed is the Overton Window of
potential choices allowed to us. I think voters would have done this a long time ago, if
they'd had the opportunity. So why now? Abject failure of our politics to solve our problems
has been true for decades, so it isn't mere failure. I'd like to think it was voter
rebellion. We just wouldn't vote for their sell outs. Here, that meant Bernie won our
primary, and then we did not turn out for Her. We finally forced it. The money men could not
get away with it anymore.
It is strange that Mr Edsall frames Medicare 4 All , Free College , and higher taxes on
wealthy as RADICAL leftist ideas .. when it fact each of these proposals have the majority of
support from Americans.. The most current poll shows 70% support for Medicare 4 All.. so you
are only radical if you DON'T support.
Unless the progressives start addressing the concerns of the middle class, they will drive
the Democratic Party right off the cliff. You remember us, don't you? People who have tried
to do things right and work hard. Granted, our cares and concerns aren't that sexy or
tweetable so it's easy for you newly elected firebrands to overlook us. Don't forget, we are
the ones who will ultimately foot the bills for your giveaways.
The notion that democrats are moving leftward is borne on revisionist history. There's
nothing new or bold being proposed; Zeitz is right on the money.
"Medicare for All, government-guaranteed jobs and a higher minimum wage" I have a question to
all the "progressive" Democratic voices in Congress - how are you going to pay for such an
agenda? Money doesn't just grow on trees. Either you will have to cut funds from another
program, or raise taxes. Most of these progressive people favor raising taxes on the wealthy.
But what is your definition of "wealthy"? $10 million in annual income? $1 million in annual
income? $500k? $200k? Almost all the proposals I have seen coming from progressives involves
increasing tax rates for families making more than $200k, either through higher rates, phased
out deductions, or ineligibility for certain programs. A professional couple where both are
software engineers could easily surpass this threshold, but they are not rich. They struggle
to pay the mortgage, save for the future, pay taxes, and provide for their children. Why
should they be forced to pay more in taxes percentage-wise than a family earning $100k or
$60k? It is for these reasons that I as an independent will never support progressive
candidates. These candidates lack basic math abilities and a basic notion of fairness. So if
the Democratic party starts to embrace some of the policies espoused by these progressives,
they are on a path to lose elections in the future. 1 Reply
@AutumnLeaf Mitch McConnell blocked Obama at every turn; he denied him the appointment of a
moderate respected Judge to the SC, a Judge the GOP had voted for on the Superior Court.
Congress wasted time with 40 attempts to declare the ACA unconstitutional; the Plan was
modeled on a Romney Plan in MA. Scalia's Citizens United Decision declared that corporations
are people; Scalia knew that he was using a Superior Ct. Decision with a transcription error:
word spoken: corporation; word transcribed: individual. Scalia spent a lot of time at
corporate lodges, "hunting"; mainly eating until he finally ate himself to death. McConnell
spends his time with mine owners. Trump spends his time with lobbyists for Israel and Saudi
Arabia. 9 Replies
I think this article underscores the incredible opportunity available to the left if they
pick a radical democratic socialist candidate. If they are already winning the college
educated crowd that is gentrifying these major urban areas and losing the poorer minority
crowd that is voting for people like the Clinton's over Sanders or Crowley over AOC; we are
getting the people whom one would think would be less incentivized to vote for our platform
and we can gain the people who would benefit more from our platform.Therefore, it is really
just a question of exposure and talking to these people. Reaching out to minorities; talking
about mass-incarceration, how it disproportinately affects precisely these minority voters
that we have to gain; and how the moderate democrats have been benefiting economically and
politically from the chaos and inequities in these communities for years. It is a question of
messaging. Minorities are our natural allies. They are disproportinately affected by the
inequality; and as soon as we can reach them; tell them that there brothers, husbands, sons
are coming home, and that we have a job for them to support their family when they do, that
is a huge % of voters that will swing our way, and accelerate the pace of our revolution--and
what critics will come to remember as the end of their decadence and control over all facets
of society, to the detriment of everyone else. The end is coming--and a new, better society
is on the verge of being reborn 1 Reply
Of all of those quoted in this article, the only one who really gets it right is Joshua
Zeitz. FDR's 1944 State of the Union address should be required reading for every Democrat,
and every Establishment talking head who warns against alienating suburban voters by
advocating for a New Deal social safety net. I share the sentiments of many on who have
responded by noting that it was, and is, the leadership of the Democratic Party that has
moved right rather than the Democratic electorate that shifted left. Don't believe me? Go
back through the sixteen years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies and see how many times
each referenced Ronald Reagan versus even mentioning Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or
Lyndon Johnson.
Medicare for all? Get ready for 6-week waits for a 10 minute appointment (and that will be
just for primary care). After that, expect to wait 6-12 months to see a specialist. 1 Reply
@José Franco I will not dig out social security trustees' projections of future
funding requirements or the possible solutions bandied about by politicians (google them),
but one single tweak would eliminate any projected shortfalls. Currently the FICA
contribution is limited to earnings of $132,900. Those who earn over that amount pay no FICA
tax on the earnings above that level. The person earning a million dollars in 2019 will stop
paying FICA on his earnings by mid-February. Applying FICA to all earnings of all earners
would keep social security solvent. No raise in retirement age, no reduction in benefits, no
insolvency. As to Medicare's solvency and public benefits, see the excellent comments of Len
Charlap. 17 Replies
There are several issues upon which I and my like-minded moderate family members will cast
our votes in 2020: - Border security and the end to the brazen exploitation of our citizenry
by the millions of foreign migrants who illegally, and with an attitude of entitlement,
trespass into our sovereign country year after year...costing our taxpayers billions. -
Reckless proposals to increase government benefit programs that aren't affordable without
raising taxes, threatening our already stressed social security safety net. - The rise of
Antisemitism and the mendacious obsession with Israel amongst leftists within Congress, as
well as within the ranks of their constituents. Democrats will need to address these issues
to our satisfaction if they want our votes. 2 Replies
Ed, it's time to retire. If you spent time looking at the actual data, Democratic primary
voters, particularly those in overly restrictive closed primary states like New York, are
older, wealthier, "socially liberal" and "fiscally conservative." They are what we would have
called moderate/Rockefeller Republicans 40 years ago, but they vote Democratic because that's
who their parents voted for. Most progressive voters today, the ones who support Medicare for
all, investment in public higher education, taxation on wealth (you know, those pesky issues
that mainstream Democrats used to support 30-40 years ago) are younger and more likely to be
unaffiliated with any political party. This is why Bernie did much better in states with open
primaries, and Hillary did better in closed primary states like NY AOC won in spite of NY's
restrictive primary system. She was able to achieve this because many of the older Democratic
establishment voters who would have voted for Crowley stayed home, and she was able to
motivate enough first-time young voters in her district to register as a Dem and vote for
her. (First time voters in NY can register with party 30 days prior to primary election)
Let's be clear though: your premise that Dem primary voters are driving the party's shift to
the left couldn't be further from the truth--the progressive shift in the body politic you
describe is coming from younger, independent, working class voters and is redefining the
American left.
From the NYT , Edsall April 19, 2018 The Democrats' Gentrification Problem "Conversely, in
the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent),
families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 -- $7,229
less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448." Syracuse, a
democratic City in one of the most democratic States in the US, so assuredly democratic that
Democratic Presidential candidates rarely show up has been left by the Democrats and the
Democratic Governor ,Cuomo, in a death spiral of getting poorer by the day That in a State,
that includes NYC, the international capital of the global billionaire elite. Exactly, what
have the Democrats done to help ?
"Sawhill argues that if the goal of Democrats is victory, as opposed to ideological purity,
they must focus on general election swing voters who are not die-hard Democrats." Wow, what
an original argument! I have been hearing the exact same thing since I registered to vote at
age 18 in 1977. Democrats are always urged to support the "sensible, centrist" candidates who
keep on losing elections to Republicans who drag their party, and the whole country by
default, even further to the right. JFK was called a communist and worse by pundits like this
and he would have won by a landslide in 1964. How about if Democrats for once push for
policies that are backed by 90 percent of Americans, like Medicare For All, the higher
minimum wage, universal college education, renewable energy and the rest of the Green New
Deal and higher marginal tax rates for the rich. I would love to see just one presidential
candidate run on this platform before I die so I can fill out my ballot without holding my
nose. 1 Reply
Kind of make sense considering how far to the right the Republican Party has gone with the
Donald. And he's a guy who was a Democrat at one point. He's a dangerous mr nobody. Let's
counter going far to the left so we can come back to some middle ground.
@Len Charlap Canada can also more easily afford universal healthcare and a stronger social
safety net because it doesn't have the outsized military budget that we do. 17 Replies
@Ronny I agree with you - have a subsidized education - (rather I prefer to say equal access
to education) as well as health care guarantees to a greater extent equality of opportunity -
which is what all democratic societies should strive for. It's not equality of outcome but
equality of opportunity. Children should not be punished for have parents of lesser means or
being born on the wrong side of the tracks...
Until I see well-crafted legislation that is initiated by her that will help improve the
lives of many she's just another politician with sound bite platitudes. She doesn't even have
a district office in the Bronx yet to the chagrin of many of the constituents.
@Midwest Josh Perhaps student loans made by the FED at the rates they charge the big banks in
their heist of the American economy achieved back in 1913. 38 Replies
AOC is a liberal darling who's stated (on 60 Minutes) that unemployment rates are low because
everyone is working two jobs; I might add, that has nothing to do with how unemployment rates
are figured and come on, "everyone?" And recently she's stated that the world will end in 12
years if we don't do something about climate change. Come on, this is silliness, ignorance
and borderline stupidity. If she's the poster child for the Democrats, then she's the gift
that will keep on giving to the GOP.
I grew up during the Vietnam War, and over the years came to admire the American people who
ultimately forced their government to withdraw from an immoral (and disastrous) military
adventure. This is rare in human history. Rare in American history too, as the follies in
Iraq drag on and on to remind us. Perhaps the American people are becoming themselves again.
I wouldn't call it drifting left at all.
Thomas Edsall's column is yet another conservative spin on Democrats from The New York Times.
Where are the voices of progressive Democrats, who form the overwhelming majority of New York
City residents? Of New York state residents? Who form the core of the Democratic Party's
support. The Times insists that these conservative voices are the only ones deserving of
publication here. Where in the world did the notion come from that The Times was a "liberal"
publication?
@Chris Young, It seems you aonly approve of departments that teach what you consider
"productive." If schools become an adjuct to the marketplace, then only the material,
quantifiable results will be the metric by which the value of education is measured. This
will leave us, as in some ways we are already becoming, a population that emulates robots,
and has no use for critical thinking, ethics, or art. The profit in education is in the
quality of the students it turns out into the world, not on a corporate balance sheet. 38
Replies
It's all good but important to expand the focus on the entirety of the Democrats in Congress
- and the amazing age range and gender mix. The opportunities are vast - an intergenerational
government of forward thinking, principled women and men. Please media pundits - avoid focus
on only 1 or 2. There are brilliant ideas pouring forth - let the ideas from every corner
flow! Remember that the intense media focus on Trump, liberal as well as conservative,
contributed significantly to what happened in election 2016.
If by liberal you mean the circular firing squad of the politics of aggrievement, no. My
politics fall in line with FDR's Second Bill of Rights. Here he describes them in 1944
https://youtu.be/3EZ5bx9AyI4
"...true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security & independence.
"Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry & out of a job are the stuff of
which dictatorships are made... We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under
which a new basis of security & prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of
station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job...; The
right to earn enough to provide adequate food & clothing & recreation; The right of
every farmer to raise & sell his products at a return which will give him & his
family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition & domination by monopolies at home or
abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care &
the opportunity to achieve & enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the
economic fears of old age, sickness, accident & unemployment; The right to a good
education." That is where Democrats used to be. Then came the Corporate Democrats, the DLC
and the Clintons.
This piece misses more than it hits. Where it misses particularly is in it's insistence that
the Class interest of working class Democrats pulls the Party right, rather than left, and
that the insurgents are mostly young, white gentrifying liberals. This is not altogether
false, but misses that many of the gentrifiers are not middle class themselves, but lower
middle class young people with huge college debt who could never dream of living in upper
middle class enclaves like most of the opinion writers in the Time for example. So they move
into the inner city, make it safe for professionals, and then yes, Brooklyn goes white.
Harlem goes white. Berkeley loses its working class majority. Etc. The big problem for the
left of the Democratic Party is not that its mostly young, white and middle class; it is that
the very term "liberal" is now widely understood by working class people as meaning
"establishment." And they are against the "establishment". As it happens, so are the young
insurgents. This then is the task for the left of the Democrats; to unite the culturally
conservative working class with the emerging multi-racial, multi-ethnic youth vote to take
down both the reactionary Right and the Liberal establishment. And the only reason such a
sentiment seems crazy is that the New York Times, far from being a bastion of the resistance
to Trump is actually a bulwark of that Liberal Establishment. Stats are stats but the future
is unwritten.
AOC is pretty interesting. She's charismatic, fearless....and I'm trying to think of
something else. OH, she's personally attractive. If the government gig falls apart she can
probably get TV work. But as an intellectual light or a rational political leader -- she is
clearly lacking. OF course that may not matter as the earth will come to an end in 12 years.
Which is even more ludicrous than saying the earth is only 6000 years old. She is simply
spouting far left talking points which are driven by emotion, not rational thought. And she
keeps making unforced errors in her public speaking engagements. She really doesn't appear to
understand what she's talking about and can't respond to reasonable questions about her
policy positions. But then, that's not too unlike much of the left. So maybe she's a perfect
fit for a fact free faction which is beginning to run the dem party. 1 Reply
One commenter gave a really insightful look at socialism for corporations and the rich here,
otherwise known to most of us as corporate welfare, including subsidies to oil companies, who
seem rich enough, but nevertheless, extend their "impoverished" bank accounts for more of our
dollars. Successful corporations, will reward investors, CEO's, hedge fund managers, all
those at the top, but the worker, not too much for that drone, who was part of the reason of
the success of that corporation. Socialism has been tainted by countries with autocratic
rulers , uneducated masses, and ofttimes, as in Latin America, religious masses. But,
Scandinavia, has shown us a socialism to envy. It's confident citizens know that much of what
makes life livable has been achieved. Finland rates as one of the happiest countries in the
world. Taxes are high, but one isn't bankrupted because of illness, one doesn't lose a home
because of a catastrophic illness, education is encouraged, and one doesn't have to pay the
debt off for 30 years or more. The infrastructure is a priority, war is not. It just seems
like it's a secure way to live. This is socialism I wish we could duplicate. Does anyone
consider that socialism also includes our police, libraries, fire stations, roads, and so
much more? Used for the good of society, it's a boon for all, rather than unregulated
capitalism which enriches the few at the expense of most of us. 3 Replies
@Reilly Diefenbach "Democratic socialism" isn't a thing, but implies two contradictory
ideals. Social democracy is thing, a good thing, and in line with what Nordic nations have.
38 Replies
Never has someone gotta so much for doing so little. None of this means anything if it
doesn't become law. As a life long Liberal Democrat (there, I said it) myself, I find it
infuriating when Liberal/Progressive politicians get out-sized credit for their good
intentions while those same good intentions threaten party unity. The Progressive idea of
party unity seems to be limited to getting what they want or they'll walk away. They just
know better, so there's no need for compromise. Never mind that they have no way of enacting
any of this legislation -- and more often than not Progressives lose at the polls. These
"kids" need to wake up and realize that there are no moral victories in politics. The ONLY
goal of any Democrat has to be unseating Trump and McConnell, everything else is a noise, and
a dangerous distraction.
I support universal health care, free college for students who meet enhanced entrance
requirements and raising marginal tax rates to 70% on wealthy Americans. Yet I do not support
an expansion of the EITC, ending immigration enforcement or putting workers on boards of
directors. So where do I stand? All my life I've voted Democratic. But there has been a
seismic shift in politics. And after the shift I will most likely vote Republican or for a
third party. The issue that causes my change in affiliation is the Me Too movement. I find it
repugnant that feminists seem to argue that the media rather than the courts should determine
guilt or innocence in sexual assault cases. Bill Cosby had an agreement with Andrea Constand
in their case. But feminists weren't happy with the outcome. So they resorted to extra-legal
means to get Cosby convicted. This included a media campaign in which the NY Times and the
New Yorker wrote stories highlighting accusations of 60 women for which statutes of
limitations had elapsed. But statutes of limitations are there for a reason. This became
clear in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh which degenerated into a trial for rape. Nobody
except maybe the accuser could remember in any detail events at the party in which the rape
had presumably occurred. So the confirmation became one of character assassination in which
Kavanaugh was convicted of drinking beer. I will NEVER vote for any politician who supports
the Me Too movement.
"... protection from the vicissitudes of market capitalism"? People want protection from
monopoly capitalism. The left-right frame is a fallacy. If you put the actual policies on the
table, the great majority want single payer, clean elections, action on climate change, etc.
Pitting Left v. Right only redounds to tribalism. It ends up with a President who shuts down
the business of which he himself is the CEO. That's not great.
"... It is utterly bizarre to hear people who believe Trump is unfit to lead seem disappointed that he isn't taking us to war. ..."
"... This is a crisis of his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it. ..."
"... The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will change his mind after about the same amount of reflection. ..."
"... Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock and load" the American military in the future. For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk" advisors are getting closer and closer to hitting pay dirt. By the way, who are his "dove" advisors? ..."
"... If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his 10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching Tucker. ..."
"... Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine - first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he hears on Fox News to start it all over again. ..."
"... "It does not require Nostradamus-like skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop routine Trump appears to be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster." ..."
"... the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the Constitution. ..."
"... And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con. ..."
No matter how laudable averting war is, the fact is that we would have never been in this
situation if Trump had not unilaterally abandoned the Iran deal. This is a crisis of his
own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it.
The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is
quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will
change his mind after about the same amount of reflection.
I don't know. Maybe a wise president would not have appointed Bolton and Pompeo in the first
place. Nor would a wise president have had a $130 million drone flying over Iranian air space
(or right on its border).
Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets
enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock
and load" the American military in the future. For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk"
advisors are getting closer and closer to hitting pay dirt. By the way, who are his "dove"
advisors?
Please, he didn't even know about projected casualties until ten minutes before the attack
was to be launched, no doubt because he's too lazy smart to attend planning
meetings/briefings.
If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his
10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching Tucker.
Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine
- first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he
hears on Fox News to start it all over again.
But just because on this pass he happened to randomly bounce off of a "good" bumper, we're
supposed to congratulate him for finally "becoming President". The only thing bizarre here is
the contortions his supporters put themselves through to try to deny what is obvious to
everyone else.
If I go to my neighbors front yard with a gun, point it at their house, then don't shoot, I
am not practicing restraint. I should be arrested for brandishing a firearm. This article is
crop.
Lighten up, folks. Obviously, Antle's headline, "The Night Donald Trump Became President," is
a play on the same words that a lot of talking heads (not just unreconstructed
neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, but "mainstream" centrists like Fareed Zakaria) used when
Trump bombed Syria for the first time.
He's being facetious, not serious. He isn't praising Trump or his "B-Team" for their
restraint (on the contrary, they have created a crisis for no good reason and have brought us
to the brink of war as a result) so much as he's criticizing the media for its
warmongering.
The media is actually trying to bait the President into a unilateral act of war against
another country that hasn't attacked us and couldn't threaten us even if it did.
"It does not require Nostradamus-like skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop
routine Trump appears to be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster."
At this point, I am almost afraid to check the latest news-with tapeworm Bolton, it is a
matter of time before the situation blows up.
Re: "If Trump continues to break with this pattern, however, it will be less celebrated
in Washington than it would deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper
place would be a truly presidential act."
However, note that Trump refuses to concede any Imperial authority to wage war that
illegally violates the Constitution. He just chose not to start a war with Iran - this time.
(And also note that the Pentagon is always happy to oblige the Imperial President and kill
and destroy without question.)
So the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial
President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and
Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the
illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the
Constitution.
And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in
to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con.
"... This is a crisis of his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it. ..."
"... The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will change his mind after about the same amount of reflection. ..."
"... "If Trump continues to break with this pattern, however, it will be less celebrated in Washington than it would deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper place would be a truly presidential act." ..."
...This Administration's handling of Iran, as compared to the last, is anything but stupid.
Unless, of course, you're of the opinion we should be going to war, and you're pissed that
this President made the right decision at the right time. Nice try, because thinking the
way you are is stupid.
No matter how laudable averting war is, the fact is that we would have never been in this
situation if Trump had not unilaterally abandoned the Iran deal. This is a crisis of
his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it.
The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump
is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will
change his mind after about the same amount of reflection.
I don't know. Maybe a wise president would not have appointed Bolton and Pompeo in the
first place. Nor would a wise president have had a $130 million drone flying over Iranian
air space (or right on its border).
Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets
enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock
and load" the American military in the future.
For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk" advisors are getting closer and closer to
hitting pay dirt.
Well, this article vanquished my very recent admiration for Michael Brendan Dougherty,
acquired by way of Mr. Dreher.
"articulates a classical Augustinian just war argument ..."
That's like claiming Mrs O'Leary's cow that kicked over the lantern and burned Chicago
to the ground was articulating the finer points of preventing forest fires originated by
Smokey the Bear.
Do the writers here do a little physical stretching before contorting yourselves into
pretzel shapes trying to justify every lantern Trump kicks over into poles of dry hay as he
goes along?
Of course conservative Christians hate pulling back from imminent, and possibly nuclear
war. When haven't they in American history?
Please, he didn't even know about projected casualties until ten minutes before the attack
was to be launched, no doubt because he's too lazy smart to attend planning
meetings/briefings.
If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his
10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching
Tucker.
Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine -
first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he
hears on Fox News to start it all over again. But just because on this pass he happened to
randomly bounce off of a "good" bumper, we're supposed to congratulate him for finally
"becoming President". The only thing bizarre here is the contortions his supporters put
themselves through to try to deny what is obvious to everyone else.
If I go to my neighbors front yard with a gun, point it at their house, then don't shoot, I
am not practicing restraint. I should be arrested for brandishing a firearm. This article
is crop.
Lighten up, folks. Obviously, Antle's headline, "The Night Donald Trump Became President,"
is a play on the same words that a lot of talking heads (not just unreconstructed
neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, but "mainstream" centrists like Fareed Zakaria) used
when Trump bombed Syria for the first time. He's being facetious, not serious. He isn't
praising Trump or his "B-Team" for their restraint (on the contrary, they have created a
crisis for no good reason and have brought us to the brink of war as a result) so much as
he's criticizing the media for its warmongering. The media is actually trying to bait the
President into a unilateral act of war against another country that hasn't attacked us and
couldn't threaten us even if it did.
"It does not require Nostradamus-like
skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop routine Trump appears to
be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster."
At this point, I am almost afraid to check the latest news-with tapeworm bolton, it is a
matter of time before the situation blows up.
Re: "If Trump continues to break with this
pattern, however, it will be less celebrated in Washington than it would
deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper place would
be a truly presidential act."
However, note that Trump refuses to concede any Imperial authority to wage war that
illegally violates the Constitution. He just chose not to start a war with Iran - this
time. (And also note that the Pentagon is always happy to oblige the Imperial President and
kill and destroy without question.)
So the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial
President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and
Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the
illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the
Constitution.
And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in
to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con.
This type of article is the reason I read The American Conservative. Thank you for
addressing this important issue from a cautious and realistic perspective.
Although Donald Trump and I are on opposite sides of the fence on nearly every issue, I
do prefer his restrained foreign policy instincts to the hawkish ones of Hillary
Clinton.
Goodness you people and your Nobel prize obsession. The last guy got one he didn't deserve
so I should get one too. Whether the decision was presidential or not is hinged on motive
in my view.
If it was an assessment that if our drone did in fly over US airspace, then it
represented a legitimate target for Iran - then certainly critical thinking as expressed
has some merit to sound management.
If the matter was decided on the messiness of conflict and calculating one's political
carreer, the level of sound management is simply not a factor.
THIS is what white supremacy looks like: Punish Iran because one day in the far off future
they may develop an atomic bomb but gift Israel $3 billion a year while it harbors hundreds
of nukes. Meanwhile, pat head choppers like Saudi Arabia on the head -- As long as they
buys billions in US weapons and force nations to use US dollars to buy oil.
Do you realize that Iran is an Aryan nation, which would make them white? Israel is a
Jewish nation, which most white supremacists hate. And Saudi Arabia is an Arab country,
which would not make it a white country.
So how in the world is this what white supremacy looks like?
by George
Washington Fri, 06/21/2019 - 23:05 18 SHARES Truth Is the First Casualty of War
Over two thousand years ago, the Greek writer Aeschylus said :
In war, truth is the first casualty.
That quote could be read to mean that - once a war starts - then truth goes out the window
...
In reality, however, wars are often planned for political reasons (having to do with
money ,
resources or other goals which may have nothing to do with directly protecting one's
country or people) and then false intelligence is created to "justify" the start of the
war.
Britain's MI5 intelligence service explained
about the claimed justifications for the Iraq War:
The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
9/11 Commission Co-Chair and 34-year veteran Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served on
numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, said :
My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by
the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.
Because war not only kills, maims and displaces a lot of innocent people, but is also
bad for the
economy and
destroys the environment (and puts out a lot of carbon
dioxide ), we passionately believe that people need to understand a little history so that
the same mistakes are not repeated, and disastrous wars are avoided when they are not necessary
to actually defend ourselves.
And because we believe that the Constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak out is
a large part of what makes us great, we will also put a spotlight on those who are trying to
shut down our First Amendment rights ... and how they're doing it.
False Pretenses
Scores of officials throughout the world have admitted (either orally, in writing, or
through recordings, photographs or videos) to carrying out, seriously proposing, or faking
attacks which they blamed on others as a way to falsely start wars or shut down free
speech:
(1) A Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in
Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later
admitted
in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a
third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the
Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.
(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed
it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the "Mukden Incident" or the
"Manchurian Incident". The Tokyo International Military Tribunal
found : "Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking
Japanese army officer], have on various occasions
admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the 'Incident' was to
afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ." And see
this , this and this.
(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that
– under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives
faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to
justify the invasion of Poland. The staged attacks included :
The German radio station at Gleiwitz [details below]
The strategic railway at Jabłonków Pass, located on the border between Poland
and Czechoslovakia
The German customs station at Hochlinden
The forest service station in Pitschen
The communications station at Neubersteich
The railroad station in Alt-Eiche
A woman and her companion in Katowice
The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include :
On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish
uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German
message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans' goal was to make
the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.
To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off
as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian
Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day
by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection,
given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed
while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as
proof of the attack.
(4) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government - subsequently approved by
Mussolini himself - admitted that
violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the
Greeks, as an excuse for Italy's 1940 invasion of Greece.
(5) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader
Hermann Goering
admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely
blaming the communists for the arson.
(6) Goering also said:
"Why of course the people don't want war But after all it is the leaders of the country
who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether
it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked , and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any
country."
And Adolph Hitler said:
" Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of
sudden death".
(7) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet
Union's Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the
attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the "Winter War" against Finland. Russian
president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the
aggressor in the Winter War.
(8) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader
Gorbachev all admit
that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army
officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.
(9) Stalin also said:
"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The
public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".
(10) The British government
admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were
Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up
a fake group called "Defenders of Arab Palestine", and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim
responsibility for the bombings (and see this , this
and this ).
(11) In the 1950s, Israeli Prime Moshe Sharett admitted in his diary:
I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have
invented , and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood ....
(The U.S. Army's School of Advanced Military Studies would later say of Mossad -
Israel's intelligence service - "Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and
make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act").
(12) The CIA admits that it
hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to
turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.
(13) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs
in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence"
implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the
Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this
and this).
(14) The Turkish Prime Minister
admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in
Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and
blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.
Starting in the 1950s Turkey's deep state sponsored killings, engineered riots, colluded
with drug traffickers, staged "false flag" attacks and organised massacres of trade
unionists. Thousands died in the chaos it fomented.
(15) The British Prime Minister
admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved
a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to
effect regime change.
(16) Leo Strauss - the
father of the Neo-Conservative movement , who counted many military policymakers of recent
American administrations, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot
Abrams, and Adam Shulsky as students in
his University of Chicago classes -
taught in the 1950s and 1960s that "if no external threat exists then one has to be
manufactured" (the quote is by one of Strauss'
main biographers ).
(18) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested
that the U.S. launch "a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of
actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow
Castro]".
(19) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs
and other high-level officials
discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion
of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious
proposals.
(20) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962,
the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an
elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on
American soil , and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See
the following ABC
news report ; the official documents ; and
watch this interview
with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter
Jennings. This plan was subsequently admitted
again in other declassified government documents.
Provocations considered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff included :
Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims ....
***
3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could
arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result
of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely
investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was
taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to
those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up
with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of
the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national
indignation.
4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida
cities and even in Washington.
The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.
We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster
attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in
instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots,
the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban
involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.
***
6. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment
of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by
MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would
convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport
were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the
security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of
the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.
***
8. it is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a
Cuban-aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United
States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to
cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba, The passengers could be a group of college
students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support
chartering a non-scheduled flight.
a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a
civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a
designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be
loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual
registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow
a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will
descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where
arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its
original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan.
When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the inter-national distress frequency a
"MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be
interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will
allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to "tell" the US what has happened to the
aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.
9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban
MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.
a. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft-will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB,
Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir
aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct
variations of these flights at frequent intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least
12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the
event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MiGs.
b. On One such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable
interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had
been Jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then
fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary.
The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number.
The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and
return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have
disappeared.
c. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or
small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20
miles off the Cuban coast and depart.
U.S. government documents declassified in October 2017 admitted that a
very high-level 1962 meeting of U.S. government officials - separate from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff - also discussed:
The possibility of U.S. manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft .... There is a
possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse
enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a
provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly
installations in order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention .
(21) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting
attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago
or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.
(22) The NSA admits that it
lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964
manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to
create a false justification for the Vietnam war.
(23) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested
covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area
remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to
initiate an attack on Guantanamo."
(24) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of
its "Cointelpro" campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s
to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.
(25) A top Turkish general
admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on
their enemy. He
explained : "In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to
increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque." In response to
the surprised correspondent's incredulous look the general said, "I am giving an example".
The bulk of the nation's undercover work is done by local police officers or outsiders
hired by the state, county or city police, according to the campus reports. Probably the best
known undercover man in the United States, M. L. Singkata Thomas Tongyai, known at Hobart
College in Canandaigua, N.Y., as "Tommy the Traveler," was one of these.
He was hired by the local sheriff's office and, according to an Ontario County grand jury,
"advocated violent forms of protest" among student radicals. He took part in a police drug
raid on the Hobart campus last June 5.
Thomas Tongyai, or Tommy the Traveler, for example, provided bombs and rifles for the
students at Hobart College and recruited the secretary of the local R.O.T.C. unit to help
destroy its files. Tongyai apparently was being paid by both the local sheriff's office and a
Federal agency
The Ontario County Sheriff
admitted that Tommy was an employee, and said that Tommy also worked for the
FBI.
(27) Former police informer and undercover operative Charles Grimm - paid by both the FBI
and the Tuscaloosa Police Department -
admitted that , in 1970, he used Molotov cocktails to burn Dressler Hall at Kent State
University to disrupt protests. The fire was blamed on dissenters and served as cause to
declare campus protests "unlawful assemblies".
(28) A declassified
1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign
police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to
investigate terrorist acts:
The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations
through its field stations .
[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]
a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military
demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage
operations.
b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory
techniques , likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by
terrorists or saboteurs.
c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning
that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.
d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical
experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication .
***
The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and
use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges,
incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques .
(29) The German government admitted (and
see this ) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a
prison and planted "escape tools" on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction
– which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.
(30) In the late 1970s, a Major General in the IDF (Israeli military)
admitted that a top Israeli general "was mining roads taken by IDF troops, to make it look
as if the PLO was behind it."
(31) The head of Israel's Northern Command staff
admitted that, during the late 1970's and early 80's, numerous terror attacks were carried
out under the fake name "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners" by Israelis "to
cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli
fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill
them with a sense of insecurity." In order to cast blame elsewhere, the Israelis recruited
Lebanese locals, Christians, and Shiite Muslims, to carry out series of targeted killings and
sabotage operations in southern Lebanon.
(32) A Mossad agent
admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi's compound in Tripoli,
Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame
Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.
(33) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil
Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an
explosives expert and asked him "to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC
[the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into
the murder incident", thus framing the ANC for the bombing.
(34) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit
that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed
Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video ; and see Agence
France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author ).
(35) A police officer admitted
on National Public Radio:
In the '90s, we turned to a different tactic .... And you can see how successful that was
in places like, you know, the Republican National Conventions in both New York City and
Minneapolis, where we even got people to - you know, we were able to encourage people to do
things like, you know, do acts of violence, which then would make it possible for us to come
in and sweep the streets and bring in large amounts of SWAT team tactical police. It was
really effective .
( This cartoon sums up the way
which provocateurs distract attention from the real messages behind peaceful protests.)
(36) One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq
invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti
girl that Iraqis
murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who
admitted
that he knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. - who
was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war - but the Congressman hid
that fact from the public and from Congress
(37) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the
Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government)
show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was
designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this .
(38) The United States Army's 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense
Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 –
recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist
regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and
other regions as part of the CIA's " Dirty Wars ". And see
this .
(39) Similarly, a CIA "psychological operations" manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the
Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value
of assassinating someone on your own side to create a "martyr" for the cause. The manual was
authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated
Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate
– President Reagan was confronted with
the following question on national television:
At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual
for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations
of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in
order to create martyrs.
(40) Official German intelligence service documents
admitted (original German ) that, in 1994, the German
intelligence services planted plutonium on an airplane coming from Russia, as a way to
frame Russia for exporting
dangerous radioactive materials which could end up in the hands of terrorists and criminals.
This frame-up job was so successful at whipping up fear that it got
German Chancellor Kohl re-elected, and the U.S. used it as an excuse to "help" secure Russia's
nuclear facilities, as a way to get access to Russian nuclear secrets.
(41) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted
that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe - a
murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than
800,000 Tutsis by Hutus - was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.
(43) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers
admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on
Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see
this report and this discussion ).
(44) As reported by the
New York Times , BBC and Associated Press , Macedonian officials
admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended
that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join
the "war on terror". They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged
gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western
embassies". Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and
then - after killing them - posed the victims with planted evidence – "bags of uniforms
and semiautomatic weapons at their side" – to show Western diplomats.
(45) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped
getting out of police cars, and were seen by an
Italian MP carrying "iron bars inside the police station". Subsequently, senior police
officials in Genoa admitted
that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8
Summit, in order to justify a violent
crackdown against protesters. And see this .
Even after the 9/11 Commission
admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is
"overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime, that Cheney
"probably" had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not 'doing
their homework' in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that hat the
Iraq war was really
for oil or to protect
Israel not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.
Despite previous "lone wolf" claims, many U.S. government officials now
say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the
hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue
elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The
key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with
it.).
(48) Many high-level American and British officials admitted
that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the Bush administration publicly claimed it did ... and
before it launched the Iraq War in 2003. For example, a CIA official insists the Bush administration was made
aware some time before the State of the Union address that the claims that Iraq was trying to
purchase yellow case uranium from Niger was false.
(50) According to the Washington Post , Indonesian police admit
that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders
on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.
(51) The well-respected former Indonesian president also
admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.
(53) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were
authorized to use the following method:
False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United
States are interrogating him.
While not a traditional false flag attack , this deception could lead to former detainees -
many of whom were tortured - attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and
torture.
(54) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the
US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having "our intelligence agencies create a
false terrorist organization . It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training
camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit
for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda's ranks, causing
operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications."
(55) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a
renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of 'netwar' – called for
western intelligence services to create new "pseudo gang" terrorist groups , as a way of
undermining "real" terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour
Hersh, Arquilla's 'pseudo-gang' strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by
the Pentagon:
"Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to
pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used
in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens
could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls 'action
teams' in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist
organizations. 'Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?' the former
high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed
atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. 'We founded them and we financed them,' he said.
'The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell
Congress about it.' A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando
capabilities, said, 'We're going to be riding with the bad boys.'"
(56) United Press International reported
in June 2005:
U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using
recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers
erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have
come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial
numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist
cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably
from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the
untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as
evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.
(57) In 2005,
British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the
police. The British soldiers shot two Iraqi policemen, killing
one . The soldiers apparently possessed
explosives , and were accused
of attempting to set off
bombs . While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British
soldiers and a column of 10 British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down
a wall of the jail, and busted them out . The extreme measures used to free the soldiers -
rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial - could be considered an
admission.
(58) Undercover Israeli soldiers
admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on
Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.
(59) A very high-level French counterterrorism official,
Paul Barril, admits
that French, US and UK intelligence services worked together to poison Russian spy Alexander
Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in 2006 in order to frame and discredit Russia. And
see this
.
(60) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks
to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and
see this ).
(61) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the
U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as "paramilitary forces, individuals,
businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates,
transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members , black
marketers, and other social or political 'undesirables.'" The manual specifically acknowledged
that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and "terrorism" (as well as
"transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and
illegal financial transactions.")
He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior infiltrate the movement with
agents provocateurs inclined to do anything . And after that, with the strength of the gained
population consent, beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite
them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.
(63) An undercover officer
admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22
countries. Germany's federal police chief admitted
that - while the undercover officer worked for the German police - he acted illegally during a
G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent
demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living
with violent "Black Bloc" anarchists.
(64) Denver police admitted
that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged "anarchists" had planned to
wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two
undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn't know the undercover officers were cops.
(65) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain
clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.
(66) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
admitted that - at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 - undercover police officers were
arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see
this and this ,
for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police,
and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail
reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police
failed to stop the attacks.
(67) Egyptian politicians
admitted (and
see this ) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to
discredit the protesters.
(68) In 2011, a Hindu "holy man"
admitted that he and other Hindu extremists had carried out a series of bombings between
2006 and 2008 which killed well over 100 people, and was blamed on Muslims.
(69) Austin police
admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors
admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal "lock boxes"
which ended up getting many protesters arrested.
(70) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers
had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms
– as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And
see
this .
(71) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican
president in 2012
admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According
to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups
behind police lines prior to the violence.
(72) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to
participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was
shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.
(73) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the
head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently
admitted that the Saudi government controls "Chechen" terrorists.
(74) In 2014, a leaked
telephone recording captured 4 high-level Turkish officials discussing a false flag attack
to be blamed on the Syrians. The Washington Post
reported :
The leaked audio appeared to feature Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, National
Intelligence Organization (MİT) Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, Foreign Ministry
Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu and Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar
Güler discussing possible intervention in Syria.
***
"Justification can be created," one voice says in the recording, appearing to reference a
"false flag" attack. "The matter is to create the will."
A leaked recording published anonymously on the platform purported to reveal a
conversation in which Turkey's foreign minister, spy chief and a top general appear to
discuss how to create a pretext for a possible Turkish attack within Syria.
The officials were heard discussing a plot to establish a justification for military
strikes in Syria. One option that is said to have been discussed was orchestrating an attack
on the Tomb of Suleyman Shah ....
Suleiman Shah Tomb is an important Turkish landmark, being the burial place of the founder
of the Ottoman Empire.
Ahmet Davutolu: "Prime Minister said that in current conjuncture, this attack (on Suleiman
Shah Tomb) must be seen as an opportunity for us."
Hakan Fidan: "I'll send 4 men from Syria, if that's what it takes. I'll make up a cause of
war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey ; we can also prepare an attack on Suleiman Shah
Tomb if necessary ."
Feridun Sinirliolu: "Our national security has become a common, cheap domestic policy
outfit ."
(75) In 2014, two members of the Turkish Parliament
admitted that the Turkish government carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and
falsely blamed them on the Syrian government. High-level American sources have more or less
confirmed this.
It's gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a "
Stop Arming Terrorists Act" , and a U.S. Congresswoman - who introduced a similar bill in
the House -
says : "For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working
directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their
fight to overthrow the Syrian government."
(77) Government officials on both sides of the conflict, as well as the snipers who actually
pulled the trigger, all
admit that shots were fired on both sides - killing both government officials and
anti-government protesters in Ukraine - to create maximum chaos and destabilization.
(78) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals
admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden
from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the
deaths.
(79) Burmese government officials
admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist
groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from
spreading.
(80) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs
and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.
(81) Britain's spy agency has admitted
(and see this ) that it
carries out "digital false flag" attacks on targets, framing
people by writing offensive or unlawful material and blaming it on the target.
(82) The CIA has
admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out
cyberattacks and blame other countries.
(83) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and
Afghanis, they then "drop" automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were
militants.
(84) German prosecutors
admit that a German soldier disguised himself as a Syrian refugee and planned to shoot
people so that the attack would be blamed on asylum seekers.
(85) Police frame innocent people for crimes they didn't commit. The practice is so
well-known that the New York Times noted in
1981:
In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.
Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight
pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he
bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a
"throwdown"–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally
justifiable . Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street
Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious
suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot them during a stakeout.
As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart
Division's anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on
suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings .
Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.
He has himself
admitted to carrying out a false flag attack.
(87) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles office said that
most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.
(88) The Director of Analytics at the interagency
Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at
George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in
the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA's
Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security
(J.D. Maddox) notes :
Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its
sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for
millennia, to compel war . A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal
opposition.
***
The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of
victimhood: we are the victims of the enemy's unforgivable atrocities .
***
In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor's own personnel are a core
tactic of the provocation .
***
The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent
importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other
states in the near term.
(89) In 2019, Israeli soldiers blamed Palestinians for intentionally lighting fires. But a
video shows that it was Israeli settlers who lit the fires.
I lived in Bangkok during the run up to the Iraq WMD war. During that time the Free
Publications and Newspapers around the world, including the Bangkok Post, were screaming the
Truth and warning the world about the folly of America's planned invasion. But when I
returned to America on vacation just before the War started NOBODY had any idea, or the
slightest suspicion, of being conned into a needless war, or recognized another Gulf of
Tonkin False Flag in the making either. The govt and the press had convinced America they
were Heroes.
War is simply the way sociopathic bloodlines kill off non-sociopathic bloodlines in order
to perpetuate their own, and the non-sociopaths let them. Seems no one ever wants to discuss
how the financial and political sociopaths finance, organize and pull-off this blood-letting
every so often.
Britain badly wanted the rich Babylonian Jews of Iraq to leave their palatial mansions in
Iraq to help those not-so-rich British Jews to found the fledgling nation of Israel. But
Iraqi Jews refused to budge like the present day Iranian Jews.
So, Britain started working. The modus operandi was to send British Indian soldiers
dressed as Iraqi Moslems to create explosions in the Jewish quarters of Baghdad. The puppet
Iraqi king helplessly watched.
To drag USA into the mess, Britain even bombed a cafeteria frequented by American and
Jewish professors and students of the American University of Baghdad.
Then the British hanged the richest Jewish merchant in Baghdad, an American car dealer, IN
PUBLIC as a traitor. The puppet King of Iraq again kept silent as otherwise the British would
kill him.
Yes, finally the Babylonian Jews' resolve was broken and the exodus began only to find
that while they lived in palatial mansions in Iraq, the jealous British Jews put them in
tents in Israel, so most of them escaped to USA.
Here in USA, our administration and courts sided with British Jews and the voice of Iraqi
Jews were suppressed and silenced. And we Americans are still paying a heavy price for that
blunder!
All this happened right before the eyes of present day elderly Iranian Jews, so they and
their children refuse to leave Iran NOW.
ASIDE:
To the disappointment of British oversmartness, the Iraqi hospital doctors found a wounded
guy from that Cafeteria bombing with major burns and WITH A NEPALESE GORKA KNIFE hanging from
his belt. Soon, The British commander came running to the hospital, ignored doctor's
pleadings and carried away that hapless, heavily charred guy to his death - to belatedly
cover up British responsibility for the bombings. Yes, that bomber was a soldier in the
BRITISH GORKA REGIMENT!
So, each time UK encourages USA in its Wars, this story comes to my mind.
"... Pompeo is a rapture supremacist warmonger that is not good for anything. ..."
"... Not a fan of Pompeo, nor of any Secy of State that champions the cause of military adventurism instead of negotiations. We've had far too many Secys of State who have beat the drums of war instead of doing what the job entails.....being the nation's chief diplomatic negotiator. Pompeo is a bigger (chicken) hawk than the Secy of Defense for crying out loud. ..."
Furthermore, Hu had some particularly harsh words for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, labeling the Secretary of State a "troublesome"
figure in US-China relations and insisting that Pompeo "can no longer play the role of a top US diplomat between the two countries."
... ... ...
Beijing's attacks on the secretary of state come as Pompeo wrapped up a string of meetings in the Middle East with King Salman
of Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince.
Not a fan of Pompeo, nor of any Secy of State that champions the cause of military adventurism instead of negotiations. We've
had far too many Secys of State who have beat the drums of war instead of doing what the job entails.....being the nation's chief
diplomatic negotiator. Pompeo is a bigger (chicken) hawk than the Secy of Defense for crying out loud.
"... Trump treats int'l matters like acrid biz negotiations (see art of the deal) - you pressure your carpet installer for your mega hotels with nasty e-mails, bellowing threats on the phone, rustling up the competition, getting a bunch of staff on your side to shore up da ego, etc. When the carpet-seller makes some bigly concessions on price (all understand the game that is played) you relent and make nicey, and the wives get together for tennis and a ruccola crab lunch and later some mega bash with smiling faces is pictured. ..."
Trump strove for some foreign policy triumphs. The art of the deal!
He tried his hand with N. Korea. What happened? (Besides perhaps improved NK-SK
relations ) Nothing.
Syria .. (though there is still plenty going on there) what gave Trump / the USA some
kind of 'victory'? Zilch, disounting missile attacks on a runway in an airport and on an
empty research and teaching facility.
Symbolic moves, as proposed to Iran (a deal, heh) to save face (see b's posts.)
Next, ho ho, regime change in Venezuela, that might be great, get some extra voters in
Florida. Result? The status quo ante, perhaps stronger than before, with the
Dauphin, Random Guaido, shown up to be a cynical petty fraudster, and not even
challenging enough to jail!
Iran? Note the pressure has been building up since last year when The Donald withdrew
the US from the JCPOA.
Real men go to Teheran!
Except Trump and US forces aren't going anywhere at all and most certainly not to Iran. A
real war in that theatre cannot be fought and won by the US. Nor can it be instigated and
subsequently 'let drop' or 'become unimportant, trivial, with some claims of victory' for ex.
Afghanistan. (very costly btw)
Iran has made it clear that economic sanctions are part of hybrid war, rightly so (but
not, as I still claim, by making some minor attacks on tankers round about, to provoke a
reaction, NO) -- at some point, one engages, if not: backing down is the only option.
Trump treats int'l matters like acrid biz negotiations (see art of the deal) - you
pressure your carpet installer for your mega hotels with nasty e-mails, bellowing threats on
the phone, rustling up the competition, getting a bunch of staff on your side to shore up da
ego, etc. When the carpet-seller makes some bigly concessions on price (all understand the
game that is played) you relent and make nicey, and the wives get together for tennis and a
ruccola crab lunch and later some mega bash with smiling faces is pictured.
I think he got on super well with Kim (NK) who understood all this.
Leaves begging what-who-why is the projected aim, potential hoped result of the hybrid
attack on Iran, and which parties (USA MIC, Fin. Trade Cos., Banking, FF industry, many other
industries; Israel, KSA) support it (again, for what precise aim?) Or are against
sanctions...
"... The massive student-debt jubilee would be financed with a tax on Wall Street: Specifically, a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades and a .005% tax on derivatives trades. ..."
"... By introducing the student-debt plan, Sanders has outmaneuvered Elizabeth "I have a plan for that" Warren ..."
In his latest attempt to one-up Elizabeth Warren and establish his brand of "democratic
socialism" as something entirely different from the progressive capitalism practiced by some of
his peers, Bernie Sanders is preparing to unveil a new plan that would involve cancelling all
of the country's outstanding $1.6 trillion in student debt.
The massive student-debt jubilee would be financed with a tax on Wall Street:
Specifically, a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades and a .005% tax on
derivatives trades.
Additionally, Sanders' plan would also provide states with $48 billion to eliminate tuition
and fees at public colleges and universities. Thanks to the market effect, private schools
would almost certainly be forced to cut prices to draw talented students who could simply
attend a state school for free.
Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington have already signed on to
introduce Sanders' legislation in the House on Monday.
The timing of this latest in a series of bold socialist policy proposals from Sanders -
let's not forget, Bernie is largely responsible for making Medicare for All a mainstream issue
in the Democratic Party - comes just ahead of the first Democratic primary debate, where
Sanders will face off directly against his No. 1 rival: Vice President Joe Biden, who has
marketed his candidacy as a return to the 'sensible centrism' of the Democratic Party of
yesteryear.
By introducing the student-debt plan, Sanders has outmaneuvered Elizabeth "I have a plan
for that" Warren and established himself as the most far-left candidate in the crowded
Democratic Primary field. Hopefully, this can help stall Warren's recent advance in the polls.
The plan should help Sanders highlight how Biden's domestic platform includes little in the way
of welfare expansion during the upcoming debate.
My federal student loan monthly statement says I don't have to make a payment. I don't
qualify for any forgiveness because I'm responsible. Nonetheless, I pay the loan every month.
The balance goes down but every month it's still the same story.
I have to imagine the provider prefers students to see that it says zero dollars owed this
month with the hope that they don't pay because it says 0 dollars owed, default, and rack up
a bunch of fees and interest that the student doesn't see in the fine print.
The provider can then get paid by the taxpayer no questions asked. Much more profit and
payment is significantly faster.
Education costs are in the stratosphere 'because' of conversion of univeristires into
neoliberal institution. Which mean that the costs will skyrocket even more.
Somebody once said: If the neoliberal government took over management of the Sahara
desert, in five years, there would be a shortage of sand.
The only way to rein in neoliberals in government is to stop giving them so damned much
money...
The guaranteed student loan program created a mechanism that increases the price of
education. Before the program, graduates could expect 10 times the cost of a years' tuition.
Now, they'de lucky to get one year. The Americans were pushed out of this business and the
UN-Americans replaced them. This goes on for decades until the marks realized that they've
been screwed. ... The victims are in full support since they've been systematically dumbed
down that it seems like a good idea. It's not. This is a bailout of a failed neoliberal
institution.
"... The Supreme Court Treason related to the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire. ..."
"The UNSC veto doesn't make the UN Charter null and void. Actions that violate it are
still illegal/unconstitutional and able to be challenged in domestic courts". I agree it does
not make the charter null and void, the question is how can aggressors be brought to book,
Tony Blair was accused of the crime of aggression but the Judges said he could not be
prosecuted see below. Thanks for the link to the Uniting for Peace resolution, I will read it
tomorrow.
"Tony Blair should not face prosecution for his role in the 2003 Iraq war, the high court has
ruled.
The lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and another senior judge, Mr Justice
Ouseley, said on Monday that there was no crime of aggression in English law under which the
former prime minister could be charged.
Thanks for your reply! I recall what an absolutely incensed Craig Murray wrote about that decision about Tony Blair--well
beyond a travesty as it's a Capital Crime and not subject to statutes of limitation. The Supreme Court Treason related to
the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the
Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire.
Going on 3 decades now, one of my primary questions is How to contain the Outlaw US Empire and make it into a law-abiding
nation without blowing up the world. I've always recognized that it would take a global coalition to arrive at a genuine
confrontation.
IMO, we're very close to that point; the G-20 will indicate just how close.
But even more importantly than the global coalition is the requirement for a political force within the Empire asking and
acting on my question. The Maximum Pressure must come from internal and external sources for any positive outcome to be
achieved. Since 2012, I've seen 2020 as THE inflection point. It seems I'm not alone.
Establishment comedian Bill Maher warned that if 2020 Democrats run "a campaign based on reparations and concentration camps"
it will be "very hard to win the election" against President Trump.
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans
have reportedly already died as a result of this administration's relentless assault on
their economy; those human beings are no less dead than they would have been if the US had
killed them by dropping cluster bombs on Caracas. Yet these deaths have received virtually no
mainstream media coverage, and Americans, while they
strongly oppose attacking Iran militarily , have had very little to say about Trump's
attacks on the nation's economy. The economy which people use to feed their children, to care
for their elderly and their sick.
I'm titling this essay "Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare", and I mean it. I
am not saying that starvation sanctions are more destructive or deadly than overt military
force in and of themselves; what I am saying is that the overall effect is worse, because
there's no public accountability for them and because they deliberately target civilians.
If the US were to launch a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into an Iranian suburb with the goal
of killing civilians, there'd be international outrage and the cohesion of the US-centralized
power alliance would take a major hit. Virtually everyone would recognize this as an
unforgivable war crime. Yet America will be able to kill the same number of civilians with the
same deliberate intention of inflicting deadly force, and it would suffer essentially no
consequences at all. There's no public or international pressure holding that form of violence
at bay, because it's invisible and poorly understood.
It reminds me of the way financial abuse gets overlooked and under-appreciated in our
society. Financial abuse can be more painful and imprisoning than physical or psychological
abuse (and I speak from experience), especially if you have children, yet you don't generally
see movies and TV shows getting made about it. In a society where people have been made to
depend on money for survival, limiting or cutting off their access to it is the same as any
other violent attack upon their personal sovereignty, and can easily be just as destructive.
But as a society we haven't yet learned to see and understand this violence, so it doesn't
attract interest and attention. That lack of interest and attention enables the empire to
launch deadly campaigns targeting civilian populations unnoticed, without any public
accountability. It's great that more people are starting to understand the cost of war, to the
extent that we're even seeing US presidential candidates make opposing it central to their
platforms, but this is happening at a time when overt warfare is becoming more obsolete and
replaced with something subtler and more sinister. We must as a society evolve our
understanding of what starvation sanctions are and what they do, and stop seeing them as in any
way superior or preferable to overt warfare.
The fact that people generally oppose senseless military violence but are unable to see and
comprehend a slow, boa constrictor-like act of slaughter via economic strangulation is why
these siege warfare tactics have become the weapon of choice for the US-centralized empire. It
is a more gradual way of murdering people than overt warfare, but when you control all the
resources and have an underlying power structure which maintains itself amid the comings and
goings of your officially elected government, you're in no hurry. The absence of any public
accountability makes the need for patience a very worthwhile trade-off.
So you see this siege warfare strategy employed everywhere by the US-centralized empire:
You see it with Iran and Venezuela.
You see it in Yemen, where in addition to deadly blockades the Saudis have been
deliberate targeting farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and
cholera treatment centers with US-assisted airstrikes.
You
saw it with Julian Assange , where Ecuador collaborated with the US to slowly make life
in the embassy more and more hellish in the hope that he'd step outside to be arrested by
British police.
You're
seeing it now with Chelsea Manning , who is currently racking up $500 a day fines for her
principled stand against a corrupt grand jury proceeding against Assange, fines which will
double next month to $1,000 a day.
The US-centralized power alliance is so powerful in its ability to hurt nations with
financial influence that in 1990 when Yemen voted against a UN Security Council Resolution
authorizing the attack against Iran, a senior US diplomat was caught on a hot mic telling the
Yemeni ambassador, "That will be the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." According to
German author Thomas Pogge , "The US stopped $70 million in aid to Yemen; other Western
countries, the IMF, and World Bank followed suit. Saudi Arabia expelled some 800,000 Yemeni
workers, many of whom had lived there for years and were sending urgently needed money to their
families."
That's real power. Not the ability to destroy a nation with bombs and missiles, but the
ability to destroy it without firing a shot.
It's no wonder, then, that the drivers of this empire work so hard to continue growing and
expanding it. The oligarchs and their allies in opaque government agencies no doubt envision a
world where all noncompliant nations like Iran, Russia and China have been absorbed into the
blob of empire and war becomes obsolete, not because anyone has become any less violent, but
because their economic control will be so complete that they can obliterate entire populations
just by cutting them off from the world economy whenever any of them become disobedient.
This is the only reason Iran is being targeted right now. That's why you'll never hear a
factually and logically sound argument defending Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal;
there is none. There was no problem with the JCPOA other than the fact that it barred America
from inflicting economic warfare upon Iran, which it needed for the purpose of toppling the
nation's government so that it can be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire.
And all the innocent human beings who die of starvation and disease? They don't matter.
Imperial violence only matters if there are consequences for it. The price of shoring up the
total hegemony of the empire will have been worth it .
Warren reintroduced the Refund Equality Act, a bill that would allow same-sex couples to
amend past tax returns and receive refunds from the IRS.
"The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file
as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade," Warren said in a statement.
"We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right - Congress should pass the
Refund Equality Act immediately."
@Sonofrex
For starters, try reading David Graeber's 'Debt: The first 5000 years' for a comprehensive
account on concepts of money, property, debt and obligation from an anthropological
perspective which soundly buries your cherished assumptions and beliefs about the primacy of
private property and it's conflation with freedom. Perhaps one of the most compelling book
I've read in recent times.
"... Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets. ..."
"... "It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people." ..."
"... The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow the pain. ..."
"... But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress. Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent ..."
"... Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing. ..."
"... Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered by social programs. ..."
"... In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember. ..."
"... "We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'" ..."
"... "When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us. Poor people feel abandoned." ..."
On the ragged streets of the shantytown across the road, where stinking outhouses sit alongside shacks fashioned from rusted sheets
of tin, families have surrendered hopes that sewage lines will ever reach them.
They do not struggle to fashion an explanation for their declining fortunes: Since taking office more than three years ago, President
Mauricio Macri has broken with the budget-busting populism that has dominated Argentina for much of the past century, embracing the
grim arithmetic of economic orthodoxy.
Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting
Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the
power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets.
"It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people."
The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away
from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble
is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow
the pain.
Mr. Macri's supporters heralded his 2015 election as a miraculous outbreak of normalcy in a country with a well-earned reputation
for histrionics. He would cease the reckless spending that had brought Argentina infamy for defaulting on its debts eight times.
Sober-minded austerity would win the trust of international financiers, bringing investment that would yield jobs and fresh opportunities.
But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress.
Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the
same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and
joblessness is stuck above 9 percent.
Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing.
Far beyond this country of 44 million people, Mr. Macri's tenure is testing ideas that will shape economic policy in an age of
recrimination over widening inequality. His presidency was supposed to offer an escape from the wreckage of profligate spending while
laying down an alternative path for countries grappling with the worldwide rise of populism. Now, his presidency threatens to become
a gateway back to populism. The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck
above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times
Image
The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts
a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times
As the October election approaches, Mr. Macri is contending with the growing prospect of a challenge from the president he succeeded,
Cristina Fernαndez de Kirchner, who faces a
series of criminal indictments for corruption . Her unbridled spending helped deliver the crisis that Mr. Macri inherited. Her
return would resonate as a rebuke of his market-oriented reforms while potentially yanking Argentina back to its accustomed preserve:
left-wing populism, in uncomfortable proximity to insolvency.
The Argentine peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year, prompting the central bank to lift interest rates to a
commerce-suffocating level above 60 percent. Argentina was forced to secure a $57 billion
rescue from the International
Monetary Fund , a profound indignity given that the fund is widely despised here for the austerity it imposed in the late 1990s,
turning an economic downturn into a depression.
For Mr. Macri, time does not appear to be in abundant supply. The spending cuts he delivered hit the populace immediately. The
promised benefits of his reforms -- a stable currency, tamer inflation, fresh investment and jobs -- could take years to materialize,
leaving Argentines angry and yearning for the past.
In much of South America, left-wing governments have taken power in recent decades as an angry corrective to dogmatic prescriptions
from Washington, where the Treasury and the I.M.F. have focused on the confidence of global investors as the key to development.
Left-wing populism has aimed to redistribute the gains from the wealthy to everyone else. It has aided the poor, while generating
its own woes --
corruption and depression in
Brazil , runaway inflation and financial ruin in Argentina. In Venezuela, uninhibited spending has turned the country with the
world's largest proven oil reserves into a land where
children starve .
Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered
by social programs.
In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country
has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember.
"We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We
never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'"
Cultivating wealth
... ... ...
In the beginning, there was Juan Domingo Perσn, the charismatic Army general who was president from 1946 to 1955, and then again
from 1973 to 1974. He employed an authoritarian hand and muscular state power to champion the poor. He and his wife, Eva Duarte --
widely known by her nickname, Evita -- would dominate political life long after they died, inspiring politicians across the ideological
spectrum to claim their mantle.
Among the most ardent Peronists were Nιstor Kirchner, the president from 2003 to 2007, and his wife, Cristina Fernαndez de Kirchner,
who took office in 2007, remaining until Mr. Macri was elected in 2015.
Their version of Peronism -- what became known as Kirchnerism -- was decidedly left-wing, disdaining global trade as a malevolent
force. They expanded cash grants to the poor and imposed taxes on farm exports in a bid to keep Argentine food prices low.
As the country's farmers tell it, Kirchnerism is just a fancy term for the confiscation of their wealth and the scattering of
the spoils to the unproductive masses. They point to Ms. Kirchner's 35 percent tax on soybean exports.
"We had a saying," Mr. Tropini says. "'For every three trucks that went to the port, one was for Cristina Kirchner.'"
reduction in export taxes.
"You could breathe finally," Mr. Tropini, the farmer, says.
He was free of the Kirchners, yet stuck with nature. Floods in 2016 wiped out more than half of his crops. A drought last year
wreaked even more havoc.
"This harvest, this year," he says, "is a gift from God."
But if the heavens are now cooperating, and if the people running Buenos Aires represent change, Mr. Tropini is critical of Mr.
Macri's failure to overcome the economic crisis.
A weaker currency makes Argentine soybeans more competitive, but it also increases the cost of the diesel fuel Mr. Tropini needs
to run his machinery. High interest rates make it impossible for him to buy another combine, which would allow him to expand his
farm.
In the first years of Mr. Macri's administration, the government lifted controls on the value of the peso while relaxing export
taxes. The masters of international finance delivered a surge of investment. The economy expanded by nearly 3 percent in 2017, and
then accelerated in the first months of last year.
But as investors grew wary of Argentina's deficits, they fled, sending the peso plunging and inflation soaring. As the rout continued
last year, the central bank mounted a futile effort to support the currency, selling its stash of dollars to try to halt the peso's
descent. As the reserves dwindled, investors absorbed the spectacle of a government failing to restore order. The exodus of money
intensified, and another potential default loomed, leading a chastened Mr. Macri to accept a rescue from the dreaded IMF.
Administration officials described the unraveling as akin to a natural disaster: unforeseeable and unavoidable. The drought hurt
agriculture.
Money was flowing out of developing countries as the Federal Reserve continued to lift interest rates in the United States, making
the American dollar a more attractive investment.
But the impact of the Fed's tightening had been widely anticipated. Economists fault the government for mishaps and complacency
that left the country especially vulnerable.
.... ... ...
Among the most consequential errors was the government's decision to include Argentina's central bank in a December 2017 announcement
that it was raising its inflation target. The markets took that as a signal that the government was surrendering its war on inflation
while opting for a traditional gambit: printing money rather than cutting spending.
... ... ...
The government insists that better days are ahead. The spending cuts have dropped the budget deficit to a manageable 3 percent
of annual economic output. Argentina is again integrated into the global economy.
"We haven't improved, but the foundations of the economy and society are much healthier," said Miguel Braun, secretary of economic
policy at the Treasury Ministry. "Argentina is in a better place to generate a couple of decades of growth."
... ... ...
Their television flashes dire warnings, like "Danger of Hyper Inflation." Throughout the neighborhood, people decry the sense
that they have been forsaken by the government.
Trucks used to come to castrate male dogs to control the packs of feral animals running loose. Not anymore. Health programs for
children are less accessible than they were before, they said.
Daisy Quiroz, 71, a retired maid, lives in a house that regularly floods in the rainy season.
"When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us.
Poor people feel abandoned."
... ... ...
Daniel Politi contributed reporting from Buenos Aires. Peter S. Goodman is a London-based European economics correspondent.
He was previously a national economic correspondent in New York. He has also worked at The Washington Post as a China correspondent,
and was global editor in chief of the International Business Times. @
petersgoodman
"... Sanders supported Clinton too in the general election. He also actively campaigned for her. ..."
"... apples and oranges, Thomas and Herr, Would you care to defend her "posture" on NATO? Ditto, for her contributing to the "Evil Vlad" narrative? Israel?? Wiki: Warren states she supports a two state solution, but she believes Palestinian application for membership in the UN isn't helpful.[63] ..."
"... "Warren lied about her ancestry to circumvent diversity quotas. Why should anyone believe anything she has to say?" You are going to be told this a million times before 11/20 but that's bullshit. It's been well established that she didn't get any job because of that. ..."
"... "In the most exhaustive review undertaken of Elizabeth Warren's professional history, the Globe found clear evidence, in documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools. At every step of her remarkable rise in the legal profession, the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman." ..."
"... With Warren and Sanders talking complete sense about our oligarchy, the electorate's expectations are going to improve. Nothing could be better. We've been asked to settle for Republican-lite servants of mammon for too long in the Democratic Party and that's going to change. ..."
"... Hell, if we're going to fine them for data breaches, do we start with the DNC? ..."
"... In a poll last week of 2,312 registered voters in South Carolina, Warren gained nine points to reach 17% compared to Biden's 37%. Among 18-34 year olds, Warren is leading 24% to Sanders' 19% and Biden's 17%. ..."
"... I keep hearing from the mainstream media that Biden is leading in the polls. But we ought to note that Biden's up against a group including Warren, Sanders, Harris etc who are pushing a progressive policies, and if you take their percentages together, Biden cannot compete. Once one of these progressive takes the lead in the group, and hires all the others as running mate, cabinet members etc, he or she will be unbeatable against both Biden and Trump. ..."
"... The latest of that polling features Sanders and Biden nearly neck and neck as far as approval goes. Funny you don't hear about that on CNN or MSNBC. ..."
"... American voters have spent so long being treated like idiots by politicians and to an even greater extent the press that Warren comes across as something new and interesting by comparison. ..."
"... This election won't be decided by defecting Trump voters. ..."
"... Those who would be swayed by Trump using "Pocahontas" as a slur or would even pay attention to it wouldn't vote for Warren anyway. He's not going to change any minds with it, just rile up his existing sheep. ..."
"... That's a very narrow view of her position on Israel. She also supported the Iran treaty, boycotting Netanyahu's speech to the Senate, called on Israel to stop colonizing the West Bank and to recognize the right of Palestinians in Gaza to peaceful protest – her comments about aggression toward Gaza were about Israeli response to missiles fired by Hamas. I don't mind her having a nuanced response to what is in fact a very complex situation. ..."
"... Nerd used to be just an insult, aimed at anyone more intelligent, thoughtful or better-informed than the speaker. But I think now, like 'queer' and other words, it has been reclaimed and repurposed in a much more positive light. ..."
Clinton said vote for me because I am a woman, Warren says vote for me because I am a potential leader who happens to be a woman.
Good luck to her and the US
Don't get me wrong. I would certainly vote for her, if needed. I believe she's quite green behind the ears on foreign policy and
how inequality is a global issue. Her backing of our entitled neoliberal wife of an ex-president & neocon dismayed me.
Sanders gets the bigger picture on poverty, race, and war/ neocolonialism:
if you wish: MLK Jr's take on "The Three Evils".
apples and oranges, Thomas and Herr, Would you care to defend her "posture" on NATO? Ditto, for her contributing to the "Evil
Vlad" narrative? Israel?? Wiki: Warren states she supports a two state solution, but she believes Palestinian application
for membership in the UN isn't helpful.[63]
In a town hall meeting in August 2014, Warren defended Israel's shelling of
schools and hospitals during that summer's Israel–Gaza conflict, stating that "when Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals,
next to schools, they're using their civilian population to protect their military assets. And I believe Israel has a right, at
that point, to defend itself". She also questioned whether future US aid to Israel should be contingent on the halting of Israeli
settlements in the West Bank.[64] In addition she defended her vote in favor of granting Israel $225 million to fund the Iron
Dome air defence system.[65]
While the 2020 election feels critical, the 2024 election will decide the future. Like Trump himself, his base is filled with
old people who are still loyal to Ronald Reagan's Republican Party. Old people watch FoxNews, old people vote, old people love
Trump and in 2016, old people decided the election.
Younger people do NOT vote. The younger someone is, the less likely they are to vote. However, young people voted for Obama,
twice, but when Hillary came along, they stayed home and let the old people choose the president.
And then, in 2018 the young voted again and we learned the next generation plans to take this country into the future. If the
young vote in 2020, Trump is toast. If the young stay home, Trump will see a second term.
However, by 2024 the young will assume their rightful place in history and the age of old white men running the country, and
the world will come to an end.
You are making assumptions that old people are idiots. Making assumptions that middle aged people do not exist or are small in
numbers. Trump gets 200 or so electoral votes. He loses. I don't see any case he wins. He is past his 'used by date' even for
Republicans. You loose Tx to the Ds its game over, add PA and OH to the list. It doesn't even matter what crazy FL man thinks.
Don't forget modern geriatric medicine, by which the dinosaurs in the senate and elsewhere in the hardening arteries of the US
body politic will live - and hold ofice - for even longer than Strom Thurmond. They can afford the private medical insurance to
pay for it.
By the way, MeRaffey , I hope you meant to omit to punctuate in your last phrase so that it would read: ... the age
of old white men running the country and the world will come to an end . Your comma has me worried.
Warren/Harris, said it before but it makes sense. I would've preferred Biden to Clinton but I can't see him getting the same turnout
as Warren. Opinions on Trump are now fixed, it's a red herring to worry about "firing up" Trump supporters, they are already as
fired up as they can get. Swing voters are probably going to vote by where the economy is which is out of our control. Ideally
Democrats will be just as fired up as Trumpists, the investigations will suppress their enthusiasm somewhat (though they wouldn't
care if he killed someone so...) and the coming Trump recession will be brought on by his trade wars and the blame will therefore
fall where it should.
Warren lied about her ancestry to circumvent diversity quotas. Why should anyone believe anything she has to say? Furthermore,
What exactly is she promising that is any different then any of the other radical leftists running right now? It's all "Free Stuff"
that she's going to make the rich pay for. Um..yeah, that always works out doesn't it? Who needs real math when fuzzy math makes
us believe the combined wealth of the richest Americans will finance all this "free" stuff to say nothing about why so many Americans
feel entitled to the earnings of others. Remember folks, if a politician says 2+2=6 then it must be true.
"Warren lied about her ancestry to circumvent diversity quotas. Why should anyone believe anything she has to say?" You are
going to be told this a million times before 11/20 but that's bullshit. It's been well established that she didn't get any job
because of that.
She claimed Native American ancestry on her application to Harvard, a job she got and it wasn't the first time she played this
card either. But hey, in a political party that loves to change races and genders and expects everyone else to go along with the
charade by all means go ahead and believe what you want to believe.
A lie, see Snopes, see any link you've been given each time you post this lie. She got it on merit.
"In the most exhaustive review undertaken of Elizabeth Warren's professional history, the Globe found clear evidence, in
documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted
resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools. At every step of her remarkable
rise in the legal profession, the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman."
With Warren and Sanders talking complete sense about our oligarchy, the electorate's expectations are going to improve. Nothing
could be better. We've been asked to settle for Republican-lite servants of mammon for too long in the Democratic Party and that's
going to change.
The danger, of course, is that in this transition period Biden gets nominated. However much centrists will clamor for voters
to hold their nose and vote for him, that's not an electoral strategy. Trump's best chance of winning is that Biden gets nominated
and the progressive base of the Democratic Party is totally demoralized and lacking energy by late 2020.
After the US public allowed themselves to be hypnotized by Trump's campaign of fatuous lies, empty promises and racist dog whistles,
I doubted the electorate possessed the wit to understand actual policies. Maybe they've finally woken up - time will tell.
Do you understand how elections work? The US public were hypnotized? He lost the popular vote. The fault lies with the Republican
establishment for letting him put the R after his name. Perot ran on essentially the same ticket back in 92 as a third party candidate.
He got 18% of the vote. Had he run as a Republican he could well have won.
Oh dear. The question is, do you know how US elections work? The popular vote is irrelevant. He's the 5th POTUS who lost
the popular vote. Almost 63 million hypnotized dolts voted for him, and he won - that's why he currently resides in the WH
Or neither "hypnotized" nor "dolts." The people I knew who voted for him in North Carolina thought he was an asshole. But they
wanted a conservative Supreme Court for the next two decades and he has delivered that for them. Why do you assume that people
on the right are idiots who don't know what they want? That essential presumption by the left is one of the reasons the left lost
last time.
As one who used to be a Warren supporter, I think she is both patronizing voters and pandering to them. These policies have some
detail, sure, but they don't deal with the consequences that Warren knows very well lurk in the wings and as a result they don't
necessarily make sense.
Her proposal for free college is one example – sounds great, while in reality it would benefit the better-off middle class
at the expense of the most vulnerable students and create a cascade of problems that she has no plans to fix.
Again, fining companies for data breaches? Surely we should fine them *if* they don't immediately report data breaches to their
customers– or maybe if they haven't maintained appropriate data security, although I'd love to see proving that one to a court.
Hell, if we're going to fine them for data breaches, do we start with the DNC?
PS To be clear, I'd still take her in a second over Fat Nixon, I just wish she would pander less and keep her plans to the sensible
and achievable, like her consumer protection bureau, which was a fantastic idea.
Yes, (politely) do you? The fines for HIPAA violation have to do with noncompliance with the act, not with an uncontrollable data
breach. The fines increase on a sliding scale if "willful neglect" has been found (the data were not properly secured) or if the
company delays in reporting a data breach/violation.
Yep - No more old white guys - just being disgusted by Trump is not enough - people want new ideas. EW all the way - with AOC
by her side as well hopefully.
There is nothing Trump fears more than the stigma of being a one term pres - his ego would implode.
Oh, I think he fears going to prison more. Michael Cohen was right – the minute Trump is no longer protected by the presidency
he is going to be facing charges, on tax evasion if nothing else. He will do anything to keep his protection for more years. He's
probably hoping to die in office. (I'd add something to that, but I don't want the Secret Service visiting me!)
The DNC is again placing it's foot on the scale in favor of Biden. I believe that they know Bernie is less likely to win because
of America's irrational fear of the word, "socialism." That's why they put Biden and Sanders on the stage together and pushed
out Elizabeth Warren to the other debate with lesser known and less popular candidates. They do not what her, with her solid plans,
to confront Biden, which would give her a greater boost in the polls and more recognition across the nation.
And who was watching the drawing? Who set up the drawing? Are you saying that there was independent oversight on its setup? Or
do you just take the DNC's word for it?
An inability to believe in coincidence will take you to some strange places. If Sanders and Warren drawn the same night you could
make an argument that Biden was getting set up to look good against the lightweight opponents. Or had Sanders drawn the undercard
that he was being marginalized. Warren will do fine either way. She's a great candidate. Biden isn't.
Biden rides high on President Obama's very long coat tails and Wall Street money even without detailed plans that actually help
the working class and the poor. Bernie is riding high on his honest fight for the working class and the poor.
Elizabeth Warren is rising fast because she not only agrees with Bernie on fighting for the working class and the poor,
but she has detailed plans that are holding up to independent economic scrutiny.
Both Warren and Sanders are honest in their fight for economic justice for all and recognize that the root cause of poverty
and lower middle class' struggle is corporate and wealthy-individual money in politics. They aim to stop it.
Biden claims he can negotiate with McConnell. Obama reached out to McConnell his entire term and drew back a nub. The same
will be true of Biden. For the Republicans and Trumpians, it's all about making Democrats fail no matter how much it hurts the
working class and the poor. Their propaganda network will always assist and sustain them by appealing to the emotions and prejudices
of millions of Americans.
Biden claims he can negotiate with McConnell. Obama reached out to McConnell his entire term and drew back a nub. The same
will be true of Biden.
The same will be true of any Democrat though. There is no way around it except by expanding the powers of the office
of the President, which is what has given Trump such a wide ability to repeal Obama-era policies.
Any Democrat coming up against a Republican Senate will have the same thing happen to them, although I can imagine the Republicans
will hate Biden marginally less than Obama given that he's not black.
There is no way around it except by expanding the powers of the office of the President, which is what has given Trump such
a wide ability to repeal Obama-era policies.
Not the first year of his presidency. His Republican Party controlled Congress and they mostly hated Obama as well. As long
as there was full control of congress, it was easy. It was not easy to remove the ACA because so many Americans liked it.
Now remember that the reasons Trump was appointed to office by the EC, was that enough far-right people voted, together with
the "conservative" media adding to Russia's concentration of propaganda in the key states (stats provided to the Russians by the
Trump campaign) and lifted him just enough to overcome the votes of ~3 million voters. Far more voters are now counting on voting
against him and for the best Democratic candidate.
Progressives do not want to expand the powers of the Oval Office. That is the wrong thing to do. True change for the better
can only come through the ballet box and by educating the voters to exactly why our government is dysfunctional and is replete
with corruption.
I think the most popular message to all voters (from farmers to all others in the working class) is that corporate and private
money in politics is the root cause of government corruption and dysfunction and why the collective wealth of the working class
is steadily redistributing to the uber-wealthy.
The only candidates who what to change the economy to a DEMAND-side economy is are those who actually and loudly advocate it.
But just voting for a progressive president while putting the "conservative" obstructionists (those who maintain the high capacity
money pipeline that runs from Wall Street to their pockets) back into Congress will mean the corruption and dysfunction will continue.
Voters must be replaced by a super-majority liberal/progressive Congress, and with that, Elizabeth Warren will make that change.
I think she also knows that she should've and easily could've been president right now. That strange piece yesterday, talking
about Biden and Sanders standing in front of good female candidates of today: leaving aside a keen Biden getting bullied out of
2016 by Clinton already having things sewn up, Sanders was notoriously late jumping into 2016 because he was waiting on Warren.
If Warren was going to run against the wretched Clinton, he wouldn't. Warren choked so Sanders had to do it himself. Warren must
know that she would have dismantled Crooked H and, seeing as Clinton was the only person who could've lost to el diablo naranja,
Warren would've hammered Trump too. Hence, Warren's got some making up to do and seems very determined.
She's always been my tip. If I was an American, I would vote for Tulsi Gabbard in a second but Warren is a strong candidate
and I always thought that her announcing on the last day of last year was going to give her licence to say to other candidates:
"I've been running since 2018!". Warren is the candidate that liars for Clinton tried to pretend that Clinton was. A note of caution,
though: someone posted a Republican survey of exactly four years ago yesterday. Bush was on 22%, Trump was polling 1%. Long time
to go yet.
In a poll last week of 2,312 registered voters in South Carolina, Warren gained nine points to reach 17% compared to
Biden's 37%. Among 18-34 year olds, Warren is leading 24% to Sanders' 19% and Biden's 17%.
I keep hearing from the mainstream media that Biden is leading in the polls. But we ought to note that Biden's up against
a group including Warren, Sanders, Harris etc who are pushing a progressive policies, and if you take their percentages together,
Biden cannot compete. Once one of these progressive takes the lead in the group, and hires all the others as running mate, cabinet
members etc, he or she will be unbeatable against both Biden and Trump.
There is no sure way of knowing how that would play out. You may be interested in looking at the Morning Consult Poll, which comes
out weekly. If you scroll down to Second Choices... it gives possible outcomes for where votes may fall. According to MC poll
the 2nd choice for Sanders voters is Biden, 2nd for Biden is Sanders, 2nd for Warren is Harris, 2nd for Buttigieg is Biden, and
2nd for Harris is Biden. The poll also shows results for early primary states, if you click on "Early Primary States". https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary
/
Only one question: are these the same polls that were running in ninth 2016? And if they are why do we give a crap what any of
them say since we know they are all horribly wrong?
The latest of that polling features Sanders and Biden nearly neck and neck as far as approval goes. Funny you don't hear about
that on CNN or MSNBC.
It's clear to me that the US public want action, and that means progressive policies. They were conned last time into thinking
Trump represented change. But a Hillary Mark II candidate such as Biden will lead to another Trump victory.
American voters have spent so long being treated like idiots by politicians and to an even greater extent the press that Warren
comes across as something new and interesting by comparison.
There is no doubt that Warren is the best policy brain in the Democratic Party. She also has some good ideas, and some not so
good ones.
Were I American, I would be tempted to vote for her. But her candidacy is hopeless. It may be unfair, but the Pocahontas issue
will kill her bid stone dead in the general election. Trump would be licking his chops over a Warren run.
Those who would be swayed by Trump using "Pocahontas" as a slur or would even pay attention to it wouldn't vote for Warren
anyway. He's not going to change any minds with it, just rile up his existing sheep.
That's a very narrow view of her position on Israel. She also supported the Iran treaty, boycotting Netanyahu's speech to
the Senate, called on Israel to stop colonizing the West Bank and to recognize the right of Palestinians in Gaza to peaceful protest
– her comments about aggression toward Gaza were about Israeli response to missiles fired by Hamas. I don't mind her having a
nuanced response to what is in fact a very complex situation.
Warren has treated voters as adults, smart enough to handle her wonky style of campaigning. Instead of spoon-feeding prospective
voters soundbites, Warren is giving them heaps to digest – and her polling surge shows that voters appreciate the nerdy policy
talk.
If talking sense and enunciating real policies is regarded as "wonky"and "nerdy"in the USA then Warren doesn't have a hope and
Trump is a shoe-in.
Nerd used to be just an insult, aimed at anyone more intelligent, thoughtful or better-informed than the speaker. But I think
now, like 'queer' and other words, it has been reclaimed and repurposed in a much more positive light.
Iran's envoy to the United Nations has called on the international community to end "unlawful destabilizing measures" by the US,
declaring that while Iran does not seek war, it "reserves the right to counter any hostile act."
Iranian envoy to the UN Majid Takht Ravanchi has condemned continuing US provocations that culminated Thursday morning in the
downing of an American surveillance drone by the Iranian air force over Hormozgan province.
The drone "had turned off its identification equipment and [was] engaged in a clear spying operation," Ravanchi confirmed in a
letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, adding that the aircraft had ignored "repeated radio warnings" in order to enter
Iranian airspace near the Strait of Hormuz.
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...
How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem
appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others,
deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist
violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues
to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to
be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States
and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears
convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For
instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military
and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and
even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben
Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United
Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than
other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson
administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's
Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against
Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with
Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no
better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial
overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never
passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if
outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those
most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon
of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington
adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to
create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated
into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to
make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had
killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant
those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary
to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died.
Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests
being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government.
This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the
full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone
campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious
hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the
Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand
Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state
could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington
expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against
the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials
anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own
interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed:
"She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination
of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more
than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established
by Washington's far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel
apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No
wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would
have an aneurysm."
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking
that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she
admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out
Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s
fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified
to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash
murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal
of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for
Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any
one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline
The Blob.
"... Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war. ..."
"... U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private. ..."
"... "Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" ainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii] ..."
"... As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern. ..."
"... Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: ..."
"... Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region. ..."
"... Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii] ..."
"... The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air. ..."
"... The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii] ..."
"... Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise. ..."
"... Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich ..."
Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for
war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government
and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind
the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext
for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised
of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky
. All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran
the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist
delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from
the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government
or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision
of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:
"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt
precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the
Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,
"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaηi appears
instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]
There was no love between Thaηi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the
hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement
arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation.
Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official
in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when
she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout
the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic
Muslim members.
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members.
The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding
the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others
wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with
the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian
delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher
Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce
the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]
Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.
"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]
It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations
were saying in private.
Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.
"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't
want to listen to our arguments." [vi]
One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators,
inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.
"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really
like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]
According to delegation member Nikola ainović ,
"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'"
ainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]
From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval
of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter."
[ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.
As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted
all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other
hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.
On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional
agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete
document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,
"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."
Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally
been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]
When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them.
Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three
new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation
that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact
Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting."
The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had
to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]
At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing
yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive
text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00
PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.
Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected
to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware
of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section
of the text states:
"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services,
and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace
negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.
The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation
of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power
to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate,
as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.
The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment
of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission
may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there
was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The
Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to
bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.
Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice
of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of
Kosovo or suffer the consequences.
Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months,
Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]
The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated
NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple
request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could
take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.
The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free
and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted
the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]
The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout
Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a
whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere
on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]
Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.
There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning,
Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery
to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's
borders to further break apart the nation.
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.
"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because
they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]
At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:
"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much
of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations."
[xxviii]
Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed
solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities."
But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about
troops and troops alone." [xxix]
While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so
that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to
unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media
would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation
when he said,
"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see
how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]
Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured
the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long
as it was concealed. [xxxi]
Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaηi to change his mind, telling him:
"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in.
You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]
That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite
such assurances, Thaηi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation.
When U.S. negotiators asked Thaηi why he would not sign, he responded:
"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]
This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated
support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.
Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaηi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated
with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.
"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails
because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]
On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow
KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage
the Albanians to sign.
So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible"
that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications
to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]
The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented,
and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about
regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that
the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]
From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense
that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable
result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted
the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext
for war.
On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy,
condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including
reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav
President Slobodan Miloević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already
been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation
to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO
if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a
topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]
Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United
States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.
In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence
of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity
to expand Western domination over other nations.
Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to
member nations.
Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial
interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations
in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.
*
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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is
a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for
Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of
Killing Democracy: CIA
and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force
to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is
https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
Andrew Bacevich
recalls Madeleine
Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.
Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks
was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other
countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority
to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that
she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered
one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:
I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam
Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered
and unconditional access.
Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons
of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American
hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans
and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.
A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led
to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not
only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future
threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the
existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John
Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.
"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory,
threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that
America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and
alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of
force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.
"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends
a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a
diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals
that cannot be reasoned with.
They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the
region, and Iran won't stand for that."
At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a
full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.
"... "Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?" ..."
"... "Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose? Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240 billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27 billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing our market... ..."
"... "Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis] ..."
"... Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance. ..."
"... What's happening is a titanic struggle to make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy. ..."
I'd like barflies to ponder the following thought/probability: Radar Saturated
Environment--radiation not from just individual, discreet, identifiable points, but from such
a vast multitude that no single point can be discerned.
To further my brainstorming de-escalation, I'd like to point out what Putin said in his
Direct Line
yesterday about the economic war being waged against Russia in accordance with the Ukraine
Coup in 2014. Pavel Zarubin asks:
"Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western
sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are
appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to
everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?"
I thought this a capital question very similar to Iran's dilemma. Putin's response is
quite long, so I won't cite it all. Rather, I'll limit it to his initial reply and conclusion
as they both deal with the Big Picture:
"First, what does it mean 'to make peace'? We have not fought with anyone and have no
desire to fight with anyone.
"Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose?
Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of
these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240
billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27
billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing
our market....
"Now to the question of whether some things would be different if we give in and abandon
our fundamental national interests. We are not talking about reconciliation here. Perhaps
there will be some external signals, but no drastic change. Look, the People's Republic of
China has nothing to do with Crimea and Donbass, does it? We are accused of occupying
Donbass, which is nonsense and a lie.
But China has nothing to do with it, and yet the tariffs for Chinese goods are rising,
which is almost the same as sanctions.
"Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The
objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global
rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will
continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become
stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis]
This year's Direct Line was as usual filled with domestic issues some that lead to foreign
policy issues. The overall scope and distinctness of the minutia are as vast as Russia. I've
followed these over the years and note they reveal Russia's strengths and fragilities. I'm
tempted to cite more but will leave it to the reader to pursue, but after 90 minutes you
still won't be finished because the transcript isn't yet complete, which while frustrating is
also amazing.
Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's
a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few
days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he
uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual
Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance.
What's happening is a titanic struggle to
make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy.
U.S. -- A new policy issued by the United States Department of Defense, in conjunction
with online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, will automatically enlist you to fight in a
foreign war if you post your support for attacking another country.
People who bravely post about how the U.S. needs to invade some country in the Middle East
or Asia or outer space will get a pop-up notice indicating they've been enlisted in the
military. A recruiter will then show up at their house and whisk them away to fight in the
foreign war they wanted to happen so badly.
"Frankly, recruitment numbers are down, and we needed some way to find people who are
really enthusiastic about fighting wars," said a DOD official. "Then it hit us like a drone
strike: there are plenty of people who argue vehemently for foreign intervention. It doesn't
matter what war we're trying to create: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea,
China---these people are always reliable supporters of any invasion abroad. So why not get
them there on the frontlines?"
"After all, we want people who are passionate about occupying foreign lands, not grunts
who are just there for the paycheck," he added.
Strangely, as soon as the policy was implemented, 99% of saber-rattling suddenly
ceased.
Note: The Babylon Bee is the world's best satire site, totally inerrant in all its
truth claims. We write satire about Christian stuff, political stuff, and everyday life.
The Babylon Bee was created ex nihilo on the eighth day of the creation week, exactly
6,000 years ago. We have been the premier news source through every major world event, from
the Tower of Babel and the Exodus to the Reformation and the War of 1812. We focus on just
the facts, leaving spin and bias to other news sites like CNN and Fox News.
If you would like to complain about something on our site, take it up with God.
Unlike other satire sites, everything we post is 100% verified by Snopes.com.
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the
existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John
Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.
"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory,
threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that
America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and
alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of
force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.
"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends
a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a
diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals
that cannot be reasoned with.
They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the
region, and Iran won't stand for that."
At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a
full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.
Mr. Biden had
support from 32% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents - in line with his 33%
support from last month.
Ms.
Warren , meanwhile, is now at 15% - up 5 points from last month - and Mr. Sanders was at 14%
support.
... ... ...
The Monmouth survey of 306 registered voters who identified themselves as Democrats or
Democratic leaners was taken from June 12-17 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.6
percentage points.
... ... ...
And a new survey from the firm Avalanche Strategy
found that when the notion of "electability" was taken off the table, Ms. Warren was the top choice of
Democratic voters at 21%, followed by Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders at 19% apiece.
"... There's a simple reason for Warren's sudden rise in the polls : the public has an appetite for policy. Of all the Democratic candidates, Warren's campaign has been by far the most ideas-driven and ambitious in its policy proposals. And voters love it. ..."
"... Week in and week out, she has been crisscrossing the country to tell receptive voters her ideas for an ultra-millionaire tax, student debt cancellation and breaking up big tech. She has also weighed in on reproductive rights, vaccines, the opioid crisis and algorithmic discrimination in automated loans. Her bevy of white papers demonstrates that there isn't a policy area Warren won't touch and she isn't worried about repelling anyone with hard-hitting proposals. ..."
"... Better than any other candidate, Warren has articulated a connection between her personal and professional struggles and her ideas, lending an air of authenticity to her campaign. Her backstory – teacher turned reluctant stay-at-home mom turned Harvard Law School professor – clearly resonates with voters in important states such as Iowa and South Carolina. ..."
"... Rule of thumb that is true for all politicians regardless of party. Most of what they promise they will do will never happen and much of does happen does not occur in the way they promised when they campaigned. ..."
n Friday, the Massachusetts senator
Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a bill to impose mandatory fines on companies that have data
breaches. It was the kind of consumer welfare legislation that in the past would have been
unremarkable. But in an era when Congress has consistently shirked its duty to shield
consumers, the bill stood out.
The legislation capped a week in which Warren surged in the polls. Less than eight months
before the Iowa caucus, Warren is making strides in 2020 primary polls. According to an
NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults, 64% of Democratic primary voters in
June were enthusiastic or comfortable with Warren, compared with 57% in March. Fewer of these
voters were enthusiastic or comfortable with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who have
lost 11 and six points, respectively, since March.
There's more. In a poll last week of 2,312 registered voters in South Carolina, Warren
gained nine points to reach 17% compared to Biden's 37%. Among 18-34 year olds, Warren is
leading 24% to Sanders' 19% and Biden's 17%.
There's a simple reason for Warren's sudden rise in the polls: the public has an appetite
for policy
There's a simple reason for
Warren's sudden rise in the polls : the public has an appetite for policy. Of all the
Democratic candidates, Warren's campaign has been by far the most ideas-driven and ambitious in
its policy proposals. And voters love it.
Rather than condescend to voters, like most politicians, Warren has treated voters as
adults, smart enough to handle her wonky style of campaigning. Instead of spoon-feeding
prospective voters soundbites, Warren is giving them heaps to digest – and her polling
surge shows that voters appreciate the nerdy policy talk.
Indeed, since Warren declared her candidacy for president, she has been offering policy
prescriptions for our country's most pressing ailments – and she hasn't been
brainstorming in a bubble.
Week in and week out, she has been crisscrossing the country to tell receptive voters her
ideas for an ultra-millionaire tax, student debt cancellation and breaking up big tech. She has
also weighed in on reproductive rights, vaccines, the opioid crisis and algorithmic
discrimination in automated loans. Her bevy of white papers demonstrates that there isn't a
policy area Warren won't touch and she isn't worried about repelling anyone with hard-hitting
proposals.
Better than any other candidate, Warren has articulated a connection between her personal
and professional struggles and her ideas, lending an air of authenticity to her campaign. Her
backstory – teacher turned reluctant stay-at-home mom turned Harvard Law School professor
– clearly resonates with voters in important states such as Iowa and South Carolina.
That sense of reciprocity has turned Warren into a populist rock star. Instead of appealing
to the lowest common denominator among the voting public, she's listening to and learning from
voters in an ideas-driven campaign that doesn't take voters for granted.
The strategy is paying off – and proving wrong the outdated political wisdom that
Americans don't care about the intricacies of government.
In May, Warren traveled to Kermit, West Virginia, the heart of Trump country, to pitch a
$2.7bn-a-year plan to combat opioid addiction.
"Her stance is decisive and bold," Nathan Casian-Lakes
told CBS News . "She has research and resources to back her ideas."
Jill Priluck's reporting and analysis has appeared in
the New Yorker, Slate, Reuters and elsewhere
I've decided that I want to see Warren as President. She is honest and has many good ideas
about the economy and offering a leg up to minorities and the poor. Her integrity is
unimpeachable. I have donated small sums to her campaign. Bernie has not spoken in detail the
way Warren has although his democratic socialism goes in a positive direction. There are many
voters who feel that he is too old. I hope that he will approve Warren as the best candidate
in the running. Biden's moment is long gone. For now I believe that another recession lurks
in the near future and Warren, as a wonk, is the best person to deal with it.
She also does not take a dime of PAC money, which helps keep her mind cleared of hidden
agendas. Because of that, she is the first candidate who campaign I've donated to.
Rule of thumb that is true for all politicians regardless of party. Most of what they promise
they will do will never happen and much of does happen does not occur in the way they
promised when they campaigned.
In the case of Sen Warren she talks a lot of wonderful stuff,
paid by rich people. Expect the same results. The courts will probably shoot down the wealth
tax as described by Warren anyway which means everything she promises just dies.
Technocratic, neoliberal, Clinton Democrat ideas which have already proven to fail.
She's for the working class, so long as that working class wears a white collar.
but she declared that she will take "the money" in the general election if she wins the nomination. Do you expect that money
to come with no strings attached. Clearly this video
implied that she knows differently.
This video shows that as a member of Congress she is cognizant of the "as Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different"
Warren knows EXACTLY what she is doing when she says she will take the money in the general if nominated.
Okay, Warren made a mistake in claiming Native American heritage, which enabled her to
advance professionally as a "diversity" candidate. But that would have to count as a venial
not mortal sin. She is doing considerable good on the campaign trail, and I believe that she
means to try to follow through on her detailed promises.
"... 780 billion per year on defense without a enemy in sight, and no nation spending a tenth that, seems to be a place one could get a dollar or two. ..."
"... As Chomsky notes in 'manufacturing consent', the mass media that is not 'Right' is 'Centrist' and will support a centrist candidate over one advocating more radical change. ..."
"... Here's an idea. If Warren was a true progressive she wouldn't have been a registered Republican for 5 years, and she would have endorsed Bernie over Hillary in the 2016 primaries. ..."
Her backstory – teacher turned reluctant stay-at-home mom turned Harvard Law
School professor – clearly resonates with voters in important states such as Iowa and
South Carolina.
Working people who are struggling in Iowa and South Carolina say: "She's just like
us!"
Please expand upon the "Constitutional issues of a wealth tax".
Looks pretty clear to me.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes,
Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general
Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout
the United States.
"Please expand upon the "Constitutional issues of a wealth tax".
"Looks pretty clear to me."
The point is that the question would go to a Republican Supreme Court which could indeed
find a wealth tax unconstitutional. If you want to know why, do a search. There's lots
written on it.
I don't know. Seems a lot more substance this go round than the last, near as I can tell.
Last go round climate change got one question and 45 seconds in response, by both candidates
in the general. The media certainly wants and will allow that to happen, but any dem who does
would be a idiot.
Seems last go round gender preference was a main thing. Warren will I think not fall into
that trap. White male midwestern industrial voters are at large, what lost HRC key states,
she took for granted. White male voters and usually their spouses, will not have a part of a
program that seems to leave them out of things.
Substance is the name of the game for warren, but to counter Trump one needs to throw out the barbs as well, as she did in
her twitter post on not being on his propaganda outlet Fox.
"I won't do a town hall with Fox News because I won't invite millions of Democratic primary
voters to tune in, inflate ratings, and help sell ads for an outlet that profits from racism
and hate. If you agree, sign our petition.
Yes that is Elizabeth Warren calling them racists and haters. A guy like Trump calls names
and it is par for the course. A woman who conducts herself as your local librarian or grade
school teacher, and you have to take pause and listen, is there substance to this? Seems
there is.
This new Elizabeth Warren, name calling and all, I find must more to my liking than that
before. Which is the why to her newfound popularity. Substance and calling a pig a pig not a
dog or some other thing.
I think you made a good case. she isn't my favorite but still acceptable.
In no particular order, for me it is Gabbard, Sanders, Williamson, Warren or Yang. the other
18 would be like voting for the GOP with some protection against the conservative slant on
social issues.
The right wingers that post here won't debate me because I'll expose them. They know how
the system works and they use it to their advantage. Socialism is about getting free stuff
but the issue here is who gets the free stuff. Supply side econ says that the rich are
entitled to the free stuff and the less fortunate aren't entitled to it. this is killing
upward mobility.
Iceland, Denmark and Sweden repealed their wealth taxes because they don't work. The
Scandinavian countries pay for their safety net by embracing capitalism and taxing the hell
out of everyone. Maybe we should embrace that model? Or does Warren's base simply all of the
benefits of that system without paying for it?
They're not similar countries to the USA, at all. US citizens are taxed no matter where they
choose to live on earth. This is not the case in most countries.
The Scandinavian countries pay for their safety net by embracing capitalism and taxing
the hell out of everyone. Maybe we should embrace that model?
It would be a hell of a lot better than the government acting as the paymaster for large
corporations - paying their workers with food stamps because the corporations don't pay them
sufficiently to live on.
You do know that is how the US works, right? Corporations don't pay their workers enough, so
the government (i.e. taxpayers) pick up the tab.
To add the average family of four, assuming one stays with the kids so they do not pay day
care costs, at Walmart earning a average salary , is eligible for federal food assistance and
in most states, Medicaid.
California for several decades paid for most of kids college education and even today, New
Mexico does the same. New Mexico is indeed one of the poorest states, and if they figured out
how to do that(under a republican governor years ago), most places could. The tax rate here
is about on average, no higher than most.
780 billion per year on defense without a enemy in sight, and no nation spending a tenth
that, seems to be a place one could get a dollar or two.
Smart and lucid. All the right ideas, without using the " S " word that people in the
USA do not really understand, and have a big fear of
I'd extent that from "The USA" to "The USA & the editorial staff of most papers in
England", and include some writers for this paper in that catchall.
'Socialist' Sanders and 'Left Wing' Labour as personified by Corbyn are all very well as
useful poles to beat the Right with in polemics, but when it looks like they might actually
gain access to the corridors of power, suddenly they become villains that have to be defeated
so that sensible 'moderates' can retain power....
Warren was receiving more support from this particular paper even before she announced her
candidacy than Sanders has or I suspect will even if he gains the nomination.
As Chomsky notes in 'manufacturing consent', the mass media that is not 'Right' is
'Centrist' and will support a centrist candidate over one advocating more radical change.
Those labels are totally irrelevant in the USA. Calling someone 'right' or 'left' or
'socialist' in the USA has nothing to do with dictionary definitions. They all mean to say
one thing: I disagree with them because they're wrong.
On Friday, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a bill to impose
mandatory fines on companies that have data breaches.
Warren is the politician who operates like a blind-folded person desperately trying to hit
a pinata. In her political realm, such companies simply twist in the wind and make easy
targets. Her policy is equivalent to any store or home being burglarized and then being fined by
government for being a victim of crime. Complete mindlessness describes the policy.
Yes. Of course every politician should simply lie down and let the corporations get away with
every damn thing. I mean, that's worked really well for most Americans since Reagan.
Agreed that is a stupid policy.
If the company suffers a data breach owing to poor security or conceals or unduly delays
disclosure of the data breach, then it would make sense to fine the company or to hold the
company civilly liable to those injured by the data breach. But a blanket fine for any company that suffers a data breach is dumb.
The Labor party in Australia surprised me with the boldness and coherency of their plans and
it was a great thing to see a party running a campaign on ideas and principles.
They lost the election.
Here's an idea. If Warren was a true progressive she wouldn't have been a registered
Republican for 5 years, and she would have endorsed Bernie over Hillary in the 2016
primaries.
What a really stupid thing to write and think. Do you have any inkling of the history of the
Republican and Democratic parties? I was born in a Republican household (progressive) and it
took me living overseas for 20 years to realize what a nasty little insurgency had taken the
Republicans from what Teddy Roosevelt championed to what he described as swine; the
Dixiecrats. Ignorance is not bliss no matter how hard you try to pretend.
One thing that needs to be done involves an honest discussion about the costs of Warren's
proposals and the fact that the US already has a $22 TRILLION national debt with more than $1
TRILLION being added each year at a minimum. A former US Comptroller General stated in 2015
that even the official National Debt figure is a misrepresentation and that taking into
account an honest understanding of the nation's actual legal obligations the figure was
actually $65 TRILLION.
If anyone wants to see it even worse just look at economist Lawrence Kotlikoff's infinite horizon estimates that placed future already promised commitments at
$220 TRILLION. My point is that Warren and everyone else in the DC political establishment,
is "blowing smoke" and that the US is bankrupt and needs a serious strategy to mitigate that
fact rather than reckless proposals aimed to attract votes.
That is not going to happen and
the country is in a fundamental financial crisis.
Its repinlicans who increase your deficits. Reagan believed deficits don't matter.
The bush tax cuts...and now Trumps tax cuts and QE. He's expanding credit, which looks like
real growth, but is it? Only the US can do this, because it runs the global dollar. We should
have had the Bankor. But the yanks ensured that did not happen.
Nobody expects Congress to deliver on a president's campaign promises. That's not how
the system works.
True. We use to call it "obstructionist" when the other party in congress
unreasonably opposed a president's proposals. We no longer use that term, though. Now we call
it "resistance". I'm sure there are at least a few republicans who see being part of the
"resistance" exciting if Warren wins the White House.
At first I thought she must be mad, running for president. Then I started listening to her
ideas and looking at how they were being received.
There are millions of young people, youngish people, and parents whose lives would actually
be changed by her college loan plan. Even conservatives admit that "her math is correct" and
"it's doable."
Then I started watching her in town halls and found her to be VERY different from that
awkward lady in the kitchen having a beer. She's warm, direct, funny, casually
self-deprecating, and easily able to translate complex ideas into readily understood ones.
Free college and health care, and the rich pay. Who wouldn't get on board with that?
Well, since you asked. I don't have any student debt and I don't need any more
health care. If we are buying votes with "free" stuff, what do I get for free?
I do like a good brisket. Can we carve out some of that tax on those nasty millionaires
for my grocery fund?
Well, as a rock ribbed Republican, you only one choice.
Not applicable since I'm not a republican. I did vote for Trump, after voting
for Obama twice. I'm an independent, and we outnumber either republicans or democrats.
For me it's a toss-up between Warren and Sanders. When it comes to who will actually get to
run against Trump, if a dining room set and 4 chairs gets the Democratic nomination, they get
my vote in the general election.
The fix is already in I think. Your table and chairs name is Sleepy Joe Biden.
Of course, it's still a long time to the election and mortality rates may kick in.
Warren is rising fast because A) she stands for something and B) she does an excellent job of
explaining how America can make the journey from where it is (including rampant inequality)
to where it needs to be to offer a future to all its people, not just to those who are white,
rich and privileged! Plus, she is super smart & sassy!
The US will provide Ukraine with $250 million worth of military equipment, training and
support, the Pentagon announced, saying Ukraine's Navy and marines would be among the
beneficiaries.
The Ukrainian military will get sniper rifles, grenade launchers, counter-battery radar
systems, night vision equipment and communication devices, the Pentagon statement said...
The statement said the package will bring total US security assistance to Ukraine to $1.5
billion since 2014, when a US-backed coup in Kiev ousted Ukraine's elected government.
In a pointed critique of President Trump's foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that "the American people deserve a
president who can more credibly justify war with Iran."
"What the American people need is a president who can make a much more convincing case for
going to war with Iran," said Schumer (D-NY), adding that the Trump administration's corruption
and dishonesty have "proven time and time again" that it lacks the conviction necessary to act
as an effective cheerleader for the conflict.
"Donald Trump is completely unfit to assume the mantle of telling the American people what
they need to hear in order to convince them a war with Iran is a good idea.
One of the key duties of the president is to gain the trust of the people so that they feel
comfortable going along with whatever he says. President Trump's failure to serve as a credible
advocate for this war is yet another instance in which he has disappointed not only his
colleagues in Washington, but also the entire nation."
Schumer later concluded his statement with a vow that he and his fellow Democrats will
continue working toward a more palatable case in favor of bombing Iran.
In a pointed critique of President Trump's foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that "the American people deserve a
president who can more credibly justify war with Iran."
"What the American people need is a president who can make a much more convincing case for
going to war with Iran," said Schumer (D-NY), adding that the Trump administration's corruption
and dishonesty have "proven time and time again" that it lacks the conviction necessary to act
as an effective cheerleader for the conflict.
"Donald Trump is completely unfit to assume the mantle of telling the American people what
they need to hear in order to convince them a war with Iran is a good idea.
One of the key duties of the president is to gain the trust of the people so that they feel
comfortable going along with whatever he says. President Trump's failure to serve as a credible
advocate for this war is yet another instance in which he has disappointed not only his
colleagues in Washington, but also the entire nation."
Schumer later concluded his statement with a vow that he and his fellow Democrats will
continue working toward a more palatable case in favor of bombing Iran.
Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the U.S. establishment for preventing an improvement in relations
between Moscow and Washington.
During his annual televised question-and-answer session with members of the
public, Putin was asked about the prospects for better ties if he met with President Donald Trump.
The Russian energy Ministry's department head Evgeny Grabchak, who faces U.S. sanctions, asked Putin on
air if he would "want to meet with Trump."
Putin replied that dialogue with the U.S. was "always good" adding that Russia was "ready for this
dialogue as long as our partners were too."
Putin went on: "But even if Trump wants to change anything, there are restrictions imposed by other
organs of power. There is a part of the American establishment that continues to invent fake news. We have
things to discuss with Trump in all areas, including the economy,"
Novaya Gazyeta
reported.
This
article was first published by GR in December 2014
Almost all wars begin with false flag operations.
The coming conflicts in North Korea and Russia are no exception.
Mass public hysteria is being manufactured to justify aggression against Moscow and
Pyongyang, in retaliation for acts attributed to the North Korean and Russian governments, but
orchestrated and carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon.
The false flagging of North Korea: CIA weaponizes Hollywood
The campaign of aggression against North Korea, from the hacking of Sony and the crescendo
of noise over the film, The Interview, bears all the markings of a CIA false flag
operation.
The hacking and alleged threats to moviegoers has been blamed entirely on North Korea,
without a shred of credible evidence beyond unsubstantiated accusations by the FBI. Pyongyang's
responsibility has not been proven. But it has already been officially endorsed, and publicly
embraced as fact.
The idea of "America under attack by North Korea" is a lie.
The actual individuals of the mysterious group responsible for the hacking remain
conveniently unidentified. A multitude of possibilities -- Sony insiders, hackers-for-hire,
generic Internet vandalism -- have not been explored in earnest. The more plausible involvement
of US spying agencies -- the CIA, the NSA, etc. , their overwhelming technological capability
and their peerless hacking and surveillance powers -- remains studiously ignored.
Who benefits? It is illogical for Pyongyang to have done it. Isolated, impoverished North
Korea, which has wanted improved relations with the United States for years (to no avail),
gains nothing by cyberattacking the United States with its relatively weak capabilities, and
face the certainty of overwhelming cyber and military response. On the other hand, Washington
benefits greatly from any action that leads to regime change in North Korea.
But discussion about Pyongyang's involvement -- or lack of -- risks missing the larger
point.
This project, from the creation of The Interview to the well-orchestrated international
incident, has been guided by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department from the start. It
is propaganda. It is a weapon of psychological warfare. It is an especially perverted example
of military-intelligence manipulation of popular culture for the purpose of war.
There is nothing funny about any of it. The Interview was made with the direct and
open involvement of CIA and Rand Corporation operatives for the express purpose of
destabilizing North Korea. Star and co-director Seth Rogen has admitted that he worked
"directly with people who work in the government as consultants, who I'm convinced are in the
CIA". Originally conceived to be a plot taking place in an "unnamed country", Sony Pictures
co-chairman Michael Lynton, who also sits on the board of the Rand Corporation, encouraged the
film makers to make the movie overtly about murdering Kim Jong-Un. Bruce Bennett, the Rand
Corporation's North Korean specialist, also had an active role, expressing enthusiasm that the
film would assist regime change and spark South Korean action against Pyongyang. Other
government figures from the State Department, even operatives connected to Hillary Clinton,
read the script.
The infantile, imbecilic, tasteless, reckless idiots involved with The Interview,
including the tasteless Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg, worked with these
military-intelligence thugs for months. "Hung out" with them. They do not seem to have had any
problem being the political whores for these Langley death merchants. In fact, they had fun
doing it. They seem not to give a damn, or even half a damn, that the CIA and the Pentagon have
used them, and co-opted the film for an agenda far bigger than the stupid movie itself. All
they seem to care about was that they are getting publicity, and more publicity, and got to
make a stupid movie. Idiots.
The CIA has now succeeded in setting off a wave of anti-North Korea war hysteria across
America. Witness the ignorant squeals and cries from ignorant Americans about how "we can't let
North Korea blackmail us", "we can't let Kim take away our free speech". Listen to the
ridiculous debate over whether Sony has the "courage" to release the film to "stand up to the
evil North Koreans" who would "blackmail America" and "violate the rights" of idiot filmgoers,
who now see it as a "patriotic duty" to see the film.
These mental midgets -- their worldviews shaped by the CIA culture ministry with its
endorsed pro-war entertainment, violent video games, and gung-ho shoot 'em ups -- are
hopelessly brain-curdled, irretrievably lost. Nihilistic and soulless, as well as stupid, most
Americans have no problem seeing Kim Jong-Un killed, on screen or in reality. This slice of
ugly America is the CIA's finest post-9/11 army: violent, hate-filled, easily manipulated,
eager to obey sheeple who march to whatever drumbeat they set.
And then there are the truly dumb, fools who are oblivious to most of reality, who would say
"hey lighten up, it's only a comedy" and "it's only a movie". Naïve, entitled,
exceptionalist Americans think the business of the war -- the murderous agenda they and their
movie are helping the CIA carry out -- is all just a game.
The CIA's business is death, and that there are actual assassination plans in the files of
the CIA, targeting heads of state. Kim Jong-Un is undoubtedly on a real assassination list.
This is no funny, either. The Modus
Operandi of Imperialist Propaganda The real act of war
The provocative, hostile diplomatic stance of the Obama administration speaks for itself.
Washington wanted to spark an international incident. It wants regime change in Pyongyang, does
not care what North Korea or China think, and does not fear anything North Korea will do about
it.
On the other hand, imagine if a film were about the assassination of Benjamin Netanyahu and
the toppling of the government in Tel Aviv. Such a film, if it would ever be permitted even in
script form, would be stopped cold. If it made it through censors that "magically" never slowed
down The Interview (and yes, there is censorship in America, a lot of it) Obama would
personally fly to Tel Aviv to apologize. At the very least, Washington would issue statements
distancing themselves from the film and its content.
Not so in the case of The Interview. Because American elites actually want the Kim family
murdered.
Despite providing no proof of North Korean involvement, President Barack Obama promised a
"proportional response". Promptly, North Korea's Internet was mysteriously shut down for a
day.
Unless one is naïve to believe in this coincidence, all signs point to US spy agencies
(CIA, NSA, etc.) or hackers working on behalf of Washington and Langley.
Given the likelihood that North Korea had nothing to do with either the hacking of Sony, the
initial pulling of the movie (a big part of the publicity stunt, that was not surprisingly
reversed) or the "blackmailing" of moviegoers, the shutting down of North Korea's Internet was
therefore a unilateral, unprovoked act of war. Washington has not officially taken
responsibility. For reasons of plausible denial, it never will.
Perhaps it was a dry run. A message. The US got to test how easily it can take down North
Korea's grid. As we witnessed, given overwhelming technological advantage, it was very easy.
And when a war against Pyongyang begins in earnest, American forces will know exactly what they
will do.
The US is flexing its Asia-Pacific muscles, sending a message not only to Pyongyang, but to
China, a big future target. Some of the other muscle-flexing in recent months included the
anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong (assisted by the CIA and the US State Department), ongoing
provocations in the South China Sea over disputed oil, and new defense agreements that place
new anti-missile systems and missile-guided naval vessels to the region. The bottom line is
that America has once again been mobilized into supporting a new war that could take place
soon. The CIA and Sony have successfully weaponized a stupid movie, making it into a cause and
a battle cry.
If and when bombs fall on North Korea, blood will be on the hands of the makers of The
Interview, every single executive who allowed it to be made, and the hordes who paid to see
it.
If America were a decent, sane society, The Interview would be exposed, roundly denounced,
boycotted and shunned. Instead it is celebrated.
The CIA should be condemned. Instead, Seth Rogen hangs out with them. America, increasingly
dysfunctional, loves them. Obeys them.
The false flagging of Russia
Regarding The Interview, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich
issued a statement in sympathy with North Korea, correctly calling the film's concept
aggressive and scandalous, and decried the US retaliatory response as counterproductive and
dangerous to international relations.
Of course. Washington has no interest in improved international relations.
The Russians should know.
Like Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin has been vilified, demonized and false-flagged,
incessantly. If Kim is today's object of ridicule, Putin is Evil Incarnate.
Consider the hysterical, desperate provocations by Washington in recent months.
A US-NATO coup, engineered by the CIA, toppled the government of Ukraine, planting a pro-US
neo-Nazi criminal apparatus on Russia's doorstep. The CIA and its worldwide network of
propagandists pinned the blame on Putin and Russia for aggression, and for obstructing
"democracy".
The MH-17 jetliner is downed by Ukrainian operatives, with the support of the CIA, Mi-6,
etc. etc. This false flag operation was blamed on Russia -- "Putin's Missile". The US and NATO
are still trying to pin these murders on Putin.
The war against the Islamic State -- a massive CIA false flag operation -- seeks to topple
with the the Assad government as well as to militarily counter Russia. The ongoing
Anglo-American conquest of regional oil and gas supplies, and energy transport routes is also
aimed at checkmating Russia and China across the region. The US and NATO have attacked the
Russian federation with sanctions. The US and Saudi Arabia have collapsed oil prices, to
further destroy the Russian economy. Full-scale military escalations are being planned. The US
Congress is pushing new legislation tantamount to an open declaration of war against
Russia.
What next? Perhaps it is time for the CIA to produce a Seth Rogen-James Franco movie about
assassinating Putin. Another "parody". Or how about a movie about killing Assad, or anyone else
the United States wants to make into a Public Enemy? Don't think Langley isn't working on
it.
The return of the Bushes (who were never gone)
In the midst of all escalating war hysteria comes news that Jeb Bush is "actively exploring"
running for president in 2016. The long predicted return of the Bush family, the kings of
terrorism, the emperors of the false flag operation, back to the White House appears
imminent.
The CIA will have its favorite family back in the Oval Office, with true CIA scion to manage
the apocalyptic wars are likely to be launched in earnest in the next two years:
Russia/Ukraine, North Korea, the Middle East.
Jeb Bush will "finish the job".
The 2016 presidential "contest" will be a charade. It is likely to put forth two corrupt
establishment political "friends" posing as adversaries, when in fact, they are longtime
comrades and conspirators. On one side, Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. On the other side, Jeb
Bush, with George H.W., George W. and all of the Bush cronies crawling back out of the rotten
woodwork. The fact is that the Clintons and Bushes, and their intertwined networks, have run
the country since the 1980s, their respective camps taking turns in power, with Obama as
transitional figurehead (his administration has always been run by neoliberal elites connected
to the Clintonistas, including Hillary Clinton herself).
The collective history of the Bushes stretches back to the very founding of the American
intelligence state. It is the very history of modern war criminality. The resume is George H.W.
Bush -- the CIA operative and CIA Director -- is long and bloody, and littered with cocaine
dust. The entire Bush family ran the Iran-Contra/CIA drug apparatus, with the Clintons among
the Bush network's full partners in the massive drug/weapons/banking frauds of that era, the
effects of which still resonate today. And we need not remind that the Bush clan and 9/11 are
responsible for the world of terror and false flag foreign policy and deception that we suffer
today.
While it remains too early to know which way the Establishment will go with their selection
(and it depends on how world war shakes out between now and 2016), it is highly likely that
Jeb
Bush would be the pick.
Hillary Clinton has already been scandalized -- "Benghazi-ed". Jeb Bush, on the other hand,
has ideal Establishment/CIA pedigree. He has waited years for the stupid American public to
forget the horrors that his family -- Georges H.W. and W. -- brought humanity. And now
Americans , with their ultra-short memories, have indeed forgotten, if they had ever understood
it in the first place.
And the American public does not know who Jeb Bush is, beyond the last name. Jeb Bush, whom
Barbara Bush always said was the "smart one", has been involved in Bush narco-criminal business
since Iran-Contra. His criminal activities in Florida, his connection with anti-Castro Cuban
terrorists and other connections are there, for those who bother to investigate them. His Latin
American connections -- including his ability to speak fluent Spanish, a Latin wife and a
half-Latin son (George P. Bush, the next up and coming political Bush) -- conveniently appeals
to the fastest-growing demographic, as well as those in the southern hemisphere drug trade.
Recent Obama overtures towards the Latino demographic -- immigration, Cuba -- appear to be a
Democratic Party move to counter Jeb Bush's known strengths in the same demographic.
Today, in the collective American mind, Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin are "the bad guys".
But the mass murdering war criminal Bushes are saints. "Nice guys".
A Jeb Bush presidency will be a pure war presidency, one that promises terror, more
unspeakable than we are experiencing now, lording it over a world engulfed in holocaust.
Bias, Lies & Videotape: Doubts Dog 'Confirmed' Syria Chemical Attacks Disturbing new evidence suggests 2018 incident
might've been staged, putting everything else, including U.S. retaliation, into question. By
Scott Ritter
June 20, 2019
It also calls into question all the other conclusions and reports by the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW) , which was assigned in 2014 "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly
chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."
As you recall, the Trump administration initiated a coordinated bombing of Syrian government facilities with the UK and France
within days of the
Douma incident and
before
a full investigation of the scene could be completed, charging Assad with the "barbaric act" of using "banned chemical weapons"
to kill dozens of people on the scene. Bomb first, ask questions later.
The OPCW began their investigation days
after the strikes . The group drew on witness testimonies, environmental and biomedical sample analysis results, and additional
digital information from witnesses (i.e. video and still photography), as well as toxicological and ballistic analyses. In July 2018,
the OPCW released an
interim report
on Douma that said "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental
samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties," but that chlorine, which is not a banned chemical weapon, was detected
there.
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The report cited ballistic tests that indicated that the canisters found at two locations on the scene were dropped from the air
(witnesses blamed Assad's forces), but investigations were ongoing.
The final report in March
reiterated the ballistics data, and the conclusions were just as underwhelming, saying that all of the evidence gathered there provides
"reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place," due in part to traces of chlorine and explosives at
the impact sites.
Now, the leaked
internal report apparently suppressed by the OPCW says there is a "high probability" that a pair of chlorine gas cylinders that
had been claimed as the source of the toxic chemical had been planted there by hand and not dropped by aircraft. This was based on
extensive engineering assessments and computer modeling as well as all of the evidence previously afforded to the OPCW.
What does this mean? To my mind, the canisters were planted by the opposition in an effort to frame the Syrian government.
The OPCW has confirmed with the validity of this shocking document and has offered statements to reporters, including Peter Hitchens,
who published
the organization's response to him on May 16.
The ramifications of this turn of events extend far beyond simply disproving the allegations concerning the events in April 2018.
The credibility of the OPCW itself and every report and conclusion
it has released concerning allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are now suspect. The extent to which
the OPCW has, almost exclusively, relied upon
the same Syrian opposition sources who are now suspected of fabricating the Douma events raises serious questions about both
the methodology and motivation of an organization that had been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for
"its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons."
In a
response to Agence France-Presse (AFP) , OPCW director general Fernando Arias acknowledged there is an internal probe into the
memo leak but that he continues to "stand by the impartial and professional conclusions" of the group's original report. He played
down the role of the memo's author, Ian Henderson, and said his alternative hypotheses were not included in the final OPCW report
because they "pointed at possible attribution" and were therefore outside the scope of the OPCW's fact finding mission in Syria.
Self-produced videos and witness statements provided by the pro-opposition Violations Documentation Center, Syrian Civil Defense
(also known as the White Helmets), and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS)
, a non-profit organization that operates hospitals in opposition-controlled Syria, represented the heart and soul of the case
against the Syrian government regarding the events in Douma. To my mind, the internal memo now suggests that these actors were engaging
in a systemic effort to disseminate disinformation that would facilitate Western military intervention with the goal of removing
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.
This theory has been advanced by pro-Assad forces and their Russian partners for some time. But independent reporting on the ground
since the Douma incident has sussed out many of the same concerns. From James Harkin, director of the Center for Investigative Journalism
and a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, who traveled to the site of the attacks and
reported for The Intercept
in February of this year:
The imperative to grab the fleeting attention of an international audience certainly seems to have influenced the presentation
of the evidence. In the videos and photos that appeared that evening, most analysts and observers agree that there were some signs
that the bodies and gas canisters had been moved or tampered with after the event for maximum impact. The Syrian media activists
who'd arrived at the apartment block with the dead people weren't the first to arrive on the scene; they'd heard about the deaths
from White Helmet workers and doctors at the hospital.
The relationship between the OPCW and the Syrian opposition can be traced back to 2013. That was when the OPCW was given the responsibility
of eliminating Syria's declared arsenal of chemical weapons; this task was largely completed by 2014. However, the Syrian opposition
began making persistent allegations of chemical weapon attacks by the Syrian government in which chlorine, a substance not covered
by Syria's obligation to be disarmed of chemical weapons, was used. In response, the OPCW established the
Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in 2014 "to establish facts surrounding
allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."
The priority of effort for the FFM early on was to investigate allegations of the use of chlorine as a weapon. Since, according
to its May 2014
summary, "all reported incidents took place at locations that the Syrian Government considers to be outside its effective control,"
the FFM determined that the success of its mission was contingent upon "identification of key actors, such as local authorities and/or
representatives of armed opposition groups in charge of the territories in which these locations are situated; the establishment
of contacts with these groups in an atmosphere of mutual trust and confidence that allows the mandate and objectives of the FFM to
be communicated."
So from its very inception, the FFM had to rely on the anti-Assad opposition and its supporters for nearly everything. The document
that governed the
conduct of the FFM's work in Syria was premised on the fact that the mission would be dependent in part upon "opposition representatives"
to coordinate, along with the United Nations, the "security, logistical and operational aspects of the OPCW FFM," including liaising
"for the purposes of making available persons for interviews."
One could sense the bias resulting from such an arrangement when, acting on information provided to it by the opposition regarding
an "alleged attack with chlorine" on the towns of Kafr Zeyta and Al-Lataminah, the FFM changed its original plans to investigate
an alleged chlorine attack on the town of Harasta. This decision, the FFM reported, "was welcomed by the opposition." When the FFM
attempted to inspect Kafr Zeyta, however, it was attacked by opposition forces, with one of its vehicles destroyed by a roadside
bomb, one inspector wounded, and several inspectors detained by opposition fighters.
The inability to go to Kafr Zeyta precluded the group from "presenting definitive conclusions," according to the report. But that
did not stop the FFM from saying that the information given to them from these opposition sources, "including treating physicians
with whom the FFM was able to establish contact," and public domain material, "lends credence to the view that toxic chemicals, most
likely pulmonary irritating agents such as chlorine, have been used in a systematic manner in a number of attacks" against Kafr Zeyta.
So the conclusion/non-conclusion was based not on any onsite investigation, but rather videos produced by the opposition and subsequently
released via social media and
interviews
also likely set up by opposition groups (White Helmets, SAMS, etc.), which we know, according to their own documents, served
as the key liaisons for the FFM on the ground.
All of this is worrisome. It is unclear at this point how many Syrian chemical attacks have been truly confirmed since the start
of the war. In February of this year, the Global Policy Institute
released a report
saying there were 336 such reports, but they were broken down into "confirmed," "credibly substantiated," and "comprehensively confirmed."
Out of the total, 111 were given the rigorous "comprehensively confirmed" tag, which, according to the group, meant the incidents
were "were investigated and confirmed by competent international bodies or backed up by at least three highly reliable independent
sources of evidence."
They do not go into further detail about those bodies and sources, but are sure to thank the White Helmets and their "implementing
partner" Mayday Rescue and Violations Documentation
Center, among other groups, as "friends and partners" in the study. So it becomes clear, looking at the Kafr Zeytan inspection and
beyond, that the same opposition sources that are informing the now-dubious OPCW reports are also delivering data and "assistance"
to outside groups reaching international audiences, too.
The role of the OPCW in sustaining the claims made by the obviously biased Syrian opposition sources cannot be understated --
by confirming the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma, the OPCW lent credibility to claims that otherwise should not --
and indeed would not -- have been granted, and in doing so violated the very operating procedures that had been put in place by the
OPCW to protect the credibility of the organization and its findings.
There is an old prosecutorial rule -- one lie, all lies -- that comes into play in this case. With the leaked internal report
out there, suggesting that the sources in the Douma investigation were agenda-driven and dishonest, all information ever provided
to the OPCW by the White Helmets, SAMS, and other Syrian opposition groups must now, in my mind, be viewed as tainted and therefore
unusable.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control
treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.
The OPCW reaction clearly considering the investigation into the leak instead of apologizing for not publishing this report is
revealing its bias.
There has been a push from 'the West' to have the OPCW also attributing responsibility. Given the bias already on display this
will further politicize the OPCW.
As soon as such organizations become propaganda tools their credibility goes into the wind.
Given what we know of the Skripal hoax and the Tories attitude to the truth with their government funded 'Integrity Initiative'
through the Institute of Statecraft' that exactly what the British Intelligence intended.
One may note the specific personal links through Orbis/Steele/Miller between the 'Integrity Initiative' and the fake 'Trump
Dossier' and one ought to be alarmed by 'services' of a British intelligence out of control, but given the FBI/CIA involvement
and exploitation of that fake 'Trump Dossier' it looks that the US has a quite similar problem.
..Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration.
Look at what we in the US have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the
right. I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.
..Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration.
Look at what we in the US have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the
right. I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.
"... - Collin Powell's "clear and convincing" evidence of Sadam's mobile missile lauchers (aka mobile weather balloons). And the GWB admin's attempts to literally destroy Hans Blix' reputation, and as it turned out Blix was right about everything. ..."
"... - "Incubator baby" lies to US Senate, swaying Desert Storm I approval by 1 vote (many senators said that fabrication was the difference in their vote). And this after Sadam's incursion into Kuwait was after 18 months of US vetoing Iraq UN resolutions seeking to condemn Kuwait's angle drilling into Iraq's largest southern oil fields. ..."
May be the intention was never to sink the tanker - but just to draw attention with some
heavy smoke. The limpet mines may exists in various size, so they may have intentionaly
used a small one for this.
As B (and many other
media ) pointed out: the crew of the Japanese tanker all said the ship was hit by an
air borne projectile. This was not a mine. Seems obvious if US was interested in the
truth, they would recover and identify the projectile.
Just for shits and giggles, a brief reminder of some of US "evidence" and false flags (all
lies) in service of these "endeavors" previously:
- reading the several excellent books and released CIA docs of the CIA engineered
Mosaddegh coup, among other things was CIA bombs set off in Mosques (this was before the
Ayatollahs were political), then flooding media with "accesssments" Mosaddegh was
responsable. Kermit Roosevelt literally boasted about this.
- Collin Powell's "clear and convincing" evidence of Sadam's mobile missile lauchers (aka
mobile weather balloons). And the GWB admin's attempts to literally destroy Hans Blix'
reputation, and as it turned out Blix was right about everything.
- Fake Satellite photos of Sadam's troops on Saudi border.
- "Incubator baby" lies to US Senate, swaying Desert Storm I approval by 1 vote (many
senators said that fabrication was the difference in their vote). And this after Sadam's
incursion into Kuwait was after 18 months of US vetoing Iraq UN resolutions seeking to
condemn Kuwait's angle drilling into Iraq's largest southern oil fields.
That's just a few from memory. At what point do US lawmakers finally put all this together
(especially given Bolton's association with those who drove GWB's Iraq invasion) and refuse
to even consider the non persuasive evidence (not to mention contradictory... aka crew says
air borne attack), remind their colleagues and America of the cost of these lies just in last
20 years, and DEMAND proof that can be verified with THEIR OWN EYES.
"... Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible. ..."
"... Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. ..."
"... "War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war," video, as well as the bipartisan ( Hillary Clinton , John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an "act of war" equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war." ..."
"... Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy": "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy." ..."
"... The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted. ..."
It's a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a
dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come.
I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation
of emerging adversaries the US is desperate to entame before any one or combination of them
becomes too strong to defeat. These include countries like Iran and China, which are developing
forces capable of resisting American military aggression against their own territory and on a
regional level, and have shown quite too much uppitiness about staying in their
previously-assigned geopolitical cages.
But Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program
of regime change -- indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and
directly in Syria, where Russia actively got in the way. So Russia is the focus of
attack, the prime target for an exemplary comeuppance.
Is it, then, a new Cold War, even more dangerous than the old one, as Stephen F. Cohen
says ?
That terminology was apt even a few months ago, but the speed, ferocity, and
coordination of the West/NATO's reaction to the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the
Skripals, as well as the formation of a War Cabinet in Washington, indicates to me that we've
moved to another level of aggression.
It's beyond Cold. Call it the Warm War. And the temperature's rising.
The Nerve of Them
There are two underlying presumptions that, combined, make present situation more dangerous
than a Cold War.
One is the presumption of guilt -- or, more precisely, the presumption that the presumption
of Russian guilt can always be made, and made to stick in the Western mind.
The confected furor over the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals demonstrates this
dramatically.
Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole
responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and
forensically impossible.
False certainty is the ultimate fake news. It is just not true that, as she says: "There is
no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state is culpable." This falsity of this
statement has been demonstrated by a slew of sources -- including the
developers of the alleged "Novichok" agent themselves, a thorough
analysis by a former UN inspector in Iraq who worked on the destruction of chemical
weapons, establishment Western scientific outlets like New Scientist ("
Other countries could have made 'Russian' nerve agent "), and the British government's own
mealy-mouthed, effective-but-unacknowledged disavowal
of that conclusion. In its own words, The British government found: "a nerve agent or
related compound," " of a type developed by Russia." So, it's absolutely,
positively, certainly, without a doubt, Russian-government-produced "Novichok" .or something
else.
Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they
all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. It's a
It boggles the -- or at least, my -- mind how, in the face of all this, anyone could take
seriously her ultimatum, ignoring the procedures of the
Chemical Weapons Convention , gave Russia 24 hours to "explain" -- i.e., confess and beg
forgiveness for -- this alleged crime.
Indeed, it's noteworthy that France initially, and rather sharply, refused to assume Russian
guilt, with a government spokesman saying, "We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are
proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made." But the whip was cracked -- and
surely not by the weak hand of Whitehall -- demanding EU/NATO unity in the condemnation of
Russia. So, in an extraordinary show of discipline that could only be ordered and orchestrated
by the imperial center, France joined the United States and 20 other countries in the largest
mass expulsion of Russian diplomats ever.
Western governments and their compliant media have mandated that Russian government guilt
for the "
first offensive use of a nerve agent " in Europe since World War II is to be taken as flat
fact. Anyone -- like Jeremy Corbyn or Craig Murray -- who
dares to interrupt the "Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!" chorus to ask for, uh, evidence,
is treated to a storm of obloquy
.
At this point, Western accusers don't seem to care how blatantly unfounded, if not
ludicrous, an accusation is. The presumption of Russian guilt, along with the shaming of anyone
who questions it, has become an unquestionable standard of Western/American political and media
discourse.
Old Cold War McCarthyism has become new Warm War fantasy politics.
Helled in Contempt
This declaration of diplomatic war over the Skripal incident is the culmination of an
ongoing drumbeat of ideological warfare, demonizing Russia and Putin personally in the most
predictable and inflammatory terms.
For the past couple of years, we've been
told by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Marco Rubio, and
Boris Johnson that Putin is the new Hitler. That's a particularly galling analogy for the
Russians. Soviet Russia, after all, was Hitler's main enemy, that defeated the Nazi army at the
cost of 20+ million of its people -- while the British Royal Family was not
un-smitten with the charms of
Hitlerian fascism , and British footballers had a poignant moment in 1938 Berlin
saluting the Fuhre.:
"War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been
inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war,"
video, as well as the bipartisan (
Hillary Clinton ,
John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an
"act of war"
equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the
warmongering lunatic John Bolton,
calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war."
Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up
by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's
noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy":
"We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial
support provided by the enemy."
Which is strange, because, since the Taliban emerged from the American-jihadi war against
Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban and Russia have "enduring enmity" towards each
other, as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts it . Furthermore, the sixteen-year-long
American war against the Taliban has depended on Russia allowing the U.S. to move
supplies through its territory, and being "the principal source of
fuel for the alliance's needs in Afghanistan."
So the general has to admit that this alleged Russian "destabilising activity" is a new
thing: "This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months When you look at the timing
it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it's interesting to note
the timing of the whole thing."
Yes, it is.
The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem
impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and
restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven
to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all.
We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if
you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted.
This is not a serious framework for respectful international relations between two sovereign
nations. It's downright childish. It paints everyone, including the party trying to impose it,
into an impossible corner. Is Russia ever going to abandon Crimea, confess that it shot down
the Malaysian jet, tricked us into electing Donald Trump, murdered the Skripals, is secretly
arming the Taliban, et. al .? Is the U.S. ever going to say: "Never mind"? What's the
next step? It's the predicament of the bully.
This is not, either, an approach that really seeks to address any of the "crimes" charged.
As Victoria Nuland (a Clintonite John Bolton) put it on NPR, it's about, "sending a message" to
Russia. Well, as Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov
said , with this latest mass expulsion of diplomats, the United States is, "Destroying what
little remained of US-Russian ties." He got the message.
All of this looks like a coordinated campaign that began in response to Russia's
interruption of American regime-change projects in Ukraine and especially Syria, that was
harmonized -- over the last 18 to 24 months -- with various elite and popular motifs of
discontent over the 2016 election, and that has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks with
ubiquitous and unconstrained " enemization " [1] of Russia.
It's hard to describe it as anything other than war propaganda -- manufacturing the
citizenry's consent for a military confrontation.
Destroying the possibility of normal, non-conflictual, state-to-state relations and
constituting Russia as "the enemy" is exactly what this campaign is about. That is its
"message" and its effect -- for the American people as much as for the Russia
government. The heightened danger, I think, is that Russia, which has for a long time been
reluctant to accept that America wasn't interested in "partnership", has now heard and
understood this message, while the American people have only heard but do not understand
it.
It's hard to see where this can go that doesn't involve military conflict. This is
especially the case with the appointments of Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and John Bolton -- a
veritable murderers' row that many see as the core of a Trump War Cabinet. Bolton, who does not
need Senate confirmation, is a particularly dangerous fanatic, who tried to
get the Israelis to attack Iran before even they wanted to, and has
promised regime change in Iran by 2019. As mentioned, he considers that Russia has already
given him a " casus belli. " Even the staid New York Timeswarns
that, with these appointments, "the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically."
The second presumption in the American mindset today makes military confrontation more
likely than it was during the Cold War: Not only is there a presumption of guilt, there is a
presumption of weakness . The presumption of guilt is something the American imperial
managers are confident they can induce and maintain in the Western world; the presumption of
weakness is one they -- or, I fear, too many of them -- have all-too blithely
internalized.
This is an aspect of the American self-image among policymakers whose careers matured in a
post-Soviet world. During the Cold War, Americans held themselves in check by the assumption,
that, militarily, the Soviet Union was a peer adversary, a country that could and would defend
certain territories and interests against direct American military aggression -- "spheres of
interest" that should not be attacked. The fundamental antagonism was managed with grudging
mutual respect.
There was, after all, a shared recent history of alliance against fascism. And there was an
awareness that the Soviet Union, in however distorted a way, both represented the possibility
of a post-capitalist future and supported post-colonial national liberation movements, which
gave it considerable stature in the world.
American leadership might have hated the Soviet Union, but it was not contemptuous of it. No
American leader would have called the Soviet Union, as John McCain called Russia, just "a gas
station masquerading as a country." And no senior American or British leader would have told
the Soviet Union what British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia last week: to "go
away and shut up."
This is a discourse that assumes its own righteousness, authority, and superior power, even
as it betrays its own weakness. It's the discourse of a frustrated child. Or bully. Russia
isn't shutting up and going away, and the British are not -- and know they're not -- going to
make it. But they may think the Big Daddy backing them up can and will. And daddy may think so
himself.
Like all bullies, the people enmeshed in this arrogant discourse don't seem to understand
that it is not frightening Russia. It's only insulting the country, and leading it to conclude
that there is indeed nothing remaining of productive, non-conflictual, US-Russian "partnership"
ties. The post-Skripal worldwide diplomatic expulsions, which seem deliberately and desperately
excessive, may have finally convinced Russia that there is no longer any use trying. Those who
should be frightened of this are the American people.
The enemy of my enemy is me.
The United States is only succeeding in turning itself into an enemy for Russians. Americans
would do well to understand how thoroughly their hypocritical and contemptuous stance has
alienated the Russian people and strengthened Vladimir Putin's leadership -- as many of Putin's
critics warned
them it would. The fantasy of stoking a "liberal" movement in Russia that will install some
nouveau-Yeltsin-ish figure is dissipated in the cold light of a 77% election day. Putin is
widely and firmly supported in Russia because he represents the resistance to any such
scheme.
Americans who want to understand that dynamic, and what America itself has wrought in
Russia, should heed the passion, anger, and disappointment in this statement about
Putin's election from a self-described "liberal" (using the word, I think, in the intellectual
tradition, not the American political, sense), Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT TV
(errors in translation by another person):
Essentially, the West should be horrified not because 76% of Russians voted for Putin, but
because this elections have demonstrated that 95% of Russia's population supports
conservative-patriotic, communist and nationalist ideas. That means that liberal ideas are
barely surviving among measly 5% of population.
And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never
surrender" mode
[W]ith all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to
stop respecting you. You and your so called "values."
We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we
wanted to live like you, but not any longer.
We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all
those people who support you.
For that you only have yourself to blame.
In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared
him an enemy, we united around him .
It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they
shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose
patriotism.
Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.
Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.
In fact, the whole "uprising"/color revolution strategy throughout the world is over. It's
been fatally discredited by its own purported successes. Everybody in the Middle East has seen
how that worked out for Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the Russians have seen how it worked out
for Ukraine and for Russia
itself . In neither Russia nor Iran (nor anywhere else of importance) are the Americans,
with their sanctions and their NGOs and their
cookies ,going to stoke a popular uprising that turns a country into a fractured client of
the Washington Consensus. More fantasy politics.
The old new world Washington wants won't be born without a military midwife. The U.S. wants
a compliant Russia ( and "international community") back, and it thinks it can force it
into being.
Fear Knot
Consider this quote from
The Saker , a defense analyst who was born in Switzerland to a Russian military family,
"studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all [his] life," and lived for 20 years in the
United States. He's been one of the sharpest analysts of Russia and Syria over the last few
years. This was his take a year ago, after Trump's cruise missile attack on Syria's Al Shayrat
airfield -- another instant punishment for an absolutely, positively, proven-in-a day, chemical
crime:
For one thing, there is no US policy on anything.
The Russians expressed their total disgust and outrage at this attack and openly began
saying that the Americans were
"недоговороспособны".
What that word means is literally "not-agreement-capable" or unable to make and then abide by
an agreement. While polite, this expression is also extremely strong as it implies not so
much a deliberate deception as the lack of the very ability to make a deal and abide by it.
But to say that a nuclear world superpower is "not-agreement-capable" is a terrible and
extreme diagnostic.
This means that the Russians have basically given up on the notion of having an adult,
sober and mentally sane partner to have a dialog with.
In all my years of training and work as a military analyst I have always had to assume
that everybody involved was what we called a "rational actor". The Soviets sure where. As
were the Americans.
Not only do I find the Trump administration "not agreement-capable", I find it completely
detached from reality. Delusional in other words.
Alas, just like Obama before him, Trump seems to think that he can win a game of nuclear
chicken against Russia. But he can't. Let me be clear here: if pushed into a corner the
Russian will fight, even if that means nuclear war.
There is a reason for this American delusion. The present generation of American leadership
was spoiled and addled by the blissful post-Soviet decades of American impunity.
The problem is not exactly that the U.S. wants full-on war with Russia, it's that
America does not fear it. [2]
Why should it? It hasn't had to for twenty years during which the US assumed it could bully
Russia to stay out of its imperial way anywhere it wanted to intervene.
After the Soviet Union broke up (and only because the Soviet Union disappeared) the
United States was free to use its military power with impunity. For some time, the U.S. had its
drunken stooge, Yeltsin, running Russia and keeping it out of America's military way. There was
nary a peep when Bill Clinton effectively conferred on NATO (meaning the U.S. itself) the
authority to decide what military interventions were necessary and legitimate. For about twenty
years -- from the Yugoslavia through the Libya intervention -- no nation had the military power
or politico-diplomatic will to resist this.
But that situation has changed. Even the Pentagon
recognizes that the American Empire is in a "post-primacy" phase -- certainly "fraying,"
and maybe even "collapsing." The world has seen America's social and economic strength
dissipate, and its pretense of legitimacy disappear entirely. The world has seen American
military overreach everywhere while winning nothing of stable value anywhere. Sixteen years,
and the mighty U.S. Army cannot defeat the Taliban. Now, that's Russia's fault!
Meanwhile, a number of countries in key areas have gained the military confidence and
political will to refuse the presumptions of American arrogance -- China in the Pacific, Iran
in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe and, surprisingly, the Middle East as well. In a
familiar pattern, America's resultant anxiety about waning power increases its
compensatory aggression. And, as mentioned, since it was Russia that most effectively
demonstrated that new military confidence, it's Russia that has to be dealt with first.
The incessant wave of sanctions and expulsions is the bully in the schoolyard clenching his
fist to scare the new kid away. OK, everyone's got the message now. Unclench or punch?
Let's be clear about who is the world's bully. As is evident to any half-conscious person,
Russia is not going to attack the United States or Europe. Russia doesn't have scores of
military bases, combat ships and aircraft up on America's borders. It doesn't have almost a
thousand military bases around the world. Russia does not have the military forces to rampage
around the world as America does, and it doesn't want or need to. That's not because of
Russia's or Vladimir Putin's pacifism, but because Russia, as presently situated in the
political economy of the world, has nothing to gain from it.
Nor does Russia need some huge troll-farm offensive to "destabilize" and sow division in
Western Europe and the United States. Inequality, austerity, waves of immigrants from
regime-change wars, and trigger-happy cops are doing a fine job of that. Russia isn't
responsible for American problems with Black Lives Matter or with the Taliban.
All of this is fantasy politics.
It's the United States, with its fraying empire, that has a problem requiring military
aggression. What other tools does the U.S. have left to put the upstarts, Russia first, back in
their places?
It must be hard for folks who have had their way with country after country for twenty years
not to think they can push Russia out of the way with some really, really scary threats, or
maybe one or two "bloody nose" punches. Some finite number of discrete little escalations.
There's already been some shoving -- that cruise missile attack, Turkey's downing of a Russian
jet, American attacks on Russian personnel (ostensibly private mercenaries) in Syria -- and,
look, Ma, no big war. But sometimes you learn the hard way the truth of the reverse Mike Tyson
rule: "Everyone has a game plan until they smack the other guy in the face."
Consider one concrete risk of escalation that every informed observer is, and every American
should be, aware of.
The place where the United States and Russia are literally, geographically, closest to
confrontation is Syria. As mentioned, the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey, have already attacked
and killed Russians in Syria, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have a far larger military force
than Russia in Syria and the surrounding area. On the other hand, Russia has made very
effective use of its forces, including what Reuters
calls "advanced cruise missiles" launched from planes,
ships , and
submarines that hit ISIS targets with high precision from 1000 kilometers.
Russia is also operating in accordance with international law, while the U.S. is not. Russia
is fighting with Syria for the defeat of jihadi forces and the unification of the Syrian state.
The United States is fighting with its jihadi clients for the overthrow of the Syrian
government and the division of the country. Russia intervened in Syria after Obama announced
that the U.S. would attack Syrian army troops, effectively declaring war. If neither side
accepts defeat and goes home, it is quite possible there will be some direct confrontation
over this. In fact, it's hard to imagine that there won't.
A couple of weeks ago Syria and Russia
said the U.S. was planning a major offensive against the Syrian government, including
bombing the government quarter in Damascus. Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff,
warned: "In the event of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, Russia's armed forces will
take retaliatory measures against the missiles and launchers used." In this context,
"launchers" means American ships in the Mediterranean.
Also a couple of weeks ago, Russia announced a number of new, highly-advanced weapons
systems. There's discussion about whether some of the yet-to-be-deployed weapons announced
may or
may not
be a bluff, but one that has already been deployed, called Dagger ( Kinzhal, not the
missiles mentioned above), is an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile that files at 5-7,000
miles per hour, with a range of 1200 miles. Analyst Andrei Martyanov claims that: "no
modern or perspective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a
single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the
destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter."
Air-launched. From anywhere.
The U.S. attack has not (yet) happened, for whatever reason (Sputnik reporter Suliman
Mulhem, citing "a military monitor," claims
that's because of the Russian warnings). Great. But given the current state of America's
anxiously aggressive "post-primacy" policy -- including the Russiamania, the Zionist-driven
need to destroy Syria and Iran, and the War Cabinet -- how unlikely is that the U.S. will, in
the near future, make some such attack on some such target that Russia considers crucial to
defend?
And Syria is just one theater where, unless one side accepts defeat and goes home, military
conflict with Russia is highly likely. Is Russia going to abandon the Russian-speaking people
of the Donbass if they're attacked by fascist Kiev forces backed by the U.S.? Is it going to
sit back and watch passively if American and Israeli forces attack Iran? Which one is going to
give up and accept a loss: John Bolton or Vladimir Putin?
Which brings us to the pointed question: What will the U.S. do if Russia sinks an American
ship? How many steps before that goes full-scale, even nuclear? Or maybe American planners (and
you, dear reader) are absolutely, positively sure that will never happen, because the U.S. has
cool weapons, too, and a lot more of them, and the Russians will probably lose all their ships
in the Mediterranean immediately, if not something worse, and they'll put up with anything
rather than go one more step. The Russians, like everybody, must know the Americans always
win.
Happy with that, are we? Snug in our homeland rug? 'Cause Russians won't fight, but the
Taliban will.
This is exactly what is meant by Americans not fearing war with Russia (or war in general
for that matter). Nothing but contempt.
The Skripal opera, directed by the United States, with the whole of Europe and the entire
Western media apparatus singing in harmony, makes it clear that the American producers have no
speaking role for Russia in their staging of the world. And that contempt makes war much more
likely. Here's The Saker again, on how
dangerous the isolation the U.S. and its European clients are so carelessly imposing on Russia
and themselves is for everybody:
Right now they are expelling Russian diplomats en mass e and they are feeling very
strong and manly.
The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial
expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have
all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff
happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made
preparations for war in Europe. Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and
Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the
USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the
continental US.
Mass diplomatic expulsions, economic warfare, lockstep propaganda, no interest whatsoever in
respectfully addressing or hearing from the other side. What we've been seeing over the past
few months is the "kind of stuff that happens when two sides are about to go to war."
The less Americans fear war, the less they respect the possibility of it, the more likely
they are to get it.
Ready or Not
The Saker makes a diptych of a point that gets to the heart of the matter. We'd do well to
read and think on it carefully:
1/ The Russians are afraid of war. The Americans are not.
2/ The Russians are ready for war. The Americans are not.
Russia is afraid of war. More than twenty million Soviet citizens were
killed in WWII, about half of them civilians. That was more than twenty times the number of
Americans and British casualties combined. The entire country was devastated. Millions died in
the 872-day siege of Leningrad alone, including Vladimir Putin's brother. The city's population
was decimated by disease and starvation, with some reduced to cannibalism. Wikileaks calls it "one of the
longest and most destructive sieges in history [and] possibly the
costliest
in casualties." Another million-plus died in the nine-month siege of Stalingrad.
Every Russian knows this history. Millions of Russian families have suffered from it. Of
course, there was mythification of the struggle and its heroes, but the Russians, viscerally,
know war and know it can happen to them . They do not want to go through it
again. They will do almost anything to avoid it. Russians are not flippant about war. They fear
it. They respect it.
The Americans are not (afraid of war). Americans have never experienced anything
remotely as devastating as this. About 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, 150 years ago.
(And we're still entangled in that!) The American mainland has not been attacked by a
significant military force since the War of 1812. Since then, the worst attacks on American
territory are two one-off incidents (Pearl Harbor and 9/11), separated by seventy years,
totaling about six-thousand casualties. These are the iconic moments of America Under
Siege.
For the American populace, wars are "over there," fought by a small group of Americans who
go away and either come back or don't. The death, destruction, and aroma of warfare -- which
the United States visits on people around the world incessantly -- is unseen and unexperienced
at home. Americans do not, cannot, believe, in any but the most abstract intellectual sense,
that war can happen here , to them. For the general populace, talk of war is just more
political background noise, Morgan Freeman competing for attention with Stormy Daniels and the
Kardashians.
Americans are supremely insouciant about war: They threaten countries with it incessantly,
the government routinely sells it with lies, and the political parties promote it
opportunistically to defeat their opponents -- and nobody cares. For Americans, war is part of
a game. They do not fear it. They do not respect it.
The Russians are ready for war. The Nazi onslaught was defeated -- in Soviet Russia,
by Soviet Citizens and the Red Army -- because the mass of people stood and fought together for
a victory they understood was important. They could not have withstood horrific sieges and
defeated the Nazis any other way. Russians understand, in other words, that war is a crisis of
death and destruction visited on the whole of society, which can only be won by a massive and
difficult effort grounded in social solidarity. If the Russians feel they have to fight, if
they feel besieged, they know they will have to stand together, take the hits that come, and
fight to the finish. They will not again permit war to be brought to their cities while their
attacker stays snug. There will be a world of hurt. They will develop and use any weapon they
can. And their toughest weapon is not a hypersonic missile; it's that solidarity, implied by
that 77%. (Did you read that Simonyan statement?) They may not be seeking it, but, insofar as
anybody can be, they are ready to fight.
Americans are not (ready for war): Americans experience the horror of wars as a
series of discrete tragedies visited upon families of fallen soldiers, reported in
human-interest vignettes at the end of the nightly news. Individual tragedies, not a social
disaster.
It's hard to imagine the social devastation of war in any case, but American culture wants
no part of thinking about that concretely. The social imagination of war is deflected into
fantastic scenarios of a super-hero universe or a zombie apocalypse. The alien death-ray may
blow up the Empire State Building, but the hero and his family (now including his or her
gender-ambivalent teenager, and, of course, the dog) will survive and triumph. Cartoon
villains, cartoon heroes, and a cartoon society.
One reason for this, we have to recognize, is the victory of the
Thatcherite/libertarian-capitalist "no such thing as society" ideology. Congratulations, Ayn
Rand, there is no such thing as American society now. It's every incipient entrepreneur
for him or herself. This does not a comradely, fighting band of brothers and sisters make.
Furthermore, though America is constantly at war, nobody understands the purpose of it.
That's because the real purpose can never be explained, and must be hidden behind some facile
abstraction -- "democracy," "our freedoms," etc. This kind of discourse can get some of the
people motivated for some of the time, but it loses its charm the minute someone gets smacked
in the face.
Once they take a moment, everybody can see that there is nobody with an army threatening to
attack and destroy the United States, and if they take a few moments, everybody can see how
phony the "democracy and freedom" stuff is and remember how often they've been lied to before.
There's just too much information out there. (Which is why the Imperial High Command wants to
control the internet.) Why the hell am I fighting? What in hell are we fighting
for? These are questions everybody will ask after, and too many people are now asking
before, they get smacked in the face.
This lack of social understanding and lack of political support translates into the
impossibility of fighting a major, sustained war that requires taking heavy casualties -- even
"over there," but certainly in the snug. American culture might be all gung-ho about Seal Team
Six kicking ass, but the minute American homes start blowing up and American bodies start
falling, Hoo-hah becomes Uh-oh , and it's going to be Outta here .
Americans are ready for Hoo-hah and the Shark Tank and the Zombie Apocalypse. They
are not ready for war.
You Get What You Play For
"Russiagate," which started quite banally in the presidential campaign as a Democratic arrow
to take down Trump, is now Russiamania -- a battery of weapons wielded by various sectors of
the state, aimed at an array of targets deemed even potentially resistant to imperial
militarism. Trump himself -- still, and for as long as he's deemed unreliable -- is targeted by
a legal prosecution of infinite reach (whose likeliest threat is to take him down for something
that has nothing to do with Russia). Russia itself is now targeted in full force by economic,
diplomatic, ideological -- and, tentatively, military -- weapons of the state. Perhaps most
importantly, American and European people, especially dissidents, are targeted by a unified
media barrage that attacks any expression of radical critique, anything that "sows division" --
from Black Lives Matter, to the Sanders campaign, to "But other countries could have made it"
-- as Russian treachery.
The stunning success of that last offensive is crucial to making a war more likely, and must
be fought. To increase the risk of war with a nuclear power in order to score points against
Donald Trump or Jill Stein -- well, only those who neither respect, fear, nor are ready for war
would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.
It's impossible to predict with certainty whether, when, or with whom a major hot war will
be started. The same chaotic disarray and impulsiveness of the Trump administration that
increases the danger of war might also work to prevent it. John Bolton may be fired before he
trims his moustache. But it's a pressure-cooker, and the temperature has spiked
drastically.
In a previous
essay , I said that Venezuela was a likely first target for military attack, precisely
because it would make for an easy victory that didn't risk military confrontation with Russia.
That's still a good possibility. As we saw with Iraq Wars 1 (which helped to end the "Vietnam
Syndrome") and 2 (which somewhat resurrected it), the imperial high command needs to inure the
American public with a virtually American-casualty-free victory and in order to lure them into
taking on a war that's going to hurt.
But the new War Cabinet may be pumped for the main event -- an attack on Iran. Trump,
Pompeo, and Bolton are all rabid proponents of regime-change in Iran. We can be certain
that the Iran nuclear deal will be scrapped, and everyone will work hard to implement the
secret agreementthe Trump administration already has with Israel to "to deal
with Iran's nuclear drive, its missile programs and its other threatening activities" -- or, as
Trump himself expresses it: "cripple the [Iranian] regime and bring it to collapse." (That
agreement, by the way, was negotiated and signed by the previous, supposedly not-so-belligerent
National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster.)
Still, as I also said in the previous essay, an attack on Iran means the Americans must
either make sure Russia doesn't get in the way or make clear that they don't care if it
does. So, threatening moves -- not excluding probing military moves -- against Russia will
increase, whether Russia is the preferred direct target or not.
The siege is on.
Americans who want to continue playing with this fire would do well to pay some respectful
attention to the target whose face they want to smack. Russia did not boast or brag or threaten
or Hoo-Hah about sending military forces to Syria. When it was deemed necessary -- when
the United States declared its intention to attack the Syrian Army -- it just did it. And
American10-dimensional-chess players have been squirming around trying to deal with the
implications of that ever since. They're working hard on finding the right mix of threats,
bluffs, sanctions, expulsions, "Shut up and go away!" insults, military forces on the border,
and "bloody nose" attacks to force a capitulation. They should be listening to their target,
who has not tired of asking for a "partnership," who has clearly stated what his country would
do in reaction to previous moves (e.g., the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and stationing of ABM
bases in Eastern Europe), whose country and family have suffered from wartime devastation
Americans cannot imagine, who therefore respects, fears, and is ready for war in ways Americans
are not, and who is not playing their game:
[2]
Though it's ridiculous that it needs to be said: I'm not talking here about the phony fear
engendered by the media presentation of the "strongman," "brutal dictator" Vladimir Putin. This
is part and parcel of comic-book politics -- conjuring a super-villain, who, we all know, is
destined to be defeated. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jim Kavanagh
"... The Gulf of Credibility - I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in https://t.co/P1wE1Y886i ..."
"... When the ruling elite wanted a war with Iraq they invented incubator babies and WMD programs that didn't exist. Their inventions were far fetched, but not unbelievable. However, the idea that the paranoid dictator Saddam was just going to hand over his most powerful weapons to religious fanatics that hated his guts, was laughably stupid. ..."
"... When the ruling elite wanted a war with Libya they invented a genocidal, Viagra-fueled, rape army. Their invention was far fetched, and bit lazy, but you could be forgiven for believing that the Mandarins believed it. ..."
"... This latest anti-Iran warmongering is just plain stupid. It's as if they don't really care if anyone believes the lies they are telling. For starters, look at the shameless liar who is telling these lies. ..."
"... Looking at this incident/narrative from any/every angle leaves one to conclude "false flag". ..."
"... As for the "most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime" that also happens to be "bazaar-level conspiracy theories involving a false-flag operation by Israel's Mossad". Because Mossad actually does that. ..."
"... If El Trumpo was going to drain the swamp, why did he take these cretins, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Abrams into his cabinet? Is the tail, wagging the dog as usual? ..."
"... The elite are both lazy and stupid. Even the Orange Man will not be sucked into another Douma style false flag operation. The reasons why this is a basic false flag is obvious. If anybody reading about this doesn't understand the culprits responsible weren't Iranian, then they should be interviewed for mental competency. ..."
"... But Pompous Mike and Bolt-on Bolt-off need to be removed from any semblance of governmental authority. I could go on but this whole affair is making me tired...I'm going back to my swamp. ..."
The Gulf of Credibility - I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack
a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in
https://t.co/P1wE1Y886i
When the ruling elite wanted a war with Iraq they invented incubator babies and WMD programs that didn't exist. Their inventions
were far fetched, but not unbelievable. However, the idea that the paranoid dictator Saddam was just going to hand over his most
powerful weapons to religious fanatics that hated his guts, was laughably stupid.
When the ruling elite wanted a war with Libya they invented a genocidal, Viagra-fueled, rape army. Their invention was far
fetched, and bit lazy, but you could be forgiven for believing that the Mandarins believed it.
This latest anti-Iran warmongering is just plain stupid. It's as if they don't really care if anyone believes the lies they
are telling. For starters, look at the shameless liar who is telling these lies.
You mean "Mr. We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole"? What a disgraceful character...
pic.twitter.com/pMtAgKaZcG
Then there are the many problems of their "proof".
Where is the video of the Iranians PLACING explosives & detonating them? Removal would be prudent by any Navy/CG. Also location
of explosives is VERY high off waterline ...Weird. It's not a limpet mine, it's a demo charge. Had to be put on by fairly high
boat w/ a long gaff/pole https://t.co/3qzB7TrrYv
The distress call went out at 6 am. So, according to CENTCOM's analysis of this video, they're suggesting that 10 hours after
the tanker was hit, the IRGC just casually pulled up to the tanker to remove unexploded limpet mine in broad daylight?!
The Japanese company that owns the ship has refused to cooperate in this
false flag mission.
But in remarks to Japanese media, the president of the company that owns the ship said the vessel wasn't damaged by a mine. "A
mine doesn't damage a ship above sea level," said Yutaka Katada, president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the vessel.
"We aren't sure exactly what hit, but it was something flying towards the ship," he said.
Looking at this incident/narrative from any/every angle leaves one to conclude "false flag".
Finally, there is the question of "why"?
What would Iran hope to accomplish by this? I found one
establishment source that tried to rationalize.
Iran denied responsibility, with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif descending to bazaar-level conspiracy theories involving a false-flag
operation by Israel's Mossad.
If you're not inclined to believe the Trump administration – and such skepticism is entirely reasonable – most detectives would
still tell you that the most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime.
To those seeking logic behind the attacks, though, it may be hard to see why Iran would do this – but that assumes that the
regime in Tehran is a rational actor.
The Gulf of Oman attacks are especially hard to explain: targeting Japanese shipping on the very day that Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe was meeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on a well-publicized peace mission would seem extraordinarily counterproductive, even
for a regime with an almost fanatical commitment to self-harm.
Have you ever noticed that everyone that we want to start a war with is crazy? Regimes that stand solid for generations under
hostile conditions are always run by maniacs. You'd think that insanity would prevent them from taking power in the first place,
but that seems to only be true with our allies.
As for the "most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime" that also happens to be "bazaar-level conspiracy theories
involving a false-flag operation by Israel's Mossad". Because Mossad actually does that.
Since the U.S.'s tightening of sanctions has squeezed Iranian oil exports, nobody else's should be allowed to pass through
waters within reach of the IRGC.
The Iranians know that these threats, if repeated, can lose their power if not followed with action. The attacks on the tankers,
then, can be explained as a demonstration that Khamenei's attack dogs have some teeth.
There is another rationale. If Iran does eventually agree to negotiate with the U.S., it will want to bring some bargaining
chips to the table – something it can exchange for the removal of sanctions. In the negotiations over the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran
was able to offer the suspension of its nuclear program. It doesn't have that particular chip now, although Tehran has recently
threatened to crank up the centrifuges again.
Meanwhile, the regime may have calculated that the only way to secure some kind of negotiating position is blackmail: End the
sanctions, or we take out some more tankers, and send oil prices surging.
This almost sounds logical, except for one thing: Iran tried that in 1988 and it didn't work. It only caused the one thing the
U.S. was itching for: to kill some Iranians.
Do you think that they've forgotten? Or that the U.S. is less warlike? Oh wait. Iranians are crazy and can't be reasoned with, amirite?
US public radio @NPR does not mention it was Iranians
who saved the crew. That's how terrible they are at journalism
-- boomerWithaLandline (@Irene34799239)
June 14, 2019
The only real question is, why such a transparent lie? Has the ruling elite gotten lazy or stupid? Or do they think that we are
that lazy and stupid? I have an alternative
theory .
For the last two years, as you've probably noticed, the corporate media have been not so subtly alternating between manufacturing
Russia hysteria and Nazi hysteria, and sometimes whipping up both at once. Thus, I've dubbed the new Official Enemy of Freedom
"the Putin-Nazis." They don't really make any sense, rationally, but let's not get all hung up on that. Official enemies don't
have to make sense. The important thing is, they're coming to get us, and to kill the Jews and destroy democracy and something
about Stalin, if memory serves. Putin is their leader, of course. Trump is his diabolical puppet. Julian Assange is well, Goebbels,
or something. Glenn Greenwald is also on the payroll, as are countless "useful idiots" like myself, whose job it is to sow division,
discord, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-Hillaryism, collusion rejectionism, ontological skepticism, and any other
horrible thing you can think of.
Their bullsh*t lies have gotten lazy and stupid because real effort isn't required to start a war and kill a lot of people.
That is the question, I ask thee? If El Trumpo was going to drain the swamp, why did he take these cretins, Bolton, Pompeo,
Haspel, Abrams into his cabinet? Is the tail, wagging the dog as usual?
The elite are both lazy and stupid. Even the Orange Man will not be sucked into another Douma style false flag operation.
The reasons why this is a basic false flag is obvious. If anybody reading about this doesn't understand the culprits responsible
weren't Iranian, then they should be interviewed for mental competency.
My money, the little that I have, is on either the Saudis or the Israelis; maybe even both.
But Pompous Mike and Bolt-on Bolt-off need to be removed from any semblance of governmental authority. I could go on but
this whole affair is making me tired...I'm going back to my swamp.
The US was always the way Orlov describes its future. It only ever belonged to those who
could keep their heads above water. You go under, and you're gone forever, and very quickly
forgotten. I don't recommend it as a social system, but that's the system.
But the people, within that system. the people are great people, with remarkable moral
fiber, in situations they understand. Those who are breathing air and not water can
rightfully enjoy the company of these others, even though many of those others might lately
be breathing an air-water mixture – and perhaps even oneself.
It's a poignant thing, these United States. The people are as good as anywhere, but only
as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of
brightness for the people. They were always a transcendent bunch, actually, in a culture
founded on spiritual independence – despite all the overlay of consumerist crap.
Somehow they uniquely evolved the means of ignoring that crap – playing the TV in the
background, for example, while reading college studies – in order to live decent
lives.
It's possible this long-remote karma of spiritual longing might still hold some embers.
Perhaps the people of the US might rediscover the power of sincere prayer? The power of
sincerity? Time alone will tell.
"... Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many conflicts. ..."
"... Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). ..."
"... Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process? ..."
"... In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital," the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International . ..."
"... U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) ..."
"... the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger , as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction. ..."
"... Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results. ..."
"... Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year. ..."
"... No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured," bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end. ..."
"... A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike. ..."
"... Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam. ..."
"... Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational awareness ." ..."
"... Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense ..."
"... Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. ..."
"... Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures -- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute. ..."
"... Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war. ..."
"... all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results. ..."
"... War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf. ..."
From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan
in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its
stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing --
and yet more bombing.
Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so
American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many
conflicts.
Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now
declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and
munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval
required).
Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of "
Made in USA " bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.
Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars
are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of
ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process?
For many of America's decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an
abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial
airliners, Americans haven't
been the target of such strikes since World War II. On Washington's battlefields across the
Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair.
There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property
of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we're no longer talking about
"war" in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as
our strong suit, our asymmetrical
advantage , our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.
Bombs away!
In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and
missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data
supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped
at least 26,172 bombs in seven
countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital,"
the U.S. and its allies dropped more than
20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to
literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600
civilians, according to
Amnesty International .
Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out
of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State
in Syria and Iraq but in
Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the
civilian death toll there even as "friendly" Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the
enemy
and killed , too. Air strikes from Somalia
to
Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing
continue to be
underreported in the American media and
downplayed by the Trump administration.
U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945,
which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later
that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least
600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term
effects of cluster
munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to
conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may
well have exceeded one million.) Today's air strikes are more limited than in those past
campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon's
scalpel, even rhetorically. When " surgical " is applied to bombing in today's
age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real
human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.
This country's propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a
winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the
early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the
U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case
of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful
non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even
when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger
, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes
to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to
yet more destruction.
Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent
in the U.S. Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenets of air power
that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air
power, defined as "flexible and versatile," will have "synergistic effects" with other military
operations. When bombing is "concentrated," "persistent," and "executed" properly (meaning not
micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate
victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it's all about. End of
story -- and of thought.
Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the
twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience
teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I'd like to offer some air
power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn't teach me, but that our leaders
might consider before launching their next "decisive" air campaign.
Ten Cautionary Tenets
About Air Power
1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with
relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World
War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.
2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would
have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air
power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring
Laos and Cambodia ), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in
defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering
the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more -- lots
more .) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the
Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year.
3. No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured,"
bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of
innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such
killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to
end.
Consider, for instance, the "decapitation" strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration's invasion of
2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all
of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to
take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause "dozens"
of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched
on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his
regime that hit the Chinese
embassy instead, killing three journalists.
Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the "precision" talk
about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a
start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even "smart" ones, do go
astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are
always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror:
the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air
strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh
insurgents to strike.
4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely
works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's
presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a
graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to
give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam.
Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North
Korea and
Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military
"messages." There's no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in
the face of the menace of those
baby-boomer-era airplanes.
5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their
munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the
present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin's boondoggle
of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least
$1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion
simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and
operate. These days, when the sky's the limit for
the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to
run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly
extravagant spending on air power.
6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command
of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational
awareness ." It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in
its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can't
negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you're high above a
potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.
7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial
power projection than with national defense . As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while
fostering the kind of "
global reach, global power " thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in
its grip.
8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens
wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air
Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American
bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground
troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields
from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the
Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn't win, they sure as hell could. The result was
escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on
the cheap due to American air supremacy.
9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact
over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures
-- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those
being bombed become more resilient and resolute.
10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the
moral high ground in war.
The Road to Perdition
If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk
about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability
to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.
For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn't precise. It's nasty,
bloody, and murderous. War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency
to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are
guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to
air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own
turf.
Who doesn't know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear
it, does it make a sound? Here's a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign
children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone
grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless
future of global destruction.
In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and
drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to
perdition.
In December of 2017, Daniel Ellsberg published a book,
"The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" . Among many other things,
he revealed the actual Strangelovian nature of our military establishment. Most enlightening
is his revelation that many in the high command of our nuclear triggers do not trust, or even
have contempt for, civilian oversight and control of the military. They covertly regard the
presidential leadership as naïve and inept, though it would be professional suicide to
admit such an attitude openly.
Comes now 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕹𝖊𝖜
𝖄𝖔𝖗𝖐 𝕿𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖘 with the
revelation that the Pentagon's Cyber Command has attacked Russia's power grid with software
"implants" designed to destroy that grid the instant a mouse click is given, thereby possibly
initiating global war. Most alarmingly, the details of this secret action were kept from the
President, lest he countermand the operation or leak it to the Russians.
So now we have a general staff that is conducting critical international military
operations on its own, with no civilian input, permission or hindrances of any kind. A
formula for national suicide, executed by a tiny junta of unelected officers who decide to
play nuclear Russian roulette.
We seem to be ineluctably and irreversibly trapped in a state of national dementia.
Just remember this: The U.S. had the technological advantage in Viet Nam, and blasted that
country, along with Cambodia, and Laos, with 7.5 million tons of bombs, (more than the entire
WWII campaign of 2.25 million tons), and the Vietnamese were still able to kick our *** out
of the country by 1975.
There is a 11th tenet: air force operations need airports or aircraft carriers, and these
are very vulnerable to modern, high precision missiles. If the enemy has plenty of missiles,
your fighters and bombers can be impeded to take off and land, or even be destroyed. Modern
aircrafts need very sophisticated and working infrastructures to be operational.
In the case of a full war with Iran, I see all hostile bases and airports destroyed or
damaged by Iranian, Hezbollah and Syrian missiles. They have tens of thousand of them - it is
30 years they have been accumulating missiles in prevision of a possible forthcoming war.
You are right. Also, there are many nations with subs and probably more countries have
acquired nukes than are willing to admit. I strongly suspect Iran already has nukes. If North
Korea has them, I see no reason that Iran wouldn't be even further ahead. They have been
under threat of US attacks for my entire lifetime. Anyway, I would not put it past some other
countries to hit US coastal cities and then deny any knowledge about who did it. There are
many capable and many people have been made enemies by our foreign policy. Surely these
people have treaties to help each other should be attack. And why would they make these
treaties public and antagonize the US military further. I'm sure there are many well kept
secrets out there. We must evolve, or the US and Israel could find it is us against the
world.
War is hell. It has always been so. The failure here is that since World War II all US
wars have been fatuously political. Actions have not been taken to win but to posture about
moral greatness and the ability to force the enemy to deal without destroying his capacity to
resist.
How can you say the US lost in Vietnam when the entire country could have been removed
from the face of the Earth? Yes the price of such removal would have been very high but it
could have been done. Do such considerations mean that if one withdraws one has lost?
The US won the war in the Pacific but it is now considered an excessive use of force that
the US used nuclear weapons to conclude the war. Perhaps the US did not use enough force then
to successfully conclude the Vietnam war? Perhaps, it failed to field the right kind of
force?
The definition of lost is an interesting one. The practical answer is that the US did lose
in many places because it was unwilling to pay the price of victory as publicly expressed.
Yet it could have won if it paid the price.
So an interesting question for military types is to ask how to lower the price. What kind
of weapons would have been needed to quickly sweep the enemy into oblivion in Vietnam let us
say, given the limits of the war? Could the war have been won without ground troops and
choppers but with half a million computer controlled drones armed with machine guns and
grenades flying in swarms close to the ground?
The factories to produce those weapons could have been located in Thailand or Taiwan or
Japan and the product shipped to Vietnam. Since only machines would be destroyed and the
drones are obviously meant to substitute for ground troops then how about a million or two
million of the drones in place of the half a million ground troops? Could the US, with
anachronistic technology to be sure, have won the war for a price that would have been
acceptable to the US?
The idea here is that one constructs an army, robot or otherwise, than can destroy the
enemy it is going to fight at a price which is acceptable. This is actually a form of
asymmetric warfare which requires a thorough understanding of the enemy and his capabilities.
The US did not enter Vietnam with such an army but with one not meant to serve in Vietnam and
whose losses would be deeply resented at home. The price of victory was too high.
But this does not mean that the US cannot win. It only means that the commitment to win in
a poorly thought out war must be great enough to pay the price of victory. This may be a
stupid thing to do but it does not mean that it cannot be done. One cannot assume that the US
will never again show sufficient commitment to win.
Victory means you get to write your own ******** version of history.The most devastating
civilian bombing campaign in human history is not even mentioned in this article. The US fire
bombing of 30 major cities in Korea with the death toll estimated at between 1.2 million and
1.6 million. I bet most US citizens aren't even aware of this atrocity or that the military
requested Truman to authorize the use of nuclear warheads which he, thankfully, declined to
do.
What does the word "victory" mean? It means whatever the rulers want it to mean. In this
case, "victory" is synonymous with prolongation and expansion of warmaking around the world.
Victory does not mean an end to combat. In fact, victory, in the classic sense, means defeat,
at least from the standpoint of those who profit from war. If someone were to come up with a
cure for cancer, it would mean a huge defeat for the cancer industry. Millions would lose
their jobs. CEO's would lose their fat pay packages. Therefore, we need to be clearheaded
about this, and recognize that victory is not what you think it is.
Talked with a guy recently. He is a pilot. He flies planes over Afghanistan. He is a
private contractor.
The program began under the Air Force. It then was taken over by the Army. It is now a
private contractor.
There are approx 400 pilots in country at a time with 3 rotations. He told me what he gets
paid. $200,000 and up.
They go up with a NSA agent running the equipment in back. He state that the dumbass
really does not know what the plane is capable of. They collect all video, audio, infrared,
and more? (You have to sense when to stop asking questions)
I just wanted to know the logistics of the info gathered.
So, the info is gathered. The NSA officer then gets with the CIA and the State Dept to see
what they can release to the end user. The end user is the SOCOM. After it has been through
review then the info is released to SOCOM.
So with all of this info on "goatherders" we still cannot pinpoint and defeat the "enemy"?
No. Too many avenues of profit and deceit and infighting. It will always be. May justice here
and abroad win in the end.
Concentrate on the true enemies. It is not your black, or Jewish, or brown, or Muslim
neighbor. It is the owners of the Fed, Dow chemical, the Rockefellers, McDonnel Douglas and
on and on and on and on and on and on..............
The ROAD to perdition passes through APARTHEID Israhell.
"It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States... has no vital
interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. Who is driving the process
and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary... " – Philip Giraldi,
Former CIA officer.
For her entire career, Warren's singular focus has been the growing fragility of America's
middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on
data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years
while employees' share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the
1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of
corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren's view of history, "The constant
tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it
to their own purposes." Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a
million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That's why economists have estimated that the
wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent.
As a presidential candidate, Warren has rolled out proposal after proposal to rewrite the
rules again, this time on behalf of a majority of American families. On the trail, she says "I
have a plan for that" so often that it has turned into a T-shirt slogan. Warren has plans
(about 20 so far, detailed and multipart) for making housing and child care affordable,
forgiving college-loan debt, tackling the opioid crisis, protecting public lands, manufacturing
green products, cracking down on lobbying in Washington and giving workers a voice in selecting
corporate board members. Her grand overarching ambition is to end America's second Gilded
Age.
"Ask me who my favorite president is," Warren said. When I paused, she said, "Teddy
Roosevelt." Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his
day -- Standard Oil and railroad holding companies -- in the name of increasing competition.
She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called
herself "a capitalist to my bones," appreciated Roosevelt's argument that trustbusting was
helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his
warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. "If you go back
and read his stuff, it's not only about the economic dominance; it's the political influence,"
she said.
What's crucial, Roosevelt believed, is to make the market serve "the public good." Warren
puts it like this: "It's structural change that interests me. And when I say structural, the
point is to say if you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce
value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top."
"... For the United States, as for all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was the climax of that bloody history. ..."
"... It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early 1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change operations, much less explained why he favored them. ..."
For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition.
You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death
and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all done in the open. That is how Alexander
overran Persia and how countless conquerors since have bent weaker nations to their will.
Invasion is the old-fashioned way.
When the United States joined the race for empire at the end of the 19th century, that was
the tactic it used. It sent a large expeditionary force to the Philippines to crush an
independence movement, ultimately killing some 200,000 Filipinos. At the other end of the
carnage spectrum, it seized Guam without the loss of a single life and Puerto Rico with few
casualties. Every time, though, U.S. victory was the result of superior military power. In the
few cases when the United States failed, as in its attempt to defend a client regime by
suppressing Augusto Cesar Sandino's nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua during the 1920s and
30s, the failure was also the product of military confrontation. For the United States, as for
all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining
whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was
the climax of that bloody history.
After that war, however, something important changed. The United States no longer felt free
to land troops on every foreign shore that was ruled by a government it disliked or considered
threatening. Suddenly there was a new constraint: the Red Army. If American troops invaded a
country and overthrew its government, the Soviets might respond in kind. Combat between
American and Soviet forces could easily escalate into nuclear holocaust, so it had to be
avoided at all costs. Yet during the Cold War, the United States remained determined to shape
the world according to its liking -- perhaps more determined than ever. The United States
needed a new weapon. The search led to covert action.
A news agency
During World War II the United States used a covert agency, the Office of Strategic
Services, to carry out clandestine actions across Europe and Asia. As soon as the war ended, to
the shock of many OSS agents, Harry Truman abolished it. He believed there was no need for such
an agency during peacetime. In 1947 he changed his mind and signed the National Security Act,
under which the Central Intelligence Agency was established. That marked the beginning of a new
era. Covert action replaced overt action as the principal means of projecting American power
around the world.
Truman later insisted that he had intended the CIA to serve as a kind of private global news
service. "It was not intended as a 'Cloak & Dagger Outfit!'" he wrote. "It was intended
merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world [not]
to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized." Nonetheless
he did not hesitate to use the new CIA for covert action. Its first major campaign, aimed at
influencing the 1948 Italian election to ensure that pro-American Christian Democrats would
defeat their Communist rivals, was vast in scale and ultimately successful -- setting the
pattern for CIA intervention in every Italian election for the next two decades. Yet Truman
drew the line at covert action to overthrow governments.
The CIA's covert-action chief, Allen Dulles, twice proposed such projects. In both cases,
the target he chose was a government that had inflicted harm on corporations that he and his
brother, John Foster Dulles, had represented during their years as partners at the globally
powerful Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1952 he proposed that the CIA
overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whose government was carrying out land reform
that affected the interests of United Fruit. By one account, State Department officials "hit
the roof" when they heard his proposal, and the diplomat David Bruce told him that the
Department "disapproves of the entire deal." Then Dulles proposed an operation to overthrow
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who had nationalized his country's oil industry.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson flatly rejected it.
White House resistance to covert regime-change operations dissolved when Dwight Eisenhower
succeeded Truman at the beginning of 1953. Part of the new administration's enthusiasm came
from Allen Dulles, Washington's most relentless advocate of such operations, whom Eisenhower
named to head the CIA. The fact that he named Dulles's brother as secretary of State ensured
that covert operations would have all the necessary diplomatic cover from the State Department.
During the Dulles brothers' long careers at Sullivan & Cromwell, they had not only learned
the techniques of covert regime change but practiced them. They were masters at marshaling
hidden power in the service of their corporate clients overseas. Now they could do the same
with all the worldwide resources of the CIA.
It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early
1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called
the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a
third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he
sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change
operations, much less explained why he favored them. He would, however, have had at least two reasons.
Since Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he was aware of
the role that covert operations such as breaking Nazi codes had played in the war victory --
something few other people knew at the time. That would have given him an appreciation for how
important and effective such operations could be. His second reason was even more powerful. In
Europe he had had the grim responsibility of sending thousands of young men out to die. That
must have weighed on him. He saw covert action as a kind of peace project. After all, if the
CIA could overthrow a government with the loss of just a few lives, wasn't that preferable to
war? Like most Americans, Eisenhower saw a world of threats. He also understood that the threat
of nuclear war made overt invasions all but unthinkable. Covert action was his answer. Within a
year and a half of his inauguration, the CIA had deposed the governments of both Guatemala and
Iran. It went on to other regime-change operations from Albania to Cuba to Indonesia.
Successive presidents followed his lead.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was once again free to launch
direct military invasions. When it found a leader it didn't like -- such as Saddam Hussein or
Muammar Qaddafi -- it deposed him not through covert action, but by returning to the approach
it had used before World War II: the force of arms. Covert efforts to overthrow governments
have hardly ceased, as any Iranian or Venezuelan could attest. The era when covert action was
America's principal weapon in world affairs, however, is over. That makes this a good time to
look back.
Metrics for covert action
Books about the Cold War heyday of covert action era are a mini-genre. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's
contribution is especially valuable. Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA
plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides
charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book
on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. Chapters on the disastrous effort to
overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe, which cost the lives of hundreds of deceived
partisans, and on the covert-action aspects of America's doomed campaign in Vietnam are
especially trenchant.
O'Rourke identifies three kinds of covert operations that are aimed at securing perceived
friends in power and keeping perceived enemies out: offensive operations to overthrow
governments, preventive operations aimed at preserving the status quo, and hegemonic operations
aimed at keeping a foreign nation subservient. From 1947 to 1989, by her count, the United
States launched 64 covert regime-change operations, while using the overt tool -- war -- just
six times. She traces the motivations behind these operations, the means by which they were
carried out, and their effects. Her text is based on meticulous analysis of individual
operations. Some other books about covert action are rip-roaring yarns. This one injects a dose
of
rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion. That rigor lends credence to
her conclusions:
When policymakers want to conduct an operation that they know violates international
norms, they simply conduct it covertly to hide their involvement.
Covert missions typically have lower potential costs than their overt counterparts, but
they are also less likely to succeed.
Can interveners acquire reliable allies by covertly overthrowing foreign governments?
Overall, I find the answer is no. Covert regime changes seldom worked out as intended.
The new leader's opponents often accused him of being a U.S. puppet and, in some cases,
even took up arms against the regime. In fact, approximately half of the governments that
came to power in a U.S.-backed covert regime change during the Cold War were later violently
removed from power.
States targeted in a covert regime-change operation appear less likely to be democratic
afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human-rights
abuses
Covert regime changes can have disastrous consequences for civilians within the target
states. Countries that were targeted by the United States for a covert regime change during
the Cold War were more likely to experience a civil war or an episode of mass killing
afterward.
Even nominally successful covert regime changes -- where U.S.-backed forces came to power
-- seldom delivered on their promise to improve interstate relations.
Although these conclusions are not new, they have rarely if ever been presented as the
result of such persuasive statistical evidence. Yet even this evidence seems unlikely to force
a reassessment of covert action as a way to influence or depose governments. It is an American
"addiction." The reasons are many and varied, but one of the simplest is that covert action
seems so easy. Changing an unfriendly country's behavior through diplomacy is a long, complex,
multi-faceted project. It takes careful thought and planning. Often it requires compromise.
Sending the CIA to overthrow a "bad guy" is far more tempting. It's the cheap and easy way out.
History shows that it often produces terrible results for both the target country and the
United States. To a military and security elite as contemptuous of history as America's,
however, that is no obstacle.
Although covert regime-change operations remain a major part of American foreign policy,
they are not as effective as they once were. The first victims of CIA overthrows, Prime
Minister Mossadegh and President Arbenz, did not understand the tools the CIA had at its
disposal and so were easy targets. They were also democratic, meaning that they allowed open
societies in which the press, political parties, and civic groups functioned freely -- making
them easy for the CIA to penetrate. Later generations of leaders learned from their ignorance.
They paid closer attention to their own security, and imposed tightly controlled regimes in
which there were few independent power centers that the CIA could manipulate.
If Eisenhower could come back to life, he would see the havoc that his regime-change
operations wreaked. After his overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran fell under royal dictatorship that
lasted a quarter-century and was followed by decades of rule by repressive mullahs who have
worked relentlessly to undermine American interests around the world. The operation he ordered
in Guatemala led to a civil war that killed 200,000 people, turning a promising young democracy
into a charnel house and inflicting a blow on Central America from which it has never
recovered. His campaign against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, which included the
fabrication of a poison kit in a CIA laboratory, helped turn that country into one of the most
violent places on Earth.
How would Eisenhower respond to the long-term disasters that followed his covert action
victories? He might well have come up with a highly convincing way to excuse himself. It's now
clear, he could argue, that covert action to overthrow governments usually has terrible
long-term results -- but that was not clear in the 1950s. Eisenhower had no way of knowing that
even covert regime-change operations that seem successful at the time could have devastating
results decades later.
We today, however, do know that. The careful analysis that is at the center of Covert
Regime Change makes clearer than ever that when America sets out to change the world
covertly, it usually does more harm than good -- to itself as well as others. O'Rourke
contributes to the growing body of literature that clearly explains this sad fact of
geopolitics. The intellectual leadership for a national movement against regime-change
operations -- overt or covert -- is coalescing. The next step is to take this growing body of
knowledge into the political arena. Washington remains the province of those who believe not
only that the United States should try to reconfigure the world into an immense American sphere
of influence, but that that is an achievable goal. In the Beltway morass of pro-intervention
think tanks, members of Congress, and op-ed columnists, America's role in the world is usually
not up for debate. Now, as a presidential campaign unfolds and intriguing new currents surge
through the American body politic, is an ideal moment for that debate to re-emerge. If it does,
we may be surprised to see how many voters are ready to abandon the dogma of regime change and
wonder, with George Washington, "Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?"
This article was originally published in the June 2019 edition ofFuture of Freedom .
This post was written by: Stephen Kinzer Stephen Kinzer is an author and
newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more
than 50 countries on five continents. His books include "Overthrow" and "All the Shah's Men".
Interesting that this Israeli-First traitor Clawson mentions Lincoln and Ft. Sumter. He finally admits what genuine historians
of the Civil War long knew: Lincoln was a warmonger and tyrant, not an emancipator. The Civil war was fought to eliminate true
freedom and equality in this country and it has been downhill ever since. The working class and soldier-class in America today
are slaves in every sense of the word. Slaves to Zion. No wonder the certified warmonger and racist Lincoln is worshiped equally
by Left and Right today, whilst genuine American patriots like Robert E. Lee have their legacy torn down. Lincoln was the proto-Neocon.
Tom Dilorenzo summed up the real Lincoln when he wrote in Lincoln Unmasked:
"Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles,
San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90 percent of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman's bombardment of
Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as
occurred in Atlanta in 1864); the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding
army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number. Would such
an American president be considered a 'great statesman' or a war criminal? The answer is obvious.
A statesman would have recognized the state's right to secede, as enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, among other places, and
then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. Agreat statesman, or even a modest
one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war.
Lincoln's warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was
harmed or killed) caused the upper South -- Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas -- to secede after originally voting
to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon
III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way.
After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into
firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history."
mathias alexand
Here's a man who holds a press conference to announce a secret plan. Only in America.
False flags here, false flags there, false flags everywhere. All too further the aims of the 'masters of the universe'. We know
who was responsible for the tanker attacks. Who are the 3 countries absolutely desperate to take Iran down and install a completely
pliant puppet regime answerable to Washington, Tel Aviv and to a lesser extent Riyadh. And creatures like Clawson, and all the
other vermin can only see $$$$. Thats all they care about. Opening up more markets to further enrich themselves. I echo the other
commenters also. The evil men stoop to for greed, power and control. Psychopaths.
harry law
The Foreign Office issued a statement saying: "It is almost certain that a branch of the Iranian military the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps attacked the two tankers on 13 June. No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible."
Unbelievable, The UK vassal will use this to as one more reason to evade their responsibilities in implementing the JCPOA.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they. The UK vassal state will spout any peice of crap in their assigned role as vassal state.
Australia is just as gushingly sycophantic and cravenly jellified.
Er . just a rough guess Bill going on the belligerent foaming at the mouth by people in those places along with the likes of Bolton
and Pompeo. In fact, you can probably go all the way back to about 1980 or so.
mark
I think the real giveaway was when all three rogue states openly stated their intention of doing this 1,000 times over the past
10 years. That was the crucial clue Sherlock Holmes was looking for.
Wilmers31
And who funds the Washington Institute? Last time I looked the International Crisis Group existed thanks to Soros and is usually
treated like a serious organisation.
Many Europeans are not in love with the idea of war with Iran, just to achieve obedience to the US. 90 million people is bigger
than Germany.
wardropper
These are the shysters, the spivs and the con men of bygone times. They are the ones who lurked at street corners, waiting for
someone to come along who was gullible enough to buy the Moon from them.
But, for some reason, they are all in politics today.
Now how could that be?
Only because there are people whom it currently suits to use shysters, spivs and con men in order to create enough chaos for
us to want to give up and just let those people have their way.
I agree with Rhys below. There is no more disgusting example of sub-humanity to be found on earth than these warmongers.
To deal with them, however, we will have to realize that their "philosophy", if you can call it that, runs very deep. It didn't
just enter their heads last week.
They are reared and trained in it.
It will be a tough battle.
wardropper
I should add that, in bygone times, the police and the law were usually able to deal with the shysters, spivs and con men, since
their lack of conscience often gave them away.
The modern version, however, which has moved into politics, was shrewd enough to use a few decades of bribery and threats in order
to build around itself a nice little shell, through which the law simply cannot penetrate, except on special occasions, mainly
for show.
Rhys Jaggar
There is a big cabal of warmongers who stoke the fuel but never see action. I find those people more disgusting than anyone on
earth.
Draft dodgers, academics, 'historians' etc etc.
Ball-less pricks is what I call them .
mark
All fully paid up members of the Bill Clinton Light Infantry.
William HBonney
Yeah, well I'm not a great fan of those who would appease Assad, Putin, Hussein, Gaddafi
You must be so proud.
andyoldlabour
The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical
weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets.
The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen.
William HBonney
The easiest, and perhaps best metric by which to judge a country, is 'do people aspire to live there? '.
I see you admire the Soviet Union, but at its dissolution, people were queuing to leave. And yet the US, and the UK, according
to you, iniquitous places of tyranny, are oversubscribed. Could it be, that for all your implied erudition, you are merely a bellend?
axisofoil
You must be a big fan of CNN and the NYT. Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?
BigB
Well, even as a pacifist: if that is his sentiment I hope he has sons or daughters in the military stationed in CENTCOM in Qatar.
I bet he hasn't, though.
Rhisiart Gwilym
He should be right there on the frontline himself. That would straighten the disgusting creep's ideas out about the 'usefulness'
of deliberately provoking war
"... The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians. The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets. The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen. ..."
WATCH: US economist urges covert violence to provoke war with Iran "I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically
go down someday one of them might not come up." Admin
Many believe war with the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the dream of some hardcore neocons in Washington since at least 2001.
Back in 2012 former employee of the IMF and current economist for the World Bank,
Patrick Clawson , provided fuel for this belief when
he was videoed obliquely advocating using covert violence so that the US president "can get to war with Iran."
In a startlingly frank speech, Clawson makes it clear he believes (and apparently approves) that the US has a history of seeking
war for profit, and of using provocations to goad its perceived enemies into starting such wars. Clawson highlights in particular
the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861
, which, he says, was deliberately engineered by president Lincoln in pursuit of an excuse to launch a war on the Southern secessionist
states.
In light of the recent alleged attacks on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, timed to coincide with the visit of the Japanese prime
minister to Iran, and in light of Secretary of State Capone Pompeo's precipitate and predictable claim the attacks were
likely perpetrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, this is an apposite time to recall this telling little incident.
Below see the transcript of Mr Clawson's remarks
Transcript
"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough and it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get
us to war with Iran which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming that the traditional way of America gets
to war is what would be best for US interests
Some people might think that mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us in to the World War two as David mentioned. You may recall we had
to wait for Pearl Harbor.
Some people might think mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War One. You may recall he had to wait for the Lusitania episode
Some people might think that mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam. You may recall they had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin
episode.
We didn't go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded, and may I point out that mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call off
the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which
the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack.
So if in fact the Iranians aren't going to compromise it would be best if somebody else started the war
But I would just like to suggest that one can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August
17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down someday one of them
might not come up.
Who would know why?
We can do a variety of things if we wish to increase the pressure. I'm not advocating that but I'm just suggesting that a it's
this is not a either-or proposition of, you know, it's just sanctions has to be has to succeed or other things.
DunGroanin
Always follow the money they made lots instantly from the firework display, it aint rocket science!
What do you expect from a Zionist Front like WINEP? They've been inciting wars for Israel for decades. "Getting the stupid goys
to fight Israel's wars for decades."
Jen
If Patrick Clawson is typical of the kind of economist employed at the IMF and then promoted to a leading position at the World
Bank, I dread to think of the calibre of people who also applied for his job in the past and were rejected. His speech is so garbled
and full of unconscious slip-ups.
andyoldlabour
The US has convinced itself of its own so called "exceptionalism", where they can say anything out in the open, reveal their greatest
desires, their unholy plans. There must be some "good" Americans who can stop this madness, or have they all become inflicted/infected
with some hate virus?
Milton
Interesting that this Israeli-First traitor Clawson mentions Lincoln and Ft. Sumter. He finally admits what genuine historians
of the Civil War long knew: Lincoln was a warmonger and tyrant, not an emancipator. The Civil war was fought to eliminate true
freedom and equality in this country and it has been downhill ever since. The working class and soldier-class in America today
are slaves in every sense of the word. Slaves to Zion. No wonder the certified warmonger and racist Lincoln is worshiped equally
by Left and Right today, whilst genuine American patriots like Robert E. Lee have their legacy torn down. Lincoln was the proto-Neocon.
Tom Dilorenzo summed up the real Lincoln when he wrote in Lincoln Unmasked:
"Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles,
San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90 percent of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman's bombardment of
Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as
occurred in Atlanta in 1864); the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding
army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number. Would such
an American president be considered a 'great statesman' or a war criminal? The answer is obvious.
A statesman would have recognized the state's right to secede, as enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, among other places, and
then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. Agreat statesman, or even a modest
one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war.
Lincoln's warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was
harmed or killed) caused the upper South -- Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas -- to secede after originally voting
to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon
III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way.
After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into
firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history."
mathias alexand
Here's a man who holds a press conference to announce a secret plan. Only in America.
False flags here, false flags there, false flags everywhere. All too further the aims of the 'masters of the universe'. We know
who was responsible for the tanker attacks. Who are the 3 countries absolutely desperate to take Iran down and install a completely
pliant puppet regime answerable to Washington, Tel Aviv and to a lesser extent Riyadh. And creatures like Clawson, and all the
other vermin can only see $$$$. Thats all they care about. Opening up more markets to further enrich themselves. I echo the other
commenters also. The evil men stoop to for greed, power and control. Psychopaths.
harry law
The Foreign Office issued a statement saying: "It is almost certain that a branch of the Iranian military the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps attacked the two tankers on 13 June. No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible."
Unbelievable, The UK vassal will use this to as one more reason to evade their responsibilities in implementing the JCPOA.
Er . just a rough guess Bill going on the belligerent foaming at the mouth by people in those places along with the likes of Bolton
and Pompeo. In fact, you can probably go all the way back to about 1980 or so.
mark
I think the real giveaway was when all three rogue states openly stated their intention of doing this 1,000 times over the past
10 years. That was the crucial clue Sherlock Holmes was looking for.
Wilmers31
And who funds the Washington Institute? Last time I looked the International Crisis Group existed thanks to Soros and is usually
treated like a serious organisation.
Many Europeans are not in love with the idea of war with Iran, just to achieve obedience to the US. 90 million people is bigger
than Germany.
wardropper
These are the shysters, the spivs and the con men of bygone times. They are the ones who lurked at street corners, waiting for
someone to come along who was gullible enough to buy the Moon from them.
But, for some reason, they are all in politics today.
Now how could that be?
Only because there are people whom it currently suits to use shysters, spivs and con men in order to create enough chaos for
us to want to give up and just let those people have their way.
I agree with Rhys below. There is no more disgusting example of sub-humanity to be found on earth than these warmongers.
To deal with them, however, we will have to realize that their "philosophy", if you can call it that, runs very deep. It didn't
just enter their heads last week.
They are reared and trained in it.
It will be a tough battle.
wardropper
I should add that, in bygone times, the police and the law were usually able to deal with the shysters, spivs and con men, since
their lack of conscience often gave them away.
The modern version, however, which has moved into politics, was shrewd enough to use a few decades of bribery and threats in order
to build around itself a nice little shell, through which the law simply cannot penetrate, except on special occasions, mainly
for show.
Rhys Jaggar
There is a big cabal of warmongers who stoke the fuel but never see action. I find those people more disgusting than anyone on
earth.
Draft dodgers, academics, 'historians' etc etc.
Ball-less pricks is what I call them .
mark
All fully paid up members of the Bill Clinton Light Infantry.
andyoldlabour
The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical
weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets.
The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen.
William HBonney
The easiest, and perhaps best metric by which to judge a country, is 'do people aspire to live there? '.
I see you admire the Soviet Union, but at its dissolution, people were queuing to leave. And yet the US, and the UK, according
to you, iniquitous places of tyranny, are oversubscribed. Could it be, that for all your implied erudition, you are merely a bellend?
BigB
Well, even as a pacifist: if that is his sentiment I hope he has sons or daughters in the military stationed in CENTCOM in Qatar.
I bet he hasn't, though.
Rhisiart Gwilym
He should be right there on the frontline himself. That would straighten the disgusting creep's ideas out about the 'usefulness'
of deliberately provoking war
<img
src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/caitlin-johnstone-130x130.jpeg"
alt="" width="100" height="100" /> I n a move that surprised exactly zero people, Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo has wasted no time scrambling
to blame Iran for damage done to two sea
vessels in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, citing exactly zero evidence.
"This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no
proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a
high-degree of sophistication," Pompeo told the press in a
statement .
"The United States will defend its forces, interests, and stand with our partners and allies
to safeguard global commerce and regional stability. And we call upon all nations threatened by
Iran's provocative acts to join us in that endeavor," Pompeo concluded before hastily shambling
off, taking exactly zero questions .
Here are seven reasons to be extremely skeptical of everything Pompeo said:
No. 1: Pompeo is a known liar, especially when it comes to Iran.
Pompeo has a
well-established history of circulating blatant lies about Iran. He recently told an audience at Texas
A&M University that when he was leading the CIA, "We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had
entire training courses."
No. 2: The US empire is known to use lies and false flags to start wars.
The U.S.-centralized power alliance has an extensive and well-documented history of
advancing preexisting military agendas using lies, false flags and psyops to make targeted
governments appear to be the aggressors. This is such a well-established pattern that "Gulf of
Tonkin" briefly trended on Twitter
after the Gulf of Oman incident. Any number of government agencies could have been involved
from any number of the nations in this alliance, including the U.S., the U.K., Saudi Arabia,
the UAE or Israel.
No. 3: John Bolton has openly endorsed lying to advance military agendas.
I
wrote an article about this last month because the Trump administration had already begun
rapidly escalating against Iran in ways that happen to align perfectly with the longtime
agendas of Trump's psychopathic Iran hawk National security adviser. At that time people were
so aware of the possibility that Bolton might involve himself in staging yet another Middle
Eastern war based on lies that The Onion
was already spoofing it .
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News' "Freedom Watch," Bolton and the show's host
Andrew Napolitano were debating about
recent WikiLeaks publications , and naturally the subject of government secrecy came
up.
"Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of
national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that's appropriate," Bolton said . "You know
Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should
be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies."
"Do you really believe that?" asked an incredulous Napolitano.
"Absolutely," Bolton replied.
"You would lie in order to preserve the truth?"
"If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would
do it," Bolton answered.
No. 4: Using false flags to start a war with Iran is already an established idea in the DC
swamp.
Back in 2012 at a forum for the Washington Institute of Near East Policy think tank, the
group's Director of Research Patrick Clawson
openly talked about the possibility of using a false flag to provoke a war with Iran,
citing the various ways the U.S. has done exactly that with its previous wars.
"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it's very hard for me to see
how the United States president can get us to war with Iran," Clawson began .
"Which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming, that the traditional
way that America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests," Clawson added. "Some
people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war you may recall we had to
wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think that Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War
One; you may recall we had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr.
Johnson wanted to get us into Vietnam; you may recall we had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin
episode. We didn't go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that
Mr. Lincoln did not feel that he could call out the Army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which
is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South
Carolinians said would cause an attack."
"So if, in fact, the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else
started the war," Clawson continued. "One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I
mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people,
Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day, one of them might not come up. Who would
know why? [Smattering of sociopathic laughter from the crowd.] We can do a variety of things,
if we wish to increase the pressure (I'm not advocating that) but I'm just suggesting that this
is not an either/or proposition -- just sanctions have to succeed or other things. We are in
the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier at that."
No. 5: The US State Department has already been running psyops to manipulate the public Iran
narrative.
State Department officials admitted to congressional staff at a closed-door meeting on
Monday that a $1.5 million troll farm had gone "beyond the scope of its mandate" by
aggressively smearing American critics of the Trump administration's Iran policy as
propagandists for the Iranian government, according to
a new report from The Independent . That "mandate" had reportedly consisted of
"countering propaganda from Iran," also known as conducting anti-Iran propaganda.
"Critics in Washington have gone further, saying that the programme resembled the type of
troll farms used by autocratic regimes abroad," says The Independent .
"One woman behind the harassment campaign, a longtime Iranian-American activist, has
received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the State Department over the years to promote
'freedom of expression and free access to information,'" the report reads.
No. 6: The Gulf of Oman narrative makes no sense.
One of the ships damaged in the attacks was Japanese-owned, and the other was bound for
Japan . This happened just as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe was in Tehran attempting to negotiate a de-escalation between the U.S. and Iran with
Trump's blessing, and just after Iran had released a
prisoner accused of conducting espionage for the U.S. in what many took to be a gesture of
good faith.
Iran has been conducting itself with remarkable restraint in the face
of relentless sanctions and provocations from the U.S. and its allies. It wouldn't make much
sense for it to suddenly abandon that restraint with attacks on sea vessels, then
rescue their crew , then deny perpetrating the attacks ,
during a time of diplomatic exchanges and while
trying to preserve the nuclear deal with Europe. If Tehran did perpetrate the attacks in
order to send a strong message to the Americans, it would have been a very mixed message sent
in a very weird way with very odd timing.
No. 7: Even if Iran did perpetrate the attack, Pompeo would still be lying.
Pompeo's statement
uses the words "unprovoked" twice and "Iran's provocative acts" once, explicitly claiming that
the U.S. empire was just minding its own business leaving Iran alone when it was attacked out
of the blue by a violent aggressor. Sometimes the things put out by the U.S. State Department
feel like they're conducting experiments on us, just to test the limits of our stupidity.
As noted in
this article by Moon of Alabama and this discussion on the Ron Paul Liberty Report , the
U.S. has been provoking Iran with extremely aggressive and steadily tightening sanctions, which
means that even if Tehran is behind the attacks, it would not be the aggressor and the attacks
would most certainly not have been "unprovoked." Economic sanctions are an act of war ; if China were to do
to America's economy what America is doing to Iran's, the U.S. would be in a hot war with China
immediately. It could technically be possible that Iran is pushing back on U.S. aggressions and
provocations, albeit in a strange and neoconservatively convenient fashion.
Either way, we have seen exactly zero evidence supporting Pompeo's claims, so anyone you see
hastening to blame Iran for the Gulf of Oman incident is either a war whore or a slobbering
moron, or both. Knowing what we know about the U.S.-centralized empire and its pre-existing regime change agenda
against Iran , there is no reason to believe Pompeo and many reasons not to.
Caitlin Johnstone could have added several more reasons to doubt. For example, there is no
evidence that the regime in Iran is now or ever has been suicidal. Another might be that
weighing what Pompeo says against what his Iranian counterpart says on any given day about
the same subject leads to invidious conclusions about Pompeo. And yet another might be to
recall that Iran has about 200 years of not attacking others. And the USA?
bob , June 15, 2019 at 01:46
I hate amerika
Tom Kath , June 15, 2019 at 00:44
My father grew up in nazi Germany and taught us 3 basic rules about how to interpret the
news media. – Always ask yourself
1/ Why this? (of all the millions of happenings in the world)
2/ Why now? (There is always some strategic reason that you are being focused on this at this
time)
3/ Why in this way? (Any occurrence can be presented to make someone appear favourably or
unfavourably)
The nazi press was no better than our MSM at teaching us this.
Joe S. , June 15, 2019 at 00:19
I don't know how they expect us to buy the narrative of Iran wishing to bomb a Japanese
tanker as Japan is attempting to overstep US's ridiculous sanctions and develop business ties
with Iran.
This makes me believe they were not only attempting a false flag, but also sending Japan a
message in the process.
dasit , June 15, 2019 at 00:08
fire your proofreader
it's spelled "gulf of tonkin"
Don Bacon , June 15, 2019 at 00:05
One reason to accept Pompeo's view.
Johnstone
The U.S. has been provoking Iran with extremely aggressive and steadily tightening sanctions,
which means that even if Tehran is behind the attacks, it would not be the aggressor and the
attacks would most certainly not have been "unprovoked."
Economic sanctions are an act of
war; if China were to do to America's economy what America is doing to Iran's, the U.S. would
be in a hot war with China immediately. It could technically be possible that Iran is pushing
back on U.S. aggressions and provocations, albeit in a strange and neoconservatively
convenient fashion.
So it possible (and likely, in my view) that Iran is reacting against US aggression, and
who can blame them. Iran has said it will react, and it has. There may well be more,
asymmetric Iran warfare against the Great Satan who will be powerless to react
effectively.
Joe , June 15, 2019 at 00:22
Why would they take it out on a country that seems willing to overstep US's ridiculous
sanctions (Japan)? Makes absolutely no sense to attack a country willing to give the US the
middle finger.
Tom Kath , June 15, 2019 at 00:51
Mr Shakespeare, you missed Caitlin's point – "Even If" (Iran was responsible),
"Pompeo would still be lying".
Linda Lewis , June 14, 2019 at 23:44
Quote: "This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise
needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact
that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such
a high-degree of sophistication," Pompeo told the press in a statement.
Apparently, they using the same assessment boilerplate used to justify attacking Syria
over alleged (and now discredited) sarin attacks.
CNN reports tonight at 10:45 p.m. that before the tanker attack, Iranians fired a missile
at a US MQ-9 Reaper Drone. So why wasn't this the actual source of the flying ordinance that
the Japanese tanker owner said struck his tanker?
Just wondering, what was the mission of that US drone?
"The Reaper has a 950-shaft-horsepower (712 kW) turboprop engine [that] allows the Reaper to
carry 15 times more ordnance payload and cruise at about three times the speed of the
MQ-1.[6] The aircraft is monitored and controlled by aircrew in the Ground Control Station
(GCS), including weapons employment." [Wikipedia]
"This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no
proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a
high-degree of sophistication," does Pompeo admit that his "assessment" is baseless?
intelligence -- to paraphrase Ghandi, "it would be an excellent idea"
the weapons use -- so far, there is no clarity what weapons were used, US Navy suspect
"limpet mines", the crew member talked about "flying objects" which is highly non-specific,
but most probably it would be drones
expertise needed to execute the operation, as drones seem to be most probable, Gulfie
proxies in Syria used drones many times, Americans and allies obviously have drone expertise,
Hoothi have them -- basically, if your reference point is clerical personnel, such expertise
would be baffling, but ME warriors of all sorts know how to use it, particularly against
large slowly moving targets with no air defenses
recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping -- number one, ascribing the attacks in Fujaira
to Iran is debatable, number two, limpet mines were used at that time, which explains why US
Navy makes torturous arguments that they were used in this case too
too sophisticated for the dim bulbs living on the southern shores of the Gulf or other
putative black flaggers -- now, is Pompeo insulting Mossad, intelligence of KSA and UAE and
so on?
too sophisticated for the moro
old geezer , June 14, 2019 at 22:17
an interesting thought experiment ; let the iranians close the straight of hormuz.
i wonder how long before ms johnstone et all would whine about the obscene profits of
american oil producers.
Kevin Schmidt , June 14, 2019 at 22:44
I wonder how long it took you to build that whiny thought experiment strawman.
Joe S , June 15, 2019 at 00:26
I can see the paid shills are working overtime. Have to clean up the sloppiness of the war
oligarchs because they have ran out of ideas on how to gain support. It is actually kind of
funny watching them make a fool of themselves. It is also funny to watch you shills stumble
for things to say. The only thing you can think of is saying "strawman" but offer no
explanation. Smart dude. I'm sur they will take it out of your pay.
CitizenOne , June 14, 2019 at 21:53
I agree. There is a common theme here and this administration seems to be covert actions
on steroids. It is not Trump but he has been persuaded to let these neocons in the room and
run wild and free with power disruptions, riots, coups and assassination attempts in
Venezuela and all sorts of threats to Iran.
Isn't it odd that the US government should be enraged about the two primary nationalized
oil companies. Iran and Venezuela.
If there is a war, it will be a war purely about oil and nothing else. Perhaps when we
come through the ashes of our greedy war for oil we will abandon our addiction to fossil
fuel.
Nah, who am I kidding. It will be Mad Max World on the toxic dying planet. Planet of the
Apes.
mike k , June 14, 2019 at 21:40
The best reason for disbelieving Pompeo is his record of lying, war mongering, and blind
support for Israel. This man has utter disregard and contempt for the truth.
"... Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south, and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not. ..."
"... Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist. ..."
"... Daesh are like another Gladio, but on steroids. ..."
Yes. Originally, creation of the "Arc of Crisis" was proposed by Bernard Lewis as a means to divide and rule, which has always
been the British Empire's mody operandi , and Zbigniew Brzezinski wanted to create an "Arc of Crisis" all along the southern
border of the USSR and later, Russia.
Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south,
and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in
perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies
whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not.
There are many different aspects to this, like from the moment that large numbers of prisoners on death row in S.A. were given
the ultimatum for joining the FSA or decline and face certain execution.
Too often regions are deliberately being exploited by greedy individuals and mixed into politics.
Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist.
Warren (D)(1): "Elizabeth Warren to introduce bill cancelling up to $50,000 in student debt
for most borrowers" [
MarketWatch ]. "The Democratic Senator of Massachusetts plans to introduce legislation in
the coming weeks that mirrors her presidential campaign proposal
Under the proposal
Warren released as part of her presidential campaign in April, borrowers with a household
income of less than $100,000 would have $50,000 of their student debt cancelled and borrowers
with an income between $100,000 and $250,000 would be eligible for some student debt
cancellation -- though not the full $50,000. Borrowers earning $250,000 or more would receive
no debt cancellation.
Her campaign estimated the plan would cost $640 billion, which would be paid through a tax
on the ultra-wealthy." • I don't think it makes sense to introduce free college without
giving relief to those who, because they chose to be born at the wrong time, are subject to a
lifetime of debt, so kudos to Warren.
That said, note the complex eligibility requirements; Warren just can't help herself. Also,
of course, you can drown in an inch of water, so pragmatically, even $50,000 might not mean all
that much, especially since servicers gotta servicer.
Warren (D)(2): "Elizabeth Warren's plan to pass her plans" (interview) [Ezra Klein,
Vox ]. Klein: "Do you think that there's a way to sequence your agenda such that you're
building momentum as opposed to losing it?" Warren: "Here's my theory: It starts now. That's
what true grassroots building is about. Green New Deal. More and more people are in that fight
and say that matters to me. Medicare-for-all, that fight that matters to me [No, it doesn't.
–lambert]. As those issues over the next year and a quarter get clearer, sharper, they're
issues worth fighting for, and issues where we truly have leadership on it, have people out
there knocking doors over it . You asked me about my theory about this. This is the importance
of engaging everyone. The importance not just of talking to other senators and representatives
but the importance of engaging people across this country." • This language seems awfully
vague, to me. For example, when Sanders says "Not me, us," I know there's a campaign structured
to back the words up. I don't get that sense with Warren. I also know that Sanders knows who
his enemies are ("the billionaires"). Here again, Warren feels gauzy to me ("the wealthy"). And
then there's this. Warren: "I believe in markets But markets without rules are theft." This is
silly. Markets with rules can be theft too! That's what
phishing equilibria are all about! (And the Bearded One would would argue that labor
markets under capitalism are theft , by definition.) But I'd very much
like to hear the views of readers less jaundiced than I am. Clearly Warren has a complex piece
of policy in her head, and so she and Klein are soul-mates.
"... I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the masses. ..."
"... As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay." ..."
"... Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free, even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept conventional wisdom. ..."
"... The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a racket and openly say so. ..."
"... The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it is another matter. ..."
"... These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is, to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it. ..."
Thank you Caitlin for this piece. Depressing but not unexpectedly so. And if my late
husband's FB friends (as I've mentioned on here before) are anything to go by, the
overwhelmingly bourgeois crowd will continue to be *willingly* propagandized with the
Russophobic, Sinophobic and Iranophobic lies of commission and omission that regale them via
MSDNC, NPR, PBS, BBC and the so-called "progressive" press (e.g. The guardian, Jacobin, the
NYT).
These friends post pro-Demrat, pro-Russiagate, consider the choice to be between Warren
and Klobuchar (?), and concentrate their minds on *progressive* ideations: sexual
preference/"gender" identity/racial/ethnic identity and now and then a little on climate
change (especially via the "green ND" – saving capitalism being all consuming or
ignored). Never a word about income inequality, about the ongoing slaughter in Yemen, of the
ongoing, never-ending nightmare of Palestinian life, of what we have done to Libya, Iraq or
Afghanistan or are doing to Syria. Not a word about the immorality, illegality of our
economic sanctions against NK, VZ, Iran nooo. Nary a peep about what we (US-UK-AU) are doing
to Assange .
These really existing realities as lived by "others" whether the poor within these borders
or the darker hued folks far from these shores do *not* matter one iota, certainly not by
comparison with being able to vacation in this or that place, buy a bigger house, more
clothes, demonstrate one's *Progressiveness.*
I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the
masses.
For example, we are now being inundated with the NARRATIVE that Iran is attacking Japanese
oil tankers. Pure nonsense, but the media is an adjunct of the bankster/military/oil
industrial complex.
Politicians are merely puppets doing the bidding of their pay masters.
Sam F , June 14, 2019 at 05:46
Yes, money control of mass media is the problem. Such articles may help some with doubts
to formulate an awareness that leads to admission of the problem. The major factor in
admissions is the rare direct experience, which may include a story close to home, a personal
loss due to narrative control. Of course the majority seek the mass media narrative because
it directs them to safety and profit in their social and economic dependent relationships.
Our unregulated market economy encourages the selfishness that enslaves the people to money
power. As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is
dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay."
I hope to set up a college of policy debate CPD constituted to protect all points of view,
and to conduct moderated text-only debate among experts of several disciplines, of the status
and possibilities of each world region, and the policy options. Debate summaries commented by
all sides are to be made available for public study and comment. The CPD would bring the
knowledge of society into public debate, educate the electorate, discourage propaganda, and
expose the wrongs of society and the corruption of government that desperately needs
reform.
The debates will require a higher standard of argument in foreign and domestic policy on
both right and left, ensure that all points of view are heard, and require all challenges to
be answered. This would have much reduced the group-think that led to our mad wars since
WWII. Extreme and naïve politicians will be easier to expose, and media commentators
will have a starting point and a standard for investigation and analysis.
Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:14
Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free,
even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept
conventional wisdom.
Donald Duck , June 14, 2019 at 03:18
"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." I have forgotten who actually said this
but it seems appropriate for our age. I think the mass of people are very well aware of what
is going on. The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a
racket and openly say so.
The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of
this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is
not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it
is another matter.
If note is taken of the David Icke phenomenon it is possible to identify a growing
awareness of the of ordinary people to the crimes of the rich and powerful.
These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any
social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is,
to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the
US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US
hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it.
Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:21
"Quiet desperation" is ftom Thoreau. The colossus with the feet of clay is the Biblical
book of Daniel, the dream of Nebuchadnezzar.
Neither Reptilans nor Zionists make us Americans commit the crimes and follies we do. We
oirselves are responsible.
T.J , June 14, 2019 at 02:43
Caitlin Johnstone has concisely and precisely, in this article, provided a compendium of
ideas and sources to explain how the powerful through it's control of propaganda corrupts
democracy to the core. Laziness, ignorance and acceptance of the status quo prevents the vast
majority from acknowledging this to be the case. As Caitlin states it takes courage to reject
the "narrative control matrix " of the powerful and that can only be achieved by changing our
relationship with that narrative. This, of course, takes time and effort but is liberating
nonetheless.
Despite
the deep schism that separates America's deranged political duopoly, they do share a common
foreign policy pet project, and that is to prevent Russia from ever shining again on the global
stage in all fields of endeavor.
One of Donald Trump's main pledges on the 2016 campaign trail was to rekindle the dying
embers of US-Russia relations, which had been undergoing a mini Ice Age under Barack Obama, his
ballyhooed 'reset' notwithstanding. But before Trump was ever put to the test of romancing
Russia, he was sidelined by one of the most malicious political stunts of the modern age.
It is only necessary to recall the 2016 Winter of Our Discontent when the Democratic leader
sent
35 Russian diplomats and their families packing just before New Year's Eve in retaliation for
Russia's alleged involvement in hacking the Democratic National Committee's computers. Before
Trump ascended the throne, those unfounded claims lit the fuse on 'Russiagate,' the debacle
which continues to undermine not just US-Russia relations, but the entire US political
system.
Yet would things have turned out any differently between Washington and Moscow had the
Democrats graciously accepted defeat in 2016 without feeling the need to blame remote Russia? I
am not sure.
Today, observers reason that
the US Republicans have no choice but to 'get tough' on Russia in an effort to dispel
Democrat-generated rumors of excessive coziness with the Kremlin. Last year, for example, Trump
bested Obama on the Russia front when he expelled 60 Russian diplomats in response to an
alleged assassination attempt on former British spy, Sergey Skripal; an astonishing move on the
part of the US conservative, but with so much riding on the line was it really a surprise?
And what was it exactly that was 'riding on the line'? Aside from good relations between the
world's two premier nuclear powers, not to mention thwarting nuclear Armageddon as Prime
Minister Theresa May very unwisely
issued an ultimatum to Russia over the matter, there is the question of hundreds of
billions of dollars of business contracts – from gas supplies to military hardware.
Tycoon Trump would sooner win over European gas supplies than the plains of Central Asia, for
example, the geopolitical lynchpin so dear to the hearts of US policymakers, like the late
Zbigniew Brzezinski. This is where so many people misread Donald Trump: His heart and mind is
devoted to the business deals, not the military steals. But that doesn't necessarily make his
moves are any less dangerous.
From President Trump's perspective, Russia is a 500-pound cigar-chomping guy at the
negotiating table with an ego and stature equal to his own that must be vanquished lest The
Deal be lost and he – Donald J. Trump, CEO and Founder of The Trump Organization –
look like a second-rate negotiator and fraud. Similar to the methods a belligerent globalist,
Trump the inveterate businessman will do anything to achieve leverage in the pursuit of
profit.
This is where Trump was only too happy to oblige the British with their extremely suspect
Skripal story because vilifying the Russians, once again, would give the US an upper hand in
stealing business away from Moscow, most notably in the realm of European gas supplies.
Presently, the Trump administration is trying hard to halt progress on Nord Stream 2, an
ambitious 11 billion euro ($12.4 billion) project to construct a gas pipeline under the Baltic
Sea from Russia to Germany.
Speaking from Kiev this week, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry
said Washington, once again endorsing the spirit of free competition and enterprise, was
preparing to introduce sanctions on foreign companies involved in the project.
But that's just the beginning.
To show how low the Americans would stoop to get a piece of this lucrative European market,
which the Russian's have been dutifully supplying for many decades, they've gone for some
dramatic
rebranding , calling LNG supplies "freedom gas." You know, the byproduct of 'freedom
fries.'
"Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom
gas throughout the world by giving America's allies a diverse and affordable source of clean
energy," said US Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes.
Dmitry Peskov, official spokesman of the Russian president, scoffed at such cynical attempts
by Washington to strong-arm nations into accepting its preferred version of the 'free
market.'
"Instead of fair competition they prefer to act like in Wild West times," Peskov told RT's
Sophie Shevardnadze ahead of the St.
Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). "They just show the gun and say that no,
you guys here in Europe, you are going to buy our natural gas and we don't care that it is at
least 30% more expensive than the gas coming from the Russians. This is the case."
Perhaps nowhere else is this effort to 'control the market' more evident than in the realm
of military spending, and particularly among NATO states. Currently, European countries spend
some $240 billion annually on military weapons and forces, while Russia spends just $66 billion
each year. Yet for businessmen like Trump, that is not good enough. Employing the vacuous claim
of an 'aggressive Russia,' Trump is passing around the proverbial hat, demanding
that NATO members contribute an ever-higher amount of their GDP to military spending. At the
same, the eastern border with Russia has become militarized like never before.
Here there is striking convergence on the part of the Democrats and Republicans when it
comes to Russia. The Democrats under Barack Obama, accepting the baton passed to them by the
Bush administration, dropped a US-made missile
defense system in Romania, a stone's throw from the Russian border. Obama's assurances that the
Russians would be allowed to participate in the project were casually forgotten. But the
Russians, who know a thing or two about military strategy, did not forget. Last year, Vladimir
Putin unveiled a number of
daunting military breakthroughs, including hypersonic weapons, which the Russian leader
explained were developed with the sole purpose of striking a strategic balance between the two
nuclear superpowers. And if the world needs more of anything these days, it is certainly
balance.
With such ploys in mind, it is easy to see why Moscow has little cause for celebration with
either a Democrat or Republican in the White House. Both political parties have long viewed
Russia not as a potential partner that could lend tremendous assistance in resolving some of
the planet's most intractable problems, but rather as some Cold War foe that needs vilified and
vanquished. Of course there is good reason for this decades-long duplicity. The double-pronged
attack by the Democrats and Republicans allows Washington to continue to make strategic inroads
against Russia, as well as China, while filling the corporate coffers at the same time. It is
an age-old strategy – albeit a foolhardy one in an age of nuclear weapons – which
is doomed to ultimate failure, if not disaster, if left unchecked. The views of individual
contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags:
NATOPerryRussiaTrumpUS
Warren (D)(1): [Team Warren, Medium ]. "The
rising cost of rent reflects a basic supply-and-demand problem. There aren't enough places to
rent that are affordable to lower-income families. That's because developers can usually turn
bigger profits by building fancier new units targeted at higher-income families rather than
units targeted at lower-income families. The result is a huge hole in the marketplace."
•
I'm not a housing maven by any stretch of the imagination, but I think a story that doesn't
consider the role of private equity in snapping up distressed housing after the Crash is likely
to be a fairy tale.
Warren (D)(2): "The Memo: Warren's rise is threat to Sanders" [
The Hill ]. "'She certainly does seem to be taking votes away from him,' said Democratic
strategist Julie Roginsky. 'It seems as if, as she is rising, he is falling.'" • The
national averages don't show that.
"... As it is, it seems that the corporate Democrats and Clintonites new strategy is to promote Warren and then start leaning on
her heavily in an effort to convert Warren to the neoliberal "dark side" or have her not be a problem for them. ..."
"... Her stance on single payer is troubling and telling, and her foreign policy positions and worldview are absolutely atrocious.
She has good policy ideas (not great political instincts), but none of the ideas at the present time have movements behind them and
would need those movements to push them through. ..."
"... As for Warren, I believe she could have value in a narrowly defined (finance-related) role in a Sanders administration. I will
not vote for her for president. Her foreign policy is atrocious, she doesn't support single payer, and she has proven herself to be
a garden variety neoliberal on all but her own niche issues. ..."
As it is, it seems that the corporate Democrats and Clintonites new strategy is to promote Warren and then start leaning
on her heavily in an effort to convert Warren to the neoliberal "dark side" or have her not be a problem for them.
Warren has unfortunately shown just how easy it is to get her to back down under pressure and there is also the fact that she
has been willing to carry water for the Clintonites before to advance her own political career like she did in the 2016 election.
At this point, I would seriously consider Yang to be my third choice after Sanders and Gabbard if it came down to it. Warren
would probably be either incapable or unwilling to face any serious political opposition either from Trump or neoliberal Democrats
and would probably cave.
Her stance on single payer is troubling and telling, and her foreign policy positions and worldview are absolutely atrocious.
She has good policy ideas (not great political instincts), but none of the ideas at the present time have movements behind them
and would need those movements to push them through.
Is she the person to lead movements and to help them grow? I can't see anyone making that case. She has had an impact on issues,
with the CFPB, which is good, but that was her work within academia. Different animal than actual movement building. Here, we
have single payer and she has backtracked.
So, changes that may happen down the road, great. At least provides some alternatives and possibly a path from here to there.
But, the fights we could win in the shorter term? Waffles. No thanks. I think she can play a great role in her current position
or if Bernie were to win, in his administration, but I think she would be very problematic as a general election nominee. Just
my opinion. I like her more than Biden and a number of others running but that says more about them than her.
The first thought that entered my mind when I saw that quote from Biden was that he really is suffering from cognitive decline.
As for Warren, I believe she could have value in a narrowly defined (finance-related) role in a Sanders administration.
I will not vote for her for president. Her foreign policy is atrocious, she doesn't support single payer, and she has proven herself
to be a garden variety neoliberal on all but her own niche issues.
The only candidates besides Sanders I would vote for (Gabbard and Gravel) have less chance of getting the nomination than he
does. If Sanders is not the Democratic nominee, I will once again be voting Green.
This is a typical Trump. He understands that "protection of Germany" is a profitable "protection racket" for the USA, but still lies.
Notable quotes:
"... U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction companies involved in the pipeline's construction. ..."
U.S. president reiterates threats over Nord Stream 2 project
Russia says efforts to block pipeline amount to 'blackmail'
'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on Pipeline,' says Trump 'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on
Pipeline,' says Trump Close Share
Donald Trump upped his criticism of Germany on
Wednesday as he threatened sanctions over Angela Merkel's continued support for a gas pipeline from Russia and warned that he could
shift troops away from the NATO ally over its defense spending.
Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said he's looking at sanctions to block the
project he's warned would leave Berlin "captive" to Moscow. The U.S. also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany.
"We're protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany" for its gas,
Trump told reporters at the White House during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The comments were the latest sign of how U.S.-German ties have eroded in recent years. The U.S. president has repeatedly rebuked
Merkel's government over the pipeline project, trade policies and defense spending. Germany, in turn, has criticized Trump's moves
to abandon international agreements, including on climate change and Iran.
Though he didn't say which companies or governments could potentially face sanctions, Trump's comments about the pipeline generated
a swift response from Moscow, which said the American president was engaging in "nothing other than blackmail and a form of unfair
competition," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Merkel and Trump met most recently last week during anniversary celebrations of the 1944 D-Day invasion. That gathering came days
after the EU's longest-serving leader took Trump to task at a commencement address at Harvard University, urging students to "tear
down walls" and not to treat "lies as truth." Without naming the U.S. leader, Merkel left little doubt as to whom she might mean
to a crowd who cheered her on.
U.S. opposition to the gas pipeline is bipartisan, out of concern that Russia could use its supplies of natural gas to exert pressure
on Western European nations dependent on the fuel. U.S. lawmakers also fear that with an added northern pipeline for its gas, Russia
could more easily cut off fuel to Ukraine, which is now a key transit country to Europe.
"Germany is making a tremendous mistake" by relying on the pipeline from Russia, Trump said during a joint news conference with
Duda.
Regardless of the political controversy, the Nord Stream 2 project has
faced delays and may not be ready to transport gas until the second half of 2020, according to a report made public by Denmark's
Energy Agency.
Nord Stream 2 organizers argue a new pipeline is needed to guarantee supplies will continue to flow in the coming decades as EU
domestic reserves shrink and import needs rise. Opponents of the project say it hurts the bloc's cohesion and weakens its Energy
Union strategy aimed at integrating the region's gas and power markets, diversifying energy supplies and improving security.
Uniper SE, Engie SA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, OMV AG and BASF SE's Wintershall are European partners of Russia's Gazprom PJSC in
financing the project to expand Nord Stream by 55 billion cubic meters a year. Russia supplies a third of Europe's gas and has no
plans to give up its share to the expanding list of competitors from Norway to the U.S.
Trump, speaking during the news conference Wednesday, said that Poland signed a contract to purchase an additional $8 billion
of liquefied natural gas from U.S. companies, on top of $25 billion already under contract.
Trump said he'll meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Japan at the end of the month, though
its not clear the pipeline project will be on their agenda.
2016 data. Source: Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction
companies involved in the pipeline's construction.
Senators Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, have drafted a bill that would target U.S.
sanctions at vessels laying the pipeline and deny U.S. visas to executives from companies linked to the ships. The legislation would
also block transactions in U.S.-based property or interests belonging to those individuals and would penalize entities that provide
insurance to the project.
In the latest sign of Trump's frustration over German defense spending, the president said he's discussed sending as many as 2,000
more U.S. troops to Poland -- and might take them from Germany since he believes Berlin isn't spending enough on defense as a partner
in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There are more than 30,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
Under an agreement reached during the Obama administration, NATO members committed to spending 2% of GDP on defense by the mid-2020s,
a level only seven
nations were estimated to have reached in 2018.
"Germany's at 1%, they should be at 2%," Trump said. According to NATO documents, spent about 1.2 percent of GDP on defense in
2018.
The U.S. already has a few thousand troops in Poland as part of its role in NATO. Trump's move, if carried out, would add to that,
but it wasn't clear if the forces would be permanently based there or just rotated through.
-- With assistance by Daryna Krasnolutska, Nick Wadhams, Daniel Flatley, Stepan Kravchenko, Ewa Krukowska, and Vanessa Dezem
This just in from the Big Island. The natives seem restless.
"Imagine if you will, in a few short years, that information on current events will only be available from a narrow band of sources
sanctioned by the government/corporate media. And this Orwellian future will be embraced by the majority of people because it
provides security, both ideological and emotional.
Any dissension, criticism, whistle-blowing, anti-exceptionalism coming from critical voices will be labeled extremist. And
this has been embraced by the two monopoly political parties.
I just received a questionnaire from the Democrats posing the question, "What's the most important issue in the upcoming
election?"
The very first multiple choice answer to pick from was - "Russian aggression and increasing global influence" Russia, a country with a small population and an economy that is a fraction of the US or Europe is our dire threat? Let's
just ignore the expansion of NATO onto Russia's borders, or that the US State Dept. spent 5 billion dollar to change the politics
of Ukraine.
Second most important issue asked on the questionnaire, "Protecting America from foreign cyber attacks" Let's ignore
the fact that the NSA is spying on all Internet traffic, that the CIA has misinformation programs like, "Operation Mockingbird"
and many other covert activities to influence perceptions domestically.
The third Democratic Party priority question is "China's increasing economic and military strength" China's state controlled
mercantile success lies directly on the twin shoulders of the US Government and it's multi-national corporations. The US granted
China, Most Favored Nation status in 1979, which gave it exposure to US markets with low tariffs. Almost immediately, corporations
went to China and invested in factories because of the cheap Chinese labor while abandoning the US worker. And in May 2000 Bill
Clinton backed a bipartisan effort to grant China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing its bid to join the WTO.
We live in a country whereby the US Government has made it possible for corporations to pay little or no taxes, to be deregulated
from government laws designed to protect the public, and allow corporate crimes to go unpunished while maintaining vast influence
over the political system through campaign contributions and corporate ownership of the mass media.
This US Government/corporate partnership smells a lot like Fascism. Instead of Mussolini we have Trumpolini. And so our time's
brand of corporatism has descended over the eroding infrastructure of America."
"Cult leaders [demagogues] arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have
been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world
they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a
mythical golden age.
The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that
are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout
law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.
Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult
leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that
the cult leaders will save them."
Chris Hedges, Cult of Trump
"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington
liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders
offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market
hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."
Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion
"We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to
protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once
considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic
epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master
epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by
the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. In this we Americans were discovering no
wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.
Franklin Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address
"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but
rather deliberate actions by the [corporatist] government to redistribute income from the rest
of us to the one percent."
"... "When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise -- to deny the political character of the modern corporation -- is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error." ..."
"There
was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those
days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.
Let's look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year
1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70
percent of the growth in the country's income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the
great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's
income growth at all.
Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's
financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand
instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."
Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017
"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief,
it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise -- to deny the political
character of the modern corporation -- is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that
disguise are those we instruct in error."
John Kenneth Galbraith
One of the older male anchors on financial TV today noted, in a very condescending tone, that for some reason Elizabeth Warren
'has an attitude' when it comes to corporations.
I hope she and some of her like minded fellows get their opportunity to extend the hand of equal justice to these smug serial
felons, pampered polecats, and corporatist clowns. It has been a long time coming.
"... The FAA has a clearly established pro-Boeing bias and will likely allow Boeing to unground the 737 MAX. We must demand that the two top FAA officials resign or recuse themselves from taking any more steps that might endanger the flying public. The two Boeing-indentured men are Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Associate FAA Administrator for Aviation Safety Ali Bahrami. ..."
"... The FAA has long been known for its non-regulatory, waiver-driven, de-regulatory traditions. It has a hard time saying NO to the aircraft manufacturers and the airlines. After the aircraft hijackings directing flights to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, the FAA let the airlines say NO to installing hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches in their planes. These security measures would have prevented the hijackers from invading the cockpits of the aircrafts on September 11, 2001. The airlines did not want to spend the $3000 per plane. Absent the 9/11 hijackings, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might not have gone to war in Afghanistan. ..."
"... Boeing has about 5,000 orders for the 737 MAX. It has delivered less than 400 to the world's airlines. From its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg to its swarms of Washington lobbyists, law firms, and public relations outfits, Boeing is used to getting its way. ..."
"... Right now, the Boeing/FAA strategy is to make sure Elwell and his FAA quickly decide that the MAX is safe for takeoff by delaying or stonewalling Congressional and other investigations. ..."
"... Time is not on the side of the 737 MAX 8. A comprehensive review of the 737 MAX's problems is a non-starter for Boeing. Boeing's flawed software and instructions that have kept pilots and airlines in the dark have already been exposed. New whistleblowers and more revelations will emerge. More time may also result in the Justice Department's operating grand jury issuing some indictments. More time would let the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) dig into the failure of accountability and serial criminal negligence of Boeing and its FAA accomplices. Chairman DeFazio knows the history of the FAA's regulatory capture. ..."
"... The FAA and its Boeing pals are using the "trade secret" claims to censor records sought by the House Committee. When it comes to investigating life or death airline hazards and crashes, Congress is capable of handling so-called trade secrets. This is all the more reason why the terminally prejudiced Elwell and Bahrami should step aside and let their successors take a fresh look at the Boeing investigations. That effort would include opening up the certification process for the entire Boeing MAX as a "new plane." ..."
The Boeing-driven FAA is rushing to unground the notorious prone-to-stall Boeing 737
MAX (that killed 346 innocents in two crashes) before several official investigations are
completed. Troubling revelations might keep these planes grounded worldwide.
The FAA has a clearly established pro-Boeing bias and will likely allow Boeing to unground
the 737 MAX. We must demand that the two top FAA officials resign or recuse themselves from
taking any more steps that might endanger the flying public. The two Boeing-indentured men are
Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Associate FAA Administrator for Aviation Safety Ali
Bahrami.
Immediately after the crashes, Elwell resisted grounding and echoed Boeing claims that the
Boeing 737 MAX was a safe plane despite the deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Ali Bahrami is known for aggressively pushing the FAA through 2018 to further abdicate its
regulatory duties by delegating more safety inspections to Boeing. Bahrami's actions benefit
Boeing and are supported by the company's toadies in the Congress. Elwell and Bahrami have both
acquired much experience by going through the well-known revolving door between the industry
and the FAA. They are likely to leave the FAA once again for lucrative positions in the
aerospace lobbying or business world. With such prospects, they do not have much 'skin in the
game' for their pending decision.
The FAA has long been known for its non-regulatory, waiver-driven, de-regulatory traditions.
It has a hard time saying NO to the aircraft manufacturers and the airlines. After the aircraft
hijackings directing flights to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, the FAA let the airlines say NO to
installing hardened cockpit doors and stronger latches in their planes. These security measures
would have prevented the hijackers from invading the cockpits of the aircrafts on September 11,
2001. The airlines did not want to spend the $3000 per plane. Absent the 9/11 hijackings,
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might not have gone to war in Afghanistan.
The FAA's historic "tombstone" mentality (slowly reacting after the crashes) is well known.
For example, in the 1990s the FAA had a delayed reaction to numerous fatal crashes caused by
antiquated de-icing rules. The FAA was also slow to act on ground-proximity warning
requirements for commuter airlines and flammability reduction rules for aircraft cabin
materials.
That's the tradition that Elwell and Bahrami inherited and have worsened. They did not even
wait for Boeing to deliver its reworked software before announcing in April that simulator
training would not be necessary for the pilots. This judgment was contrary to the experience of
seasoned pilots such as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. Simulator training would delay
ungrounding and cost the profitable airlines money.
Boeing has about 5,000 orders for the 737 MAX. It has delivered less than 400 to the world's
airlines. From its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg to its swarms of Washington lobbyists, law firms, and
public relations outfits, Boeing is used to getting its way. Its grip on Congress – where
300 members take campaign cash from Boeing – is legendary. Boeing pays little in federal
and Washington state taxes. It fumbles contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense but
remains the federal government's big vendor for lack of competitive alternatives in a highly
concentrated industry.
Right now, the Boeing/FAA strategy is to make sure Elwell and his FAA quickly decide that
the MAX is safe for takeoff by delaying or stonewalling Congressional and other
investigations.
The compliant Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, under Senator Roger
Wicker (R-MS), strangely has not scheduled anymore hearings. The Senate confirmation of Stephen
Dickson to replace acting chief Elwell is also on a slow track. A new boss at the FAA might
wish to take some time to review the whole process.
Time is not on the side of the 737 MAX 8. A comprehensive review of the 737 MAX's problems
is a non-starter for Boeing. Boeing's flawed software and instructions that have kept pilots
and airlines in the dark have already been exposed. New whistleblowers and more revelations
will emerge. More time may also result in the Justice Department's operating grand jury issuing
some indictments. More time would let the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee,
led by Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) dig into the failure of accountability and serial criminal
negligence of Boeing and its FAA accomplices. Chairman DeFazio knows the history of the FAA's
regulatory capture.
Not surprising on June 4, 2019, DeFazio sent a stinging letter to FAA's Elwell and his
corporatist superior, Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao, about the FAA's intolerable
delays in sending requested documents to the Committee. DeFazio's letter says: "To say we are
disappointed and a bit bewildered at the ongoing delays to appropriately respond to our records
requests would be an understatement."
The FAA and its Boeing pals are using the "trade secret" claims to censor records sought by
the House Committee. When it comes to investigating life or death airline hazards and crashes,
Congress is capable of handling so-called trade secrets. This is all the more reason why the
terminally prejudiced Elwell and Bahrami should step aside and let their successors take a
fresh look at the Boeing investigations. That effort would include opening up the certification
process for the entire Boeing MAX as a "new plane."
The Boeing-biased Elwell and Bahrami have refused to even raise in public proceedings the
question: "After eight or more Boeing 737 iterations, at what point does the Boeing MAX 8
become a new plane?" Many, including Cong. David Price (D-NC), chair of the House
Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the FAA's budget, have already questioned the
limited certification process.
Heavier engines on the old 737 fuselage changed the MAX's aerodynamics and made it
prone-to-stall. It is time for the FAA's leadership to change before the 737 MAX flies with
vulnerable, glitch-prone software "fixes".
Notwithstanding the previous Boeing 737 series' record of safety in the U.S. during the past
decade – (one fatality), Boeing's bosses, have now disregarded warnings by its own
engineers. Boeing executives do not get one, two, three or anymore crashes attributed to their
ignoring long-known aerodynamic engineering practices.
The Boeing 737 MAX must never be allowed to fly again, given the structural design defects
built deeply into its system.
"... "I feel duped," said the voter, Renee Elliott, who was laid off from her job at the Indianapolis Carrier plant. "I don't have a lot of faith in political candidates much anymore. They make promises. They make them and break them." ..."
"... Warren rose to her feet. "The thing is, you can't just wave your arms," the she said, gesturing energetically. "You've really got to have a plan – and I do have a plan." ..."
"... But despite the burst of momentum, Warren's path to the nomination has two major roadblocks: Sanders and Biden. Her success will depend on whether she can deliver a one-two punch: replacing Sanders as the progressive standard bearer while building a coalition broad enough to rival Biden. ..."
"... "She sounds like Donald Trump at his best," conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson told his largely Republican audience as he read from Warren's proposal during the opening monologue of his show this week. The plan calls for "aggressive intervention on behalf of American workers" to boost the economy and create new jobs, including a $2tn investment in federal funding in clean energy programs. ..."
"... His praise was all the more surprising because Warren has vowed not to participate in town halls on Fox News, calling the network a "hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists" ..."
The senator's 'I have a plan' mantra has become a rallying cry as she edges her way to the
top – but is it enough to get past the roadblocks of Biden and Sanders?
Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in Fairfax, Virginia, on 16 May. Photograph: Cliff
Owen/AP Plan by plan, Elizabeth Warren is making inroads
and gaining on her rivals in the 2020 Democratic race to take on Donald Trump.
This week a Morning Consult poll saw Warren break
into the double digits at 10%, putting her in third place behind Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
A recent
Economist/YouGov poll found Warren was making gains among liberal voters, with Democrats
considering the Massachusetts senator for the Democratic presidential nomination in nearly
equal measure with Sanders.
Her intense campaigning on a vast swathe of specific issues has achieved viral moments on
the internet – even including one woman whom
Warren advised on her love life – as well as playing well during recent television
events.
At a televised town hall in Indiana this week, Warren listened intently as a woman who voted
for Trump in 2016 described her disillusionment – not only with a president who failed to
bring back manufacturing jobs as he said he promised but with an entire political system
stymied by dysfunction.
"I feel duped," said the voter, Renee Elliott, who was laid off from her job at the
Indianapolis Carrier plant. "I don't have a lot of faith in political candidates much anymore.
They make promises. They make them and break them."
Warren rose to her feet. "The thing is, you can't just wave your arms," the she said,
gesturing energetically. "You've really got to have a plan – and I do have a plan."
That mantra – a nod to the steady churn of policy blueprints Warren's campaign has
released – has become a rallying cry for Warren as she edges her way to the top of the
crowded Democratic presidential primary field.
But despite the burst of momentum, Warren's path to the nomination has two major roadblocks:
Sanders and Biden. Her success will depend on whether she can deliver a one-two punch:
replacing Sanders as the progressive standard bearer while building a coalition broad enough to
rival Biden.
Warren began that work this week with a multi-stop tour of the midwest designed to show her
strength among working class voters who supported Trump. Ahead of the visit, Warren unveiled a
plan she described as "economic patriotism", which earned startling praise from one of Trump's
most loyal supporters.
"She sounds like Donald Trump at his best," conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson
told his largely Republican audience as he read from Warren's proposal during the opening
monologue of his show this week. The plan calls for "aggressive intervention on behalf of
American workers" to boost the economy and create new jobs, including a $2tn investment in
federal funding in clean energy programs.
His praise was all the more surprising because Warren has vowed not to participate in town
halls on Fox News, calling the network a "hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to
racists and conspiracists".
The debate over whether
Democrats should appear on Fox News for a town hall has divided the field. Sanders, whose
televised Fox News town hall generated the highest viewership of any such event, argued
that it is important to speak to the network's massive and heavily Republican audience.
As Warren courts working-class voters in the midwest, she continues to focus heavily on the
early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. After jumping into the race on New Year's Eve 2018,
Warren
immediately set to work , scooping up talent and building a massive
operation in Iowa. Her campaign is betting a strong showing in the first in the nation
caucuses will propel her in New Hampshire, which neighbors Massachusetts, and then boost her in
Nevada and South Carolina.
But as Warren gains momentum, moderate candidates are becoming more vocal about their
concern that choosing a nominee from the party's populist wing will hand Trump the
election.
"If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the
answer," former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper told Democrats in California last weekend.
Though his comments were met with boos and jeers among the convention's liberal crowd, his
warning is at the heart of the debate over who should be the Democratic presidential
nominee.
Warren has pointedly distinguished herself as a capitalist as opposed to a socialist or a
democratic socialist, but she has not backed away from a populist platform that embraces
sweeping economic reforms.
In her address to the California Democratic party, Warren rejected appeals for
moderation.
"Some say if we all calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses," she said. "But
our country is in a time of crisis. The time for small ideas is over."
Is Donald
Trump a fascist? The question is usually posed as an insult rather than as a serious
inquiry. A common response is that "he is not as bad as Hitler", but this rather dodges the
issue. Hitler was one hideous exponent of fascism , which comes in different flavours
but he was by no means the only one.
The answer is that fascist leaders and fascism in the 1920s and 1930s were similar in many
respects to Trump and Trumpism. But they had additional toxic characteristics, born out of a
different era and a historic experience different from the United States.
What are the most important features of fascism? They include ultra-nationalism and
authoritarianism; the demonisation and persecution of minorities; a cult of the leader; a
demagogic appeal to the "ignored" masses and against a "treacherous" establishment; contempt
for parliamentary institutions; disregard for the law while standing on a law and order
platform; control of the media and the crushing of criticism; slogans promising everything to
everybody; a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and
war.
The list could go on to include less significant traits such as a liking for public displays
of strength and popularity at rallies and parades; a liking also for gigantic building projects
as the physical embodiment of power.
Hitler and Mussolini ticked all these boxes and Trump ticks most of them, though with some
important exceptions. German and Italian fascism was characterised above all else by aggressive
and ultimately disastrous wars. Trump, on the contrary, is a genuine "isolationist" who has not
started a single war in the two-and-a-half years he has been in the White House.
It is not that Trump abjures force, but he prefers it to be commercial and economic rather
than military, and he is deploying it against numerous countries from China to Mexico and Iran.
As a strategy this is astute, avoiding the bear traps that American military intervention fell
into in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an approach which weakens the targeted state economically,
but it does not produce decisive victories or unconditional surrenders.
It is a policy more dangerous than it looks: Trump may not want a war, but the same is not
true of Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, or his national security adviser John Bolton. And
it is even less true of US allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been
pushing Washington towards war with Iran long before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took
control in Riyadh in 2015.
Trump's aversion to military intervention jibes with these other influences, but it is
erratic because it depends on the latest tweet from the White House. A weakness, not just of
fascist leaders but of all dictatorial regimes, is their exaggerated dependence on the
decisions of a single individual with God-like confidence in their own judgement. Nothing can
be decided without their fiat and they must never be proved wrong or be seen to fail.
Trump has modes of operating rather than sustained policies that are consequently shallow
and confused. One ambassador in Washington confides privately that he has successfully engaged
with the most senior officials in the administration, but this was not doing him a lot of good
because they had no idea of what was happening. The result of this Louis XIV approach to
government is institutionalised muddle: Trump may not want a war in the Middle East but he
could very easily blunder into one.
Of course, Trump is not alone in this: populist nationalist authoritarian leaders on the
rise all over the world win and hold power in ways very similar to the fascists of the
inter-war period. What is there in these two eras almost a century apart that would explain
this common political trajectory?
Fears and hatreds born out of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Great
Depression propelled the fascists towards power. When old allegiances and beliefs were
shattered and discredited, people naturally looked to new creeds and saviours. "The more
pathological the situation the less important is the intrinsic worth of the idol," wrote the
great British historian Lewis Namier in 1947. "His feet may be of clay and his face may be
blank: it is the frenzy of the worshippers which imparts to him meaning and power."
Is the same thing happening again? Fascism was the product of a cataclysmic period in the
first half of the 20th century that is very different from today. The US failed to get its way
in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but these were small-scale conflicts in no way comparable to
the First World War. The recession that followed the 2008 crash was a blip compared to the
Thirties.
Many of the better off reassure themselves with such thoughts. But they underestimate the
destructiveness of de-industrialisation and technological change for great numbers across the
globe. Inequality has vastly increased. Economies expand, but the benefits are skewed towards
the wealthy. Metropolitan centres plugged into the global economy flourished, but not their
periphery.
The distinction between winners and losers varies from country to country but governments
everywhere underestimated the unhappiness caused by social and economic upheaval. Beneficiaries
of the status quo invariably downplay the significance of fault lines that populists are swift
to identify and exploit.
Philip Hammond, the British chancellor of the exchequer, contemptuously dismisses claims by
the UN that great number of people in Britain were living in "dire poverty" and saying that, in
so far as deprivation existed, the government was acting effectively to address the problem.
The new wave of Trump-like leaders springing up all over the globe do not have to do very much
to do better than this.
Such overconfidence on the part of the powers-that-be is becoming rarer. Democrats who had
convinced themselves that Trumpism would be exposed and discredited as a conspiracy wished on
America by the dark powers in the Kremlin have seen their fantasy evaporate.
But there is probably worse to come: experience shows that populist authoritarian
nationalism – what Namier called "Caesarian democracy" – is not a static
phenomenon. It may not begin with all the fascist characterisation listed above, but its
trajectory is always in their direction. Regimes become more nationalistic, authoritarian,
demagogic, shifting from intolerance of criticism or opposition to a determination to
extinguish it entirely.
A case study of this process is Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reinforcing
his one-man rule by overturning an opposition victory in the election to choose the mayor of
Istanbul. Many Americans deny that the same process is happening in the US, but they tend to be
the same people who did not believe that Trump could be elected in the first place.
'Trump may not want a war in the Middle East but he could very easily blunder into one.'
Nations blunder into the very war they are trying to avoid – abject defeat. The US
president, encouraged by his counselors, might launch an attack on Iran, not realizing the
consequences. He wouldn't be alone in history for doing that, so it cannot be held against
him. Regional conflicts today are so interconnected that a localized dispute could drag in
the major nuclear powers in multiple theaters. That is what happens if vital interests clash.
It is the pattern of history. And there is nothing to suggest it has changed. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Let me get this straight: Cockburn identifies the central problem as the widening inequality
that emerged following the Great Recession of 2008, but then he blames Trump for being Trump.
WTF!
Here's Cockburn: " Inequality has vastly increased. Economies expand, but the benefits are
skewed towards the wealthy. Metropolitan centres plugged into the global economy flourished,
but not their periphery."
Trumps a ceo which is dictatorial hardly as dangerous as your FDR WILSON TEDDY LINCOLN ETC.
FASISM is the death throes of democracy as it tries to resist its inevitable slide into
further extremes of Mobism it tries to put a bit of lipstick on the pig with fascism. It
tries to recover a bit of order with authority and a bit of lawfulness by reigning in a bit
of the elite looting Democracy leads to cultural degeneracy and so there's often a lowbrow
attempt at restoring the culture the elite highbrows having led the degeneracy spiral only
the middle is available to try and save the culture.
I am yet to read a convincing argument how the most hardline Zionist president in US history,
who had his campaign run by the AIPAC guy Michael Glassner, influenced by Jared Kushner and
proud Christian Zionist Steve Bannon, who hired Jewish Goldman Sachs bankers Mnuchin and
Cohen right from the start, made the Jewish olgarchy of the Kushners and others into Jewish
aristocracy in the white house, has most to all his children married or dating Jews, is an
obscene, vulgar and tasteless vessel for the wishes of the Jewish Casino Godfather Sheldon
Adelson, filled his government with Neocons, has his power base in Zionist Evangelical
Christians, has somehow anything remotely to do with with Adolf Hitler or Benito
Mussolini. -- This one isn't.
Neither are Boomerisms about what "fascism" is or isn't. And the downright idiotic
habbit of Anglosphere journalists and intellectuals to label totalitarianism as "fascist"
brings already a fundamental misinformation in the term itself. And I can only explain it
from a necessity of the Anglosphere commentators, who are drenched in post WW2 mythology, to
obfuscate the fact that one was allied to a certain Stalin and produced the rise of
communist China starting under Mao himself. The greatest mass murderer in human history who
did have near total control over his subjects and their minds. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler or
even Stalin.
What are the most important features of fascism? They include ultra-nationalism and
authoritarianism
As ultra-nationalistic as Churchill or Roosevelt, as authoritarian as Stalin and Mao.
the demonisation and persecution of minorities
Tibetans, Uyghurs, Palestinians – ah yes, and concentration camps for the Boer!
a cult of the leader
Echnaton, Caesar himself is actually a weaker example, Mao, Stalin, again Churchill, then
Truman; or John F. Kennedy for that matter: The enshrined patron-saint of US democracy and
its tragedy and crucifixion, his mythological rise to almost sainthood like Lincoln, or until
recently MLK jr. Nevermind that Hillary Clinton was the absolute and total cult leader figure
for the US establishment and Angela Merkel was crowned leader of the free world in a
detestable act of disinformation and lies, almost on the level of Stalinist lies. A woman who
has turned German parliamentary politics into a GDR like one party coalition of leftist
neo-liberal imperialism on her own people.
a demagogic appeal to the "ignored" masses and against a "treacherous" establishment
The masses are ignored. Want Anglosphere examples? Brexit. And as Charles Murray
noted: the peoples have – for generations! – voted against more
immigration, the establishment has also for generations ignored them. There is also something
to be said about the victims of Rotherham and how they were ignored, for over a decade crimes
comitted against them systematically covered up.
And when it comes to a treacherous establishment, look no further than to the Ziocons,
Merkel, May and unfortunately Trump himself now. How utterly rotten and morally bankrupt, for
example, the establishment of Britain is shows the case of again Rotherham and Jimmy
Savile.
contempt for parliamentary institutions
And for good reason! Politicians are mindless and usually incompetent drones to be bought
by foreign and corporate lobbies, pushed by manipulative and deceptive mass media and to be
used as pawns for foreign policy of unelected deep state actors.
disregard for the law while standing on a law and order platform
Ah yes! There is something about the acts of the declared "leader of the free world"
Angela Merkel breaking the German constitution and European law while ordering a stand down
to the German border police who was ready to close the German borders, to allow in a million
illegals against the strong wishes of at least a significant minority. This crypto-communist
also leads the "conservative" party of "stability" who loves to talk about democracy,
toleranz and openness and the dangers of undemocratic Russia.
control of the media and the crushing of criticism
ADL, SPLC, overwhelming control over the old media corporations and near monopoly control
over the internet and social media platforms of a certain group that shall not be named. But
it's certainly not better when the government itself directly controls the media as in
Europe. Is the author seriously trying to make the claim that today the dangers in
this regard come from new right populists? Or that this was something singular and a defining
characteristic of fascism?
slogans promising everything to everybody
"Wir schaffen das!", "Stadt für alle!", "Land für alle!", "Diversity is our
strength!" , "Globalism brings more wealth for everyone involved!", "Free trade is good
for everybody!", "Workers of the world unite! All you have to lose is your chains!"
a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and war.
Ah yes such a true forces for peace and democracy and the freedom of all peoples of the
world the British Empire was and the USA are! The peoples of Vietnam, Serbia, Libya, Syria,
Iraq, Yemen, Palestine and Germany can sing a song about it. The USA are such a peaceful
hegemon! Dedicated to spreading human rights, democracy and freedom globally. -- But they are
also nothing special in this regard. Indeed this point is typical for basically all forms of
government. Haven't you people read your Machiavelli?
What did derail the Trump movement and turned MAGA into MIGA and a continuation of the
status quo and its lobbies, were not the populist grassroots support for Trump – across
the entire West, even globally, or the hopes and wishes of the indeed ignored masses of the
USA, or the populist supporters in the West who saw him as a beacon of their own hopes and
wishes. It was the 'deep state' which by all means is just the functional reality of
representative, parliamentary democracy in the age of mass media, a global financial system
and corporations.
The claim that tree of life recipient Donald Trump and life long supporter and friend of
Israel is a "fascist" is even more bizarre and ridiculous than calling Saddam Hussein or
Muammar al-Gaddaffi Adolf Hitler. And do I really need to quote all the things Trump said
about Israel and Netanyahu, or after the synagogue shootings..?
But the idea that he is a true isolationist who doesn't want war, is absurd. The Syria
strikes speak volumes about his intellect, judgement, foreign policy independence and also
about his willingness to do anything what Bibi and Adelson want. Just as the embassy move to
Jerusalem, just as the Golan Heights and so much more.
The USA simply cannot start a war with Iran. Because they don't have the sufficient
access to execute a major ground invasion of Iran through Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan,
Turkmenistan, Pakistan or a D-Day like operation from the Sea. The USA also cannot do it,
because the overwhelming majority of the people in Europe, globally and even a majority in
the USA itself would condemn another war of aggression by the USA. This has nothing to
do with the wishes of the Kushner, Bolton, Pompeo Trump government and its shadow puppeteers
Netanyahu and Adelson. The same is true for Venezuela and Syria.
The Anglosphere, with the USA as its hegemonic leader, is caught in its own life-long
delusions, its own mythology from the British Empire to WW2, its decade spanning structural
and fundamental mistakes and errors and flaws. It's not the first Empire to be in this
situation and it won't be the last Empire who will have its own downfall accelerated by it
all.
Liberal democracy is a failed, a false and a falsified political model turned into a
post-political ideology of an increasingly undemocratic establishment. The Europeans do not
want it, the Africans do not want it, the Asians do not want it and increasingly the citizens
of the USA and Great Britain do not want it. Trump and Brexit are indeed indicators for
this.
Because people are communal, they do not wish to be atomized individuals. And nobody wants
social-democracy either for that matter. They do not solve problems, they do not provide
people with what they need and they have no truly inspiring visions to offer either. And
that's why the future lies in nations and peoples. Not because there is a threat of
"fascism". And I think when it comes to the erosion of the rule of law and democracy being a
means for the demos, the establishment has done absolutely everything itself to make this the
reality for the citizens in the USA and EU.
@dearieme The false claims about Trump are intended to deflect from the Truth.
dasFuherer Obama started down the road to Facism directing the SS/FBI to conduct
surveillance and enforce political orthodoxy. If the transfer of power to dasFuherer H.
Clinton had taken place successfully we would be living in a Facist nation by this point.
Authoritarian Left National Socialism (Nazism), also known as Globalism, is a threat to
the Christian Citizens of the U.S. The Democratic party openly embraces these National
Socialist / Globalist goals. The Facist Stormtroopers of Antifa are their version of the
Hitler Youth.
@Paul "control of the media and the crushing of criticism; slogans promising everything
to everybody; a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and
war.
The list could go on to include less significant traits such as a liking for public
displays of strength and popularity at rallies and parades; a liking also for gigantic
building projects as the physical embodiment of power."
Trump hasn't conquered any nations, while Emperor Obama conquered Honduras, Libya, Somalia,
Ukraine, and tried to conquer Yemen, Turkey, and Syria. Obama also expanded the drone
assassination campaign, to include US citizens. Obama restarted the Cold war by demonizing
Russia and dispatching American troops to Russia's borders with new military bases in the
Baltic states.
Control of the media? Trump has none, while the media cheered Obama all the time, even
when he imprisoned journalists. They want to impeach Trump, but have no specific reason. I
can list a dozens reasons to impeach any of our past Presidents. Finally, whenever Trump
tries to ease tensions with Russia and North Korea, or pull troops from Syria, he is attacked
by the media and Democrats.
Trump is no saint, but this article is absurdly biased; typical of a corporate media
figure.
Fascism (A police state created by the wedding of corporate and state powers) has been coming
to America along various lines for quite some time but it's not the "nationalism" that we
need to worry about. In fact our tendencies to run fascistic have moved quickest while
nationalism evaporated.
The US is a divided nation, there is barely a "nation" here anymore, so we can stop
worrying about nationalism. We are no longer a single nation and haven't been for some time.
Trump isn't going to change that. LOL We are more in danger from increasing polarity ripping
us apart than we are nationalism uniting us into some new Reich.
Trump has at best hit 40% approval ratings in the polls, he barely holds onto power and in
fact lost the house. That's not a dictator in the making. There is zero danger that he will
unite the country either, that isn't going to happen.
As for socially that one is really a joke. There has never been a nation on Earth that is
less "Socially" fascist, NEVER. How a nation like ours, where you can literally self identify
as any thing you want, would be socially fascist is beyond me, yet that is actually what is
being described.
The fascism I'm worried about comes in the form of Crony Capitalism spawning endless wars
for profit while cracking down on liberty at home with the Patriot act and all the rest.
That's the creeping fascism we all should be worried about and many of us were. We voted for
Trump as the only alternative to that very problem.
No, no, no, missing the point. A 'Fascist' is someone saying something that the rich and
powerful don't want said.
So when Donald Trump said that he wanted to stop us from wasting trillions of dollars on
pointless winless foreign wars that serve only to enrich politically-connected defense
contractors, that was Fascist and Rascist and Literally Hitler.
Trump got beaten down, and without consulting Congress, launched a completely unjustified
and stupid missile attack on Syria, and suddenly he was 'presidential.' So you see, a leader
taking power into his own hands and running roughshod over the rule of law, that's
'Democracy' – as long as he's doing what the rich want done.
Bottom line: now that Trump has morphed into "Swamp Thing," there will be political
theater and screaming and howling, but it's all for show. It's a circus.
Trumpism is a mixture of kosher Americana and an apotheosis of the sharp vulgarian
businessman as politician as opposed to the hero or the visionary leader as statesman. It is
a kind of halfhearted bourgeoisie reaction to the extreme cultural Marxism and social
engineering, as well as a slavish adherence to Zionism. Its so called "national spirit" may
be more exemplified by a hexagram or skull cap on top of its figurehead leader, as opposed to
a legionary's helmet, Fuehrer's cap or Latin Cross. It is almost the polar opposite of the
eponymous Fascism of Mussolini, in which the Fascist Council dictated to the cartels, not
vice versa, and Il Duce was in charge and not a boardroom of soulless corporate
internationalists . Fascism can cut both ways- it can be used by an authoritarian leader to
unify the state and nation or it can be used by corporate oligarchs and their figurehead to
destroy the nation and its people.
Trumpism is even further removed from National Socialism and the Fuehrer. A man of the
people arose from humble origins on his own merits and reputation for courage under fire and
engineered both the greatest economic recovery and most spectacular renaissance of national
pride and dignity in recorded history. Hitler was not driven by personal vanity to see the
"H" of his name in lights, nor was he a crooked vulgarian beholden to casino pimps and
subterranean international Jews. Had National Socialism been allowed to flourish and had not
been destroyed by the world Sanhedrin and its shabbos goyim camp followers, Europe would in
all likelihood be a far cleaner, culturally vibrant and thriving culturally radiant center of
power for the entire world and especially its own far flung diaspora.
Trump could have been a true, independent nationalist leader but he scorned that role and
has largely turned on his base. While he is still the lesser of the two evils compared to
most of the Democratic automaton and pervert contenders, he certainly knows on which side his
shekels are buttered.
"... Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger. ..."
"... They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy. ..."
"... The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to them by their civilian bosses. ..."
"... And the CIA torture? ..."
"... Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it. ..."
"... Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's the classic Catch-22 of political corruption. ..."
"... "They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace." ― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania ..."
"... The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they are easily corrupted. ..."
"... Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it was news. ..."
"... Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money... ..."
"... If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? ..."
There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many
others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.
John Brennan's next job should be in a orange jump suit earning pennies and hour.
But we all know that this will never happen. Brennan is the right hand of the commander and chief of death, destruction and torture.
and has been for a long time. This is the work of evil, plain and simple.
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress,
the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly
being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail.
A minor detail?
The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff.
That's why we are safe. :-)
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job.
And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this
crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger.
Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals.
You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy.
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem
to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that
extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's
the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and,
arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of
law.
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is
getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a
sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to
take the right one. This is who they are.
Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.
Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing
spying on - well, everybody.
Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies,
and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?
What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain
hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In
the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked
with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of
elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the
public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more
pressing matters.
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging
than the act of spying itself?
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals
being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal
backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book
for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal
involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The
recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover
up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by
ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of
empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government
have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case
for a coup carried out on America.
In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned
King Edward V was still alive.
A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated
state spying on state has been.
Yes, they don't like others to be in a position to know of their venality, their sexual deviances and assorted other human failings.
Else that knowledge be used to control them...............
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of
its citizens in doing anything about it.
Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries, that pretend to be functioning democracies but
are in fact anything but.
The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they
are easily corrupted.
We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are
'on message'.
The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist
that and have the power to do so.
Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it
was news.
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda.
The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems.
Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money...
(Out of Control is the thought that springs to mind)
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is
it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
"... A sincere question: who is running the CIA and on whose behalf? ..."
"... They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians' criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo. ..."
"... Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the world can live with the same blissful ignorance. ..."
"... The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do. ..."
"... This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people. ..."
"... I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam opponents to the War on US soil. ..."
"... The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never. They are all being blackmailed. ..."
"... The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions' the CIA is. ..."
"... Yes and the only politician who has called for the abolition of the CIA is Ron Paul. ..."
"... The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists. ..."
They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians'
criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo.
leaders haven't been voted into office for a while now - they're rigged into office - from the lowly dog catcher to the president
- and its happening all over the world.
If you take the easy way now, you will take the easy way in the future. This not a sandlot baseball game here. These are high-
powered people , who are responsible for matters extremely operant to the people of our country, and it must be admitted, the
world.
To simply brush off these serious breaches of Government procedure (law) would serve to perpetuate the Executive Branch intrusions
into the business of the Legislative Branch.
Separation of the powers is a time-honored method of setting up a government that has kept us 'moving along' for quite
awhile now. Most of its problems stem from the populace placing too much trust in their elected officials .
It is everyone's responsibility to collectively maintain our government. It was never the intention of our founders that our
leaders become reclusive despots: from today's vantage point, we can see this. It is a short walk to realize where the blame should
be laid. Up and on your way to no future.
Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the
world can live with the same blissful ignorance.
The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special
protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do.
I find it absolutely shocking that this guy's dismissal is still debatable. Should be a no-brainer is any democracy
In the UK and USA these spooks backed by politicians and civil servants are getting way out of hand. Having the technology to
do things doesn't provide the need or right to do such things. They are getting to the point where they are "protecting" us from
the very people and system they have become.
although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama's most trusted security aides.
This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration
has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people.
I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam
opponents to the War on US soil.
They're all fuc@#$g rogue. Power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who polices the police? No one apparently. They
and all their UK counterparts will walk away from this unscathed. If the heat gets a little too warm just play your joker, 'Terrorism'.
The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never.
They are all being blackmailed.
Your state can imprison anyone it wants, for as long as it wants, without having to justify it in any way... hell they are not
even required to let relatives know. That is a police state. The US is operating what effectively are concentration camps all
over the place, Guantanamo being the flagship.
The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when
those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions'
the CIA is.
Quite how the CIA, White House or any other government body think that they have any credibility regarding any matter, is amazing.
I JUST PUT A LIST OF QUESTIONS ON MY TIME LINE THIS SHOULD KEEP THE SPY NETWORK BUSY FOR A WHILE ! BUT THEY NEVER DO ANYTHING
THAT MAKES SENSE ANYWAY ; THEY ONLY HAVE A 30 BILLION DOLLAR BUDGET ; BUT CANNOT TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO MH370 MALAYSIAN AIRPLANE
! WOW ! SOME SPY NETWORK ! IT 'S EASY FOR THEM TO SCREW WITH US ; BECAUSE WE ARE EVERYDAY MARKS !
If the United States government doesn't even govern by popular mandate, it certainly won't give a fuck about anyone's respect,
dear fellow internet commentator.
The penalties for lying under oath are quite strict and can include up to 5 years of prison time. But nobody is willing to go
after these guys, they have too much information on too many people. The day the US congress voted for the patriot act was the
last day of their democracy.
What exactly does a CIA member have to do to get arrested, prosecuted and convicted for an action inside the USA?
It is not spying on Congress. It it spying on the Supreme court, or killing a Senator? Do they walk away free after assassinating
their own president? Do they need to do more?
The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and
coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position
to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists.
Everyone who matters can be
kept inline with blackmail and for public figures it can be the smallest thing. Recently, during a primary, a candidate lost as
questions were raised about the fact he had checked in the a mental care facility. He probably had a breakdown and needed to be
observed for a couple of days. This piece of information would be easy to pick up with the various NSA programmes.
If this candidate
had the same views as you, this little fact would not have been released but I believe he was a defender of your constitution
and that could cause problems for the criminal regime you now live under.
Snooping is poison in a democracy. Your system was built so that it had self correction and could hence adapt to new situations
and constantly improve. This served Americans well for many years, but it has ended.
Feinstein and the word "hope" do not belong in one and the same sentence. She along with her fellow conspirators in the intelligence
committee are the ones that have been green-lighting this fascism for years. It's like expecting John McCain to repeal the Patriot
Act.
People like Feinstein are chosen to oversee mass surveillance for the simple reason that they are old, completely technologically
illiterates who can be easily fooled or if need be blackmailed through their extensive business empires
.
Yeah and let's take a look at the CIA's backing for Operation Gladio in post WW2 Europe. Yeah, you Americans were there but you
certainly weren't saving lives or making the aftermath bearable for the victims.
Notable quotes:
"... Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and, arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of law. ..."
"... "What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?" ..."
There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many
others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.
Get Smart Amarica
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress,
the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly
being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail. But Snowden is a traitor for revealing the truth.
A minor detail? The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their
staff.
That's why we are safe. :-)
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for
which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger.
Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect
the people if you see them as the enemy.
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem
to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
Um, no, Trevor Alfred, "the REAL terrorists" are still the folks who deliberately bomb civilians in areas where peace is supposed
to exist. The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to
them by their civilian bosses.
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that
extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's
the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and,
arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of
law.
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is
getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a
sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to
take the right one. This is who they are.
Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.
Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing
spying on - well, everybody.
Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies,
and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?
What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain
hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In
the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked
with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of
elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the
public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more
pressing matters.
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging
than the act of spying itself?
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals
being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal
backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book
for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal
involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The
recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover
up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by
ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of
empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government
have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case
for a coup carried out on America.
In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned
King Edward V was still alive.
A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated
state spying on state has been.
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of
its citizens in doing anything about it. Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries,
that pretend to be functioning democracies but are in fact anything but.
The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they
are easily corrupted.
We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are
'on message'.
The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist
that and have the power to do so.
Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it
was news.
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the
Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA, the very people who give them the money... (Out of Control
is the thought that springs to mind)
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is
it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. Let's begin
tonight with a thought experiment: What if the Republican leadership here in Washington had
bothered to learn the lessons of the 2016 election? What if they'd cared enough to do that.
What if they'd understood, and embraced, the economic nationalism that was at the heart of
Donald Trump's presidential campaign? What would the world look like now, two and a half years
later? For starters, Republicans in congress would regularly be saying things like this.
Quote:
"I'm deeply grateful for the opportunities America has given me. But the giant 'American'
corporations who control our economy don't seem to feel the same way. They certainly don't act
like it. Sure, these companies wave the flag -- but they have no loyalty or
allegiance to America. Levi's is an iconic American brand, but the company operates only 2% of
its factories here. Dixon Ticonderoga -- maker of the famous №2
pencil -- has 'moved almost all of its pencil production to Mexico and China.'
And General Electric recently shut down an industrial engine factory in Wisconsin and shipped
the jobs to Canada. The list goes on and on. These 'American' companies show only one real
loyalty: to the short-term interests of their shareholders, a third of whom are foreign
investors. If they can close up an American factory and ship jobs overseas to save a nickel,
that's exactly what they will do -- abandoning loyal American workers and
hollowing out American cities along the way. Politicians love to say they care about American
jobs. But for decades, those same politicians have cited 'free market principles' and refused
to intervene in markets on behalf of American workers. And of course, they ignore those same
supposed principles and intervene regularly to protect the interests of multinational
corporations and international capital. The result? Millions of good jobs lost overseas and a
generation of stagnant wages, growing inequality, and sluggish economic growth. If Washington
wants to put a stop to this, it can. If we want faster growth, stronger American industry, and
more good American jobs, then our government should do what other leading nations do and act
aggressively to achieve those goals instead of catering to the financial interests of companies
with no particular allegiance to America.... The truth is that Washington policies --
not unstoppable market forces -- are a key driver of the problems American
workers face. From our trade agreements to our tax code, we have encouraged companies to invest
abroad, ship jobs overseas, and keep wages low. All in the interest of serving multinational
companies and international capital with no particular loyalty to the United States....It's
becoming easier and easier to shift capital and jobs from one country to another. That's why
our government has to care more about defending and creating American jobs than ever
before -- not less. We can navigate the changes ahead if we embrace economic
patriotism and make American workers our highest priority, rather than continuing to cater to
the interests of companies and people with no allegiance to America."
End quote. Now let's say you regularly vote Republican. Ask yourself: what part of that
statement did you disagree with? Was there a single word that seemed wrong? Probably not.
Here's the depressing part: Nobody you voted for said that, or would ever say it. Republicans
in congress can't promise to protect American industries. They wouldn't dare. It might violate
some principle of Austrian economics. It might make the Koch brothers angry. It might alienate
the libertarian ideologues who, to this day, fund most Republican campaigns. So, no, a
Republican did not say that. Sadly.
Instead, the words you just heard are from, and brace yourself here, Senator Elizabeth
Warren of Massachusetts. Yesterday, Warren released what she's calling her "plan for economic
patriotism." Amazingly, that's pretty much exactly what it is: economic patriotism. There's not
a word about identity politics in the document. There are no hysterics about gun control or
climate change. There's no lecture about the plight of transgender illegal immigrants. It's
just pure old fashioned economics: how to preserve good-paying American jobs. Even more
remarkable: Many of Warren's policy prescriptions make obvious sense: she says the US
government should buy American products when it can. Of course it should. She says we need more
workplace apprenticeship programs, because four-year degrees aren't right for everyone. That's
true. She says taxpayers ought to benefit from the research and development they fund. And yet,
she writes, "we often see American companies take that researchand use it to manufacture
products overseas, like Apple did with the iPhone. The companies get rich, and American
taxpayers have subsidized the creation of low-wage foreign jobs." And so on. She sounds like
Donald Trump at his best. Who is this Elizabeth Warren, you ask? Not the race hustling, gun
grabbing, abortion extremist you thought you knew. Unfortunately Elizabeth Warren is still all
of those things too. And that is exactly the problem, not just with Warren, but with American
politics. In Washington, almost nobody speaks for the majority of voters. You're either a
libertarian zealot controlled by the banks, yammering on about entrepreneurship and how we need
to cut entitlements. That's one side of the aisle. Or, worse, you're some decadent trust fund
socialist who wants to ban passenger cars and give Medicaid to illegal aliens. That's the other
side. There isn't a caucus that represents where most Americans actually are: nationalist on
economics, fairly traditional on the social issues. Imagine a politician who wanted to make
your healthcare cheaper, but wasn't ghoulishly excited about partial birth abortion. Imagine
someone who genuinely respected the nuclear family, and sympathized with the culture of rural
America, but at the same time was willing to take your side against rapacious credit card
companies bleeding you dry at 35 percent interest. Would you vote for someone like that? My
gosh. Of course. Who wouldn't? That candidate would be elected in a landslide. Every single
time. Yet that candidate is the opposite of pretty much everyone currently serving in congress.
Our leadership class remains resolutely libertarian: committed to the rhetoric of markets when
it serves them; utterly libertine on questions of culture. Republicans will lecture you about
how payday loan scams are a critical part of a market economy. Then they'll work to make it
easier for your kids to smoke weed because, hey, freedom. Democrats will nod in total
agreement. They're on the same page.
Just last week, the Trump administration announced an innovative new way to protect American
workers from the ever-cascading tidal wave of cheap third-world labor flooding this country.
Until the Mexican government stops pushing illegal aliens north over our border, we will impose
tariffs on all Mexican goods we import. That's the kind of thing you'd do to protect your
country if you cared about your people. The Democrats, of course, opposed it. They don't even
pretend to care about America anymore. Here's what the Republicans said:
MITCH MCCONNELL: Look, I think it's safe to say – you've talked to all of our
members and we're not fans of tariffs. We're still hoping this can be avoided.
"We're not fans of tariffs." Imagine a more supercilious, out of touch, infuriating
response. You can't, because there isn't one. In other words, says Mitch McConnell, the idea
may work in practice. But we're against it, because it doesn't work in theory. That's the
Republican Party, 2019. No wonder they keep losing. They deserve it. Will they ever change?
The Project for a New Middle East[1] is a Project for a New Holocaust. It is happening
now. The policy of "Creative Chaos"[2] underpins the "Middle East Holocaust". Empire willfully
destroys the sovereignty and territorial integrity of prey nations such as Libya, Iraq, Syria,
Yemen, Ukraine, and beyond. Genocidal ethnic cleansing, mass murder and destruction are
described benignly as "chaos" and as "creative".
Empire deploys meticulously planned strategies to fabricate sectarian and ethnic divides,
and to balkanize prey nations. The notion, as expressed by Condoleeza Rice , that the Middle
East should be divided into a "Sunni Belt" and a "Shia Belt"[3] objectifies peoples, diminishes
their humanity, turns them into fictional "stock characters" defined exclusively by perceived
religious affiliations, and deliberately fabricates ethnic and religious tensions, all of which
serve as preconditions for imperialists to create chaos and the disintegration of strong
nation-states into fractious vassal states, devoid of self-determination and sovereignty.
Empire sees non-compliant, self-governing, secular, pluralist, multi-confessional,
democratic states as enemies. Syria is all of the above, and therefore an "enemy". Empire
further destroys the "host" when it "opens the veins" of prey countries for resource plundering
and criminal occupation. The oil-rich, strategically-located area East of the Euphrates is one
such example.
When Empire supports the SDF against ISIS, it is polishing its fake image by creating the
perception that it opposes ISIS, even as it re-introduces "rebadged" ISIS into the same battle
grounds. Alternatively, as in the case of Raqqa, Empire "rescues" and redeploys ISIS elsewhere.
Both terrorists and civilians are expendable in these demonic operations.
Empire rounds civilians up in terrorist-controlled concentration camps[4]. It "weaponizes"
them by deliberately creating conditions of desperation which lend themselves to recruiting
opportunities for new terrorist proxies. Daesh will never disappear as long as Empire is in
control or seeking control globally.
As long as Western war propaganda remains ascendant, and Western populations remain
oblivious, Westerners will continue to believe that these wars are humanitarian or in their
national interests. In fact, the wars are anti-humanitarian, and they only represent narrow
"special interests."
NATO's strongest weapon is its apparatus of "Perception Management". Without it, NATO and
the imperialists would be exposed as the Supreme International War Criminals that they
are.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
and the author of Voices from Syria , Global Research Publishers, 2017.
"... Last February, the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Gaza's protests concluded that "it has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately investigated by Israel." ..."
"... Article 12 of the Rome Statute allows for ICC's jurisdiction in two cases; first, if the State in which the alleged crime has occurred is itself a party of the Statute and, second, if the State where the crime has occurred agrees to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the court. ..."
The
Chief Military Advocate General of the Israeli army, Sharon Afek, and the US Department of
Defense General Counsel, Paul Ney,
shared a platform at the 'International Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict', which
took place in Herzliya, Israel between May 28-30.
Their panel witnessed some of the most misconstrued interpretations of international law
ever recorded. It was as if Afek and Ney were literally making up their own law on warfare and
armed conflict, with no regard to what international law actually stipulates.
Unsurprisingly, both Afek and Ney agreed on many things, including that Israel and the US
are blameless in all of their military conflicts, and that they will always be united against
any attempt to hold them accountable for war crimes by the International Court of Justice
(ICC).
Their tirade against the ICC mirrors that of their own leaders. While Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's
anti-ICC position is familiar, last April, US President Donald Trump virulently expressed
his contempt for the global organization and everything it represents.
"Any attempt to target American, Israeli, or allied personnel for prosecution will be met
with a swift and vigorous response," Trump
said in a writing on April 12.
While Trump's (and Netanyahu's) divisive language is nothing new, Afek and Ney were
entrusted with the difficult task of using legal language to explain their countries' aversion
for international law.
Prior to the Herzliya Conference, Afek addressed the Israel Bar Association convention in
Eilat on May 26. Here, too, he made some ludicrous claims as he absolved, in advance, Israeli
soldiers who kill Palestinians.
"A soldier who is in a life-threatening situation and acts to defend himself (or) others
(he) is responsible for, is receiving and will continue receiving full back-up from the Israeli
army," he
said .
The above assertion appears far more sinister once we remember Afek's views on what
constitutes a "life-threatening situation", as he had articulated in Herzliya a few days
later.
"Thousands of Gaza's residents (try) to breach the border fence," he said, with reference to
the non-violent March of Return at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.
The Gaza protesters "are led by a terrorist organization that deliberately uses civilians to
carry out attacks," Afek said.
Afek sees unarmed protests in Gaza as a form of terrorism, thus concurring with an
earlier statement made by then-Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on April 8,
2018, when he declared that "there are no innocents in Gaza."
Israel's shoot-to-kill policy, however, is not confined to the Gaza Strip but is also
implemented with the same degree of violent enthusiasm in the West Bank.
'No attacker, male or female, should make it out of any attack alive,'
Lieberman said in 2015. His orders were followed implicitly, as hundreds of Palestinians
were
killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem for allegedly trying to attack Israeli occupation
soldiers or armed illegal Jewish settlers.
Unlike democratic political systems everywhere, in Israel the occupation soldier becomes the
interpreter and
enforcer of the law.
Putting this policy into practice in Gaza is even more horrendous as unarmed protesters are
often being killed by Israeli snipers from long distances. Even
journalists and
medics have not been spared the same tragic fate as the hundreds of civilians who were
killed since the start of the protests in March 2018.
Last February, the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Gaza's protests
concluded
that "it has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli
soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those
violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately
investigated by Israel."
In his attack on the ICC at the Herzliya Conference, Afek contended that "Israel is a
law-abiding country, with an independent and strong judicial system, and there is no reason for
its actions to be scrutinized by the ICC."
The Israeli General goes on to reprimand the ICC by urging it to focus on "dealing with the
main issues for which it was founded."
Has Afek even read the Rome Statute? The first Article states that the ICC has the "power to
exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern, as
referred to in this Statute."
Article 5 elaborates the nature of these serious crimes, which include: "(a) The crime of
genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression."
Israel has been accused of at least two of these crimes – war crimes and crimes
against humanity – repeatedly, including in the February
report by the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry.
Afek may argue that none of this is relevant to Israel, for the latter is not "a party to
the Rome Statute," therefore, does not fall within ICC's legal jurisdiction.
Wrong again.
Article 12 of the Rome Statute allows for ICC's jurisdiction in two cases; first, if the
State in which the alleged crime has occurred is itself a party of the Statute and, second, if
the State where the crime has occurred agrees to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the
court.
While it is true that Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, Palestine has, since
2015, agreed to submit itself to the ICC's jurisdiction.
Moreover, in April 2015, the State of Palestine formally became a member of the ICC, thus
giving the court jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed in the Occupied Territories since
June 13, 2014. These crimes include human rights violations carried out during the Israeli war
on Gaza in July-August of the same year.
Afek's skewed understanding of international law went unchallenged at the Herzliya
Conference, as he was flanked by equally misguided interpreters of international law.
However, nothing proclaimed by Israel's top military prosecutor or his government will alter
the facts. Israeli war crimes must not go unpunished; Israel's judicial system is untrustworthy
and the ICC has the legal right and moral duty to carry out the will of the international
community and hold to account those responsible for war crimes anywhere, including Israel.
"... In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination. ..."
"... Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village. ..."
"... Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo. ..."
In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination.
Pics or it didn't happen.
I am very sorry and sincerely apologize. Please view this as a plausible hypothesis ;-)
Some considerations (neoliberals and neocons usually interpret those facts differently so this is a view from paleoconservative
universe; you are warned):
1. Exoneration of Hillary deprived Sanders of chances to lead Democratic ticket in 2016. This is as close to the proven fact as
we can get.
2. Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created
to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises
with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director
Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village.
3. JFK and then Robert Kennedy assassination. The key role of the CIA in the JFK assassination now is broadly accepted in the
USA.
3. Obama connection to CIA was subject of many articles, especially in the alt-right press. He definitely was raised in a family
of CIA operatives.
4. Brennan spied on Congress and was not fired, which means that the CIA hieratically is above the Congress. Proven fact.
In short, nothing in the power structure of democratic societies prevents intelligence agencies from becoming key political actors,
the Pretorian guard which selects the Presidents by keeping dirt on politicians and controls the press (see Church commission). They
have both motivation (preservation and enhancement of their status as any large bureaucracy), means (weakly controlled, oversized
budget; access to shadow funds from arms and narcotics trading) and skills (covert operations, disinformation, sabotage. This triad
is inherent in their status as the legalized mafia which operates above the law. As Pompeo recently said in a recent speech at Texas
A&M University CIA operatives lie and cheat and steal.
When intelligence agencies control MSM that alone gives them considerable power to influence the political process. For example,
in the case of Russiagate, we saw well organized and timed series of leaks. So, in fact, they can be viewed as the "Inner Party"
in terms of Orwell dystopia 1984.
And the fact of media control is a proven fact. And not only via Church commission. Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating
that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders
would result in him losing his job.
Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies
is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping
its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from
militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining
the status quo.
In any case, the problem of "the tail wagging the dog" is a problem for any country, not only for the USA. The fact that both
Brennan and Clapper become 'talking heads' after retirement tells something about the trend. Such things would be impossible 20 years
ago.
Some insights into the problem can be obtained by reading the article about the politicization of intelligence agencies in other
countries. For example:
Ultimately, making the intelligence agencies accountable amounts to a broader reevaluation of the larger framework of civil-military
relations. As a result, not only is intelligence reform an almost intractable political issue, but it also requires a complete
change of mentality for the actors involved. Reigning in the intelligence agencies is a problem of a deeper political culture,
one that requires a systemic change in the psychology of the organizations.
the lack of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies is a byproduct of the political imbalance between civilian and military
actors, a power structure that favors the latter.
As long as the military can get its way through seemingly constitutional means, the importance of the intelligence agencies
will remain relatively limited. Their role, however, becomes essential whenever the military meets some resistance
the military's domestic political power "has always derived from [its] ability to mediate confrontations among feuding political
leaders, parties or state institutions, invariably presented as threats to the political order and stability. The military [is]
of course the only institution empowered to judge whether such threats existed based on the assumption that a polity in turmoil
cannot sustain a professional military" (Rizvi 1998: 100). Yet whenever necessary, the military has not hesitated to generate
problems itself if it believes its institutional interests would be better served by a weak and divided polity. This is where
the intelligence agencies come into play.
the link between journalists and the intelligence agencies is a complex one, and cannot be reduced to a simple power dynamic
in which the journalists are merely the victim. Journalists need information, and thus have an interest in maintaining a good
relationship with intelligence agencies. In return, journalists are often asked to provide information themselves to intelligence
agencies.
"... Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. ..."
"... The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies. ..."
"... It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did. ..."
"... Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war. ..."
"... In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown. ..."
"... You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient. ..."
"... Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them. ..."
"... People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place. ..."
"... How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy? ..."
"... These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation. ..."
"... Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI. ..."
"... It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers. ..."
"... It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control. ..."
"... It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case. ..."
"... And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism ..."
"... The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance. ..."
"... Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA. ..."
"... Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants. ..."
"... John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves. ..."
"... A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror. ..."
"... Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses. ..."
"... Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments. ..."
"... While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it. ..."
Conspiratorially-minded writers envisaged the Shadow World Government as a board of evil sages surrounded by the financiers and
cinema moguls. That would be bad enough; in infinitely worse reality, our world is run by the Junior Ganymede that went berserk.
It is not a government, but a network, like freemasonry of old, and it consists chiefly of treacherous spies and pens-for-hire, two
kinds of service personnel, that collected a lot of data and tools of influence, and instead of serving their masters loyally, had
decided to lead the world in the direction they prefer.
German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the last head of the Abwehr, Hitler's Military Intelligence, had been such a spy with political
ambitions. He supported Hitler as the mighty enemy of Communism; on a certain stage he came to conclusion that the US will do the
job better and switched to the Anglo-American side. He was uncovered and executed for treason. His colleague General Reinhard Gehlen
also betrayed his Führer and had switched to the American side. After the war, he continued his war against Soviet Russia, this time
for CIA instead of Abwehr.
The spies are treacherous by their nature. They contact people who betrayed their countries; they work under cover, pretending
to be somebody else; for them the switch of loyalty is as usual and normal as the gender change operation for a Moroccan doctor who
is doing that 8 to 5 every day. They mix with foreign spies, they kill people with impunity; they break every law, human or divine.
They are extremely dangerous if they do it for their own country. They are infinitely more dangerous if they work for themselves
and still keep their institutional capabilities and international network.
Recently we had a painful reminding of their treacherous nature. Venezuela's top spy, the former director of the Bolivarian National
Intelligence Service (Sebin), Manuel Cristopher Figuera , had switched sides during the last coup attempt and escaped abroad
as the coup failed. He discovered that his membership on the Junior Ganymede of the spooks is more important for him than his duty
to his country and its constitution.
Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though
they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike
Whitney and Philip Giraldi described
the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. In
the conspiracy, foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, played an important role. As by law, these spies aren't
allowed to operate on their home ground, they go into you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back routine. The CIA spies in England
and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to
unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies.
It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal
to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is
good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the
Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians
and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did.
Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of
JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq
war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war.
Russian spooks are in a special relations mode with the global network – for many years. In Russia, persistent rumours claim the
perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982)
Yuri Andropov . He and his appointees
dismantled the socialist state and prepared the takeover of 1991 in the interests of the One World project.
Andropov (who had stepped into Brezhnev's shoes in 1982 and died in 1984) had advanced Gorbachev and his architect of glasnost,
Alexander Yakovlev . Andropov
also promoted the arch-traitor KGB General Oleg Kalugin
to head its counter-intelligence. Later, Kalugin betrayed his country, escaped to the US and delivered all Russian spies he knew
of to the FBI hands.
In late 1980s-early 1990s, the KGB, originally the guarding dog of the Russian working class, had betrayed its Communist masters
and switched to work for the Network. But for their betrayal, Gorbachev would not be able to destroy his country so fast: the KGB
neutralised or misinformed the Communist leadership.
They allowed Chernobyl to explode; they permitted a German pilot to land on the Red Square – this was used by Gorbachev as an
excuse to sack the whole lot of patriotic generals. The KGB people were active in subverting other socialist states, too. They executed
the Romanian leader Ceausescu and his wife; they brought down the GDR, the socialist Germany; they plotted with Yeltsin against Gorbachev
and with Gorbachev against Romanov. As the result of their plotting, the USSR fell apart.
The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened
calf being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards discovered that their country was to play
the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards. Years later, Vladimir
Putin came to power in Russia with the blessing of the world spooks and bankers, but being too independent a man to submit, he took
his country into its present nationalist course, trying to regain some lost ground. The dissatisfied spooks supported him.
Only recently Putin began to trim the wild growth of his own intelligence service, the FSB. It is possible the cautious president
had been alerted by the surprising insistence of the Western media that the alleged attempt on Skripal and other visible cases had
been attributed to the GRU, the relatively small Russian Military Intelligence, while the much bigger FSB had been forgotten. The
head of
FSB cybercrime department had been arrested and sentenced for lengthy term of imprisonment, and two FSB colonels had been arrested
as the search of their premises revealed immense
amounts of cash , both Russian and foreign currency. Such piles of roubles and dollars could be assembled only for an attempt
to change the regime, as it was demanded by the Network.
In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych.
They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad.
The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support
of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown.
In the US, the spooks allowed Donald Trump to become the leading Republican candidate, for they thought he would certainly lose
to Mme Clinton. Surprisingly, he had won, and since then, this man who was advanced as an easy prey, as a buffoon, had been hunted
by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry.
You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were
and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the
plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient.
Their knowledge of official leaders' faults gives them their feeling of power, but this knowledge can be translated into actual
control only for weak-minded men. Strong leaders do not submit easily. Putin has had his quota of imprudent or outright criminal
acts in his past, but he never allowed the blackmailers to dictate him their agenda. Netanyahu, another strong man of modern politics,
also had managed to survive blackmail. Meanwhile, Trump defeated all attempts to unseat him, though his enemies had used his alleged
lack of delicacy in relation to women, blacks and Jews to its utmost. He waded through the deep pond of Russiagate like Gulliver.
But he has to purge the alphabet agencies to reach safety.
In Russia, the problem is acute. Many Russian spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other
countries than to their fellow citizens. There is a freemasonic quality in their camaraderie. Such a quality could be commendable
in soldiers after the war is over, but here the war is going on. Russian spooks are particularly besotted with their declared enemies;
apparently it is the Christian quality of the Russian soul, but a very annoying one.
When Snowden reached Moscow after his daring escape from Hong Kong, the Russian TV screened a discussion that I participated in,
among journalists, members of parliament and ex-spies. The Russian spooks said that Snowden is a traitor; a person who betrayed his
agency can't be trusted and should be sent to the US in shackles. They felt they belong to the Spy World, with its inner bond, while
their loyalty to Russia was a distant second.
During recent visit of Mike Pompeo to Sochi, the head of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Mr Sergey Naryshkin
proposed the State Secretary Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA director,
to expand contacts between Russian and US special services at a higher level. He clarified that he actively interacted with Pompeo
during the period when he was the head of the CIA. Why would he need contacts with his adversary? It would be much better to avoid
contacts altogether.
Even president Putin, who is first of all a Russian nationalist (or a patriot, as they say), who has granted Snowden asylum in
Moscow at a high price of seriously worsening relations with Obama's administration, even Putin has told Stone that Snowden shouldn't
have leaked the documents the way he did. "If he didn't like anything at his work he should have simply resigned, but he went further",
a response proving he didn't completely freed himself from the spooks' freemasonry.
While the spooks plot, the scribes justify their plots. Media is also a weapon, and a mighty one. In Richard Wagner's opera
Lohengrin , the protagonist is defeated by the smear campaign in the media. Despite his miraculous arrival, despite his glorious
victory, the evil witch succeeds to poison minds of the hero's wife and of the court. The pen can counter the sword. When the two
are integrated, as in the union of spooks and scribes, it is too dangerous tool to leave intact.
In many countries of Europe, editorial international policies had been outsourced to the spooky Atlantic Council, the Washington-based
think tank. The Atlantic Council is strongly connected with NATO alliance and with Brussels bureaucracy, the tools of control over
Europe. Another tool is
The
Integrity Initiative , where the difference between spies and journalists is
blurred
. And so is the difference between the left and the right. The left and the right-wing media use different arguments, surprisingly
leading to the same bottom line, because both are tools of warfare for the same Network.
In 1930s, they were divided. The German and the British agents pulled and pushed in the opposite directions. The Russian military
became so friendly with the Germans, that at a certain time, Hitler believed the Russian generals would side with him against their
own leader. The Russian spooks were befriended by the Brits, and had tried to push Russia to confront Hitler. The cautious Marshal
Stalin had purged the Red Army's pro-German Generals, and the NKVD's pro-British spooks, and delayed the outbreak of hostilities
as much as he could. Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult
to deal with them.
If they are so powerful, integrated and united, shouldn't we throw a towel in the ring and surrender? Hell, no! Their success
is their undoing. They plot, but Allah is the best plotter, – our Muslim friends say. Indeed, when they succeed to suborn a party,
the people vote with their feet. The Brexit is the case to consider. The Network wanted to undermine the Brexit; so they neutralised
Corbyn by the antisemitism pursuit while May had made all she could to sabotage the Brexit while calling for it in public. Awfully
clever of them – but the British voter responded with dropping both established parties. So their clever plot misfired.
People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected
legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and
media men should know their place.
How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage
to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?
Spymasters are usually renowned for their inscrutability and for playing their cards close to their vests.
These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created
the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of
a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation.
Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution
to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI.
Forthcoming books will no doubt get into all the remarkable and bizarre details.
Donald Trump has demonstrated the ability to troll and goad many of his opponents into a state of imbecility. It's a negotiating
tactic -- knock them off balance, provoke them to lose control. No matter how smart they are, some people take the bait.
I am sitting here pointing to my nose. Spies run the world – contemporary history in a nutshell. A few provisos:
– It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes.
If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal
biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers.
– It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control.
The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control;
it's firmly IN control.
– There is a crucial difference between US and Russian spies. Russians can go over the head of their government to the world.
That's the only effective check on state criminal enterprise like CIA. Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says "in the Russian
Federation rights and freedoms of person and citizen are recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles
and norms of international law and in accordance with this Constitution." Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person
and citizen are directly applicable, which prevents the kind of bad-faith tricks the USA pulls, like declaring "non-self executing"
treaties, or making legally void reservations, declarations, understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article
46(3) guarantees citizens a constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms
if internal legal redress has been exhausted. Ratified international treaties including the ICCPR supersede any domestic legislation
stipulating otherwise.
Isn't it just collusion that holds certain elite groups together, including in some businesses where a lot of chicanery goes on.
The most important thing is to be in on it as one of them, not as a person who can be trusted not to say anything, but as one
of the gang. It's exactly how absenteeism-friendly offices full of crony parents with crony-parent managers work.
The only problem for the guy at the tippy top is what would happen if such a tight group turned on him / her? Maybe, some leaders
see the value in protecting a few brave individuals, like Snowden, letting any coup-stirring spooks know that some people are
watching the Establishment's rights violators, too. Those with technical knowledge have more capacity than most to do it or, at
least, to understand how it works.
In a country founded on individual liberties, including Fourth Amendment privacy rights that were protected by less greedy
generations, the US should have elected leaders that put the US Constitution first, but that is too much to ask in an era when
the top dogs in business & government are all colluding for money.
In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the
KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov.
FWIW, I have heard the exact same thing from Russian commenters myself. Some have insisted that, if Andropov had lived long
enough, he would have carried glasnost and perestroika himself.
Spies are loathsome bunch, with questionable loyalties and personal integrity. But I believe that overall they play a positive
role. They play a positive role because they help adversaries gain insight into their adversary's activities.
If it wasn't for the spies, paranoia about what the other side is doing can get out of hand and cause wrong actions to take
place. The problem with the spies is also that no one knows how much they can be trusted and on whose side they are really on.
It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected
to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism
– depending on the case.
And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money,
because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism.
The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial
espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage
them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR
close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance.
Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization
of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA.
An aspect of the rule of spies that Mr. Shamir does not touch on is the legitimization of this rule through popular culture.
This started with the James Bond novels and movies and by now has become ubiquitous. Spies and assassins are the heroes of the
masses. While secrecy is still needed for tactical reasons in the case of specific operations, overall secrecy is not needed nor
even desirable. So you have thugs like Pompeo actually boasting of their villainy before audiences of college students at Texas
A&M and you have the Mossad supporting the publication of the book Rise and Kill First which is an extensive account of their
world-wide assassination policy. They have the power; now they want the perks that go with it, including being treated like rock
stars.
dear mr Shamir, the criminals are not only stupid but also utterly wicked. they will be stricken down in the twinkling of the
eye and will cry out why God? all the righteous will shout for joy and give thanks to the Almighty for judging Babylon. woe unto
them! they will have no place to hide or run to.
Ezekiel 9 (NKJV)
The Wicked Are Slain
9 Then He called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, "Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a
deadly weapon in his hand." 2 And suddenly six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his
battle-ax in his hand. One man among them was clothed with linen and had a writer's inkhorn at his side. They went in and stood
beside the bronze altar.
3 Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple. And He
called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side; 4 and the Lord said to him, "Go through the midst
of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations
that are done within it."
5 To the others He said in my hearing, "Go after him through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor have any pity.
6 Utterly slay old and young men, maidens and little children and women; but do not come near anyone on whom is the mark; and
begin at My sanctuary." So they began with the elders who were before the temple. 7 Then He said to them, "Defile the temple,
and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!" And they went out and killed in the city.
8 So it was, that while they were killing them, I was left alone; and I fell on my face and cried out, and said, "Ah, Lord
God! Will You destroy all the remnant of Israel in pouring out Your fury on Jerusalem?"
9 Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed,
and the city full of perversity; for they say, 'The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!' 10 And as for Me also,
My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head."
11 Just then, the man clothed with linen, who had the inkhorn at his side, reported back and said, "I have done as You commanded
me."
E Michael Jones was just warning President Trump about the possibility of this in the Straits of Hormuz.
https://youtu.be/iIm3WuJAVEE?t=272
Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors,
but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor
is a spook and he does what he wants.
John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves.
@Antares that's because the Mossad
isn't like "our" spy agencies. it's closer to the old paradigm of the hashishim or true assassins. Mossad "agents" don't gad around
wearing dark glasses and tapping phones; they run proper deep cover operations. "sleepers" is a term used in the USA. they have
jobs. they look "normal". They integrate
Do spies run the world? No not really, bankers run the world.
Bankers constitute most of the deep state in the US/UK in particular and most of Europe. It is the bankers/deep state which
control the intelligence agencies. The ethnicity of a hefty proportion of said bankers is plain to see for anyone with functioning
critical faculties. How else can a tiny country in the middle east have such influence in the US? How else do we explain why 2/3
of the UK parliament are "friends of Israel" How come financial institutions can commit felonies and no one does jail time? why
is Israel allowed to commit war crimes and break international law with total impunity? who got bailed out of their gambling debts
at the expense of inflicting "austerity" on most of the western world?
How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage
to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?
A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks
who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country,
its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion
and terror.
Since winning, Trump has been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry. <fallacy is that Trump could have gained the assistence
of every American, had Trump just used his powers to declassify all secret information and make it available to the public, instead
he chases Assange, and continues to conduct the affairs of his office in secret.
Propaganda preys on belief.. it is more powerful than an atomic weapon.. when the facts are hidden or when the facts are changed,
distorted or destroyed.
Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their
fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule
making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence
of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/josh-gottheimer-democrats-yemen/
<i wrote IRT to the article, that contents appearing in private media supported monopoly powered corporations and distributed
to the public, direct the use of military and the willingness of soldiers of 22 different countries.
Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended
to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately
owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments.
I am bothered by you article because it looks to be Trumped weighted and failes to make clear it is these secret apolitical,
human rights abusers, that direct the contents of the media distributed articles that appear in the privately owmed, media distributed
to the public. Also not explained is how the cost of advertising is shared by the monopoly powered corporations, and it is that
advertising that is the source of support that keeps the fake news in business, the nation state propaganda in line, and the support
of robin -hood terror.
Monopoly powered global corporation advertising funds the fake and misleading private media, that is why the open internet
has been shut in tight. In order for the evil, global acting, high technology nomads to continue their extortion and terror activities
they need the media, its their only real weapon. I have never meet a member of any of the twenty two agencies that was not a trained,
certified mental case terrorist.
I think the interplay between the spooks and scribes warrants a deeper explanation. Covert action refers to anything in which
the author can disclaim his responsibility, ie it looks like someone else or something else. The handler in a political operation
cannot abuse his agent because the agent is the actor. The handler in an intelligence gathering operation can abuse his agent
because the agent merely enables action.
The political operations in this case are propaganda. The Congress of Cultural Freedom is the most clearly described one to
date. Propaganda is necessary in any mass society to ensure that voters care about the right issues, the right way, at the right
time. Propaganda can be true, false, or a mix of the two. Black propaganda deals in falsehoods, ie the Steele Dossier. Black propaganda
works best when it enables a pre-planned operation, but it pollutes the intelligence gathering process with disinformation.
Intelligence gathering is colloquially called investigative reporting. If anyone knows about Gary Webb, Alan Frankovich, or
Michael Hastings they know you can't really do that job well for very long. So how do the old timers last so long? It's a back
and forth. The reporter brings all of his information on a subject to his intelligence source (handler). The source then says,
"print this, print that, sit on that, and since you've been a good boy here's a little something you didn't know." The true role
of the investigative reporter is to conduct counterintelligence and package it as a limited hangout.
While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control.
They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care
as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it.
@Sean McBride And now Trump should
have then all rounded up and hung from the trees in the front of the Whitehouse. Anything less should be seen as encouragement.
The worst among us rule over the rest of us. As Plato said, this needs to change. How to do that? We don't know, but we desperately
need to find out ..
Obama was a very effective promoter of what might be called the "globalist" agenda. He of course didn't invent it but did appoint
those three.
Wayne Madsen gave a convincing account in his speculation that both Obama's parent's were CIA operatives. So it's "all
the family" and in the details one might conclude with the author that indeed "spies run the world."
"... Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing , just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk. ..."
Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And
their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath
he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing
, just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our
opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk.
Here's Trump's hero ..
"One day, from his sniper nest, Chief Gallagher shot a girl in a flower-print hijab who
was walking w/ other girls on the riverbank. She dropped, clutching her stomach, & the
other girls dragged her away."
A mass murderer according to Senior Seals: "Would order needless risks, to fire rockets at
houses for no apparent reason. He routinely parked an armored truck on a Tigris River bridge
& emptied the truck's heavy machine gun into neighborhoods on twith no discernible
targets."
"Platoon members said he spent much of his time in a hidden perch with a sniper rifle,
firing three or four times as often as other platoon snipers. They said he boasted about the
number of people he had killed, including women."
Two other snipers said, the chief shot an unarmed man in a white robe with a wispy white
beard. They said the man fell, a red blotch spreading on his back."
Gallagher ordered a hatchet & a hunting knife" before 2017 deployment. He texted the
man who made them (a Navy Seal veteran) shortly after arriving in Iraq: "I'll try and dig
that knife or hatchet on someone's skull!"
May 2017, a SEAL medic was treating a wounded 15 y/o Islamic State fighter. "He's mine,"
Gallagher said. "Gallagher walked up without a word and stabbed the wounded teenager several
times in the neck and once in the chest with his hunting knife, killing him."
He didn't even try to hide the murder of the 15 y/o. He brought other seals around minutes
later & took a photo over the body. Later, he texted the photo to a fellow SEAL in
California: "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/navy-seals-crimes-of-war.html
Now Trumpies bear in mind that Gallagher's own fellow Seals testified against him
that's how depraved this guy Trump is pardoning is.
Here's Gallagher if you live in a stand your ground state and run into him shoot the
bastard, he'll have his hunting knife on him so you can claim self defense.
Warren (D)(1): "Elizabeth Warren's latest big idea is 'economic patriotism'" [
Vox ].
"The specific Warren proposal on this score has three parts, a Green Apollo
Program, a Green Marshall Plan, and a Green Industrial Mobilization. The Apollo Program is a
ten-fold increase in clean energy R&D funding, the Marshall Plan is a $100 billion
program to help foreign countries buy American-made clean technology, and the Industrial
Mobilization (which it would perhaps be more natural to call a 'Green New Deal,' were that
name not already taken) proposes a massive $1.5 trillion federal procurement initiative over
10 years to buy 'American-made clean, renewable, and emission free products for federal,
state, and local use and for export.'
That's roughly the scale of federal spending on defense
acquisition and would of course turn the federal government into a huge player in this
market."
• I bet Warren's policy shop didn't copy and paste from other proposals
either
Readers here are brainwashed. Industrial policy is based on a partnership between
manufacturing, banks and finance, government, and workers. All of these relationships are
built on trust and all the members stand to profit. This is the secret of Germany's and
Scandinavia's over 200 years of success. It is called stakeholder capitalism. It includes all
members of society. Germany is the world's largest exporter for a reason. It has
approximately 1,500 banks, 70% of them are non-profit and restricted to lending for loans
that are productive - create jobs and add value.
The English/American model of capitalism is called shareholder capitalism. Shareholder
because the owners are absentee landlords. The financial markets rule, all other members
serve. The communities are shells - people are distrustful of each other and of the social
institutions. Shareholders don't live in the communities that add the value. They are the
elites, and are spread throughout the world.
Readers here might not like Elizabeth Warren, and that's ok. I don't really like her. But
her ideas are good. No Republican or corporate Democrat would ever embrace her ideas.
The irony is that Trump campaigned on similar ideas as Warren's. Why do you people think
Trump is engaging in all the trade war rhetoric? It's for the same ends as Warren's ideas,
except her ideas are more complete. Trump doesn't bring enough to the table. He needs to
include labor, banks, manufacturers, and government. He hasn't because his ideas are not
developed.
All the blabber mouths on Zero Hedge complaining about how full of **** academia is and
now is your chance to actually stand for something. Do you think industrial policy is built
on "snowflake" studies in Harvard?
No, it's in vocational schools and mentoring. Apprenticeships, and so forth.
Un-*******-believable. Zero Hedge is no different from Rush Limbaugh, a big fat closeted
queen.
What ever happened to states rights? Ever increasing central governmental control is not
the answer, and was never intended to be. The Democrats spout about "Democracy!!!". This is
nothing of the sort. They are perfectly happy to tell someone in Nebraska what to do, even if
they have no idea corn grows in dirt. Narcissistic sociopaths is what they are. It's time to
neuter them.
Unfortunately, a fair number of people are listening to her. The article below warns that
her push towards socialism as many progressives, liberals, or those simply left of center are
proposing, would be a grave mistake. Socialism is not the answer to combating inequality.
Well, down here in Australia we had a Federal election a couple of weeks ago, and the
opposition party, the Labor Party(ie the equivalent of your Democrats) was soundly defeated
partially because of their radical "climate change" policies.
Quite obviously the left cannot grasp the fact that not everybody buys into the climate
change hoax/industry. After the election many "journalists" who work for our national
broadcaster, the ABC, which is funded by the Feds, came out on social media describing the
result as a catastrophe for the climate and branded Australians as stupid. Sound familiar,
just like a certain someone who labeled half of America as deplorables.
Australians are not stupid, and realised that the changes Labor were proposing were too
radical. Their plan called for a 45 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It should be
noted that despite rhetoric to the contrary by Labor, it is a well established fact that
Australia is far exceeding it's Kyoto & Paris targets.
Yet, the Labor party wanted to take these steps.
Labor, a party which is supposed to be in support of the workers, had they have won
governmengt, would have no doubt done everything in their power to prevent the Adani coal
mine in Queensland going ahead!
FFS, what sort of a world are we living in where coal mining is viewed by the left as a
criminal activity?
The result of Labor's insanity, they did not win back a single seat in Qld, and in the
Hunter Valley in NSW, a massive coal mining town, one particular seat there has been held by
Labor for 25 years with a healthy margin. The local Labor candidate, Joel Fitzgibbon, managed
to still hold onto the seat despite a 20 percent swing against him!
The fact is, as I am sure you are all aware being intelligent people on ZH, is you cannot
take radical steps like what was proposed by Labor & in the process destroy the economy.
These changes, if they are to be implemented, need to happen over the course of decades,
four, five, maybe six, I don't know.
But more importantly, there needs to be serious discussion as to whether man made "climate
change" is real because it does not seem to be, and obviously the vast majority of people are
not buying into it. much to the chagrin of the left.
In Australia, and I am sure the same happens in America, the only people buying the
climate change ******** are the cafe latte/upper class inner city snobs.
The other thing that escapes the minds of the left in Australia is simple mathematics. We
are a population of 24 million in a world of 7.5 billion, that makes us 0.33 of 1 percent of
the world population. Even if Australia cut it's emissions to zero tomorrow, it will make no
difference to the world when we have China & India building coal fired power
stations.
Ironically, the high priest of climate change, Al Gore, is down here at the moment, in
Queensland of all places where voters told the left where to get off, on a $300,000 taxpayer
funded love-in. From memory, didn't Al Gore state in his doco in 2006 that within 10 years
the Earth would be facing a climate catastrophe? lol
You go girl.... Lynn Rothschild will back you once she counts con-tracts and loans
filtered back into her " All Inclusive Capitalism" banking system... She's got your back. She
was was only kiddig about rewrting an ecconomic plan for Hillary and ditching yours....xoxo
Lynn
"on Tuesday Elizabeth Warren proposed
spending $2 trillion on a new "green manufacturing" program that would invest in research
and exporting American clean energy technology."
"In my administration, we will stop making excuses. We will pursue aggressive new
government policies to support American workers."
"In my administration, we will NOT stop making excuses. We will pursue aggressive new
government TOTALITARIAN policies to support American Stalinist ideals ."
The problem is more complex than just CIA. The Deep state encompass more players and it replaced elected officials (surface
state) while elections now provide mostly function of legitimizing the rule of the Deep State
Notable quotes:
"... The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle. ..."
"... Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country. ..."
The growth of the USA is going to depend on the ability of the people in government to
disband the Central Intelligence Agency which has become a bottleneck in the progress of the
USA. The USA cannot grow as long as you have such a powerful bottleneck similar to a dictator
with absolute power.
The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world
gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will
become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle.
Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the
hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the
CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for
their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country.
We are being left behind .... China is going to keep growing... there is nothing the USA
can do to stop her now. If war is used, the USA will lose, if economics of scale is compared
the USA loses. China is a giant with an almost monolithic population of over one billion. Can
you imagine what an educated country with over one billion people can do???
The USA has a lot of blacks, hispanics, asians, Arabs etc, we are not a single group of
people. While diversity is a good thing when you have a lot of money to keep everyone happy,
poverty will be the enermy of diversity. People will be at each other's jugulars fighting for
the little scraps of wealth left behind after the big and powerful grab all they can.
We are into a very hard future in the USA.... no thanks to the silly Central Intelligence
Agency. For heavens sake, cant the CIA learn from Chinese or Russian intelligence???? How do
the intelligence agencies of the Chinese or Russians operate? Learn instead of sitting on the
silly high horse thinking US intelligence is anything but primitive and third rate!
Now the entire USA has to pay for the silly inteliigence agencies which keep expanding
with acronyms like rats!
Have brought up Gabbard's sticking with the lies and false narratives regarding Russia and Ukraine, clearly one of her blind
spots in her "antiwar" political campaign, that along with the massive and unrelenting war OF terror. That letter is a rather disgusting
display of imperialist obfuscation by the duopoly political parties, fully supporting the lies about Maduro and what's happening
in VS and in effect providing cover for future actions. You can't claim to be against military action while also lying about the
reasons. Of course they can, that's how they prep the public for imperial advances. up 4 users have voted.
i totally endorse zuesse's theory, but oh my, he'd brought in a lot of moving parts at the time. paranoid conspiracy theory
or 'coincidence theory', as some brilliant mofo used to ask. (i'l think of his name later.) the russian defense ministry's contentions
are in conflict with zuesse's (buk missiles v. another jet with missiles), but i sure as hell know that the dutch report
decision in advance was bullshit. i'd think that one would have to be willfully blind to accept it at face value, esp.
if any of them like gabbard were on the defense and intel committees at the time. same with madurro's venezuela, to pretend
that it's not mainly the egregious sanctions and blockades that are responsible for the estimated 40,000 citizens who've died
for lack of medicines and food. and now their CLAP food delivery system is under attack...again.
i get that the intel they're fed is rubbish, but they all have the duty to look further than what lies they're spoon fed.
CEPR has been incredibly valuable a resource for one, and it's pretty mainstream.
but he's right about one thing: yanukovitch was overthrown due to his refusal to sign the EU association memo, and when Imperialists
speak of how 'russia stole crimea', or refuse to see why the separatists in the donbass formed their own independent nation-states,
it's utter hypocrisy.
thanks for reading and commenting, big al.
oh, and do you know if tulsi's FP is still at her house.gov site? i looked at all her press releases that were dated after
that offensive letter, but i'd found nothing new.
@wendy davis I mean, there's the establishment/government narrative and there's the truth, that's about all I need to
know. It's like that saying "trust, but verify". I say fuck that, "don't trust, and verify that".
I don't know about Gabbard's FP, she's done some housecleaning and avoided certain things since becoming the CFR's choice for
2024. Again, I've already done enough research, what, for over 3 years now?, to see what she's all about, something I failed
to do in 2007/8 regarding Obama. Lo and behold, all the clues were there just waiting to be uncovered, but I wasn't in the same
place as now.
...by the Russians, who were not allowed to participate in the Dutch investigation. The information and data was presented
to the Dutch and to the Western media in September 2018. Everything one could hope to see in physical evidence is here. There
is additional evidence not in this article that adds to the details and forensics presented here.
This information was not published in the West or in the Vassal State of Netherlands. The US possesses satellite photos of
the incident. But it has classified those photos and refuses to release them.
As for means, motive and opportunity:
MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, not over Russia.
It was shot down with a missile owned by Ukraine, not by Russia.
It had propaganda value for Ukraine and its CIA masters, none for
The missile was fired from territory controlled by the neo nazi Kiev regime.
But the best evidence of what took place, as far as I'm concerned, is right here:
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, falling in the rebel-held part of
the country. The crash claimed the lives of 283 passengers and 15 crew members, most of them Dutch nationals. Russia
was blamed by Western media in the first days after the tragedy, even before any evidence had been collected on the ground.
and thank you. your memory is prodigious, and having the 2018 RT news is srsly helpful, as is your M,M, & O formula. blame
first, then fail to allow russia (and malaysia) to be able to run investigations. good to know as well that the malaysian minister
knew of the serial numbers and that ukraine owned the missiles.
eric zuesse had said that even dutch journalists were raising havoc with the JIT back in the day. but just think what this
false blame resulting in mega-sanctions began, then onto the skripals, russia-gate in many guises, and tra la la.
mr. wd laughed this mornin' and said he wishes he had a choice to vote for sergei lavrov for prez; i second that!
dunno if the EU still wants a compact with ukraine, but NATO sure wants the neo-nazi nation as a member. ping: if i have
the energy and time, i'll try to find in zuesse's tome admissions by snipers in 2014, as well.
Must admit I didn't hunt down her Ukraine position, but my personal take is Obummer and the CIA set out to foment problems
and managed to get a fascists regime elected in order to oppose Russia. The new Ukrainian president may take things in a more
pro-Russia direction?
site, at her election site. well, check out Russia , for now. and i do thank you; i was lookin' in all the wrong places.
; )i'll check out more soon as i have time, but zounds: russia: crimea, the nation's interference in our election, wooof. of
course jill stein raised boatloads of bucks for recounts in three states on the basis of russian interference, later 'foreign
interference' against the wishes of the green party board and her own running mate, so...there's that, but it was just a dodge
against trump winning, not hillary. sorry, tulsi.
for being in such a hurry i hadn't even registered your speculation about zelenskiy, but nah, he wants crimea and the donbass
self-declared republics that Putin stole from him...back. he's being lauded and applauded for 'standing up to KGB Putin'. ;
)
and the IMF's bailin' em out again so they have enough to pay their NATO dues and join the EU. (just saw that tryin' to remember
how to sorta spell the comic's name.)
maybe it was passengers', was returned to Malaysia ... but in a sealed coffin, that even family members were refused to open.
At the time an OSCE member was the first to arrive at the crash site. Some 20 minutes after the downing. The photos taken
by him, or so it was attributed, showed round holes (not shrapnel) shot in the pilot area. Sorry I don't have any links handy
on either of these, but I'm pretty sure this is correct.
as i understand it, the hole size was not in contention. but weather it had been the pilot or a passenger: '...but in a sealed
coffin, that even family members were refused to open.'
is that perhaps a malaysian custom? is the truth out there somewhere?
eric zuesse remind us, the holes in the cockpit were likely from machine guns on the ukrainian fighter jet sent to make sure
the ukie buk missiles had (omg) killed the plane, which if i'm getting it right (a big IF) was changing direction as it went
down. my apologies for not getting all the moving parts and claims right on this thread.
but the 21st century wire shows charts and evidence that the flight crew was ordered to change course by the air traffic
control tower (as per the later censored bbc plus recordings).
...was involved in the downing of MH17, which was the opinion of many aviation experts and others, who found bullet holes
in the cockpit, wings, and fuselage. This in addition to Buk damage.
Recordings were captured by multiple sources of a frightened and stressed Ukrainian pilot, who radioed, "I shot the wrong
plane!" He sounded as if he was commanded to shoot down a military target plane and was misled into shooting a passenger jet.
That pilot, named Voloshyn, later committed suicide.
The typical recollection of the incident is:
A fighter was also sent up to 'make sure' the target plane was shot down. If I remember rightly, the plane was hit, but
was still flying and it began to turn back. If the plane story (which I tend to believe) is true, it's at that point that
the fighter jet opened fire on the cockpit and wings.
That would also account for Buk damage to the Boeing, as well as fighter machine gun damage to the cockpit.
You can find many references to this incident along with transcripts of the conversation between the fighter pilot and the
ground base.
video confessions from the snipers at maidan (i assume ukrainians firing on protestors in front of the trades union building
that was eventually...burned to the ground.
but this?
"For instance, Moscow said a theory was never tested that the airliner could have been downed by a fighter jet spotted
by Russian radar stations near flight MH17. The theory was later proven false by the discovery of debris from the Buk rocket.
Though Russia doesn't possess those black boxes ( which, by chance, were handed by the pro-Russian separatists to the
Malaysian Government's representative, and yet that Government handed them to Netherland's Government instead of to Russia's
-- apparently trusting Netherlands more than trusting Russia or even themselves), Russia does possess, and publicly reveals,
evidence that's conclusive on its own; and it is 100% consistent with Haisenko's reconstruction of the event, regardless
whether a Buk was involved or not."
one of his links went to ' MH17 Verdict: Real Evidence Points to US-Kiev Cover-up of Failed False Flag '
July 25, 2014 , 21stcenturywire.com
"As MH17 moved into Ukrainian air space, it was moved by ATC Kiev approximately 200 miles north putting it on a new
course, heading directly into a war zone, a well-known dangerous area by now one that's hosted a number of downed military
craft over the previous 3 weeks. Robert Mark, a commercial pilot and editor of Aviation International News Safety magazine,
confirmed that most Malaysia Airlines flights from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur would normally travel along a route significantly
further south than the route MH17 was diverted onto.
Data on all airline flight records can be found here. The BBC reported on July 17th: " Ukraine's SBU security service
has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner,
a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency."
a great (and lengthy) collaborative investigation by 21st century wire. thanks, obomba, thanks, tulsi, thanks Pierre and
vickie nuland. and even the new guy can't control his neo-nazis. but then again, at least yulia tymoshenko didn't win.
but NATO will add them to the roster soon, which is one of the reasons that the atlantic council had recommended him: to
root out poroshenko's oligarchs' corruption.
but i almost wish i hadn't it's sooooo long and full of twists and turns, news reports, videos, but in general the theme
is that mikhail saakashvilli hired them, then stiffed them.
' The "Snipers' Massacre" in Kiev -- Another False Flag? ',
January
13, 2015 , granvillepost.com, eric zuesse
you may remember him best john Mccains buddy: 'today we are all georgians'? like ahmed chalabi, he's the proverbial bad penny
who keeps returning in whatever guise needed (after expulsions), and the
big news this week is that zelenskiy's reinstated his ukrainian
citizenship after promising to give up his former ambitions and work with the new prez.
An interesting method of monitoring access to the particular WEB site or page by intercepting pages at the router and
inserting reference to the "snooping" site for example one pixel image) which collects IPs of devices which accessed particular
page. Does not require breaking into the particular Web site 00 just the control of provider router is is enough. That
makes it more understandable the attack on Huawei.
Notable quotes:
"... Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate this long standing intl understanding. ..."
"... said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit. ..."
"... Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and prism.. explained how it worked. basically a collaboration between big corporations and government ..."
"... Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web page request between user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has surveillance hidden in the page, then blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user. said it goes beyond collaboration and moves to proactive surveillance. ..."
"... Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified "trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico to defeat political opposition ..."
Describes the incredible pressure governments are applying on anyone who steps forward to
help a whistle blower.
Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application
under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds
application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate
this long standing intl understanding.
Explained the constitution of Equador was the most complex constitution on planet its due
process rights solid due process safeguard, has a very high threshold but. Morales decision
was arbitrary to strip Mr. Assange of his asylum. Said HK angry at Germany over two whistle
blowers
Snowden then speaks .. excellent talk..
1st point.. progress in science has been unprecedented, especially nuclear science, but
the nation states are using that new
knowledge to make nuclear weapons.. called the progress an "Atomic Moment" in Science
evolution. .
said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of
power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit.
2nd point Platforms and Algorithms are being used by those in power to "shift our
behaviors" accomplished covertly by user
contracts people are required to sign when joining something on line (<=he said no one
reads these things, but they are dangerous
Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and
prism.. explained how it worked.
basically a collaboration between big corporations and government
Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web
page request between
user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has
surveillance hidden in the page, then
blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user.
said it goes beyond collaboration
and moves to proactive surveillance.
said the legal means to spy on the populations existed long before 9/11, but it could not
find daylight to be adopted until 9/11.
Basically the government and massive in size corporations have all of the data on every
single person on the earth because they gather it everywhere all of the time. discussed
warrant_less wire tap, explained why whistle blower fair trial in he USA not likely,
Said everything single call or electronic communication made by citizens is captured
suggested monitoring calls was a felony many corporations committed before the FISA Act was
enacted to protect the listener.
Mentioned Signal by Open Whisper <= for encryption??
Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices
that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified
"trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico
to defeat political opposition.
But the big thing I got out of it, was how website contract agreements are not innocent.
Such agreements prey on human desire to [interact, connect, share and cooperate] these
desires have been modelled into a platform that allows government or private commercial
enterprises to manipulate, exploit and prey-on any human "interacting with a such
websites.
"... And again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called “privatization”… of poor mother Russia. ..."
Tainted tenure indeed! No one asks the right questions anymore. For example, where did all
that Brexit cash come from? As I commented previously at CONSORTIUMNEWS and it is redacted
here; “The Panama Papers signaled a need for radical change(s) in the EU banking laws.
Hiding money, legit or not from, fair and open taxation, has become increasingly difficult
for the upper crust….”
The BREXIT cash originated, no surprise folks, from a
Gibraltar based firm, where a Mr Arron Banks (big bucks Banks) a guy with money to burn, with
corporate holdings in the Isle of Man and too, one of his buddies, an Alan Kentish of the STM
group specializing in, oh you’ll love this, offshore wealth preservation! LOL
And
again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same
guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called
“privatization”… of poor mother Russia. Well, to make a long story short, Mr Kentish, the original pro-BREXITeer was arrested in Gibraltar under the UK’s Crime
Act for such suspicious money funneling(s). My oh my Ms May, what strange political
bedfellows you seem to have!
"... They will be the ones to blackmail Europe and Germany if Europe becomes dependent on LNG from the U.S. So everything U.S. administrations are yelling at others is just projection, one knows immediately that it is in fact what the U.S. is doing under the veil or will be doing when the need/opportunity will arise. ..."
"... Trump is not an aberration, it is just how the U.S. always behaved, but now it is in the open, for all to see, the crassness and the bullying. ..."
"... Germany is the linchpin of the world and the U.S. (and others) is becoming hysterical at the possibility of not keeping the Germans down any longer… ..."
"... American Jewish intellectuals have really jumped the shark since the Iraq War. The most outlandish, slandering statements are stuffed into their essays and they trash whole peoples at the slightest “offence” to their worldview. ..."
If Daenerys Targaryen had announced her desire to use her last dragon to torch Moscow and
Saint Petersburg, the Neocons would have lionized her as the womanly exemplar of democracy
and wise foreign policy that produces peace and justice for all.
Neocons are very much the evil they call us to battle.
I had to rub my eyes with incredulity when I read that.
If Russia wants to weaken Ukraine, why did it ever build a pipeline through it in the first
place? Russia didn't stop using the Ukraine pipeline intially for political reasons. It was
because Ukraine was stealing gas meant for pass-through to other European countries and it
wasn't paying its bills. Don't pay your utility bills and see what happens.
Russia does not want to "control" Germany with Nord Stream, it wants to make money. And
Germany wants cheap gas. Strictly business.
And how can Russia control Germany with Nord Stream when it knows that the first time it
shuts off gas for political reasons would be the last. Because Russia knows that Germany will
find alternative suppliers and never come back. The Russians ain't stupid.
Russia wants bilateral trade with Europe without the Global Cop Gorilla perpetually in the
background arrogant calling the shots.
The final reconciliation of Europe and Russia should have occurred 25 years but didn't
because the ham-fisted United States threw up the fear-monger barriers. And that was because
its National Security States wants an existential "enemy" to justify its massive costs.
The sooner Europe ejects the U.S. War Machine from its territories the better. Better for
Europe, better for Russia and better for the American taxpayers.
I am with SteveM here. And I was shocked to see MarkVA’s comment. Mark has proved to
be a respectable commentator, especially on Rod’s Blog, with very astute and sensible
observations. It seems that tribalism is clouding his judgment when observing the world outside
the U.S.
It is well known that the Soviets and the Russians always keep their end of the bargain and
they know if they don’t do so they will end up loosing and being vilified. Whereas the
U.S. always breaks its agreements, it is not thrust worthy (not agreement capable). Imagine
depending on such an economic partner?!
They will be the ones to blackmail Europe and Germany if Europe becomes dependent on LNG
from the U.S. So everything U.S. administrations are yelling at others is just projection, one
knows immediately that it is in fact what the U.S. is doing under the veil or will be doing
when the need/opportunity will arise.
Trump is not an aberration, it is just how the U.S. always behaved, but now it is in the
open, for all to see, the crassness and the bullying.
Germany is the linchpin of the world and the U.S. (and others) is becoming hysterical at
the possibility of not keeping the Germans down any longer… And Germany is moving
ahead. It just sacrificed West Bank, and declared the BDS movement illegal as a soap to
Israelis, to burnish its credentials with those blackmailers, so that it will become free to
re-orient its politics and strategic configuration as it needs and wants.
fabian, May 23, 2019 at 2:33 pm
Gas? Where is the problem? Russian gas is cheaper that’s it. Furthermore, there is
another pipeline that’s going to bring gas from the Mediterranean to Europe and another
from Qatar.
And if all else fails and Russia flexes its muscles (which ones by the way) do you think
that the over-indebted America will not sell its gas to the Germans?
And yes, it’s not a good strategy to be too dependent on America. It quickly takes the
goods away when its interests are at stake.
Tiktaalik, May 24, 2019 at 5:14 pm
@MarkVA
>>The Nord Stream I and II gas pipe lines (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Gas Lines), a
Gazprom initiative, has everything to do with weakening Ukraine and increasing German energy
dependence on Russia;
How could NS increase German energy dependence on Russia? It will be the very same gas which
at the moment flows through the Ukraine.
Surely, NS would decrease anybody’s dependence from the Ukraine. So what?
Tiktaalik, May 24, 2019 at 5:18 pm
@MarkVA
>>Oh, and some lesser European countries were partitioned by the important European
countries. So yes, Europe was quite busy spreading joy and happiness all around:
It’s a bit rich when it’s coming from an American. You’re still in
Plymouth, right?
Kouros, May 24, 2019 at 11:35 pm
@MarkVA (May 23, 2019 at 8:12 pm )
That was a hit with the posting on Ukraine…
To bad it wasn’t accompanied by the Recognition of the US administration that the
Golan Heights, taken from Syria by Israel after a war, against all worlds dictum, now belongs
to Israel.
At least in Crimea, which by administrative fiat was moved within USSR from Russia to
Ukraine in the 1950s, there was a referendum.
And for me, US is Devil Incarnate since it put a target of nuclear missiles on my mother
country. May the curse of a 1000 hells be upon it.
Josep, May 25, 2019 at 5:05 am
Reading sites like Russia Insider gave me the notion that Germany would be better off as
allies with Russia than with the USA. After all, Russia and Germany:
* are on the metric system
* have languages that use grammatical gender
* share the same 220-volt “Schuko” power plugs and sockets
* implement Civil Law, and most importantly
* aren’t separated by a whole ocean.
American Jewish intellectuals have really jumped the shark since the Iraq War. The most
outlandish, slandering statements are stuffed into their essays and they trash whole peoples at
the slightest “offence” to their worldview.
There are strong anti-German currents in American culture and politics, going back to at
least WW1 and also manifest today (no other treaty ally is treated with such dismissive
hostility by the Trump administration as Germany). But they are regarded as completely normal
and rarely get critical attention, whereas German anti-Americanism is treated as a pathology or
some kind of sacrilege…the German-American relationship (calling it
“friendship” is a lie) is profoundly asymmetrical.
Agreed in both counts. The casual anti-white racism thrown about by the likes of such people
(let’s not forget Davids Medienkritik, Little Green Footballs, Grouchy Old Cripple and
Dissident Frogman) is a lot scarier than any jumpscare I’ve encountered. And in the case of
German_reader’s comment, It’d be interesting to consider how Trump reconciles his
hostility towards Germany with his own German heritage.
At one point in the Iraq War, the German news outlet Der Spiegel had readers rate their
opinion of president Bush on their website on a scale of 1 (most favorable) to, if I recall
correctly, 6 (least favorable). After seeing public opinion of Bush in Germany overwhelmingly
“least favorable”, users of FreeRepublic went to this poll and attempted to
gerrymander the results by selecting “most favorable”, deleting their site cookies,
and repeating so as to make it look like more people in Germany supported Bush than opposed. This
was called “freeping”.
"... Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN ..."
"... It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally. ..."
"... Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view. ..."
"... It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. ..."
"... Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of Josι Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq. ..."
"... We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it." ..."
"... Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election ..."
"... This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power. ..."
"... Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology. ..."
"... Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions. ..."
"... Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. ..."
"... It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles." ..."
"... The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it." ..."
"... Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks. ..."
"... But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views. ..."
"... Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi! ..."
"... To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS ..."
"... Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades. ..."
"... The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets! ..."
"... John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. ..."
"... Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, ..."
"... But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like. ..."
"... Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS! Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it." ..."
"... Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor. ..."
"... Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush! ..."
"... I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons ..."
"... The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation! ..."
"... I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. ..."
"... "Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees." ..."
"... Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes. ..."
"... They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel." ..."
"... The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today. ..."
John Bolton has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time he
may have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria.
I knew John Bolton and interacted with him on a nearly daily basis with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations headquarters
in New York when Bolton was the United States ambassador there from August 2005 to December 2006.
Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had
actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN. But that turned out to be the point.
It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order
to weaken it, perhaps even fatally.
Bolton's most infamous quote about the UN followed him into the building. In 1994 he had
said : "The Secretariat building
in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
But a more telling comment in that same 1994 conference was when he said that no matter what the UN decides the U.S. will do
whatever it wants:
Bolton sees such frank admissions as signs of strength, not alarm.
He is a humorless man, who at the UN at least, seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room. He once gave a
lecture in 2006 at the U.S. mission to UN correspondents, replete with a chalk board, on how nuclear enrichment worked. His aim,
of course, was to convince us that Iran was close to a bomb, even though a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate being prepared
at the time said Tehran had
abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
I thought I'd challenge him one day at the press stakeout outside the Security Council chamber, where Bolton often stopped to
lecture journalists on what they should write. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government
in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?' I asked him.
"That's an interesting question," he told me, "but for another time and another place." It was a time and a place, of course,
that never came.
More Than an Ideology
Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed
with deep personal failings hidden from public view.
He seemed perpetually angry and it wasn't clear whether it was over some personal or diplomatic feud. He seems to take personally
nations standing up to America, binding his sense of personal power with that of the United States.
It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all
other nations and isn't afraid to say so. He'd have been better off perhaps in the McKinley administration, before the days
of PR-sugarcoating of imperial aggression. He's not your typical passive-aggressive government official. He's aggressive-aggressive.
And now Bolton is ordering 120,000 troops to get ready and an aircraft carrier to steam towards Iran.
Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly
threatened the children
of Josι Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to
invade Iraq.
After Bolton's failed 2005 confirmation hearings, Tony Blinken, the then staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
told The New Yorker
's Dexter Filkins:
"We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe.
But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the
intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it."
Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in
Venezuela and of course Bolton organized
the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
What is alarming about the above video is not so much that he justifies lying, but the example he gives: lying to cover up military
plans like the invasion of Normandy. This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for
overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is
a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit
of profits and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology.
Regime Change for Iran
The U.S. national security adviser has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his
move. But this time John Bolton may have flown too high.
He was chosen for his post by a president with limited understanding of international affairs -- if real estate is not involved
-- and one who loves to be sucked up to. Trump is Bolton's perfect cover.
But hubris may have finally bested Bolton. He had never before maneuvered himself into such a position of power, though he'd
left a trail of chaos at lower levels of government. Sitting opposite the Resolute desk on a daily basis has presented a chance to implement
his plans.
At the top of that agenda
has been Bolton's stated aim for years: to
bomb and
topple
the Iranian government.
Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times,
on May 14 , it was he who
"ordered" a Pentagon
plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf. These were to be deployed "if Iran attacked American forces or accelerated its
work on nuclear weapons."
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation
deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions.
At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman, who had been undersecretary of state for arms control and
international security, as had Bolton,
predicted
to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it "would be the kind of excuse that a
person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran."
In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said on May 5 (May 6 in Tehran) that it would indeed
restart partial nuclear enrichment. On the same day, Bolton
announced the carrier strike group was headed to the Gulf.
Bolton Faces Resistance
If this were a normally functioning White House, in which imperial moves are normally made, a president would order military
action, and not a national security adviser.
"I don't think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are doing to him,"
former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel told RT's Afshin Rattansi
this week.
"They have manipulated him. When you get the national security adviser who claims that he ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla
to go into the Persian Gulf, we've never seen that. In the days of Henry Kissinger, who really brought sway, he never ordered
this, and if it was ordered it was done behind closed doors."
Bolton claimed he acted on intelligence that Iran was poised to attack U.S. interests close to Iran.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight
its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. An
editorial on May 16 in the Saudi English-language news
outlet, Arab News , called for a U.S. "surgical strike" on Iran. But The New York Times reported on the
same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack
Iran causing a full-scale war.
The
intelligence alleged Iran was fitting missiles on fishing boats in the Gulf. Imagine a government targeted by the most powerful
military force in history wanting to defend itself in its own waters.
Bolton also said Iran was threatening Western interests in Iraq, which led eventually to non-essential U.S. diplomatic staff
leaving Baghdad and Erbil.
It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense
you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow
them away with cruise missiles."
But this time the bully is being challenged. Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security
policy,
resisted the U.S. on Iran when she met Pompeo in Brussels on May 13.
"It's always better to talk, rather than not to, and especially when tensions arise Mike Pompeo heard that very clearly today
from us," said Mogherini. "We are living in a crucial, delicate moment where the most relevant attitude to take the most responsible
attitude to take is and we believe should be, that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side."
The New York Times that day
reported
: "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series
of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it."
Ghika: No new threat from Iran. (YouTube)
British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika then said on May 14: "There has been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or
Syria." Ghika was
rebuked by U.S. Central Command, whose spokesman said, "Recent comments from OIR's Deputy Commander run counter to the identified
credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region."
A day later it was Trump himself, however, who was said to be resisting Bolton. On May 15 The Washington Post reported:
"President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military
confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S.
officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran's leaders."
"President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, according
to several administration officials, in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against
the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict."
Then it was the Democrats who stood up to Bolton. On Tuesday Pompeo and Shanahan briefed senators and representatives behind
closed doors on Capitol Hill regarding the administration's case for confronting Iran.
"Are they (Iran) reacting to us, or are we doing these things in reaction to them? That is a major question I have, that I still
have," Sen. Angus King told reporters after the briefing. "What we view as defensive, they view as provocative. Or vice versa."
Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told reporters after the briefing: "I believe there is a certain level of escalation
of both sides that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The feedback loop tells us they're escalating for war, but they could
just be escalating because we're escalating."
Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian
and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite
possible that Iran was behind" the attacks.
Bolton was conspicuously absent from the closed-door briefing.
It's Up to Trump
Trump has pinballed all over the place on Iran. He called the Times and Post stories about him resisting Bolton
"fake news."
"The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly
sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!"
Trump tweeted on May 17.
The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot,
poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good
thing!
Then he threatened what could be construed as genocide against Iran. "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of
Iran. Never threaten the United States again!" he tweeted on Sunday.
But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the
"military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from
Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views.
On Monday he implied that the crisis has been drummed up to get Iran to negotiate.
"The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation
with Iran. This is a false report ."
The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up
a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report....
John Bolton must be stopped before he gets his war. It is beyond troubling that the man we have to count on to do it is Donald
Trump.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal,
Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected]and followed on Twitter @unjoe .
Or as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is US." As in the lies that created the Vietnam war and the waste of 58,000
American soldiers and thousand of Vietnamese. Or the lie that Iran is our enemy when we funded and encouraged Saddam to attack
them and destroyed their attempt to have a secular government.
Or the lie of the WMD's and the 9/11 attack which was funded by Saudi Arabia, and run by Saudis and NOT Iraq.
Or the lies of Afghanistan which was economically and culturally better off when it was controlled by the USSR...
John Hawk , May 26, 2019 at 16:56
Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi!
To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump
is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS.
It can't get any more delusional than this. Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump
et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier
on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades.
After all, deception is their game and they use it liberally, like feeding their agenda to Bolton as 'intelligence' info
of the highest order. The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason.
Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets!
Zhu , May 26, 2019 at 03:20
If Bolton were struck by lightning tomorrow morning, would anything change much? I doubt it. We Americans are as warlike
as the ancient Assyrian. We've been slaughtering Indians, Koreans, SE Asians, Central Americans, and multiple Middle Eastern
people for a looong time. It is flattering to blame this individual or th t country, but no. We, as a community, are all responsible
to some degree. Even me, on the far side of the world.
Alex , May 25, 2019 at 21:50
Bolton's choosing destroyed IRAN but staying friends with Saudi Arabia it's so contradicting, and so obvious that he is influenced
to behave this way is because Israelies influence. Saudy Kingdom using Bolton to get IRAN so Saudy will be only country promote
Extreme version of Wahhabi Islam which is didn't existed In Islam's history.
So Bolton's obsession with destruction of Iran is ignorance as its best. September 11th suspects were most of them Saudy
nationals, yet nobody wanted to talk about it, because there is irony that, George W Bush was and probably still doing business
with Saudy. So how can you explain that to American people? No you can not.
Perhaps collectively hypnotism !
OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 02:58
" So how can you explain that to American people?"
Given that useful fools are useful, why would you want to?
" No you can not."
An illustration of the benefits of dumbing down do not accrue solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, facilitating
the minimising of blowback during implementation of strategies based on "How to drown a drowning man with the minimum of blowback",
given that many believe that critical mass is a function of linear notions of 50% +1 and above; a further conflation of quantity
with quality to which the opponents are prone.
William , May 25, 2019 at 19:06
John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized.
Put him in a strait jacket and keep him in a padded cell. He poses a threat to millions of people.
Eddie S , May 25, 2019 at 11:26
Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of
us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, IF it was assessed from a pro-peace perspective.
But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign,
with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency
that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing
meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which
is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like.
Good article about a reprehensible politician.
renfro , May 25, 2019 at 11:18
"But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian
threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war. "
________________________________
Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS!
Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now
they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh
we have nothing to do with it."
Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump
appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor.
Seriously, how stupid do they think we are? If we attack Iran it will be for the Zionist and Saudis and we all know it.
Luther Bliss , May 25, 2019 at 10:57
Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush!
Remember it wasn't until Bush JR's second term that he asked his father, "What's A Neocon?" to which Pappy Bush replied,
"Israel."
I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot
free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons.
The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security
Advisers. What a joke of a nation!
Mark , May 25, 2019 at 02:30
I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq,
and Syria. Bolton stands out for his extremity among extremists, but he's a means rather than the end. The agenda is something
into which he bought, passionately by all indications, but which a paucity of other people created strictly to advance their
own, tiny, exclusive clan, not for the benefit of the United States.
Hank , May 25, 2019 at 09:43
To think that this administration campaigned on a promise to restrict future wasteful and needless interventions and then
hired this dinosaur of a warmonger makes my blood curl! Everyone with half a brain knows what Bolton's agenda is yet here he
is leading the USA into a war at the behest of a foreign nation led by a felon and terrorist! The American people who want peace
and their tax dollars invested into improving the USA have once again been stabbed in the back by a conniving administration.
Will this cycle of non-democracy ever end? Until it does, future administrations will continue on just like previous ones- kowtowing
to special interests, in particular the military/industrial mafia and the apartheid criminal state of Israel! All this massive
business of holding "elections" in the USA, all the talk about "Russian collusion" and the REAL collusion is right there in
front of us all- the US administration has once again COLLUDED to go back on a campaign promise and once again open the money
trough for the military/industrialist pigs!
Mark , May 26, 2019 at 05:31
I get the idea, but it's necessary to look 'behind' back-stabbing, conniving, colluding administrations, and Bolton, and
the military/industrial complex, and to bring Israel and some barely known U.S. history, at least back to World War I, explicitly
to the fore for public scrutiny. That's a monumental task, to say the least, owing to American attention spans and the contrary
interests of the powers that be.
Taras77 , May 24, 2019 at 20:24
Bolton has his own well funded PAC, from which he is free to "contribute" (bribe) sychophant congress individuals. What a
situation for the fix for war.
"Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as
have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees."
ricardo2000 , May 24, 2019 at 17:29
By far the most productive, and most verifiable, way to eliminate weapons is at a negotiating table. The easiest way to start
a war is with ignorant blather.
O Society , May 24, 2019 at 16:09
Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes.
They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel."
Trump initially declined on Bolton because "he doesn't like Bolton's moustache."
Kool Aid drinkers and idiots. We're being lead by a cult of morons who worship the bombs, money, and a white separatist state.
i doubt the iranians will test a nuke until after djt is out of office. after that you might wake up one morning and everything
you knew before becomes quite obsolete.
my guess is israel has stealth cruise missiles with h bombs. it would be very foolish of them to not have them. those descendants
of egyptian slaves are anything but foolish.
Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:33
@ CitizenOne: Thank you for your long comment. I agree with much of what you wrote, but would like to know why you claimed,
"Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel " . According to what I've read, Iran has not initiated hostilities
with any nation for over a century a clear, peaceful contrast to the rogue states of Israel & the U.S. Are you referring to
the long-ago-debunked claim that Iran claimed to 'wipe Israel off the map'?
(See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155
? "So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors,
the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague
wish for the future.
"A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem"
with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel.
")
Or perhaps you're referring to Revolutionary Guard deputy leader Hossein Salami's warning that if Israel starts an aggressive
war against Iran, it 'will end with {Israel's} elimination from the global political map'? IMHO, warning an extremely aggressive,
self-obsessed, Apartheid-practicing rogue state against trying to attack your nation is wise ;-) .
I look forward to your response. Thanks very much.
Sam F , May 27, 2019 at 06:12
Sam: please use an identifier initial as I do, to prevent confusion.
I have asked you twice before; perhaps not the same person.
It is unfair to expect others to make the clarification, and easy to prevent.
How is it that crazies like Bolton can end up high in our government hierarchy? It is because the whole damned government
is crazy through and through
Joe , May 23, 2019 at 20:48
His Dad probably made a huge donation to Yale just like Bush's Dad. That's what happens when the system is gamed.
Art Thomas , May 25, 2019 at 09:22
Yes, in my opinion. The state stripped of patriotic rhetoric and other obfuscations that keep us devoted to it is nothing
more than a criminal gang that hides behind the law.
Some basic examples. 1. The law: taxation, the crime: theft. 2. The law: monetary credit expansion, i.e. debt financing,
the crime: counterfeiting, i.e. creating money out of thin air. 3. The invasion of countries not a threat to the invading state.
Etc. etc.
Tiu , May 23, 2019 at 18:30
If the US "political establishment" was working for America's benefit, things would look very different.
They are instead working on the "globalist" agenda, which will, if successful, destroy all nations as we know them today and
what remains will be ruled over by a bunch of sociopaths who are the same group that has inflicted John Bolton on the world.
Bolton's a tool, a bit like a hammer, to get their project done. The Democrats have equivalent tools e.g. H R Clinton.
Mark Thomason , May 23, 2019 at 18:04
The problem is if he hasn't gone too far. If he gets his war.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:53
John Bolton should get to ride the missile in the remake of Dr. Strangelove.
evelync , May 23, 2019 at 19:53
hah hah hah
I loved that movie :)
and yes Bolton is a perfect caricature of Slim Pickens AKA Dr Strangelove.
I also refer to him as Yosemite Sam
one difference for our current real life war monger is that the movie character was simply insane and didn't justify his
craziness with explanations.
Bolton, OTOH, blames "national Security" and "the national interests" of this country .say what????
if we look at the horrific human costs and the enormous financial costs of the wars that were fought for U.S. "national interests"
one would want to ask, once the rubble had cleared, what "interests" were actually served and whose "security" did they actually
improve?
The answers always take us back to Eisenhower's MIC and Ray McGovern's MICIMATT (maybe I got a couple of these letters wrong?).
Whoever profited from the mayhem don't represent either our "national interest' or our "national security" IMO and yet those
two phrases are used to shut down any discussion or criticism in the lead up .
whew
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:20
Strictly about the movie Slim Pickens plays the ranking officer on the B-52 (I think?) which is actually dropping the bomb.
Dr Strangelove is a totally different character, one of a few played by Peter Sellers in that movie, and is a (mostly!) wheelchair-bound
German scientist.
And the wheelchair bound psychopathic scientist of Dr. Strangelove was inspired by Kubrick meeting Henry Kissinger at a cocktail
party and recognizing that Kissinger was the most evil person on this planet because he looked and sounded so responsible and
rational.
Now that Saddam, bin Laden, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler are dead, Kissinger holds the record of the person still alive who has
needlessly killed more people, both Americans and non-Americans, than any other person on this planet.
Hillary's idea of destabilizing Libya and creating a political vacuum there was from her training when working for Kissinger.
Abe , May 23, 2019 at 16:51
The Pathology:
John Bolton
Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Chairman of Gatestone Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former board member of Project for the New American Century (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former Adviser to Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (pro-Israel Lobby organization) https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/john-bolton/
Mike Pompeo
Christian Zionist: "We will continue to fight these battles, it is a never ending struggle until the Rapture."
Associate of Center for Security Policy (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Sponsor of ACT! for America (pro-Israel Lobby organization) https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/mike-pompeo/
Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:38
@ Abe: Thanks for the info!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:42
John Bolton is obviously a very sick puppy.
This is patently obvious to any observer with the least desgree of psyhological sophistication and insight.
If he lived on your block and made such statements about his neighbors, or a woman living nearby, he would be looking at restraining
orders.
He is an out-of-control abusive pig who belongs in an institution where a course of shock therapy might actually help him. I
reckon any basic psychological test would find that he has a least borderline personality and at worst is actually insane and
incapable of taking responsibility for the consequences of his action.
Bolton has permanent termporary insanity.
Letting this tortured, psychopathic individual run the military is itself an enormous crime, one of murderous negligence, one
for which Trump truly should and could be impeached. Congress must take all possible steps to get this man out of the Executive
Branch.
Threaten Trump with impeachment if he doesn't fire Bolton.
His appointment of Bolton is reckless negligence and endangers this country.
James , May 23, 2019 at 19:09
I wonder how good American politicians of the past, if there were any, would react to the appointment of this psychopath
as what he is now. Whom should be blamed for it? Donald Trump? The pro-Israeli lobbies? Or the American nation? A glance at
the man's face is enough to realize that he is deeply sick. To me, he doesn't look like a human being at all! He looks like
a monkey out of a stuffy room. Why don't psychotherapists do anything about him? Shouldn't he be hospitalized for the safety/security
of the world population? By the way, I wonder where Netanyahu, the psychopath's provoker, is. He has been very quiet for about
a month or so. Maybe he is waiting for the war to ignite without getting himself directly involved in it. Let Americans and
Iranians kill one another while he waits to pick up the fruit in the end.
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:27
Where does the blame lie? Who hired him? Who's the chief of the executive branch? Who's a person who could actually fire
him (as he's so famous for doing on reality TV shows) instead of wringing his hands on friendly TV networks declaring he doesn't
want to actually go to war, but if he's 'forced' to, he'll erase Iran from the map?
Druid , May 26, 2019 at 03:16
He would have to get permission from Adelson and the Mercers first.
CitizenOne , May 24, 2019 at 20:52
Bolton and Pompeo are the only things keeping him from impeachment. As long as Trump satisfies the bloodthirsty war mongers
and the insatiable appetite of the MIC and the Pro Israel lobby and the Oil Lobby or Koch Industries he cannot lose. So far
Trump is bangin on all cylinders. I really think he knows what he needs to do to survive. All this impeachment talk is just
fantasy by the left dreaming about getting him out of office "somehow".
bjd , May 23, 2019 at 16:13
That the mono-maniacal psychopath Bolton is a walking exhibit of the DunningKruger effect is no surprise to me. It is extra
frightening though.
Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:00
What was Bolton's day job before he started mucking around in politics and foreign policy? Master waterboarder or testicular
electrificator in extraordinary renditions for the CIA? He seems the sort to have spent much time at Abu Ghraib, and not just
to take notes. Honestly, his major goals seem to be the eradication of entire cultures and societies, which will somehow redound
to the magnificence of the United States of America. Clearly a sociopathic personality. A lot in common with Cheney.
Jimmy G , May 23, 2019 at 15:57
Again the panic is stirred by .. The NYT! (The source of such good info regarding Russia gate) .
The statement regarding Bolton " ordering" anything is just one more example of the media and the intel bureaucrats trying to
put the President in a jam politically . (Remember how a month ago we were invading Venezuela?)
Bolton is doing nothing more than getting enough rope to hang himself, and the military intelligence service, congressional
and media Trumpophobes are willing to stir this to the very edge, and we all know Congress could (if it could act in good Constitutional
faith, rather than pretending to be the judicial branch) unite for the good of this country and Trump would be amenable to whatever
they came up with. Trump is far less of a warmonger than any POTUS we've had in a very long time.
Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:18
If Congress is the only branch of government with the constitutional power to declare a war, surely it has the power to FORBID
the executive branch from fomenting such a war against their judgement.
In fact, wasn't the Boland Amendment such a legislative act passed with the intent of preventing the Reagan administration
from pursuing military action in Central America, most notably Nicaragua and El Salvador?
What's to prevent the Congress, if it were so inclined (which I doubt it is) to instruct the president (especially if he
seems trigger-happy) to refrain from initiating any unprovoked attacks upon Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or any other country,
for that matter?
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:56
Ollie North worked for Reagan, didn't he?
RnM , May 25, 2019 at 17:27
Trump is very aware that 'Stache Bolton and Mike "Mumbles" Pompeo are significant threats to his re-election. Would not be
surprised to see them removed before January.
CitizenOne , May 25, 2019 at 21:02
The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial
news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes
back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty
much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today.
I agree with your statement that Trump is far less vulnerable based on his history but I am sure that the war planners are
always concocting special information diets that are carefully prepared to appeal to the particular tastes of the leader of
the day. Whatever Trumps opinion is he will be surrounded by the hand picked lunatics of the day who will entice and enjoin
him to agree with plans for war based on their carefully prepared menu of propaganda specifically designed to be appealing to
the palate of whoever is in charge.
It is less certain that Trump's long history of opposing military action will have real staying power as he is served up
courses of a sumptuous meal prepared specially for his palate designed to engage him in support for military action all over
the World.
Trump is particularly susceptible to flattery and appeals to his greatness and his very stable genius. He wants to be the
great leader and for that he needs a plan to deal with the geopolitical situation in many countries.
Trump is a man who knows what to do too.
He advised Germany that it was a puppet of Russia until he didn't
He advised Teresa May how to do Brexit the right way until he didn't
He announced to the World he had forged deep connections with North Korea until he didn't
He had high hopes for an alliance with Russia until he didn't.
He specified the right type of fire fighting to be used to fight the Notre Dame Cathedral fire until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the fight in Syria until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the war in Syria again until he didn't
He wanted to cut the military budget until he didn't
Ordinarily if we were in the middle of a democratic presidency the press would be raising the "flip flopper" argument every
second of their available airtime.
Democrats are the flip floppers but never a republican even when he is. It all depends on the way the flips and the flops
land. If they land on conservative positions then a flop or a flip never occurred. With republicans, flip flopping is just a
corrective action to realign the president on the correct course. If it is a democrat then their hypocrisy and flip flopping
are broadcast 24/7 and are portrayed a fundamentally disqualifying events which demonstrate a fundamental lack of principles
and weakness of character deserving of condemnation. When errant republicans flip flop over to the "correct" vision they are
welcomed with open arms into the fold.
Trump wants to be accepted so badly that the democrats hounding him are in fact herding him into the fold of the conservatives
who will shelter him and support him at all costs and the media will never ever ever never call this flip flopping.
In short, if a political candidate shifts to the left his integrity will be destroyed as his character will be portrayed
as weak and built on shifting sands. He will be deemed not to be trusted like some loose cannon.
On the other hand, if a political candidate shifts to the right he will be greeted as a prodigal son returning to the fold
and will be welcomed with open arms.
So I am not as sure as you that Trump's background will be any indicator of his future ideas about how to succeed in the
environment he is in where both democrats by their antagonism and republicans by their defense of him both push him over to
the right.
He may once have been far less of a war hawk but politicians on both sides of the aisle are pushing him further to the right
every day.
Consortium News editor Joe Lauria may wish to contribute a follow up series of articles detailing the purity of pro-Israel
Lobby pathology exemplified by Bolton, Pompeo, and the beyond troubling Trump preferably before the next war.
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 19:33
"the wider extent of pro-Israel Lobby pathology in the US government. "
That's it in a nutshell.
KiwiAntz , May 24, 2019 at 18:46
Thanks Joe for the great article. Bolton (aka the moustache) truly is a humourless, warmongering, depraved psycho? This is
a cowardly man who dodged the Vietnam draft as he didn't want to die in some foreign patty field! But this lunatic has no qualms
to send other peoples sons & daughters into a Iranian war zone as cannon fodder to satisfy his deluded & perverted bloodlust
to destroy Iran? If "the moustache" wants a War with Iran he should be forced to fight on the frontlines with his troops along
with POTUS Bonespurs Trump, another cowardly draft dodger? Let the moustache & the Dotard make a stand, like Jon Snow in the
Battle of the bastards, sword in hand, facing down the so called Iranian, bogeyman enemy, but this would never happen as cowards
& bastards like Bolton & Trump don't personally fight in the battles they start, they hide in safety in a Washington situation
room, as far away from any War zone as possible! If Bolton gets his War with Iran, Trump will pay the price for this suicide
mission because he would be blamed for the fallout of any Military defeat! America's already sorry record of Military humiliation
& defeat in Regime change operations around the Globe would reach a crescendo if they ever dared to try to attack & overthrow
Iran as it would be the endgame of the US Empire!
mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:28
Trump is just Israel's bitch.
incontinent reader , May 24, 2019 at 01:08
Good comment, Abe. We've missed you. Keep posting more of the same.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:37
We Americans were bloodthirsty long before Israel existed.
anon , May 25, 2019 at 06:35
What an absurd zionist troll post. Try it with someone dumb, Zhu.
Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 15:17
First Joe, McKinley did not implement American submission to British Imperialism, though it began with the end of Grant's
administration as with the twice elected Groucher Cleveland, but it's confirmation as US policy began with Teddy Roosevelt.
The Roosevelt Corollary destroyed JQA's Community of Principle in the Americas which should be known as the true Monroe Doctrine,
contrary to popular opinion today which has incorrectly replaced the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary (as Bolton
is especially want to do). TR signalled the end of the Lincoln Era of American industrial development and global cooperation,
which was best represented by Grant, the most overlooked of great Presidents (and perhaps we see similarities of Grant to Trump
today). Bolton indeed is Captain Kangaroo, presiding over his Court as the Queen of No Hearts would in Alice's confrontation
with British rule once she penetrates behind the facade of British Lockean empiricism. With insight only equalled to Lincoln's,
who said "We can't fight two wars at once, so first the Confederacy and then the British," Trump has identified the fascist
nexus within our government as that same British foe, a nexus led by Brennan, Rice, Clapper, Jarrett, et al, which works on
behalf of what Eisenhower (another overlooked great President and General) called the Military Industrial Complex. The MIC is
a British Intelligence deployment to fundamentally undermine our Constitution and put the US into a state of perpetual war and
police surveillance. It is now over 70 years in the making, and is enforcing a new Cold War and attempted coup of our elected
Government, and yet, it may have finally found its match, not just in Trump, but in Trump's intended cooperation with Putin
of Russia and Xi of China. These three nations, along with Modi of India (just reelected) are a true threat to this rotten British
system, from Fabian liberals to Bolton chickenhawks, the true enemy is this British System. If we move on that effectively,
we may just have a chance to win this revolutionary moment now unfolding throughout the trans-Atlantic world. Let us return
to JQA's community of principle for the entire world. Let us work with Trump to end this fascist British nexus. Let us celebrate
our true heritage as Americans!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:51
Your comments read with interesting and well taken.
BUT: The bottom line is that Trump hired Bolton (and Pompeo) and has wound him up and set him loose goosewalking across the
globe.
Why?
The buck for Bolton's suicidal buffonery stops with Trump.
So, I can't see him as a genuine foe of the Deep State-MIC as you describe.
Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 18:10
Bolton is loyal to Trump, even though he is a failed chickenhawk. Look at McMaster, at the leaking, and outright betrayal
of the President. Same with Tillerson, betrayal. Pompeo and Bolton have ridiculous views and bloated war rhetoric, but they're
personally loyal, perhaps opportunistically, and even temporarily, but nonetheless right now they are, and when they're not,
I bet they're gone. But Trump does control the policy. Look at North Korea, any war? Media said there would be, then worked
to undermine a deal. Venezuela, war? They're talking in Norway now, how'd that happen? Syria, troops out? MIC, Dems and Media
opposed, and Trump called them out for the first time since Eisenhower! Pompeo to Sochi to see Putin, progress. How'd that happen?
Trump is fighting the MIC and too many good Americans are spinning so fast from the propaganda machine they can't see straight.
anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 18:40
Interesting, but it is easy for a president to fight the MIC: simply fire and arrest anyone who acts against efforts to control
them. He could send any federal enforcement agency, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, reserves, national guard, or even the Coast
Guard, Secret Service, DC police, or private guards to arrest them and prosecute any resisters as traitors. It is not one man
against the MIC.
And they cannot assassinate him once he has announced that intention, without exposing their hand and unleashing a generation
of purges and strict controls. If he is surrounded by traitors, he has only to say that and fire the lot of them. He could leak
that anonymously to Wikileaks or tweet it and they would be terrified.
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:48
Bolton has been working DC bureaucracy like a pro for decades. He's using Trump like a marionette while he runs circles around
the amateur. He was helping orchestrate foreign wars of choice back when Trump was still playing a pretend boss on TV. Bolton
has no loyalty except as a facade for those he needs to suck up to.
Your examples of non-wars are terrific. Trump is amazing! because he's running the government so badly that the State Dept
doesn't know what the Pentagon is doing doesn't know and vice versa. He chose to ignore the Iran nuclear deal, which had prevented
Iran from developing nuclear weapons. So now, the Iranians declare (out of self defense) that they're now going to pursue nuclear
weapons. Trump then says that he doesn't want to attack Iran, but they must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. This
is a circular argument exactly of the type the MIC uses to engage in war. Pompeo then indicates that laughable, ineffectual
attempts at sabotage are most likely Iranian. This grave threat to our nation can't even do enough damage to an oil tanker to
make it take on water.
Just because someone fails to do something doesn't mean that they were against it the whole time. Maybe they're just awful
at it. Sure, Trump says some things that are heartening to the anti-war and anti-interventionist crowd. But the next day he'll
say something heartening to rabid neocons. He needs to grow a spine, but it's far too late. He's a dandy, a spoiled rich kid
fop who's never had to answer for his mishaps, because why, when you have inherited money and a stout legal team?
anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 19:06
The idea that "the MIC is a British Intelligence deployment" is fantastical, as the US MIC is several times the size of UK's
entire MIC, and such a secret could never be kept. The US MIC has engaged UK secret agencies to subvert the US Constitution
by serving as agents to pass intercepted US communications back to the US to pretend that the MIC didn't do it, or that it was
foreign intel. But that is a long way from UK controlling the US MIC.
There are certainly confluences of interests between the US and UK oligarchies, but I see no basis for the contention that
"American submission to British Imperialism began with the end of Grant's administration" when the US prosecuted Britain for
building the Alabama etc. to break the Union blockade, and was outraged that Britain considered recognition of the Confederacy
until it lost at Gettysburg. The US under TR was not submitting to anyone when it sent the Great White Fleet on tour, or when
it seized Cuba and the Philippines. Nor under Wilson when it stayed out of WWI until very late in the war, despite the Lusitania
loss. Nor under FDR when it stayed out of WWII until attacked, despite the passionate pleas of Churchill.
Some detailed argument with credible references would be needed to support those assertions.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:44
Scapegoating is real popular with lefties & rughties alike. American Exceptionalism forbids we ever accept respobility for
what we've done.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:45
No, the rest of humanity is not any better.
anon4d2 , May 25, 2019 at 06:48
The commenter was searching for causes, and some UK conspiracy is simply too far from any available evidence. In fact it
much appears to be a wild attempt to distract from the obvious causes including zionism, which you pretend is "scapegoating."
No, zionism is a principle corrupting factor in US politics, especially foreign policy.
If you don't see that, you must start learning the evidence, rather than relying on the presumption that it is mere scapegoating.
Otherwise you are serving their wrongful and racist tribal purposes, and others will presume that you know that.
Oscar Shank , May 26, 2019 at 07:24
Zhu knows it.
Vera Gottlieb , May 23, 2019 at 14:56
How much more peaceful the life on our entire planet would be if the Americans weren't around.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:58
Extend that to all humans, and the head of PETA would support the project.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:16
I doubt that. Nature hates a void.
Bethany , May 24, 2019 at 17:50
Exactly. Very well put.
Abe , May 23, 2019 at 14:19
Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),
only served about one year of his second term.
Bustani was forced out by the U.S. government in April 2002 because he wanted international chemical weapons monitors inside
Iraq and thus was seen as impeding the US push for war against Iraq. The US accused Bustani of "advocacy of inappropriate roles
for the OPCW".
Since 2011, the United Nations has stood by a US-Saudi-Israeli Axis financed and armed the mercenary terrorist forces attacked
Syria. In addition to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, major support for terrorist mercenaries has provided
via NATO-member state Turkey, as well as Jordan. Israel has launched repeated air attacks and provided direct support for terrorist
forces in Syria.
From July 2010 to 2018, the Director-General of the OPCW was Turkish career diplomat Ahmet Uzumcu. Uzumcu served ambassador
to Israel from 1999 to 2002, and as the Permanent Representative of Turkey to NATO between 2002 and 2004.
Turkey has been the primary channel for mercenary terrorist forces assaulting the Syrian state. The remaining terrorist forces
in the Idlib Governorate continue to be supplied through Syria.
Since Uzumcu announced the creation of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria on 29 April 2014, not a single OPCW report
has acknowledged these basic facts concerning the conflict in Syria.
Following a consensus recommendation by the OPCW Executive Council in October 2017. Spanish career diplomat Fernando Arias
was appointed to replace Uzumcu as Director-General of the OPCW. Previously, Arias served as Ambassador of Spain to the Netherlands
and the Permanent Representative of Spain to the OPCW. He also has served as Permanent Representative of Spain to the United
Nations in New York.
Uzumcu, and now Bustani, obviously understand that the appropriate role of the OPCW is to provide propaganda support for
"regime change" operations, and to say nothing contrary to the "narrative" endorsed by the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:52
The OPCW has certainly disgraced themselves in Syria. What a sham.
Randal Marlin , May 23, 2019 at 13:48
John Bolton's questioner in the second clip should have made the distinction between deception used to lead the country into
war, and deception used to pursue a war already constitutionally declared and already underway.
In the first case there is a violation of democratic principle. When the people are the ultimate sovereign, they need to be
properly informed. They can agree to deception, like where and when D-Day will occur, during war; but not in the case of leading
the people into war. Lying to Congress is always unacceptable, and those who do lie to Congress should be made to suffer serious
penalties.
zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 02:13
I read a report that the aircraft carrier strike force and preparation of 120,000 US troops, to Persian Gulf was ordered
sometime ago and that Bolton took advantage of that fact to make it look that 'Bolton ordered it'?
vinnieoh , May 24, 2019 at 10:54
What I'd read is that the carrier strike force and bomber detachment were previously scheduled: there had been a previous
drawdown and this deployment represents a return to a level similar to the end of the Iraq war, and that does sound like Bolton/Pompeo
opportunism. The 120,000 troops plan sounds like something Bolton prodded pentagon scribes to produce. How to interpret when
Bolton says that then Trump denies it, and then a new troop deployment (1% of the previous) is announced/suggested/leaked? I
see it as Trump taking his dogs out for a walk to snarl at the neighbors.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 13:07
"Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York
Times, on May 14, it was he who 'ordered' a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf."
That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton, may be giving
such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.
The National Security Advisor is, as the title states, merely an advisor not confirmed by the Senate, and therefore not,
in constitutional terms, an "officer of the United States" with the authority to carry out the policy of the government. Other
than his assistant fetching him lunch, nobody in government should be following Bolton's orders at all while he holds this job.
But this is nothing new. I had the same concern, on an even larger scale, during the first Bush Jr. administration when Cheney
was running around reshaping the government in his own warped image. Despite the Vice President's elected status, he has no
executive power under the Constitution no power at all, in fact, except when sitting as President of the Senate. There was
a time when everyone knew that.
With all the perennial crowing we see about the greatness of the Constitution, and the mewling about how Trump is degrading
it, it would be nice if Congress and the media could spare a moment to care about whether the people giving orders to the world's
largest military and covert/intelligence apparatus are legally empowered to do so.
Ash , May 23, 2019 at 17:17
> That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton,
> may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.
It does kind of have an Alexander Haig flavor to it, doesn't it?
David G , May 23, 2019 at 22:08
When Bolton gets up and says "I'm in control here", I'm definitely finding a rock to hide under.
Zenobia van Dongen , May 23, 2019 at 13:06
The question that Joe Lauria asked of John Bolton, i.e. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically
elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?"
seems to imply that Iran seeks revenge against the US for the CIA's 1953 coup d'ιtat against prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
However the current leaders of Iran are not entitled to consider themselves the heirs of Mossadeq, nor are they morally justified
in avenging him, since the CIA coup relied largely on support from the very same clerical establishment that now rules Iran.
As a matter of fact in the 1950s and 60s Shia clerics in Iran were routinely considered CIA agents. Consequently the Iranian
elite's pretense of carrying on Mossadeq's anti-imperialist struggle is profoundly hypocritical. I grant that the current reactionary
clique that governs Iran defends Iran's sovereignty against US imperialism as Mossadeq did. But the underlying concept of the
Iranian nation is profoundly different. The present rιgime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty
that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist
revolution of 1909. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution
Indeed, Iran has no hesitation in crushing underfoot the aspirations to independence of other nations. It ruthlessly conducts
ethnic cleansing in Syria, commits assassinations in South America, and in general behaves with imperialist ruthlessness that
is moreover unmitigated by any concern for human rights or international law.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 14:27
As to your last paragraph please provide proof for your allegations. As to your second paragraph you assume to know the meaning
behind the question Mr. Lauria asked. Could it be possible (this I believe is more likely) that what Mr. Lauria meant or realizes
that absent the '53 coup would there now be an Islamic theocracy ruling Iran?
Again making the disclaimer that I'm no expert on the region or Iran particularly I have followed many leads of reading and
investigation to understand the ramifications of that seminal event (the '53 coup.) What I believe I've understood is that Iran
prior to and until the '53 coup was on its own unique trajectory of reclaiming its sovereignty and rejecting its status as a
(UK) colonial vassal. There seemed to be a somewhat fluid acceptance of the rising democratic movement of Mosaddeq et. al.,
a fading nod to the former royal house, and an acceptance of Shiite religiosity of some considerable social legitimacy.
So, three centers of power and influence working its unique way to an unique Iranian future.
With the US/UK engineered coup the imperialists destroyed the legitimate democratic evolution happening there. With the re-installation
of the Shah Reza Pahlavi as the puppet ruler of the US, that traditional center of power and legitimacy was likewise forever
delegitimized in the eyes of most Iranians. That sentiment was cemented with the creation of SAVAK by the US, UK, and Israel
to be the iron fist of the Shah and his new imperial master.
That left only one center of power or authority which retained legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians the Shiite theocrats,
and that is why when Iranians kicked the US out it was the Islamic theocracy doing the booting. You are correct that there was
at least one Shiite cleric (I've forgotten his name,) jealous and fearful of the rising influence of democratic governance,
who is a known and recorded collaborator with the US/UK machinations of the coup. Without the help of the US/UK his part in
the affair would probably have been inconsequential.
It is not Iran that is funding and establishing Islamic madrasses in Pakistan, India, China, Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere.
It is the Wahhabist Sunnis and they preach intolerance and violent jihad. Furthermore, of the total global population of adherents
of Islam, 75% are Sunni affiliated, and 25% are Shiite affiliated. Those percentages hold true in the immediate region of the
ME as well. The repeated claims of Iranian desires of empire are a shibboleth emanating from KSA and UAE.
The leaders of the Islamic Revolution used Mossadegh's image to help get people on board against the Shah, The National Front
was allowed to be a party again for a short time, and a Street in Tehran was renamed post-revolution for Mohammad Mossadegh.
This was a cynical ploy by the Mullahs to get people on board with their revolution and make people believe that they were indeed
the true heirs of Mossadegh and committed to democracy. It was all a sham. The National Front was made illegal again at some
point in the 80s, and the street named for Mossadegh was renamed around the same time. These people are the heirs of the Shah
whether they like it or not.
anon4d2 , May 23, 2019 at 16:59
Joe's question points out that, had the US not overthrown Mossadegh, there would have been a secular democratic government.
That is true throughout the Mideast, where in the 1950s-70s the US supported radical Islamic movements that suppressed secular
movements and overthrew secular governments, pretending that the USSR was moving in. There was no evidence of USSR interest
there, as it was preoccupied with such factions in its central Asian republics, and apparently only some arms from the USSR
in Egypt were ever found as "evidence."
Similar US actions have continued to date, almost 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, the US always supporting fanatics
against moderates like Assad and Ghaddafi, and pretending to support "democracy."
Compare the US support of Saudi Arabia, a fanatical fundamentalist monarchy engaged in terrorism throughout the region, including
against their only neighbor that defends minority rights, Syria. Again falsely claiming the need to protect oil supply, which
it can buy anywhere without bombing anyone, like any other oil buyer. Again falsely claiming to support democracy which it overthrows
everywhere at the pleasure of its own oligarchy, always to "protect Israel" or attack socialism, which is always to get political
bribes.
There is no evidence of any "ethnic cleansing" by Iran in Syria or elsewhere. Where do you get that idea? Iran is majority
Shiah, defending the majority Sunni population of Syria from Sunni fundamentalists. You certainly have no evidence that Iran
"commits assassinations in South America" or opposes "aspirations to independence of other nations" and made that up to deceive
others. Your comments on this site have been knowingly false.
zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 03:44
The above, re the current Iranian religious govt, very informative, thankyou.
Re Joe's article I cannot take seriously that Trump is against war and the Deep State.
If Trumps rhetoric during his electioneering, supporting the middle class (deeply deprived after the US corporations abandoned
them for low paid Chinese labour) was in any way honest he would not have chosen the cabinet he did (and keeps on choosing).
Trump has not chosen one cabinet member that would support that supposed sympathy for the middle class.
Reporting that assumes Trump is fighting for moderation (against his own cabinet) and to establish policies in the direction
of that sympathy, is without evidence, it seems to me, regardless of what he might suggest to Fox News.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 17:00
"The present rιgime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist
struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909."
And the American government has equal respect for the Constitution.
Bolton didn't order a carrier group to the Persian Gulf. He doesn't have the authority. The carrier group left because of
the deployment was already planned. Bolton does not have the power that has been ascribed to him. He is a grandiose clown who
knows how to play the press. I don't think he will have his job six months from now.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 12:16
"At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment
after the U.S. left the deal, it 'would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation
or direct attack on Iran.' In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said that it would indeed restart partial nuclear
enrichment."
Two problems with this part of the article:
The link in the main text here goes to an Intercept article about Bolton, but it has no mention of Tom Countryman, or even
of Iran.
It isn't accurate to say that Iran may now, or is saying it will, "resume" or "restart" nuclear enrichment, since it never
ceased, nor did it ever commit to cease, such activity. The JCPOA merely imposed strict *limits* and monitoring on nuclear enrichment
and stockpiling, some of which Iran is saying it will now depart from.
I also disagree with the imputation elsewhere in the article that Donald Trump has a good understanding of real estate. His
disastrous, decades-long record in that business suggests otherwise. But I suppose some people will always believe what they
see on TV.
lou e , May 23, 2019 at 12:06
Creeping fascism works like fishing with a rod and reel. You hook the fish and it runs off 100 ft of line . You reel in 50
ft and the fish takes 30 feet back. Do the Math! Some times burning down the village IS the only way to get rid of the infestation.
Bit hard on the USSA, but as Ben Franklin put it you have a democratic republic IF ypu can Keep It.
Remember at an earlier time with Bolton, someone described him as a kiss up kick down kind of guy, i.e., a real jerk. I defended
Trump against Russiagate because it was a threat to the office of the president. Unless, he gets his head straight, his "political"
moves in the Middle East and Southwest Asia can spin out of control. He is not negotiating a new deal with some city to build
another hotel, and his rhetoric makes him sound like that is the way he thinks he should act with other countries.
One can defend him by saying maybe it will work, but then maybe not and it is not a matter of your target taking his papers
and leaving the room.
Great article, Mr. Lauria. Have you posted your resume on your site? Interested in your confrontation with Bolton.
Trump wants to be reelected more that being the President but in his defense we know what he will face if he decides to enter
into honest negotiations. He's going to have a heck of a time finding people to cover his back. He can count on one presidential
aspirant, Tulsi Gabbard but she's on the other side.
Jeff Harrison , May 23, 2019 at 11:42
If we have to rely on Thump for anything other than social controls, we're screwed.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 11:40
These personal reminiscences of Bolton at the U.N. by Joe Lauria unfortunately only confirm the man's very public record.
The fact that such a creature has been accepted for so long in the heart of U.S. foreign "policy" is yet more evidence that
the country's crisis of political culture started long before Trump came on the scene.
I don't quite accept the slight comfort implied in the formulations here that this time Bolton has "gone too far", or "flown
too high", since to me they imply that there is some moral or rational bedrock that he has struck beneath which the establishment
is not willing to go.
I don't think that's true, as a general proposition. For example, the U.S. continues less noisily but inexorably on its long-term
collision course with China, which will be even more catastrophic than war with Iran, not to mention the ultimate one with the
planet's environmental limits.
For me it's enough that, for a number of contingent reasons, Bolton's (and MBS's and Netanyahu's) lunge at Iran has fallen
flat with both U.S. and European policy and media elites for now, and I hope forever.
I just called WH 202-456-1111 to tell President Trump that Bolton should be fired; had to wait 8 min to talk. Trump certainly
has lots of problems, but he'll have plenty more if he starts a war! Pox Americana!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:58
Great idea.
I'll do the same.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:04
Thank you Mr. Lauria. I'm tending to believe that not only has Bolton flown too high, but Trump's predictable method of trying
to get what he wants was completely miscalculated wrt Iran. There is no better treaty or deal to be had concerning keeping Iran
from developing a nuclear weapon. The failures of the JCPOA that Trump is probably griping about all have to do with matters
of Iran's necessary and legitimate right to security and self-defense. No sane nation would willingly give in to this bullying.
Thanks again.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:44
Also, wrt Trump's predictable patterns, note that little if anything has changed regarding the US and the DPRK, so if he
is a crafty and effective negotiator I'm having a hard time seeing it.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 18:22
Good example Vinnieoh. NK and SK are reaching out and (more importantly) shoving out the US. More winning.
I love Trump. He is useful. Fascism, NAFTA, generic racism you name it, he really shines a light on issues.
Here again. (Currently) SA, GAZA, Israel, Syria and of course Iran. Hell, the entire region. What a train wreck he is.
What about the dollar? The EU? Yikes.
By gosh this man could single handedly take down an empire! MAGA!
Well done, Joe Lauria. Of course our dilemma is Donald Trump says one thing and contradicts himself 5 minutes later. You
could say he "changes his mind" but I do not think his mind is stable to begin with. He's far too nuts to put any faith in for
"doing the right thing,"
Bolton and his neoconservative pox on the world serve the interests of the war machine and fossil fuel corporations. When
will be rid of them? When We the People grow a set of testicles and throw them all into prison. Trump isn't going to save us,
but he might let Bolton get us all killed.
Seems that Trump is so small minded that what we observe cannot be explained mechanistically, we need quantum mechanics.
Rather that a particular state of mind we have a stochastic distribution, wave patterns and spin.
Yes, Joe Lauria has presented the problem very well.
A major factor is certainly the persuasiveness of the NSC and other MIC entities which surround the president, and comprise
much of official DC. Try persuading anyone in the MIC that war is ever inappropriate: they are all full of extreme scorn and
false accusations, and have endless "evidence" of threats behind every tree, and rationales to attack this or at least that,
just to make "statements" and "warnings" to invisible foreign monsters. The MIC is a completely and permanently logic-proof
subculture of bullying, which bullies every member of its own tribe to line up behind tyrants like Bolton and a million other
puerile bullies devoid of humanity.
No doubt you know that this was all well understood by the founders of the US, who restricted federal military powers to
repelling invasions and knew that any standing military was a threat to democracy. The Federalist Papers should be required
reading in the US. All of those understandings were gradually lost after the War of 1812 and the 1820s, as the founders died
off. As the US became confident that it could repel any invasion, it lost the sense of the necessity of unity and cooperation
of regions, and Congress degenerated into a battle of intransigent factions leading to the completely unnecessary Civil War.
With the ebullient emergence of the middle class, no effort was made to correct the defects of the Constitution in failing to
protect the institutions of democracy from the rising power of economic concentrations. With WWI and WWII, the power of oligarchy
over mass media was consolidated, and by WWII the oligarchy and MIC effectively controlled elections, mass media, and the judiciary,
the tools of democracy. Democracy has been a facade ever since.
The US has zero security problems that the MIC has not created, and could at any time re-purpose 80% of the MIC to developing
infrastructure in the poorest nations with positive effects upon its security. Had it done so since WWII, we would have rescued
the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, and would have had a true American Century.
Instead we have killed over 20 million innocents and mortgaged the lives of our children to serve the infantile psychopaths
of the MIC.
The solution is not only to eliminate the 2000-member NSC, cut the military by at least 80 percent, prohibit acts of war
or surveillance by the executive branch, tax the rich so that no one has income above upper middle class, and demand amendments
to the Constitution restricting funding of the mass media and elections to limited and registered individual donations. We also
desperately need a fourth branch of federal government, which I am calling the College of Policy Debate, to conduct moderated
textual debates of policy issues in all regions, protecting and representing every viewpoint, in which all views are challenged
and must respond, and all parties must come to common terms. The CPD should produce commented debate summaries available to
the public with mini-quizzes and discussion groups. Without that rational analysis and access to the core debates, we do not
have a democracy at all, we are all no more than the fools and pawns of these oligarchy scammers, who must be actively excluded
from all government capacities.
Sorry for the lecture.
Linda Wood , May 24, 2019 at 01:59
Please don't apologize, Sam F. Your brilliant and humane words give me hope at a time in which I am in shock at the blatancy
of fascism in our government.
Doggrotter , May 23, 2019 at 10:33
Where is a drone strike when you need one?
OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 10:23
" seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room."
Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools.
Once upon a time there was a discussion of which of the opponents' should be proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize the list
being relatively long.
After extensive analysis and discussion the short-list consisted of two opponents in alphabetical order Mr. John Bolton and
Mr. Karl Rove.
However in light of the notion "Do you think your opponents are as stupid as you are? " the proposal question was left in
abeyance, not only as a function of decorum but also through understanding that "Useful fools are often most useful when they
are believers that they are not fools." and that even small dogs can seem tall when you are lying on your stomach.
OlyaPola , May 24, 2019 at 17:33
Since omniscience can't exist perhaps Mr. Bolton was/is subject to misrepresentation and misunderstanding?
"Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian
and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's
quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks."
What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships? Smells of another false flag.
I would not be so sure. A delicate signal that Iran has more capabilities concerning stopping in-out-Gulf traffic than naive
people like Bolton realize has a sobering potential. By the way of contrast, what kind of black flag it is if it is instantly
put in doubt, "we do not know" etc. When there were "chemical incidents" in Syria, no one in Washington claimed the need for
more facts, uncertainty etc.
Instead, UAE initially denied that it happened at all, subsequently, together with KSA, they did not have any "certain knowledge".
Somehow no government appears to promote the incident. Even USA.
BTW, the allegation that Iran is placing missiles on fishing boats staggers the mind. First of all, "missile boats" of which
Iran has plenty are small ships, BUT NOT VERY small, ca. 500-800 tons, which are fast, 40 kt, but not as fast as their predecessors,
torpedo boats (200-300 tons, 50-60 kt). They are still faster than any of the larger naval vessels, can trail them, and attack
from small distance in the case of start of hostilities. That Iran places missiles on such boats can be learned from videos
proudly provided by PressTV.ir.
Using "fishing boats" for that purpose is dubious, and the largest question mark would be: WHY? The reason that missile boats
are larger and heavier than torpedo boats is that you need more stability to launch missiles than torpedoes. Then you need a
radar etc. Placing missiles on fishing boats would be a waste of missiles. Hardly an escalation.
OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 12:47
"Hardly an escalation."
Perhaps you are being deflected by framing?
One of the escalations is the escalation of belief in, requirement of, and resort to, the dumbed-downess of the "target audience".
One of the salient questions being deflected is why, and as ever investigation requires some knowledge of Mr. Heisenberg
and his principles.
mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:34
Perhaps the Iranians are putting missiles on fishing boats to stun the fish and catch them that way. Fishing boats aren't
exactly very fast.
Anyone who actually believes the oil tanker incidents were carried by Iran should seek an immediate consultation with their
doctor. These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools and Iranians are not fools.
Brian , May 23, 2019 at 17:22
Exactly. According navel personnel, Iran has been using fishing boats to transfer rockets from land to it's vessels for years,
supposedly because the gulf is too shallow. I don't have hydrographic maps of the area, anyone know if this is true?
Clearly, Persian Gulf has routes for the largest ships on Earth, but the supply bases for missiles may be away from ports,
and it would make sense to place them so they are not easily accessible to a big ship navy, and in general, to disperse them.
Tim , May 26, 2019 at 06:43
"Thomas"
> These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools
Since neither you nor I know who did it, and there are a whole slew of plausible suspects, we don't know why they did it,
either. So it is silly to claim they are fools.
Since the Saudis and UAE are in the midst of waging war on Yemen, the most obvious suspects are their enemies there, al-Ansara.
(And by the way, contrary to what another commentator claimed, it was not a "few dents", but a gaping hole in the hull just
below the waterline. And since the local authorities spoke of an impact by an unidentified object, these were presumably torpedo
strikes.)
OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 07:58
"What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships?"
Quite a few including but not limited to further data on the opponents' perception of what constitutes plausible belief for
the opponents' target audience, and the opponents' increasing resort to, amplitude, scope and velocity of "misrepresentations".
As is the case with the benefits of dumbing down not accruing solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, the benefits
of creation and implementation of "false flags" do not accrue solely to those engaged in "false flags", and are enhanced when
the creators and implementers of "false flags" are immersed in amalga of projection and notions of sole/prime agency, facilitating
potential benefits to many others not restricted to Iran.
John Bolton is a True Believer. The True Believer mindset is manifest in terrorist acts.
True Believers have signed onto the ideology that dictates that True Believers must act in
any way to oppose their perceived enemy. War is not a last option for the True Believer.
Terrorist attacks are not beyond the possible actions of the True Believer. The True Believer
has one goal which is to defeat the perceived enemy at all costs and which will use all means
to do so including violent attacks on innocent persons.
Terrorists are usually members of organizations that have a True Believer mentality and
can rationalize unspeakable acts of terror in order to wipe out innocents if that will
further their cause.
What is the advantage of enlisting True Believers and how do they further the causes of
their affiliated organizations? That is the same question that we ask about terrorist
organizations that imagine and create violent acts in order to fulfill the plans of the
terrorist organization.
What is the motivation of a terrorist to strap on an explosive vest and wander into a
crowd of innocent people and detonate their explosives? Why are they willing to commit
suicide in order to kill a whole bunch of people that they have no quarrel with?
The answer is that they are True Believers in their cause and will do anything to advance
the agenda of their affiliated organizations including murder.
The problem we face today is the ideological domination of opposing forces which will
absolutely send Kamikaze's to their death in order to win.
It works both ways. The US is determined to wipe out opposition to its interests even if
that means that warships will rain down explosives on anyone they remotely suspect is an
enemy of the ideology of the West. We are willing to go to war with our perceived enemies
even if it means that millions of innocents will be killed in the process of defeating our
ideologically opposed enemies.
On the other side the ideological goals of the countries we attack is also aligned to
commit mass atrocities and use of illegal weapons in order to win their bid to destroy the
United States or its allies notably Israel.
There are True Believers on each side that are willing to inflict mass casualties on the
other in order to preserve their ideology.
Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel and the US is also guilty of
vowing the destruction of Iran. Each ideology depends on True Believers to take the stakes to
the ultimate goal of annihilation of the enemy.
We have a choice in this. We can decide whether or not the differences in ideology are
worth war.
The big issue we face is whether or not we trust those opposed to our policies and actions
will try diplomacy despite historical diplomatic failures on both sides leading to the clash
of ideologies and ending in a military solution. I say "we trust" because we are also on the
line to trust the opposition with plenty of history which has shown that diplomacy doesn't
work.
The even bigger issue is the geopolitical strategy of nations which seek to control huge
natural resources like oil. This issue is at the top of every national agenda of oil states
and is the reason we quarrel with oil rich nations that seek to place ideological political
restrictions on the free flow of oil or depend on the money provided by the sale of the
resources to advance an agenda which is opposed to the West. It is the reason that Iran seeks
to dominate the politics of the region and intervene when we try to interfere with their
economic output with sanctions based on ideological differences that end in official US
sanctions which are the economic equivalent of warfare on Iran.
We see economic sanctions on Iran as the least violent way of dissuading them from
carrying out their anti western agenda especially their anti Israel agenda which includes
lots of funding for the True Believers (terrorists) who are willing to die for the "Cause" to
destroy Israel.
The Iranians see sanctions as a an unwarranted threat to their economy and are even more
determined to fund groups that try to defeat the Western policies that include support for
Israel they see as an illegal foreign power occupying Muslim lands.
It is no surprise that the tensions in the Middle East have resulted in the rise of the
True Believers on both sides based equally on economic and ideological differences. Each side
is steeped in the belief that the survival of their culture and their economy is at stake.
There can be little doubt that these differences amount to a potential powder keg.
Layered on top of the clash is the historical realization that compromise and diplomacy
have failed in the past and that the failure of diplomacy has resulted in war. Neville
Chamberlain's efforts to secure "peace within our time" by capitulating to German demands are
seared on everyone who has a responsibility to prevent war. It was a huge mistake to believe
that Hitler would abide by a piece of paper. Huge mistake is an understatement for the
millions who lost their lives.
We need to use historical facts to guide future actions. Prevention of war via diplomacy
has been thoroughly debunked by historical facts such as WWII. The belief of Western nations
and their content that promises of aggressors promising peace would be honored has a
historical and factual basis proving that the peaceful approach and the trust in aggressors
to abide with peace plans leads to World War, death, destruction etc. WWII was certainly a
formative event for the West which has since forged its disdain for diplomacy based on the
history of world war.
Enter Donald Trump, President of the United States of America. A tragically flawed man who
is just as tragically flawed as all of the rest of us as the leader of our nation. We are so
tragically flawed in so many ways we cannot count them all. We wanted a president who was
first and foremost a businessman. We wanted a populist president as we always do but we got a
rich and privileged president who has done his level best to support the rich which is not
exactly a populist notion by filling the swamp rather than draining it. We have a president
that calls all the news "fake" but who also spends his time in conversations with the right
wing media never assuming that right wing views of the news of the day might just be the real
fake news. Fake news to him is talk from the left.
Where does all this end up? It is anybody's guess.
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake
up. By Robert W. Merry
May 22,
2019
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday,
November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. (
Official White House Photo
by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out
in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in
a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain,
from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win
world are gone.
For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a
wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The
trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on
almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential
threat."
Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge,"
released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has
mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there."
The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United
States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."
The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more
intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."
... ... ..
Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American
alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability
to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain
its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.
The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted,
it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it
feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been
part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.
Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing
assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within
Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to
accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli
-- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.
Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be
sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that
allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's
strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.
NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on
that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist.
The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as
well.
So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's,
while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does
anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as
in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient
to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.
This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led,
not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform
us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever
a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked,
should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization
itself.
And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations
in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course,
any Russian provocations.
Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar
to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by
his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.
But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of
far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:
From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we --
not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant
to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living
in or near Washington, D.C.
If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could
explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.
Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification
for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore
required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).
"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because
we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated
and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate
change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into
the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that
wrong.
Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global
leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers,
including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent
counted for nothing.
Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful
run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely
approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall,"
provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether
irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.
There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense
the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider
neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)
In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia
and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when
the USSR existed.
I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat
suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in
China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)
Dems only need few select states to campaign in and they will win elections all the time.
Everybody is playing the racists card when they do not like what is said or done!!
U.S. ships are involved in provocative "freedom of navigation" exercises in the South China
Sea and other ships gather ominously in the Mediterranean Sea while National Security Advisor
John Bolton and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo along with convicted war criminal Elliot
Abrams conspire to save the people of Venezuela with another illegal "regime change"
intervention. But people are drawn to the latest adventures of Love and Hip-Hop, the Mueller
report, and Game of Thrones. In fact, while millions can recall with impressive detail the
proposals and strategies of the various players in HBO's latest saga, they can't recall two
details about the pending military budget that will likely pass in Congress with little debate,
even though Trump's budget proposal represents another obscene increase of public money to the
tune of $750 billion.
This bipartisan rip-off could not occur without the willing collusion of the corporate
media, which slants coverage to support the interests of the ruling elite or decides to just
ignore an issue like the ever-expanding military budget.
The effectiveness of this collusion is reflected in the fact that not only has this massive
theft of public money not gotten much coverage in the mainstream corporate media, but also it
only received sporadic coverage in the alternative media. The liberal-left media is distracted
enough by the theatrics of the Trump show to do the ideological dirty work of the elites.
Spending on war will consume almost 70% of the budget and be accompanied by cuts in public
spending for education, housing, the environment, public transportation, jobs trainings, food
support programs like food stamps and Meals on Wheels, as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security. Most of the neoliberal candidates running in the Democratic Party's electoral
process, however, haven't spoken a word in opposition to Trump's budget.
The public knows that the Democratic Party's candidates are opposed to Trump's wall on the
southern border, and they expect to hear them raise questions about the $8.6 billion of funding
the wall. But while some of the Democrats may oppose the wall, very few have challenged the
details of the budget that the
U.S. Peace Council indicates . For example:
"$576 billion baseline budget for the Department of Defense; an additional $174 billion
for the Pentagon's Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), i.e., the war budget; $93.1 billion
for the Department of Veterans Affairs; $51.7 billion for Homeland Security; $42.8 billion
for State Department; an additional $26.1 billion for State Department's Overseas Contingency
Operations (regime change slush fund); $16.5 billion for the Department of Energy's National
Nuclear Security Administration (nuclear weapons budget); $21 billion for NASA (militarizing
outer space?); plus $267.4 billion for all other government agencies, including funding for
FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice."
The Peace Council also highlights the following two issues: First, the total US military and
war budget has jumped from $736.4 billion to $989.0 billion since 2015. That is a $252.6
billion (about 35%) increase in five years. Second, thesimultaneous cuts in the government's
non-military spending are reflected in the proposed budget.
Here are some of biggest proposed budget cuts:
+ $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years, implementing work requirements as well
as eliminating the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The budget instead adds
$1.2 trillion for a "Market Based Health Care Grant" -- that is, a block grant to states,
instead of paying by need. It's not clear whether that would be part of Medicaid.
+ An $845 billion cut to Medicare over 10 years. That is about a 10 percent cut .
+ $25 billion in cuts to Social Security over 10 years, including cuts to disability
insurance.
+ A $220 billion cut to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program(SNAP) over 10 years ,
which is commonly referred to as food stamps, and includes mandatory work requirements. The
program currently serves around 45 million people.
+ A $21 billion cut to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families , an already severely
underfunded cash-assistance program for the nation's poorest.
+ $207 billion in cuts to the student loan program, eliminating the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness program and cutting subsidized student loans.
+ Overall, there is a 9 percent cut to non-defense programs , which would hit Section 8
housing vouchers, public housing programs, Head Start, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
nutrition program, and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program , among others.
The working classes and oppressed peoples of the U.S. and around the world can no longer
afford the unchallenged ideological positions of the Pentagon budget and the associated
expenditures for so-called defense that are considered sacrosanct in the U.S. They cannot
afford that much of the U.S. public is not concerned with issues of so-called foreign policy
that the military budget is seen as part.
The racist appeals of U.S. national chauvinism in the form of "Make America Great" and the
Democrats' version of "U.S. Exceptionalism" must be confronted and exposed as the cross-class,
white identity politics that they are. The fact that supposedly progressive or even "radical"
politics does not address the issue of U.S. expenditures on war and imperialism is reflective
of a politics that is morally and political bankrupt. But it also does something else. It
places those practitioners firmly in the camp of the enemies of humanity.
The objective fact that large numbers of the public accept that the U.S. can determine the
leadership of another sovereign nation while simultaneously being outraged by the idea of a
foreign power interfering in U.S. elections demonstrates the mindboggling subjective
contradictions that exist in the U.S. For example – that an Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez can
assert that she will defer to the leadership of her caucus on the issue of Venezuela or that
Barbara Lee can vote to bring Trump's budget proposal out of committee or that Biden can
proudly support Trump's immoral backing of a neo-fascist opposition in Venezuela and
they will all get away with those positions – reveals the incredible challenge that we
face in building an alternative radical movement for peace, social justice and
people(s)-centered human rights.
So, we must join with
U.S. Peace Council and the other members of the Anti-war, pro-peace, and anti-imperialist
communities in the U.S. to "resist and oppose this military attack on our communities, our
livelihoods and our lives." This is an urgent and militant first step in reversing the cultural
support for violence and the normalization of war that currently exists in the U.S. Now is the
moment to demand that Congress reject and reverse the Trump Administration's military budget
and the U.S. Government's militaristic foreign policy. But now is also the moment to commit to
building a powerful countermovement to take back the power over life and death from the
denizens of violence represented by the rapacious 1%. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Ajamu Baraka
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016
candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing
columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch
magazine.
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the
right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a
minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks
Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news
mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's
almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill
Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire
continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda
techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their
assigned puppets.
Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State
controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the
masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of
this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.
Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and
successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion,
pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP),
rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in
corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their
corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.
There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social
issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The
real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it
appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the
Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare.
Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort
whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The
proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as
the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of
Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out
"legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions.
The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote
against a defense spending increase.
Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing
from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too
Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy
in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as
people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.
When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are
bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed
billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge
tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in
every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no
legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.
I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line,
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative
doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals
will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses,
thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true
libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public.
There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last
election by referencing another famous cynic.
"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one
who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking
and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks
Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey,
John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure
her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and
subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump
was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator
at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.
As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be
good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV
ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The
vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed
this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and
disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over
Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.
I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since
2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way.
I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign
stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I
don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not
their words.
Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news
CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The
Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He
provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is
difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.
I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal
judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive.
Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and
renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep
energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing
to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have
gotten it done when he controlled both houses.
The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating
tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets
better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the
Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global
recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life
and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global
recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.
I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle
class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to
mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received
little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many
cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.
With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their
coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a
massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock
to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave
themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered
winning in present day America.
The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises
unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards
as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard
response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with
a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being
a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the
day. Truthfulness not required.
The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the
performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has
become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies
permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant
criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to
corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the
land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human
trait over two hundred years ago.
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental
lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity
of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less
than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over
300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths
occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches,
and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.
These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans.
They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't
care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others.
They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their
unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of
controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every
politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head,
MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the
president.
The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question
will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning.
What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding
Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused
by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I
don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and
their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard,
Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of
personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama
years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.
In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine
whether he can defeat the Deep State.
"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant
step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over
nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the
status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one
has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus,
despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will
probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and
manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism,
cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general
relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here,
too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the
Trumpeteers
That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does
not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of
it, but they're still pissed.
These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is
for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.
Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm
swallowing it.
I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to
include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to
distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?
"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."
If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at
this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself
one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".
If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I
would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real
leadership and not another political hack.
The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side"
you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand
for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and
trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the
minute they become them and not one of us.
Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire
complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before
I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.
Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at
Arkancide.com and start counting the
bodies.
Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of
fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that
situation.
Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of
**** as my governor for 12 years.
NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and
shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped
bafoon.
I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been
nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to
Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.
Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..
Great theater..
Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked
with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream,
vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely
concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now.
If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin
immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.
Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest,
but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect
.. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.
Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" /
current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic
posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..
Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds
Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for
Trump and they were laughing their asses off.
The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were
immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned
nightmare..
Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive
& risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.
I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life,
own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore,
laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to
live in poverty & homelessness in.
At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not
= a financial death sentence.
Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no
electricity.....no running water......no roads....
There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have
given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.
The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare
because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want
to puke.
There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.
This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the
poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents
represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his
reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power
network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's
dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a
proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army
The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot
compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful
countries
Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced
is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire
history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds
of obedient citizens.
This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or
paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful
ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions
The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy,
and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries
have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.
The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd
be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle
leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them
barely read, though they probably can
I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem
gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.
If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What
should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even
mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen
the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants,
liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny
continues to grow and fester as a cancer.
You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is
quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.
If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are
already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your
life.
I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless
without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king
George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's
God.
I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then
pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life.
There are worse things than dying.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing
from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke!
this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.
Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.
We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of
England and the issued of the British-pound currency.
George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed
George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way
of the phony revolution.
Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks,
Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The
same parasite remains within our government.
It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of
rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to
manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the
Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution,
and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.
To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional
books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for
dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while
they are being manipulated.
"First published From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College: "There will
be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple
conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines,
but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de
facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open
to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
"Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival':
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the
territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that
posed formerly by the Soviet Union.
This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and
requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose
resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These
regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and
Southwest Asia.
There are three additional aspects to this objective: First, the U.S. must show the
leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of
convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a
more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the
advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking
to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the
mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role. An effective reconstitution capability is important here, since it implies
that a potential rival could not hope to quickly or easily gain a predominant military
position in the world."
... access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil"
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian
Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On
Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegelpublished
(German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in
east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal
circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to
a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire
plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire,
who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation
but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid,
German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them.
He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could
probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws.
They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch
daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair.
Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire
who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches
for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter.
Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the
conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much
politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted
to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive
reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately
stepped down and the conservatives
ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky
opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic
nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the
videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics
and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view.
The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party
are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian"
puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important
member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament
election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded
politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd
been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election.
Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was
likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support
for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while
drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video
was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will
see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers
hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new
far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the
Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even
the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly
snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to
do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of
real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray
put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting
almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami.
It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through
multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately
funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind
alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties
– and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political
symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine
the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people,
especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What
was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded
with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through
austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote
for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new
'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties
they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions,
he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes,
we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
The US objective is to sustain US tech prominence by stifling Chinese plans to advance its
economy. Of course China will never agree to that.
from CFR..
The Chinese government has launched "Made in China 2025," a state-led industrial policy
that seeks to make China dominant in global high-tech manufacturing. The program aims to
use government subsidies, mobilize state-owned enterprises, and pursue intellectual
property acquisition to catch up with -- and then surpass -- Western technological prowess
in advanced industries.
For the United States and other major industrialized democracies, however, these tactics
not only undermine Beijing's stated adherence to international trade rules but also pose a
security risk. . . here
Blooming Barricade , May 17, 2019 3:32:07 PM |
link
A bit off topic, I thought b and barflies would find it in their wheelhouse...
French researchers have completed their Map of Neoconservative Networks. It's interactive
and gives links to each neocon/neocon group. Most of who you would expect feature
prominently: Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, BHL, but it also connects neoconservatives to the
Great Replacement theorists showing strong links between them and fascists. https://anticons.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/anticons9.pdf
Along similar lines, Swiss Propaganda Research released the Media Navagator earlier this
year. b will be happy to know that MoA ranks in the hard anti-establishment camp alongside
MintPress and the WSWS. There is also a European version
Boeing and Hollywood are two week stops that China can hit with impunity.
Notable quotes:
"... China has outspent the US on R&D since 2009 and now invests three times as much each year. ..."
"... The issue with these chips highlights just how ridiculous the American position is. The chips referred to are Intel processors they use in servers and qualcomm (arm core) processors in cell phones. Funny thing is, these processors are not even made in the US, and their replacement isn't that much of an issue, not for a company with the resources Huawei possesses. ..."
"... For government and other high security uses China has options like the MIPs based Loongson but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to x86 and windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like AMD markets, and it wouldn't take that long to do. ..."
"... The United States attacked China's largest telecom equipment maker Huawei. If China decides to retaliate, it could target chip giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which rely heavily on it for revenue, or tech giant Apple, which depends on them for iPhone manufacturing. ..."
"... Huawei's competitors Nokia and Ericsson would stand to win from the above ban as the United States and its allies would resort to them for 5G deployment. Nokia's and Ericsson's stocks rose more than 4% and 2% in early trading on May 16. . . here ..."
"... Chip fab is the only remaining significant technological lead that America retains anymore, but the raw engineering brainpower behind that industry in the US is mostly imported from China anyway. The Chinese have no shortage of brilliant engineers, they just have not really had the need to do without Intel and AMD before. Now they do. ..."
"... Within a year or so China will be producing chips as good as America's. Another year after that and America will be eclipsed in that industry. No longer will people be looking for "Intel Inside!" stickers on products but rather "Huawei Inside!" . ..."
"... What doesn't seem to be clear, or else ignored/excused here -- China is today just as globalist as the US and in fact the multinational corporations in control of both countries are inextricably linked, especially in the high tech sector currently under the intense MoA thread microscope. ..."
"... By our standards exploitation of workers in China is a grim picture , which compares with the grim blue collar conditions in the US, the equal and opposite result of the globalist equation wrt offshoring factory jobs endemic to capitalist production. ..."
"... MoA China "experts" should study the reality of globalization after removing the rose colored glasses if you wish to be considered analysts instead of merely wishful thinkers/cheerleaders of groupthink delusion. ..."
@William Gruff #75: China is already producing world-class ARM chips. HiSilicon 's latest Kirin
processors are on par with Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Samsung's Exynos processors. Apple's
A-series is ahead of them all, but what does it matter if Apple's rising prices and falling
quality are going to kill Apple anyway?
Per Reuters, Huawei spends $11b on US components, and its ability to withstand this hit will
vary by segment: "Huawei being unable to manufacture network servers, for example, because
they can't get key U.S. components would mean they also stop buying parts from other
countries altogether," said an executive at a Huawei chip supplier.
"They can relatively better manage component sourcing for mobile phones because they have
their own component businesses for smartphones. But server and network, it's a different
story," the executive said.
Are there any articles on how dependent Apple and Boeing are on Chinese components? This
strategy seems incredibly short-sighted.
Remember the "Asian pivot"? Did Huawei and other critical tech companies start making
independent chips back then? Or before? When were the tariffs planned? Speculation, anyone?
The issue with these chips highlights just how ridiculous the American position is. The chips
referred to are Intel processors they use in servers and qualcomm (arm core) processors in
cell phones. Funny thing is, these processors are not even made in the US, and their
replacement isn't that much of an issue, not for a company with the resources Huawei
possesses.
Huawei already has its own arm based soc's it uses in it's high end phones and they can
replace processors in it's low end phones with lesser versions of these.
The Intel processors will be tougher to do for the commercial market because of software
compatibility issues.
For government and other high security uses China has options like the MIPs based Loongson
but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to x86 and
windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like AMD markets, and it
wouldn't take that long to do.
The United States attacked China's largest telecom equipment maker Huawei. If China
decides to retaliate, it could target chip giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which rely
heavily on it for revenue, or tech giant Apple, which depends on them for iPhone
manufacturing.
Huawei uses Qualcomm's modems in its high-end smartphones and has been in settlement talks
with the chip supplier over a licensing dispute. Tensions between the United States and
Huawei could delay this licensing settlement, sending Qualcomm's stock down 4.4% on May
16.
Huawei's competitors Nokia and Ericsson would stand to win from the above ban as the
United States and its allies would resort to them for 5G deployment. Nokia's and Ericsson's
stocks rose more than 4% and 2% in early trading on May 16. . .
here
"Soon U.S. chip companies will have lost all their sales to the second largest
smartphone producer of the world. That loss will not be just temporarily, it will become
permanent." --b
This is a crucial and important development. So long as China is just developing their
domestic chip designs as an academic exercise they will forever trail behind the market
leaders by at least one technological iteration. Why try so hard with chip designs that will
only ever just be used in college degree theses papers and proof of concept models? Real
innovation comes from scratching an itch; from fulfilling an actual need. Chip fab is the
only remaining significant technological lead that America retains anymore, but the raw
engineering brainpower behind that industry in the US is mostly imported from China anyway.
The Chinese have no shortage of brilliant engineers, they just have not really had the need
to do without Intel and AMD before. Now they do.
In the short term the transition will be painful for China. The first few iterations of
their replacement chip designs will be buggy and not have the features of chips they could
have bought for cheaper from the US. They will also have problems ramping up capacity to meet
their needs. Typical growing pains, in other words. In the long term, though, this will be
seen as the point at which the end started for America's chip tech dominance. Within a
year or so China will be producing chips as good as America's. Another year after that and
America will be eclipsed in that industry. No longer will people be looking for "Intel
Inside!" stickers on products but rather "Huawei Inside!" .
Isnt it clear the US is globalist? Uhhm, well, yes, it's only been clear for the prior 75
years at least. In fact Lenin laid it all out during WWI so one could
say it's been clear for 100 years.
What doesn't seem to be clear, or else ignored/excused here -- China is today just as
globalist as the US and in fact the multinational corporations in control of both countries
are inextricably linked, especially in the high tech sector currently under the intense MoA
thread microscope.
Why aren't Huawei making making more smartphone chips in production? Because so many
Chinese component manufacturers are still heavily invested in churning out product for Apple.
These companies employ millions in "relatively high paying" factory jobs and account for a
large slice of Chinese export income and stock market capitalization. These corporate
oligarchs supported by the Chinese government retain a vested interest in the status quo.
This is not to minimize Huawei or Chinese growing ability to compete at the design and
innovation level as well as production, it is simply rightsizing the perspective to fit the
reality. Huawei production is growing worldwide but this doesn't mean Apple or Samsung will
evaporate or fall by the wayside and the Chinese need Apple and its markets too . In
fact, Huawei is now willing for the first time to sell microchips to third party cell phone
producers including Apple. Successful capitalist growth for China depends on increasing
production into new products, technologies and markets not replacing current platforms with
new. The product cycle will take care of itself in time anyway.
China is still in the industrial growth phase of its capitalist development, although
beginning to transition to the higher phase for sure. Of course.
MoA China "experts" should study the reality of globalization after removing the rose
colored glasses if you wish to be considered analysts instead of merely wishful
thinkers/cheerleaders of groupthink delusion.
Trump calculation is probably that neoliberalism in China already corrupted Communist Party enough for US being able to
destabilize the country buy depriving it of export revenue. And it is true that influence neoliberal Fifth column in china exists
and can compete with Communist Party for power. If Trump timing is correct China will be crushed. If this in incorrect the
USA might be crushed. This is a very high stake game as Trump burn bridges way too easily (being reckless and arrogant all his
life). Bulling as a negotiating tactics might be OK for New York real estate market is not that good in negotiating with
countries such as China.
Both countries are neoliberal countries but Chinese have more flexibility as remnants of Communist Party control remain in
place. But the same remnants are also a bog danger, as China might find itself in the position of the USSR when the US
crushed oil price and deprived it of much of its export revenue. In this case Communist Party will be blamed for social
disruptions and might lose power due tot he power of Chine Fifth column of
nouveau riche like happened in the USSR (opposition was supported by huge cash injections from the USA). I hope they study the
USSR experience very carefully and will not repeat Gorbachov mistakes (although it is difficult, as it is very difficult to find a
more stupid politician then Gorbachov, unless we assume that he was a traitor). Also the level of nationalism in China is
much higher and that might help. In any case this uncharted territory for both China and the USA.
The Trump administration seems to have the illusion that if you raise the stakes high enough, other countries will cave to US
demands. There might also be an element of creating foreign adversary in order to unite the domestic front. If Chinese will hold
their position tight despite the pain, Trump might lose the election in 2020 as he will be unable to protect the economy for
more then a year and the first signs of reception nullify his changes, as he will be blames for it.
Notable quotes:
"... This article titled 'Face' by Walrus over at SST is well worth a read alongside b's piece. https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/05/face-by-walrus.html ..."
"... Both these articles give a very clear picture of what the drunken louts 'Team Trump' are up against in their so called trade war. Very much like a drunken spectator climbing into the ring thinking he can take on a professional boxer. ..."
"... The US attack on China did not start with Trump. This is what Obama's military "Pivot to Asia" was about, as was the TPP, which explicitly was designed to develop an economic alliance that left China out. Capitalist trade wars are also not new, as are hot wars. They are part of capitalism. ..."
"... "Intellectual property" is a laughable assertion, an audacious attempt by the US to corner all human advances and claim them as the property of US capitalists, to be only used for their profits. As if! ..."
"... What an appalling ruling elite in the USA. Blamers and punishers. Never take any responsibility for their murderous acts ..."
"... The U.S. talks about pressuring China until they give in. China talks about a solution that respects the dignity of each party. ..."
"... I had the sudden realisation that US politics is essentially monarchist in its nature, for all the complicated legal and constitutional structures that have been built around it over the past 240+ years. US politics and culture are fixated on one individual with extreme powers; the superhero obsession in Hollywood is one symptom of that. ..."
"... In a way the US now resembles the Ottoman empire during that empire's Sultanate of Women period (late 1500s to mid-1700s) when sultans' power was dominated by their mothers, viziers and sometimes the janissaries who became a hereditary class during that period. ..."
"... Idolatry is universal. People always gravitate towards Alpha personalities. ..."
"... In looking into US culture and why it gives rise the type of leadership it has, I think it may be the belief in exceptionalism. Exceptionalism may also carry with it the belief that all other peoples want to be like them and all they (Americans) have to do is free those peoples from the nasty dictators ruling over them. ..."
"... Patrick Armstrong in one of his articles has said that in his dealings with US officials as Canadian ambassador or diplomat, is that American officials genuinely believed that all they had to do was overthrow the evil dictator and the people would welcome Americans or willingly join the US system. ..."
"... But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town square. ..."
"... We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it, Doublethink. ..."
"... The British court said, no patent, no copyright and no monopoly can last longer than 7 years. that was 1787-89, and it explains the for a short time clause in the USA constitution. ..."
"... I don't think the US sees the world's nations as commanded by their senior politician. Far from it, but to keep the US public locked in a child's mentality, the govt and its MSM present every political event/action/reaction as between personalities. Can't have reason and logic breaking out among the minions can we? ..."
"... China's "competitive advantages" are too big for a confederation of micro-countries in the Pacific to overcome. ..."
"... b said;" the U.S. economic system is based on greed and not on the welfare of its citizens." Bingo! Jrabbit @ 52 said;"US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20 years." Maybe the last 100 yrs.? Demonize countries people and rulers, and take their stuff, but why not? We are, don't ya' know, the exceptional nation, doing gods work. Manifest Destiny, isn't it great? ..."
"... Smacking down China is a strategic priority for the Deep State. ..."
"... the neocons in the US believes it is now or never to defend the USA unique position as world power. They believe, that if they don't fight now, they will have lost. I say, they already have. ..."
"... Trust the UnitedSnake to blame the Chinese for reneging on an agreement ! Fact is, Trump's team Add in last minute conditions that are totally unacceptable to China. Chinese commentators are fuming at the audacity of the demands. 'WTF, Do they think we'r their gawd damned 51st state ?' ..."
"... Typical UnitedSnake's 'negotiation' tactics, designed to fail ! Thats how Clinton justity his bombing of ex Yugo, by blaming Belgrade for the breakdown of negotiation ,to justify its 78 days of aerial arsons against Yugo. ..."
Both these articles give a very clear picture of what the drunken louts 'Team Trump' are
up against in their so called trade war. Very much like a drunken spectator climbing into
the ring thinking he can take on a professional boxer.
@ Peter AU 1 | May 17, 2019 4:33:54 PM |
1 5 Trump
demanded concessions on trade
banned Huwei
made military [plans with Taiwan
saber rattled in the China Sea
Trump wants improved trade conditions for improved economic climate in the U.S.
But there are others in the admin who want something else.
But still: "backup chips it has independently developed"
That's a good one Mr Moon.
The US attack on China did not start with Trump. This is what Obama's military "Pivot to
Asia" was about, as was the TPP, which explicitly was designed to develop an economic
alliance that left China out.
Capitalist trade wars are also not new, as are hot wars.
They are part of capitalism.
"Intellectual property" is a laughable assertion, an audacious attempt by the US to corner
all human advances and claim them as the property of US capitalists, to be only used for
their profits.
As if!
What an appalling ruling elite in the USA. Blamers and punishers. Never take any
responsibility for their murderous acts.
Rise up people, these are dangerous, stupid leaders and elites.
B says: Whatever face is at the top is only representing the layers below.
Yes, this is the case when complex governmental systems are functioning properly. In
this case power is distributed throughout the system, based on the role each individual
within the system. People must have a collaborative culture for complex systems to function
properly.
People of an authoritarian nature hate complex systems and distributed power, as such
systems limit the freedom of action of the authoritarian leader. The corollary to this is
that systems must be kept simple to accommodate authoritarian leaders. And simple systems
are much less powerful and effective than complex systems.
My observation is that, in the U.S., authoritarianism is the dominant culture, as
opposed to a collaborative culture of the Chinese that is implied by B's comment.
Indeed we see many signs in these negotiations that the U.S. is operating based on a
culture of authoritarianism, whereas China is operating based on a culture of
collaboration. Among the signs:
The tendency that B. noted of Americans to assign all power to the leader.
(This is not the first time, and in fact it is a common mistake of the U.S. and one of the
reasons that their regime change efforts almost never achieve a result that is favorable
for the U.S.)
The U.S. talks about winning and losing. China talks equity.
The U.S. talks about pressuring China until they give in. China talks about a
solution that respects the dignity of each party.
The principle behind negotiations for people of a collaborative culture is 'Win-Win or
No-Deal'. For Authoritarians, Win-Win is a compromise, and compromise is the equivalent of a
loss. My conclusion is that there is only a very low probability that the U.S. and China will
successfully negotiate a trade deal. The cultures of the authoritarian Americans and the
collaborative Chinese are too divergent. China will only accept Win-Win and the U.S. cannot
accept Win-Win.
Classic US empire strategy.
Build up a supplier and when they start to be serious a competitor take them down.
Asian Tiger crisis,forcing occupied Japan into the Plaza Accord etc.
They left it too long with China, way too long.
China has not recycled its trade dollars surplus into USTs since 2014.
No replacement suppliers like Vietnam or Indonesia etc will do either, no more vendor
finance
for the US.
It will have to live within its means, no wonder the neocohens are going
insane.
We are watching the death of the $ as GRC first hand.
NO jared, Trump is in charge, fully responsible and yet totally irresponsible. He hires
and fires, he barks the orders, Trump is not captive. You may desperately wish to believe
that but NO, Trump wants it like this and NO dissent.
This is Henry Kissinger's plan implemented by Trump. A war criminal implementing a
sociopath war criminal's plan. Trump is a killer and an oligarchs stooge and he like the
rewards.
See the fabulous Aaron Mate discussion previously linked in the last thread.
I'd be curious to know what other MoA barflies think of the US tendency to personalize
other countries' governments and political systems and reduce them all to monarchies of one
sort or another, and what this says about the American psychology generally. So much of the
US slather and accusations against Russia and China and what those nations are supposedly
doing look like psychological projection of the US' own sins and malevolent behaviour.
I was in hospital nearly 20 years ago for a major operation and some of my recuperation
there was spent watching a few old "Star Trek: Next Generation" episodes. Watching those
shows, I was struck by how much "power" the Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard appeared to
wield. Every one of his subordinates deferred to his decisions and very few challenged
him.
I know this is an old TV show with scripts that emphasise individual action over
collective action and delineating a whole culture on board the Starship fleet (this is a
long time before "Game of Thrones") but I had the sudden realisation that US politics is
essentially monarchist in its nature, for all the complicated legal and constitutional
structures that have been built around it over the past 240+ years. US politics and culture
are fixated on one individual with extreme powers; the superhero obsession in Hollywood is
one symptom of that.
In a way the US now resembles the Ottoman empire during that empire's Sultanate of Women
period (late 1500s to mid-1700s) when sultans' power was dominated by their mothers,
viziers and sometimes the janissaries who became a hereditary class during that period.
@ dh-mtl 21
You provided an excellent analysis of two very different kinds of people, westerners and
Asians (Chinese). Americans who believe that Chinese are pretty much like them, and respond
to people, to pressures and and to situations in the same way, are badly mistaken.
I would add another: Westerners want instant results and quick profits whereas Chinese take
the long view. Heck, they've been around for five thousand years so why not.
I'm glad you raise the issue of increased prices for US consumers, b. I have been looking
in vain for a mention of this even in alternative media. Nobody appears to be talking about
it.
If I can go off track for a moment the events surrounding Boeing are highly significant
and a parallel to what is happening generally in the US. Here is a something I wrote for
naked capitalism but did not send - Yves is too fierce and I don't trust her. A bit like a
feminine Colonel what's his name Laing...
Because of the prestige of Boeing Wall Street left its dimantling until quite late -
1997. GE and Ford had already produced their versions of the 737 Max in the 1960s with the
Corvair and the Pinto respectively as finance people started to take over the running of US
companies. There is something very sad in watching a once magnificent company reduced by
bankers to a shadow of its former self.
There has been a trade imbalance for quite a while but it didn't seem to matter much. The
Chinese raised their standard of living, Americans got cheap stuff, surplus dollars went
into treasuries to fund the deficit.
It all worked pretty well until Trump and MAGA. Somehow he thinks he'll bring the jobs
back but no Americans are going to make sneakers and circuit boards for $2 an hour.
I have just replied to Karlof1 in I think the previous thread and I link into this. In
looking into US culture and why it gives rise the type of leadership it has, I think it may
be the belief in exceptionalism. Exceptionalism may also carry with it the belief that all
other peoples want to be like them and all they (Americans) have to do is free those
peoples from the nasty dictators ruling over them.
Patrick Armstrong in one of his articles has said that in his dealings with US officials as
Canadian ambassador or diplomat, is that American officials genuinely believed that all
they had to do was overthrow the evil dictator and the people would welcome Americans or
willingly join the US system.
All the economic momentum is in Eurasia, centering on China, India, and Russia.
China is spearheading this drive and re-assuming its historical status as the richest
land in the world. Instead of resisting, Washington should be working with projects like
the BRI that help enrich everyone. (Indeed, why doesn't Washington announce a BRI for North/South America, perhaps a Yellow
Brick Road? But that's an aside...)
And concerns about Chinese spying through their companies should be equaled with
internal reflection about the practice in the United States. Perhaps it would be wise for
both countries to develop and practice international standards that respect human rights in
an Everything's Connected world.
Given how the US and China frequently treat "different" people with disdain, that's a
lot to ask. But no country or people is spotless regarding abusing human rights and some
wisdom with power would be welcome from both governments.
You point out that our entertainment industry focuses its plots on strong leaders, and Good
Guys vs Bad Guys, and we definitely internalize that, especially when our overlords want to
demonize another country, and use our entertainment-induced perspective as a shortcut.
They tell us that the leader of the targeted country is a Bad Guy and we must kill the
people in order to save them. And Americans nod and comply. Except for the 5% that prefers
peace, and they argue that the leader is not a Bad Guy, so we shouldn't kill the people to
save them.
No American ever thinks to argue international law or basic morality, we just argue about
the plot lines.
But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a
puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town
square.
We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it, Doublethink.
China has succeeded because it does not honor copyright and patent monopolies. Western
civilization is failing because it imposes the feudal monopoly by rule of law system.. The
state will make sure a few fat cats are lords and the masses are their slaves.
---
It is almost asking the change of China's political system." <= no its not, the struggle
today is freedom, human rights and the right to self determination not socialism vs
capitalism.. it the struggle today is capitalism vs monopolism.. because monopolism aims to
make every single human being alive its slave to a very few monopoly powered corporate
giants.. China is a clear example of what can be if the masses are allowed to compete
without the shackles of copyrights, patents and other thin air monopolies.
Some aspects of China's trade behavior can and should be criticized.
Why? Because of that "intellectual property" stuff? Japan basically built itself from the
ground up in the post-war through allowed and unallowed intellectual property theft. Canon
and Nikon, for example, essentially fac-similed Leica during that period; after the
transition to digital, they erased their theft past, but it doesn't change the objective
truth both wouldn't exist without stealing technology from a defeated country (Germany). It
did the same with missile reentrance technology it stole from the USSR after the Cold
War.
< Technology is a product of the human mind.. copyright and patents are thefts of the
products of the human mind.. and human mind assets do not belong to anyone, to any
country.. Instead, copyright and patents (intellectual property) are and should be in the
public domain (but the scum that write the laws have created from thin air; rights which do
not exist, and given the rights they fabricated to their feudal lords and the corporations
owned by such lords. So the lawmaking scum have made it possible for a few (feudal lords)
to establish and maintain a monopoly in the good life, over the masses in the world. ..
Just as in the in England, France and Switzerland, where only the rich, corrupt
politicians, and criminal few hung out and traded copyright and patent monopolies in the
coffee houses, (much like stocks and bonds are traded today, monopoly trading was a game
between fat cats (today's the fat cats are wall street barons), ..monopolies allow rich and
wealth to support their royal life styles at the price of enslaving the masses to poverty.
Luckily a court in England, threaten by an angry crowd of the masses, denied the wealthy
their perpetual lifetime patents and copyright demands, no longer could the fat cats
squeeze ownership of an intellectual creation from its creator, convert it to intangible
property, and use the intellectual property to monopolize the world.
The British court
said, no patent, no copyright and no monopoly can last longer than 7 years. that was
1787-89, and it explains the for a short time clause in the USA constitution.
I don't think the US sees the world's nations as commanded by their senior politician. Far
from it, but to keep the US public locked in a child's mentality, the govt and its MSM
present every political event/action/reaction as between personalities. Can't have reason
and logic breaking out among the minions can we?
As for Trump being in charge, I rather doubt it, no US president has been "in charge" of
any thing except possibly what is for lunch since Washington.
Too many policies Trump began, such as negotiations with NK, have been trashed by his
"teams" who I believe are actually his minders put in place by the Deep State.
Is Trump a great guy? A NY developer by their very nature is not a great guy. But I do
think he wants to be seen as a great president. To do that he has to pull off some deals
that will be remembered which is why he wanted the deal with NK, that Pompeo blew up.
I also think that the govt is preparing for the time when the dollar is no longer the
reserve currency. And to do that you need to pull manufacturing back from abroad (from
China), seize critical assets (from Venezuela),break any and all treaties that require you
to spend money you won't have (making NATO (pay as you go).
All things the govt is doing, admittedly with the most horrific management team since
Taft's. But they are moving on all fronts to circle the wagons of US commerce.
They know what is coming, some of them may see war as the way to bilk a few more
trillions out of the treasury, but I don't think the military will let them. For they know
that if they go up against a nation that Russia and China support and botch it, that
R&C will go for the throat and that, more so than the currency crash would be the end
of the US.
These moves we see are very serious because the end game is for the continued existence
(or death)of the US. And many of these tactical moves are very high risk because they
hasten the end of the dollar. I give the dollar five years more, tops. Then it will be just
one in a basket of currencies until the yuan makes its way to the top.
And where that strange UN Agenda 21 fits in this I don't know, its plan for the US is
for drastically reduced population (70% loss, from what?)the remaining population in mega
cities and truly vast areas of no go set aside for the "environment." It reads like a
National Parks program on crack with a side of Hunger Games.
The next five years are going to be really critical and I personally think the US will
only make it by the skin of its teeth.
@ Jen. Another thought. The era in which the current state of America was conceived.
British colonies in a war of separation or independence against the British. Europe and
Britain at that time mostly ruled by hereditary monarchs nobles and lords ect.
Americans which I take it at that time would have been mostly British ancestry had done
away with hereditary monarchs and so forth. It would have been somewhat exceptional at the
time. In the targeting of the leader of a nation as the source of all evil, I wonder if
that relates back to doing away with hereditary leadership especially monarch.
President Trump has declared a national emergency due a threat to the US from "the ability
of foreign adversaries to create and exploit vulnerabilities in information and
communications technology or services, with potentially catastrophic effects, and thereby
constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy,
and economy of the United States," so various actions and prohibitions have been stipulated
here .
I think war reporting rules are in place with China, and Trade war has started.
Every month that passes without a crisis is a success for China right now as it over takes
US in GDP, tech, and trade links.
Key issues are bringing Europe in - the Huawei ban extended to Europe is battlefield #1,
Northstream (gas link to Russia) is #2.
First get Europe on board, the US can up things a lot further.
If Trump gets this right, he can delay outright defeat by China under well beyond his 8
years are up. (Bush or Obama early on could have won, or could have found a peaceful
solution).
A president doesn't have to obey the orders of the powers that be just because they
threaten to kill him otherwise. A brave president would defy them to do their worst. If
they went ahead and killed him, he would still have accomplished something important. By
exposing the nature of the system, he would have robbed it of its legitimacy and brought a
revolution much closer.
You've all been trained very well to ignore the class warfare.
China's "peaceful rise" was convenient when it enriched the Western elite.
But when China makes a play for equal footing, the must be smacked down. In each case (rise, smack-down) ordinary people (like yourselves) get f*cked. Kissinger's NWO? It's for the children.... No, not YOUR children. Welcome to the rabbithole.
Best example of a country stealing foreign inventions and protecting its 'uneconomical'
industries with tariffs is the USA.
It was notorious that in the C19th American publishers pirated authors and musicians from
Europe, particularly of course from Britain where the intellectual properties of Dickens
and his contemporaries laid the basis for many an American publishing fortune.
Among the primary victims were American authors who couldn't compete against stolen
imports.
I am not so sure the conclusions of the article are correct. Tariffs on Chinese factories
will force production to other countries in the area like Vietnam where costs are not going
to be much higher than China.
Granted, the US may be pissed off that Huawei is placing back doors in their systems but
I suspect that they are only copying what the US has done for years with US companies like
Microsoft.
My daughter managed 5 factories located in China of a clothing manufacture based in the
US some years ago. She said there was constant chaos as the workers were continually on
strike. Bad air, dangerous machines, poor wages. few bathrooms, bad water, childcare is
chaining you child to a fence for the day, and the like. Her boss flew to China and asked
for the cheapest costs possible. They showed him a factory full of little children cranking
out production. He left crying his eyes out. He was a cold hearted bastard but even that
was too much for him to see.
I viewed first hand the destruction trade agreements like NAFTA caused to good union
wages and benefits in the US. Hell, that is what got Trump elected. It is tough to watch
your children go into the same profession and make 50% less in wages and fringes 30 years
later.
Intellectual property and patents? No so sure about that, the views here are new to me.
I always supported them but I guess I need to dig deeper on that one.
In the net I think China is the loser, fewer jobs, higher food costs, their markets are
down 30%, ours are peaking and are seen as a safe haven for money. Export numbers for China
are dropping as is the trade balance.
At this point it is not a trade war but a re balancing of markets IMHO. If it was a real
trade war things would be far worse. Middle supplier countries will be hurt, US farmers,
some markets win some lose. If it was business as usual then it would be business as usual.
Trump is stirring the pot and what the endgame is is anyone's guess. Did anyone really
believe China would just bend over and accept any demands from the US?
All that being said China can easily wait it out and hope Trump loses and the policy is
reversed which I am sure his policies will be reversed if anyone else gets elected.
Your link about Boeing is a good one. Today at Naked Capitalism was a
story about a possible 'payback' link between Huawei and Boeing. China has the option
of causing a great deal of pain to both the US and Boeing in retaliation.
They could declare the recertified 737-MAX to be unsafe, so much so they're cancelling
all orders and forbidding any landings in or overflights of China. If Canada hadn't screwed
up so badly, the local Bombardier airplane might have been substituted for the 737. But
Canada did goof in a major way.
There is no way that the US could subsidize the growth of a larger population base
forever.
China sends vast amounts of manufactured goods to the United States; the US pays for all
this with dollars it can effortlessly print. So who is subsidizing whom?
The National Basketball Association Inc. is hiring its first head of government and
public affairs in China as it seeks to protect its most important international market at
a time of high tension in the U.S.-China relationship.
What I don't like about Chas Freeman's article is his tone-deafness.
He has been around government enough to know better. Smacking down China is a strategic
priority for the Deep State. But Chas says:
There is no longer an orderly policy process in Washington to coordinate, moderate, or
control policy formulation or implementation. Instead, a populist president has
effectively declared open season on China.
It's a bit disturbing to see people here read Kissinger's 2014 Op-Ed (finally) but say
nothing about Chas Freeman's assertion that it's all made up by a "populist" President.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
If the above hurt your feeling please feel free to retreat to your happy place. We'd all
be better off.
Not happy, just learned to live with it. I think I get your point. The policy really
means little, the underlying issues will never change.
Been in the rabbit hole for a really long time. If more people jump in maybe things will
really start to change.
I am not so sure the conclusions of the article are correct. Tariffs on Chinese factories
will force production to other countries in the area like Vietnam where costs are not
going to be much higher than China.
First of all, this is not a new phenomenon: low wages, low technology industries are
already being transferred to India and SE-Asia. The Chinese know this and there are
innumerous articles on the internet you can find about it.
But even if this process accelerates, that won't solve the manufacturing problem of the
USA: it will continue to be abroad. Besides, China's "competitive advantages" are too big
for a confederation of micro-countries in the Pacific to overcome. It has a socialist
economy (centrally planified economy, under the hegemony of the working class); it has 1.5
billion people that will only peak in 2030; it is decades ahead in built infrastructure; it
has a huge scale economy advantage (e.g. infrastructure projects that are required to reach
a certain desired productive level, which are profitable in China, may not be profitable in
e.g. Malaysia simply because it is too small); its financial sector is not dominant over
production. But then, I repeat: even if the USA nukes China, manufacturing still won't go
back to American soil.
America's problem is a secular fall of its profit rates, not manufacturing capacity: it
can import whatever and how much products it needs simply because it can print world money
(Dollar system).
b said;" the U.S. economic system is based on greed and not on the welfare of its
citizens." Bingo! Jrabbit @ 52 said;"US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20
years." Maybe the last 100 yrs.? Demonize countries people and rulers, and take their stuff, but
why not? We are, don't ya' know, the exceptional nation, doing gods work. Manifest Destiny, isn't it great?
I know next to nothing about the "Huawei" business, so a new
article about it is something to grab at. Pretty cut and dried, huh? Hauwei is pure
evil, and no 'ifs' or 'buts' about it.
But who is this guy. A couple of quick searches turned up some more of his output.
'It's now or never': The untold story of the dramatic, Canadian-led rescue of Syria's
White Helmets
How Israel became a defender of the Syrian people
Just another neocon hack peddling BS, so I'm back to square one.
China will wait it out until Trump is out of office. The Chinese leadership is pretty
smart and had at least three years to prepare for the worst case scenario. Once Chinese
industries as a whole follow Huawei's footsteps (i.e. Plan B), there will be no turning
back. They'll set off Plan B once they see Trump winning 2020.
Are we to asume from "Some aspects of China's trade behavior can and should be criticized"
that the United States are shining example of trade (and all other) policies,all others to
follow?
For government and other high security uses China has options like the mips based
Loongson but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to
x86 and windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like amd
markets, and it wouldn't take that long to do.
Chinese-Taiwanese joint venture Zhaoxin has been making x86 processors since
2013, based on VIA Technologies' x86 license. These processors are manufactured by
Taiwanese TSMC, but may switch to Chinese SMIC
once it launches its 14nm process later this year.
"Whatever face is at the top is only representing the layers below." --b
The truth of this is also why so many in America hate Trump so much. He is too perfect a
reflection of what America truly stands for. Trump accurately represents America, from
America's bloated, over-inflated sense of self-importance and worth to America's
pussy-grabbing foreign policy. Trump-hate is really self-hate.
Delusional American Russiagater Trump Derangement Syndrome victims will protest, but
such people are incapable of taking a good hard look at themselves.
Hmm... "delusional" and "American" are redundant adjectives here. I should
be more careful with my writing style.
Mr. Gruff you have it almost correct, Americans and the USA are not one in the same and
they never have been.
I still don't think you guys get it.. The 7 article constitution of the USA apportions the
power to rule between two branches and separates the masses from their personal political
powers and their human rights. Its result is not a democracy, but a few people rule
republic. 100% of the authority to rule (operate and make decisions) is vested in one
person (Art. II, rule and decide: President w/VP backup), subject only to the powers
distributed to the two bodied legislative structure ( Art. I, pass law and raise money: 450
house+100 senate persons). Critical to understand => one person makes all decisions, and
directs the day to day government. Article III thru VII defines the judiciary and clarifies
various situations. (525 popularly elected + 2 electoral college appointed <=paid
governors) vs. 350,000,000 powerless governed persons entitled only to 3 votes/voter
[Senator(1), House members(2)] and allowed one vote/voter for each President(1) and VP(1)
<=but both Art. II persons are appointed by the electoral college).
The USA is about delivering to the ownership of a very few, all of the assets, all of
the power, and all of the services once possessed by the many. The demand for all of the
possessions of the many, to be delivered to the few, has expanded over time from 13 colony
America to earth and now space. No one but the few are entitled to anything and the USA and
other governments are there to be sure of it. But how is 'total possession vested in the
few' to be maintained? By rule of law!
But what law would transfer everyone's possessions into the ownership of a few? Ah, the
laws of monopoly.. so rule of law, from thin air , generates=> monopoly powers
and rights of ownership.. Examples of laws that bear monopoly powers and that transfer
ownership rights are copyright laws, patent laws, as they convert monopoly powers that once
the many shared (via governments) now belong to the few. The transfer is called
privatization. Oil is controlled for the benefit of the private few by ownership laws and
right to produce contracts. All in all the function of t he USA has been to make a few very
wealthy at the expense of the many.
The trade issues, sanctions, wars, tariffs, race wars, oil wars, religious wars etc. are
about which people are going to be the few. Until the form and function of governments are
determined by the masses from the bottom, instead of by the few from the top, nothing will
ever change. The masses will suffer or prosper according to which government is the
winner.
US factories moved to China because the US economy is based on greed?!! US government greed
for the company's money maybe. US factories moved to China because it was cheaper to
produce products there and then pay the expense to ship them all the way back. The US has
one of the highest federal tax rates on earth, and add in high state taxes for an
unacceptable situation. US fiat paper money is the base problem.
William Gruff @ 72 & snake 71
I was just about to say the very same thing !
Delusions of grandeur ! And now major self-harm systems !
But are these degenerates above the law ? They are after all genocidal mass murder's!
String um up I say or shall we fry um ?
Right now the brain dead American public are like something out of -- - -
'The invasion of the body snatchers ' film
@58, JackRabitt, Smacking down China is a strategic priority for the Deep State.
the first time I got some type of glimpse of the average American Mind on China, as it
filtered down from "the deep state" to the more fearfully ill-informed quarters of society
no doubt, was in the post 9/11 universe. The person or persons pushing the meme, may have been a bit confused by all the
conspiracy theories about 9/11 unfolding at the time.
Anyway, Chinese troops he/she/they asserted readers were close to the Mexican border
approaching, advancing swiftly.
In hindsight, maybe accidentally, although I doubt, Trump combines the elements of that
narrative perfectly. And it is not my intention to argue right or wrong here. But
apparently down at the border there is this "invasion" on the other hand there's also the
Yellow Peril.
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , May 18, 2019 9:58:41 AM |
link
Well, the chinese system of power has always been the thoughest to understand for any
outsider. It has been this way, but in the last years it seems the so called age of
information has lead to erode the curtains of this complex mechanism. At least for those
who want to look behind those curtains, and not use them to project their propaganda.. ;)
And it is a good sign that while Xi tired to establish himself in such a unique position
of power like Mao, and openly tried to put himself into the historic succession of the old
emperors (like Mao did too), that the will of the people and party still tips the scale of
power.
It means the chinese confucian tradition and its consequences for a ruler even today still
matter. Even though they are anyway lost on someone who is not of Asian origin.
What to westerners look like a dictator, is of a different nature as one can even
imagine with western eyes. Every ruler has to strive for balance, for harmony, which in
turns makes hearing of the peoples popular will be a necessity.
Even though many Chinese say, they like any other people only strive for what they need
most ;) (like harmony and compromise). Though many also say, that the chinese will always
choose stability and security over freedom. And i guess that is what many from the western
world dont get about China, and also about the Putinists.
I say let them and every one else have their choice. Just like i say let the US do theirs,
and reap what they seeded.
For those able to read German check out the Books of Peter Scholl-Latour on China. The
most telling and authorative books from a journalist who has reported first had for over 60
years, and has always defended and honored his own perspective;
While the western so called reporters were trapt in their professional delusion of pro-NATO
propaganda, and while the SDS praised the culture revolution as a democratic means, when
whole china was terrorized and millions slaugtherd.
Hard to walk that middle ground, while being attacked from ideological drones from both
sides i guess..
Anyway, the neocons in the US believes it is now or never to defend the USA unique
position as world power. They believe, that if they don't fight now, they will have
lost.
I say, they already have.
Short of pulling a Hitler on China, meaning a total annihilation of the Chinese people,
there is nothing they can do. And even Bolton will have a hard time trying to push through
a clear cut genocide ;)
We will see China rise. Those who feared of this will see that china will not be half as
bad as thought, and those who gloirfy china and put them into a good (vs bad US) black-wide
scheme will learn of the faults of the Chinese power and its projection (Like its own
believe of supremacy, of racism (a reason why china in the cold war was pretty
unsuccessful in Africa, where most knew who deeply racist Chinese treated their fellows as
workers, guest students,..).
All in all, what we need is a true and functional global community of nations and
people, where goverments truely work together to balance out the stronger world powers. And
with the pressure of Chinas rise and its strugle with the US, we may finally have a better
chance for this to at least partially succed.
I hope.. ;) Or of course it nuclear winter time. We will see.
China now, Japan in the 1980s - it's "deja vu all over again!"
"AFTER ITS DEFEAT in World War II, Japan was content to take foreign inventions -- the
transistor, the laser, the videotape player -- and convert them into products that it could
market around the world. Japan acquired much of its base of Western technology, most of it
American, perfectly legally through licensing, careful study of scientific papers and
patents, and imitation. But when the U.S. wasn't willing to share, some Japanese companies
simply copied with little regard for patents and other intellectual property rights that
the courts have only recently begun to define in many areas of high technology.
The U.S.,
confident of its technical superiority, ''sold out to the Japanese,'' says G. Steven Burrill, head of the high-technology consulting group at Arthur Young, a Big Eight
accounting firm. ''We let them share our brain.''
Now, belatedly awake to the recognition
that Japan has been eating their breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime snack, American
companies are stirring. IBM vs. Fujitsu over computer software, Honeywell vs. Minolta over
automatic focusing, Corning Glass vs. Sumitomo Electric over fiber optics -- these are only
the latest, best-publicized complaints that Japan has stolen American technology.
Even as
those legal battles are fought out, the copycat cliche is becoming obsolete. A series of
studies financed by the U.S. government since 1984 warn that Japan has caught up with the
U.S. or passed it in the development of integrated circuits, fiber optics, computer
hardware engineering, and advanced materials like polymers. It is pressing hard in some
areas of biotechnology, and lags primarily in computer software.
Already there are signs
that the Japanese, buoyed by their new prowess, have assumed the arrogance of the U.S.
along with its technology."
"A MEASURE of Japan's progress can be found in the number of patent filings in the U.S.,
Japan's most important export market. ..."
"THE FACT that Americans now worry about their access to Japanese technology is an
acknowledgment of Japan's new scientific competence. When the Japanese were known primarily
as copycats, the flow of technology was essentially in one direction. It was also cheap.
Aaron Gellman, president of a consulting firm, says that for years U.S. firms licensed
technology to the Japanese without asking for a grant-back, the right to use any
improvements they made. Says Gellman: ''This was very arrogant and implied that no one
could improve on our technology.''"
"U.S. scientists and companies have failed to take advantage of opportunities to tap
Japanese academic research. ''What's wrong here is pure laziness,'' says Martin Anderson,
an analyst with the MAC Group, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
Trust the UnitedSnake to blame the Chinese for
reneging on an agreement ! Fact is, Trump's team Add in last minute conditions that are totally unacceptable to
China.
Chinese commentators are fuming at the audacity of
the demands.
'WTF, Do they think we'r their gawd damned 51st state ?'
Typical UnitedSnake's 'negotiation' tactics, designed to fail ! Thats how Clinton justity his bombing of ex Yugo,
by blaming Belgrade for the breakdown of negotiation ,to justify its 78 days of aerial
arsons against Yugo.
How the UnitedSnake destroyed Toshiba and took over its crown jewel chip tech,... Toshiba was severely punished for breaking fukus
sanction on USSR, by selling state of art milling
machine to the Soviets. the unitedsnake slapped a heavy fine, demanded
the resignation of Toshiba CEO, imposed a ten
years ban on Toshiba products, FORCED the Japs
to share their latest chip tech with Merikkans. Toshiba never recovered from that disaster.
An excellent summary of many aspects of a serious and deteriorating situation. In the end, China has a lot of brainpower to apply to situations like this.They are used to speaking and writing one of the world's most difficult languages. They are used to playing Go, one of the world's most difficult board games. And their national endowment of analytical skills immensely surpasses that of the United
States.
They are said to have eight times as many students in math and science and engineering
in their universities. Xi himself is very bright, having earned degrees in difficult subjects at demanding
universities, and he is calm and very forward-thinking. Just consider that magnificent
long-term Silk Road Project. When I think of Trump with his constant mock-heroic poses and foot-high signatures on
every silly memo and his gang of noisy, pompous thugs in top appointments, I can't help
thinking I know how this will turn out in the end.
China's
yuan slide risks trolling Trump It's good to remember that would not be the first time. After the first round of
tariffs, China devalued the Renminbi and it basically
wiped out the tariffs . In fact, it didn't even need to devalue that much: 1 Renminbi
is now US$ 0.14 -- just a little over the Government max upwards band of 1:7.
In 2013, the CEO of French hi tech co Alstom
was arrested by FBI, while changing flight at
New York.
His 'crime', breaking MERIKKAN anti corruption
law by bribing govn officials in INDONESIA ! Such is the LONG arm of merikkan extra territorial jurisdiction, rings a bell ...
Ms meng ?
Just like Toshiba, the French paid a very heavy price. The CEO went to jail, Allstom,
the crown
jewel of French industry, was FORCED to sell off its core business to its main rival, GE.
!
What did Ian Fleming's fundamental law of probability says....
ONCE IS HAPPENSTENCE, TWIC IS COINCIDENCE...
US MegaCos. outsourced and 'globalised' with the blessing, nay encouragement! of the Pol.
Class. Cheaper labor and lax environmental rules, in comparison with 'home' (US, W countries,
etc.) is a mantra. That is of course good enough, and one can track, say, sh*t-clothes
factories transiting from Bangladesh, to China, to Malaysia, to Mexico, etc.
Other motives, the first is lack of responsibility and involvement which allows
domineering and rapacious behavior. Foreign co. implant can just leave, relocate, if
whatever. A random /racist term/ exploited worker in the 3rd world is not voting in US
elections.
Deadly industrial pollution is outsourced, and energy use etc. at home while not
curtailed or significantly diminished is not as high as one might see under condition of
the industries returning home - a sort of 'greener' environment can be touted.
The PTB simply cannot grasp why some US citizens, who live high on the hog, house, 2
cars, 3 kids, endless dirt cheap consumer goods, etc. produced by 'slaves' abroad,
complain. If the 'stuff' was produced at home, it would cost much more, the pay would be
going to 'low-level' US labor -- in a more closed economic circuit there would be more
'equality' as things stand today in the US - *not* claiming it's a general rule.
Trump had some confused? thoughts about turning the present situation around, and
relocating industrial - some extractive - manufacturing - jobs back home, say 1960s, with
decent pay, to ppl who would then vote for him.
The stumbling block is that profits to shareholders, oligarchs, chief CEO's, asset
trippers, usurers, Mafia types, Banks and other Fin, and Politicians who in the US are
highly paid lackeys, etc. is set to diminish, as 'the pie' can no longer be grown much to
accomodate all these grifters. Due to energy constraints, disruption of climate change,
etc.
Brit and Dutch spooks now concur with Trump the charlatan's claim of Huawei security risk ! Trust the Brits to doublecross the Chinese, after they've been given the huawei source
codes to examine and declared it free of bugs. As for the Dutch , they seems to be the goto guys these days, whenever the 5liars need
some loyal poodles to corroborate their B.S., cue the M17 'investigation'.
"... United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for. ..."
"... Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers. ..."
Uh, no, Tom, she won't be collecting a lot of voters, well, at least not near enough. Biden
has already been "chosen" like Hillary was over Bernie last time. You should know by now Tom,
we don't select our candidates, they're chosen for us for our own good. 2 hours ago
This is going to take a long time. You just can't turn this ship around overnight.
US Political System:
United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical
literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old,
it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a
system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the
nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be
fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting.
That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are
voting for.
This is not an accident. America was founded on the principle, explained by the Founding
Father that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against
the majority. That is how the US Constitution was designed sort of ensuring that there will be
a lot of struggle. US is not as the same as it were two centuries ago but that remains the
elites ideal.
Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of
capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of
elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made
possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of
political powers.
A republic is SUBORDINATE to democracy. Polyarchy can't be subordinated to any form of
Democracy. 2 hours ago Is the author, to use an English term, daft? Tulsi Gabbard won't get out
of the primaries, much less defeat Sanders or Biden. Farage achieved his goal (Brexit), then
found out (SHOCK!) that the will of the people doesn't mean anything anymore.
If Luongo had wanted to talk about the people's uprising, he should've mentioned the Tea
Party. 3 hours ago Gabbard appears to have some moral fibre and half a backbone, at least for a
politician, regardless of their views, Farage is a slimy charlatan opportunistic populist shill
3 hours ago (Edited) I like Tulsi Gabbard on MIC stuff (and as a surfer in my youth - still
dream about that almost endless pipeline at Jeffreys Bay in August), but...
On everything else?
She votes along party lines no matter what bollocks legislation the Democrats put in front
of Congress. And anyone standing full-square behind Saunders on his socialist/marxist
agenda?
Do me a favour. 1 hour ago (Edited) Farage left because he saw what UKIP was becoming...a
zionazi party.
Also Gabbard is a CFR member. 3 hours ago Gold, Goats and Guns? Certainly not guns under
President Gabbard! Here's her idea of "common sense gun control:"
I'm totally against warmongering, but I have to ask - what good is it to stop foreign
warmongering, only to turn around and incite civil war here by further raping the 2nd
Amendment? The CFR ties are disturbing as hell, too. And to compare Gabbard to Ron Paul? No,
just...no! 3 hours ago Always been a fan of Bernie, but I hope Gabbard becomes president. The
world would breathe a huge sigh of relief (before the assassination). 4 hours ago By this time
in his 1st term, Obama had started the US Wars in Syria and Libya and has restarted the Iraq
War.
Thus far Trump has ended the War in Syria, pledged not to get us dragged into Libya's civil
wars and started a peace process with North Korea.
Venezuela and Iran look scary. We don't know what Gabbard would actually do when faced with
the same events. Obama talked peace too.
"... United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for. ..."
"... Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers. ..."
Uh, no, Tom, she won't be collecting a lot of voters, well, at least not near enough. Biden
has already been "chosen" like Hillary was over Bernie last time. You should know by now Tom,
we don't select our candidates, they're chosen for us for our own good. 2 hours ago
This is going to take a long time. You just can't turn this ship around overnight.
US Political System:
United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical
literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old,
it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a
system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the
nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be
fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting.
That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are
voting for.
This is not an accident. America was founded on the principle, explained by the Founding
Father that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against
the majority. That is how the US Constitution was designed sort of ensuring that there will be
a lot of struggle. US is not as the same as it were two centuries ago but that remains the
elites ideal.
Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of
capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of
elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made
possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of
political powers.
A republic is SUBORDINATE to democracy. Polyarchy can't be subordinated to any form of
Democracy. 2 hours ago Is the author, to use an English term, daft? Tulsi Gabbard won't get out
of the primaries, much less defeat Sanders or Biden. Farage achieved his goal (Brexit), then
found out (SHOCK!) that the will of the people doesn't mean anything anymore.
If Luongo had wanted to talk about the people's uprising, he should've mentioned the Tea
Party. 3 hours ago Gabbard appears to have some moral fibre and half a backbone, at least for a
politician, regardless of their views, Farage is a slimy charlatan opportunistic populist shill
3 hours ago (Edited) I like Tulsi Gabbard on MIC stuff (and as a surfer in my youth - still
dream about that almost endless pipeline at Jeffreys Bay in August), but...
On everything else?
She votes along party lines no matter what bollocks legislation the Democrats put in front
of Congress. And anyone standing full-square behind Saunders on his socialist/marxist
agenda?
Do me a favour. 1 hour ago (Edited) Farage left because he saw what UKIP was becoming...a
zionazi party.
Also Gabbard is a CFR member. 3 hours ago Gold, Goats and Guns? Certainly not guns under
President Gabbard! Here's her idea of "common sense gun control:"
I'm totally against warmongering, but I have to ask - what good is it to stop foreign
warmongering, only to turn around and incite civil war here by further raping the 2nd
Amendment? The CFR ties are disturbing as hell, too. And to compare Gabbard to Ron Paul? No,
just...no! 3 hours ago Always been a fan of Bernie, but I hope Gabbard becomes president. The
world would breathe a huge sigh of relief (before the assassination). 4 hours ago By this time
in his 1st term, Obama had started the US Wars in Syria and Libya and has restarted the Iraq
War.
Thus far Trump has ended the War in Syria, pledged not to get us dragged into Libya's civil
wars and started a peace process with North Korea.
Venezuela and Iran look scary. We don't know what Gabbard would actually do when faced with
the same events. Obama talked peace too.
Warren (D)(1): "Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country" [
Politico ].
West Virginia: "It was a startling spectacle in the heart of Trump country: At least a dozen
supporters of the president -- some wearing MAGA stickers -- nodding their heads, at times
even clapping, for liberal firebrand Elizabeth Warren . LeeAnn Blankenship, a 38-year-old
coach and supervisor at a home visitation company who grew up in Kermit and wore a sharp pink
suit, said she may now support Warren in 2020 after voting for Trump in 2016.
'She's a good ol' country girl like anyone else,' she said of Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma. 'She's
earned where she is, it wasn't given to her. I respect that.'"
Also: "The 63-year-old fire
chief, Wilburn 'Tommy' Preece, warned Warren and her team beforehand that the area was 'Trump
country' and to not necessarily expect a friendly reception. But he also told her that the town would welcome anyone, of any party, who wanted to address the opioid
crisis ." ( More on West
Virginia in 2018 .
Best part is a WaPo headline: "Bernie Sanders Supporter Attends Every
DNC Rule Change Meeting. DNC Member Calls Her a Russian Plant." • Lol. I've been saying
"lol" a lot, lately.)
Warren (D)(2): "Our military can help lead the fight in combating climate change"
[Elizabeth Warren,
Medium ]. "In short, climate change is real, it is worsening by the day, and it is
undermining our military readiness. And instead of meeting this threat head-on, Washington is
ignoring it -- and making it worse . That's why today I am introducing my
Defense Climate Resiliency and Readiness Act to harden the U.S. military against the threat
posed by climate change, and to leverage its huge energy footprint as part of our climate
solution.
It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New
Deal, the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and
infrastructure by 2030 .. We don't have to choose between a green military and an effective
one . Together, we can work with our military to fight climate change -- and
win." • On the one hand, the Pentagon's energy footprint is huge, and it's a good idea
to do something about that. On the other, putting solar panels on every tank that went into
Iraq Well, there are larger questions to be asked. A lot of dunking on Warren about this. It
might play in the heartland, though.
I hope that might be interesting to Tulsi supporters.
In this interesting speech "Fascism in the Age of Trump" Chris Hedges predicts 20 years to the US empire. So somewhere
around 2040 or when the age of "cheap oil" approximately ends and/or come under considerable stress.
He does not understands neoliberal social system well and does not use the term "neoliberarism" in his speak (which is
detrimental to its value) , but he manages to provide a set of interesting arguments, although the speech is full of exaggerations
and inconsistencies.
It also can explains the current Trump stance toward China as "Hail Mary" attempt top preserve the global hegemony by
suppressing China even at considerable cost for the USA population.
I really feel for Chris Hedges on a personal level. Unlike say Blyth, or Chomsky, whom
seem to revel in being intellectual bad boys, Hedges seems to be at heart a very conservative
man in the true sense of the word, driven to the extremes by the rabid greed and sociopathic
nature of mainstream politics. The corruption of it seems to visibly torture him. It takes a
special kind of courage to take an unpopular stand like he does.
President Eisenhower stated that the largest threat to our Democracy was/is the Military
Industrial Complex. He quickly terminated the Korean War that he inherited then kept us out
of foreign conflict. He believed in a strong Middle Class and promoted our economy with a
massive highway system. He kept the highest progressive tax rate at 90% discouraging CEO's
from massively overpaying themselves.
"... Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with Peters - and Tucker takes him on ..."
"... Max Boot is an example of someone who takes himself so seriously that they become a joke. ..."
"... Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist! Dangerous! ..."
Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering
whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with
Peters - and Tucker takes him on
Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in
every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist!
Dangerous!
Her call for impeachment procedures is a blunder. She is trying to play the dominant mood of the Dems crowd, not
understanding that in this case Biden will be the winner.
Notable quotes:
"... Beto O'Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to collude with the Russian government," will not fare much better. ..."
"... Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail , declares the next that voters don't care about the Mueller report because they're too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless. ..."
Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN’s have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump.
Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease.
But if Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic
nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon.
Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving, speech-slurring, child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican
border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One’s windshield.
Beto O'Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who
declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, "beyond the shadow of a
doubt, sought to collude with the Russian government," will not fare much better.
Sen.
Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one
moment that Trump is
heading to jail , declares the next that voters
don't care about the Mueller report because they're too concerned with bread-and-butter
issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the
impeachment morass regardless.
Such "logic" is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next
Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.
Good domestic policy suggestions and debate skills. Horrible understanding of foreign policy
(he completely subscribes to the Russiagate hoax)
His capitulation to Hillary in 2016 still linger behind his back despite all bravado. he
betrayed his followers, many of who put money of this while being far from rich. he betrayed them
all. As such he does not deserve to run.
Warren and Tulsi are definitely better options then Sanders for 2020.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., became a household name in 2016 when he ran a progressive
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination -- and came close to securing it. He's back
in the 2020 race, but this time up against more than 20 other candidates. Sanders sits down
with Judy Woodruff to discuss trade with China, health care, student debt, Russian election
interference and more.
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to
have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe."
[80] Ibid .,
229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014),
250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name)
and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network
consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism."
[81] Ibid .,
230. Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist
purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant
reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small
minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism.
[82] Ibid .
The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public
were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning
about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism
since World War Two."
[83] Ibid .,
257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American
(and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish
overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during
the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation
in leftist politics with particular concern.
Neoconservatism
Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s
would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of
Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish
leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community.
[84] Ibid .,
22.
Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between
modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed
Jewish dependence from international to national forces."
[85] Ibid .,
viii. With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas
of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left
as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions."
[86] Ibid .,
235.
The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over
the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies
(i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been
anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish
leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:
There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and
misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly
arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their
head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth.
[87] Ibid
., 236-37
The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist,
rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of
"another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout
the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million
dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish
population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally.
750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,
there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption
took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion
of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause.
[88] Ibid
., 238.
The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic
Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish
relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations
like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to
advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future.
[89] Ibid .,
243.
This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans
and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated
factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than
from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as
abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are
anathema to many Jews."
[90] Ibid .,
287.
Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of
their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds
with the more liberal opinions of most Jews."
[91] Ibid .,
239.
Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their
ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their
personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic
status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which
historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This
"middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing
beliefs no longer exists."
[92] Ibid .,
239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended."
[93] Ibid .,
241.
Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left
Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain
a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their
impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid.,
287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s
were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the
founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of
the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,”
no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid.,
286.
The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly
for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political
spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:
With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews
seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage,
the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led
Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This
fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American
Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish
teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman
(2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust
into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous
rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid.,
288-89.
This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical.
While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews
have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the
great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations
of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within
their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising
Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.
The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are
reflected in comments by
Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could
turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in
Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political
engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American
Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.”
Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If
Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”
Jewish writer David Cole recently
questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism.
He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:
For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with
Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S.
That’ll
save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white
supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.
Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against
each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad.
… But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy
to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …
And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the
Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and
a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind
every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…
In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally
get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy,
but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad
strategy.
In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism
is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish
activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.
Conclusion
While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue
of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same
apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity
and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous
actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of
Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish
apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback
position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern
Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants,
Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth
century.
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an
unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as
chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as
far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles
class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama --
Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April
2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit
pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget
was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent
of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.
According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn
to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and
Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents
for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe
drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through
diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty
alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.
Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's
website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is
propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:
"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for
national security and urgent military needs".
He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the
government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense
– go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the
next fiscal year".
"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"
He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is
antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and
inaccessible to those who need it most.
The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more
spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US
economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far
exceeding the tax revenues.
In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK
stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$
45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO
member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to
4 percent in five years.
According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases
China retains twelve military bases;
France runs nine military bases including in Germany, Lebanon and UAE;
Germany has two military bases in France and United States;
India has seven bases including in Tajikistan and Maldives;
Israel possesses one military base in Syria's Golan Heights;
Pakistan has a military center with 1,180 personnel in Saudi Arabia;
Russia runs eight military facilities including in Armenia, Georgia, Syria and some
Central Asian countries;
UK controls ten military bases including in Bahrain, Canada, Germany, Singapore and
Qatar;
t he US is leading nearly 800 military bases across the world that run in full swing with
the highest budget.
In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The
Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a
military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this
planet.
The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and
running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases
abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to
address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.
In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi
Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan
and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.
In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to
taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces,
US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.
But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in
Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for
American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US
troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the
US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.
In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9
trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and
nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.
The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include
Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the
Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to
US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010
with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards
trend in the later years.
Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently
decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish
expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.
According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$
126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for
security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly
budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have
pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders
is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.
With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is
ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or
unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict
causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy
remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of
population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.
The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one
takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be
immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made
government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt
country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of
that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan
officials.
Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than
it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US
invasion.
Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000
representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million
(equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only
symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under
poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to
Global Research.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed a broad number of security
related issues in Sochi on Tuesday ranging from nuclear arms control to ratcheting US tensions with Iran to Venezuela to Ukraine.
Importantly, the two top diplomats traded warnings against election meddling and interference in their respective countries -- though
we might add that Lavrov's message was packed with more sarcasm following the Mueller report clearing Trump of "collusion".
In response to Pompeo's reportedly warning Russia to never interfere in what he described as America's "sacred" elections, specifically
warning against any 2020 presidential election interference, Lavrov shot back with: "We can discuss this topic forever, but until
we have cold hard facts on the table, we cannot have a grown-up discussion about it," according to Russia's
RT .
Speaking to reporters afterward, Lavrov said proudly that he had handed Pompeo a "memorandum" on US interference in Russia but
didn't reveal its precise contents, only saying, "we're prepared to talk on this topic."
Though both expressed hope for improved ties between Washington and Moscow, Reuters characterized it as a testy and impatient
exchange :
Visiting Russia for the first time as secretary of state, Pompeo publicly clashed with Lavrov on issues from Ukraine to Venezuela.
After their meeting, both men said they had been far apart on many issues .
"I made clear to Foreign Minister Lavrov... that interference in American elections is unacceptable. If the Russians were engaged
in that in 2020 it would put our relationship in an even worse place than it has been ," he said.
"I'd encourage them not to do that. We would not tolerate that."
However, soon after the summit, Russian President Putin in public statements indicated his belief that "Trump is in the mood to
restore ties with Russia."
He also indicated it's his own desire to "fully restore" Russia-US ties, according to the AP, and interestingly also praised the
"quite objective" Mueller report in statements to reporters
.
"As you know, just a few days ago, I had the pleasure of talking with the US president on the phone," Putin told Pompeo during
the Tuesday summit in Sochi. "I got the impression that the [US] president was inclined to re-establish Russian-American relations
and contacts to resolve together the issues that are of mutual interest to us."
Pompeo, for his part, appeared to say as much following the meeting, saying, "The United States stands ready to find common ground
with Russia as long as the two of us can engage seriously on those issues."
President Trump has made clear that his expectation is that we will have an improved relationship between our two countries.
This will benefit each of our peoples. And I think that our talks here today were a good step in that direction.
However, Pompeo still went through a litany of disagreements he had with Russia, especially centering on multiple hot spots around
the globe where the Trump administration has exercised a big stick approach.
At Lavrov-Pompeo presser, around 28:30, Lavrov says something significant: Russia recently offered to publish info from a US-Russia
channel on cyberspace that he claims would address the allegations of Russian election meddling. He says the US declined:
https://t.co/o4MbqQlwCy
Below is a brief run-down of key points to the two briefed reporters on afterwards.
Nuclear treaty
At the top of the agenda, Lavrov signaled Russia could be open to a new arms control treaty after the recent US withdrawal from
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, countered by Russia suspending its obligations under the Reagan-era pact which
crucially served to keep missile build-up out of Europe.
Pompeo stressed China had to be part of any future sweeping deal, also considering rapid advances in defense technology. Lavrov
expressed hope that any future agreements will be "positively received by both nations."
The New START nuclear arms reduction treaty will expire in February of 2021, giving greater impetus for both sides to work through
the current impasse.
No common ground on Venezuela
Predictably the Venezuela hawk Pompeo slammed Russia's "interfering" in the Latin American country's internal affairs, adding
also to that list China, Cuba and Iran.
"Maduro has brought nothing but misery to the Venezuelan people," Pompeo stated. "We hope that Russian support for Maduro will
end." Lavrov defended the right of Venezuelans to choose their own president and refused to recognize US-declared "Interim President"
Juan Guaido.
"Democracy cannot be done by force," Lavrov told reporters. "The threats that we hear against the Maduro government, threats that
come from the mouths of US officials this has nothing in common with democracy."
* * *
No desire for war with Iran
"We fundamentally do not see a war with Iran," Secretary of State Pompeo said, but added: "We've made it clear to the Iranians
that if American interests are attacked, we will certainly respond in an appropriate fashion."
On Tuesday President Trump denied a prior
New York
Times report which alleged the White House was planning to send up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East should conflict erupt
between Iran and the United States. The president called the report "fake news" but still added that should war actually break out
he would send "a hell of a lot more," according to Reuters.
Lavrov stated that Russia hopes "reason will gain the upper hand," and added that Moscow opposed the US pullout of the 2015 Iran
nuclear deal (JCPOA), and further that Europe is right in attempting to stick to the deal.
Ukraine standoff
Pompeo informed Lavrov that the US hadn't budged in its position regarding Moscow's "illegal" annexation of the Crimea in 2014,
saying economic sanctions would remain in place until Russia reverses course.
Following the Ukrainian election of comedian turned unlikely politician Volodymyr Zelensky, Pompeo said Russia should now "work
with Ukraine's new president-elect to bring peace to eastern Ukraine," according to a paraphrase of Pompeo's words by Reuters, and
further that Russian authorities should release Ukrainian sailors captured in last year's dangerous
Kerch Strait incident .
Here's a summary of the day thus far: Donald Trump praised attorney
general William Barr for opening what appears to be a broad investigation of the Russia
counterespionage investigation that swept up the Trump campaign. Barr appointed a US attorney
to lead the inquiry and reportedly has got the CIA and DNI involved.
Senator Elizabeth Warren took a "hard pass" on an offer to do a Fox News town hall event,
calling the network "hate-for-profit".
"... The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today. ..."
"... "Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all "respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" ..."
"... Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning leaked it in the first place. As she said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as 'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers." ..."
Yves
here. Even though this post covers known territory, it seems worthwhile to encourage those of
you who haven't watched the "Collateral Murder" footage to view the full version. It's
important not only to keep the public (and that includes people in your personal circle)
focused on what Assange's true hanging crime is in the eyes of the officialdom .and it ain't
RussiaGate. That serves as a convenient diversion from his real offense. That effort has a
secondary benefit of having more people watch the video.
Before
and after images of the van that came to pick up the bodies of eleven men shot to death by
circling American helicopters in Iraq in 2007. Both children in the van were wounded. "Well,
it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," said one of the pilots. "That's right,"
replies another. From the videoCollateral Murder.
Below is a full video version of Collateral Murder , the 2007 war footage that was
leaked in 2010 to Wikileaks by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. This version was posted to the Wikileaks YouTube
channel with subtitles. It will only take about 15 minutes of your life to view it.
It's brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a
special kind of murder -- murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine
guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges
of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are
dead.
The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S.
military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting,
then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the
Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who
matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today.
"Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards
for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all
"respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though
unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?"
Yes, Julian Assange the person can be a giant douche even to his supporters, as this exchange
reported by Intercept writer Micah Lee attests. Nevertheless, it's not for being a
douche that the Establishment state wants him dead; that state
breeds, harbors and honors douches everywhere in the world . They want him dead for
publishing videos like these.
Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless
brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning
leaked it in the first place. As she
said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the
seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the
individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as
'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers."
The Wikileaks page for the video is here . A transcript is here .
This was done in our name, to "keep us safe." This continues to be done every day that we
and our allies are at "war" in the Middle East.
Bodies pile on bodies as this continues. The least we can do, literally the least, is to
witness and acknowledge their deaths.
Warren definitely have the courage to put forward those important proposals. Lobbyists like
Cory Booker of course attack them.
Notable quotes:
"... It's called Anti-Trust laws not her "opinions"... ..."
"... Let's be honest, Booker isn't fit to shine Warren's shoes! I wonder if Cory's ass is jealous of all the shit that just came out of his mouth!! SMDH ..."
"... CB bought and paid for by drug companies. Of course he doesn't like Warren. But ask him about Americans right to free speech and he puts after the needs of any foriegn country ..."
"... He who looks like a slick bouncer for the big money monopolies, is looking to get a piece of it ..."
Cory- .Most Americans will NOT think you are Presidential Caliber.Where's the MONEY coming
from? Small donor contributions? I don't even think you'll get the Black & hispanic
vote.Why do this?
You are stealing the votes from way more qualified candidates. Bad idea if
you want to have Democratic POTUS in 2020
CB bought and paid for by drug companies. Of course he doesn't like Warren. But ask him
about Americans right to free speech and he puts after the needs of any foriegn
country
After that Trump remark, Cory can bite my butt. Whatever disagreements I may have with
Warren, she has some very daring, intelligent, and discussion-worthy policies. We need her in
the next administration, whether as potus or in the cabinet. Sheesh, Cory, burn your bridges,
sir.
Below is the second half and conclusion of "Afghanistan,
the Forgotten Proxy War". While the previous sections examined the economic roots of
imperialism, as well as the historical context of the Cold War within which to situate the
Mujahideen, the following explores the anatomy of proxy warfare and media disinformation
campaigns which were at the heart of destabilizing Afghanistan. These were also a large part of
why there was little to no opposition to the Mujahideen from the Western 'left', whose
continued dysfunctionality cannot be talked about without discussing Zbigniew Brzezinski. We
also take a look at what led to the Soviet Union's demise and how that significantly affected
the former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and many other parts of the world. The United
States has been at war in Afghanistan for four decades now, and it will reach its 40th year on
July 3, 2019. The original "moderate rebel"
One of the key players in the anti-Soviet, U.S.-led regime change project against
Afghanistan was Osama
bin Laden , a Saudi-born millionaire who came from a wealthy, powerful family that owns a
Saudi construction company and has had close ties to the Saudi royal family. Before becoming
known as America's "boogeyman", Osama bin Laden was put in charge of
fundraising for the Mujahideen insurgents, creating numerous charities and foundations in
the process and working in coordination with Saudi intelligence (who acted as liaisons between
the fighters and the CIA). Journalist Robert Fisk even gave bin Laden a glowing review, calling
him a "
peace warrior " and a philanthropist in a 1993 report for the Independent . Bin
Laden also provided recruitment for the Mujahideen and is believed to have also received
security training from the CIA. And in 1989, the same year that Soviet troops withdrew, he
founded the terrorist organization Al Qaeda with a number of fighters he
had recruited to the Mujahideen. Although the PDPA had already been overthrown, and the Soviet
Union was dissolved, he still maintained his relationship with the CIA and NATO, working with
them from the
mid-to-late 1990s to provide support for the secessionist Bosnian paramilitaries and the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the destruction and dismantling of Yugoslavia.
The United States would eventually turn Bin Laden into a scapegoat after the 2001 terrorist
attacks, while still maintaining ties to his family and providing arms, training, and funding
to Al Qaeda and its affiliates (rebranded as "moderate rebels" by the Western media) in its
more recent regime change project against Syria, which started in 2011. The Mujahideen not only
gave birth to Al Qaeda, but it would set a precedent for the United States' regime-change
operations in later years against the anti-imperialist governments of Libya and Syria.
Reagan entertains Mujahideen fighters in the White House.
With the end to the cycle of
World Wars (for the time being, at least), it has become increasingly common for the United
States to use local paramilitaries, terrorist groups, and/or the armed forces of comprador
regimes to fight against nations targeted by U.S. capital interests. Why the use of proxy
forces? They are, as Whitney Webb
describes , "a politically safe tool for projecting the U.S.' geopolitical will abroad."
Using proxy warfare as a kind of power projection tool is, first and foremost, cost-effective,
since paid local mercenaries or terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda will bear the burden of
combat and casualties rather than American troops in places like Libya and Syria. For example,
it costs much less
to pay local paramilitaries, gangs, crime syndicates, terrorist groups, and other reactionary
forces to perform the same military operations as U.S. troops. Additionally, with the advent of
nuclear weapons it became much more perilous for global superpowers to come into direct combat
with one another -- if the Soviet Union and the United States had done so, there existed the
threat of "mutually assured destruction", the strong possibility of instantaneous and
catastrophic damage to the populations and the economic and living standards of both sides,
something neither side was willing to risk, even if it was U.S. imperialism's ultimate goal to
destroy the Soviet Union. And so, the U.S. was willing to use any other means necessary to
weaken the Soviet Union and safeguard its profits, which included eliminating the Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan even if it had neither the intent nor the means of launching a military
offensive on American soil. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had the means of producing a
considerably large supply of modern weapons, including nuclear deterrents, to counter the
credible threat posed by the United States. To strike the Soviet Union with nuclear missiles
would have been a great challenge for the United States, since it would have resulted in
overwhelming retaliation by the Soviet Union. To maneuver this problem, to assure the
destruction of the Soviet Union while protecting the U.S. from similar destruction, the CIA
relied on more unconventional methods not previously thought of as being part of traditional
warfare, such as funding proxy forces while wielding economic and cultural influence over the
American domestic sphere and the international scene. Furthermore, proxy warfare enables
control of public opinion, thus allowing the U.S. government to escape public scrutiny and
questions about legal authorization for war. With opposition from the general public
essentially under control, consent for U.S.-led wars does not need to be obtained, especially
when the U.S. military is running them from " behind the scenes " and
its involvement looks less obvious. Indeed, the protests against the war on Vietnam in the
United States and other Western countries saw mass turnouts.
And while the U.S.-led aggression in Vietnam did involve proxy warfare to a lesser degree,
it was still mostly fought with American "boots-on-the-ground", much like the 2001 renewed
U.S.-led aggression against Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In contrast, the U.S.
assault on Afghanistan that began in 1979 saw little to no protest. The Mujahideen even
garnered support from large portions of the Western left who joined the chorus of voices in the
Western mainstream media in demonizing the PDPA -- a relentless imperialist propaganda campaign
that would be repeated in later years during the U.S. wars on Libya and Syria, with the
difference being that social media had not yet gained prominence at the time of the initial
assault on Afghanistan. This leads to the next question: why recruit some of the most
reactionary social forces abroad, many of whom represent complete backwardness?
In Afghanistan, such forces proved useful in the mission to topple the modernizing
government of the PDPA, especially when their anti-modernity aspirations intersected with U.S.
foreign policy; these ultra-conservative forces continue to be deployed by the United States
today. In fact, the long war on Afghanistan shares many striking similarities with the long war
on Syria, with the common theme of U.S. imperialism collaborating with violent Sunni extremists
to topple the secular, nationalist and anti-imperialist governments of these two former 'Soviet
bloc' countries. And much like the PDPA, the current and long-time government of the Ba'ath
Arab Socialist Party in Syria has made many strides towards achieving national liberation and
economic development, which have included: taking land from aristocratic families (a majority
of whom were Sunni Muslims while Shia Muslims, but especially Alawites, traditionally belonged
to the lower classes and were treated as second class citizens in pre-Ba'athist Syria) and
redistributing and nationalizing it, making use of Syria's oil and gas reserves to modernize
the country and benefit its population, and upholding women's rights as an important part of
the Ba'athist pillars.
Some of these aristocratic landlords, just like their Afghan counterparts, would react
violently and join the Muslim Brotherhood who, with CIA-backing, carried out acts of terrorism
and other atrocities in Hama as they made a failed attempt to topple the government of Hafez al
Assad in 1982.
The connection between the two is further solidified by the fact that it was the Mujahideen
from which Al Qaeda emerged; both are inspired by Wahhabist ideology, and one of their chief
financiers is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as well as Israel, a regional imperial power and a
key ally of the United States). In either case, these Wahhabi-inspired forces were vehemently
opposed to modernization and development, and would much rather keep large sections of the
population impoverished, as they sought to replace the PDPA and the Ba'athists with Sunni
fundamentalist, anti-Shia, theological autocracies -- Saudi-style regimes, in other words.
These reactionary forces are useful tools in the CIA's anti-communist projects and
destabilization campaigns against independent nationalist governments, considering that the
groups' anti-modernity stance is a motivating factor in their efforts to sabotage economic
development, which is conducive to ensuring a favourable climate for U.S. capital interests. It
also helps that these groups already saw the nationalist governments of the PDPA and the Syrian
Ba'ath party as their 'archenemy', and would thus fight them to the death and resort to acts of
terrorism against the respective civilian populations.
Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in response
to the following question:
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given
arms and advice to future terrorists?
[Brzezinski]: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the cold war?
Once again, he makes it clear that the religious extremism of the Mujahideen fighters was
not an issue for Washington because the real political value lay in eliminating the PDPA and
putting an end to Soviet influence in the Greater Middle East, which would give the U.S. the
opportunity to easily access and steal the country's wealth. And in order to justify the U.S.
imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, as well as to obscure the true nature of the
Mujahideen fighters, the intervention needed to be accompanied by a rigorous mass media
campaign. The Reagan administration -- knowing full well that American mainstream media has
international influence -- continued the war that the Carter administration started and saw it
as an opportunity to "step up" its domestic propaganda war, considering that the American
general public was still largely critical of the Vietnam War at the time.
As part of the aggressive imperialist propaganda campaign, anyone who dared to publicly
criticize the Mujahideen was subjected to character assassination and was pejoratively labelled
a "Stalinist" or a "Soviet apologist", which are akin to labels such as "Russian agent" or
"Assadist" being used as insults today against those who speak out against the U.S.-backed
terrorism in Syria. There were also careful rebranding strategies made specifically for Osama
bin Laden and the Mujahideen mercenaries, who were hailed as "revolutionary freedom fighters"
and given a romantic, exoticized "holy warrior" makeover in Western media; hence the title of
this section. The Mujahideen mercenaries were even given a dedication title card at the end of
the Hollywood movie Rambo III which read, "This film is dedicated to the brave
Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan"; the film itself added to the constructed romantic image as
it portrayed the Mujahideen fighters as heroes, while the Soviet Union and the PDPA were
portrayed as the cartoonish villains. The Rambo film franchise is well known for its
depiction of the Vietnamese as "savages" and as the aggressors in the U.S. war on Vietnam,
which is a blatant reversal of the truth .
The Hollywood blockbuster franchise would be used to make the Mujahideen more palatable to
Western audiences, as this unabashed, blatantly anti-Soviet propaganda for U.S. imperialism
attracted millions of viewers with one of the largest movie marketing campaigns of the time. Although
formulaic, the films are easily consumable because they appeal to emotion and, as Michael
Parenti states in Dirty Truths , "The entertainment industry does not merely give the
people what they want: it is busy shaping those wants," (p. 111). Rambo III may
not have been critically
acclaimed , but it was still the second most commercially successful film in the
Rambo series, grossing a total of $189,015,611 at the box
office . Producing war propaganda films is nothing new and has been a long staple of the
Hollywood industry, which serves capitalist and imperialist interests. But, since the
blockbuster movie is one of the most widely available and distributed forms of media,
repackaging the Mujahideen into a popular film franchise was easily one of the best ways
(albeit cynical) to justify the war, maintaining the
American constructed narrative and reinforcing the demonization campaign against Soviet
Russia and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Now, outside of the cinema, CBS News went as
far as to air fake battle footage meant to help perpetuate the myth that the Mujahideen
mercenaries were "freedom fighters"; American journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould,
although decidedly biased against the Soviet Union and its allies, documented this ruse
in which the news channel participated. In terms of proxy warfare, these were just some of the
ways used to distract from the fact that it was a U.S.-led war.
The dedication title card as it originally appeared at the end of the film Rambo III.
In Afghanistan, proxy forces provided a convenient cover because they drew attention away
from the fact that U.S. imperialism was the root cause of the conflict. The insurgents also
helped to demonize the targets of U.S. foreign policy, the PDPA and the Soviet Union, all the
while doing the majority of the physical combat in place of the American military. In general,
drawing attention away from the fact that it has been the United States "pulling the strings"
all along, using proxy forces helps Washington to maintain
plausible deniability in regard to its relationship with such groups. If any one of these
insurgents becomes a liability, as what had happened with the Taliban, they can just as easily
be disposed of and replaced by more competent patsies, while U.S. foreign policy goes
unquestioned. Criminal gangs and paramilitary
forces are thus ideal and convenient tools for U.S. foreign policy. With the rule of
warlords and the instability (namely damage to infrastructure, de-industrialization, and
societal collapse) that followed after the toppling of the PDPA, Afghanistan's standard of
living dropped rapidly, leading to forced mass migrations and making the country all the more
vulnerable to a more direct U.S. military intervention -- which eventually did happen in
2001.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: godfather of colour revolutions and proxy wars, architect of the
Mujahideen
The late Brzezinski was a key figure in U.S. foreign policy and a highly influential figure
in the Council on Foreign Relations. Although the Polish-American diplomat and political
scientist was no longer the National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan's presidency, he
still continued to play a prominent role in enforcing U.S. foreign policy goals in upholding
Washington's global monopoly. The liberal Cold War ideologue's signature strategy consisted of
using the CIA to destabilize and force regime-change onto countries whose governments actively
resisted against Washington. Such is the legacy of Brzezinski, whose strategy of funding the
most reactionary anti-government forces to foment chaos and instability while promoting them as
"freedom fighters" is now a longstanding staple of U.S. imperialism.
How were the aggressive propaganda campaigns which promoted the Mujahideen mercenaries as
"freedom fighters" able to garner support for the aggression against the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan from so many on the Western left who had previously opposed the war on
Vietnam? It was the through the CIA's use of 'soft-power' schemes, because leftist opinion also
needed to be controlled and manipulated in the process of carrying out U.S. foreign and public
policy. Brzezinski mastered the art of targeting intelligentsia and impressionable young people
in order to make them supportive of U.S. foreign policy, misleading a significant number of
people into supporting U.S.-led wars.
The CIA invested money into programs that used university campus, anti-Soviet "radical
leftist activists" and academics (as well as artists and writers) to help spread imperialist
propaganda dressed up in vaguely "leftist"-sounding language and given a more "hip",
"humanitarian", "social justice", "free thinker" appeal. Western, but especially American,
academia has since continued to teach the post-modernist "oppression theory" or "privilege
theory" to students, which is anti-Marxist and anti-scientific at its core. More importantly,
this post-modernist infiltration was meant to distract from class struggle, to help divert any
form of solidarity away from anti-imperialist struggles, and to foster virulent animosity
towards the Soviet Union among students and anyone with 'leftist' leanings. Hence the
phenomenon of identity politics that continues to plague the Western left today, whose strength
was effectively neutered by the 1970s. Not only that, but as Gowans mentions in his book,
Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom :
"U.S. universities recruit talented individuals from abroad, instill in them the U.S.
imperialist ideology and values, and equip them with academic credentials which conduce to
their landing important political positions at home. In this way, U.S. imperial goals
indirectly structure the political decision-making of other countries." (pp. 52-53)
And so we have agencies and think-tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
which has scholarly appeal and actively interferes in elections abroad -- namely, in countries
that are targets of U.S. foreign policy. Founded in 1983 by Reagan and directed by the CIA, the
agency also assists in mobilizing coups and paid "dissidents" in U.S.-led regime change
projects, such as the 2002 failed attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, as well as helping
to create aggressive media campaigns that demonize targeted nations. Another instance of this
"soft power" tactic of mobilizing U.S.-backed "dissidents" in targeted nations are the number
of Sunni Islamic fundamentalist
madrassas (schools) sponsored by the CIA and set up by Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi
Arabia in Afghanistan -- which started to appear in increasing numbers during the 1980s,
reaching over 39,000 during the decade. Afghanistan's public education institutions were
largely secular prior to the fall of Kabul in 1992; these madrassas were the direct,
ideological and intellectual antitheses to the existing institutions of education. The
madrassas acted as centres for cult-like brainwashing and were essentially CIA covert
psychological operations (psy-ops) intended to inspire divisiveness and demobilize younger
generations of Afghans in the face of imperial onslaught so that they would not unite with the
wider PDPA-led nationalist resistance to imperialism.
The NED's founding members were comprised of Cold War ideologues which included Brzezinski
himself, as well as Trotskyists who provided an endless supply of slurs against the Soviet
Union. It was chiefly under this agency, and with direction provided by Brzezinski, that
America produced artists, "activists", academics, and writers who presented themselves as
"radical leftists" and slandered the Soviet Union and countries that were aligned with it --
which was all part of the process of toppling them and subjugating them to U.S. free market
fundamentalism. With Brzezinski having mastered the art of encouraging postmodernism and
identity politics among the Western left in order to weaken it, the United States not only had
military and economic might on its side but also highly sophisticated ideological instruments
to help give it the upper hand in propaganda wars.
These "soft power" schemes are highly effective in masking the brutality of U.S.
imperialism, as well as concealing the exploitation of impoverished nations. Marketing the
Mujahideen mercenaries as "peace warriors" while demonizing the PDPA and referring to the
Soviet assistance as an "invasion" or "aggression" marked the beginning of the regular use of
"humanitarian" pretexts for imperialist interventions. The Cold War era onslaught against
Afghanistan can thus be seen as the template for the NATO-led regime change projects against
Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria, which not only involved the use of U.S.-backed proxy forces but
also "humanitarian" pretexts being presented in the aggressive propaganda campaigns against the
targeted countries. It was not until 2002, however, that then-American UN representative
Samantha Powers, as well as several U.S.-allied representatives, would push the United Nations
to officially adopt the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine into the Charter -- which
was in direct contradiction to the law that recognizes the violation of a nation's sovereignty
as a crime. The R2P doctrine was born out of the illegal 78-day NATO
air-bombing of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999. And although plans to dismantle
Yugoslavia go as far back as 1984, it was not until much of the 1990s that NATO would begin
openly intervening --
with more naked aggression -- starting with the funding and support for secessionist
paramilitary forces in Bosnia between 1994-1995. It then sealed the 1999 destruction of
Yugoslavia with with the balkanization of the Serbian province of Kosovo . In addition
to the use of terrorist and paramilitary groups as proxy forces which received CIA-training and
funding, another key feature of this "humanitarian" intervention was the ongoing demonization
campaigns against the Serbs, who were at the centre of a vicious Western media propaganda war.
Some of the most egregious parts of these demonization campaigns -- which were tantamount to
slander and libel -- were the claims that the Serbs were "
committing genocide " against ethnic Albanians. The NATO bombing campaign was illegal since
it was given no UN Security Council approval or support.
Once again, Brzezinski was not the National Security Advisor during the U.S.-led campaign
against Yugoslavia. However, he still continued to wield influence as a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations, a private organization and Wall Street think tank. The Council on Foreign
Relations is intertwined with highly influential NGOs who are essentially propaganda
mouthpieces for U.S. foreign policy, such as Human Rights Watch, which has fabricated stories
of atrocities allegedly committed by countries targeted by U.S. imperialism. Clearly,
unmitigated U.S. imperial aggression did not end with the destruction of the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan, nor with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War years
were a continuation of U.S. imperialism's scramble for more spheres of influence and global
domination; it was also a scramble for what was left of the former 'Soviet bloc' and Warsaw
Pact. The dismantling of Yugoslavia was, figuratively speaking, the 'final nail in the coffin'
of whatever 'Soviet influence' was left in Eastern Europe.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the "Afghan trap" question
Image on the right: Left to right: former Afghan President Babrak Karmal, and former Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev. Karmal took office at around the same time (December 1979) the PDPA
requested that Moscow intervene to assist the besieged Afghanistan.
The sabotage and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that only one global
hegemon remained, and that was the United States. Up until 1989, the Soviet Union had been the
barrier that was keeping the United States from launching a more robust military intervention
in Afghanistan, as well as in Central and West Asia. While pulling out did not immediately
cause the defeat of Kabul as the PDPA government forces continued to struggle for another three
years, Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to withdraw Soviet troops arguably had a
detrimental impact on Afghanistan for many years to come. Although there was no Soviet
military assistance in the last three years of Najibullah's presidency, Afghanistan continued
to receive aid from the USSR, and some Soviet military advisers (however limited in their
capacity) still remained; despite the extreme difficulties, and combined with the nation's
still-relatively high morale, this did at least help to keep the government from being
overthrown immediately. This defied U.S. expectations as the CIA and the George H.W. Bush
administration had believed that the government of Najibullah would fall as soon as Soviet
troops were withdrawn. But what really hurt the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan's army was
when the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991; almost as soon as the dissolution happened and
Boris Yeltsin (with U.S. backing) took over as Russia's president, the aid stopped coming and
the government forces became unable to hold out for much longer. The U.S. aggression was left
unchecked, and to this day Afghanistan has not
seen geopolitical stability and has since been a largely impoverished 'failed state',
serving as a training ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. It continues to be
an anarchic battleground between rival warlords which include the ousted Taliban and the U.S.
puppet government that replaced them.
But, as was already mentioned above, the "Afghan trap" did not, in and of itself, cause the
dismantling of the Soviet Union. In that same interview with Le Nouvel Observateur ,
Brzezinski had this to say in response to the question about setting the "trap":
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself
desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
[Brzezinski]: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Likewise with Cuba and Syria, the USSR had a well-established alliance with the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, one of mutual aid and partnership. Answering Kabul's
explicit request for assistance was a deliberate and conscious choice made by Moscow, and it
just so happened that the majority of Afghans welcomed it. For any errors that Leonid Brezhnev,
the General Secretary at the time, may have made (which do deserve a fair amount of criticism,
but are not the focus of this article), the 1979 decision to intervene on behalf of Afghanistan
against U.S. imperialism was not one of them. It is true that both the Soviet and the U.S.
interventions were military interventions, but the key difference is that the U.S. was backing
reactionary forces for the purposes of establishing colonial domination and was in clear
violation of Afghan sovereignty. Consider, too, that Afghanistan had only deposed of its king
in 1973, just six years before the conflict began. The country may have moved quickly to
industrialize and modernize, but it wasn't much time to fully develop its military defenses by
1979.
Image below: Mikhail Gorbachev accepts the Nobel Peace Prize from George H.W. Bush on
October 15, 1990. Many Russians saw this gesture as a betrayal, while the West celebrated it,
because he was being awarded for his capitulation to U.S. imperialism in foreign and economic
policy.
Other than that, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Soviet Union imploded due
to an accumulating number of factors: namely, the gradual steps that U.S. foreign policy had
taken over the years to cripple the Soviet economy, especially after the deaths of Brezhnev and
Yuri Andropov. How Gorbachev responded during the U.S.-led onslaught against Afghanistan
certainly helped to exacerbate the conditions that led to the dissolution. After the deaths of
Brezhnev and Andropov, the Soviet Union's economy became disorganized and was being liberalized
during much of the 1980s. Not only that, but the Reagan administration escalated the arms race,
which intensified after they had scrapped the 'detente' that was previously made in the
mid-1970s. Even prior to Reagan's hardline, bombastic rhetoric and escalation against the USSR,
the Soviet Union was already beginning to show signs of strain from the arms race during the
late-1970s. However, in spite of the economic strains, during the height of the war the
organized joint operations between the Soviet army and the Afghan army saw a significant amount
of success in pushing back against the Mujahideen with many of the jihadist leaders either
being killed or fleeing to Pakistan. Therefore, it is erroneous to say that intervening in
Afghanistan on behalf of the Afghan people "did the Soviet Union in."
In a misguided and ultimately failed attempt to spur economic growth rates, Gorbachev moved
to end the Cold War by withdrawing military support from allies and pledging cooperation with
the United States who promised "peace". When he embraced Neoliberalism and allowed for the USSR
to be opened to the U.S.-dominated world capitalist economy, the Soviet economy imploded and
the effects were felt by its allies. It was a capitulation to U.S. imperialism, in other words;
and it led to disastrous results not only in Afghanistan, but in several other countries as
well. These include: the destruction of Yugoslavia, both wars on Iraq, and the 2011 NATO
invasion of Libya. Also, Warsaw Pact members in Eastern Europe were no longer able to
effectively fight back against U.S.-backed colour revolutions; some of them would eventually be
absorbed as NATO members, such as Czechoslovakia which was dissolved and divided into two
states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Without Soviet Russia to keep it in check, the United
States was able to launch an unrestrained series of aggressions for nearly two decades. Because
of his decision to withdraw from the arms race altogether, in a vain attempt to transform the
Soviet Union into a social democracy akin to those of the Nordic countries, Gorbachev had
deprived the Russian army of combat effectiveness by making significant cuts to its defense
budget, which is partly why they were forced to evacuate. Not only that, but these diplomatic
and military concessions with the United States gave them no benefit in return, hence the
economic crisis in Russia during the Yeltsin years. Suffice to say, the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years
are not remembered fondly in Russia and many regard Gorbachev as a traitor and Western agent
who helped to bring the Soviet Union to its collapse. In more recent years,
efforts are being made to assess the actions taken by Gorbachev with regards to
Afghanistan; this includes going against and revising the resolution put forth by him which
suggested that the USSR intervention was "shameful".
In short, Afghanistan did not cause the Soviet Union's demise even if it required large
military spending. More accurately: it was Gorbachev's impulsive decision to quickly discard
the planned economy in favour of a market economy in order to appease the United States, who
made the false promise that NATO would not expand eastward. If there was a real "trap", it was
this and Gorbachev played right into the hands of U.S. imperialism; and so, the Soviet Union
received its devastating blow from the United States in the end -- not from a small, minor
nation such as Afghanistan which continues to suffer the most from the effects of these past
events. For many years, but especially since the end of WWII, the United States made ceaseless
efforts to undermine the USSR, adding stress upon stress onto its economy, in addition to the
psychological warfare waged through the anti-Soviet propaganda and military threats against it
and its allies. Despite any advances made in the past, the Soviet Union's economy was still not
as large as that of the United States. And so, in order to keep pace with NATO, the Soviet
Union did not have much of a choice but to spend a large percentage of its GDP on its military
and on helping to defend its allies, which included national liberation movements in the Third
World, because of the very real and significant threat that U.S. imperialism posed. If it had
not spent any money militarily, its demise would most likely have happened much sooner. But
eventually, these mounting efforts by U.S. imperialism created a circumstance where its
leadership under Gorbachev made a lapse in judgment, reacting impulsively and carelessly rather
than acting with resilience in spite of the onslaught.
It should also be taken into account that WWII had a profound impact on Soviet leadership --
from Joseph Stalin to Gorbachev -- because even though the Red Army was victorious in defeating
the Nazis, the widespread destruction had still placed the Soviet economy under an incredible
amount of stress and it needed time to recover. Meanwhile, the convenient geographical location
of the United States kept it from suffering the same casualties and infrastructural damage seen
across Europe and Asia as a result of the Second World War, which enabled its economy to
recover much faster and gave it enough time to eventually develop the U.S. Dollar as
the international currency and assert dominance over the world economy. Plus, the U.S. had
accumulated two-thirds of the world's gold reserves by 1944 to help back the Dollar; and even
if it lost a large amount of the gold, it would still be able to maintain Dollar supremacy by
developing the fiat system to back the currency. Because of the destruction seen during WWII,
it is understandable that the Soviet Union wanted to avoid another world war, which is why it
also made several attempts at achieving some kind of diplomacy
with the United States (before Gorbachev outright capitulated). At the same time, it also
understood that maintaining its military defenses was important because of the threat of a
nuclear war from the United States, which would be much more catastrophic than the Nazis'
military assaults against the Soviet Union since Hitler did not have a nuclear arsenal. This
was part of a feat that U.S. imperialism was able to accomplish that ultimately overshadowed
British, French, German, and Japanese imperialism, which Brzezinski reveals in his book, The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives : an unparalleled
military establishment that, by far, had the most effective global reach which allowed the U.S.
to "project forces over long distances", helping it to assert its global domination and impose
its "political will". And what makes the American Empire distinct from the Japanese Empire,
British Empire, and other European empires is that one of the bases for its ideology is the
socially constructed international hierarchy of nations, and not races as was the case with the
other aforementioned empires. This constructed international hierarchy of nations is more
effective because it means not only greater expansionism, but also the greater ability to
exercise global primacy and supremacy. More specific to Central Asia and the Middle East, the
Wahhabist and Salafist
groups propped up by the CIA were always
intended to nurture sectarianism and discord in order to counter a mass, broad-based united
front of nations against imperialism -- an example of divide-and-conquer, which is an age-old
tradition of empire, except this time with Neoliberal characteristics.
Therefore, the
Mujahideen against Afghanistan should not be thought of simply as "the Afghan trap", but rather
as the U.S. subjugation and plundering of West and Central Asia and an important milestone
(albeit a cynical one) in shaping its foreign policy with regards to the region for many years
to come. If one thing has remained a constant in U.S. foreign policy towards West and Central
Asia, it is its strategic partnership with the oil autocracy of Saudi Arabia, which acts as the
United States' steward in safeguarding the profits of American petroleum corporations and
actively assists Western powers in crushing secular Arab and Central Asian nationalist
resistance against imperialism. The Saudi monarchy would again be called on by the U.S.
government in 2011 in Syria to assist in the repeated formula of funding and arming so-called
"moderate rebels" in the efforts to destabilize the country. Once again, the ultimate goal in
this more recent imperial venture is to contain Russia.
Cold War 2.0? American Supremacy marches on
The present-day anti-Russia hysteria is reminiscent of the anti-Soviet propaganda of the
Cold War era; while anti-communism is not the central theme today, one thing remains the same:
the fact that the U.S. Empire is (once again) facing a formidable challenge to its position in
the world. After the Yeltsin years were over, and under Vladimir Putin, Russia's economy
eventually recovered and moved towards a more dirigiste economy; and on top of that, it moved
away from the NATO fold, which triggered the old antagonistic relationship with the United
States. Russia has also decided to follow the global trend of taking the step towards
reducing reliance on the
U.S. dollar , which is no doubt a source of annoyance to the U.S. capitalist class. It
seems that a third world war in the near future is becoming more likely as the U.S. inches
closer to a direct military confrontation against Russia and, more recently, China. History
does appear to be repeating itself. When the government of Bashar al Assad called on Moscow for
assistance in fighting against the NATO-backed terrorists, it certainly was reminiscent of when
the PDPA had done the same many years before. Thus far, the Syrian Arab Republic has continued
to withstand the destabilization efforts carried out by the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist
groups and Kurdish militias at the behest of the United States, and has not collapsed as Libya,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan did.
But what often gets overlooked is the repeated Brzezinskist formula of funding highly
reactionary forces and promoting them as "revolutionaries" to Western audiences in order to
fight governments that defy the global dictatorship of the United States and refuse to allow
the West to exploit their natural resources and labour power. As Karl Marx once said , "Men
make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past." Such a phenomenon is no accident or a mere mistake. The geopolitical
instability that followed after the overthrow of the PDPA ensures that no sound, united, and
formidable opposition against U.S. imperialism will emerge for an indefinite number of years;
and it seems that Libya, where the Brzezinskist-style of regime change also saw success and
which is now a hotbed for the slave trade, is on the same path as Afghanistan. This is all a
part of what Lenin calls moribund capitalism
when he discussed the economic essence of imperialism; and by that, he meant that imperialism
carries the contradictions of capitalism to the extreme
limit . American global monopoly had grown out of U.S. foreign policy, and it should go
without saying that the American Empire cannot tolerate losing its Dollar Supremacy, especially
when the global rate of profit is falling. And if too many nations reject U.S. efforts to
infiltrate their markets and force foreign finance capital exports onto their economies in
order to gain a monopoly over the resources, as well as to exploit the labour of their working
people, it would surely spell a sharp decline in American Dollar hegemony. The fact that the
United States was willing to go as far as to back mercenaries to attack the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan and fight the Soviet Union, as well as to spend billions of dollars on
a highly elaborate but effective propaganda campaign, shows a sign of desperation of the
American Empire in maintaining its global hegemony.
Since the end of World War II the United States has been, and is by and large still, the
overwhelming world-dominating power. It is true that the American Empire is in decline, in
light of increasing trends towards "de-Dollarization," as well as the rise of China and Russia
which pose as challenges to U.S. interests. Naturally, Washington will desperately try to cling
on to its number one position in the world by accelerating the growth of its global monopolies
-- whether it is through placing wholly unnecessary tariffs against competitors such as China,
or threatening to completely cut
Venezuelan and Iranian oil out of the global market -- even if it means an increasing drive
towards World War III. The current global economic order which Washington elites have been
instrumental in shaping over the past several decades reflects the interests of the global
capitalist class to such an extent that the working class is threatened with yet another world
war despite the unimaginable carnage witnessed during the first two.
When we look back at these historical events to help make sense of the present, we see how
powerful mass media can be and how it is used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy to manipulate
and control public opinion. Foreign policy is about the economic relationships between
countries. Key to understanding how U.S. imperialism functions is in its foreign policy and how
it carries it out -- which adds up to plundering from relatively small or poorer nations more
than a share of wealth and resources that can be normally produced in common commercial
exchanges, forcing them to be indebted; and if any of them resist, then they will almost
certainly be subjected to military threats.
With the great wealth that allowed it to build a military that can "project forces over long
distances," the United States is in a unique position in history, to say the least. However, as
we have seen above, the now four decade-long war on Afghanistan was not only fought on a
military front considering the psy-ops and the propaganda involved. If anything, the Soviet
Union lost on the propaganda front in the end.
From Afghanistan we learn not only of the origins of Al Qaeda, to which the boom in the
opioid-addiction epidemic has ties, or why today we have the phenomenon of an anti-Russia
Western "left" that parrots imperialist propaganda and seems very eager to see that piece of
Cold War history repeat itself in Syria. We also learn that we cannot de-link the events of the
2001 direct U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and what followed from those of 1979;
Afghanistan's colonial-feudal past, its break from that with the 1978 Saur Revolution, and the
U.S.-led Mujahideen are all as much of a part of its history (and the Greater Middle East, by
extension) as the events of 2001. It cannot be stressed enough that it is those historical
conditions, particularly as they relate to U.S. foreign policy, that helped to shape the
ongoing conflict today.
Obviously, we cannot undo the past. It is not in the interests of the working class
anywhere, in the Global South or in the Global North, to see a third world war happen, as such
a war would have catastrophic consequences for everyone -- in fact, it could potentially
destroy all of humanity. Building a new and revitalized anti-war movement in the imperialist
nations is a given, but it also requires a more sophisticated understanding of U.S. foreign
policy. Without historical context, Western mass media will continue to go unchallenged,
weaning audiences on a steady diet of "moderate rebels" propaganda and effectively silencing
the victims of imperialism. It is necessary to unite workers across the whole world according
to their shared interests in order to effectively fight and defeat imperialism and to establish
a just, egalitarian, and sustainable world under socialism. Teaching the working class
everywhere the real history of such conflicts as the one in Afghanistan is an important part of
developing the revolutionary consciousness necessary to build a strong global revolutionary
movement against imperialism.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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Originally published by LLCO.org on March 30, 2019. For the full-length article and
bibliography, click here .
This was true about Iraq war. This is true about Venezuela and Syria.
Notable quotes:
"... In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books , Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. ..."
"... Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. ..."
"... Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back to 1959 . ..."
"... Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.) ..."
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small c rappy little country and
throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
- Michael
Ledeen , holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute
Actually, the U.S. had been beating Iraq's head against the wall for a dozen years, with
sanctions and bombing. The
sanctions alone killed over a million Iraqis, far more than have been done in by weapons of
mass destruction throughout history. But Ledeen's indiscreet remark, delivered at an AEI
conference and reported by Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online , does capture some
of what the war on Iraq is about.
And what is this "business" Ledeen says we mean? Oil, of course, of which more in a bit.
Ditto construction contracts for Bechtel. But it's more than that - nothing less than the
desire, often expressed with little shame nor euphemism, to run the world. Is there anything
new about that?
The answer is, of course, yes and no. In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books ,
Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had
excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when
earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. Anderson, who's edited New Left Review for years, but who has almost no
connection to actual politics attributed this strange explosion not to a popular outburst of
anti-imperialism, but to a cultural antipathy to the Bush administration.
Presumably that antipathy belongs to the realm of the " merely cultural ," and is of no great
political significance to Anderson. But it should be. U.S. culture has long been afflicted with
a brutally reactionary and self-righteous version of Christian fundamentalism, but it's never
had such influence over the state. The president thinks himself on a mission from God, the
Attorney General opens the business day with a prayer meeting, and the Pentagon's idea of a
Good Friday service is to invite Franklin Graham , who's pronounced Islam a "wicked and
evil religion," to deliver the homily, in which he promised that Jesus was returning soon. For
the hard core, the Iraq war is a sign of the end times, and the hard core
are in power.
Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also
recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. Though the
administration has been discreet, many of its private sector intellectuals
have been using the words "imperialism" and " empire " openly and with
glee. Not everyone of the millions who marched against the war in the months before it started
was a conscious anti-imperialist, but they all sensed the intensification, and were further
alarmed.
While itself avoiding the difficult word "empire," the Bush administration has been rather
clear about its long-term aims. According to their official national security strategy and the
documents published by the Project
for a New American Century (which served as an administration-in-waiting during the Clinton
years) their goal is to assure U.S. dominance and prevent the emergence of any rival powers.
First step in that agenda is the remaking of the Middle East - and they're quite open
about this as well. We all know the countries that are on the list; the only remaining issues
are sequence and strategy. But that's not the whole of the agenda. They're essentially
promising a permanent state of war, some overt, some covert, but one that could take
decades.
Imperial returns?
Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its
public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction
have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues
believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were
really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear
reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the
billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington
supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as
many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back
to 1959
.
Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why
it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much
tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.)
It now looks
fairly certain that the U.S. will, in some form, claim some large piece of Iraq's oil. The
details need to be worked out; clarifying the legal situation could be very complicated, given
the rampantly illegal nature of the regime change. Rebuilding Iraq's oil industry will be very
expensive and could take years. There could be some nice profits down the line for big oil
companies - billions a year - but the broader economic benefits for the U.S. aren't so clear. A
U.S.-dominated Iraq could pump heavily and undermine OPEC, but too low an oil price would wreck
the domestic U.S. oil industry, something the Bush gang presumably cares
about. Mexico would be driven into penury, which could mean another debt crisis and lots of
human traffic heading north over the Rio Grande. Lower oil prices would be a boon to most
industrial economies, but they'd give the U.S. no special advantage over its principal economic
rivals.
It's
sometimes said that U.S. dominance of the Middle East gives Washington a chokehold over oil
supplies to Europe and Japan. But how might that work? Deep production cutbacks and price
spikes would hurt everyone. Targeted sales restrictions would be the equivalent of acts of war,
and if the U.S. is willing to take that route, a blockade would be a lot more efficient. The
world oil market is gigantic and complex, and it's not clear how a tap could be turned in
Kirkuk that would shut down the gas pumps in Kyoto or Milan.
Writers like David Harvey argue
that the U.S. is trying to compensate for its eroding economic power by asserting its military
dominance. Maybe. It's certainly fascinating that Bush's unilateralism has to be financed by
gobs of foreign money - and he gets his tax cuts, he'll have to order up even bigger gobs. But
it's hard to see what rival threatens the U.S. economically; neither the EU nor Japan is
thriving. Nor is there any evidence that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about
economic policy, domestic or international, or even thinking at all. The economic staff is
mostly dim and marginal. What really seems to excite this gang of supposed conservatives is the
exercise of raw state power.
Jealous rivals
And while the Bushies want to prevent the emergence of imperial rivals , they may only be encouraging that. Sure, the EU
is badly divided within itself; it has a hard enough time picking a top central banker , let alone deciding on a common
foreign policy. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is already semi-apologizing to Bush for
his intemperate language in criticizing the war - not that Bush has started taking his calls.
But over the longer term, some kind of political unification is Europe's only hope for acting
like a remotely credible world power. It's tempting to read French and German objections to the
Iraq war as emerging not from principle, but from the wounded narcissism of former imperial
powers rendered marginal by American might. Separately, they'll surely hang. But a politically
united Europe could, with time, come to challenge U.S. power, just as the euro is beginning to look like a credible rival to the dollar.
(Speaking of the euro, there's a theory circulating on the net that the U.S. went to war
because Iraq wanted to price its oil in euros, not dollars. That's grossly overheated
speculation. More on this and related issues when LBO begins an investigation of the
political economy of oil in the next issue.)
An even more interesting rivalry scenario would involve an alliance of the EU and Russia.
Russia is no longer the wreck it was for most of the 1990s. The economy has been growing and
the mildly authoritarian Putin has imposed political stability. Russia, which has substantial
oil interests in Iraq that are threatened by U.S. control, strongly opposed the war, and at
least factions within the Russian intelligence agency were reportedly feeding information
unfriendly to the U.S. to the website Iraqwar.ru . There's a lot recommending an EU-Russia
alliance; Europe could supply technology and finance, and Russia could supply energy, and
together they could constitute at least an embryonic counterweight to U.S. power.
So the U.S. may not get out of Iraq what the Bush administration is hoping for. It certainly
can't want democracy in Iraq or the rest of the region, since free votes could well lead to
nationalist and Islamist governments who don't view ExxonMobil as the divine agent that Bush seems to. A
New York Times piece celebrated the outbreak of democracy in Basra, while conceding that
the mayor is a former Iraqi admiral appointed by the British. The lead writers of the new
constitution are likely to be American law professors; Iraqis, of course, aren't up to the task
themselves.
Certainly the appointment of Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner (Ret.) - one of the
few superannuated brass not to have enjoyed a consulting contract with a major TV network - to
be the top civilian official guiding the postwar reconstruction of Iraq speaks volumes. A
retired general is barely a civilian, and Garner's most recent job was as president of
SY Technology , a military
contractor that worked with Israeli security in developing the Arrow antimissile system. He
loves antimissile systems; after the first Gulf War, he enthused about the Patriot's
performance with claims that turned out to be nonsense. He's on record as having praised
Israel's handling of the intifada. If that's his model of how to handle restive subject
populations, there's lots of trouble ahead.
lightness
In the early days of the war, when things weren't going so well for the "coalition,"
it was said that the force was too light. But after the sandstorm cleared and the snipers
were mowed down, that alleged lightness became a widely praised virtue. But that force
was light only by American standards: 300,000 troops; an endless rain of Tomahawks,
JDAMs, and MOABs; thousands of vehicles, from Humvees to Abrams tanks; hundreds of
aircraft, from Apaches to B-1s; several flotillas of naval support - and enormous
quantities of expensive petroleum products. It takes five gallons of fuel just to start
an Abrams tank, and after that it gets a mile per gallon. And filling one up is no
bargain. Though the military buys fuel at a wholesale price of 84¢ a gallon, after
all the expenses of getting it to the front lines are added in, the final cost is about
$150 a gallon. That's a steal compared to Afghanistan, where fuel is helicoptered in,
pushing the cost to $600/gallon. Rummy's "lightness" is of the sort that only a $10
trillion economy can afford.
The Bush gang doesn't even try to keep up appearances, handing out contracts for Iraq's
reconstruction to U.S. firms even before the shooting stopped, and guarding only the oil and
interior ministries against looters. If Washington gets its way, Iraq will be rebuilt according
to the fondest dreams of the Heritage Foundation staff, with the educational system reworked by
an American contractor, the TV programmed by the Pentagon, the ports run by a rabidly antiunion
firm, the police run by the Texas-based military contractor Dyncorp , and the oil taken out of
state hands and appropriately privatized.
That's the way they'd like it to be. But the sailing may not be so smooth. It looks like
Iraqis are viewing the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. It's going to be hard enough to
remake Iraq that taking on Syria or Iran may be a bit premature. But that doesn't mean they
won't try. It's a cliché of trade negotiations that liberalization is like riding a
bicycle - you have to keep riding forward or else you'll fall over. The same could be said of
an imperial agenda: if you want to remake the world, or a big chunk of it, there's little time
to pause and catch your breath, since doubt or opposition could gain the upper hand. Which
makes stoking that opposition more
urgent than ever.
Losing it all
There's a feeling around that Bush is now politically invulnerable . Certainly the atmosphere
is one of almost coercive patriotism. That mood was nicely illustrated by an incident in
Houston in mid-March. A teenager attending a rodeo failed to stand along with the rest of the
crowd during a playing of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American," a dreadful country song
that has become a kind of private-sector national anthem for the yahoo demographic, thanks to
its truculent unthinking jingoism. A patriot standing behind the defiantly seated teen started
taunting him, tugging on his ear as an additional provocation. The two ended up in a fight, and
then under arrest.
There's a lot of that going around, for sure. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins get disinvited
from events, websites nominate
traitors for trial by military tribunal, and talk radio hosts organize CD-smashings. But things
aren't hopeless. A close analysis of Greenwood's text might suggest why. The song's core
argument is contained in its two most famous lines: "I'm proud to be an American/where at least
I know I'm free." But the oft-overlooked opening reads: "If tomorrow all the things were
gone/I'd worked for all my life," the singer would still be a grateful patriot. That's
precisely the condition lots of Americans find themselves in. More than two million jobs have
disappeared in the last two years. Millions of Americans have seen their retirement savings
wiped out by the bear market, and over a million filed for bankruptcy last year. Most states and
cities are experiencing their worst fiscal crises since the 1930s, with massive service cuts
and layoffs imminent. In the song, such loss doesn't matter, but reality is often less
accommodating than a song.
As the nearby graphs show, W's ratings are much lower than his father's at the end of Gulf
War I, and his disapproval ratings much higher. Their theocratic and repressive agenda is
deeply unpopular with large parts of the U.S. population. Spending scores of billions on
destroying and rebuilding Iraq while at home health clinics are closing and teachers working
without pay is potentially incendiary. Foreign adventures have never been popular with the
American public (much to the distress of the ruling elite). An peace movement that could draw
the links among warmongering, austerity, and repression has great political potential. Just a
month or two ago, hundreds of thousands were marching in American streets to protest the
imminent war. Though that movement now looks a bit dispirited and demobilized, it's unlikely
that that kind of energy will just disappear into the ether.
Neoconservativsm is a distinct ideology brought into being by U of Chicago professor Leo
Strauss and his ex-Trotskyist acolytes. It is American exceptionalism on steroids and its
core tenet is that American society needs elite rulers to guide the retarded masses who are
too stupid to know what their best interests are.
To keep them in line the masses need to be fed grandiose myths they can believe in and
rally around.
This is where America the Good as the shining beacon on the hill, slaying evil wherever it
is found to make the world safe for freedom comes in.
George H.W. Bush, Dubya's daddy, called them "the crazies in the basement."
First, the neocons and some Israeli strategists had long seen the Shia as "outsiders"
opposed to the mainstream Arab (read: Sunni) nationalist current, and over decades had
developed an affinity for the Shia as potential allies in the region, much as they saw the
Lebanese Maronite Christians and other minorities in the Arab world.
"There existed a supercilious 'Shiaphilia' among certain academics, Iraqi political
exiles, policy wonks and policymakers linked to the Bush administration," wrote Ahmed
Hashim, author of Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq and a professor of strategic
studies at the U.S. Naval War College. At the American Enterprise Institute and among
partisans of Chalabi's INC, it was routine to speak of "de-Arabizing" Iraq after the fall
of Saddam Hussein, a favorite theme of the INC's favored intellectual, Kanan Makiya.
Second, the neocons had been seduced by Chalabi, who convinced them that Iraq's Shia
leaders would abandon their ties to Iran and rush to embrace a secular, pro-American
political culture. Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival and a professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School, attributes this to the neocons' "reading of the Israeli experience in
the invasion of south Lebanon in 1982. That's why they had this vocabulary of 'They're
going to greet us with flowers,' because that's what happened in south Lebanon -- the
Israeli army was greeted by Shia villagers with flowers and rice."
Third, the neocons believed that moderate, nonpolitical Shia in Iraq would establish
Najaf, the Iraqi shrine city that is the holiest place in Shia Islam, as a new center of
gravity that would overpower Qom, the clerical powerhouse city in Iran. They believed that
the "good Shia," supposedly "quietist" ayatollahs such as Ali al-Sistani, would emerge to
present a frontal challenge to Iran's militant "bad Shia," followers of the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. A leading proponent of this theory was David Wurmser, a radical neocon
who is currently Vice President Cheney's top Middle East adviser. "They deluded themselves
into thinking that these links operated only one way -- with Najaf undermining Qom," says
Nasr. "They assumed that it was Iraq that would influence Iran, not that Iran would
influence Iraq."
"... It's not obvious to me that universal access to college education is a progressive goal. ..."
"... I think it is extremely important to understand where Warren is coming from on this. Warren initially became active in politics because she recognized the pernicious nature of debt and the impact it had on well-being. I ..."
"... Warren's emphasis in this particular initiative, it seems to me, is to alleviate debt so that individuals can pursue more advanced functionings/capabilities. ..."
"... The more a college degree is the norm, the worse things are for people without one. Making it easier to get a college degree increases the degree to which its the norm, and will almost inevitably have the same impact on the value of a college degree as the growth in high-school attendance (noted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt above) had on the value of a high school degree. ..."
"... The debate on this subject strikes me as misguided because it says nothing about what students learn. A good high school education should be enough to prepare young people for most kinds of work. In most jobs, even those allegedly requiring college degrees, the way people learn most of what they need to know is through on the job training. Many high school graduates have not received a good education, though, and go to college as, in effect, remedial high school. ..."
by Harry on May 6, 2019 Ganesh Sitaraman argues in
the Garun that, contrary to appearances, and contrary to the criticism that it has earned,
Elizabeth Warren's college plan really is progressive, because it is funded by taxation that
comes exclusively from a wealth tax on those with more than $50 million in assets. Its
progressive, he says, because it redistributes down. In some technical sense perhaps he's
right.
But this, quite odd, argument caught my eye:
But the critics at times also suggest that if any significant amount of benefits go to
middle-class or upper-middle class people, then the plan is also not progressive. This is
where things get confusing. The critics can't mean this in a specific sense because the plan
is, as I have said, extremely progressive in the distribution of costs. They must mean that
for any policy to be progressive that it must benefit the poor and working class more than it
benefits the middle and upper classes. T his is a bizarre and, I think, fundamentally
incorrect use of the term progressive .
The logic of the critics' position is that public investments in programs that help
everyone, including middle- and upper-class people, aren't progressive. This means that the
critics would have to oppose public parks and public K-12 education, public swimming pools
and public basketball courts, even public libraries. These are all public options that offer
universal access at a low (or free) price to everyone.
But the problem isn't that the wealthy get to benefit from tuition free college. I don't
think anyone objects to that. Rather, the more affluent someone is, on average, the more they
benefit from the plan. This is a general feature of tuition-free college plans and it is built
into the design.
Sandy Baum and Sarah Turner explain:
But in general, the plans make up the difference between financial aid -- such as the Pell
Grant and need-based aid provided by states -- and the published price of public colleges.
This means the largest rewards go to students who do not qualify for financial aid. In plans
that include four-year colleges, the largest benefits go to students at the most expensive
four-year institutions. Such schools enroll a greater proportion of well-heeled students, who
have had better opportunities at the K-12 level than their peers at either two-year colleges
or less-selective four-year schools. (Flagship institutions have more resources per student,
too.) .
For a clearer picture of how regressive these policies are, consider how net tuition --
again, that's what most free-tuition plans cover -- varies among students at different income
levels at four-year institutions. For those with incomes less than $35,000, average net
tuition was $2,300 in 2015-16; for students from families with incomes between $35,000 and
$70,000, it was $4,800; for those between $70,000 and $120,000, it was $8,100; and finally,
for families with incomes higher than $120,000, it was more than $11,000. (These figures
don't include living expenses.)
Many low-income students receive enough aid from sources like the Pell Grant to cover
their tuition and fees. At community colleges nationally, for example, among students from
families with incomes less than $35,000, 81 percent already pay no net tuition after
accounting for federal, state and institutional grant aid, according to survey data for
2015-16. At four-year publics, almost 60 percent of these low-income students pay
nothing.
If you take progressivism to mean "improvement of society by reform", Warren's plan is
clearly progressive. It reduces the pie going to the rich, greatly improves the lot of
students who are less than rich, and doesn't harm the poor.
Who cares – as long as this plan -(and hopefully an even more extended plan) puts an
end to a big part of the insanity of the (stupid and greedy) US education system?
In other words – let's call it "conservative" that might help to have it passed!
The difficulty with the plan as proposed is not whether it is progressive or not but that it
targets the wrong behavior – borrowing for education. If the goal is to make education
more accessible – subsidize the university directly to either facilitate point of
admission grants in the first place or simply bring down tuition cost to all attendees.
Under this proposal (assuming one thinks Warren would win and it could get passed) the
maximizing strategy is to borrow as much as one possibly can with the hope/expectation that
it would ultimately be forgiven. If that's the "right" strategy, then it would benefit those
with the greatest borrowing capacity which most certainly is not students from low income
families but is in fact families which could probably pay most of the cost themselves but
would choose not to in order to capture a benefit they couldn't access directly by virtue of
being 'too rich' for grants or other direct aid.
"Rather, the more affluent someone is, on average, the more they benefit from the plan. "
This doesn't seem like a fair description of what's going on. If Starbucks gives a free muffin to everyone who buys a latte, it's theoretically helping
the rich more than the poor under this way of looking at things. The rich can afford the
muffin; the poor can't. So the rich will get more free muffins. But the rich don't give a
crap. They can easily just buy the damn muffin in the first place. They're not really being
helped, because the whole damn system helps them already. They're just about as well off with
or without the free muffin.
Same here. My kid's going to Stanford. I'm effin rich and I don't give a crap about
financial aid. If it was free I'd have an extra 75k a year, but how many Tesla's do I need
really? How many houses in Hawaii do I need? But when I was a kid I was lower middle class. I
didn't even apply to Stanford because it was just too much. Yeah, I could have gone rotc or
gotten aid, but my parents just couldn't bust out their contribution. Stanford just wasn't in
the cards. And Stanford's a terrible example, it had needs blind admissions and can afford
to just give money away if it wants.
I don't understand the fear, in certain areas of what's apparently the left, of giving
benefits to people in the middle of the income/wealth curve.
The expansion of the term "middle class" doesn't help with this, nor does the expansion of
education. These debates often sound as if some of the participants think of "middle class"
as the children of physicians and attorneys, who moreover are compensated the way they were
in the 1950s.
The ability to switch between "it's reasonable to have 100% college attendance within 5
years from now" and "of course college is only for the elite classes" is not reassuring to
the average more or less educated observer (who may or may not be satisfied, depending on
temperament and so on, with the answer that of course such matters are above her head).
The actual plan is for free tuition at public colleges. So not "the most expensive
four-year institutions" that Baum and Turner discuss. [HB: they're referring to the most
expensive 4-year public institutions]
There's also expanded support for non-tuition expenses, means-tested debt cancellation,
and a fund for historically black universities, all of which make the plan more progressive.
And beyond that, I could argue that, for lower-income students on the margin of being able to
attend and complete school, we should count not only the direct financial aid granted, but
also the lifetime benefits of the education the aid enables. But suffice it to say, I think
you're attacking a caricature.
the college plan does not actually offer 'universal access'
Given that something like one third of Americans gets a college degree, Warren's plan
seems good enough. It's not obvious to me that universal access to college education is a
progressive goal.
I think it is extremely important to understand where Warren is coming from on this. Warren
initially became active in politics because she recognized the pernicious nature of debt and
the impact it had on well-being. If you are trying to get out from under the burden of debt
your capabilities for flourishing are severely restricted, and these restrictions can easily
become generational. One of the more difficult debts that people are facing are student
debts. This was made especially difficult by the 2005 bankruptcy bill which made it close to
impossible for individuals to get out from under student debt by entering in to Chapter 7
bankruptcy.
Warren's emphasis in this particular initiative, it seems to me, is to alleviate debt so
that individuals can pursue more advanced functionings/capabilities. So if you think that the
definition of progressive is creating situations where more individuals in a society are
given greater opportunities for flourishing then the plan does strike me as progressive (an
Aristotelian interpretation of Dewey such as promoted by Nussbaum might fall in this
direction). There is another issue however that might be closer to the idea of helping those
from lowest social strata, something that is not being discussed near enough. Internet
technologies helped to promote online for profit universities which has (and I suppose
continues to) prey and those most desperate to escape poverty with limited resources. The
largest part of their organizations are administrators who help students to secure loans with
promises of high paying jobs once they complete their degrees. These places really do prey on
the most vulnerable (homeless youth for instance) and they bait individuals with hope in to
incurring extremely high debt. The loan companies are fine with this I am guess because of
the bankruptcy act (they can follow them for life). This is also not regulated (I think you
can thank Kaplan/Washington Post for that). Warren's initiative would help them get out from
under debt immediately and kick start their life.
I agree k-12 is more important, but it is also far more complicated. This plan is like a
shot of adrenaline into the social blood stream and it might not even be necessary in a few
years. I think it dangerous to make the good the enemy or the perfect, or the perfect the
critic of the good.
– and how cynical does one have to be – to redefine a plan canceling the vast
majority of outstanding student loan debt – as some kind of ("NON-progressive") present
for "the rich"?
But even apart from that, the argument of the post seems like it would suggest that many
things that we currently fund publicly are not progressive in a problematic way. Everything
from arts to national parks to math research "benefits" the rich more than the poor. There's
possibly a case that public provision of these goods is problematic when we as a society
could spend that money on those who are more disadvantaged. But that's a very strong claim
and implicates far more than free college.
Finally, it's worth comparing the previous major expansion of education in the US. The
point at which high school attendance was as widespread as college attendance is now (about
70% of high school graduates enroll in college of some form right away) was around 1930, well
after universal free high school was available. I think moving to universal free college is
an important step to raise those rates, just as free high school was.
It strikes me that the argument made here against a universal program of tuition free college
is not all that different than an argument made against social security -- that the benefits
go disproportionately to middle class and professional class individuals. Since in the case
of Social Security, one has to be in gainfully employed to participate and one's benefits
are, up to a cap, based on one's contributions, middle class and professional class
individuals receive greater benefits. Poor individuals, including those who have not been
employed for long periods of time, receive less benefits. (There are quirks in this 10 second
summary, such as disability benefits, but not so much as to alter this basic functioning.)
Every now and again, there are proposals to "means test" social security, using this
functioning as the reasoning. A couple of points are worth considering.
First, it is the universality of social security that makes it a political 'third rail,'
such that no matter how it would like to do away with such a 'socialist' program, the GOP
never acts on proposals to privatize it, even when they have the Presidency and the
majorities that would allow it to get through Congress. The universality thus provides a
vital security to the benefits that poor and working people receive from the program, since
it makes it politically impossible to take it away. Since social security is often the only
pension that many poor and working people get (unlike middle class and professional class
individuals who have other sources of retirement income), the loss of it would be far more
devastating to them. There is an important way, therefore, that they are served by the
current configuration of the system, even given its skewing.
Second, and following from the above, it is important to recognize that the great bulk of
proposals to "means test" Social Security come from the libertarian right, not the left, and
that they are designed to undercut the support for Social Security, in order to make its
privatization politically viable.
Most colleges and universities "means test" financial aid for their students, which is one
of the reasons why it is generally inadequate and heavily weighted toward loans as opposed to
grants. I think it is a fair generalization of American social welfare experience history to
say that "means tested" programs are both more vulnerable politically (think of the Reagan
'welfare queen' narrative) and more poorly funded than universal programs.
There are additional argument about the skewing of Social Security benefits, such as the
fact that they go disproportionately to the elderly, while those currently living in poverty
are disproportionately children. This argument mistakes the positive effects of the program
-- before Social Security and Medicare the elderly were the most impoverished -- for an
inegalitarian design element.
The solution to the fact that children bear the brunt of poverty in the US is not to
undermine the program that has lifted the elderly out of poverty but to institute programs
that address the problem of childhood poverty. Universal quality day care, for example,
provides the greatest immediate economic benefits to middle class and professional class
families who are now paying for such services, but it provides poor and working class kids
with an education 'head start' that would otherwise go only to the children of those families
that could afford to pay for it. And insofar as day care is provided, it makes it easier for
poor and working class parents (often in one parent households) to obtain decent
employment.
So the failings of universal programs are best addressed, I would argue, by filling in the
gaps with more universal programs, not 'means testing' them.
To the extent that Warren's 'free tuition' proposal addresses only some of the financial
disadvantages of poor and working people obtaining a college education, the response should
not be "oh, this is not progressive," but what do we do to address the other issues, such as
living expenses. It is not as if there are no models on how to do this. All we need to do is
look at Nordic countries that provide post-secondary students both free tuition and living
expenses.
Having grown up and gone to university in Germany it is simply incomprehensible to me that
there is tuition supporters on the political left in the U.S. It's true that free college
isn't universal in the same sense free K-12 education is. But neither are libraries (they
exclude those who are functionally illiterate completely, and their services surely go mostly
to upper middle class people who have opportunity and education to read regularly), for
example. Neither are roads – the poor overwhelmingly live in inner cities, often take
public transport – it's middle class suburbanites that mostly profit. Speaking of
public transport, I assume Henry opposes rail; it is very middle class, the poor use buses.
(The last argument actually has considerable traction in Los Angeles, it's not completely far
fetched.)
I agree that Warren's free college and debt forgiveness plans would not be very progressive,
but I'd propose that I think the dynamic mechanism built in would make it worse than a static
analysis shows.
(Note that most of my siblings and in-laws do not have college degrees; this perspective
is based on my own observations.)
The more a college degree is the norm, the worse things are for people without one. Making
it easier to get a college degree increases the degree to which its the norm, and will almost
inevitably have the same impact on the value of a college degree as the growth in high-school
attendance (noted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt above) had on the value of a high school degree.
(We're already seeing this: many positions that used to require a college degree now require
a specific degree, or a masters degree.) This will increase age discrimination, and further
worsen the position of the people for whom college is unattractive for reasons other than
money.
To give a particular example of a mechanism (idiosyncratic, but one I know specifically).
Until a couple decades ago, getting a KY electrician's license required 4 years experience
under a licensed electrician, and passing the code test. Then the system changed; now it
requires a 2-year degree and 2 years experience, OR 8 years experience. This was great for
colleges. The working electricians don't think the new electricians are better prepared as
they used to be, but all of a sudden people who don't find sitting in a classroom for an
additional 2 years attractive are hugely disadvantaged. Another example would be nursing
licenses; talk to any older LPN and you'll get an earful about how LPN's are devalued as RNs
and BSNs have become the norm.
I suspect tuition reform will be complex, difficult and subject to gaming. Being simple
minded I offer an inadequate but simple palliative. Make student loan debt dischargeable in
bankruptcy. You can max out your credit cards on cars, clothes, booze or whatever and be able
to discharge these debts but not for higher education.
The inability to even threaten bankruptcy gives all the power to collection companies.
Students have no leverage at all. The threat of bankruptcy would allow for negotiated
reductions in principal as well as payments.
Bankruptcy does carry a lot of negative consequences so it would offset the likely
objections about moral hazards, blah, blah. I would also favor an additional method of
discharging student debt. If your debt is to a for-profit school that can't meet some minimum
standards for student employment in their field of study then total discharge without the
need for bankruptcy. For-profit vocational schools intensively target low income and minority
students without providing significant value for money.
Progressivity looks much better if the program sticks to free community college, at least
until there is universal access to 4-year schools. That's what Tennessee did (IIRC the only
example that is actually operational).
Harry: it doesn't seem as if you responded to my comment. I'll try again.
1. A policy is progressive if it is redistributive.
2. Warren's plan is redistributive.
3. Thus, Warren's plan is progressive.
Comments about how effective the redistribution is are fine, but to claim a non-ideal
distribution framework invalidates the program's claims to being progressive seems spurious.
And I don't think this definition of progressive is somehow wildly ideosyncratic.
To whine that free college is somehow not progressive because not everyone will go to college
is a ridiculous argument, one of those supposedly-left-but-actually-right arguments that I
get so tired of. To assume that the class makeup of matriculators will be unchanged with free
college is to discount knock-on effects. This is a weird, weird post. I guess I'm going back to ignoring this site.
The debate on this subject strikes me as misguided because it says nothing about what
students learn. A good high school education should be enough to prepare young people for
most kinds of work. In most jobs, even those allegedly requiring college degrees, the way
people learn most of what they need to know is through on the job training. Many high school
graduates have not received a good education, though, and go to college as, in effect,
remedial high school.
Readers who attended an average American high school, as I did long ago, will know that
there are certain students, especially boys, who are itching to be done with school. It is
far more productive to give them a decent high school education and have them start working
than to tell them they need another two to four years of what to them is pointless
rigamarole.
Rather than extending the years of education, I would reduce the high school graduation
age to 17 and reduce summer vacations by four weeks, so that a 17 year old would graduate
with as many weeks of schooling as an 18 year old now. (Teachers would get correspondingly
higher pay, which should make them happy.)
Harry Truman never went to college. John Major became a banker and later prime minister of
Britain without doing so. Neither performed noticeably worse than their college-educated
peers. If a college education is not necessary to rise to the highest office in the land, why
is it necessary for lesser employment except in a few specialized areas?
An experiment that I would like to see tried is to bring back the federal civil service
exam, allowing applicants without college degrees who score high enough to enter U.S.
government jobs currently reserved for those with college degrees.
Looks more and more like Crowdstrike conducted false flag operation to implicate Russians, not a real investigation.
I always assumed that #Guccifer2 was either a Crowdstryke construction at DNC request (that's probably why it was so badly,
incompetently done) or a NSA construction (then, we somehow need to explain, why it was so badly done?). In both cases the
goal was to implicate Russia in a DNC 'hack' ...
Craig Murray has stated he received the DNC files in Wash DC from a leaker. Mueller failed to interview him, which
suggest the Mueller and his team were the part of cover-up, not the part of investigation.
Notable quotes:
"... We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22, 2016 and extracted later): ..."
"... The malware samples provided by CrowdStrike show that the earliest compile date of Fancy Bear malware reportedly discovered at the DNC was April 25, 2016 . ..."
"... Whoever was controlling the Guccifer 2.0 persona went out of their way to be perceived as Russian and made specious claims about having already sent WikiLeaks documents, even claiming that WikiLeaks would release them soon (all before Mueller records any initial contact between the parties) . ..."
"... The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks' DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. ..."
"... There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect, looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the outset. ..."
On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of Robert Mueller's report on "RussiaGate" related
activities was released to the public.
This article focuses on Volume I Part III titled "Russian Hacking & Dumping Operations"
and provides details of the errors made, critical omissions, lack of conclusive evidence and
reliance on assumptions and speculation.
We will also look at problems relating to attribution methods used, countervailing evidence
that has clearly been disregarded and other problems that are likely to have affected the
quality of the investigation and the report.
The Mueller Report: Context & Contradiction
We start with a read-through of this section of the report, highlighting missing context,
contradictions and errors.
Page 36
[To minimize repetition, we'll deal with statements made in this introduction where the
basis is explained or details are provided on other pages ahead.]
Page 36
While the Netyksho
indictment does provide details of intrusions and infrastructure used, it's still unclear
how the infrastructure has been attributed back to individuals in the GRU and no conclusive
evidence has been presented to support that in the indictment or the report.
In the Netyksho
indictment it is stated that the "middle-servers" are overseas:
So, what was the point in having a US-based AMS Panel if you're using overseas servers as
proxies?
This seems to be a needlessly noisy setup that somewhat defeats the purpose of having a
US-based server for the AMS panel.
This setup makes the assets allegedly used by GRU officers subject to US laws, subject to
Internet monitoring by US intelligence agencies and prone to being physically seized.
With the GRU using middle-servers, as alleged, there would have been absolutely no reason to
have the AMS panel hosted on a server within the US and every reason to have it hosted
elsewhere.
It almost seems like they wanted to get caught!
Page 40
We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a
little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22,
2016 and extracted later):
The problem with this is that it suggests the GRU had their implant on the DNC network
earlier than what the available evidence supports.
Perhaps they didn't discover all the malware until later? (Though, with their flagship
product installed across the network, one would think they'd have detected all the malware
present by the time they reported on discoveries).
The implication that this was stolen from the DNC is questionable due to this.
Going further, the story surrounding this changed in November 2017 when the Associated Press
published a story titled " How Russians
hacked the Democrats' emails " in which they cite an anonymous former DNC official who
asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not
originate in the DNC as initially reported.
Another interesting point relating to this is the "HRC_pass.zip" archive released by
Guccifer 2.0 on June 21, 2016 (
which also provided another US central timezone indication ) contained files with last
modification dates of April 26, 2016. While this fits within the above timeframe, the transfer
of the files individually, the apparent transfer speeds involved and the presence of FAT-like
2-second rounding artifacts ( noted elsewhere
in Guccifer 2.0's releases ) when the files came from an NTFS system (and the ZIP
implementation was not the cause) does not correlate well with what the report
outlines.
In spite of its name ("HRC_pass.zip") this archive appears to contain files that can be
sourced to the DNC. Out of 200 files, only one showed up as an attachment (in the Podesta
emails) .
Regarding the May 25 - June 1 timeframe cited, this seems to exclude the date on which
approximately 70% of the DNC's emails published on WikiLeaks' website were acquired (May 23,
2016)
What makes this interesting is that this is apparently being evaluated on evidence that was
very likely to have been provided by CrowdStrike:
Page 40
How did Crowdstrike's evidence not inform the FBI and Special Counsel of the real initial
acquisition date of WikiLeaks' DNC emails?
Was the May 23, 2016 activity not recorded?
Going back to the Netyksho indictment , we have also been
told that Yermakov was searching for Powershell commands between the May 25 - June 1st
period:
However, we know 70% of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks had already been acquired
prior to that time, before Yermakov had allegedly researched how to access and manage the
Exchange server.
Page 41
We can tell from the use of "appear" here that the Special Counsel does not have conclusive
evidence to demonstrate this.
Page 41
While the overlap between reported phishing victims and the output of DCLeaks cannot be
denied, it is still unclear how bitcoin pools or leased infrastructure have been definitively
tied back to any GRU officers or the GRU itself.
This isn't to say that there isn't evidence of it (I would assume there is some evidence
or intelligence that supports the premise to some degree, at the very least) but we have no
idea what that could be and there is no explanation of how associations to individual GRU
officers were made (perhaps to protect HUMINT but this still leaves us completely in the
dark as to how attributions were made) .
We know already that things are assumed by the Special Counsel on the basis of
circumstantial evidence, so there is good reason to question whether the attributions made are
based on conclusive evidence.
Page 42
This is the first point at which to recall Assange's announcement on 12 June that WikiLeaks
was working on a release of "emails related to Hillary Clinton" - two days before the DNC goes
public about being hacked by Russians, and three days before the appearance of Guccifer
2.0.
It's also approximately one month before Mueller says Guccifer 2.0 first successfully sent
anything to WikiLeaks.
While WikiLeaks did mention this via their Twitter feed on June 16, 2016, they were clearly
skeptical of his claims to be a hacker and although they cite his claim about sending material
to WikiLeaks, they don't confirm it:
It also seems a little odd that the GRU would do searches for already translated phrases
(using Google translate to get English translations would be more understandable) and if
it's Guccifer 2.0 doing it why did he not use the VPN he used for his other activities
throughout the same day?
Why does the Mueller report not report on the IP address of the Moscow-based server from
which searches occurred? It wouldn't really expose sources and methods to disclose it and it's
unclear how it was determined to have been used and managed by a unit of the GRU. (Citation
#146 references the Netyksho indictment, however, that fails to provide evidence or explanation
of this too.)
The body content of a Trump Opposition research document (originally authored by Lauren
Dillon) that was attached to another of Podesta's emails was then
copied into the template document.
The document was saved (with a Russian author name), its body content cleared and this was
then re-used to produce two further "Russia-tainted" documents.
It was no accident that led to the documents being tainted in the way that they were and it
looks like Guccifer 2.0's version of the Trump opposition research didn't really come from the
DNC.
It should be noted that the data referenced above was also unrelated to the general election
and didn't have any noticeable impact on it (the 2.5Gb of data Guccifer 2.0 provided to
Aaron Nevins was unlikely to have hurt the Clinton campaign or affect the outcome of the
general election) .
In the states that the data related to, general election results didn't flip between the
time of the publication of the documents and the election:
Page 43
Interesting to note that Guccifer 2.0 lied about DCLeaks being a "sub project" of
WikiLeaks.
Page 44
The only materials Mueller alleges that WikiLeaks confirmed receipt of was a "1gb or so"
archive, for which, instructions to access were communicated in an attached message
(none-too-discreetly titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg") and sent by Guccifer 2 via
unencrypted email.
It is an assumption that this was an archive of DNC emails (it could have contained other
files Guccifer 2.0 subsequently released elsewhere).
We don't even know for sure whether WikiLeaks released what had been sent to them by either
entity.
This, of course, doesn't rule out the possibility of it being a portion of the overall
collection but what the persona had sent to WikiLeaks could also easily have been other
material relating to the DNC that we know Guccifer 2.0 later released or shared with other
parties.
Page 45
This is the second point at which to recall Assange's 12 June TV announcement of upcoming
"emails related to Hillary Clinton", coming two days before Guccifer 2.0's colleagues at
DCLeaks reach out to WikiLeaks via unencrypted means on 14 June 2016 to offer "sensitive
information" on Clinton.
Then, seven days after Guccifer 2 had already claimed to have sent material to WikiLeaks and
stated that they'd soon release it (which made it sound as though he'd had confirmation
back), we see that WikiLeaks reaches out to Guccifer 2.0 and suggests he sends material to
them (as though there's never been any prior contact or provision of materials previously
discussed) .
Page 45
How is it "clear" that both the DNC and Podesta documents were transferred from the GRU to
WikiLeaks when there is only around a gigabyte of data acknowledged as received (and we
don't even know what that data is) and little is known about the rest (and the report
just speculates at possibilities) ?
Page 46
We aren't provided the full dialogue between WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. Instead we have
just a few words selected from the communication that could easily be out of context. The
Netyksho indictment did exactly the same thing. Neither the indictment nor the report provide
the full DM conversation in context.
(It certainly wouldn't harm HUMINT resources or expose methods if this evidence was
released in full context.)
Would the GRU really engage in internal communications (eg GRU Guccifer 2.0 to GRU
DCLeaks) via Twitter DMs? Maybe, but it seems insanely sloppy with regards to operational
security of a clandestine organization communicating between its own staff.
The statement that concludes on the following page (see below) also seems a little
bizarre. Would WikiLeaks really ask Guccifer 2.0 to DM DCLeaks to pass on such a message on
their behalf?
Why doesn't Mueller provide the comms evidence of WikiLeaks asking Guccifer 2.0 for
assistance in contacting DCLeaks?
As written, we are expected to take the words of Guccifer 2.0 (stating that the media
organisation wished to talk to DCLeaks) at face value.
It was actually the last-modification date, not the creation date that was recorded as 19
September, 2016.
This wasn't necessarily the creation date and is only indicative of the last recorded
write/copy operation (unless last modification date is preserved when copying but there's no
way to determine that based on the available evidence) .
The gap between email file timestamps and attachment timestamps may simply be explained by
WikiLeaks extracting the attachments from the EML files at a later stage. With the DNC emails
we observed last-modifications dates as far back as May 23, 2016 but the attachments had
last-modification dates that were much later (eg. July 21, 2016).
The wording is also worth noting: "Based on information about Assange's computer and its
possible operating system" [emphasis mine] does not sound like it's based on
reliable and factual information, it sounds like this is based on assessment/estimation. This
also seems to be relying on an assumption that the only person handling files for WikiLeaks is
Assange.
How have the Special Counsel cited WikiLeaks metadata for evidence where it's suited them
yet, somehow, have managed to miss the May 23, 2016 date on which the DNC emails were initially
being collected?
Going further, the report, based on speculation, suggests that the GRU staged releases in
July (for DNC emails) and September (for Podesta emails). However, going off the same logic as
the Special Counsel, with last-modification dates indicating when the email files are "staged",
the evidence would theoretically point to the DNC emails being "staged" in May 2016).
It doesn't seem so reliable when the rule is applied multilaterally.
Of course, if both assumptions about staging dates are true, then we're left wondering what
Julian Assange could have been talking about on June 12, 2016 when mentioning having emails
relating to Hillary Clinton.
The speculation in the final paragraph of the above section also shows us that the Special
Counsel lacks certainty on sources.
Page 48
Really, this correlation of dates (March 21, 2016 and the reported phishing incident
relating to March 19, 2016) is one of the best arguments for saying that emails published
by WikiLeaks were acquired through phishing or hacking incidents reported.
However, this merely suggests the method of acquisition, it says nothing of how the material
got to WikiLeaks. We can make assumptions, but that's all we can do because the available
evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive.
Page 48
Far from "discredit[ing] WikiLeaks' claims about the source of the material it posted", the
file transfer evidence doesn't conclusively demonstrate that WikiLeaks published anything sent
to it by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.
Although there are hints that what was sent by Guccifer 2.0 related to the DNC, we don't
know if this contained DNC emails or the other DNC related content he later released and shared
with others.
"The statements about Seth Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen
DNC emails" is itself a false statement. The reason Assange gave for offering a reward for
information leading to the conviction of Seth Rich's killers was "Our sources take risks and
they become concerned when they see things occurring like that [the death of DNC worker Seth
Rich]... We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States" ( source ) .
This implies WikiLeaks is offering the reward for info about Seth Rich at the behest of its
actual source/s.
Page 49
By the time Trump had made the statements cited above, it was already assumed that Hillary
had been hacked by the Russians, so Trump saying he hoped the Russians would find the emails
seems more likely to have been in reference to what he assumed was already in their
possession.
What is being described here is, to a considerable extent, just common exploit scanning on
web services, scanning that will almost certainly have come from other nodes based in other
nations too .
These scans are typically done via compromised machines, often with machines that are in
nations completely separate to the nationality of those running the scanning effort.
The Department of Homeland Security threw
cold water on this a long time ago.
DHS would not characterize these efforts as attacks, only "simple scanning ... which occurs
all the time".
The remaining pages in this section of the report include a lot of redactions and mostly
cover the actions of individuals in the US in relation to communications they had with or in
relation to WikiLeaks. As this article is about the technical claims made in relation to
hacking and so much is redacted, we'll only look at those really relevant to this.
[The remaining pages in this section have little relevance to the technical aspects of
this section of the report and/or acquisition of materials that this article is intended to
cover.]
While the above does show numerous issues with the report, it's important not to fall into
the trap of outright dismissing as false anything for which evidence is lacking or assuming
there is no evidence at all to support assertions.
However, without knowing what evidence exists we're left to make assumptions about whether
it's conclusive or circumstantial, we don't know if the source of evidence is dependable and
it's clear in the report that the Special Counsel has relied on assumptions and made numerous
statements on the basis of presuppositions.
There is also a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence that, although it doesn't
conclusively prove what the report tries to convince us of, it does at least raise questions
about relationships between different entities, especially with regards to any overlaps in
resources and infrastructure used.
For example, based on the cited evidence, it is perfectly understandable that people will
assume Guccifer 2.0 provided DNC emails to WikiLeaks and will also assume that WikiLeaks
published whatever it was that Guccifer 2.0 had sent them (especially with Mueller
presenting that conversation in the form of a couple of words devoid of all context) .
The apparent overlap between a VPN service used by Guccifer 2.0 and by DCLeaks does suggest
the two could be associated beyond Guccifer 2.0 just being a source of leaks for them.
Also, DCLeaks publishing some DNC emails that later appeared in the DNC email collection
(though not necessarily from the same mailboxes) also suggests that DCLeaks and WikiLeaks could
have had access to some of the same material and/or sources.
The same is true for Guccifer 2.0 releasing Podesta and DNC email attachments before
WikiLeaks released both collections. Unless given good reason to consider any ulterior motive,
the implied explanation, on the surface, seems to be that it was this persona that was a source
for those emails. If nothing else, that's how it appears based on the little information
typically made available to us by the mainstream press.
However, despite all of this, we still have not seen conclusive evidence showing that either
of the entities was really controlled by the GRU and, when the countervailing evidence
(which seems to have been completely ignored by the Special Counsel's investigation) is
considered, there is reason to give consideration to Guccifer 2.0's efforts to not just
associate himself with WikiLeaks and DCLeaks but also to associate third parties with each
other through false claims.
The Mystery Of The May 23, 2016 Omission
One of the most notable omissions is the date on which emails from several mailboxes
(including Luis Miranda's) were originally collected.
Not only is this prior to the May 25, 2016 - June 1, 2016 timeframe given for the DNC's
exchange server being hacked, this activity is unmentioned throughout the entire report.
How has this failed to come to the surface when it should have been apparent in evidence
CrowdStrike provided to the FBI and also apparent based on the WikiLeaks metadata? How is it
the Special Counsel can cite some of the metadata in relation to WikiLeaks releases yet somehow
manage to miss this?
Countervailing Evidence
What the Special Counsel's investigation also seems to have completely disregarded is the
volume of countervailing evidence that has been discovered by several independent researchers
in relation to the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
It's worth considering what evidence the Special Counsel has brought to the surface and
comparing it with the evidence that has come to the surface as a result of discoveries being
made by independent researchers over the past two years and the differences between the two
sets of evidence (especially with regards to falsifiability and verifiability of
evidence) .
Some excellent examples are covered in the following articles:
Skip Folden (who introduced me to VIPS members and has been a good friend ever since)
recently shared with me his assessment of problems with the current attribution methods being
relied on by the Special Counsel and others.
It covered several important points and was far more concise than anything I would have
written, so, with his permission, I'm publishing his comments on this topic:
No basis whatsoever
APT28, aka Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Strontium, Pawn Storm, Sednit, etc., and APT29, aka Cozy
Bear, Cozy Duke, Monkeys, CozyCar,The Dukes, etc., are used as 'proof' of Russia 'hacking' by
Russian Intelligence agencies GRU and FSB respectively.
There is no basis whatsoever to attribute the use of known intrusion elements to Russia,
not even if they were once reverse routed to Russia, which claim has never been made by NSA
or any other of our IC.
On June 15, 2016 Dmitri Alperovitch himself, in an Atlantic Council article, gave only
"medium-level of confidence that Fancy Bear is GRU" and "low-level of confidence that Cozy
Bear is FSB." These assessments, from the main source himself, that either APT is Russian
intelligence, averages 37%-38% [(50 + 25) / 2].
Exclusivity :
None of the technical indicators, e.g., intrusion tools (such as X-Agent, X-Tunnel),
facilities, tactics, techniques, or procedures, etc., of the 28 and 29 APTs can be uniquely
attributed to Russia, even if one or more had ever been trace routed to Russia. Once an
element of a set of intrusion tools is used in the public domain it can be reverse-engineered
and used by other groups which precludes the assumption of exclusivity in future use. The
proof that any of these tools have never been reverse engineered and used by others is left
to the student - or prosecutor.
Using targets
Also, targets have been used as basis for attributing intrusions to Russia, and that is
pure nonsense. Both many state and non-state players have deep interests in the same targets
and have the technical expertise to launch intrusions. In Grizzly Steppe, page 2, second
paragraph, beginning with, "Both groups have historically targeted ...," is there anything in
that paragraph which can be claimed as unique to Russia or which excludes all other major
state players in the world or any of the non-state organizations? No.
Key Logger Consideration
On the subject of naming specific GRU officers initiating specific actions on GRU Russian
facilities on certain dates / times, other than via implanted ID chips under the finger tips
of these named GRU officers, the logical assumption would be by installed key logger
capabilities, physical or malware, on one or more GRU Russian computers.
The GRU is a highly advanced Russian intelligence unit. It would be very surprising were
the GRU open to any method used to install key logger capabilities. It would be even more
surprising, if not beyond comprehension that the GRU did not scan all systems upon start-up
and in real time, including key logger protection and anomalies of performance degradation
and data transmissions.
Foreign intelligence source
Other option would be via a foreign intelligence unit source with local GRU access. Any
such would be quite anti-Russian and be another nail in the coffin of any chain of evidence /
custody validity at Russian site.
Chain Of Custody - Without An Anchor There Is No Chain
Another big problem with the whole RussiaGate investigation is the reliance on a private
firm, hired by the DNC, to be the source of evidence.
As I don't have a good understanding of US law and processes surrounding evidence collection
and handling, I will, again, defer to something that my aforementioned contact shared:
Chain of Evidence / Custody at US end, i.e., DNC and related computing facilities
Summary: There is no US end Chain of Evidence / Custody
The anchor of any chain of evidence custody is the on-site crime scene investigation of a
jurisdictional law enforcement agency and neutral jurisdictional forensic team which
investigate, discover, identify where possible, log, mark, package, seal, or takes images
there of, of all identified elements of potential evidence as discovered at the scene of a
crime by the authorized teams. The chain of this anchor is then the careful, documented
movement of each element of captured evidence from crime scene to court.
In the case of the alleged series of intrusions into the DNC computing facilities, there
is no anchor to any chain of evidence / custody.
There has been no claim that any jurisdictional law enforcement agency was allowed access
to the DNC computing facilities. The FBI was denied access to DNC facilities, thereby
supposedly denying the FBI the ability to conduct any on-site investigation of the alleged
crime scene for discovery or collection of evidence.
Nor did the FBI exercise its authority to investigate the crime scene of a purported
federal crime. Since when does the FBI need permission to investigate an alleged crime site
where it is claimed a foreign government's intelligence attacked political files in order to
interfere in a US presidential election?
Instead, the FBI accepted images of purported crime scene evidence from a contractor hired
by and, therefore, working for the DNC. On July 05, 2017 a Crowdstrike statement said that
they had provided "... forensic images of the DNC system to the FBI." It was not stated when
these images were provided. Crowdstrike was working for the DNC as a contractor at the
time.
This scenario is analogous to an employee of a crime scene owner telling law enforcement,
"Trust me; I have examined the crime scene for you and here's what I've found. It's not
necessary for you to see the crime scene."
Crowdstrike cannot be accepted as a neutral forensic organization. It was working for and
being paid by the DNC. It is neither a law enforcement agency nor a federal forensic
organization. Further Crowdstrike has serious conflicts of interest when it comes to any
investigation of Russia.
Crowdstrike co-founder and Director of Technology, Dimitri Alperovitch, is a Nonresident
Senior Fellow, Cyber Statecraft Initiative, of the Atlantic Council. Alperovitch has made it
clear of his dislike of the government of Putin, and The Atlantic Council can not be
considered neutral to Russia, receiving funding from many very staunch and outspoken enemies
of Russia.
Summary: Not only was no federal jurisdictional law enforcement agency allowed to
investigate the alleged crime scene, but the organization which allegedly collected and
provided the 'evidence' was not neutral by being employed by the owner of the alleged crime
scene, but seriously compromised by strong anti-Russian links.
This issue of this substitute for an anchor then leads us to our next problem: an apparent
conflict of interest from the investigation's outset.
Conflict of Interest Inherent In The Investigation?
Would it seem like a conflict of interest if the person in charge of an investigation were
friends with a witness and source of critical evidence relied upon by that investigation?
This is effectively the situation we have with the Special Counsel investigation because
Robert Mueller and CrowdStrike's CSO (and President) Shawn Henry are former colleagues
and friends.
If nothing else, it's understandable for people to feel that the Special Counsel would have
struggled to be truly impartial due to such relationships.
Conclusion
The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing
evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian
breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks'
DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which
is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers
tens of millions of dollars.
There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the
Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect,
looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the
outset.
This article may be republished/reproduced in part or in full on condition that content
above is unaltered and that the author is credited (or, alternatively, that a link to the full
article is included).
I would love to have a social conservative who was as red-hot on the abuse of corporate
power as she is. Of course there's no way she would ever win the Democratic nomination if she
were a social conservative, nor would she be a US Senator from Massachusetts.
Back in 2011, when she announced for the Massachusetts Senate race on an anti-big business
platform, I wrote in this space that she was "a
Democrat I could vote for." In 2014, observing how far gone she is on cultural leftism, I
lamented that
I wanted so bad for her to be good -- but hey, you can't always get what you want.
Warren's vision of human flourishing is fundamentally a conservative one -- or at least it
would be if the family were still at the center of the conservative conception of politics.
What she argues for is the right of families to thrive, not be the slave of financial
interests, corporate power, housing monopolies, the educational establishment, or any other
external force. She believes, radically, alas, in 2018, that we all have a right to food,
water, housing, education, and medical care. The idea that hard-working Americans should be
able to raise their children in comfort and with a sense of dignity is not, or at least
should not be, the exclusive purview of any one politician or party. The fact that Warren
very frequently does seem to be among the only elected officials in this country who both
affirms these things and has taken the trouble to think carefully about them is a reminder
that the centrism rejected by her and fellow travelers on the left and the right alike is not
only noxious but omnipresent.
Warren's economic vision of human flourishing -- that is, the economic conditions she
believes must be in place for people to flourish -- is fundamentally conservative, in an older,
more organic sense. Old-fashioned Catholic reactionaries understand exactly what she's talking
about, and so would the kind of Christian conservatives who read Wendell Berry and
Crunchy Cons (which, alas, came out about 13 years too early).
Elizabeth Warren said that out loud. Nobody seemed to mind. She'd never say that today.
It's not allowed like so much else that is true and important. She can't talk about the
things that she believed 10 years ago. No modern Democrat can.
If anyone had suggested to me five years ago that the most incisive public critic of
capitalism in the United States would be Tucker Carlson, I would have smiled blandly and
mentioned an imaginary appointment I was late for. But that is exactly what the Fox News host
revealed himself to be last week with an extraordinary monologue about the state of American
conservative thinking. In 15 minutes he denounced the obsession with GDP, the tolerance of
payday lending and other financial pathologies, the fetishization of technology, the
guru-like worship of CEOs, and the indifference to the anxieties and pathologies of the poor
and the vulnerable characteristic of both of our major political parties. It was a
masterpiece of political rhetoric. He ended by calling upon the GOP to re-examine its
attitude towards the free market.
Carlson's monologue is valuable because unlike so many progressive critics of our social
and economic order he has gone beyond the question of the inequitable distribution of wealth
to the more important one about the nature of late capitalist consumer culture and the
inherently degrading effects it has had on our society. The GOP's blinkered inability to see
beyond the specifications of the new iPhone or the latest video game or the infinite variety
of streaming entertainment and Chinese plastic to the spiritual poverty of suicide and drug
abuse is shared with the Democratic Socialists of America, whose vision of authentic human
flourishing seems to be a boutique eco-friendly version of our present consumer society. This
is lipstick on a pig.
And:
It is difficult for me to understand exactly why conservatives have come around to their
present uncritical attitude toward unbridled capitalism. It cannot be for electoral reasons.
Survey after survey reveals that a vast majority of the American people hold views that would
be described as socially conservative and economically moderate to progressive. A
presidential candidate who spoke capably to both of these sets of concerns would be the
greatest political force in three generations.
The answer is that for conservatives the market has become a cult. No book better explains
the appeal of classical liberal economics than The Golden Bough , Sir James Frazer's
history of magic. Frazer identified certain immutable principles that have governed magical
thinking throughout the ages. Among these is the imitative principle according to which a
favorable outcome is obtained by mimicry -- the endless chants of entrepreneurship, vague
nonsense about charter schools, calls for tax cuts for people who don't make enough money to
benefit from them. There also is taboo, the primitive assumption that by not speaking the
name of a thing, the thing itself will be thereby be exorcised. This is one reason that any
attempt to criticize the current consensus is met with whingeing about "socialism." This
catch-all talisman is meant to protect against everything from the Cultural Revolution to
modest restrictions on overdraft fees imposed at the behest of consultants.
"In the real world you are going to have to keep companies from getting too powerful if you
want a free(ish) market."
"So, is it possible that in this everything-can-be-bought-and-sold culture that the
massive corporations made the very rational choice to buy themselves a government?"
Noah makes an excellent point about the differences between public- and private-sector unions
and collective bargaining units. I would personally add that public-sector unions would never
have been necessary if governments were not run under the same philosophy as private-sector
employers: minimize the cost of employees by any means possible. I've always held that
regardless of any definition of necessity, public-sector unionization was and remains a bad
idea.
I also don't know of a better alternative. Sometimes it's the evil you must handle, rather
than the lesser of two evils.
As for the shifts in the socio-economic realities, there's a necessary categorization
necessary when discussing women in the workforce. I offer these broad categories which are
likely arguable. It's a starting point, not a line in the sand.
Families at or below the poverty line: when you control for the benefits of a stay-at-home
parent, these families only ever had one option to get above the poverty line enough to no
longer need public assistance, and that was a second income. The entire motivation for
minimum wage, stable work hours and such was an attempt to mitigate the need for a second
income. It gets politicized and complicated from there, partially for good reasons, but
unless you look at a given family's income limitations before criticizing the woman's working
instead of being at home, you are ignoring the consequences of poverty, which cannot be
mitigated by parenting.
The woman has a higher income potential: it started well before the employment argument,
as in decades previous women were "permitted" to attain higher education in skill and content
areas beyond nursing and teaching. One reaction to that, an analysis conclusion I arrive at
personally, was to routinely discriminate against female employees in both compensation and
promotion. The prevailing "wisdom" (again, my personal POV) was that women are going to get
pregnant anyway, why encourage them away from that? If the only disparity in compensation was
for unpaid leave due to pregnancy and childbirth, you might have avoided a large part of the
feminist revolution.
The broad mix of "women belong in " arguments based on some moral construct (religious or
other): this is where the feminist revolution was inevitable. It comes down to personal
agency and choice. I have an Orthodox Jewish relative whose wife fully, happily and
creatively embraces her religiously mandated role. She's very intelligent, an erudite writer
and speaker, and is as much a pillar of her community as any male in it. We should avoid
extreme examples like Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, but her plight without fatal consequences is
precisely what many women face, and want to escape. Feminism simply states that such women
have the right to make that different choice, and the power the men of their community have
over them is a denial of a human right.
I'm sure other broad categories need to be described. I'll leave this before it gets
beyond being too long.
@kgasmart "I defy Elizabeth Warren, or any other prominent lefty, to publicly restate her
thesis that the entry of women into the workforce has ultimately harmed the family.
Imagine the furious tweetstorms. How dare she suggests it's been anything but wonderful
for women themselves – and thus, for society as a whole. Evidence to the contrary be
damned as 'hateful,' of course."
You don't understand the left. And no, having once been in favor of SSM doesn't mean you
understand the left. I and many others will happily say the following: "Society was not
prepared for the mass entry of women into the workplace. Childcare suffered, work-life
balance suffered, male-female relations suffered."
The problem here is that we follow that up with: "The problem was not women having basic
aspirations to the dignity and relative economic security work offers. The problem was a
government captured by the rich who don't understand what policy for families that can't
afford nannies would look like. The problem was also a social structure which valued families
less than it valued proscribed gender roles. Time to chart a different course."
Trust me, feminists talk all the time about how much harder it is to have a family these
days. We just don't think the problem exists because women selfishly wanted basic economic
security.
Warren is a smart, informed academic with some solid views on economic issues.
On the other hand, she is a terrible politician, and not suited for high executive office.
She lacks gravitas and has no intuition for the optics of what she does, going from gaffe to
gaffe. She'd be chewed up and spit out before she became a contender.
While I think HRC had terrible ideas, I never questioned her capacity to project authority
and credibility, that is, "act presidential". In contrast, Obama's dork factor got him in
trouble on a number of occasions (although his "communist salute" stands out), and Warren is
many times more a dork than Obama.
"I confess I have never understood her appeal. She is the very model of a useless New England
scold, constantly seeking to regulate just about everything. There is almost no problem that
more government, more regulation – usually with no oversight – cannot fix. No,
thank you."
This sounds like someone who has not researched Warren's writings and positions
and just does not like her style (i.e. New England Scold). I think her style, which would
be fine in a man (e.g. who is a scold if not Bernie) will primary her out.
The market is not a Platonic deity, floating in the sky and imposing goodness and
prosperity from on high. It is the creation of our choices, our laws, and our democratic
process. We know, for instance, that pornography has radically altered how young boys
perceive their relationships with women and sex, and that the pornography industry has
acquired a lot of wealth in the process of creating and distributing that content. Just last
month, we learned that a Chinese entity created the first gene-edited baby, using a
technology developed in the United States. Some company, here or there, will eventually
create a lot of prosperity by using this gene-editing technology (called CRISPR) in an
unethical way, quite literally playing God with the most sacred power in the universe -- the
creation of human life. In the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that Apple --
despite self-righteously refusing to cooperate with American security officials -- has
willingly complied with the requirements of the Chinese surveillance state, even as China
builds concentration camps for dissidents and religious minorities. And, as Carlson
mentioned, there are marijuana companies pushing for legalization, though we know from the
Colorado experience that legalization increases use, and from other studies that use is
concentrated among the lower class, causing a host of social problems in the process.
I'm an anti-capitalist so of course I'd agree with JD Vance that there's no good reason to
trust the free market or the owners of capitalist enterprises. Nonetheless, I can't join him
in his specific criticisms of free markets here, and I think this kind of underscores the
difficulties there may be in building bridges between social conservatives and social
liberals. Bridges can certainly be built, for sure, but it will take some work and some
painful compromises, and this is a good example of why: several of the things that JD Vance
points to as examples of free markets gone wrong, are things that I'd say are good
things, not bad ones.
I'm not going to defend pornography (although I'm not particularly going to criticize it
that much either: while I distrust conservative / orthodox Christian sexual ethics, I don't
really care about pornography per se and would be happy if the more violent / weird /
disturbing stuff was banned). Gene editing of humans though strikes me as a clearly good
thing: why wouldn't we want our species to be more peaceful, better looking, more pro-social
and more healthy? And why wouldn't we, at the margins, want to raise people who might
otherwise be born with serious physical or mental handicaps to be 'fixed'? I have a lot of
fears for the future of the world, but the idea that gene editing of our species might become
commonplace is one of the things that makes me hopeful. I also think it's a good thing that
tech companies are cooperating with the Chinese state: not because I like China and its
government, particularly, but because I believe strongly in the sovereign nation state and in
the right of national governments to decide how foreign companies are going to behave on
their territory. I'd much rather a world in which companies in China are constrained by the
Chinese state than one in which they're constrained by no rules at all other than their own
will. Finally, the legalization of marijuana and other soft drugs seems to me to be a good
thing as well.
I'm sure that JD Vance and I can come to lots of agreement over other issues, but I did
want to point out there may be stumbling blocks over social issues as well- precisely because
these issues do matter. They don't matter as much as the economic issues, but they do matter
somewhat.
"We believe that family, local communities, and voluntary associations are the first
guarantors of human dignity, and cultivate mutual care. National institutions and policies
should support, not supplant them."
Quite seriously, the entire party could have been invented by Rod, and I mean that as the
highest endorsement.
"You think creating a power vacuum will prevent big businesses from imposing their will on
the population? Go back and look at your beloved 19th century and tell me that absent
government intervention corporations won't crush peoples lives for a few extra cents."
Absolutely. Absent government help, businesses can't do anything except offer people goods
or services, or offer to purchase their labor or goods or services, on terms the individuals
may or may not find advantageous compared to the status quo. When Big Business ran roughshod
over people in the 19th Century, it was because government helped them (e.g., court cases
letting businesses off the hook for their liabilities because of the supposed need for
"progress").
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We
know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS)
by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those
reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry
Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.
The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer
of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive
steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives,
the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie
Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified
the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This
information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting."
This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.
One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was
CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka
the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.
This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel
and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.
For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey
of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially,
his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone
unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump
and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert),
a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately
2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later
contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee
of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency
put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the
direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from
a registered FBI informant.
By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign
Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:
" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: "
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."
The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research.
This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition
research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets--
Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about
with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against
Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry
Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6
[British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI
for launching the investigation into
George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that
led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's
associates conspired," The Times reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially,
he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client
cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation
of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.
Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET
intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation
mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so
enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what
I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that
he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect
that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?
The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which
can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but,
there again, they may 'compose', which is not.
Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law
enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses
to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should
be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.
Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial
misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution"
to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance.
But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.
I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump
to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently
writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But
it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still
believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing
Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns
though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos'
ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation
that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked
a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved.
No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes
spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before
the country move forward on any front.
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele
via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something
important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured
that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't
been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?
Too often caught between Randian individualism on one hand and big-government collectivism
on the other, America's working-class parents need a champion.
They might well have had one in Elizabeth Warren, whose 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap , co-authored with her daughter Amelia
Warren Tyagi, was unafraid to skewer sacred cows. Long a samizdat favorite among socially
conservative writers, the book recently got a new dose of attention after being spotlighted on
the Right by Fox News's
Tucker Carlson and on the Left by Vox's
Matthew Yglesias .
The book's main takeaway was that two-earner families in the early 2000s seemed to be less,
rather than more, financially stable than one-earner families in the 1970s. Whereas
stay-at-home moms used to provide families with an implicit safety net, able to enter the
workforce if circumstances required, the dramatic rise of the two-earner family had effectively
bid up the cost of everyday life. Rather than the additional income giving families more
breathing room, they argue, "Mom's paycheck has been pumped directly into the basic costs of
keeping the children in the middle class."
Warren and Warren Tyagi report that as recently as the late 1970s, a married mother was
roughly twice as likely to stay at home with her children than work full-time. But by 2000,
those figures had almost reversed. Both parents had been pressed into the workforce to
maintain adequate standards of living for their families -- the "two-income trap" of the book's
title. Advertisement
What caused the trap to be sprung? Cornell University economist Francine Blau has helpfully
drawn a picture of women's changing responsiveness to
labor market wages during the 20th century. In her work with Laurence Kahn, Blau found that
women's wage elasticities -- how responsive their work decisions were to changes in their
potential wages -- used to be far more heavily driven by their husband's earning potential or
lack thereof (what economists call cross-wage elasticity). Over time, Blau and Kahn found,
women's responsiveness to wages -- their own or their husbands -- began to fall, and their
labor force participation choices began to more closely resemble men's, providing empirical
backing to the story Warren and Warren Tyagi tell.
Increasing opportunity and education were certainly one driver of this trend. In 1960, just
5.8
percent of all women over age 25 had a bachelor's degree or higher. Today, 41.7 percent of
mothers aged 25 and over have a college degree. Many of these women entered careers in which
they found fulfillment and meaning, and the opportunity costs, both financially and
professionally, of staying home might have been quite high.
But what about the plurality of middle- and working-class moms who weren't necessarily
looking for a career with a path up the corporate ladder? What was pushing them into full-time
work for pay, despite consistently
telling pollsters they wished they could work less?
The essential point, stressed by Warren and Warren Tyagi, was the extent to which this
massive shift was driven by a desire to provide for one's children. The American Dream has as
many interpretations as it does adherents, but a baseline definition would surely include
giving your children a better life. Many women in America's working and middle classes entered
the labor force purely to provide the best possible option for their families.
Warren's academic work and cheeky refusal to fold under pressure when her nomination as
Obama's consumer ('home ec.'?) finance czar was stymied by the GOP are worthy of respect. I'd
like to see her make a strong run at the dem nomination, but am put off by her recent
tendency to adopt silly far-left talking points and sentiments (her Native DNA, advocating
for reparations, etc.). Nice try, Liz, but I'm still leaning Bernie's direction.
As far as the details of the economic analysis related above, though, I am unqualified to
make any judgment – haven't read the book. But one enormously significant economic
development in the early 70s wasn't mentioned at all, so I assume she and her daughter passed
it over as well. In his first term R. Milhouse Nixon untethered, once & for all, the
value of the dollar from traditional hard currency. The economy has been coming along nicely
ever since, except for one problematic aspect: with a floating currency we are all now living
in an economic environment dominated by the vicissitudes of supplies and demands, are we not?
It took awhile to effect the housing market, but signs of the difference it made began to
emerge fairly quickly, and accelerated sharply when the tides of globalism washed lots of
third world lucre up on our western shores. Now, as clearly implied by both Warren and the
author of this article, young Americans whose parents may not have even been born back then
– the early 70s – are probably permanently priced out of the housing market in
places that used to have only a marginally higher cost of entry – i.e. urban
California, where I have lived and worked for most of my nearly 60 years. In places like this
even a 3-earner income may not suffice! Maybe we should bring back the gold standard, because
it seems to me that as long as unfettered competition coupled to supply/demand and (EZ credit
$) is the underlying dynamic of the American economy we're headed for the New Feudalism. Of
course, nothing could be more conservative than that, right? What say you, TAColytes?
"Funny that policy makers never want to help families by taking a little chunk out of hedge
funds and shareholders and vulture capitalists and sharing it with American workers."
Funny that Warren HAS brought up raising taxes on the rich.
Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate"
media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite
are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss
NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.
Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".
Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free
Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing
to expose the outright lies out there.
These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis
only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.
The US and Great Britain are trying to economically cripple Syria via cutoff of oil
supplies as "The Syrian government is scrambling to deal with its worst fuel crisis since
the war began in 2011, aggravated by U.S. sanctions targeting oil shipments to
Damascus." https://www.apnews.com/a99a22ad2598474ca39a7d8cde560c31
"Under the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Great Britain, no Iranian oil tankers are
allowed to transit the Suez Canal if they are destined for a Syrian port, a Syrian military
source told Al-Masdar News this morning."
Thus the Egyptian government is apparently technically lying about their role in the
sanction when they state "Egypt's government denied Wednesday banning the passage of oil
tankers to Syria through the Suez Canal. Navigation in the canal is going according to
international conventions and treaties that guarantee the right of safe navigation to all
tankers without discrimination."
https://syrianobserver.com/EN/news/49720/cairo-denies-syrian-accusations-on-banning-iranian-oil-tanker-passage.html
Consequently, Iran is shipping Syria oil via tanker trucks.
"1200 Iranian tankers loaded with oil products reached Syria through Iraq in the past
week," Al- Iraqia reports, adding, "The number of Iranian oil tankers are expected to reach
1500 per week, and after providing current Syrian needs, they will be fixed at 500 tankers
per week."
Those that oppose US and Israeli world domination has to buy time and promote economic
collapse within the Empire. Eventually the Sparta like militarism will bankrupt both
countries. The wild card is Venezuela - if they can get their hands on this oil they, and
their allies, can continue to spread chaos for a couple more decades. As it now stands the US
proven oil reserves are between 36-39 billion barrels and the US is consuming that oil at a
rate of about 4.3 billion barrels/year.
The US is also putting pressure on Turkey in hopes of deposing the current government that
supports the GNA in Libya and opposes the gulf states and Saudi Arabia. Turkey needs the
Iranian heavy crude for its Tupras refinery. Substituting heavy crude from Russia is an issue
as Russia has already contracted with Italy and Greece to supply heavy crude to their
refineries. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/04/turkey-iran-usa-ankara-seeks-alternative-sources-iranian-oil.html
B wrote "The Syrian oilfields, which could produce enough to keep the country running, are under
control of the U.S. proxy forces. The U.S. prohibited to sell that oil to the Syrian
government."
It is about the money. It is another spinning plate trying to be war just like Iran,
Venezuela, etc. And when the money music stops (which is only when enough nations stop buying
US Treasuries) the elite are going to say that the poor should pay for those attempts at
war.
I like the comment by frances above about the drunk on the canal boat and China/Russia/et
al are trying to keep us alive, hoping the drunk passes out.....and we all get to watch and
learn how not to run a world where the drunk owns the punch bowl.
The military sucks up 54% of
discretionary federal spending. Pentagon bloat has a huge effect on domestic priorities; the
nearly $1
trillion a year that goes to exploiting, oppressing, torturing, maiming and murdering
foreigners could go to building schools, college scholarships, curing diseases, poetry slams,
whatever. Anything, even tax cuts for the rich, would be better than bombs. But as then GOP
presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said in 2015, "The military is not a social experiment.
The purpose of the military is to
kill people and break things ." If you're like me, you want as little killing and breaking
as possible.
Unfortunately, no major Democratic presidential candidate favors substantial cuts to
Pentagon appropriations.
Current frontrunner Joe Biden (
33% in the polls) doesn't talk
much about defense spending. He reminds us that his son served in Iraq (so he cares about
the military) and that we shouldn't prioritize defense over domestic programs. Vague. Though
specific programs might get trimmed, Lockheed Martin could rest easy under a President
Biden.
"Since he arrived in Congress, [runner-up] Bernie Sanders [19%] has been a fierce
crusader against Pentagon spending , calling for defense cuts that few Democrats have been
willing to support," The Hill reported in 2016. "As late as 2002, he supported a 50 percent cut
for the Pentagon." Bernie is
still a Pentagon critic but he won't commit to a specific amount to cut. He wouldn't
slash and Bern. He'd trim.
Elizabeth Warren (8%) wants "to identify which programs actually benefit American security
in the 21st century, and which programs merely line the pockets of defense contractors -- then
pull out a sharp knife and make some
cuts ."
... ... ...
Kamala Harris (5%) has not weighed
in on military spending. She has received substantial campaign contributions from the
defense industry, though.
The Democrats on Wars for Fun
As senator, Biden voted for the optional wars against
Afghanistan and
Iraq . He
lied about his votes so maybe he felt bad about them. He similarly seems to regret
his ro le in
destroying Libya.
Sanders voted to invade Afghanistan . His
comment at the time reads as hopelessly naïve about the bloodthirsty Bush-Cheney regime:
"The use of force is one tool that we have at our disposal to fight against the horror of
terrorism and mass murder it is something that must be used wisely and with great discretion."
Sanders voted against
invading Iraq , favored regime change in Libya (
albeit nonviolently ) and voted to bomb Syria .
There have been no major new wars since 2013, when Warren joined the Senate so her antiwar
bona fides have not been tested. Like many of her colleagues, she wants an end to the "forever
war" against Afghanistan. She also wants us out of
Syria .
Democrats on NSA Spying Against Americans
... ... ...
Joe Biden, though to the right on other foreign-policy issues, was a critic of NSA spying
for years, going
back at least to 2006. Under Obama, however, he
backtracked . Even worse, Biden
called the president of Ecuador in 2013 to request that he deny asylum to NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden.
Pentagon serves Wall Street and is controlled by CIA which is actually can be viewed as a
Wall Street arm as well.
Notable quotes:
"... This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. ..."
"... General It-Doesn't-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because his tanks and troops could "mop the floor" with the Russians, in a battle that "wouldn't even be close." It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general -- who clearly longs for the Cold War fumes that defined his early career -- overestimating the Russian menace and underestimating Russian military capability . ..."
"... The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don't think strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations -- deploying massive formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they get promoted past their respective levels of competence. ..."
"... If America's generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they'd have spoken out about -- and if necessary resigned en masse over -- mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive . Their oath is to the Constitution, after all, not Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It's all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. ..."
"... Let's start with Mattis. "Mad Dog" Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM. ..."
"... Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, "intellectual" " warrior monk " chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump's altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. ..."
The two-star army general strode across the stage in his rumpled combat fatigues, almost
like George Patton -- all that was missing was the cigar and riding crop. It was 2017 and I was
in the audience, just another mid-level major attending yet another mandatory lecture in the
auditorium of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The general then commanded one of the Army's two true armored divisions and had plenty of
his tanks forward deployed in Eastern Europe, all along the Russian frontier. Frankly, most
CGSC students couldn't stand these talks. Substance always seemed lacking, as each general
reminded us to "take care of soldiers" and "put the mission first," before throwing us a few
nuggets of conventional wisdom on how to be good staff officers should we get assigned to his
vaunted command.
This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it
crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly
defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the
general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. Generals can be like that --
utterly "in-the-box," "can-do" thinkers. They take pride in how little they discuss policy and
politics, even when they command tens of thousands of troops and control entire districts,
provinces, or countries. There is some value in this -- we'd hardly want active
generals meddling in U.S. domestic affairs. But they nonetheless can take the whole "aw shucks"
act a bit too far.
General It-Doesn't-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because
his tanks and troops could "mop the floor" with the Russians, in a battle that "wouldn't even
be close." It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general -- who clearly longs for the Cold
War fumes that defined his early career -- overestimating the Russian menace and
underestimating Russian military
capability . Of course, it was all cloaked in the macho bravado so common among
generals who think that talking like sergeants will win them street cred with the troops.
(That's not their job anymore, mind you.) He said nothing, of course, about the role
of mid- and long-range nuclear weapons that could be the catastrophic consequence of an
unnecessary war with the Russian Bear.
I got to thinking about that talk recently as I reflected in wonder at how the latest
generation of mainstream "liberals" loves to fawn over generals, admirals -- any flag officers,
really -- as alternatives to President Donald Trump. The irony of that alliance should not be
lost on us. It's built on the standard Democratic fear of looking "soft" on terrorism,
communism, or whatever-ism, and their visceral, blinding hatred of Trump. Some of this is
understandable. Conservative Republicans masterfully paint liberals as "weak sisters" on
foreign policy, and Trump's administration is, well, a wild card in world affairs.
The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don't think
strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations -- deploying massive
formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of
tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they
get promoted past their respective levels of competence.
If America's generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers,
they'd have spoken out about -- and if necessary resigned en masse over -- mission sets that
were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive . Their oath is to
the Constitution, after all, not
Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It's all symptomatic of the
disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. More of the same is all they know:
their careers were built on fighting "terror" anywhere it raised its evil head. Some, though no
longer most, still subscribe to the faux intellectualism of General Petraeus and his legion of
Coindinistas
, who never saw a problem that a little regime change, followed by expert counterinsurgency,
couldn't solve. Forget that they've been proven wrong time and again and can count
zero victories since 2002. Generals (remember this!) are never held accountable.
Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than
just tactical "how" advice. They ought to be giving "if" advice -- if we invade Iraq,
it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we'll ultimately destabilize the
country and region, justify al-Qaeda's worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become
immersed in an unwinnable war. Some, like Army Chief General Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM head
John Abizaid, seemed to
know this deep down. Still, Shinseki quietly retired after standing up to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Abizaid rode out his tour to retirement.
Generals also love to tell the American people that victory is
"just around the corner," or that there's a "light at the end of the tunnel." General
William Westmoreland used the very same language when predicting imminent victory in Vietnam.
Two months later, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed the largest uprising of the war,
the famed Tet Offensive.
Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this,
America's longest war. All have commanded within the system and framework of their
predecessors. Sure, they made marginal operational and tactical changes -- some preferred
surges, others advising, others counterterror -- but all failed to achieve anything close to
victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism. None refused to play the same-old game
or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan.
That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.
Exhibit B involves Trump's former cabinet generals -- National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis -- whom adoring and
desperate liberals took as saviors and canonized as the supposed adults
in the room . They were no such thing. The generals' triumvirate consisted ultimately of
hawkish conventional thinkers married to the dogma of American exceptionalism and empire.
Period.
Let's start with Mattis. "Mad Dog" Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian
Gulf that President Barack Obama
removed him from command of CENTCOM.
Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, "intellectual" " warrior
monk " chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump's altogether
reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria.
Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death? Mattis rebuked
Congress and
supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime. No, he fell
on his "courageous" sword over downgrading a losing 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not to
mention he came to Trump's cabinet straight from the board of contracting giant General
Dynamics, where he collected hundreds of thousands of military-industrial complex dollars.
Then there was John Kelley, whom Press Secretary Sarah Sanders implied
was above media questioning because he was once a four-star marine general. And there's
McMaster, another lauded intellectual who once wrote an interesting book and taught history at
West Point. Yet he still drew all
the wrong conclusions in his famous book on Vietnam -- implying that more troops, more
bombing, and a mass invasion of North Vietnam could have won the war. Furthermore, his work
with Mattis on Trump's unhinged
, imperial National Defense Strategy proved that he was, after all, just another devotee of
American hyper-interventionism.
So why reflect on these and other Washington generals? It's simple: liberal veneration for
these, and seemingly all, military flag officers is a losing proposition and a formula for more
intervention, possible war with other great powers, and the creeping militarization of the
entire U.S. government. We know what the generals expect -- and potentially
want -- for America's foreign policy future.
Just look at the curriculum at the various war and staff colleges from Kansas to Rhode
Island. Ten years ago, they were all running war games focused on counterinsurgency in the
Middle East and Africa. Now those same schools are drilling for future "contingencies" in the
Baltic, Caucasus, and in the South China Sea. Older officers have always lamented the end of
the Cold War "good old days," when men were men and the battlefield was "simple." A return to a
state of near-war with Russia and China is the last thing real progressives should be
pushing for in 2020.
The bottom line is this: the faint hint that mainstream libs would relish a Six Days in May– style military coup is more than a little disturbing, no matter what you think
of Trump. Democrats must know the damage such a move would do to our ostensible republic. I
say: be a patriot. Insist on civilian control of foreign affairs. Even if that
means two more years of The Donald.
Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to Truthdig . His
work has also appeared in Harper's, the Los Angeles Times , The Nation , Tom Dispatch , and The
Hill . He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later taught history at his alma
mater, West Point. He is the author of Ghostriders of
Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet .
[ Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of
the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
As soon as nations learn to avoid dollar transactions that will dramatically weaken the USA
neoliberal empire. Bulling using technology transfer prohibitions is not effective as Germany and
Japan are now fully recovered from WWII destruction and post immediate threat to the USA
technological hegemony.
We the people needn't worry about our vote for president in as much as we the people
should investigate the people who surround our president's. Trump has been overtaken from his
campaigns foreign policy rhetoric by the same cabal of those who have captured the other
previous presidents from they're living up to their promises, whether by choice or by
compromise. I wish that a presidential campaign requirement were that each presidential
candidate would divulge the cabinet choices they would make as secretary's of our national
agencies. I wish for a lot of things that never will happen but still it would be nice to
know such substantial appointments as opposed to knowing about their personality disorders
wish are always disclosed for further review and constant discussion.
I've said it before that the US is going to sanction itself into obscurity. These
sanctioned nations are many and still growing if you include our allies. It's all sticks and
no carrots. When it all collapses the collapse may be blamed on US arrogance and profit.
"... US global power is built on several significant facts. These include: the US victory in World War II, its subsequent advanced economy and dominant military position throughout five continents. ..."
"... The US advanced its dominance through a series of alliances in Europe via NATO; Asia via its hegemonic relationship with Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Taiwan as well as Australia and New Zealand in Oceana; Latin America via traditional client regimes; Africa via neo-colonial rulers imposed following independence. ..."
"... The most significant advance of US global power took place with the demise and disintegration of the USSR, the client states in Eastern Europe, as well as the transformation of China and Indo-China to capitalism during the 1980's. ..."
US global power in the Trump period reflects the continuities and changes which are
unfolding rapidly and deeply throughout the world and which are affecting the position of
Washington.
Assessing the dynamics of US global power is a complex problem which requires examining
multiple dimensions.
We will proceed by:
Conceptualizing the principles which dictate empire building,
specifically the power bases and the dynamic changes in relations and structures which shape
the present and future position of the US. Identifying the spheres of influence and power and
their growth and decline. Examining the regions of conflict and contestation. The major and
secondary rivalries. The stable and shifting relations between existing and rising power
centers. The internal dynamics shaping the relative strength of competing centers of global
power. The instability of the regimes and states seeking to retain and expand global power.
Conceptualization of Global Power
US global power is built on several significant facts. These include: the US victory in
World War II, its subsequent advanced economy and dominant military position throughout five
continents.
The US advanced its dominance through a series of alliances in Europe via NATO; Asia via its
hegemonic relationship with Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Taiwan as well as Australia and
New Zealand in Oceana; Latin America via traditional client regimes; Africa via neo-colonial
rulers imposed following independence.
US global power was built around encircling the USSR and China, undermining their economies
and defeating their allies militarily via regional wars.
Post WWII global economic and military superiority created subordinated allies and
established US global power, but it created the bases for gradual shifts in relations of
dominance.
US global power was formidable but subject to economic and military changes over time and in
space.
US Spheres of Power: Then and Now
US global power exploited opportunities but also suffered military setbacks early on,
particularly in Korea, Indo-China and Cuba. The US spheres of power were clearly in place in
Western Europe and Latin America but was contested in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The most significant advance of US global power took place with the demise and
disintegration of the USSR, the client states in Eastern Europe, as well as the transformation
of China and Indo-China to capitalism during the 1980's.
US ideologues declared the coming of a unipolar empire free of restraints and challenges to
its global and regional power. The US turned to conquering peripheral adversaries. Washington
destroyed Yugoslavia and then Iraq – fragmenting them into mini-states. Wall Street
promoted a multitude of multi-national corporations to invade China and Indo-China who reaped
billions of profits exploiting cheap labor.
The believers of the enduring rule of US global power envisioned a century of US imperial
rule.
In reality this was a short-sighted vision of a brief interlude.
The End of Unipolarity: New Rivalries and Global and Regional Centers of Power: An
Overview
US global power led Washington into 'overreach', in several crucial areas: it launched a
series of costly prolonged wars, specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had three negative
consequences: the destruction of the Iraq armed forces and economy led to the rise of the
Islamic State which overtook most of the country; the occupation in Afghanistan which led to
the emergence of the Taliban and an ongoing twenty year war which cost hundreds of billions of
dollars and several thousand wounded and dead US soldiers; as a result the majority of the US
public turned negative toward wars and empire building
The US pillage and dominance of Russia ended, when President Putin replaced Yeltsin's vassal
state. Russia rebuilt its industry, science, technology and military power. Russia's population
recovered its living standards.
With Russian independence and advanced military weaponry, the US lost its unipolar military
power. Nevertheless, Washington financed a coup which virtually annexed two thirds of the
Ukraine. The US incorporated the fragmented Yugoslavian 'statelets' into NATO. Russia countered
by annexing the Crimea and secured a mini-state adjacent Georgia.
China converted the economic invasion of US multi-national corporations into learning
experiences for building its national economy and export platforms which contributed which led
to its becoming an economic competitor and rival to the US.
US global empire building suffered important setbacks in Latin America resulting
from the the so-called Washington Consensus. The imposition of neo-liberal policies
privatized and plundered their economies, impoverished the working and middle class, and
provoked a series of popular uprising and the rise of radical social movements and center-left
governments.
The US empire lost spheres of influence in some regions (China, Russia, Latin America,
Middle East) though it retained influence among elites in contested regions and even launched
new imperial wars in contested terrain. Most notably the US attacked independent regimes in
Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Sudan via armed proxies.
The change from a unipolar to a multi polar world and the gradual emergence of regional
rivals led US global strategists to rethink their strategy. The Trump regime's aggressive
policies set the stage for political division within the regime and among allies.
The Obama – Trump Convergence and Differences on Empire Building
By the second decade of the 21 st century several new global power alignments
emerged: China had become the main economic competitor for world power and Russia was the major
military challenger to US military supremacy at the regional level. The US replaced the former
European colonial empire in Africa. Washington's sphere of influence extended especially in
North and Sub Sahara Africa: Kenya, Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia. Trump gained leverage in the
Middle East namely in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Jordan.
Israel retained its peculiar role, converting the US as its sphere of influence.
But the US faced regional rivals for sphere of influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and
Algeria.
In South Asia US faced competition for spheres of influence from China, India, Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
In Latin America sharp and abrupt shifts in spheres of influence were the norm. US influence
declined between 2000 – 2015 and recovered from 2015 to the present.
Imperial Power Alignments Under President Trump
President Trump faced complex global, regional and local political and economic
challenges.
Trump followed and deepened many of the policies launched by the Obama- Hillary Clinton
policies with regard to other countries and regions . However Trump also radicalized and/or
reversed policies of his predecessors. He combined flattery and aggression at the same
time.
At no time did Trump recognize the limits of US global power. Like the previous three
presidents he persisted in the belief that the transitory period of a unipolar global empire
could be re-imposed.
Toward Russia, a global competitor, Trump adopted a policy of 'rollback'. Trump imposed
economic sanctions, with the strategic 'hope' that by impoverishing Russia, degrading its
financial and industrial sectors that he could force a regime change which would convert Moscow
into a vassal state.
At the beginning of his Presidential campaign Trump flirted with the notion of a business
accommodation with Putin. However, Trump's ultra-belligerent appointments and domestic
opposition soon turned him toward a highly militarized strategy, rejecting military –
including nuclear – agreements, in favor of military escalation.
Toward China, Trump faced a dynamic and advancing technological competitor. Trump resorted
to a 'trade war' that went far beyond 'trade' to encompass a war against Beijing's economic
structure and social relations. The Trump regime-imposed sanctions and threatened a total
boycott of Chinese exports.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump and his economic team demanded China privatize and denationalize its entire state
backed industry. They demanded the power to unilaterally decide when violations of US rules
occurred and to be able to re-introduce sanctions without consultations. Trump demanded all
Chinese technological agreements, economic sectors and innovations were subject and open to US
business interests. In other words, Trump demanded the end of Chinese sovereignty and the
reversal of the structural base for its global power. The US was not interested in mere 'trade'
– it wanted a return to imperial rule over a colonized China.
The Trump regime rejected negotiations and recognition of a shared power relation: it viewed
its global rivals as potential clients.
Inevitably the Trump regime's strategy would never reach any enduring agreements on any
substantial issues under negotiations. China has a successful strategy for global power built
on a 6 trillion-dollar world-wide Road and Belt (R and B) development policy, which links 60
countries and several regions. R and B is building seaports, rail and air systems linking
industries financed by development banks.
In contrast, the US banks exploits industry, speculates and operates within closed financial
circuits. The US spends trillions on wars, coups, sanctions and other parasitical activities
which have nothing to do with economic competitiveness.
The Trump regime's 'allies' in the Middle East namely Saudi Arabia and Israel, are parasitic
allies who buy protection and provoke costly wars.
Europe complains about China's increase in industrial exports and overlook imports of
consumer goods. Yet the EU plans to resist Trump's sanctions which lead to a blind alley of
stagnation!
Conclusion
The most recent period of the peak of US global power, the decade between 1989-99 contained
the seeds of its decline and the current resort to trade wars, sanctions and nuclear
threats.
The structure of US global power changed over the past seven decades. The US global empire
building began with the US command over the rebuilding of Western European economies and the
displacement of England, France, Portugal and Belgium from Asia and Africa.
The Empire spread and penetrated South America via US multi-national corporations. However,
US empire building was not a linear process as witness its unsuccessful confrontation with
national liberation movements in Korea, Indo China, Southern Africa (Angola, Congo, etc.) and
the Caribbean (Cuba). By the early 1960's the US had displaced its European rivals and
successfully incorporated them as subordinate allies.
Washington's main rivals for spheres of influence was Communist China and the USSR with
their allies among client state and overseas revolutionaries.
The US empire builders' successes led to the transformation of their Communist and
nationalist rivals into emergent capitalist competitors.
In a word US dominance led to the construction of capitalist rivals, especially China and
Russia.
Subsequently, following US military defeats and prolonged wars, regional powers proliferated
in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Regional blocs competed with US
clients for power.
The diversification of power centers led to new and costly wars. Washington lost exclusive
control of markets, resources and alliances. Competition reduced the spheres of US power.
In the face of these constraints on US global power the Trump regime envisioned a strategy
to recover US dominance – ignoring the limited capacity and structure of US political ,
economic and class relations.
China absorbed US technology and went on to create new advances without following each
previous stage.
Russia's recovered from its losses and sanctions and secured alternative trade relations to
counter the new challenges to the US global empire. Trump's regime launched a 'permanent trade
war' without stable allies. Moreover, he failed to undermine China's global infrastructure
network; Europe demanded and secured autonomy to enter into trade deals with China, Iran and
Russia.
Trump has pressured many regional powers who have ignored his threats.
The US still remains a global power. But unlike the past, the US lacks the industrial base
to 'make America strong'. Industry is subordinated to finance; technological innovations are
not linked to skilled labor to increase productivity.
Trump relies on sanctions and they have failed to undermine regional influentials. Sanctions
may temporarily reduce access to US markets' but we have observed that new trade partners take
their place.
Trump has gained client regimes in Latin America, but the gains are precarious and subject
to reversal.
Under the Trump regime, big business and bankers have increased prices in the stock market
and even the rate of growth of the GDP, but he confronts severe domestic political instability,
and high levels of turmoil among the branches of government. In pursuit of loyalty over
competence, Trump's appointments have led to the ascendancy of cabinet officials who seek to
wield unilateral power which the US no longer possesses.
Elliot Abrams can massacre a quarter-million Central Americans with impunity, but he has
failed to impose US power over Venezuela and Cuba. Pompeo can threaten North Kore, Iran and
China but these countries fortify alliances with US rivals and competitors. Bolton can advance
the interests of Israel but their conversations take place in a telephone booth – it
lacks resonance with any major powers.
Trump has won a presidential election, he has secured concessions from some countries but he
has alienated regional and diplomatic allies. Trump claims he is making America strong, but he
has undermined lucrative strategic multi-lateral trade agreements.
US 'Global Power' does not prosper with bully-tactics. Projections of power alone, have
failed – they require recognition of realistic economic limitations and the losses from
regional wars.
This is a fine synopsis but it leaves out the most fundamental of issues.
The American People don't want to be an Empire, .never asked to be an Empire and despise,
to the core, our ruling elites who defrauded us into becoming one.
We do live in an Empire now, to our chagrin, but it is (in truth) a malevolent empire .an
Empire of Fraud, Belligerence .. and Heinous
F#cking Debt .
Show me one American, anywhere, who is happy about it .
Our ruling elites have "lied" us into multiple wars of "never ending" criminal aggression
..wars which have all but exterminated the solvency of the nation and reaped untold carnage
and misery on tens of millions of people who never attacked us (and never intended to).
This "War Fraud", foisted upon us , has been a catastrophic disaster for our country and
the world.
A "mind -bending, catastrophic, . disaster".
Every single belligerent "oligarch" , "plutocrat" and "establishment elite", who conspired
to defraud us into these "illegal wars", should be rounded up and thrown in federal prison
Every single penny of their assets should be seized to pay down the cost of wars they lied us
into.
This is , hands down, the most meaningful step we could take, as a nation.
Not only would it change the direction of the world, almost overnight, but it would lay
the groundwork for the United States to rebuild itself.
Once we make "Accountability for War Fraud" our nations highest priority, we can repair
and rebuild.
If we don't, we won't and(tragically) might never be able to.
Sanctions are the foreign policy equivalent of obstruction of justice traps. Sanctions
are initiated in the hope the sanctioned country then commits some actionable trepidation, a
Casus belli. They say the first casualty of war is the truth but that casualty comes way
before war starts and continues long after war ends.
"... Trump *escalated* US-Iran and US-Venezuela conflicts and intensified the sabre rattling towards both countries, according to all analysts. For the first time a POTUS openly said direct US invasion to Venezuela "is on the table" and his Adelson bought appointment for USNSA Bolton publicly showed in a notebook the writing "5000 troops to Colombia" openly suggesting a direct invasion was imminent. For the first time the White House asked the Pentagon to draw up options for military strikes against Iran. ..."
"... Trump's administration declared a whole branch of the Iran armed forces (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. This is an escalation and according to most analysts, considered an act of war. ..."
"... Trump administration heavily increased sanctions to Iran, Russia and Venezuela and in the latter case even instigated a failed uprising and coup d'etat, going as far as to declare a virtual political Venezuelan nobody the "official" president of the country, which is in itself unbelievable and has no historic precedent. Another act of war actually. ..."
"... Trump administration also escalated the tensions with China, ordered the arrest and de facto kidnapping of Chinese corporate executives and openly used the US legal apparatus to attack and hinder a foreign corporation. ..."
"... Trump has been, objectively, the most neocon Israel-firster POTUS in US history. ..."
"... Friendly reminder that voting for Republicans and expecting US Jewish lobby/Corporate America promoted policies such as open borders and US imperialist interventions to stop is moronic beyond belief. Republicans are the most pro corporate pro US Jewish lobby of the two parties by far. At least there is talk and critique about how the Israel Lobby owns the USG in the Dem party. Nothing of the sort going on in the GOP. ..."
The U.S. missile strike on Shayrat Airbase on 7 April 2017 was the first time the U.S.
became a deliberate, direct combatant against the Syrian government and marked the start of
a series of deliberate direct military actions by U.S. forces against the Syrian government
and its allies in May -- June 2017 and February 2018.
Trump *escalated* the war from covert support to insurgents to direct intervention and
official *invasion* in Syria. This is the equivalent of going from financing and supporting a
faction in a so called proxy war in say Vietnam to leading the US to go full Iraq WMD and
become a warring and invading faction in the conflict. Again, this is an escalation.
The number of boots on the ground vs Obama's is data you just took out of your bottom.
Sources for your cheap PR shilling? You don't have any because this statement of yours is a
blatant lie.
Trump *escalated* US-Iran and US-Venezuela conflicts and intensified the sabre rattling
towards both countries, according to all analysts. For the first time a POTUS openly said
direct US invasion to Venezuela "is on the table" and his Adelson bought appointment for
USNSA Bolton publicly showed in a notebook the writing "5000 troops to Colombia" openly
suggesting a direct invasion was imminent. For the first time the White House asked the
Pentagon to draw up options for military strikes against Iran.
Trump's administration declared a whole branch of the Iran armed forces (IRGC) as a
terrorist organisation. This is an escalation and according to most analysts, considered an
act of war.
Trump's administration ended the Iran deal without any objective reasons, ie Obama's
effort to deescalate the Israel firsters driven Iran-US conflict
Trump administration heavily increased sanctions to Iran, Russia and Venezuela and in
the latter case even instigated a failed uprising and coup d'etat, going as far as to declare
a virtual political Venezuelan nobody the "official" president of the country, which is in
itself unbelievable and has no historic precedent. Another act of war actually.
Trump administration declared Golan Heights part of Israel brought US embassy to
Jerusalem, increasing the tensions and animosity towards the US in the ME.
Trump administration will declare Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, increasing
the animosity from Arab countries in the ME to unbelievable levels. This includes non Arab
country Turkey also, a traditional ally until neocon Trump took power.
Trump administration also escalated the tensions with China, ordered the arrest and de
facto kidnapping of Chinese corporate executives and openly used the US legal apparatus to
attack and hinder a foreign corporation.
Trump has been, objectively, the most neocon Israel-firster POTUS in US history.
Friendly reminder that voting for Republicans and expecting US Jewish lobby/Corporate
America promoted policies such as open borders and US imperialist interventions to stop is
moronic beyond belief. Republicans are the most pro corporate pro US Jewish lobby of the two
parties by far. At least there is talk and critique about how the Israel Lobby owns the USG
in the Dem party. Nothing of the sort going on in the GOP.
Immigration restrictionism is a traditional pro working class, leftist policy.
Non intervention and "pacifist" policies the same. How many GOP supporters were against
the Vietnam and Iraq war? Not many yeah.
Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles on Middle Eastern countries in a comparable
period of time than any modern U.S. President. Presidents Bush, Obama and now [2017] Trump
have dropped nearly 200,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia. Trump's rate of bombing eclipses both Bush and Obama; and Trump is on a
pace to drop over 100,000 [180,000 to be precise] bombs and missiles on Middle Eastern
countries during his first term of office -- which would equal the number of bombs and
missiles dropped by Obama during his entire eight-year presidency.
Here's more perspective:
The United States Government, under the Trump administration, reportedly drops a bomb
every 12 minutes, which means that 121 bombs are dropped in a day, and 44,096 bombs per year.
The Pentagon's data show that during George W. Bush's eight years he averaged 24 bombs
dropped per day, that is, 8,750 per year. Over the course of Obama's time in office, his
military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year. This shows that even though American
presidents are all war criminals, Trump is the most vicious of them all.
Yes, Trump is dropping almost FOUR TIMES MORE BOMBS than Barack Obama and over FIVE TIMES
MORE BOMBS than G.W. Bush -- which included military invasions of two countries.
We also know that Trump expanded America's wars in Afghanistan and Syria (and, no, he is
NOT bringing U.S. troops home from Syria) and is ramping up America's war machine against
Venezuela, Iran, China and Russia. And this does not even take into account the way Trump has
given Benjamin Netanyahu's raunchy racist regime the green light to expand its wars against
the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria and Iran or the U.S./Israeli proxy war (with Saudi Arabia
taking the lead) in Yemen.
Then there is Somalia:
In the age of Donald Trump, wasn't that [the Battle of Mogadishu -- Black Hawk Down] a
million presidencies ago? Honestly, can you even tell me anymore what in the world it was all
about? I couldn't have, not without looking it up again. A warlord, starvation, U.S.
intervention, 18 dead American soldiers (and hundreds of dead Somalis, but that hardly
mattered) in a country that was shattering. President Clinton did, however, pull out those
troops and end the disastrous mission -- and that was that, right? I mean, lessons learned.
Somalia? Africa? What in the world did it all have to do with us? So Washington washed its
hands of the whole thing.
And now, on a planet of outrageous tweets and murderously angry white men, you probably
didn't even notice, but more than two years into the era of Donald Trump, a quarter-century
after that incident, American airstrikes in yep, Somalia, are precipitously on the rise.
Last year's 47 strikes, aimed at the leaders and fighters of al-Shabaab, an Islamist
terror outfit, more than tripled the ones carried out by the Obama administration in 2016
(themselves a modest increase from previous years). And in 2019, they're already on pace to
double again, while Somali civilians -- not that anyone (other than Somali civilians) notices
or cares -- are dying in significant and rising numbers.
And with 500 troops back on the ground there and Pentagon estimates that they will remain
for at least another seven years, the U.S. military is increasingly Somalia-bound, Congress
hasn't uttered a peep on the subject, and few in this country are paying the slightest
attention.
So consider this a simple fact of the never-ending Global War on Terror (as it was once
called): the U.S. military just can't get enough of Somalia. And if that isn't off the
charts, what is? Maybe it's even worth a future book (with a very small print run) called not
Black Hawk Down II but U.S. Down Forever and a Day.
And now that I've started on the subject (if you still happen to be reading), when it
comes to the U.S. military, it's not faintly just Somalia. It's all of Africa.
After all, this country's military uniquely has a continent-wide Africa Command (aka
AFRICOM), founded in 2007. As Nick Turse has often written for TomDispatch, that command now
has its troops, thousands of them, its planes, and other equipment spread across the
continent, north to south, east to west -- air bases, drone bases, garrisons, outposts,
staging areas, you name it. Meanwhile, AFRICOM's outgoing commanding general, Thomas
Waldhauser, only recently told Congress why it's bound to be a forever outfit -- because,
shades of the Cold War, the Ruskies are coming! ("Russia is also a growing challenge and has
taken a more militaristic approach in Africa.")
And honestly, 600-odd words in, this wasn't meant to be a piece about either Somalia or
Africa. It was meant to be about those U.S. wars being off the charts, about how the Pentagon
now feeds eternally at the terror trough, al-Shabaab being only a tiny part of the slop it
regularly digests.
And, while America's wars are way up, according to Gallup, church attendance in America is
way down:
As Christian and Jewish Americans prepare to celebrate Easter and Passover, respectively,
Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or
mosque at an all-time low, averaging 50% in 2018.
U.S. church membership was 70% or higher from 1937 through 1976, falling modestly to an
average of 68% in the 1970s through the 1990s. The past 20 years have seen an acceleration in
the drop-off, with a 20-percentage-point decline since 1999 and more than half of that change
occurring since the start of the current decade.
Most interesting is this Gallup observation:
Although the United States is one of the more religious countries, particularly among
Western nations, it is far less religious than it used to be. Barely three-quarters of
Americans now identify with a religion and only about half claim membership in a church,
synagogue or mosque.
The rate of U.S. church membership has declined sharply in the past two decades after
being relatively stable in the six decades before that. A sharp increase in the proportion of
the population with no religious affiliation, a decline in church membership among those who
do have a religious preference, and low levels of church membership among millennials are all
contributing to the accelerating trend.
Obviously, America's Jewish and Muslim populations pale compared to its Christian
population. The vast decline of attendance to religious services, therefore, primarily means
church attendance. Notice, also, that this steep decline commenced at the beginning of this
century (2000) -- when G.W. Bush became President of the United States.
I tried to warn readers -- and listeners to my nationwide radio talk show -- that due to
his insatiable war fever, G.W. Bush was going to forever warp the perception in people's
minds of Christianity. And, sadly, I was absolutely right. After eight years of the
warmongering G.W. Bush in the White House, millions of Americans came to associate
Christianity with wars of aggression. As a result, the exodus out of America's churches began
in earnest.
Enter Donald Trump.
As noted above, Trump has expanded Bush's war fever exponentially. But Trump has done more
than that: He has aggressively put the United States smack dab in the middle of Israel's
wars. It could even be argued that Donald Trump has turned the U.S. military into a proxy
army for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Don't get me wrong: I am very cognizant of the fact that G.W. Bush's "war on terror" was
nothing more than a proxy war for Israel. But the Israeli connection was covert and
completely covered up. Not anymore. Donald Trump is unabashedly and explicitly partnering the
mission of the U.S. military with that of the IDF. No wonder Benjamin Netanyahu promises to
name a community in the Israel-seized, Israel-occupied Golan Heights after Donald Trump.
(Trumplinka would fit Netanyahu's concentration-style occupation nicely.)
So, not only are millions of Americans now associating Christianity with G.W. Bush's wars
of aggression, they are associating Christianity with Donald Trump's wars of aggression for
the racist apartheid State of Israel. The result: the steepest decline in church attendance
and church affiliation in U.S. history.
The longer evangelical Christians continue to support Donald Trump's radical pro-Israel,
pro-war agenda, the deeper America will plunge into an anti-Christian country.
The good news is that all over America, people are waking up to the Israel deception.
Support for the erroneous doctrine of dispensational eschatology is in a giant free fall; the
myth of Zionist Israel being a resurrected Old Testament Israel is being repeatedly exposed;
the attempts by Israel's toadies to characterize people whose eyes are open to the truth of
Zionism as being "anti-Semitic" is losing more and more credibility by the day; and more and
more people are becoming aware of the utter wickedness of the Zionist government in Israel.
Plus, more and more people are beginning to understand the plight of the persecuted people
(including Christian people) in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine.
Ron, maybe your shipmates on the USS LIBERTY didn't die in vain after all.
From an historical perspective, overextended wars are the downfall of any empire; from a
financial perspective, warfarism is the precursor to an economically depressed middle class;
and from a Scriptural/spiritual perspective, God cannot and will not bless a warmongering
nation.
Let's be clear: God is not building a "Greater Israel." God is not building a third Jewish
temple. God is not speaking through phony prophets who are attributing some sort of divine
calling to Trump's pro-Israel warmongering. God is not blessing America because we are
blessing Zionist Israel. Just the opposite: The more America aligns itself with Israel's
belligerence, bullying and bombing of innocent people, the more God will deliver us over to
becoming an antichrist country. After all, one cannot idolize and partner with antichrists
without becoming one himself.
Burning down the house. Driving like a madman on the road to nowhere has put the nation on a
path to its own demise. Our foreign policy is a disaster that does nothing to promote
democracy anywhere in the world. Our military has provided nothing but instability in the
world since the end of world war 2. Ask yourself, why are we involved in so many useless wars
that don't make the world a better place?
Don't you feel like we are being used by war hawks who see every skirmish as a threat to our
national security? Why can't we cut out all the military BS and just trade with with nations
that want to trade, and ignore those who want to kill each other. Let them figure it out on
their own. Social Capitalism is the only policy we should be supporting.
"All statements of Trump do not count. All Trump statements are results from stress of
torture by Democrats, and deep state."
When this president stated during the campaign,
that christians don't have to forgive their enemies, I rolled my eyes stated he wrong, and
understood well he doesn't know what christianity means and supported him anyway
that he supported same sex marriage, I rolled my eyes, rebuffed the the silliness of his
comments and understood, he is not a conservative and beyond that he doesn't know what
christianity means
when it was uncovered that he had in fact had relations outside of marriage, I rolled my
eyes, and understood that alone could be a disqualifying factor in light of the competition
and supported him anyway
when some of the most respected departments of government leaders said he colluded with
Russians, based on the evidence, I said "poppycock" and supported him anyway
when media swirled with tales of Russian bath houses and carousings abounded, I thought
nonsense and supported hum anyway
when the rumors of underage girls and same sex parties and orgies seped into the main, I
rolled my eyes and supported him anyway . . .
when he spouted off about Charlottesville prematurely, I supported him anyway . . .
when became clear he actually advocated torture, I choked, spat and supported him anyway,
afterall he's not schooled in international relations and the consequences for our service
personnel, much less apparently the basics of tortures effectiveness, especially in large
scale strategies such as the US is engaged in
when it came to light he was completely ignorant of how our criminal justice system gets
it wrong as exampled by the Cen 5 case, I supported him anyway . . .
I supported him in spite of his comments about the poor and people like me who supported
him
There's a long list of tolerance is support of this president based on his advocacy
regarding turning the attention to the US welfare . . .
And when he actually agreed that the Russians had sabotaged the US elections and even
engaged in murder in the states of our European allies -- I knew, that in all liklihood the
turn inward was dead.
Here' a man who beat all the odds because of stalwart support of people like me, who
repeatedly bit the sides of our cheeks in the understanding that the returns would exceed the
price only to discover that the man who beat the odds doesn't seem to have a spine to stand
on ideologically which were the foundations of my advocacy: national security, less reckless
spending, holding business and financial organizations accountable for misbehavior, investing
in the US citizen, restructuring our trade deals to benefit the US, not merely shooting up
tarrifs that would in turn be priced to the citizens the supposed tarrifs were intended to
protect, tax cuts that actually gave middle americans less, no evidence of a draw down in our
careless ME behaviors, i even gave him some room to deal with israel as perhaps a new way
forward -- it's a new way alright – no pretense of acting as honest brokers –
that's new, Immigration is worse and by worse he might as well be serving tea and crumpets at
the border welcoming illegals . . .
If the man you elected to turn the corner actually becomes the vehicle for of what you
elected him to reject and change, eventually one has to acknowledge that fact. he beat the
deep state, he just either had not the courage, the integrity, or the ability, perhaps all
three to withstand the victory and do the work. Of course he had opposition and not much of
it very fair and nearly all of it damaging to the country. But he had support to stand
against it -- he chose an easier path.
And while I support him still, I have no intention of pretending that he is fulfilling the
mandate for which he was elected. I would be lying to myself and doing a disservice to
him.
I have not changed, I knew he was a situational leader, I knew what that meant, but I
voted for a particular agenda, he left the reservation on his own accord and the "deep
state", the establishment", the democrats, the liberals, the libertarians, can only be held
to blame for so much --
But several weeks ago, on top of a complete failure to ensure US order security, the armed
forces paid homage to Mexicans on US territory by relinquishing their weapons and
surrendering -- and given the tenure thus far -- - it devastatingly fitting that this
occurred under this admin.
And in the midst of all this, he is pandering to those engaged in same sex behavior --
– deep state my eye . . .
the path of least resistance. I cling to the belief that having voting for any of the
other candidates -- matters would have been far worse.
I make no apologies for being a conservative and Christian and holding a loyalty to the
US.
I reject your whine, it had legs and even some salience still, but at this stage, very
little.
Now he is bed with Sen. Rubio, Sen. Cruz and others on mucking around in SA -- I can only
consider your comments as an attempt at humor.
"... As much as Trump has proven to be a disaster with his appointments of Bolton/Pompeo/E Abrams, things could still be worse. We could have wound up with Little Marco, the John McCain of his generation. All praise to Tucker for having the guts to go against the grain. ..."
"... The answer here is simple. When the President of of the US stated that he believed Russia under the instructions of Pres. Putin attempted to sabotage the democratic process, and from the mouths many of our leadership -- was successful he made a major power on the world stage a targeted enemy of the US. When that same president accused Pres. Putin of plotting the same in Europe and ordered the murders inside those sovereign states -- ..."
"... He essentially stated that our global strategic interests include challenging the Russian influence anywhere and everywhere on the planet as they are active enemies of the US and our European allies. What ever democratic global strategic ambitions previous to the least election were stifled until that moment. ..."
"... Sanctions and blockades are acts of war. Try doing it to Washington or one of its vassals, and watch the guns come out. ..."
"... Historically, sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are a prelude to it. Sanctions are how Uncle Scam generally softens up foreign countries in preparation for an invasion or some sort of 'régime-change' operation. ..."
"... All of this is smoke in mirrors. The real story is that Washington is headed for default on it's 22 trillion dollar debt and the Beltway Elites are losing it. They are desperate to start a conflict anywhere, but especially with an oil rich nation like Venezuela or Iran install their own puppets and keep this petro-dollar scam running a little while longer. ..."
"... Syria, Iraq and Libya were not destroyed for oil. Oil provided cover for the real reason. In fact, oil companies opposed war for oil. It doesn't benefit the US or those companies. Those three countries were and are Israel's primary enemies and neighbors and that is why they were destroyed. Only if you stick your head in the sand and ignore the enormous power of Israel and their Jewish supporters which is constantly on full display constantly can someone not see that. ..."
"... Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. I'm pretty sure there are still lots of guns around. They're not using rocks to kill one another. The U.S. military richly deserves to get itself trapped in a Gaza type situation of house to house fighting in the favellas above Caracas. ..."
"... Trump is a Trojan horse under zionist control who had 5 draft deferments but now is the zionists war lord sending Americans to fight and die in the mideast for Israel just like obama and bush jr. , same bullshit different puppet! ..."
"... America is Oceania , war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and I would add to what Orwell said, war in the zio/US is perpetual for our zionist overlords. ..."
"... Imperialists always see themselves as spreading good things to people who will benefit from them. And imperialists necessarily always dilute their own culture. ..."
"... If the imperialist culture is already rootless cosmopolitan, it will see no downside to the above. If the Elites of a culture have become cosmopolitans divorced from any meaningful contact with their own people (i.e. those of their own blood and history), then they will lead their people into ever more cultural pollution and perversion. ..."
"... Remember. The choice was between Trump and Clinton. Not Trump and Jesus. ..."
"... The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed at articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime change wars. ..."
"... I'm not sure what "Alt-Right" or "2.0 movement" really means in the current shills-vs-people wars but all the best and the brightest in our ranks are clearly against the globalists. ..."
Venezuela illustrates why a 3.0 movement is necessary.
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed at
articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and
international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime change
wars.
The Trump administration's interventions in Syria and Venezuela are victimizing mainly poor
brown people in Third World countries. And yet, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is extremely
animated and stirred up in a rage at the neocons who are currently running Blompf's foreign
policy. Similarly, it has cheered on the peace talks between North Korea and South Korea.
Isn't it the supreme irony that the "racists" in American politics are the real
humanitarians
while the so-called "humanitarians" like Sen. Marco Rubio and Bill Kristol are less adverse
to bloodshed and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die than the
"racists"?
It is ironic. There is also the issue of economic-based US interventionism, particularly in
the oil-gifted nations mentioned. It's their oil. Since the US economy is oil-dependent --
and since fracking is a short-lived "miracle" of unprofitable companies that have already
extracted the easy pickings -- it is the role of US leaders to make sure that we can buy oil
from nations like Venezuela, keeping relations as good as possible for those means. But US
leaders have no business telling them who should rule their country, much less stirring up
trouble that can end up in bloodshed.
There's a comment on here about US forces and the Kurds in Syria, helping themselves to
oil, while Syrians wait in long lines for gas in a country that is an oil fountain. I have no
idea whether or not it is true, and since the US press would rather gossip than report, we'll
probably never know. But since oil prices have gone up recently in the USA, it might be true,
especially since politicians always want to pacify the serfs facing other unaffordable
expenses, like rent. If true you can see how that would make the people in an oil-rich
country mad.
Isn't it the supreme irony that the "racists" in American politics are the real
humanitarians while the so-called "humanitarians" like Sen. Marco Rubio and Bill Kristol
are less adverse to bloodshed and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people
die than the "racists"?
There is nothing ironic about your simple statement of fact. The humanitarians you mention
are about as much interested in human rights as John Wayne Gacy. There is gold in them there
hills, and their "friends" no longer control that gold. So we must go to war.
Rubio is running neck and neck in my mind as one of the most disgusting political whores
of all time.
As much as Trump has proven to be a disaster with his appointments of Bolton/Pompeo/E Abrams,
things could still be worse. We could have wound up with Little Marco, the John McCain of his
generation. All praise to Tucker for having the guts to go against the grain.
How is that working out now?
Those are rocks those guys are throwing..right?
Why not let THEM do the fighting and keep the guys from Ohio and Alabama here?
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela
What Trump administration military intervention? Number of Boots on the ground:
Syria -- Reduced vs. Obama, at most a few thousand
Iran -- ZERO
Venezuela -- Again ZERO
It is quite amazing that Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS] can take ZERO troops and falsely
portray that as military intervention. In the real, non-deranged world -- Rational thought
shows ZERO troops as the absence of military intervention.
Trying to use non-military sanctions to convince nations to behave better is indeed the
exact opposite of military intervention. If the NeoConDem Hillary Clinton was President. Would the U.S. have boots on the ground in
Iran And Venezuela?
Why is the Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS] crowd so willing to go to war for Hillary
while misrepresenting TRUMP's non-intervention?
Those who pathologicially hate Trump are simply not rational.
The answer here is simple.
When the President of of the US stated that he believed Russia under the instructions of
Pres. Putin attempted to sabotage the democratic process, and from the mouths many of our
leadership -- was successful he made a major power on the world stage a targeted enemy of the
US. When that same president accused Pres. Putin of plotting the same in Europe and ordered
the murders inside those sovereign states --
He essentially stated that our global strategic interests include challenging the Russian
influence anywhere and everywhere on the planet as they are active enemies of the US and our
European allies. What ever democratic global strategic ambitions previous to the least
election were stifled until that moment.
Until that moment foreign policy could have been shifted, but after that moment
Don't forget the genocide in Yemen. Wanting to exclude Yemenis from the USA means you're an
evil racist, but turning a blind eye to mass murder is A-OK.
Gold, Black Gold and Pirates : all about wealth and people getting in the way of the 21st
Century Privateers who will stop at nothing including overthrowing governments in Syria,
Libya, Iraq and elsewhere.
@A123Historically, sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are a prelude to it.
Sanctions are how Uncle Scam generally softens up foreign countries in preparation for an
invasion or some sort of 'régime-change' operation.
I appreciate the fact that Team Trump has not actually sent in the tanks yet, whereas
Hellary probably would have by now. Believe me, that is probably one of the very few good
arguments in favor of Trump at this point. But if we want to make sure that he never does
attack, then now is the time to make some noise– before the war starts.
All of this is smoke in mirrors. The real story is that Washington is headed for default on
it's 22 trillion dollar debt and the Beltway Elites are losing it. They are desperate to
start a conflict anywhere, but especially with an oil rich nation like Venezuela or Iran
install their own puppets and keep this petro-dollar scam running a little while longer.
If we weren't on the brink of economic collapse I could never see the Washington Elites
risking it all with a game of nuclear chicken with Russia and China over Ukraine and
Taiwan.
This commentator lost me when he decided Guaido was as socialist as Maduro. Nope. He would
not have US backing were that the case.
I checked out Telesur on Youtube on April 30 – its continued functioning was one sign
the coup attempt had failed. The comments section was full of Guaido supporters ranting about
how much they hated Chavistas and socialists and some were asking where Maduro was, probably
trying to sustain the myth that he had fled.
"When was the last time we successfully meddled in the political life of another country" The
answer to that, Tucker, depends on who you ask. While Syria, Iraq and Libya were "failures"
because we were told we would bring peace and prosperity to those countries, that was not the
goal of the architects of those wars, neither was it oil. The primary goal was to pacify
these countries and neuter them so they would not stand up to their neighbor and enemy
Israel. And if they had to be destroyed to accomplish that, that's fine. Minus Egypt, those
three countries were Israel's primary enemies in the three Arab-Israeli wars. Venezuela is
not "another" war for oil, but it might be the first.
Syria, Iraq and Libya were not destroyed for oil. Oil provided cover for the
real reason. In fact, oil companies opposed war for oil. It doesn't benefit the US or those
companies. Those three countries were and are Israel's primary enemies and neighbors and that
is why they were destroyed. Only if you stick your head in the sand and ignore the enormous
power of Israel and their Jewish supporters which is constantly on full display constantly
can someone not see that.
@EliteCommInc.
The russians are not the ennemies of the europeans , the russians are europeans , the yankees
are nor european .
If the yankees were the allies of the europeans , why they should need hundreds of
military occupation bases in Europe ? why they should impose on europeans self defeating
trade sanctions against Russia ? , strange " allies " .
@conatus
you are late conatus , the russians are building in Venezuela a factory of Kalasnikov rifles
, and Maduro is traing a militia of two million men , to help the army .
@conatusVenezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. I'm pretty sure there are still
lots of guns around. They're not using rocks to kill one another.
The U.S. military richly deserves to get itself trapped in a Gaza type situation of house
to house fighting in the favellas above Caracas.
@War
for Blair Mountain{If JFK were alive ..and POTUS in 2019 he would give the order to
overthrow the Maduro Goverment .}
JFK was alive way back then, when he gave the order to overthrow Castro and the result was
the Bay of Pigs disaster. And – for better or worse – Cubans are still running
their own country, not some foreign installed puppet.
'The order to overthrow Maduro' today would have the same disasterous end.
It should be obvious by now, that despite all the hardships, majority of Venezuelans don't
want a foreign installed puppet.
Carlson is right on Venezuela but was wrong on 911 truthers which he said back in September
2017, that 911 truthers were nuts! 911 which was done by Israel and the zionist controlled
deep state lead to the destruction of the mideast for Israel and the zionist NWO!
Trump is a Trojan horse under zionist control who had 5 draft deferments but now is the
zionists war lord sending Americans to fight and die in the mideast for Israel just like
obama and bush jr. , same bullshit different puppet!
America is Oceania , war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and I would
add to what Orwell said, war in the zio/US is perpetual for our zionist overlords.
One more thing, if Venezuela did not have oil the zio/US would not give a damn about
it!
Imperialists always see themselves as spreading good things to people who will benefit from
them. And imperialists necessarily always dilute their own culture.
If the imperialist culture is already rootless cosmopolitan, it will see no downside to
the above. If the Elites of a culture have become cosmopolitans divorced from any meaningful
contact with their own people (i.e. those of their own blood and history), then they will
lead their people into ever more cultural pollution and perversion.
Jews are a people who fit the opening sentence of the preceding paragraph. The WASP Elites
fit the second sentence.
If "no one is more opposed to destructive regime-change wars than the Alt-Right", it means
that the Alt-Right are traditional conservatives, paleo-(as opposed to neo)conservatives.
Real conservatives have always opposed getting into foreign wars that posed no threat to the
U.S. They opposed Wilson lying us into WW1, Roosevelt lying us into WW2. When the
neo-conservatives (American Jews loyal to Israel) got Washington under their thumb, we
started our decades of disastrous regime-change wars based on lies, starting with the
invasion of Iraq. Those neocon mf ers are still in charge.
An Alt Right 2.0 concept that is compassionate with the damage done by US war and economic
exploitation against the poorest people of the world who are mostly brown people is an
interesting concept.
But I think it will ultimately fail, since so many of the white people who make up the Alt
Right are angry with minorities and see them as a lower race. And these white people are more
interested in playing the victim card anyways.
@A123
You speak truth and cite facts, these loons go bananas.
Thank God they have no real power.
Hopefully they don't even own a hamster . probably would make the little fella read Mien
Kempf.
Because a hamster reading is just as cogent and linear as their arguments.
They are frustrated they cannot find a way to blame the Jews! for Maduro being a greedy
murdering sweathog who lets zoo animals starve while he looks like animated male
cellulite.
Funny- in their prostrations to dictators ( these retards actually defend and admire
Jong-Un) they conveniently have omitted Putin is cutting Russia from the WWW- the
Internet.
They will have a Russia intranet.
Pointing out to the obtuse daily commenters that under the tyrants that practically
fellate- they would be arrested and tortured for their Unz hissy fits and word diarrhea
Nationwide radio talk show? Wow! What's the station name, number and air time?
If you listen to people with actual media shows, they don't call people TROLL just because
they have a different opinion. They don't engage in female hysterical ranting because someone
has a different idea about the mechanics of the world.
Who are your sponsors? I can't imagine you would not want the free publicity .
I agree, there is irony in labels, in trying to tell who is more disposed towards 'bloodshed
and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die'. Why do we fight? It is
for power. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every conflict of the past
– no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might
change, but not power. Interest cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin,
nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our
principles, because that is what serves our interest. It is power, not any of the above
concepts, that is the cause of war. And that is what is leading the world to nuclear
Armageddon. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
@TKK
My sponsors are truth and America first. All Zionist hucksters are on my hit list. Again, I
suggest you and yours consider "making aliyah". https://www.nbn.org.il/
Number of Boots on the ground:
-- Syria -- Reduced vs. Obama, at most a few thousand
-- Iran -- ZERO
-- Venezuela -- Again ZERO
We will see in the future. Trump has to stir the pot. The foaming at the mouth media and his political opposition, in
both parties, need something to blather on about. Jus like rasslin'. Remember. The choice was between Trump and Clinton. Not Trump and Jesus.
@TKK
Oh, I see a point there, and it's an interesting one – openly Christian presidents
discredit their Christianity by engaging in non-righteous wars. After contemplating the
point, I don't think the foreign policy of W or Trump is anywhere close to being the primary
factor in the decline in church attendance. After all, the Catholic Church and other
denominations are mired in myriad sex scandals, the internet pulls people from God with
private depravity, science offers compelling hows if not whys, entertainment options abound,
and so on. Nonetheless, an orthodox and faithful Christian president committed to peace and
not fighting for oil or foreign interests would be a thing to behold. With caveats relating
to perceived sanity, that person would get my vote.
"The russians are not the ennemies of the europeans , the russians are europeans , the
yankees are nor european . "
These comments don't make any sense to me based on what I wrote. My comments have no
bearing on whether the Russians are an actual threat or not. I see them as competitors with
whom there are some places to come to some agreements. They doesn't mean I truth them.
Furthermore, my comments have no bearing on the territorial nature of Russian ethos.
That's not the point. Europeans have been at each other since there were Europeans. From the
Vikings and before to Serbia and Georgian conflicts. But none of that has anything to do with
my comments.
You might want to read them for what they do say as opposed to what you would like them to
say.
Jul 26, 2017 CIA director hints US is working to topple Venezuela's elected government
CIA Director Mike Pompeo indirectly admitted that the US is pushing for a new government
in Venezuela, in collaboration with Colombia and Mexico.
Feb 22, 2019 An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela: Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose
Coup
On the eve of another US war for oil, Abby Martin debunks the most repeated myths about
Venezuela and uncovers how US sanctions are crimes against humanity with UN investigator and
human rights Rapporteur Alfred De Zayas.
"After all, the Catholic Church and other denominations are mired in myriad sex scandals . .
."
Not even to the tune of 4%, and I am being generous. The liberals have managed to make the
Church look a den of NAMBLA worshipers -- hardly. In the west the Churches are under pressure
from the same sex practitioners to reject scriptural teachings on the behavior, but elsewhere
around the world, Catholic institutions, such as in Africa -- reject the notion.
@TKK
Thanks. Ignoring mindless trolls is a necessary skill for the site.
____
Given the end of the Mueller exoneration, both Trump and Putin are looking to strengthen
ties. Thus it is:
-- Unlikely that Putin is heavily committed to helping Maduro. The numbers are too small
for that. Also, what would Putin do with Maduro? The last thing Putin needs is a spoiler to
the developing detente.
-- Much more likely the troops have a straightforward purpose. Brazilian
military/aerospace technology would jump ahead 20 years if they could grab an intact S-300
system. Russia doesn't want a competitor in that market, so they have a deep interest in
reclaiming or destroying S-300 equipment as Maduro goes down.
@EliteCommInc.
You are certainly right. I have no doubt that the vast majority of priests are good men
innocent of these charges, and that there are more public school sex scandals (by both raw
numbers and percentage) then similar Church scandals. The scandals do have public currency
and legs, though, and are one reason often cited as to why the pews are empty. I am at fault
for helping to keep this ruinous perception alive with my online rhetoric, and thank you for
pointing it out.
' It's the oil ' canard has always been the excuse cultivated for suckers, and boy
do suckers fall for it.
US oil companies have not received the big oil deals in countries where the US, at the
behest of "that shitty little country", have interfered militarily. However, Russia, China,
& to a limited degree, a few European companies have.
@PeterMX
Bibi's biggest enemy, his main prize, has always been Iran. He is afraid that, if Trump
refuses to do his bidding now, it may well be too late in an election year. One way or
another Bolton and Pompeo are going to convince their token boss to green light a massive
bombing campaign, especially if Iran attempts to shut down the Straits of Hormuz. It will
happen this year if Trump fails to come to his senses.
@Scalper
In the first place, your bizarre partisan rant is a little out of place. There aren't too
many QAnons here at Unz, and there are probably a fair number of regulars here who wouldn't
even identify as Republicans or 'conservatives' (whatever that term means today).
Secondly, some of your talking points aren't even accurate:
Trump administration will declare Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation,
increasing the animosity from Arab countries in the ME to unbelievable levels. This
includes non Arab country Turkey also, a traditional ally until neocon Trump took
power.
If Trump were truly to declare the Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization, a lot of
Arab rulers would actually thank him. You see, the Brotherhood is actually illegal in
most Arab countries today, precisely because it has a history of collaborating with foreign
intelligence services such as MI6, the CIA and Mossad. More recently, it was strongly
associated with failed régime-change projects in countries like Egypt and Syria; so
with a few exceptions (like Qatar), the Brotherhood is not well liked by Arab rulers.
Immigration restrictionism is a traditional pro working class, leftist policy.
Traditionally leftist? Sure up until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965! The sad fact is,
we don't an anti-immigration party in the US at all today. Neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats have any interest whatsoever in halting–or even just slowing
down–immigration.
@PeterMX
It's obvious that FOX is giving Tucker a lot of latitude. They continued to support him when
advertisers left, and when accusations of racism emerged from a radio interview he'd done
years ago with a shock jock. They dare not fire him as he has the largest and most fervent
base of supporters on cable news. But Tucker knows that there is one big issue, the Elephant
in the room, of which he dare not speak. It's that shitty little country calling the shots,
whose name begins with an I.
@Anonymous
I think there may be more alt-righters opposed to foreign wars and exploitative 'free' trade
treaties than you assume. Most of the alt-righters I know oppose the current régime's
"invade the world, invite the world" policies (to borrow a phrase from our own Steve Sailer).
But unlike the anti-imperialist left (with whom they often do ally), they usually argue
against such policies based on popular self-interest rather than abstract universal morality.
They usually choose to argue that being a mighty world empire has worked to the
detriment of the majority of people in America; that the whole thing is just a scam to
enrich and empower a small, corrupt élite.
what goes unremarked here and elsewhere is the ethnic composition of Venezuela. From a few
searches, Whites are only about one-third of V.
The Tipping Point for chaos is clear. Brazil is half White, Argentina is near 100 % White,
ditto Chile.
(Argentina ca. 1900 exterminated a large number its "Indigenous." )
The most stable of Latin America is Costa Rica, which is apparently about three quarters
White.
Meanwhile the jewyorktimes reports the narco-traffickers in the Maduro administration.
Hopeless. Any Brown or Black Country is doomed. Brazil works cuz Whites know how to
control the 45% mulattos and 5 % Blacks. For now anyway. Mexico is a narco-state with the
only 9% Whites able to control the half breeds and Indigenous thru co-option. Wait for Mexico
to blow up.
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed
at articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and
international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime
change wars.
That's an amazing point. I'm not sure what "Alt-Right" or "2.0 movement" really means in the current
shills-vs-people wars but all the best and the brightest in our ranks are clearly against the
globalists.
@Avery
The Deep state/CIA did the Bay of Pigs. JFK was not informed about it before it happened. JFK
was fighting the CIA and deep state throughout his presidency. He wanted to shatter the CIA
into a million pieces. Read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W. Douglass. His peace speech
on June 10, 1963 was too much for our deep state. That speech was the biggest triggers that
set the motion for his assassination.
Whatever anyone thinks about the Alt-Right it did expose a lot of things about our current
era, our history, our politics, and power paradigms that once seen can not be unseen.
And what are you going to do about it? What can anyone really do, honestly?
Not too much at least in America. Eastern Europe still has a good chance.
In America, the trajectory and machinations of power have been set for a long time and
revolutionary romanticism tends to work better for the Left than the Right. A quick look at
the data easily reveals this.
So what do you do when you realize how so much of everything that's presented as real and
true isn't real or true? And there are so many truly bad human beings with major power over
our culture, politics, and society?
Well, when has that not been the case in human history? At some point, acknowledging all
the black pills is sort of like accepting your human limits, your finitude, your genetics,
the unanswered mysteries of existence, the nothingness of Earth in the grand scheme, and just
basic gravity.
You could become a courageous online revolutionary and eventually trigger some unstable
person to get things shut down and deplatformed.
Or you could organize with socially and psychologically healthy and mature adults who try
to prioritize attainable and realistic goals and gain some moralizing victories that can
buffer against the demoralizing defeats.
Luckily, out of the winter of our discontent have emerged many healthy tendrils of new
growth.
"... Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies. ..."
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens
the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations
as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
America's hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist
organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted
countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State
property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.
The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These
military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific
countries in all major regions of World.
Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization.
Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which
consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.
In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995,
evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely
into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the
developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland,
etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.
The global economic crisis is intimately related to America's hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget
backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. "War is Good for Business": the powerful financial groups which routinely
manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war.
A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.
Beyond the Globalization of Poverty
Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic
reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the
"globalization of poverty": countries are transformed in open territories,
State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad
sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads
to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire
populations (refugee crisis).
This "second stage" goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial
institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction
of human life.
In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force
of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.
The New World Order
Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are
Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds
and secret accounts,
the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major "defense contractors", security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits,
on contract to the Pentagon;
the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,
The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;
Big Pharma,
The Communication Giants and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.
There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.
These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state
structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the "Deep State", integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks,
secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate
interests.
In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, trade unions, political parties.
What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy
to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.
Media Propaganda
The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops
oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian
narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.
Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.
Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus
at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding
the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.
Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development
There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era,
the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as
well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.
In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union.
Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.
The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial
apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial
trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar
speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians,
civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It's called corruption, co-optation, fraud.
Latin America: The Transition towards a "Democratic Dictatorship"
In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e.
a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded.
They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.
Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin America region.
In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup
in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated
in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the "Dirty war" and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.
The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged.
Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.
Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of "dirty tricks" including acts of
infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social
divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate
and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money
laundering and the protection of the drug trade.
The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua,
May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky
by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)
"... The Empire is not weak, this is poor analysis. India and Europe stopped buying Iranian oil. 1 billion $ of Iranian oil stays blocked in China, no one wants to touch it. Even Khamenei admitted that Europe left the JCPOA in practice. ..."
"... Iran is in deep recession. Venezuela is in deep recession and is surrounded. ..."
"... Iraq? US troops are staying there. Syria? US troops are staying there long term. 1 third of the country containing the biggest oil fields is under US control. There is fuel shortage crisis due to sanctions. Europe is not stopping its sanctions either. ..."
"The Empire only appears to be strong. In reality it is weak, confused, clueless"
The Empire is not weak, this is poor analysis. India and Europe stopped buying Iranian oil. 1 billion $ of Iranian oil stays blocked in
China, no one wants to touch it. Even Khamenei admitted that Europe left the JCPOA in
practice.
Iran is in deep recession. Venezuela is in deep recession and is surrounded. Almost
all of Latin America now has pro-US governments. CIA linked Bolsonaro took over in Brazil.
Turkey is in deep recession and Erdogan lost the big cities.
India is moving closer to the US. Europe remains a vassal. Russian economic growth is
weak. The US won the trade war against China as Andrei Martyanov himself admitted.
Iraq? US troops are staying there. Syria? US troops are staying there long term. 1 third
of the country containing the biggest oil fields is under US control. There is fuel shortage
crisis due to sanctions. Europe is not stopping its sanctions either.
There is no doubt that they will be weaker in the future, but they will fight hard to stop
this and gain time.
Update 10: Though she isn't in the room today, Sen. Elizabeth Warren felt she needed to
communicate a very important message to Barr: That she would like him to resign.
AG Barr is a disgrace, and his alarming efforts to suppress the Mueller report show that
he's not a credible head of federal law enforcement. He should resign -- and based on the
actual facts in the Mueller report, Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against the
President.
This is
the second in two recent
Real News Network interviews with Bill Black, white collar criminologist and frequent Naked
Capitalism contributor. Bill is author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and teaches
economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC).
Bill argues that the problem isn't deficient laws, which is Warren's focus. He says
instead:
It's far better to focus on using the existing criminal laws but changing the things in
the system that are so criminogenic and changing institutionally the regulators, the F.B.I.,
and the prosecutors, so that you go back to systems that we've always known how to make work.
The simple example is task forces. What produced the huge success in the savings and loan,
the Commercial Bank, and the Enron era fraud prosecutions? It was these task forces where we
brought everyone together to actually bring prosecutions. They killed those criminal task
forces, both under the Bush administration and under the Obama administration.
I think this is cause for optimism. For it means we don't have to go through the long and
torturous process of passing new laws to get somewhere with fixing a deeply broken system. The
Dodd-Frank Act wasn't passed until July 2010, despite the huge clamor to do something about the
banks that created the Great Financial Crisis. And then it took many years for all affected
agencies to finish rule-makings necessary to administer and enforce the law. Imagine if we had
to do that again to get somewhere with the necessary clean-up.
Instead, we merely have to elect politicians who will appoint necessary personnel to
confront the prevailing criminogenic environment. I know, I know – that's a big ask too.
But believe me, it would be even bigger if we must also take the preliminary step of passing
new legislation as well.
MARC STEINER Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Mark Steiner. Always good to have you
with us. Now if you were watching the previous segment and you saw what Bill Black and I were
talking about, you saw that we were kind of diving into the history of this. Why it's so
difficult to prosecute or maybe it's not, and we're finding out why. But what we didn't jump
into was about Elizabeth Warren's proposal. Do they make sense? If they passed, will they
actually make a difference. What is it that we do we need, more laws like that or do we need
more regulation? What would solve the crisis that we seem to constantly be falling into? And
we're still here with Bill Black as always, which is great. So Bill, let me just jump right
into this. Her proposals -- do they meet muster? Do they actually make a difference? Some
people say she's piddling around the edges. What do you think?
BILL BLACK So for example, the proposed bill on Too Big to Jail would largely recreate the
entities that we had during the great financial crisis, which led to virtually no prosecutions. So yes, we need more resources, but bringing back SIGTARP, the special inspector general for
the Treasury, would have next to no effects.
The criminal referrals have to come from the
banking regulatory agencies. They have essentially been terminated. You need new leadership at
those entities that were actually going to make criminal referrals. The second part -- would it
change things to be able to prosecute simply by showing negligence? Well yes, but it would
still be a massive battle to show negligence in those circumstances and at the end of the day,
the judge could just give probation. And judges are going to be very hostile to it,
particularly after Trump gets all these judicial appointees.
You would just see a wave, if you
used a simple negligence standard of conservative judges who didn't think it was fair to make
it that easy to prosecute folks. They would give people probation. Prosecutors wouldn't want to
go through a huge fight just to get probation and such. And so, it would be immensely
ineffective, and it would break.
There'd be maybe some progressive judges that would actually
give the maximum term, but that's only one year under her proposal. So you're not going to get
significant deterrence through those mechanisms. It's far better to focus on using the existing
criminal laws but changing the things in the system that are so criminogenic and changing
institutionally the regulators, the F.B.I., and the prosecutors, so that you go back to systems
that we've always known how to make work. The simple example is task forces.
What produced the
huge success in the savings and loan, the Commercial Bank, and the Enron era fraud
prosecutions? It was these task forces where we brought everyone together to actually bring
prosecutions. They killed those criminal task forces, both under the Bush administration and
under the Obama administration. So we don't have to reinvent the bike. We don't have to design
a new vehicle. We have a vehicle that works for successful prosecutions. We actually need to
use it and to do that, we need people in charge who have the will to prosecute elite
white-collar criminals.
MARC STEINER So you do agree with a critique of these bills, saying what we need is just to
have greater regulation and enforce regulations we have? We don't need new prosecutorial tools?
Is that what you're saying?
BILL BLACK No I completely reject that view in Slate that is by two folks who have really
extreme views. One thinks that we prosecute and sentence elite white-collar criminals way too
much and much too heavily. And the other, for example, has written an article saying, we
shouldn't make wage theft which is theft, a crime.
Even though it's Walmart's dominant strategy
and it makes it impossible for more honest merchants to compete against Walmart, that is an
insane view. And of course, it will never happen because you're going to put the same people in
charge who don't believe. If they don't believe in prosecuting, you think seriously they
believe in regulating the big banks?
MARC STEINER What I'm asking you though Bill, to critique that, what do you think? Are the
bills that Elizabeth Warren is suggesting unnecessary, other than maybe putting more money into
regulatory agencies to oversee all of this? Are you saying that we have enough prosecutorial
tools?
BILL BLACK They're unnecessary. The specifics in the bills are unnecessary. But that doesn't
mean that regulation is the answer to it, although it's part of the issue.
MARC STEINER I got you. Right.
BILL BLACK What you need is leaders who will use the tools we know work, to do the
prosecutions. And they made absolutely sure -- that's Lanny Breuer who you talked about in the
first episode of this thing, that actually said to a nationwide audience on video that he was
kept awake and fearing not what the bank criminals were doing but fearing that somebody might
lose their job in banks because of it.
You know he doesn't represent the American people at
that point. If you put Lanny Breuer in, you could put 10,000 F.B.I. agents and you would still
get no prosecutions, because Lanny Breuer simply isn't going to prosecute just like Eric Holder
simply wasn't going to prosecute.
It's not just the US, but the UK, too. Readers may be aware that the British government is seeking a successor to Mark Carney at
the Bank of England, which has resumed most, but not all, of its former supervisory
responsibilities this decade.
One of the candidates, Andrew Bailey, a former Bank official and currently head of the
conduct risk regulator, is desperate for the Bank job and publicly and privately speaking
about lightening the regulatory load. Not only that, Bailey is also reluctant to take action
against the well connected and have anything going on that will have an impact on his
application, vide the current London Capital Finance scandal.
At a recent address to asset managers, Bailey said that not on Brexit + day 1, but soon
after the red pen would be applied to the UK rule book. He implied that prosecutions would be
a rarity. It was very much a plea to firms to stay after Brexit and to lobby for his
candidacy.
I am old enough remember clearly the Blue Arrow case in the 1980's ( easily looked up )
but essentially a share rigging operation. The smokescreen advanced by the establishment in
these cases had always been the same; that company fraud is far to complicated for ordinary
mortals to understand . But in the Blue Arrow case they ( the jury ) did understand it, which
terrified the establishment, and word came down from on high that no such prosecutions should
ever happen again . And then we had ' light touch regulation '. And then we had the Great
Financial Crash.
I do indeed Colonel. Both scandals seem almost quaint in the light of the scale of the
manipulation and fraud in the years leading up to the GFC and subsequently; and the
unwillingness of both the UK and US government to even attempt to bring about prosecutions.
The intertwining of politics and big business ( ' the revolving door ' ) has played a large
part in this and IMHO distressed the wider public to such an extent that when they had the
opportunity to show their displeasure they did so and voted for Brexit and Trump.
Those regulators and their ilk need trips to the Old Bailey, although that is not likely
to happen in the foreseeable future. Too much is riding on the Brexit preparations, until the
next panic, and then the following panic. All of those militate against any action that would
harm the fabric of, ahem, pay packets.
If you put Lanny Breuer in, you could put 10,000 F.B.I. agents and you would still get
no prosecutions, because Lanny Breuer simply isn't going to prosecute just like Eric Holder
simply wasn't going to prosecute.
IMHO, you could put Bill Black in, many, if not most of those 10,000 F.B.I. agents would
passively resist, and you would still get no prosecutions.
We're seeing, with Trump, what passive resistance looks like, the same will be done to
Bernie if elected.
The massive momentum of neo-liberal rule is baked in, and has been quite successful at
making sure Trump doesn't screw any of their plans up, in fact Trump derangement syndrome
seems to be working better than they could ever have dreamed to cover the really nasty stuff
that's going on while the people are treated to Russia, Russia, Russia! 24/7.
Bernie would face the same, but probably worse, more intense resistance from what would be
a unified, bi-partisan resistance, the 10%, with forty years worth of Washington Consensus
training under their belts, all either chanting in unison against the evils of socialism, or
sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting Na, Na, Na, Na!
After 9/11, the FBI pulled thousands of agents off white collar crime and switched them to
fighting terrorism, in hindsight, this seems closer to evidence of a plan than an accident of
history.
By now, most, if not all those agents have decided that for the sake of their careers,
they had better forget about what they used to think was important.
It would probably take all of Bernie's first term to bring the public up to speed, and in
alignment with the effort to prosecute the banksters, and that's being optimistic.
Right now, half the electorate believes that dead-beat borrowers crashed the economy in
2008.
You don't need the FBI to prosecute bank crimes. In his book version of Inside Job,
Charles Ferguson laid out the evidence for WaMu (and IIRC another bank) that was sufficient
to be able to indict executives. There was plenty of evidence in the public domain.
Yes, and what is it we are discussing, the reasons why no indictments were made, and what
is to be done about it?
My point is that changes in leadership, IMO are insufficient to prompt those indictments
into being in the near term because in the period since 2008, everything possible has been
done to load the federal bureaucracy with politically reliable persons dedicated to helping
defend the status quo.
I might add that ' The Resistance' has, IMO, been focused almost exclusively on
making sure Trump is not reelected, thereby protecting democratic rice bowls, and sadly, not
so much on preventing his destroying regulatory systems, the courts, and every remnant of the
New Deal.
The situation we're facing is the Augean Stables, except that it's been 40 years, not 30,
that the filth has been building up without a proper cleaning.
So, being wildly optimistic, we elect Bernie Sanders, and if we're lucky, start a
generation long process against a strong head wind.
That said, I remain wildly optimistic that that is what will happen, I just can't help
myself.
I'm not a legal expert but what about going after banks, most of which do business in NY
state, by using the existing Martin Act like Eliot Spitzer. According to
this older article :
"Spitzer's big gun was New York's Martin Act. The law allowed him to subpoena virtually
any document from anyone doing business in the state. Because the law permits prosecutors to
pursue either civil or criminal penalties, Spitzer could refuse to tell suspects which one he
was seeking. Spitzer's willingness to wield the considerable powers permitted by the Martin
Act turned the New York AG's office from a backwater into a rainmaker and made the SEC, which
could impose only puny civil penalties, look like a peashooter.
Spitzer used the Martin Act
to drag angry and unwilling corporate executives into his office for questioning. Then he'd
subpoena huge company files.
Dedicated staff combed through them and, almost inevitably,
found a smoking gun: secretive after-hours trading between mutual funds and hedge funds;
alleged bid rigging at Marsh; and emails from Wall Street analyst Jack Grubman bragging to
his mistress about how he'd recommended a shoddy company in a three-way deal to help his
boss, Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill, humiliate a corporate foe.
Spitzer would then wave "the
bloody shirt," as journalist Roger Donway puts it, in front of the cameras, show off the
worst offenses he had uncovered and use them to tar and feather an entire industry."
Senator Elizabeth Warren's Q&A at the March 7, 2013 Banking Committee hearing entitled
"Patterns of Abuse: Assessing Bank Secrecy Act Compliance and Enforcement." Witnesses were:
David Cohen, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, United States Department
of the Treasury; Thomas Curry, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; and
Jerome H. Powell, Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
HSBC has a long history dealing in illicit, immoral drugs. In fact, the bank was
established to facilitate such. "After the British established Hong Kong as a colony in the
aftermath of the First Opium War, local merchants felt the need for a bank to finance the
growing trade between China and Europe (with traded products including opium). They
established the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Company Limited in Hong Kong (March 1865) and
Shanghai (one month later)." ~ Wikipedia Another good source is the book "Dope, Inc." RESIST
!!!
Obviously nobody wants to take responsibilities. They would not even consider what is
morally wrong or acceptable. These are the people we pay salaries to protect us, 316 million
Americans? So we still pay a hefty salary to Senator Powell and David Cohn in Treasury
department? Are these people in cahoots with those who laundered money at J P Morgan ? Do
they make money from both sides? Peel off the tax payers and get bribes from the banks which
launder the money ? I assume this is just a game. Banksters on Wall Street who suck our blood
are still outside on the prowl. They did it in 2008 and are looking for the next move
soon.
What gets me is these banks are part of the illicit drug trade with no chance of jail
time, but if one of the peasants gets busted with a single joint.Prosecution,jail, fines, you
name it, it's throw the book time.We need more people like Warren in government.
Elizabeth Warren may have smart policies. But Bernie Sanders has mass politics.
Last week I wrote
an article
praising Elizabeth Warren for advancing the student debt conversation. While I think her proposal falls short of what we
deserve -- a full-on student debt jubilee, no means-testing or exceptions -- I'm impressed by how seriously it takes the
problem of student debt, leaving Obama-style "refinancing" behind in favor of large-scale debt forgiveness, commensurate
with the gravity of the crisis.
The student debt proposal was one of many recent plans released by Warren in recent
months, ramping up in the last few weeks. Some are better than others. Her
Ultra-Millionaire Tax
is a winner, as is her
Real
Corporate Profits Tax
. Warren's universal childcare plan is promising overall, though it retains
unnecessary
fees
for users. Her
affordable
housing plan
is one-sidedly market-based: its central proposal is to incentivize local governments to remove zoning
restrictions. That needs to be complemented by heavy investments in social housing, a policy
recently
floated
by the People's Policy Project.
But criticisms aside, Warren's proposals trend in a
positive direction. At the very least, they demonstrate a willingness to tackle working people's real problems
with debt, housing, health, and childcare. If they were to materialize, many of these proposals would
significantly improve life for working people -- maybe not as much as we'd like, but enough to be considered a
positive development, especially after decades of Democratic disinterest in policies that threaten corporate
profits or meaningfully redistribute wealth.
So it's understandable why many on the Left have reacted to
Warren's policy blitz with delight. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The proposals she's pumping out are
exciting, but more to the point, they are a strategy for raising her campaign's profile.
It's not standard in presidential politics to bust out
of the gate with a constant stream of detailed policy ideas. The other candidates aren't
behind
on
releasing policy proposals -- Warren is way ahead, doing something unusual. Bernie Sanders doesn't even have
his policy team fully assembled yet, nor do the others. We need to ask why Warren feels compelled to adopt
this early traction-gaining strategy to begin with.
In my view, Warren's policy blitz is a bid to
distinguish herself in light of her difficulty thus far in cohering an organic base. Put bluntly, Warren is
turning her campaign into a policy factory because she's had trouble inspiring people with a broad-strokes
political vision the way her closest ideological competitor, Bernie Sanders, has.
This strategy may work to boost her campaign prospects, but it's a bad omen for any presidential
administration seriously committed to taking on the ruling elite. If you can't impart to millions of working
people the sense that they are carrying out a historic mission during your campaign -- a "
political
revolution
" driven by "
Not
Me, Us
" -- you won't be able to mobilize them to exert pressure on the state to challenge the interests
of capital when it really counts, during your presidency.
Part of Warren's trouble in the area of mass politics can be traced to the fact that she's neither an
establishment plaything nor an opponent of capitalism. To her credit, Warren won't take corporate money (at
least
during the primary
), and she evades the regular donor circuit. That means that to make her campaign
viable, she needs masses of ordinary people to believe in her project strongly enough to donate their own
hard-earned money to her campaign. Unlike Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, or certainly Joe
Biden, she can't
paper
over
her lackluster popular support with fat checks from elites.
So far, those masses have failed to materialize. That's largely because Warren's temperate political
ideology makes it hard for her to say the things necessary to get their attention. She's great at diagnosing
the worst problems of capitalism and has plans to address them, but her rhetoric doesn't polarize along
class lines. She therefore struggles to define her constituency and identify who exactly that constituency
is up against.
Warren hates egregious inequality, but
fundamentally believes
in the superior rationality of markets. She has unwavering faith in capitalism,
calling herself
"a capitalist to my bones" -- her primary concern is that it has been led astray. At a
time when socialism is
becoming synonymous
with efforts to put people over profit, Warren disavows it. When Donald Trump
declared that "America will never be a socialist country" a couple of months ago, Sanders stayed slouched in
his chair, while Warren
rose to
her feet
in applause.
This means that while Warren knows down to the last detail what she'd like better regulations to look
like, she's not quite solid on the antagonists and protagonists, i.e. which broader social forces need to be
arranged against which other forces to make change.
Sanders's vision of social conflict is quite clear, and is summed up by the name of his
town hall
last year:
CEOs vs. Workers. To make favorable policy materialize and to protect it from reversal, the forces of
workers need to be arranged against the forces of CEOs. Nearly everything Sanders says and does leads back
to this core belief in the power of ordinary working people to take on capitalist elites themselves. As he
puts it
, "Real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on
up."
In Warren's case, where oppositional rhetoric appears at all, the contest more often comes across as
"Smart Progressive Policymakers vs. Bad Rules." Not only is there no room in that rivalry for ordinary
people, but the enemy is also faceless. The enemy is incorrect policy, and it must be corrected by expert
policy correctors. Elect Warren, on the basis of her demonstrated expertise, and she will deftly set about
changing the rules so that capitalism doesn't produce so many awful externalities.
Sanders may as well have been winking at Warren when he said, in a
video
screened recently to thousands of self-organized groups of Bernie supporters in every congressional
district:
No president, not the best intentioned, not the most honest person in the world, no one person can do
it alone. Now why is that? Because this is what is not talked about in the media, not talked about in
Congress: the power structure of America is such that a small number of wealthy individuals and large
corporate entities have so much influence over the economic and political life of this country that no
one person can do it.
You think we're gonna pass Medicare for All tomorrow because the president of the United States says
that's what we should do? You think we're gonna take on the fossil fuel industry and effectively and
aggressively combat climate change change because the president of the United States thinks we should do
that? A lot of presidents say, "Gee I have a great idea. I woke up yesterday and I think health care
for all's a good idea." That's not the way it happens. It happens when millions of people stand up and
demand it.
It's unsurprising that Bernie's broad vision of social conflict is more inspiring than Warren's. After
decades of skyrocketing living costs and stagnating wages, many working people are spoiling for a fight.
That nascent fighting spirit can be seen in the popular protest movements that began in 2011, the
unprecedented popularity of Sanders's dark-horse candidacy in 2016, and the teachers strike wave that kicked
off last year.
Unencumbered by an awkward mixture of admiration for capitalism and disapproval of its ugliest excesses,
Bernie Sanders is uniquely capable of picking that fight -- and making ordinary working people feel like
they're at the center of it, that it's theirs to win.
It's the trouble Warren has had breaking through in this way that explains why she has turned to cranking
out hyper-detailed proposals. She's making up with wonkery what she lacks in big-picture political clarity.
In the process, she's successfully grabbing headlines and winning the hearts of left technocrats with
prominent platforms. That might translate into some boost in popular support. But it's not obvious that such
support will ever rival that of a
candidate who tells workers
, "This is class warfare, and we're going to stand up and fight."
We are right to admire many of the ideas coming out of the Warren campaign. Best-case scenario, they will
spur a progressive policy arms race, which would be to the benefit of all.
But we shouldn't see her policy blitz purely as a sign of strength. It may actually be an SOS message, a
panicked response to her campaign's shortcomings in the field of mass politics. And of course, mass politics
are necessary for creating durable and militant constituencies that can
self-organize
outside the state, which is in turn necessary to win and preserve a progressive policy
agenda against the interests of capitalists -- an agenda that Warren and Sanders largely share.
Warren's policy blitz strategy may pay off in the short term. But in the long term, there's no substitute
for naming the sides, picking a side, and building up your side to fight the other side. And that's Bernie's
game.
She rips the Obama White House for its allegiance to Citibank. But she does nto understadn that the problem is not with
Citibank, but with the neoliberalism as the social system. Sad...
Democrats and Republicans are just two sides of the same coin as for neoliberalism. Which presuppose protecting banks, like
Citigroup, and other big corporations. The USA political system is not a Democracy, we have become an Oligarchy with a two Party
twist (Poliarchy) in whihc ordinary voters are just statists who have No voice for anyone except approving one of the two
preselected by big money candidates. It's time we put a stop to this nonsense or we'll all go down with ship.
Anyway, on a positive note
"Each time a person stands up for an ideal to improve the lot of others, they send forth a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistence." RFK
This budget deal is absolutely disgusting. More financial deregulation, the potential for
a second TARP, cuts to pensions, and cuts to funding for Pell Grants to help out students.
Once again, the people lose.
So tough, so strong, and so right. And I love that she's not afraid to rip into Democrats
and the White House for their complicity in selling out our country and tax dollars to the
big banks. We need more strong politicians on both sides of the aisle like this.
It's not party specific, though the Republicans are the worst. Both parties are to be
blame. The biggest blame goes to the Americans who do not vote and those who have no clue who
or what they are voting for. The government is the way it is, it's because of the attitude of
Americans towards politics. Majority do not give a shit and hence you have that pile up in
Washington and states legislature.
Elizabeth Warren is like a fictional do gooder character from Hollywood. No one take her
seriously.
Blame all the politicians you want, you Americans voting or not voting are the lousiest
employers in the world, because you hire a bunch of corruptors into your government. These
corruptors in fact control your lives.
They abuse your money, spending every penny on everything but on you. You would not hand
over your wallet or bank accounts to a strangers, yet are precisely doing that by putting
these corruptors in the government.
This speech encapsulates and exposes all that is wrong with America in general and with
our governance in particular. Taking the heinous provision out of the bill would be a great
first baby step toward cleaning up our politics, economy and collective spirit as a nation.
All the "smart money" says that Warren is engaged in a Quixotic attempt to do something good
in a system that is irredeemably corrupted by money and the lust for power. The cynics may be
right, perhaps America is doomed to be consumed by the parasites to the last drop of
blood...but maybe not. Maybe this ugly indefensibly corrupt malevolent move to put the
taxpayers back on the hook for the next trillion dollar bail out theft will be sufficient to
wake up hundreds of millions of us. When the people wake up and turn on the lights, the
crooks and the legally corrupt will slither away back into their hole...and many may just
wind up in prison, where they belong. But so long as corrupt dirty dastardly interests can
keepAmerica deceived and asleep, they will continue to drain our nation's life's blood dry.
Please share this video widely. If half as many folks watch this speech as watched the Miley
Cyrus "Wrecking Ball" YouTube, the provision to which Warren is objecting will be taken out
very quickly indeed.
As George Carlin said a decade ago,who are we going to replace these politicians with?
They did not fall out of the sky or come from a distant planet. They are US. You can vote all
you want and replace every last one of them but nothing will change. It is human nature.
Besides the road from being on the local town council, to the mayor,Gov then into the Capital
is littered with test to weed out anyone who might really pose a danger to the system. The
occasional odd one that does make it to power is castrated or there simply to give the
illusion that elections matter. Unless you can eliminate the attraction of greed,ego and
power nothing will ever change. Just a quick look back at history tells you what is happening
now and what will be going on in our future. The only difference is there are more zeros.
"... Although the causal relationships are difficult to untangle, there are solid grounds for believing that the rise in monopoly power has played a role in exacerbating income inequality, weakening workers' bargaining power, and slowing the rate of innovation. ..."
"... The debate about how to regulate the sector is eerily reminiscent of the debate over financial regulation in the early 2000s. Proponents of a light regulatory touch argued that finance was too complicated for regulators to keep up with innovation, and that derivatives trading allows banks to make wholesale changes to their risk profile in the blink of an eye. And the financial industry put its money where its mouth was, paying salaries so much higher than those in the public sector that any research assistant the Federal Reserve System trained to work on financial issues would be enticed with offers exceeding what their boss's boss was earning. ..."
"... It is a problem that cannot be overcome without addressing fundamental questions about the role of the state, privacy, and how US firms can compete globally against China, where the government is using domestic tech companies to collect data on its citizens at an exponential pace. And yet many would prefer to avoid them. ..."
"... At this point, ideas for regulating Big Tech are just sketches, and of course more serious analysis is warranted. An open, informed discussion that is not squelched by lobbying dollars is a national imperative. ..."
The debate about how to regulate
the tech sector is eerily reminiscent of the debate over financial regulation in the early 2000s. Fortunately, one US politician
has mustered the courage to call for a total rethink of America's exceptionally permissive merger and acquisition policy over the
past four decades.
CAMBRIDGE Displaying a degree of courage and clarity that is difficult to overstate, US senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth
Warren has taken on Big Tech, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Warren's proposals amount to a
total rethink of the
United States' exceptionally permissive merger and acquisition policy over the past four decades. Indeed, Big Tech is only the poster
child for a significant increase
in monopoly and oligopoly power across a broad swath of the American economy. Although the best approach is still far from clear,
I
could not agree more that something needs to done, especially when it comes to Big Tech's ability to buy out potential competitors
and use their platform dominance to move into other lines of business.
Warren is courageous because Big Tech is big money for most leading Democratic candidates, particularly progressives, for whom
California is a veritable campaign-financing ATM. And although one can certainly object, Warren is not alone in thinking that the
tech giants have gained excessive market dominance; in fact, it is one of the few issues in Washington on which there is some semblance
of agreement . Other
candidates, most notably Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have also taken
principled stands
Although the causal relationships are difficult to untangle, there are solid grounds for believing that the rise in monopoly power
has
played a role in exacerbating income inequality, weakening workers' bargaining power, and slowing the rate of innovation. And,
perhaps outside of China, it is a global problem, because US tech monopolies have often achieved market dominance before local regulators
and politicians know what has happened. The European Union, in particular, has been trying to steer its own course on
technology regulation . Recently,
the United Kingdom commissioned an expert group, chaired by former President Barack Obama's chief economist (and now my colleague)
Jason Furman , that produced a
very useful report on approaches to the tech sector.
The debate about how to regulate the sector is eerily reminiscent of the debate over financial regulation in the early 2000s.
Proponents of a light regulatory touch argued that finance was too complicated for regulators to keep up with innovation, and that
derivatives trading allows banks to make wholesale changes to their risk profile in the blink of an eye. And the financial industry
put its money where its mouth was, paying salaries so much higher than those in the public sector that any research assistant the
Federal Reserve System trained to work on financial issues would be enticed with offers exceeding what their boss's boss was earning.
There will be similar problems staffing tech regulatory offices and antitrust legal divisions if the push for tighter regulation
gains traction. To succeed, political leaders need to be focused and determined, and not easily bought. One only has to recall the
2008 financial crisis and its painful aftermath to comprehend what can happen when a sector becomes too politically influential.
And the US and world economy are, if anything, even more vulnerable to Big Tech than to the financial sector, owing both to cyber
aggression and vulnerabilities in social media that can pervert political debate.
Another parallel with the financial sector is the outsize role of US regulators. As with US foreign policy, when they sneeze,
the entire world can catch a cold. The 2008 financial crisis was sparked by vulnerabilities in the US and the United Kingdom, but
quickly went global. A US-based cyber crisis could easily do the same. This creates an "externality," or global commons problem,
because US regulators allow risks to build up in the system without adequately considering international implications.
It is a problem that cannot be overcome without addressing fundamental questions about the role of the state, privacy, and how
US firms can compete globally against China, where the government is using domestic tech companies to collect data on its citizens
at an exponential pace. And yet many would prefer to avoid them.
That's why there has been
fierce pushback against Warren for daring to suggest that even if many services seem to be provided for free, there might still
be something wrong. There was the same kind of pushback from the financial sector fifteen years ago, and from the railroads back
in the late 1800s. Writing in the March 1881 issue of The Atlantic , the progressive activist Henry Demarest Lloyd
warned that,
"Our treatment of 'the railroad problem' will show the quality and caliber of our political sense. It will go far in foreshadowing
the future lines of our social and political growth. It may indicate whether the American democracy, like all the democratic experiments
which have preceded it, is to become extinct because the people had not wit enough or virtue enough to make the common good supreme."
Lloyd's words still ring true today. At this point, ideas for regulating Big Tech are just sketches, and of course more serious
analysis is warranted. An open, informed discussion that is not squelched by lobbying dollars is a national imperative.
The debate
that Warren has joined is not about whether to establish socialism. It is about making capitalist competition fairer and, ultimately,
stronger.
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University
and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund
from 2001 to 2003. The co-author of This Time is Different:
Eight Centuries of Financial Folly , his new book, The Curse of Cash , was released in August 2016.
"... It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables. ..."
"... The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same way. ..."
"... {A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result of their personality or experience} ? ..."
"... They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism. In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the evidence - or at least they can make that claim. ..."
"... So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going. ..."
"... we're talking 1 and a half million dead so far in Iraq and Afghanistan...and that's being conservative. ..."
"... Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the Empire will be obliged to come in and "help". ..."
"... I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets. ..."
"... Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud. ..."
"... Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot. ..."
"... Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video." ..."
"... A history of Wahhabism which is a problem for the globe; https://ahtribune.com/religion/155-a-history-of-wahhabism.html The KSA, whose ass the empire kisses daily, is the main funder for these clowns. ..."
What's the Wonder my dear?
Duh!
He is in CIA safe house in Al-Anbar.
ISI is looking for this CIA's "Patsy" hide out. Watch this space, he has blood of 14
Pakistani soldiers on his hands via Iran hit. We will end this MOSSAD Agent.
The one hundred thousand people that died in Iraq and Afghanistan due to terrorist
activities would certainly agree that the trillions of dollars that have been spent on the
War on Terror has done very little to remove the spectre of terrorist activities from their
homes, cities and nations.
Sally Snyder: The war on terror is a war of terror and in that sense, though morally
reprehensible and costly, has been success. Regime change and the destabilization of the
Middle East has been the goal.
It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables.
War on terror was the war on an entire civilization. Association/Replacement of the word
terror was just for the public consumption. It's a simple strategy that makes the
aggressors appear like the good guys who are there to defend themselves or the values they
hold.
The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in
this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population
then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the
policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad
intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what
they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same
way.
War on the civilizations yields massive benefits. It's the shortcoming of the model of
the western civilization that it continuously requires massive input that can't be achieved
by the legal means of business and trade.
Auntie Gina the tit ular head of Al-CIA-duh/ Al Qaeda/ ISIS?
{A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership
who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of
titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result
of their personality or experience} ?
They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism.
In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the
evidence - or at least they can make that claim.
So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for
various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand
and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have
half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going.
They don't seem to be having that much success with getting that war going, so I expect
the attacks will go on.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self declared caliph of ISIS, appeared in new video
published today.
Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the
IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold
F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to
Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the
Empire will be obliged to come in and "help".
I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad
or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince
targets.
Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria
or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.
Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed
meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot.
The guy in recent picture looks like one of Rita Katz's actors.
It is a show to threaten Turkey with the same as Sri Lanka (where they refine lots of
Iranian crude...and more...look it up). Many ties to Iran/Sri Lanka....and to Turkey.
Typical nazi thugs....bribes, arson, dynamite...and patsies...in this case maybe mossad
actor? Why not> Cui Bono?
As to the locus of the actor? Paramount? Warner Bros? Probably not. Does it matter?
They're parading a ringer...don't fall for the gag. Erdo won't fall for it either.
Baghdadi has nice toys by his side and not just the AK-47 with the camo bit over the
barrel. It looks like a camo case on night vision gear (or vidcam?) just below that, too.
To quote the Joker: "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"
Ahh a new game of "where in the world is ..." except instead of bin Laden (or his
stand-in) the guest in Pakistan living near a military base we have Baghdadi. Maybe
Baghdadi lives in that area, too. (awaiting his execution for the media and masses). I
doubt it though. I'm thinking Turkey or even Saudi Arabia.
... This move by Baghdadi could backfire in a big way. Got my popcorn ready. Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 29, 2019 5:06:26 PM | 19
It does seem unnecessarily cheeky/ fishy.
If 'they' had fiendishly brilliant plan, why wouldn't they'd just do it and leave it to the
intel wonks to figure out what went wrong?
It's big news in the J-C International media.
Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video."
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and
brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences
agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There
were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign
policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such
is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The
atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons
Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky
killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a
marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised
by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and
diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible
to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the
traitor /
puppet / asset in the
White House
.
The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations
it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report
does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction.
It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton,
and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired
with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what
Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what
amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.
1. Russiagate Without Russia
The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the
report's release, The New York
Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin
intermediaries and the Trump campaign."
Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence
that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian
ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen
began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful
Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect."
If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with,
perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between
Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where
Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to
the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting
with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track
every
known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit
interacted with " the Russians ," or
someone who can be linked
to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic
about implying as much.
2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere
The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation.
During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George
Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its
way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted
for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an
intermediary between
Trump and Russia
.
But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial
connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections.
Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that
is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that
Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators
when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that
sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.
3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election
were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of
Jeff Sessions, then attorney
general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were
brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's
much
ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing
mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention,
Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."
The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions"
in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was
that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an
election-related payoff or "
quid pro quo
" with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents
was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration,
and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting
the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive
to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."
4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow
The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy,
for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's
failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that "
Trump is compromised by
Russia ," " full stop ."
But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen,
the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with
financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov,
spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall
any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office
identify any evidence of direct follow-up."
5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It
The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also
rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News
reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to
Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that
Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow
project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an
acknowledgment
of Mueller's conclusion .
6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"
The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was
widely
dubbed
the
" Smoking
Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part
of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead
from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure
the meeting, because in reality,
as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."
Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist
candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]."
The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste
of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional
efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election
In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and
discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller,
the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed
" the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual
collusion " and even the "
Russian collusion smoking gun ."
Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling
data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian
government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing"
the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated
by proving his financial value to former and future clients.
Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First,
Mueller did not join
media pundits in asserting such about
Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller
offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's
Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently
told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.
8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction
The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia
criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in
its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent
politicians ,
pundits , and
media
outlets promoted it as
credible .
The Mueller report,
The New York Times
noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared
to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent
stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing
the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other
individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the
Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."
The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy
reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later
denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."
After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform
that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that"
the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."
9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks
In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress
about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone
had no communications with WikiLeaks
before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were
trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with
WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.
Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending
trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign,
and Stone -- and came up empty. New
reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted
time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack
Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing,
cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post
reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to
ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."
10. There Was No Cover-Up
The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years;
it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a
cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was
somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence
, while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.
One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does
"not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees,
it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged,
extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the
report's contents.
In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and
media establishments to be a work of
fiction . The American public
was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the
countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated
claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence
in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy
theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.
"... The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with Iran. ..."
"... We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they are ready to pull out from the deal. ..."
"... He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition. ..."
It's hard to foresee how US efforts to bring Iranian oil exports to zero will play out in
future, Vladimir Putin admitted, saying OPEC members should live up to their obligation to keep
output as low as possible if it comes true. Russia has an agreement with the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut their output by 1.2 million barrels per day,
which remains in effect until July of this year, Putin said. But the US waivers – which
gave a host of countries an exemption from the existing anti-Iran sanctions – expire much
earlier, he reminded.
I don't imagine how the global energy market will react to that.
In November, the US re-imposed sanctions on Iran's energy, shipbuilding and banking sectors
in a bid to deprive Tehran of its main sources of revenue. But it simultaneously issued waivers
to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey – the main importers of Iranian crude
– so that they can find alternative vendors of oil.
The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions
beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American
restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with
Iran.
Commenting on the issue, Putin said he hopes the market will eventually avoid the deficit of
Iranian oil and that Iran will still be able to sell it. The comment came on the heels of
conflicting reports that Donald Trump persuaded Riyadh to ramp up oil output this lowering fuel
costs; these reports were denounced by OPEC officials.
Nevertheless, there is "no evidence" that any country is going to withdraw from the
OPEC+ agreement to drop oil outputs, Putin said.
We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they
are ready to pull out from the deal.
He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed
by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to
withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition.
Note an interesting statement of a pro-Isreally lobbyist: "Jewish exceptionalism and the
exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued
evolution of their civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at
large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." ~ by
Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. If this not a descript on
neofascist mentality I do not know what is. just replace Jewish with German.
You will get "German exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of German civilization
require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for
German civilization is good for humanity at large. German civilization is an international
treasure trove that must be protected."
Notable quotes:
"... In his essay, Hill insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should faithfully keep his campaign promise to incorporate West Bank settlements. In fact, according to Hill, the Israeli leader has a "moral right to annex all of the West Bank for a plethora of reasons." ..."
"... First, the Israelis were too "altruistic" in dealing with the Palestinians whom they conquered in 1967. It would been better if the Israelis had regarded the Palestinians as "enemies of the state ..."
"... Second, he implies that Palestinian authority doesn't deserve any better ..."
"... "Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." ..."
"... Third, Israel has "every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires." On top of that, the United States is morally obligated to pay "political and financial reparations" to Israel, supplying it with "more advanced military capabilities" so that it can maintain its "unrivaled military status in the Middle East." ..."
"... Finally, Hill solemnly arrives at his last point. The Palestinians have no moral authority "because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." ..."
"... Hill's extravagant description of "Jewish civilization" in language that recalls the extreme, belligerent nationalists of an earlier age ..."
"... Finally, I'm wondering whether any government that Hill judges to be "better" than another one has a moral right to overthrow the offending regime and then expel its inhabitants. Or is this a one-time deal only for Israelis? By the way, "reparations" are the things that the Germans paid Nazi victims, not the support a nation gives to a weaker ally. Perhaps Hill is telling us more about what should be the servile U.S. relationship to Israel than he intends. ..."
"... This commentary has made me think of an unpleasant experience in my own life. In 1987 I lost the chance for a graduate professorship at a large university in Washington, D.C. after several noted neoconservatives called my prospective employer and insisted passionately that "I was not quite reliable on Israel." If Professor Hill has established the standard of who is "reliable on Israel," then perhaps my accusers were correct. ..."
published
an opinion piece by Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago.
As I read this commentary, I had to wonder whether it was some kind of spoof. It seems to have
been written to poke fun at over-the-top Zionists; and this may indeed be the case -- or so one
can hope.
In his essay, Hill insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should
faithfully keep his campaign
promise to incorporate West Bank settlements. In fact, according to Hill, the Israeli
leader has a "moral right to annex all of the West Bank for a plethora of reasons."
This "plethora of reasons" comes down basically to four.
First, the Israelis were too "altruistic" in dealing with the Palestinians whom they
conquered in 1967. It would been better if the Israelis had regarded the Palestinians as
"enemies of the state : supporters of the Fatah (Palestinian Liberation Organization)
Charter, which basically calls for the end of Jewry in the region." Jewish conquerors should
have immediately annexed the land and made "the people there [who should have been expelled]
the responsibility of their original homeland: Jordan."
Second, he implies that Palestinian authority doesn't deserve any better , in part
because it fails to recognize the inherent inferiority of their people in relation to the
Jewish masters of the West Bank: "Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of
Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their
civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish
civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected."
Third, Israel has "every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas
and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires." On top of that, the United States is morally
obligated to pay "political and financial reparations" to Israel, supplying it with "more
advanced military capabilities" so that it can maintain its "unrivaled military status in the
Middle East."
Finally, Hill solemnly arrives at his last point. The Palestinians have no moral
authority "because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the
basic principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." Additionally, they vote
for terrorist organizations like Hamas to represent them. In short, they are a "security threat
to Israel because a core feature of their identity is a commitment to destroying Israel as a
Jewish state." It is therefore immoral to accept "anti-Semitics devoted to the destruction of
Israel into the domain of Jewish civilization."
Hill does make two serious points: one, that Israelis face an immense security problem and
two, that the Palestinians on the West Bank (and let's not forget Gaza) are angry because of
both the cramped conditions and military control/occupation they've had to endure for decades.
Right and wrong can be found on both sides of this protracted conflict: Palestinians were
defeated and expelled from what is now Israel, while Israelis are being threatened by violence
from the descendants of those whom they defeated and their terrorist allies.
But Hill's extravagant description of "Jewish civilization" in language that recalls the
extreme, belligerent nationalists of an earlier age does nothing to help his cause, nor for
that matter, the credibility of The Federalist. And why exactly should I suppose that every
Palestinian is a terrorist or theocratic fanatic? Understandably, desperate people vote for
extremist parties. I too wish that West Bank Palestinians were more reasonable and more
compromising but I can understand their frustration as an occupied population.
Finally, I'm wondering whether any government that Hill judges to be "better" than another
one has a moral right to overthrow the offending regime and then expel its inhabitants. Or is
this a one-time deal only for Israelis? By the way, "reparations" are the things that the
Germans paid Nazi victims, not the support a nation gives to a weaker ally. Perhaps Hill is
telling us more about what should be the servile U.S. relationship to Israel than he
intends.
But the most childish piece of advice Hill offers, which the Israelis fortunately never
took, is sending West Bank Palestinians to neighboring Jordan. Is Hill aware that Jordan has
over two million
Palestinians , some of whom have been there since 1948, and has taken in a total of 657,628
Syrian refugees as of
early 2018 ? King Abdullah of Jordan has maintained generally friendly relations with both
the United States and Israel, and the last thing he needs is the turmoil and political unrest
that would result from sticking more irate Palestinians, who had been kicked out of their
homes, into his country.
This commentary has made me think of an unpleasant experience in my own life. In 1987 I lost
the chance for a graduate professorship at a large university in Washington, D.C. after several
noted neoconservatives called my prospective employer and insisted passionately that "I was not
quite reliable on Israel." If Professor Hill has established the standard of who is "reliable
on Israel," then perhaps my accusers were correct.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown
College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the
author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents
.
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protιgι of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University
his own alma mater the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Armythese guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) by his own Fellow American soldiers ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
A clown beat a high profile member of the established political class, due most likely to the
voters being disgusted by said political class? Uhmm, where have we seen this before?
Some pretty strange ideas if we are taking about oil. What they are smiling at RAND?
Notable quotes:
"... That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms. ..."
"... of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is all so very sad.. ..."
"... No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian ethos.) ..."
"... I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced. ..."
"... Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give “free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets? ..."
According to RAND the best option to overextend and unbalance is to produce more oil:
Expanding U.S. energy production would stress Russia's economy, potentially constraining its government budget and, by extension,
its defense spending. By adopting policies that expand world supply and depress global prices, the United States can limit Russian
revenue. Doing so entails little cost or risk, produces second-order benefits for the U.S. economy, and does not need multilateral
endorsement.
That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make
a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production
comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields
at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There
is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to
survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms.
The second best option says RAND is to increase sanctions of Russia. This also doesn't make much sense. Russia can produce everything
it needs and it has free access to the world's largest markets, China and India.
The best military options listed by RAND are all useless. All the new weapon systems Russia has revealed over the last two years
are way more capable than anything the U.S. is able to field. If the U.S., as RAND advocates, invest more in certain fields, it will
only be to catch up. That does not impose any new costs on Russia.
... ... ...
In all I find it a bit impertinent to publicly argue for "overextending and unbalancing Russia". Where is the need to do such?
The study demonstrates again that strategic analysis by U.S. think tanks is woefully shallow-minded. The "experts" writing these
have no deep understanding of Russia, or even of the economic-political complexity of the real world.
Four of the eight best options the RAND study found start with the words "Invest more in ...". It is a sign that the foremost
motive its writers had in mind is to grab more taxpayer money. Fine. Give it to them already. Overextending and unbalancing the U.S.
by more abstruse expenditure for weapon systems that do not work will neither hurt me nor Russia.
thanks b.. of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools
for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more
money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is
all so very sad..
@1 steven.. well, as i read you, you are essentially supporting a continuation of the usa pouring endless
money into the military then, regardless the accuracy of the accounts on the new Russian weapons.. do i have that right?
No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think
it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is
the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian
ethos.)
However, since I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think
pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced.
>> The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production
beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers.
Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give
“free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal
subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets?
Of course, the money is not “free”. Depreciating the currency, an inflation tax, shows up in lower-quality goods (like frankenfood—
we cannot afford healthy food any more) and higher prices in everything. But, again, who’s counting? The BLS and the media? Yep.
That completely wrong. You can't prevent the "march of history" even if you understand that it is directed against you.
The collapse of the USSR put in motion forces for the revolution of the results of WWII. And EuroMaydan like previously Baltic
states "Maidans" were the direct result of this dissolution and changed balance of power in Europe with EU now being the
dominant force and the USA dominant geopolitical force.
Still it is true that Ukraine EuroMaydan was the major Putin's defeat and the major victory of the US neocons in general and
Obama as the President in particular. It might well be that this was inevitable as the
trajectory of post-soviet republic is reliable move toward anti-Russian stance as a side effect
of obtaining the independence, but still this was a defeat. It was actually Yanukovich who encouraged and helped to organized and
finance far right forces and the Party in Ukraine. such a pro-Russian President as fame news media in the USA and GB like to
describe him
Poroshenko was the USA SOB. The USA allowed Zelensky to run for office, and allowed him to win. Zelensky is most probably
another USA SOB, although only time will tell. Comedians are usually are people with very high IQ who see the absurdity of
the current life in Ukraine and Poroshenko regime more clearly then others. The question is whether he will be allowed to do
something about it by the USA and EU, who control Ukraine both politically and financially. Biden story of dismissal of the
General Prosecutor of Ukraine (who tried to procedure the firm Biden son got money from ) with ease tells us something about the
nature of the current governance of Ukraine: is is not even a vassal state -- it is a colony.
Nuland success in pushing Ukrainian nationalists to arm uprising against Yanukovich (pissing EU which signed a treaty with
Yanukovich about holding elections, which he would certanly lose, a day before) also can be explained that at this point the USA
controlled vital centers of Ukrainian political power including intelligence agencies, several oligarchs (Poroshenko is one;
Timoshenko is another) and, especially, media. In Ukraine Western NGO have the status of diplomatic missions (with
corresponding immunity), so in no way such a country can be independent in any meaningful sense of this word.
But craziness, aggressiveness and recklessness of the US neocons, who now practice old imperial "might makes right" mode
of operation, gives the world some hope. They most probably will burn the USA geological power it acquired after the
dissolution of the USSR sooner then many expect. Like look at Bolton and Pompeo recent actions.
Notable quotes:
"... "For better or for worse, Putin has put an end to oligarch rule in Russia. Members of Putin's inner circle may be immensely rich, but they know to whom they owe their wealth. By imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin sent a clear message to the all-powerful oligarchs that controlled Russia during former president Boris Yeltsin's time: stay out of politics." ..."
The main feeling about the entire topic of the Ukraine is one of total disgust, a
gradual and painful realization of the fact that our so-called "brothers" are brothers only
in the sense of the biblical Cain and the acceptance that there is nobody to talk to in
Kiev.
Russia likes to fashion itself as a "great power". A real great power should have been
able to insert itself in Ukrainian politics, regardless of any brotherly feelings – you
know, like US did.
As a Russian, I feel disgust at our leaders who squandered all of Russia's historic
influence on the Ukraine and gave up – poor neo-Soviet dinosaurs got completely
outmaneuvered.
@Kiza
Read
Try to understand
Read it again
Try to understand
Read it again
Try to understand
"For better or for worse, Putin has put an end to oligarch rule in Russia. Members of
Putin's inner circle may be immensely rich, but they know to whom they owe their wealth. By
imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin sent a clear message to the all-powerful oligarchs
that controlled Russia during former president Boris Yeltsin's time: stay out of
politics."
Vladimir Golstein, professor of Slavic studies at Brown University. He was born in Moscow
and emigrated to the United States in 1979.
MARC STEINER Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Mark Steiner. Great to have you all with
us. Senator Elizabeth Warren is attempting to make waves with her bold pronouncements during
her bid for this presidency. She's introduced two bills into the Senate. The first is called
the Corporate Executive Accountability Act, which will hold corporate executives of
million-dollar corporations criminally liable for negligence with potential prison time. The
other is called The Too Big to Jail Act, creating a corporate crime strike force. In the wake
of the 2008 meltdown, where there were no criminal prosecutions of note despite ruining
millions of lives in our country, it's led to a roiling discontent in America. Why has it been
so difficult to prosecute bankers and corporate leaders and executives in our country? Why has
the government been so reluctant to do so? And in the unlikely circumstance that Warren's bills
will get passed in the Senate, what would be the result and complications if they did? Joining
us once again to sort through all of this is a man who knows a thing or two about white-collar
crime. Bill Black -- Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City, white- collar criminologist, former financial regulator, the author of
the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, and a regular contributor here at The Real
News. Bill, welcome back. Good to have you with us. Thank you. So this has obviously been
building since 2008. People have been wanting some answer, but I think most folks don't know
really what that means. I've been reading a lot of pieces that are pro and con about what
Elizabeth Warren is suggesting. Let's go through what she's suggesting and get your initial
read and analysis of that.
BILL BLACK Okay. So as you said, there are two different acts. She just rolled one of them
out a couple of days ago and they fit together. One is addressed more directly to the financial
crisis and the other one is prompted by the financial crisis, but broader than it. That second
one would propose to change the requirement to get a guilty verdict to a demonstration of
negligence on the part of officers when they commit the really serious crimes. The other act
would basically provide more resources to go after elite, white-collar criminals.
MARC STEINER In the New York Times, there was a quote from Lanny Breuer who is a Justice
Department, Criminal Division official former head. He said on Frontline, "when we can't prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a criminal intent, then we have a constitutional duty
not to bring those cases." And Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate committee that some
banks would become "too big," that prosecuting them would have negatively affected the economy.
In other words, they've become too big to jail. And then, in Britain there it was said that if
you start prosecuting these people, then it threatens the very foundations of the free
enterprise system. So Bill, what's the problem here?
BILL BLACK So the problem is the people at the top in both the United States and the United
Kingdom. For example, Prime Minister Blair complained at a time when the Financial Supervisory
Authority -- which is referred to over there as the Fundamentally Supine Authority [laughter]
-- was absolutely not regulating anything, that it was outrageous overregulation, and how dare
they treat bankers as potential criminals. We have the combination of Breuer and Holder where
the only issue is, which of them was more moronic on this subject, and it was a dead tie.
MARC STEINER So tell me why do you use the word "moronic?"
BILL BLACK Because it's a family show.
MARC STEINER [laughter]
BILL BLACK So seriously, to go through these things, let's recall that in much more
difficult cases in the savings and loan debacle, we oriented the prosecutions entirely towards
the most elite defendants. And here's the first thing: There is never a problem to the
financial system from prosecuting individual criminals. It is not good for a financial system
to be run by criminals. You strengthen the financial system when you convict and remove
criminals from running the largest bank. [laugher]
MARC STEINER Let me just ask you a question about that. But is the nature of the competition
among banks and the competition to make as much money as humanly possible -- like the scandal
that happened in 2008 that tanked our economy for a while and put millions of people into huge
financial jeopardy -- that seems to me to be the daily workings of those institutions. And the
issue
BILL BLACK No, no.
MARC STEINER Go ahead. Tell me why you say no.
BILL BLACK Banks don't do anything.
MARC STEINER The people in them do, though.
BILL BLACK The bankers do things and bankers shape the institutions, so institutions matter
enormously. And that's the first big thing in a critique of Senator Warren. If anybody is close
to Senator Warren, please send her this link. [laughter] We can really help. She's got exactly
the right ideas, but she isn't an expert in criminology. She wasn't part of the efforts to
prosecute folks successfully that I'm about to describe. We can really, really help her be
effective and we're willing to help any candidate be effective on these issues. Two enormous
institutional changes have made the world vastly more criminogenic. Those changes are: we got
rid of true partnerships where you had joint and several liability. Therefore, it really paid
to make sure that you didn't make a partner, someone who was super sleazy, because then they
could sue you -- not them, not the sleazy partner, but you and it was absolutely no defense
that you had nothing to do with it. Your entire net worth could be taken. That's what a true
partnership was. We got rid of true partnerships throughout the financial world. The second
thing is modern executive compensation. Modern executive compensation not only creates the
incentives to defraud, because you can be made wealthy. It provides the means to defraud. This
allows you to convert corporate assets to your own personal wealth in a way that has very
little risk of prosecution and it allowed you to suborn the controls but also [allowed] the
lower officers and employees to actually commit the fraudulent acts, which are usually
accounting for you in a way that you'd have plausible deniability. We can change both and we
must change both of those incredibly perverse incentives if we want to deal with fraud
successfully. So that's the missing part of her plan and I think she would agree with
everything I've said. Now we have a detailed plan -- we being the bank whistleblowers united --
that we put out two years ago in the election, two and a half years ago. We'll put this on the
website, or at least the links to it for folks who want to know the kind of institutional steps
you need to start changing this. But even with what I've said about this much more criminogenic
environment, it remains true that we could have prosecuted successfully elite officers and
every one of the major participants that committed these frauds. Indeed in many ways it would
have been easier than during the savings and loan debacle, because unlike the savings and loan
debacle, we have superb whistleblowers -- literally hundreds of whistleblowers who can say
explicitly that these frauds occurred. And then we do it the old-fashioned way. That would give
us the ability to prosecute midlevel officials and we can take it up the food chain by flipping
them so that they give us information on the more senior folks. In some cases, our
whistleblowers were right there in the C-suite and that would have included for example, a dead
to rights prosecution against Robert Rubin. That's as senior as you can get at city, a dead to
right prosecution of Mozilo at Countrywide. And we have other institutions like Wells Fargo
where the following happened, so it's easy to look at liar's loans. Liar's loans again had a
fraud incidence of 90 percent -- nine-zero. So the only entities doing liar's loans as a
significant product are fraudulent. Similarly, if they're doing appraisal fraud, extorting
appraisers to inflate appraisals, that only occurs at fraudulent shops. So Wells actually
checked and it's easy to check and that's an important point. The fact that the Department of
Justice never did this, and the banking agencies never did this, is a demonstration that they
didn't want to actually conduct investigations. Here's how you check: so in a liar's loan, you
don't verify the borrower's income, but the borrower signs at the same time a permission that
says you can check this against my I.R.S. forms. And here's a hint: none of us deliberately
inflate our income on our income tax returns because we'd have to pay more taxes. [laughter] So
in the case of both Countrywide and Wells Fargo, we know that senior management who was given
the results said, these kinds of loans, liar's loans, are majority frauds. And we know that
senior management in both cases said, you know what we should do? Many, many more of those.
That is a great criminal case. At J.P. Morgan, we have a great criminal case.
MARC STEINER Let me just interrupt you for a second, Bill. I want people to understand this
because everything you're reading in the press right now, almost every article, whether they
seem to like what Elizabeth Warren is suggesting, or oppose it, have questions about it. Almost
everybody to a person I've read has said, it's almost impossible to prosecute these cases. We
don't have a law to do it, that prosecuting somebody for, as she's suggesting, for negligence
would not get the job done even if her bill ever passed. And so, talk a bit about that though.
I'm very curious since clearly, you're going against the common wisdom that most people would
have and anything they read -- whether it's The New York Times or anywhere else -- that we
don't have the laws to make prosecutions work, which is one of the reasons why we're not
prosecuting people.
BILL BLACK Okay so everybody you've read, has never been involved in these successful
prosecutions.
MARC STEINER No, but if they're journalists and they've studied it, they should know what
they're talking about.
BILL BLACK Seriously? [laughter]
MARC STEINER You would think, right? Well I would hope so. Anyway, but go ahead.
[laughter].
BILL BLACK No, I would not think so. I don't think that at all because otherwise, they would
have talked to people like us who actually did it. So let's go back. Under the same laws in the
savings and loan debacle, we were able to hyper-prioritized prosecutions against the most elite
folks. So we're going after folks in the C-Suite -- the C.E.O.s, the chief operating officers,
the boards of directors, and such. We got over a thousand convictions in these cases, just the
ones designated as major. We did over 600 prosecutions of the most elite of the elite, against
the best criminal defense lawyers in the world with the same laws, and we got over a ninety
percent conviction rate. So can it be done? Of course it can be done. We've shown that it can
be done. Maybe our cases were just simple because it was just savings and loans and these are
big banks. Actually, the prosecutions in many of these cases were easier. The loans in the
savings and loan debacle, were actually much more complicated than home loans. They were
commercial construction loans, $80-90 million dollars at-a-pop often. That's far more complex
to explain to a jury, than a home loan and something as easy as a liar's loan and extorting an
appraiser. In addition, there are massively more whistleblowers. I cannot remember the name of
a significant whistleblower in the savings and loan debacle that was critical to prosecutions.
I'm sure there were a couple, but again we have literally hundreds of whistleblowers who came
forward in this crisis. This crisis occurred because first the Bush administration and then the
Obama administration, were unwilling to investigate, unwilling to prosecute. And here's again
the key. There are about two F.B.I. white-collar specialists per industry in the United States
-- not per firm, per industry. So that means they don't have expertise in individual industries
and they don't walk a beat, or they'd never find it. They only come when there's a criminal
referral. Our agency, our much tinier agency back in the savings and loan debacle, made over
thirty thousand criminal referrals. All of the federal banking regulatory agencies, much bigger
in the great financial crisis, made fewer than a dozen criminal referrals, 30,000 to under a
dozen. That means that the banking regulatory agencies basically ceased functioning in terms of
criminal referrals. And why? That's the third big change and the third big change is
ideological. What you saw is, both under the Republicans and under Bill Clinton -- the
Democratic Party, the due Democrats, the Wall Street wing of the party -- they were simply
unwilling to even think of bankers as criminals. I got out of the regulatory ranks when under
Bill Clinton we were ordered, and I witnessed personally, to refer to the industry as our
customers. Not the American people as our customers, the industry as our customers. Well do you
make criminal referrals on your customers?
MARC STEINER So we're here talking to Bill Black and we've been covering some of the history
of this. What we are going to do is we're going to take a break here and come back with another
segment shortly and really probe into what Elizabeth Warren has said she wants to make into
law. Would that make a difference? Does it fall short and it could lead to more prosecutions?
We're going to come back to that. So you want to hit the next segment with Bill Black and Marc
Steiner. Bill, thank you once again for being with The Real News. It's always a pleasure to
have you with us.
BILL BLACK Thank you.
MARC STEINER And I'm Mark Steiner here for The Real News Network. Take care.
Parachuting Harvard mafia on Russia was a more powerful weapon and led to more destruction of Russian economy then direct
bombardment would
Notable quotes:
"... Concerning the capability of wrecking finances of other states, USA is not a slouch, the most powerful weapon is economic advise. If I interpret news correctly, it were experts of Goldman Sachs that help Greek government to borrow about twice as much as they could handle in the long run. The wreckage in Russia was as impressive, but, alas, hard to repeat, so now it remains to carp about their "bad behavior". ..."
I think that at least some weapon systems that USA makes or develops can be indeed
superior. The most acute loss from the approach of "invest in over-extending and un-balancing
the opponent" is that USA, while powerful, cannot do everything in the same time.
My favorite comparison chart is timeliness of subway systems in major metropolitan areas.
Honestly, I cannot find it, because the search is swamped with the tales of woe of subway
commuters in NYC. As befits the greatest financial center, cultural metropolis etc. etc., NYC
has a transportation system that is comparable in its extend to other metropolitan areas like
Tokyo, Paris or London. However, the performance is uninspiring. On the chart in NYT that I
can't find out at the moment, only Mexico City had a lower percentage of train rides delayed
by less than 10 minutes. I checked Moscow that has a larger subway system (compared to NY)
and which was not on the chart. They pride themselves with frequency of delays that is 5
times smaller than in Paris (50 times smaller than in NYC?). Moscovites can actually plan
their daily lives assuming that their commutes will arrive on time.
This is the most glaring example of a lost opportunity to take care of domestic needs, but
the quality of education, healthcare etc. is mediocre compared with the rest of OECD,
although there is always the southern neighbor that saves USA from being dead last.
Incidentally, NYC subway is not exactly underfunded, instead, it may have the most
irrational management among major metropolitan areas which accurately reflects deficiencies
of American political system. Bloated costs are pervasive across many areas, surely in
military, healthcare and broadly meant policing, and their originate in lobbo-cracy, a
plethora of lobbies grabbing chunks of monies either directly spent or (mis)regulated by the
government. The activity of these lobbies is tightly regulated by elaborate rules, but the
end effect is as if USA were pathetically corrupted (say, half as corrupted as Nigeria).
Concerning the capability of wrecking finances of other states, USA is not a slouch, the
most powerful weapon is economic advise. If I interpret news correctly, it were experts of
Goldman Sachs that help Greek government to borrow about twice as much as they could handle
in the long run. The wreckage in Russia was as impressive, but, alas, hard to repeat, so now
it remains to carp about their "bad behavior".
Sanctions are also powerful when directed at small/medium size economies. Russia, although
disparaged as "a smaller economy than Italy", but in actuality, Italy has "GDP per capity
PPP" that is 40% larger than Russia, and Russia has 2.4 times larger population, so quite a
bit larger economy in terms of "purchasing parity", and the most glaring domestic production
deficiency are fruit and vegetables that, according to latest news, have a number of
potential suppliers that are most glad when they can sell their produce.
There are several crimes for which Poroshenko can be investigated and the USA can do nothing
about: one is Odessa massacre which supposedly was financed by Poroshenko. And Kolomysky was also
involved so it remain to be seen if this issues will be raised. Also the power of far right
forces in Ukraine is such that just raising this question might be equal to treason in the eyes
of Ukrainian nationalists. Because such powerful figures as Avakov and Parubiy were also
involved.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukrainians don’t give a shit about the Poro regime, and are perfectly willing to see it incarcerated. Nor do NatsBatalions really crave to be seen as puppets of DC, Kolo, or Israel, or Brussels. Your take is really simplistic here. ..."
The West is concerned with protecting Poro. Based on WSJ editorials, obsequious legations to
manlet Macron. None of that means jack shit.
DC will have to exercise real power to prevent a cleaning of the house. Word are words.
Rumors are rumors. Z. will act within his mandate and limits placed by rabid opposition. He
will act in keeping with rational need to not fight a US-backed congress, to get shot in the
streets for things too radical. Majority of Ukrainians will be happy to see Poro in prison. DC
can keep this from happening not with words, but with bullets. Strana can claim what it wants,
its claims are patent garbage.
Ukrainians don’t give a shit about the Poro regime, and are perfectly willing to
see it incarcerated. Nor do NatsBatalions really crave to be seen as puppets of DC, Kolo, or
Israel, or Brussels. Your take is really simplistic here.
... ... ...
Z. does have a party. The elections for the Ukranian Parliament is in September. His party,
as a matter of fact, is leading in opinion polls. https://ria.ru/20190416/1552741067.html And it is
doing so together with the party of Boiko.
Logically then, given enough time/space Z. should be in a position to pursue necessary
policies end of the year.
‘The truth is nobody knows what will happen next…There are just too many
parameters to consider, and the real balance of power following this election has not
manifested itself yet’, as The Saker forebodingly warns. The pattern of history
suggests the continent is heading for another world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The course of events in Europe and globally predict things will only get worse. Like The
Saker, ‘I also very much hope that I am wrong.’
A clown beat a high profile member of the established political class, due most likely to the
voters being disgusted by said political class? Uhmm, where have we seen this before?
"... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
"... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
"... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
"... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a
final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to
explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start
the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the
Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that
could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the
Harvard Law School,
are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts
of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in
anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited
from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's
cooperation with it."
Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some
Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or
cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like
Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian
activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale
and basically ineffective.
One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has
generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed
that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the
Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one
as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would
be taking a very hard line against Moscow.
The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an
Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among
them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be
sentenced tomorrow .
Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe
that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association
(NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the
intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy.
Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun
ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence
front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active
membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can
own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to
Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been
charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was
arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed
to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a
Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and
return home.
FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to
registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while
deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to
advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and
assessing."
Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment,
hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the
nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities,
turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal
investigators before and after her guilty plea.
Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where
her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her
in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals
ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to
be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with
FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.
Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the
wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was,
ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to
the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump
Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should
have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law
Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.
Kushner reportedly aggressively
pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United
Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United
Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed
when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice
and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York
City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.
Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser
George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately
determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that
Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli
government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to
do nothing about it.
As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in
American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel.
Noam Chomsky
described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as
compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu
goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama
and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress
trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And
that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."
Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered
security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior
advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access
to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but
recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by
Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.
Looks like she is incompetent beyond her narrow specialty and financial issues. This way she
deprive herself of votes that otherwise belong to her. And what she is trying to achieve ?
President Pence? Come on !
The most aggressive response to the full Mueller report has, naturally, come from the most
liberal wings of the Democratic Party. Last month, I sketched out six chief
Democratic blocs (from most liberal to most moderate): the Super Progressives, the Very
Progressives, the Progressive New Guard, the Progressive Old Guard, the Moderates and
Conservative Democrats. Many of the party's Super Progressives , including U.S. Reps.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York,
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and
Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, are already talking about impeachment, as is a key voice in the
party's Very Progressive bloc, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Zakariah is an interesting example of the immigrant neocon class. Khalilzad is another.
Sebastian Gorka and Varney are others. They like the US, but, if only it were more
aggressive, less federal.
Khalizad told me once that you WASP types have no idea of the real uses of power. Etc.
Gorka may be in the "immigrant neocon class," but as harmful to USA foreign policy as is
Khalilzad, Gorka is not in his league: Gorka is a mediocre-talent, blowhard Wannabe.
--
re Mr. Bolan's critique of US "diplomacy" with Iran: a threshold question I ask is, By
what right?
What right has USA to demand that Iran "change its behavior."
The response from the neocon community was voiced most recently in a discussion titled,
Countering Violent Extremism
https://www.c-span.org/video/?460029-1/us-institute-peace-hosts-forum-combating-violent-extremism
moderated by David Ignatius and including such stellar 'diplomats' as Bushites Madeleine
Albright, Michael Singh and Stephen Hadley: USA created the "international order" post-WWII
and the institutions and values of that "international order" have maintained "peace,
stability and prosperity" in the world ever since. The proof: "there have been no major wars
between European powers since WWII." Democracy and stability are the keys to defeating
"violent extremism" and maintaining the international order.
To maintain that Pax Americana, the US is entitled undermine the sovereignty of-; destabilize
- , and impoverish any and all nations that resist its stabilizing efforts.
"... foreign policy scarcely moves the needle in the US electorate at large so that won't necessarily help Trump nor hinder Bernie except on the outer fringes. Americans are tired of endless wars so the Demotards should generally be favoured on this issue whether or not warranted so long as they play their cards right. ..."
"... US Presidential elections definitely turn on the economy. A slowdown or recession before 11/2020 and Trump is toast. Also, the conversation has clearly moved left on economic inequality and healthcare. Bernie owns these issues and to the extent he can make his way through the primaries he will stand a great chance of unseating Trump. ..."
"... Warren does too but as you stated she is not telegenic nor peronable. Her .01% Native American schtick really hurt her credibility. That was a dumb move. ..."
"... Gabbard is certainly telegenic and hasn't been blackballed as much as she is simply not well-known. She's in the field at the moment. Her chances appear more real farther down the road so running now could be seen as a first step in the eventual process. I doubt Bernie will choose her as VP but who knows? ..."
Russiagate will scarcely matter to most voters by election time 2020. Trump has already
received whatever positives he will receive courtesy of Barr's whitewashing. It is clear
among
a majourity of Americans that Trump obstructed justice and the drip drip of continued
information, hearings, etc will not improve his standing. May not hurt him but definitely
will not help him gain voters at the margins.
Likewise, foreign policy scarcely moves the needle in the US electorate at large so that
won't necessarily help Trump nor hinder Bernie except on the outer fringes. Americans are
tired of endless wars so the Demotards should generally be favoured on this issue whether or
not warranted so long as they play their cards right.
Trump may gain an advantage among more conservative-tinged independent voters if he
continues to work in concert with Russia and Israel on Middle East issues in the sense that
many may see these alliances as promoting strength and peace (whether warranted or not). The
coming deal with China on trade will benefit Trump too...as long as the economy keeps humming
along.
US Presidential elections definitely turn on the economy. A slowdown or recession before
11/2020 and Trump is toast. Also, the conversation has clearly moved left on economic
inequality and healthcare. Bernie owns these issues and to the extent he can make his way
through the primaries he will stand a great chance of unseating Trump.
Warren does too but as you stated she is not telegenic nor peronable. Her .01% Native
American schtick really hurt her credibility. That was a dumb move. Are some of her problems
related to gender bias? Without a doubt. However, as I have long said, the first American
female president will not come from the baby boom. The first American female president will
more likely be a millenial.
Gabbard is certainly telegenic and hasn't been blackballed as
much as she is simply not well-known. She's in the field at the moment. Her chances appear
more real farther down the road so running now could be seen as a first step in the eventual
process. I doubt Bernie will choose her as VP but who knows?
Smiling Joe Biden, the glad handler from Delaware, is nothing more than another neocon
wolf in sheep's clothing. His tenure as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993
resulted in the infamous Anita Hill debacle due to his failure to investigate Ms. Hill's
allegations that then SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her several years
earlier. The result was an embarrassing televised hearing that exposed Biden's
incompetence, along with that of other members of the committee.
In the end, an unqualified right wing legal 'bump on the log' attained a seat as a
Supreme Court justice. Later it was proven that Ms. Hill's claims were true, but the damage
was done. BTW, Biden's penchant for fascists was on display in the Yugoslavian civil
war.
Well known Twitter "bot" Ian56 has published a thread about Biden
. I suggest people give it a looksee. Ian asks in his first entry:
"How the hell does the Oligarchy think they are going to get Creepy Joe Biden past the
public? I mean the average American Joe is extremely dumb & ignorant, but even they are
not that dumb."
I just posted the answer @11. Welcome to 1984. We are now officially at war with
Eastasia!
The good thing about Biden entering the race is that it complicates an already difficult path
to the nomination for the slew of establishment candidates. Biden is not a first choice for
the Democratic intelligentsia. Sample Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight regularly and you'll know
that Kamala Harris and boy-mayor Buttigieg are the favorites. Of course, Trump would eat
either whole.
I'm rooting for Sanders, not because I believe him to be uniquely authentic, but because
he is the one who scares the shit out of the big-ticket donors who guide the Democratic
Party.
Read last week's
front-pager from Jonathan Martin. Guaranteed if Bernie walks away with the primary in a
rout, you'll see prominent Dems back a third party candidate.
The fact that Biden survived the "GropeGate" stuff from a view weeks ago reinforces how the
msm is cooking coverage or withholding it altogether.
Take a look at some video compilations of ol' Gropey-Joe as he is swearing in elected reps
and photo-documenting the occasion.
Irrespective of his Obama-esque policies and status as standard-bearer for TPTB, the guy
is just a straight up creep. And a particularly bad Catholic.
...
I agree that Sanders-Gabbard would absolutely destroy Trump and garner perhaps even more
backing than Obama c. 2008.
I put the scary Socialist angle that is used against Sanders as carrying the same weight
as the whole Crouching Blackman, Hidden Muslim thing that followed Obama during his run.
It is just hard to tell as to how sensible they (Sanders and Gabbard) would be allowed to
be WRT FP.
But Trump had an opportunity to love his country. And he chose orherwise. SAD!
As long as Hunter Biden is still a director
of Burisma Holdings (which includes at least one other unpleasant individual on
the Board of Directors), there is always a chance that elements within or connected to the
Ukrainian government (even under Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Presidency, when he has his back
turned on his fellow politicians), the previous Poroshenko government or Poroshenko himself,
and / or the Maidan Revolution - Crowdstrike, Dmitri Alperovich and Chalupa sisters, we're
looking at all of you - might try to derail any or all of the Democratic Party presidential
candidates in attempts to have Joe Biden declared the official Democrat presidential
contender in 2020. The only question is how openly brazen these people are going to be in
order to save their pet project in Kiev before Ukraine erupts in civil war (and it won't be
civil war in the Donbass area) and the entire country goes down in flames.
As for the rest of the 20 candidates, I would prefer Tulsi Gabbard out of the lot. In this
respect India's general elections, already under way, are going to be important. Gabbard
needs to let go of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva BJP party - her friendship with Modi and
his association with Hindutva are sure to come under scrutiny as will also any connections
she and her office staff have with
The Science of Identity Foundation organisation.
Joe Biden is hard wired to the corruption in the corporate DNC. The tell on this will be when
the media starts to roll him out with the fanfare of a new model car. It is hard to imagine
that he can inspire voters in the primaries. But if the sell goes overboard and it becomes
obvious that the fixers are determined to hand him the nomination; then it will be a real
poke in the eye, and another PSYOPS to grossly demoralize voters in this country. Biden is
about as exciting as a glass of milk that's curdled overnight on the end table by the bed.
The Deep State wanted a MAGA nationalist to counter the challenge from Russia and China and
that's what they got.
Sanders is a sheepdog/stooge that works for the Zionist establishment and Deep State just
like Biden and a few others that are in the race. As much as you wag your 'tale', the stink
remains.
The oligarchy reels out all tired scams over and over, until you want to cry out in anguish.
Don't let them wear you down. Never capitulate. If Biden by some horrible chance has the
winning hand, I'm guessing he will pick Gillibrand for his VP, a centrist of compromising
kind, a shapeshifting clone to remind people of Hillary on some subconscious level. More of
the same will fix us right up, on our journey to virtual political reality, and the end of
humanity. These fucks will use the "little nukes" as they tuck us into bed.
That's a blunder, but it does not matter as much as her blunder with "reparations"
Warren is not telegenic nor personable. Her .01% Native
American schtick really hurt her credibility.
Notable quotes:
"... On facebook in May 2017, "We know that the Russians hacked into American systems to try to influence our election." ..."
"... Warren is crap. There are only two genuine leading candidates, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders that offer some serious prospect of change and either could get there. ..."
re Warren, she is also a "Russia! Russia! Russia!" type.
On facebook in May 2017, "We know that the Russians hacked into American systems to try to
influence our election."
The other day on CNN she said, re the Mueller report, "Three things just totally jump off
the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order
to help Donald Trump. The evidence is just there. Read it, footnote after footnote, page
after page documentation. ..."
Not saying that most other candidates aren't the same.
Thank you spudski #26, Warren is crap. There are only two genuine leading candidates, Tulsi
Gabbard and Bernie Sanders that offer some serious prospect of change and either could get
there. Any change away from the Belligerant faction would be welcome. But it needs a Congress
and a Senate to combine with the change agenda to make a concrete, durable new direction.
That is a daunting task but achievable in these times.
It will be interesting to watch Creepy Joe Biden eat shit but he is just the bait, I look
forward to the switch being revealed. Nothing will surprise me.
For
decades, Washington's favourite means of punishing nations that do not subscribe to its
narrative has been through the imposition of economic sanctions. This has become particularly
apparent with the ongoing and increasing sanctions against Iran, Russia and North Korea. While
sanctions against these governments have garnered headlines for the past few years, in fact,
there are far more sanctions that we rarely hear about.
In 1950, the Office of Foreign
Assets Control was formed as part of the United States Department of the Treasury. OFAC
administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions that are based on U.S. foreign policy and
national security goals. Sanctions have been imposed for the following reasons:
1.) terrorism
2.) international narcotics trade
3.) proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
4.) threats to national security, foreign policy and/or economy of the United States
Economic sanctions, in their most basic form, are defined as the withdrawal of trade and
financial relations with a targeted nation for foreign and security policy purposes. Economic
sanctions can take many forms including freezing of assets, arms embargoes, trade restrictions
and bans, capital restraints, foreign aid reductions and travel bans. According to the Council on
Foreign Relations , the United States uses economic and financial sanctions more than any
other nation.
In the United States, sanctions can originate in either the Executive or Legislative branches
of government. Presidents begin the process by issuing an Executive Order or EO which affords
the president social powers to regulate commerce with a given entity. Under the EO, the
president declares that there is a national emergency in response to "unusual and
extraordinary" foreign threats, for instance, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. In addition to Executive actions,
Congress can also pass legislation to both modify and impose sanctions. Most sanctions programs
are administered by the previously mentioned OFAC, however, other government departments may be
involved including Homeland Security, Justice, State and Commerce.
On the OFAC website interested parties can search for information on federally mandated
sanctions programs. Under each sanctions program there is an exhaustive listing of changes to
the programs, guidelines that must be followed under penalty of law. There is also a listing of
"General Licences" which are issued in order to authorize activities that would otherwise be
prohibited under law. Here is a
list from OFAC showing active sanctions programs and the date of their last update:
OFAC also tracks " Specially
Designated Nationals (SDNs) and Blocked Individuals ". This list contains the names of
individuals and companies that are owned, controlled by or acting on behalf of targeted nations
as well as the names of terrorists and narcotics traffickers that are not affiliated with any
nation. The assets of these SDNs are blocked and American citizens and permanent residents are
prohibited from doing business with them. Here is a very small sampling of SDNs from the PDF
version of the complete listing:
In total, there are 1157 pages listing the names of over 6000 SDNs and blocked individuals.
Here is a specific person showing how difficult it is to ensure that you are not dealing with a
SDN with an unknown number of aliases:
In this case, the SDGT following his name indicates that he is sanctioned under the Global
Terrorism Sanctions Regulations.
OFAC can impose civil penalties on individuals and organizations that act in contradiction to
the imposed sanctions. So far in 2018, there have been two penalties imposed as shown
here
for doing business with Iran:
...and here for doing business with Sudan:
During 2017 , 16 OFAC
Enforcement Actions resulted in penalties of $119,527,845, up substantially from penalties
totalling $21,609,315 in 2016.
Let's now look at the sanctions programs that are currently in place from the Council on
Foreign Relations. Here is a graphic showing the current U.S. sanctions programs and their year
of inception:
With this background on Washington's use of sanctions, let's look at what the World Economic
Forum (WEF) has to say about the effectiveness of
sanctions . The key factor in the effectiveness of sanctions is the size and capacity of
the nation being sanctioned and the power of the sanctioning nation or coalition. Applying
sanctions is a double-edged sword; for instance, in the case of Iran, China and Russia have
stepped in to develop Iran's massive natural gas reserves whereas American oil companies are
banned from investing and profiting from their potential investments in Iran. There are also
longer term impacts of sanctions as show in this quote from the WEF:
" The consequences of this trend are evolving, but they potentially include companies'
"de-globalization". That is, as companies are increasingly forced to think of themselves as
tied to their home governments, they will think twice before investing in certain markets
abroad. Other consequences include changes in traditional foreign trade patterns in line with
new geopolitical alignments. Faced in 2006 with the Russian wine embargo, Georgia had to
look for new markets in the West, where it was headed politically. When in 2014 Russia faced
Western sanctions, it accelerated its rapprochement with China, the one major power that
refused to condemn its actions and shared Moscow's opposition to US global dominance. The outcome of these geo-economic campaigns is not a zero-sum game. The stronger economy
backed by other forms of power can incur more damage on the target country than it will sustain
in return, but it does not always alter the political behaviour of the government to be
"punished". Sometimes sanctions can make that behaviour even more problematic. Ironically,
the true winner may be a third party that jumps into the opening: European countries in the
initial phases of US-Iran sanctions; China in the case of current Western sanctions against
Russia; Russia in the case of the post-Tiananmen Western weapons ban on China; Turkey in the
situation when EU pressure made Russia abandon its South Stream gas pipeline project. " (my
bolds)
In many cases (i.e. Iran, Syria and North Korea), the ultimate desired impact of sanctions is
to create an atmosphere where the targeted government is subjected to "regime change". As well,
sanctions are generally less effective against nations that are adversaries since the sanctions
may create a political climate where there is a stiffening of resolve of the people being
punished by an outside power. We need look no further than the example of Vladimir Putin who,
despite nearly five years of sanctions, still retains the backing of the majority of Russians
as shown here :
One would think that Washington would have concluded that economic sanctions have not
necessarily proven to be an effective means of getting its way in the world and, in fact, may
have punished domestic businesses more than they punished foreign adversaries. The lessons
taught by nearly 70 years of American economic isolation against Cuba are a prime example;
while the sanctions have been painful, they resulted in a nation that has maintained its
resolve in the face of economic difficulties and a leader that outlived and out ruled the
reigns of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I,
Clinton and Bush II.
Tuesday, April 23, 2019US Power
Wielding - Unconventional Warfare and Financial Power Back in December 2008, WikiLeaks
released a relatively little-noted document "
US Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare ". This 248-page, nine chapter
publication was the September 2008 revision of the U.S. Army Field Manual 3-05.130, the
keystone doctrine for Army special operations forces operations in unconventional warfare.
This document defines unconventional warfare as:
" Operations conducted by, with or through irregular forces against a variety of state and
no-state opponents. "
These operations are conducted:
" ...in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, and ongoing or pending conventional
military operations "
Such operations have the following common conceptual core:
". ..working by, with, or through irregular surrogates in a clandestine and/or covert manner
against opposing actors. "
In Chapter 2, the document outlines the instruments of United States national power which help
the United States to achieve its national strategic objectives. These instruments of national
power include diplomacy, information, intelligence, economic, financial, law enforcement and
military. For the purposes of this posting, let's focus on one of these instruments as follows,
the Financial Instrument of National Power . Here's how the document describes this
instrument:
" The financial instrument of national power promotes the conditions for prosperity and
stability in the United States and encourages prosperity and stability in the rest of the
world. The Department of the Treasury (Treasury) is the primary federal agency responsible
for the economic and financial prosperity and security of the United States and as such is
responsible for a wide range of activities, including advising the President on economic and
financial issues, promoting the President's growth agenda, and enhancing corporate governance
in financial institutions. In the international arena, the Treasury works with other federal
agencies, the governments of other nations, and the international financial institutions to
encourage economic growth; raise standards of living; and predict and prevent, to the extent
possible, economic and financial crises." I like that " encourages
prosperity and stability intherest of the world ". That is true, unless you
happen to live in a nation which doesn't share Washington's viewpoint. Just ask people living
in one of many nations who are currently subject to one or another of Washington's long list of
sanctions as shown here (current to
mid-2017):
The document proceeds to note the following:
" T he application of economic or financial incentives is among the most powerful ideas
in the U.S. arsenal of power. Although some U.S. adversaries are irreconcilable to
accommodation with U.S. interests and must be engaged in other ways, many declared or
potential adversaries can be persuaded or dissuaded by economic or financial means to become
declared or potential allies (or at least neutralized) the ability of the United States
government to affect the economic environment is enormous, and it has economic weapons at its
disposal. Unconventional warfare planners must carefully coordinate the introduction and
withholding of economic and financial assets into the Unconventional Warfare Operational Area
(UWOA) with their interagency partners. For example, direct application of USAID grants to
specific human groups can alter negative behaviors or cement positive affiliations. At the
highest levels of diplomatic and financial interaction, the United States Government's ability
to influence international financial institutions -- with corresponding effects to exchange
rates, interest rates, credit availability, and money supplies -- can cement multinational
coalitions for unconventional warfare campaigns or dissuade adversary nation-state governments
from supporting specific actors in the UWOA. " (my bolds)
As you can see, the United States is willing to use financial blackmail including exchange and
interest rate manipulation, credit availability and the supply of money to either persuade
certain nations to join its unconventional warfare campaign or to dissuade adversarial nations
from supporting the "other side" of an unconventional warfare strategy.
Here is a screen capture of page 2-8 of the document outlining how the United States can use
financial incentives to manipulate other nations (ARSOF = Army Special Operations Forces and UW
= Unconventional Warfare, DOS = Department of State, IC = Intelligence Community):
Note this sentence:
" Government can apply unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive
influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms
of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors
."
It is also interesting to note that the document clearly states that the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Bank for
International Settlements are basically functioning as organizations that Washington can use to
drive its global agenda and as yet another tool in America's quest for global hegemony. This
isn't terribly surprising in the case of the World Bank since we find the following on its
website:
In addition, the Treasury Department's
Office of Foreign Assets Control whose sole responsibility is as follows:
". ..to administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and
national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists,
international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and other threats the national security... "
...has a " long history of conducting economic warfare valuation to any Army Special
Operations Forces unconventional warfare. ".
This Army manual, leaked over a decade ago by WikiLeaks, gives us a very clear view of how
Washington uses financial manipulation through its influence on the World Bank, IMF, OECD and
other "global" groups to wage unconventional warfare on any nation that doesn't share its view
of how the world should function and that threatens America's control of the globe. The use of
financial blackmail to bend countries to America's narrative and overthrow nations who do not
succumb to America's wishes is not terribly surprising, however, it is interesting to actually
see one key aspect of Washington's unconventional warfare methodology in print.
Understand this if nothing else, Khalifa Haftar is a terrorist hand puppet of the CIA. He
is a thief, a liar, a thug, and a traitor to Libya. He threatens legitimate Libyans daily and
uses the NSA listening equipment (brought into Libya in 2011) to target any Libya who speaks
his name. Khalifa Haftar would not ever be supported by Russia. This lie has been perpetrated
in the mainstream for years. Now they have stepped up their game and have stated that Russian
mercenaries are in Libya supporting Haftar at the behest of the leader of Russia. Nothing
could be farther from the truth.
The Great Tribes have confirmed to me everything that I have written.
Libya has lost their country to terrorist thugs, their infrastructure has been destroyed,
their wealth has been stolen and continues to be stolen. They have had one million Libyans
killed....
It is the assets and geographical location that they would own. The ruination, destruction
and death of Libya and her people are just acceptable collateral damage to achieve their evil
agenda.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR just released the
third edition of its High-Risk List to the 116th Congress of the United States and the
Secretaries of both State and Defense. In this report, SIGAR identifies the most serious
threats to the American government's $132 billion reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. This
information is of particular interest and importance given that negotiations are currently
underway to end the United States' involvement in Afghanistan, involvement that began on
October 7, 2001, making this the longest military engagement in American history.
The report opens with this rather sobering summary of the past, present and future in
Afghanistan:
" The $132 billion appropriated since 2002 for Afghanistan's reconstruction has been used to
train and equip Afghan security forces, strengthen government institutions, promote the rule of
law, protect women's rights, improve health and education, and stimulate economic development,
among other objectives. Yet the gains from our nation's investment in Afghanistan's reconstruction face multiple
threats: continued insecurity, endemic corruption, weak Afghan institutions, the insidious
impact of the narcotics trade, and inadequate coordination and oversight by donors. While an equitable and sustainable peace agreement in Afghanistan could end much of the
violence that presents the greatest threat to the reconstruction effort, a peace agreement may
bring its own set of challenges to sustaining the gains that the United States, its Coalition
partners, and the Afghan government have achieved over that time." (my bold)
Here is a listing of the eight current high risk areas: 1.) Widespread Insecurity - whether a peace plan is put into place or not, Afghanistan
is likely to continue to experience multiple violent extremist organizations. The Afghan
National Defense and Security Forces require annual funding of between $4 billion and $5
billion to remain viable. 2.) Underdeveloped Civil Policing Capability - The United States has spent more effort
reconstructing the Afghan National Army than on the Afghan National Police meaning that there
is no strategy for a competent civil police force backed by rule of law. Sustaining a national
police force will require significant foreign funding. 3.) Endemic Corruption - Corruption is endemic and forms a significant threat to the
Afghan government. This means that reconstruction programs will continue to be subverted and
are likely to fail. Here is a graphic from Transparency International showing where Afghanistan
lies on the global spectrum when it comes to corruption:
Afghanistan has the world's 9th lowest corruption score as shown on this list: 4.) Sluggish Economic Growth - Afghanistan's legal economy is sluggish and there are
numerous barriers to further economic growth. 5.) Illicit Narcotics Trade - Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium
poppies and had the two highest years of cultivation in 2017 and 2018. Funds from the illicit
drug trade fund the Taliban, corrupt members of the Afghan government, military and police and
also employ 600,000 Afghanis. 6.) Threats to Women's Rights - More than $1 billion has been spent since 2002 to
advance the status of women in Afghanistan but gains made so far are fragile, particularly in
rural areas, and are likely to be unprotected should the Taliban be part of a peace
settlement. 7.) Challenge of Reintegration - The social, economic and political reintegration of
tens of thousands of former fighters back into Afghan society will be difficult, particularly
in light of the nation's weak economy and political uncertainty and distrust. 8.) Restricted Oversight - If a peace settlement includes reductions in foreign
personnel providing oversight on foreign funded programs, problems in the nation will only
increase thanks to high levels of corruption.
Let's look at some examples of where U.S. tax dollars have been spent in Afghanistan. Since
2001, an estimated $780 billion has been appropriated for Afghanistan including war funding,
diplomatic and consular programs, military and embassy construction projects etcetera. Of this
$738 billion or 95 percent of the total was obligated by the Department of Defense.
Reconstruction costs make up 15 percent of total U.S. funds obligated for Afghanistan since
2001 and are broken down as follows: 1.) Security - $83.1 billion (63 percent of the total) to build up Afghan military and
police. In fiscal 2019, 82 percent of the funds appropriated for Afghanistan reconstruction
were spent on assisting the security sector. The "success" of this program can be put into
perspective with
this map showing the areas of Afghanistan that are under control of the Taliban, the
original target of Operation Enduring Freedom: 2.) Governance and Economic Development - $33.9 billion (26 percent of the total). In
fiscal 2018, only 12 percent of the funds appropriated for Afghanistan reconstruction were
spent on improving the nation's economy. 3.) Counternarcotics Programs - $8.9 billion (7 percent of the total).
The remaining 4 percent of reconstruction funds have been spent to support civilian operations,
humanitarian initiatives and in combating society-wide corruption.
Let's close by looking at a few quotes from the report that show just how dire the situation in
Afghanistan still is nearly 18 years after Operation Enduring Freedom began and how unlikely a
peace settlement is likely to change the situation on the ground: 1.)Failure to successfully reintegrate an estimated 60,000 Taliban fighters and
their families, and other illegal armed groups, could undermine the successful implementation
of any peace agreement.
2.) The opium trade plays a significant role in the Afghan economy and it is difficult to
seehow a peace accord between the Afghan government and the insurgency would translate
into the collapse or contraction of the illicit drug trade. The country requires a growing
economy or favorable economic conditions to provide farmers and former insurgents with
legitimate employment and a reliable income to replace opium poppy cultivation. The Afghan
government also needs to pursue major drug traffickers, which it has not done consistently or
successfully. According to the Department of Justice, "certain influential people are above the
law."
3.) Effective policing will require a force that gives citizens the presumption of innocence
rather than anticipating and taking preemptive offensive operations against perceived threats.
U.S. agencies, such as the Justice Department, currently lack the personnel numbers and
para-military strength to accompany Afghan National Police trainees into high-threat
districts.
4.) In a post-settlement environment, depending on the terms of an agreement, there may also
be the challenge of integrating former Taliban fighters into the national security forces and
society. These issues could become more acute should international financial and military
support decline sharply before, during, or after peace talks between the Afghan government and
the Taliban.
Let's close this sobering view of Afghanistan's future with an excerpt from the prepared
remarks given by
the the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John F. Sopko that
accompanied the release of the report:
" If the U.S. reduces its presence in Afghanistan but feels compelled to provide significant
financial support for reconstruction, there may be little choice but to provide a greater
proportion of funding as on-budget assistance. But if that road is taken, assistance should be
conditioned on an independent finding that adequate monitoring mechanisms and internal controls
for the Afghan ministry or multilateral trust fund in question are in place. If those conditions are lacking and assistance is provided anyway, we may as well set the
cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do. I urge Congress to not just think about how much money should be given, but also to think
about how that money will be provided and monitored. If the need for oversight is ignored or
sidelined, both the American taxpayer and the Afghan people will suffer, even with a successful
peace agreement." (my bold)
At the very least, it appears that 18 years of war has accomplished almost nothing when it
comes to meaningful and permanent changes in Afghanistan despite the spending of hundreds of
billions of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars.
Israel and the Ukraine are now the two countries on the planet in which both the
President [Zelenskii] and the Prime-Minister [Groisman] are Jews
just a day after his election Zelenskii is already making all sorts of anti-Russian
statements.
since Zelenskii has no personal power base of any kind, Kolomoiskii will have him do
exactly as he is told and Kolomoiskii can easily be told to behave by the Empire.
Here is a new ruler of Ukraine, the Israeli/Ukrainian/Swiss citizen Kolomoisky
:
The ethnically Jewish Kolomojsky has been the main financier of Azov Battalion
:
The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine.
Azov Battalion -- which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human
Rights Watch and the United Nations -- was incorporated into Ukraine's National Guard.
The New York Times called the battalion "openly neo-Nazi," while USA Today, The Daily
Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members' proclivity for swastikas,
salutes, and other Nazi symbols
Looks like tail wags the dog -- CIA controls the US foreign policy and in the last elections
also played active role in promoting Hillary. A the level of top brass we have
several people mentioned by Giraldi who are probably as dangerous as Allen Dulles was. Brennan
is one example.
The parade of rogues that Philip describes is really
alarming. Each with agenda that directly harms
the USA as a country promoting the interest of military-industrial complex and neocon
faction within the government...
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter. ..."
"... Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level would appear to be fully on board with that effort. ..."
"... Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was revealed in the press two weeks ago. ..."
"... Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of totally bereft of his senses. ..."
"... Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting attended by Pompeo, he told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent (one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down. ..."
"... And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration. Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been some Russian recruitment of Trump people. He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
"... Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan, and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time. ..."
"... Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia. ..."
"... The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like the British MI5. The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words. ..."
"... As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants of the Deep State. ..."
"... The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary to its purposes. ..."
"... The CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service, long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has done. ..."
"... The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. ..."
"... While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies, it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos, the bankster mafiosi. ..."
"... I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments. The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too well the truth about the Clintons and Obama. ..."
"... Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally oblivious to their own uselessness. ..."
"... How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries. On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN. ..."
"... Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began. ..."
"... Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside the group consensus. ..."
"... So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to face. ..."
"... Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set himself up for success in the next elections. ..."
"... What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink" in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles' thought pattern & subsequent action. ..."
"... To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically sworn in on a bible. ..."
Long ago, when I was a spear carrying middle ranker at CIA, a colleague took me aside and said
that he had something to tell me "as a friend," that was very important. He told me that his wife
had worked for years in the Agency's Administrative Directorate, as it was then called, where she
had noticed that some new officers coming out of the Career Trainee program had red tags on their
personnel files. She eventually learned from her boss that the tags represented assessments that
those officers had exceptional potential as senior managers. He added, however, that the reverse
appeared to be true in practice as they were generally speaking serial failures as they ascended
the bureaucratic ladder, even though their careers continued to be onward and upward on paper. My
friend's wife concluded, not unreasonably, that only genuine a-holes had what it took to get promoted
to the most senior ranks.
I was admittedly skeptical but some recent activity by former and current Directors and Acting
Directors of CIA has me wondering if something like my friend's wife's observation about senior management
might indeed be true. But it would have to be something other than tagging files, as many of the
directors and their deputies did not come up through the ranks and there seems to be a similar strain
of lunacy at other U.S. government intelligence agencies. It might be time to check the water supply
in the Washington area as there is very definitely something in the kool-aid that is producing odd
behavior.
Now I should pause for a moment and accept that the role of intelligence services is to identify
potential threats before they become active, so a certain level of acute paranoia goes with the job.
But at the same time, one would expect a level of professionalism which would mandate accuracy rather
than emotion in assessments coupled with an eschewing of any involvement in the politics of foreign
and national security policy formulation. The enthusiasm with which a number of senior CIA personnel
have waded into the Trump swamp and have staked out positions that contradict genuine national interests
suggests that little has been learned since CIA Director George Tenet sat behind Secretary of State
Colin Powell in the UN and nodded sagaciously as Saddam Hussein's high crimes and misdemeanors were
falsely enumerated.
Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who
have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than
anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war
and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter.
Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money
flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being
made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed
by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority
of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been
sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been
selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's
defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level
would appear to be fully on board with that effort.
The most recent inexplicable comments come from the current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, speaking
at the Aspen Institute Security Forum. He began by asserting that Russia had interfered in the U.S.
election
before saying that the logic behind Russia's Middle Eastern strategy is to stay in place in Syria
so Moscow can "stick it to America." He didn't define the "it" so one must assume that "it" stands
for any utensil available, ranging from cruise missiles to dinner forks. He then elaborated, somewhat
obscurely, that "I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think
they find that something that's useful."
Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting
ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged
in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It
just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been
fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate
has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency
to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors
which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was
revealed in the press two weeks ago.
Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of
totally bereft of his senses. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee back in May,
he suggested that some Trump associates might have been recruited by the Russian intelligence service.
He testified that
"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions
between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about
because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether
or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals."
In his testimony, Brennan apparently forgot to mention that the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs
on American citizens. Nor did he explain how he had come upon the information in the first place
as it had been handed over by foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and Estonians,
and at least some of it had been sought or possibly inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first
place. Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian
operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected,
which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate started.
Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting
attended by Pompeo, he
told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials
should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent
(one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down.
A lesser known former CIA senior official is
John McLaughlin,
who briefly served as acting Director in 2004. McLaughlin was particularly outraged by Trump's recent
speech to the Boy Scouts, which he described as having the feel "of a third world authoritarian's
youth rally." He added that "It gave me the creeps it was like watching the late Venezuelan [President
Hugo] Chavez."
And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied
to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration.
Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose
show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been
some Russian recruitment of Trump people.
He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify
vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr.
Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr.
Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
I and others noted at the time that Putin and Trump had never met, not even through proxies, while
we also wondered how one could be both unwitting and a recruited agent as intelligence recruitment
implies control and taking direction. Morell was non-plussed, unflinching and just a tad sanctimonious
in affirming that his own intelligence training (as an analyst who never recruited a spy in his life)
meant that "[I] call it as I see it."
One could also cite Michael Hayden and James Clapper, though the latter was not CIA They all
basically hew to the same line about Russia, often in more-or-less the same words, even though no
actual evidence has been produced to support their claims. That unanimity of thinking is what is
peculiar while academics like Stephen Cohen, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, and John Mearsheimer,
who have studied Russia in some depth and understand the country and its leadership far better than
a senior CIA officer, detect considerable nuance in what is taking place. They all believe that the
hardline policies current in Washington are based on an eagerness to go with the flow on the comforting
inside-the- beltway narrative that paints Russia as a threat to vital interests. That unanimity of
viewpoint should surprise no one as this is more of less the same government with many of the same
people that led the U.S. into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They all have a vested interested in the
health and well-being of a fully funded national security state.
And the other groupthink that seems to prevail among the senior managers except Pompeo is that
they all hate Donald Trump and have done so since long before he won the election. That is somewhat
odd, but it perhaps reflects a fear that Trump would interfere with the richly rewarding establishment
politics that had enabled their careers. But it does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of CIA
employees. Though it is admittedly unscientific analysis on my part, I know a lot of former and some
current CIA employees but do not know a single one who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly all voted
for Trump.
Beyond that exhibition of tunnel vision and sheer ignorance, the involvement of former senior
intelligence officials in politics is itself deplorable and is perhaps symptomatic of the breakdown
in the comfortable bipartisan national security consensus that has characterized the past fifty years.
Once upon time former CIA officers would retire to the Blue Ridge mountains and raise Labradors,
but we are now into something much more dangerous if the intelligence community, which has been responsible
for most of the recent leaks, begins to feel free to assert itself from behind the scenes. As Senator
Chuck Schumer
recently warned "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways
from Sunday at getting back at you."
In jumping this fascist nihilist shark, the groupthinkers have closed themselves off from the
logical conclusion to their viewpoint, which is final annihilation.
Brennan, Morell, and Pompeo should better find ways to justify their salaries: the U.S. has
suffered the greatest breach in cybersecurity on their watch:
" an enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members
of Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump, but t he media avoids
providing nightly updates about these 5 spies that have compromised Congress ."
"In total, Imran's firm was employed by 31 Democrats in Congress, some of whom held extremely
sensitive positions on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House
Committee on Foreign Affair s."
Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and
blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan,
and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time.
And back to reality we have VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the
United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking
came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia.
That is war, World War Three and it would seem now that Congress is marching that way, but
the report below hold the key to fighting back.
One of the VIPS is William Binney fomer NSA Technical Director, an important expert. leading
the group is Ray McGovern with some whit and grace, well yes how about some sanity, to which humor
is important to the insight and to stay in the sights of what is clever thievery and worse. Much
worse,
and there is a twinkle in the eye when realize that it is straight forward.
And Congress could stop it tout sweet, but well old habits but they have taken an Oath of Office,
so, so what, yeah they did go after Bernie, so will you challenge your elected officials, either
do their sworn duty or resign, for what this sanctions bill against Russia and Iran is a declaration
of war, not only against Russia and Iran, but a declaration of war against the United States.
for there is no reason to do this against Russia when indeed there are great opportunities to
get along, but war is the insanity as it is sedition and treason. Tell them that,
I wonder if groupthink exists.
In any organisation people know quite well why the organisation exists, what the threats are to
its existence.
If they think about this, I wonder.
The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like
the British MI5.
The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words.
If indeed Trump changes USA foreign policy, no longer trying to control the world, the CIA is
obsolete, as obsolete as NATO.
" but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA
had any say in the matter."
Not to defend the CIA, but didn't Rumsfeld, doubt the enthusiasm of the CIA for providing the
slanted, bogus, "sexed up" intelligence the Executive required to make its "destroy Iraq now"
case ? So Rumsfeld therefore set up an independent intelligence agency within the Defence Dept
to provide/create the required "intelligence" ?
I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find
that something that's useful."
Yeah, because that's what resource-constrained countries with limited ability to tap the global
capital markets do. Methinks Mr. Pompeo is projecting his and the neocons' fantasies on the Russians.
As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor
decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep
State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who
make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants
of the Deep State.
Being resistant to jargon and catch phrases it is only slowly that I have accepted that "Deep
State" is not entirely pretentious waffle when used to describe aspects of the US. However I may
not be your only reader PG who would appreciate a clear explanatory description of the American
Deep State and how it works.
Here are some suggested parameters.
The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in
the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal
of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary
to its purposes.
And its origins imply that it is not just one in a number of major influences ln government or
those who vote for it.
So one has to acknowledge that in the US the Deep State has to be different in the important
respect that levers of power are observably wielded by lobbies for the aged, gun owners and sellers,
Israel, Wall Street, bio fuels, sugar and other ag, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, the arms industry,
Disney and other Hollywood and media, health insurers and the medical profession, and I could
go on.
These are all relevant to legal events like votes on impeachment or to hold up appointments.
The CIA and FBI together completely united (and note how disunited 9/11 showed them to be) wouldn't
remotely approach the old Turkish Deep State's ability to stage a coup. Are all of the putative
elements of the Deep State together today as powerful as J.Edgar Hoover with his dirt files on
everyone? (A contrast and compare exercise of today's presumed Deep State configuration and modus
operandi with the simpler Hoover days might shine some light on who does what and how today. And
how effectively).
To avoid lack of focus can a convincing account of the US Deep State be best given in terms
of a plausible scenario for
getting rid of Trump as President and/or
maintaining the lunacy and hubris which has the US wasting its substance on totally unnecessary
antagonistic relations with China and Russia and interference in the ME?
I would read such accounts with great interest. (Handwavers need not apply).
Of course the US Deep State must hate Russia. First, Jews have a very long history of hating Russia and Russians. That never changed. The
USSR was not Russia; the USSR was Marxism replacing Russia. Jews tended to love that. Rich Jews
from across the world, from the US and the UK of most interest to us, sent money to support the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Russia managed to survive the USSR and is slowly coming back around to Russian common sense
from the Christian perspective. Neither Jews nor their WASP BFFs can ever forgive that. They want
Russia to act now to commit cultural and genetic suicide, like Western Europe and the entire Anglosphere
are doing.
@polistraThe CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service,
long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has
done.
The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence
Presidency.
While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies,
it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos,
the bankster mafiosi.
But doing so would mean a voluntary end to playing the role of Sauron, determined to find and
wear the One Ring to Rule Them All. The average Elite WASP, and his Jewish BFF, definitely would
prefer to destroy the world, at least outside their gated compounds of endless luxury, than to
step down from that level of global domination.
@Wizard
of Oz Wiz Here is an article I did on the Deep State two years ago. It was one of the first
in the US media looking at the issue. It would have to be updated now in light of Trump, but much
of what it states is still more-or-less correct.
But we need to make certain that your use of the word 'mafiosi' does not lead anyone to assume
that group has more than a handful of Italians. Jews, WASPs, and continental Germanics each will
outnumber Italians by at least 30 to 1.
I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are
Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments.
The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans
who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too
well the truth about the Clintons and Obama.
Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the
Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success
balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead
and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally
oblivious to their own uselessness.
Well before he was elected I had a letter delivered to President Trump in which I outlined in
detail what would happen to him if he did not immediately purge the CIA of these assholes. I know
that at least some people on his staff read it but, of course, my advice was ignored. Trump has
paid dearly for not listening to an ordinary CIA guy who wanted to give him a reality brief on
those vicious snakes.
Historical facts teach humanity that Anglo-Saxon group of Nations was built on slavery, thuggery
and theft of other peace loving Civilizations.
We Slavs are the New "niggers", hate is the glue that holds you "toGether".
People of color have been successfully conditioned and practice it as well.
Time will tell how well it holds when balloon bursts and 99% gets called to serve as cannon fodder.
Terrorizing UNARMED and WEAKER is not true test of "superiority" and "exceptionalism".
Tiny, extremely tiny minority of Anglo-Saxons and Satraps understand this.
How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they
had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries.
On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed
to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the
DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN.
Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes
of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then
and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because
of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in
the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption
and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began.
It probably does as do group psychoses and group fantasies.. Anyone who's ever served in a beuaracracy
knows that groupthink exists.
Take a bunch of mediocre minds. And, they do exist, as Garrison Keiler once famously made a
joke out of with his line Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career
advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside
the group consensus. If everyone is wrong, then there is safety in the group. After all, if they
are wrong, so was everyone else in the organization. Thus they are immune to attack and censure
for being wrong. But if someone takes a position outside of the group consensus, that can be a
career-ending move if they are wrong, as now everyone else will be in the I-told-U-So camp. And
even if they are correct, they will still be hated and shunned just for being the person who pointed
out to the group that they are wrong.
So, you take your typical average mind, and not only do they not have any great insights of
their own, but they tend to stick to the group out of sheer survival and then when you take a
mass of these mediocre minds you have 'groupthink'.
If only Trump would really clean the swamp - particularly the neo-cons and other traitors and
globalists. One can dream ....
What we've learned from Trump is that 'Draining the Swamp' will
take more than an individual. It will take a political movement.
One sees this on the fringes of politics. Someone gets the idea of running for President, and
they point out all that is wrong. But, they focus only on their own campaign, their own goal,
and they thus gloss over the fact that they'll be outnumbered and powerless even if they win.
Seen this often on the Left. The most recent example is Bernie Sanders. Likewise, had Bernie
been elected President, he too would face an entrenched establishment and media with only a small
fraction of the Congress supporting him.
Change has to be built from the bottom up. There are no shortcuts. Electing a Trump, or a Nader
or a Bernie does not lead to real change. Step one is to build the political movement such that
it has real voting block power and which has already won voting majorities in the legislature
before the movement achieves the election of a President.
What Trump has needed to be doing for this first two years is to form clear divisions that
he could then take to his voters in the mid-term elections. He's needed to lay out his own agenda.
So what if he loses votes in Congress? He then takes that agenda back to the voters in 2018 with
a nationwide slate of Congressional candidates who support that agenda and runs a midterm campaign
asking the voters to help him drain that swamp.
So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who
cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless
war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support
me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer
to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to
face.
Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set
himself up for success in the next elections.
It is a serious error to consider President Trump "naive."
What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink"
in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles'
thought pattern & subsequent action.
To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by
the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically
sworn in on a bible.
Mr. Trump is neither naive nor stupid. Sheldon Adelson would not donate $millioms to any POTUS
wannabe who could not effectively lead the American Groupthink tradition. Subsequently, the political
horror show is brought to you in the understandable form of the perpetually elusive Deep State
which gets annual Academy Award.
CIA is actually a state within the state as Church commission revealed and it has an immanent tendency to seek control over "surface
state" and media. In other words large intelligence apparatus might well be incompatible with the democratic governance.
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds. ..."
"In the long run, the CIA can't deceive the Chinese government without also deceiving, in some way, the American public. This
leaves us with an obvious problem: Should we believe anything the CIA says?" [RealClearWorld].
"It's a tough question for a democracy to answer. Trust is built on the tacit agreement that the "bad things" an agency does are
good for the country.
If the public believes that that is no longer the case if it believes the agency is acting out of self-interest and not national
interest then the agreement is broken. The intelligence agency is seen as an impediment of the right to national self-determination,
a means for the ends of the few."
Huey Long <
RE: Hall of Mirrors/Believing the CIA
The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds.
I think the reason folks like Manning, Snowden
and Assange are so reviled by the agency is because they are a threat to the CIA's reputation more than anything else.
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'rιgime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'rιgime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the inherently intractable security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the inherently intractable security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'rιgime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'rιgime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the inherently intractable security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The publicly available
evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the very dangerous late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take genuine audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the Anglo-American 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'rιgimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' aka 'suitcase nuke' to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'rιgime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would rather naturally try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his accurate but irrelevant point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot yet at least be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the inherently intractable security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were apparently at least cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty if not always
judgement I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson clearly in collusion with
Steele was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
which Steele may also have had a hand in organising I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' whatever that is to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released
a wide-ranging plan to fix the U.S. college system, with proposals including making two-year
and four-year public college free and expanding the size and scope of the federal Pell Grant
program. And one particularly radical idea is sure to grab the attention of young people around
the country: wiping out student loan debt for the vast majority of American borrowers. "The
time for half-measures is over," Warren, one of many politicians and public figures hoping to
secure the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, wrote in a post published Monday on Medium.
"My broad cancellation plan is a real solution to our student debt crisis. It helps millions of
families and removes a weight that's holding back our economy." Last year, outstanding student
debt in the U.S. topped $1.5
trillion , a growing financial burden that Warren argues is "crushing millions of families
and acting as an anchor on our economy." "It's reducing home ownership rates," she wrote. "It's
leading fewer people to start businesses. It's forcing students to drop out of school before
getting a degree. It's a problem for all of us." To address the problem, Warren is suggesting
what she calls a "truly transformational" approach: wiping out $50,000 in student loan debt for
anyone with a household income below $100,000. People with student loans and a household income
between $100,000 and $250,000 would receive substantial relief as well. At that point, "the
$50,000 cancellation amount phases out by $1 for every $3 in income above $100,000," Warren
wrote.
"Yet so desperate are America's neo-liberals, as well as neo-conservatives to topple
democratically twice –elected President Maduro that they are pulling off their bright
smiling wholesome masks that are the public face of globalization to reveal the snarling,
cowardly, crazed little creeps behind them.
"We saw this phenomenon last week when Fareed Zakaria, the Golden Pin-Up Boy of global
liberalism, used his two supposedly most influential platforms – his talk show on CNN
and op-ed page access in The Washington Post to call for the immediate toppling of Maduro and
then for a full superpower confrontation with Russia as well."
The article is actually quite fitting for Easter--Global death of the fealty to the Outlaw
US Empire while those nations seek resurrection and far better prospects with BRI/EAEU.
National leaders unwilling to see the Devilish/Satanic nature of the Outlaw US Empire that's
so evident for all to see must think hard on what they're partnering with. If they continue
their partnership, then their citizenry will do the proper thing and exorcize such leaders
from their body politic. Globally, there's only one entity that's similar in nature to the
Outlaw US Empire--Zionistan--two equally, evilly possessed threats to humanity.
"Interior's Bernhardt worked closely on matters he promised to avoid"
'New disclosures of the secretary's schedule add to questions surrounding his ties to past
lobbying clients, including a California water district'
By ANNIE SNIDER...04/21/2019...06:57 AM EDT
"Interior Secretary David Bernhardt began working on policies that would aid one of his
former lobbying clients within weeks of joining the Trump administration, according to a
POLITICO analysis of agency documents -- a revelation that adds to the ethics questions
dogging his leadership of the agency.
Bernhardt's efforts, beginning in at least October 2017, included shaping the department's
response to a key portion of a water infrastructure law he had helped pass as a lobbyist for
California farmers, recently released calendars show. The department offered scant details at
the time about meetings that Bernhardt, then the deputy secretary, held with Interior
officials overseeing water deliveries to the farmers, leading many observers to believe he
was steering clear of the issues he had previously lobbied on.
But newly disclosed schedule "cards" prepared by Interior officials for Bernhardt show
more than three dozen meetings with key players on California water issues, including
multiple lengthy meetings on specific endangered species protections at the heart of his
previous work. Those appointments were only vaguely identified on his official calendars.
Interior's inspector general is probing whether Bernhardt violated ethics rules by working
on policies he had pushed as a lobbyist for the Westlands Water District, a job that earned
his former firm more than $1.3 million in the five years before he returned to government
service.
Bernhardt's ethics agreement barred him from participating in any "particular matters"
involving Westlands until August 2018, one year after he arrived at the agency, and it was
only after that recusal period ended that then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly tasked
him with working on California water issues. But the newly released information shows that
Bernhardt had weighed in on discussions around Westlands' policy priorities for nearly a year
by that point."...
That's a third Warren blunder after reparations blunder and Indian heritage blunder. She
might be out of the race soon...
Does not she understand that impeachment of Trump means President Pence? What is idiotic
statement. She is definitely no diplomat and as such does not belong to WH.
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Friday called for lawmakers to start impeachment proceedings
against President Trump, saying he obstructed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation
into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Warren became the first of the Democratic presidential candidates to unambiguously call
for impeachment proceedings. Most senior Democrats in Congress have stopped far short of it
following the delivery of Mueller's 448-page report.
"The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside
political considerations and do their constitutional duty,'' the Massachusetts Democrat said
on Twitter. "That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the
President of the United States."
Also Friday, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for an
unredacted version of Mueller's report as Congress escalates its investigation. Trump and
other Republicans dismissed the report's findings.
The redacted version of Mueller's report details multiple efforts Trump made to curtail a
Russia probe he feared would cripple his administration. While Mueller declined to recommend
that Trump be prosecuted for obstruction of justice, he did not exonerate the president, all
but leaving the question to Congress.
The report stated, "If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that
the President did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she doesn't support impeachment without bipartisan
backing because it would be too divisive for the nation She signaled she wanted the House to
continue to fulfill its constitutional oversight role.
''We believe that the first article -- Article 1, the legislative branch -- has the
responsibility of oversight of our democracy, and we will exercise that,'' she said in
Belfast on Friday.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee,
said, ''It now falls to Congress to determine the full scope of that alleged misconduct and
to decide what steps we must take going forward.'' He expects the Justice Department to
comply by May 1.
On Twitter Friday, Warren said the report "lays out facts showing that a hostile foreign
government attacked our 2016 election to help Donald Trump and Donald Trump welcomed that
help. Once elected, Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into that attack."
She said Mueller "put the next step in the hands of Congress," adding in another tweet
that "[t]o ignore a President's repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own
disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would
suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in
similar ways."
According to a Warren aide, the senator started to read the Mueller report Thursday during
a plane ride back to Boston following campaign stops in Colorado and Utah.
Warren, according to the aide, felt it was her duty to say what she thought after reading
the report but does not plan to emphasize impeachment on the campaign trail.
Mary Anne Marsh, a Boston-based Democratic strategist who is not connected to any
presidential campaign, said Warren has been the first Democratic candidate to stake out
numerous policy stances during the campaign. Her impeachment statement will force everyone
else running for president to take a position, Marsh said.
"More often than not the field is reacting to her positions," she said.
Warren's call for impeachment proceedings, Marsh said, "shows she's willing to lead."
"She's willing to make the hard calls," Marsh said.
After the Mueller report's release, Trump pronounced it ''a good day'' and tweeted ''Game
Over.'' Top Republicans in Congress saw vindication in the report as well. On Friday, Trump
was even more blunt, referring to some statements about him in the report as "total
bullshit."
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said it was time to move on and said Democrats were
attempting to ''vilify a political opponent.'' The California lawmaker said the report failed
to deliver the ''imaginary evidence'' incriminating Trump that Democrats had sought. ...
Now, liberals are pressing the House to begin impeachment hearings, and the issue is
cropping up on the presidential campaign trail.
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who is running for president, was asked
Friday if Trump should be impeached as he made an appearance at a Stop & Shop union
picket line in Malden .
"I think that Congress needs to make that decision," he said. "I think he may well deserve
it, but my focus, since I'm not part of Congress, but I am part of 2020, is to give him a
decisive defeat at the ballot box, if he is the Republican nominee in 2020."
On Friday, Julián Castro, a former housing secretary running for the Democratic
nomination, said he thought "it would be perfectly reasonable'' for Congress to open
impeachment proceedings.
Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is running for president, told MSNBC on
Thursday that she also thinks Mueller should testify. When asked about impeachment
proceedings, she told that outlet, "I think that there's definitely a conversation to be had
on that subject, but first I want to hear from Bob Mueller."
Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator running for president, was asked about impeachment
during a campaign trip to Nevada. Specifically in regard to impeachment, he said, ''There's a
lot more investigation that should go on before Congress comes to any conclusions like
that.''
In the House, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is now signed on to an
impeachment resolution from fellow Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
But senior leaders remain cool to the idea.
Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the number two in the House Democratic leadership,
told CNN on Thursday, "Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is
not worthwhile at this point." However, Hoyer quickly revised his comments, saying "all
options are on the table."
"[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western
thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that
human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of
life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.
Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that
human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control
and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and
self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades Whereas Socialism, and even
capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said
to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings
itself at his feet"
? George Orwell
BRH, in his perversity, supports Capitalism/Communism and the growth of the Gay Disco
Global State. He should be with us but that would mean discarding this Holy of Holies, World
War Two American military triumphalism. He jus can't, the Truth be damned.
Americans really do not understand who Hitler was, and that is EVRYONE I know. And they
never understood, even in the 50s. But the British understand, but made a deal with the
devil.
But let's start everything in order.
For the dualistic consciousness of Americans, the natural desire is to belittle the role
of the USSR in the defeat of Hitler's Germany, since this does not fit their concept of "good
guys vs bad guys " – if the Russians are the bad guys, then why did they fight along
with the good guys against the bad guy Hitler?
In addition, in the process of changing generations, they are more and more inclined to
the view that Hitler was not so bad, and their fathers and grandfathers put a lot of
accusations against him, just as America puts many accusations on those she desire to bomb
today.
Of course, this should not apply to American intelligentsia, but, as I understand it, it
is difficult to live in a society that professes these or other errors en masse, and not to
allow these errors to penetrate your brain and soul, even if you absolutely know that these
errors are invented by you propaganda.
Especially if these errors are invented by your own propaganda.
Hitler was vilified publicly but glorified privately by the elite (Allen Dulles in
particular). He provided a valuable service by providing the test bed for theories and
practices (eugenics, wholesale population controls and disruptions, sophisticated propaganda
techniques, and perpetual full-spectrum wars) which have since been perfected and are being
implemented much more discreetly and effectively now.
"... Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage. ..."
"... Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg. ..."
"... On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed. ..."
"... IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position. ..."
"... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
"... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation. ..."
"... both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
"... It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team. ..."
"... The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump. ..."
"... In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end. ..."
Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would
explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny
the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage.
Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying
other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to
cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg.
On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which
mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg
began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced
as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed.
Such a scenario would explain why Sater, Mufid, Steele and apparent attempts at entrapment got buried. And, with obstruction
still hanging over Trump's head, the borg's leverage is still there if needed.
IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO
apparatus
to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the
new boss same as the old boss.
It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the
Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as
per usual smokey mirrors and deception.
I live you with this one thought.
Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and
the Russian Federation.
THe IRGC being labeled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce
a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence
conference.
Special Relationship? All it's possible for the outsider to see in that are questions.
The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in repelling the Russian threat. Also, along with France, helps with any R2P
that needs doing. That's a consistent if by now bedraggled story.
But Europe, including the UK, is now going hell for leather at the "European Army" project. How long will it be before that
becomes a respectable independent force? A decade?
In the meantime all recognise that the US is the only significant European defence force. It's not just the money. The US ties
the European components of NATO together and provides the big reserves of men and equipment. Even Mr Blair accepts that reality.
I've been listening to his talk at the Munich Security Conference.
So the US is to hold the fort in Europe while the Europeans prepare to supplant NATO? Do the Europeans plan to be a military
superpower themselves eventually?
And where does Trump fit in? Trumpphobia is as strong as Russophobia in the UK and stronger than Russophobia in continental
Europe. So Trump is supposed to sit there placidly defending Europe until the Europeans are strong enough to dispense with the
American alliance, and that while the Europeans, including the UK, throw mud at him?
Neither in neocon terms nor in terms of sensible defence are these various stories compatible. Is there any sort of coherent
defense policy in this respect on either side of the Atlantic? Or are they all just winging it and ignoring the inconsistencies?
Bravo ! One word "Bravo!!!" This is a very good, probably the best so far in depth analysis of Mueller's final report. And your phase "disingenuous and dishonest" is like a stamp on Mueller's hatchet job:
A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report
is a failed hatchet job.
Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released.
It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.
The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be
filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump.
In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in
mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction,
but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does
not end.
IMO, that is the biggest evidence that the whole thing was an attempt at facilitating a political power grab instead of a serious
criminal investigation.
Here we need to look at the candidate political history, their actions before the election. "Trump scam" like "Obama
scam" was based on the fact that they do not have political history, they were what Romans called "Tabula
rasa". A "clean state" politician into which
voters can project their wishes about domestic and foreign policy. That was a dirty. but very effective trick.
But the most important factor in Trump win was the he was competing against despicable warmonger Hillary Clinton, the
establishment candidate who wanted to kick the neoliberal globalization can down the road. So the "lesser evilism" card was
also in play consciously or unconscionably as well. So with Hillary as the opposition candidate it was a kind of
implementation of the USSR style elections on a new level. but with the same with zero choice. Effectively the US
electorate was disenfranchised when FBI has thrown Sander under the bus by exonerating Hillary. In a way FBI was the
kingmaker in 2016 elections.
And please note that the Deep State launched a color revolution against Trump to keep him in check. Only later it became
evident that he from the very beginning was a pro-Israel neoconservative, probably fully controlled by pro-Israel forces. That Trump
electorate bought MIGA instead of MAGA from the day one.
Notable quotes:
"... The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? ..."
In a recent call from Trump requesting his opinion on China, Jimmy Carter noted that China
has not spent a dime on war since 1979, whereas we've spent trillions & continue to spend
even more.
China invested trillions in their infrastructure while ours crumbles. They've invested in
building the world's manufacturing capacity while we dismantled ours. We spend twice per
capita on healthcare compared to any other western country, yet chronic diseases like
diabetes keeps growing. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined yet
how superior is our weaponry compared to the Russians who spend one-tenth of what we spend?
We've financialized our economy and socialized speculative losses of Wall St mavens but when
some politicians talk about spending on the commons then socialism is labeled bad.
The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos,
would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our
endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding
ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even
with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?
"Within approximately five hours of Trump's statement, GRU officers targeted for the
first time Clinton's personal office. "
The report shows that Russia coordinated with Trump even if he was unaware of it.
Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration in total and utter incompetence,
if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called
criminal negligence in legal speak.
So all our three letter agencies with their enormous budgets and staff including NSA which
intercepts all incoming/outgoing communications (and probably most internal communications)
can't protect the USA elections from interference that they knew about ? Why they did not
warn Trump?
Or NSA assumed that it was yet another CIA "training exercise" imposing as Russian
hackers?
It not clear why Russia need such a crude methods as, for example, hacking Podesta email
via spearfishing (NSA has all the recodings in this case), as you can buy, say a couple of
Google engineers for less then a million dollars (many Google engineers hate Google with its
cult of performance reviews and know that they are getting much less then their Facebook
counterparts, so this might well be not that difficult) and get all you want without extra
noise.
Historically Soviet and, especially, East German intelligence were real experts in
utilizing "humint". With the crash of neoliberal ideology that probably is easier for
Russians now then it was for Soviets or East Germans in 60th-80th.
For example, from my admittedly nonprofessional point of view, the most logical assumption
about DNC hack is that it was a mixture of the internal leak (download of the files to the
UCB drive) and Crowdstrike false flag operation (cover up operation which included implanting
Russian (or Ukrainian) malware from Vault 7 to blame Russians.
"Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration"
They did screw up.
Wrong. The fact that they did not warn/brief Trump suggests that this was an a
deliberate and pre-planned attempt to entrap him by initiating Russian contacts by
FBI/CIA/MI6 moles
Papadopoulos set up ( via Josef Misfud (MI6) and Stefan Halper (CIA) ). At the time
Halper probably was reporting to the current CIA director Gina Haspel who was at this
time CIA station chief in GB. She is a Brennan protégé, of recent Skripals
dead ducks hoax fame.
Surveillance was specifically established to collect compromising material on Trump
and his associates with high level official in Obama administration (and probably Obama
himself) playing coordinating role.
Colonel Lang's blog is a good source of information on those issues with posts by
former intelligence specialists.
And please note that I am not a Trump supporter. I resent him and his policies.
Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a
formidable machine.
Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg
Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression
against Iraq long before 9/11.
"... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
"... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
"... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
"... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
"... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
"... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
"... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite
that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite
inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like
the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately
on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when
he was elected will help clarifying these theses.
Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even
religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces
at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple
expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material
welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of
time.
From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of
US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism,
a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing
population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production,
initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was
broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist
goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson
and Madison, among others.
As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces
caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted
interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation
of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during
the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the
US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the
domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.
The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the
ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's
aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic
forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment,
as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War
II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.
Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War
II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces
shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time.
The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence
of NATO, for instance.
Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable
to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown.
Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in
the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the
bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened
and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict
across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.
Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated
white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its
manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting
immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign
policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump
administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and
economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.
Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's
actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from
his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically
seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really
cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to
honor
their funding commitments.
From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy
initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently,
they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones
used in the past.
Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge
it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues,
will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is
that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning,
much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is
not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority
of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.
As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints
of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further
increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an
attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences
that it may cause.
On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find
a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd
combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep
down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that
will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few
years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although
it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in
international affairs.
In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the
inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence
or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.
Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous
deterioration of relations seems inevitable.
Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in
world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using
it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even
inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands
taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).
While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing
capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it
becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's
relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.
A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its
different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in
its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily
a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The
deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is,
for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because
it has a very short history itself.
Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there
is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined
with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous
combination.
Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and
Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa.
He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting
across emerging markets.
Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power
structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us
know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which
refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's
true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its
political and
media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and
unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If
everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to
take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's
imprisonment, thereby
establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around
the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him
you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or
near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet
in his head.
Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our
fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big
part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they
appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information
which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help
of hundreds of
tips from my
readers and social media followers
I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people
can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the
disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.
This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on
Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of
refutation.
As he does nearly every day, Max Boot, the
Washington Post
's in-house neocon columnist, wrote some words today. As has been the case quite a few times
before, none of his latest words, even when strung together into a coherent sentence, were particularly good. For
this very reason, several of those sentences were noteworthy. So let's (OK,
let me
) look at just what that beautiful, smooth organ in Boot's skull considers a "neoconservative."
According to Merriam-Webster, a neoconservative is a person who cites dictionary definitions in their writing.
It's also, simply put, someone in American politics who's conservative on economic issues, hews to the middle or
even center-left on social issues, and also really, really likes to Do War. That last one is a big requirement, so
don't forget it -- war equals a strong, responsible nation.
Boot opened his column with a critique of
Rep. Ro Khanna's recent op-ed in the
Post
,
with Boot writing that Khanna's position -- that neocons were responsible for the Iraq War -- is little more than an
oft-repeated "canard" that plagues the American discourse. He then proceeded to take the reader through what a
real neoconservative looks like by rewriting the top-summary of
the neoconservatism Wikipedia page
.
Boot started by citing a group of 1970s characters he classified as the True Neocons. (Initially, the term was
embodied by folks who were a little more skeptical of the Soviet Union than some of their Democratic
counterparts.) Boot then argued neocons simply were not in power at the time the Iraq War was being decided on (a
fact that is demonstratively untrue) by citing Bush administration officials widely credited as architects of the
Iraq War:
The "neocons" -- second-tier officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith, and vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- were not the decision-makers. The
decision to invade was made by President George W. Bush in consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin
Powell. None of them would ever label themselves a "neocon."
Note the last sentence -- Boot frames his argument in a way that hangs the burden of proof that one is a
neoconservative, or acts in a neoconservative fashion, on the stipulation that they publicly identify themselves
as such, which, plainly, is so fucking dumb that I'm going to show you him doubling down on this line of thinking
just because it's so unbelievably shallow.
Moreover, a bipartisan majority of both houses approved the use of military force. Are Democratic then-Sens.
Joe Biden, John Kerry, Charles E. Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein
neocons?
To state the obvious: Yes! All of those people are absolutely neocons, at least in some way.
The idea that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden don't at the very least actively display numerous neoconservative
tendencies is an outright rejection of what Americans have watched play out in the political realm since the
national Democratic Party imploded in the 70s. Democrats can be neocons; Republicans can be neolibs. Neos of some
sort or the other are probably around you, right this very second, and no, not
the good kind
!
The concept that political identity is wholly defined as being a list of beliefs a person writes down in their
diary or says aloud during a campaign ad, and not by the actions conducted by said person, is one that has needed
to die for at least the past half-century of American politics. But, again, Boot's column is not engaging in a
discussion about what a neocon actually is in 2019. It's a deceptive and even laudatory tactic, but Boot is
purposefully choosing to frame his argument around how politicians frame themselves. And that's a major problem if
you happen to be employed to write down your opinions for one of the major news outlets in a nation and not for
the political operatives themselves.
If anything, the fact that this batshit lazy argument permeated the top three-fourths of his column offered a
bit of relief with how it would end. Then this sentence appeared and I ascended to heaven:
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear,
but...
"... Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy." ..."
Who is taking the over/under on whether Barr will actually investigate the origins of the attempted entrapment of Trump in Russia
collusion and the roles played by key players in US law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as the Brits & Aussie government
agencies therein?
I'm willing to bet that it will all be swept under the rug and that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch & Rice will not be testifying
to any grand jury. Barr has received multiple criminal & conspiracy referrals from Rep. Devin Nunes. However, Trump himself disregarded
Nunes recommendation to declassify several documents & communications including the FISA application on Carter Page. The question
is does Trump want to get to the bottom of the conspiracy? So far all he's done is tweet. IMO, Barr is the epitome of a Swamp
Rat.
"Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." – Sun Tzu
I have a feeling that President Trump will declassify and release the relevant documents in a manner that they will have maximum
effect. It is stunning that the entirety of federal law enforcement, intelligence, and State department embraced and fortified
Russian misinformation in their jihad against Trump.
This must never happen again. At least the operation was run by political hacks, former analysts who fancied themselves as
operators. Their ham- fisted prints are over this shit storm. Thank you God for Comey, Brennan, and Clapper -- the three stooges
of espionage.
I suppose that it's possible that AG Barr's DoJ will mount a serious investigation into the many tentacles ongoing governmental
debacle that began with the Lynch DoJ providing political direction and cover for Comey's FBI to lie down on the Clinton e-mail
investigation. Which came first, the cover up, or the capitulation, is not completely clear. Perhaps it was a hand in glove affair.
Suffice it to say that by any standard of competence, it was a faux effort.
In my opinion, what was not done should constitute the elements of an obstruction violation. It would be a difficult charge
to argue before a jury. Was the level of incompetence such that a reasonable person could not believe that it could not exist
in the FBI, that there had to be malicious intent?
Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas
in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough
reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy."
Once again the question, could they possibly have been so incompetent. "What the heck" appears to have been the launching pad;
Clinton's going to win anyway, Trump will be crushed under the unmaskings, leaks, and innuendo; and no one will ever find out.
But Trump wins, and the unwholesome political cabal is now stuck with an investigation of an incoming President whom they had
tried to frag on the skimpiest evidentiary grounds imaginable. And worse, he appears to be sensing there is something rotten in
the state of Denmark, and Cardinal Jim Comey is a shitty liar, and now he's out, and what is going to happen to this garbage scow
they've launched, now with Comey gone. How do they kill this thing? Worse, how do they kill the political riot this thing has
caused. They can't; they double down; they take out another insurance policy - Jim Comey's good bud, Bob Mueller with a posse
of partisan attorneys, many vets of the Obama DoJ, a couple of squads of FBI Agents, including two who were prominent in the e
mail case and the Steele inquiry, and a set up akin to a shadow DoJ. What could go wrong? They would hound the bastard out of
office.
Which returns us to the question of whether Barr will mount a serious investigation into the political scandal of the last
100 years, at least. I suppose it is possible, but right now I'm not optimistic. For one thing Barr appeared at the big press
conference with Rod Rosenstein. Rod Rosenstein is at minimum a critical witness. There is every reason to suspect that Comey,
McCabe, Mueller, and Rosenstein conferred before Comey's leak to the NYT via a lawyer friend in furtherance of Mueller's appointment.
Going side by side with Rosenstein at this juncture doesn't augur well.
On the other hand, the continuing lunatic behavior of the demented left may give Barr no other choice but to sort the mess
out once and for all for the good of the country. We'll see.
The biggest take I got out of the Mueller report is that Trump is a sleazy character and that is not what I want from the president,
the Face of America to the rest of the world. Whether the Deep State went after Trump in an organized fashion is just noise in
my ears. To me that is just normal political infighting the same as Trump and other Republicans went after Obama for being an
illegitimate President as a non-citizen.
Sorry, but it IS NOT "normal political infighting" for the cabal to have sought and still to seek the overthrow of of the legitimate
head of state and government.
I think the ancestry scandal is about as important as wearing white pants after Labor
day.
You are far too partisan, you ignore the creation of the CPA and all the benefits it give
the public when Republicans at this very moment are looking to loosen the Pay Day Loan
lending rules.
I guess a 1400% interest rate is just not enough, do you support the loan sharks and rip
off banks? Yes or No.
What does Alcoholics Anonymous have to do with Elizabeth Warren?
By AA he meant Affirmative Action, not Alcoholics Anonymous. Although people with lots of
Native American DNA often have drinking problems. prudence would dictate "don't sell whiskey
and guns to Elizabeth Warren."
Look at the spin machine in action. She used the benefits of lying about her American
Indian ancestry to further her career and derive perks. We all know it. AA is a joke and
utter reverse racism in action.
No, she kept pushing it even to the point of claiming that her genetic result of 1/1024
Indian proved her claim. The lack of judgement -- both technical and political -- is simply
astounding. Then she apologized to the Cherokee for pretending to be one of them since she
doesn't meet the tribal criterion. To my knowledge she has never back off her claim beyond
that -- and never apologized to Whites for trying to get out of OUR Tribe, the one she was
born into.
I always try to look at the big picture, the whole episode was foolish but she harmed no
one and gained nothing.
Has she pushed the anti Russian crap? That would bother me as we have been the aggressor
with Russia and that is really dangerous.
As we speak nuclear armed bombers are flying daily close the the Russian borders and
Russia has to scramble jets to ward them off. One pissed off Russian fighter pilot and there
goes the world!
She is pushing for criminalizing White Nationalism -- as if We aren't persecuted enough
already. Foolishness to the nth degree. Whites have been amazing passive as their Nation has
been stolen from them. And those who make peaceful change impossible ..
Gordon begins her
comparison by exploring the main charge levied against Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, which was
committing a crime against peace due to Germany's breach of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which, she
explains, "essentially outlawed war." American prosecutors in the mid-20th century insisted that this
initial crime was the unlawful act from which all other crimes committed by the Nazis originated.
"By comparison," the author tells Scheer, "I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make
an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.
"It's very clear from the documentary record that exists that the main reason people were being
tortured [by the U.S. before the Iraq War began] was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say
that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq,"
Gordon says.
Throughout the so-called war on terror, the ethics expert says, the U.S. has also violated several
rules set forth in just-war theory, including what constitutes collateral damage and proportionality, in
its slaughter of countless Iraqi civilians.
"We took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed and cosmopolitan countries in that part of
the world -- which was Iraq -- and we essentially did what [U.S. military officials] used to say they wanted to
do to North Vietnam: bombed it back to the Stone Age," Gordon says.
Listen to Scheer and Gordon discuss a range of moral issues that Americans for several generations
have swept under the rug as the government both openly and secretly commits crimes in their name abroad.
You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
The intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it's Rebecca Gordon. And she has her doctorate in
ethics and social theory. I teach ethics at USC; you teach at the University of San Francisco, which is a
Catholic school, so presumably with all their difficulties they're still concerned about ethics. And
actually we have a good pope, in major ways, who's dealing with the subject I want to talk to you about:
the ethics of war making, and the violence that has been unleashed on the world. And you wrote two very
important books, maybe the most important in some ways. One is called
Mainstreaming Torture,
and
another is called
American Nuremberg.
So the question I want to ask you, you know, because we've
always treated the crimes of others, particularly the Germans, the worst crimes of modern history, as an
aberration in the development of the human race. Those people went berserk, crazy, and they were evil;
now we have another category, Muslims are evil, they do terrible things. We're recording this on a day
where in New Zealand, some 48 people trying to practice their religion were killed. So we see a lot of
crime against Muslims, as there was obviously a lot of crimes against Jews and other people. And in your
writing, you're very clear that the crimes of Nuremberg, of the Nazis, are a low level of evil. But the
real question is, the Germans are so much like Americans. They werelargest number of immigrants in this
country were Germans; they're a white, Anglo-Saxon population; they're highly educated, probably the
highest level of music and science at that point. And can it happen here?
Rebecca Gordon:
And that, of course, is the question many of us have been asking at
least since the election of 2016, and probably before that. And the answer in some ways, of course, is
that it did happen here with the invasion of the Americas by people from Europe, and the destruction of
all the peoples who were living here at the time. So there has been a genocide on this continent and in
South America that, you know, we just forget about, because it happened a while ago. But coming to
Nuremberg, what I was trying to do in the book is to say how important the principle was that was
established at Nuremberg, which is that international law is real law. And when you break international
law, there are genuine consequences, and people can and should be held accountable. So what I looked at
was the conduct of this so-called War on Terror in the post-September 11th period, and asked: Could the
United States be accused of the same categories of crimes for which the Nazi leadership were held
accountable? And there were three categories that were established by the prosecution, and these were
crimes against peace; ordinary war crimes, which had already been well described in the body of
international law; and a new category, crimes against humanity, which was created in order to take in the
enormity of what had been done in Europe by the Nazis. But what was very interesting is that it was
Americans who insisted that the first of these crimes should be crimes against peace. So what's that?
That means making an aggressive war. It means starting a war that was not a war of self-defense, that was
not a war of so-called necessity, but making an aggressive war. Why was that illegal? It was illegal
because Germany and the United States and many other countries in Europe had signed a treaty in 1928
called the KelloggBriand Treaty, which essentially outlawed war. It said that nations will not use war
to settle their disputes. And the argument that the U.S. prosecutors made was that all the other crimes
that the Germans committed actually sprang from this first crime of making this aggressive, unnecessary,
illegal war. And so by comparison, I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make an
unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. And just as the Nazi crimes
arose from this making of a war that was wrong and illegal, the U.S. crimesand specifically now because
my area of expertise is torture, I look at the reasons why the United States became involved in torture.
And in the beginning, it's very clear from the documentary record that exists, that the main reason
people were being tortured, both in the CIA dark sites and also at Guantanamo under the Department of
Defense, was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with
Al-Qaeda, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq. And so the other crimes
RS:
But wait, let's be very clear about that. This would be like the Nazis saying,
Jewish bankers destroyed our economy and colluded with Western powers, and therefore made life untenable
in Germany. That was the vicious scapegoating argument to justify Nazi expansion and destruction of other
societies. So this thing of whether Bushyou know, it's kind of become part of folklorethey lied us into
the war in Iraq. But what you're saying, and very clearly, the very idea of going to war in Iraq over the
9/11 incident, which not only did Saddam Hussein have
RG:
Nothing to do with.
RS:
nothing to do with, but actually he was opposed to Al-Qaeda, and it was the one
country where Al-Qaeda could not operate in, was Iraq. But instead of going to war with Pakistan, or
going to war, you know, elsewhereno. We
RG:
Or Saudi Arabia.
RS:
Well, of course, Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 hijackers
RG:
Came from.
RS:
came from. You could actually make an argument to go intohey, you attacked us,
you supplied the money and so forth. No, we whitewashed the Saudi Arabia thing and went to war with Iraq.
So your analogy, listeners should understand, is very precise. It is inventing an excuse, a defensive
excuse, to engage an offensive invasion.
RG:
Exactly. And from that spring all of these other kinds of crimes. So then I look
at ordinary war crimes, and if you go over the Geneva Conventions and the various other laws of war, you
can see that there are a number of categories of crimes. Many of them have to do with failing to make the
distinction between civilians and fighters, combatants. And of course the Bush-Cheney administration very
early on decided to create a third, nonexistent category called unlawful combatants. But this designation
doesn't exist in the International Red Cross's understanding; it doesn't exist in the Geneva
Convention's. It was just a convenient way of saying this particular group of people, whoever it is that
we choose to capture, detain forever, torturethey have no legal standing in the world. They exist
outside of international law.
RS:
So let me pick up on that also. And I don't want to lose the earlier thread of
the invention of war, and connecting with this incredibly important work you've done on torture. And you
made the statement, which I think people should ponder: the reason we were torturing these people was not
to get information about a future attack. We already had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and everything, we knew
everything about it, and so forth. The real reason for it was to invent an alibi for the invasion, to get
somebody to say Saddam Hussein was backing them. And I think that's a very importanta reason, by the
way, to read your book,
Mainstreaming Torture
; let me give a plug here. But this other argument
is also interesting, the whole idea of the noncombatant. And we are doing this interview at a time when
Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, is in prison
RG:
Yes.
RS:
again, because they want to fabricate a story about WikiLeaks and all that, and
get everybody off the hook for all of the crimes and torture and everything they've done. But the
interesting thing is, if you look at what did WikiLeaksand they were just like in the position of the
Washington Post
with the Pentagon Papers, they're the publisherwhat did Chelsea Manning reveal?
She revealed the death of noncombatants, including journalists. So why don't you develop that a little
bit, because that is so critical to the moment, that no oneno one has been prosecuted for those attacks
that she revealed with the data. But she is now sitting in prison.
RG:
And this is, of coursethe fate of whistleblowers all over the world, and
certainly in this country, is exactly that. That the matters that they have revealed disappear in a story
that becomes about the crimes of the revealer. And of course in the war in Iraq, there was tremendous
amounts of civilian death. And it falls into a number of categories; one category is those people who had
actually been detained and were being held by U.S. forces. And for example at Abu Ghraib, we knowwhich
is the prison outside of Baghdad that had been Saddam Hussein's major torture site, and which the U.S.
decided in its wisdom would be the perfect place to hold detainees, and where we know a group of
reservists ended up torturing people. But the real torture was going on upstairs, by the employees of
various C.I.A. contractors, and by the C.I.A. itself. And that's where people actually died. So there's
that whole category of people, but that's a much smaller category than the category of ordinary civilians
whose lives were either ended or destroyed by the regular U.S. use of warfare in places like Fallujah and
other cities. So that we took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed, and cosmopolitan
countries in that part of the worldwhich was Iraqand we essentially did what they used to say they
wanted to do to North Vietnam, bombed it back to the Stone Age. And so in just war theory, there are
these rules about discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, and you are permitted a certain
number of civilian deaths as long as they are side effects of your attempt to go after some legitimate
military target. And this is called collateral damage; it's, collateral means on the side, right? But in
fact, in Iraq, we don't know because there are many different counts, but anywhere between 500,000 and a
million people have died in the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. And when you lay that against the
3,000 people who died on September 11th, none of whom were killed by anyone even from Iraq, you also see
that we have violated another rule of just war theory, which is proportionality. We have destroyed human
life out of all proportion.
RS:
And let me justyou know, it's so difficult to grapple with these questions. And
you are teaching at one of the major Catholic universities here.
RG:
It's a Jesuit university, and that's a little different. And these are the
left-wing Jesuits.
RS:
I'm not putting down your school. [Laughter] Hey, I teach ethics at the
University of Southern California
RG:
Enough said.
RS:
and clearly, yes, we are ethically challenged at this moment. I was about to
actually celebrate the pope in this regard. And so there is a certain necessity for being consistent in
the application of these principles, or they mean nothing.
RG:
Exactly.
RS:
And I think that's the body of your life's work, to remind us of that. So in a
sense, you are at a good place where you're teaching. I'm just wondering, how is this disregarded so
widely? I mean, people make a big deal about don't kill the unborn child. You know, I could see arguments
about that. But if that's the beginning of a consistent, pro-life position, yes, it makes certain sense.
If it's the end of a pro-life position, and then you end welfare and you don't care what happens to the
baby and so forth, you're into a deep immorality. And it seems to me you're at a very interesting place.
Because for better or worse, this pope seems to be the only one able to challenge, let's call it U.S.
imperialism or imperial ventures, on a moral basis.
RG:
I think that's right. He certainly is doing a better job of that than either of
his last two predecessors.
RS:
Or the major
RG:
Other major, yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, it's
interesting that at USF, we have Reserve Officers' Training Corps. We have people who are training to be
second lieutenants when they leave university in the U.S. Army. And I have had students tell me, I had a
student from Guam who told me, you know, Professor Gordon, I know that when they send me to basic
training, they're going to try to take me apart and change me from being a person into being a soldier.
And I just want you to know that I'm not going to let them do that to me. He said, but you know, ROTC was
my ticket off the island, and I have a duty now to follow through with my promise. And I just, my heart
broke for him. Because what they do to you in basic training is actually a slightly lighter version of
what they do when they train torturers. Everyone who becomes a torturerand people don't just torture on
a whim; people are trained to be torturers. And part of that training involves being brutalized first
yourself, and having survived that ordeal, you emerge with this sense of yourself as an elite person who
therefore has the right, as a superior being, and now the skills, to turn around and abuse and torture
people who come along behind you. And the U.S. has its own methods of training, and its own locations
where this happens.
RS:
[omission for station break] I'm back after our break with Professor and Doctor
Rebecca Gordon. And we were just talking about how we train people to be torturers. And this is
fascinating, because if you don't consider this question, that you're getting basically good people to do
horrible things, you're missing the whole point. But I just want to say something about the good German.
Because the basic appeal of Hitler was the solidyou know, he was going to make Germany great again. And
this is, I'm not demonizing Germans here, but Donald Trump's father was obviously familiar with this in
his lineage, in that tradition. And the whole appeal, even though this dictator Hitler was this
funny-looking guy, hardly the Aryan modelwas to a notion of order. And even in the concentration camps,
keeping direct bookkeeping of how many teeth you pulled and gold you found in the teeth, and so forth.
But it's notmanners. They had the manners. And what bothers me about the very simplistic Trumpwashing
that we're going through now, that Trump is uniquely evilit's all about manners. He's crude, he's
boorish, he's a misogynist, he says these things, he does these things, he grabs people's private parts,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's not his crime. His crime is he's continuing a tradition of
bombing people who we have no right to bomb. And so I want to push this a little bit more, the whole
question of manners. Because what Nuremberg did is unmask the manners. And this was also true in the
Eichmann trial that Hannah Arendt talked about, when she talked about the banality of evil. Evil can be
masked by manners. Smile while you learn to kill, right?
RG:
That's exactly right. And I especially know, when you talk about the meticulous
records that they kept, this is a hallmark of torture regimes all over the world. This very careful
record-keeping, this documentation of the work that's been donebecause there's no shame about the work.
The process of becoming a torturer includes developing a sense of yourself as doing something uniquely
courageous, uniquely necessary, a unique sacrifice that you as the torturer, more in sorrow than in
anger, are being forced to do by the tremendous evil that confronts you. And so you're absolutely right
that especially among upper-class liberals in the United States, the objection to Trump is his manner,
and his manner is crude and obnoxious, as you say. But what he's really doing is not only continuing to
kill people, and in fact increasing the number of drone strikes, for example, over the already great
number that the Obama administration
RS:
A man of impeccable manners. Barack Obama. I even feel that way about Bill
Clinton. When Bill Clinton's on television, I smile. I like him. He's warm, he's encouraging. And then I
forget, he's the guy that ended the welfare system, for example. Yes.
RG:
Exactly. Exactly right. And you know, Trump is now with his, I don't know if
you've taken a look at his so-called budget, but he's planning to take away our Medicare and Medicaid,
just in case you might have wanted to have healthcare. Obviously, that's dead on arrival. But
nonetheless, the point is that he is masking what he is actually doing by distracting us with this
bombastic display. And in fact, one of his officials in the EPA actually recently said exactly that, that
they've been able to make all these regulatory changes because every time it looks as though the press is
going to notice, Trump fires off a tweet, and everybody's like, ooh, shiny!
RS:
This is a really important point. Because if you look at the Nuremberg Trial or
you look at the Eichmann trial, these people all hid behind manners. They were well spoken, they were
well educated, and they were following a Charlie Chaplinesque figure, a ludicrous figure; Hitler was
certainly a, yes, he was a more ludicrous figure than Trump, in terms of manners and style and
everything. But his popularity was largely based on being a sort of comic figure, in a way. He inspired a
whole nation of logical, scientific, well-educatedprobably the best-educated population in the world.
And so I've had this experience, I've talked to people in the business community and they say well, you
know, but Trump is good for business. And we did have a mess before, and then look at what's happened to
unemployment, and so forth and so on. And so we are really at the limit of manners as a guide. And that's
really what Nuremberg is about. Nuremberg was unmasking manners. Now, we didn't continue after that; we
had the brief Eichmann trial. But what we didn't really ever do in this countryand this is why I want
people to listen or to read your book, better to read it, although listening is greatwe never really
took apart the Nazi experience. Because we wanted the ex-Nazis and other Germans to be our allies in the
Cold War. So we have never had that investigation of how an incredibly well-educated, Christian,
law-and-order nation goes into madness.
RG:
Not only that, we never did what the next step was supposed to be, which is
establish a venue in which U.S. war crimes could also be examined in World War II. And there were a
number of people who developed the Nuremberg principles, and worked on the original trial, who really
honestly believed that this would be the prelude to establishing an international court for trying
offenses committed during war, and expected that the United States would in fact be held accountable, not
only for the firebombing of German cities, but for the destruction of up to 60 Japanese cities which were
constructed of wood and paper and reduced to ashes, in a campaign that really very few people in this
country even know about. Although Robert McNamara actually describes it in that excellent documentary
RS:
The Fog of War
, yeah.
RG:
--
The Fog of War.
RS:
And it's excellent because you see that McNamara was involved in designing the
bombing of Japan and Germany. But also, I meanlike, we talk about Korea. Oh, North Korea, animals, and
Kim Il-sung and his progenynobody I ever run into knows we leveled every single structure in North Korea
during the Korean War. Again, a war that was not needed; it was an attempt to get a Chinese communist who
had come to power the year before. I mean, it's bizarre. Then you look at what we did to North Vietnam,
and the carpet bombing, and everything. So this is critical. American exceptionalismI've mentioned this
a number of times on this podcastto my mind, is a really, it's the most profound problem that American
people have to face.
RG:
It's a vicious idea. And it's been taken up in different ways by both the liberal
democratic world, and by the, you know, the hard right in this country. The idea that by definition, the
United States can do no wrong, because we are the leader of the so-called free world. Which is a locution
I don't even understand anymore, given that we're not competing anymore with the unfree communist world
that supposedly we were in opposition to. But the idea thatand this was the argument, actually, that the
Bush administration made about torture. By definition, the United States is a country that does not
torture. Therefore, whatever it is that you are observing, it cannot be torture, because that would be a
logical contradiction, because we are the nation that doesn't do that. And it's almost impossible to
enter into that understanding of the world, because no amount of evidence that you can present to the
person who believes that is going to break that worldview. And so American exceptionalism allows us not
only to have military bases in over 100 countries around the world; not only to conduct secret wars that
the people in this country don't even know aboutwe just suddenly woke up and said, oh my gosh, we're
having a war in Somalia! Who knew. And not to mention YemenI was very heartened to see that the Senate
had actually voted with the House to reprimand the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But leave
that aside. This whole idea that we are a unique bearer of human rights and democracy in the worldit's
very hard to break, because it's a concealed, hermetically sealed worldview that people imbibe in grade
school. And they imbibe it as they grow up, and it takes a lot of effort to break through. And one of the
sad things that I see, especially with younger people that I've worked with in organizations like War
Times/Tiempo de Guerras, is that once you've broken through, it then becomes very hard to imagine that
the United States is not permanently and always going to be the hegemon. It almost, having made the
effort and understood the danger the U.S. actually presents to the world, it becomes almost impossible to
recognize when the U.S. actually loses one. And I think it's very important we claim our victories.
RS:
Well you know, you hit it clearly with this, the abandonment by the Democratic
Party of any serious oppositional role. [With] control of the House now, there should be hearings about
what are we doing in these different countries. And instead they're actually criticizing Trump for being,
kind of selling out by getting out of Afghanistan, or not fighting more aggressively in Syria. And we've
actually sort of lost the peace movement, in a way, is a theme I get back to once in a while here. And we
forget, actually, most of the terrible wars since World War II have been fought under democrats, and
financed enthusiastically. So I want to get back to basic moral principles, because they don't mean
anything if you're not consistent. You have to call out people on the left or on the right, you have to
call out war crimes, you have to call out the attacks on homosexuals, black people, Jewish
peopleanybody, any other, and so forth. It's something that Jesus reminded us of in the tale of the Good
Samaritan, if you can believe that Luke is the word of God, and not the others, [Laughter] where the Good
Samaritan doesn't appear. I don't want to get into your whole Catholic university thing here. But it's
interesting to me, this notion of consistency. Because it's painful to be consistent. It requires
examining the motives of people you voted for. And this was the problem of Germany: people forget Hitler
was elected. People forget Germany had all the trappings of a
RG:
Of a democracy.
RS:
of a democracy. And more important, the conceit that somehow
educationeducation, and mannerswill prevent genocide is a lie. Maybe it's time to recognize this whole
notion of American greatness is the end of thought; if you are by definition great, there's nothing to
question. And it seems to me that main religions that we've had, their one demand that they have in
common is you must question not only your nation's morality, but your own. The devil is in you. We have
to struggle with this devil, we have to struggle with these forces. Yet as a nation, we think America the
beautiful absolves us all. And that's what you're saying in your torture book. That basically, you take
these young recruits that have a very limited knowledge of our history, and you convince them that they
are the agents, really, of a higher power.
RG:
Absolutely right. And in doing that, you pervert the very virtues that we say the
United States is supposed to represent. The virtue of courage, for example, becomes the courage to
suppress your squeamishness at causing pain to another human being. And justice becomes the idea that you
give the punishment first and the trial later, if ever. Right? And this is exactly what we see in the way
our detainees have been treated. And honestly, another locus of this that we don't often recognize is
what goes on on the U.S. soil prisons and jails in this country, where we have 2.2 million people locked
up in cages, and where torture is a regular feature of prison life. It's no accident that the reservists
who were downstairs at Abu Ghraib, they were from West Virginia, and most of them in their civilian life
were prison guards. They were corrections officers. And there's a famous email that one of the
ringleaders, Charles Graner, sent home which said: The Christian in me knows it's wrong, but the
corrections officer in me loves to see a grown man piss himself. And that is exactly the attitude of the
people who are caging up 2.2 [million] largely, vastly disproportionately, black and Latino, Latinx,
people in this country today. And so torture actually is a red thread that runs through the entire
history of the United States, beginning with the Native American population. Slavery itself would not
have been as successful as it was at allowing the amassing of capitalwhich is, you know if you're a good
Marxist, the congealed labor of these unpaid, captive people, who when they got to the United States, or
what was not even yet the United States, would not work unless, the farmers figured out, they were caused
physical pain. And it was the use, the concerted, intentional, well-documented use of physical pain in
the cotton fields a century later that forced people to develop a physical technology of their bodies
that allowed them, in the course of 40 years, to multiply by eight times the amount of cotton a human
being could pick in a day, because the alternative was to have the skin taken off your back with a whip.
RS:
You know, increasingly in my life I have been a bad Marxist. And I've embraced
some truths that seemed to come out of these religions that, growing up, really frightened me or were
intimidating, and also were on the wrong side. But let's take it back to the pope, let's take it back to
the Jesuit school, University of San Francisco, where you teach. There's a wisdom that I daresay Karl
Marx did not sufficiently embrace. It is that we all have a capacity for evil. That we have virtue; we
care, we bring children into this world, we nurture them, we care about others, we can cry over a
refugee. On the other hand, the 2.2 millionI've been on Death Row quite recently interviewing Kevin
Cooper, who I believe is an innocent man. And fortunately, the governor of California has suspended the
death penalty, and I think Gavin Newsom deserves great credit for his courage. Butand it is a cage, and
we don't care; we don't care about these people. And we don't care about the people we bomb, and we don't
carethey're expendable, they're throwaway people. You want them out of sight, out of mind. It's very
deliberate. And the problem is, if Marxism were accurate [Laughter]I don't know, not too many people
care, anyway, but since the two of us are talking about ityou know, if it was just the economic motive,
we'd probably do better. The libertarians, for instanceto the degree that they're right, they're right,
yes. But the wars don't make sense. And growing that cotton that way didn't ultimately make sense. And
slavery didn't make sense. Exceptexcept if we have a barbaric part of our nature, if we have a need to
exploit others. Not just for economic reasons; if power corrupts. And this, not to quote Marx, but to
quote Jefferson or Washington, these people who came to power in this great experiment of ours, with all
its contradictionsI repeat this ad nauseum on these podcasts. All their, yes, white, male, I got it, I
got it, slave owners, the whole thingthey were on to a wisdom about their own corruption. And the reason
we have the First Amendment, the reason we have all the amendments, the reason we have separation of
powers, is that power corrupts.
RG:
Absolutely.
RS:
And what comes through in these torture stories and so forthI talked, I have one
student, just like you, I've had students go off to these wars. I had one who ended up at Abu Ghraib and
at Guantanamo, a reserve officer. He was outside with the families. I'm not going to compromise his
privacy. But he told me what shook him up was he was being told all these things about the people inside
the jail, but his job was to herd the families that were trying to visit. And he could not deny that
there was some kind of humanity going on with these people inside, or why would all these people care so
much about them. And I think we need to be reminded of our own capacity for evil. I think that's what
Nuremberg was about, that the people who commit evil don't present as evil and are not inherently more
evil than we are.
RG:
Exactly.
RS:
And we have to struggle with this. And the good liberals who accommodate this,
and say well, you know, Barack Obama had to do this with the drones, and governor so-and-so had to kill
these people even though he didn't believe in the death penaltywe have to challenge that. Because that
is the fount of evil.
RG:
So, my favorite virtue, Aristotle calls it phronesis, or practical wisdom. St.
Thomas Aquinas calls it prudentia, prudence. But what it really is, is that capacity of the mind that
allows you to actually understand the moral questions that are in front of you. And not to be fooled by
the fog of American exceptionalism, by the distraction of a Trumpian tweet, but to be able to actually
examine and really see, in this case, the effects of U.S. policy on actual human beings around the world.
And this requires a kind of courage to be willing to accept that your own self-understanding, and the
understanding of your people, your country, might be wrong. But it also requires a willingness to look,
to actually see and examine what's in front of you. And if there's one virtue I would like to see
developed, and that I try to develop in my own students, it's this virtue of practical wisdom, where you
actually are responsible for what the effects of your actions can reasonably be foreseen to be. And this
is something that we in the United States really don't have. It's trained out of us, we don't have it.
And part of it, yes, is that capacity to understand that the ability to do evil things exists in all of
us, and it's also to understand that when you multiply that capacity by the technological and economic
power that a country like the United States has, the resultswell, the results
"... John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch. ..."
"... But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire. ..."
"... This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart. ..."
"... The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically. ..."
"... The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why. ..."
"... Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak. ..."
"... Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel. ..."
"... he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in "Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework "destroys this story about Russian hacking." ..."
"... No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile intelligence agency" ..."
"... Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange. ..."
"... George Galloway has a guest who explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VvPFMyPvHM&t=8s ..."
"... Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it. ..."
The Made-by-FBI indictment of
Julian Assange does look like a dead man walking. No evidence. No documents. No surefire
testimony. Just a crossfire of conditionals...
But never underestimate the legalese contortionism of US government (USG) functionaries. As
much as Assange may not be characterized as a journalist and publisher, the thrust of the
affidavit is to accuse him of conspiring to commit espionage.
In fact the charge is not even that Assange hacked a USG computer and obtained classified
information; it's that he may have discussed it with Chelsea Manning and may have had the
intention to go for a hack. Orwellian-style thought crime charges don't get any better than
that. Now the only thing missing is an AI software to detect them.
Assange legal adviser Geoffrey Robertson – who also happens to represent another
stellar political prisoner, Brazil's Lula – cut
straight to the chase (at 19:22 minutes);
"The justice he is facing is justice, or injustice, in America I would hope the British
judges would have enough belief in freedom of information to throw out the extradition
request."
That's far from a done deal. Thus the inevitable consequence; Assange's legal team is
getting ready to prove, no holds barred, in a British court, that this USG indictment for
conspiracy to commit computer hacking is just an hors d'oeuvre for subsequent espionage
charges, in case Assange is extradited to US soil.
All about Vault 7
John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to
destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end
of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence
Assessments Branch.
It was all about criminalizing WikiLeaks and personally smearing Assange, using "shock
troops enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the
truth."
This plan remains more than active – considering how Assange's arrest has been covered
by the bulk of US/UK mainstream media.
By 2012, already in the Obama era, WikiLeaks detailed the astonishing "scale of the US Grand
Jury Investigation" of itself. The USG always denied such a grand jury existed.
"The US Government has stood up and coordinated a joint interagency criminal investigation
of Wikileaks comprised of a partnership between the Department of Defense (DOD) including:
CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); Defense Information Systems Agency
(DISA); Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA); US Army Criminal Investigation Division
(CID) for USFI (US Forces Iraq) and 1st Armored Division (AD); US Army Computer Crimes
Investigative Unit (CCIU); 2nd Army (US Army Cyber Command); Within that or in addition,
three military intelligence investigations were conducted. Department of Justice (DOJ) Grand
Jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (DOS) and Diplomatic
Security Service (DSS). In addition, Wikileaks has been investigated by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Office of the National CounterIntelligence
Executive (ONCIX), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the House Oversight Committee; the
National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB (President's Intelligence
Advisory Board)."
But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic;
that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast
hacking/cyber espionage repertoire.
This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy
overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart.
WikiLeaks got Vault 7 in early 2017. At the time WikiLeaks had already published the DNC
files – which the unimpeachable Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
systematically proved was a leak, not a hack.
The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was
that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work
of a state actor – and he could prove it technically.
There was some movement towards a deal, brokered by one of Assange's lawyers; WikiLeaks
would not publish the most damning Vault 7 information in exchange for Assange's safe passage
to be interviewed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI
director James Comey killed it. The question is why.
It's a leak, not a hack
Some theoretically sound
reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew
– via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it
was a leak.
Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see
here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources;
one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel.
There was nothing for Comey to "investigate". Or there would have, if Comey had ordered the
FBI to examine the DNC servers. So why talk to Julian Assange?
T he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in
"Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts
foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran,
or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework
"destroys this story about Russian hacking."
No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile
intelligence agency", usually manipulated by Russia.
Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7,
has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he
aggress to testify against Julian Assange.
It's a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is
ever to be extradited to the US. Two things for the moment are already crystal clear. The USG
is obsessed to shut down WikiLeaks once and for all. And because of that, Julian Assange will
never get a fair trial in the "so-called 'Espionage Court'" of the Eastern District of
Virginia, as
detailed by former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou.
Meanwhile, the non-stop demonization of Julian Assange will proceed unabated, faithful to
guidelines established over a decade ago. Assange is even accused of being a US intel op, and
WikiLeaks a splinter Deep State deep cover op.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile intelligence
agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood. It's all ultra-high-stakes shadow play
– and the show has not even begun.
Not to mention the Pentagram has silenced 100,000 whistleblower complaints by
Intimidation, threats, money or accidents over 5 years . A Whistleblower only does this when
know there is something seriously wrong. Just Imagine how many knew something was wrong but
looked the other way.
Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify
against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile
intelligence agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood.
Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with
destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it.
assange and wikileaks are the real criminals despite being crimeless. the **** is a
sanctioned criminal, allowed to be criminal with the system because the rest of the
sanctioned criminals would be exposed if she was investigated.
this is not the rule of laws. this is the law of rulers.
"... Today, it seems, the best description of the FBI's main activity is corporate enforcer for the white-collar mafia known as Wall Street. There is an analogy to organized crime, where the most powerful mobsters settled disputes between other gangs of criminals. Similarly, if a criminal gang is robbed by one of its own members, the mafia would go after the guilty party; the FBI plays this role for Wall Street institutions targeted by con artists and fraudsters. Compare and contrast a pharmaceutical company making opiates which is targeted by thieves vs. a black market drug cartel targeted by thieves. In one case, the FBI investigates; in the other, a violent vendetta ensues (such as street murders in Mexico). ..."
"... The FBI executives are rewarded for this service with lucrative post-retirement careers within corporate America Louis Freeh went to credit card fraudster, MBNA, Richard Mueller to a corporate Washington law firm, WilmerHale, and Comey, before Obama picked him as Director, worked for Lockheed Martin and HSBC (cleaning up after their $2 billion drug cartel marketing scandal) after leaving the FBI in 2005. ..."
"... Some say they have a key role to play in national security and terrorism but their record on the 2001 anthrax attacks is incredibly shady and suspicious. The final suspect, Bruce Ivins, is clearly innocent of the crime, just as their previous suspect, Steven Hatfill was. Ivins, if still alive, could have won a similar multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against the FBI. All honest bioweapons experts know this to be true the perpetrators of those anthrax letters are still at large, and may very well have had close associations with the Bush Administration itself. ..."
"... Comey's actions over the past year are certainly highly questionable, as well. Neglecting to investigate the Clinton Foundation ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments and corporations, particularly things like State Department approval of various arms deals in which bribes may have been paid, is as much a dereliction of duty as neglecting to investigate Trump ties to Russian business interests but then, Trump has a record of shady business dealings dating back to the 1970s, of strange bankruptcies and bailouts and government sales that the FBI never looked at either. ..."
I made the mistake of listening to NPR last week to find out what Conventional Wisdom had to say
about Trump firing Comey, on the assumption that their standardized Mister-Rogers-on-Nyquil voice
tones would rein in the hysteria pitch a little. And on the surface, it did-the NPR host and guests
weren't directly shrieking "the world is ending! We're all gonna die SHEEPLE!" the way they were
on CNN. But in a sense they were screaming "fire!", if you know how to distinguish the very minute
pitch level differences in the standard NPR Nyquil voice.
The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how "unprecedented" Trump's
decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about "rule of law"
and "violating the Constitution" but then switched to Trump "violating norms"-and back again, interchanging
"norms" and "laws" as if they're synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was
100% legal, but that didn't seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law
for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn't pass a high school civics class, but there they
were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage-I'm not sure anyone
really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or "normative" history
of the FBI.
For starters, the FBI hardly belongs in the same set with concepts like "constitutional" or "
rule of law." That's because the FBI was never established by a law. US Lawmakers refused to approve
an FBI bureau over a century ago when it was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt. So he ignored Congress,
and went ahead and set it up by presidential fiat. That's one thing the civil liberties crowd hates
discussing - how centralized US political power is in the executive branch, a feature in the constitutional
system put there by the holy Founders.
In the late 1970s, at the tail end of our brief Glasnost, there was a lot of talk in Washington
about finally creating a
legal charter for the FBI -70 years after its founding. A lot of serious ink was spilled trying
to transform the FBI from an extralegal secret police agency to something legal and defined. If you
want to play archeologist to America's recent history, you can find this in the New York Times' archives,
articles with headlines like
"Draft of Charter for F.B.I. Limits Inquiry Methods" :
The Carter Administration will soon send to Congress the first governing charter for the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. The proposed charter imposes extensive but not absolute restrictions
on the bureau's employment of controversial investigative techniques, .including the use of informers,
undercover agents and covert criminal activity.
The charter also specifies the duties and powers of the bureau, setting precise standards and
procedures for the initiation ,and conduct of investigations. It specifically requires the F.B.I.
to observe constitutional rights and establishes safeguards against unchecked harassment, break‐ins
and other abuses.
followed by the inevitable lament, like this editorial from the Christian Science Monitor a year
later, "Don't Forget the
FBI Charter". Which of course we did forget-that was Reagan's purpose and value for the post-Glasnost
reaction: forgetting. As historian Athan Theoharis
wrote , "After 1981, Congress never seriously considered again any of the FBI charter proposals."
The origins of the FBI have been obscured both because of its dubious legality and because of
its original political purpose-to help the president battle the all-powerful American capitalists.
It wasn't that Teddy Roosevelt was a radical leftist-he was a Progressive Republican, which sounds
like an oxymoron today but which was mainstream and ascendant politics in his time. Roosevelt was
probably the first president since Andrew Jackson to try to smash concentrated wealth-power, or at
least some of it. He could be brutally anti-labor, but so were the powerful capitalists he fought,
and all the structures of government power. He met little opposition pursuing his imperial Social
Darwinist ambitions outside America's borders-but he had a much harder time fighting the powerful
capitalists at home against Roosevelt's most honorable political obsession: preserving forests, parks
and public lands from greedy capitalists. An early FBI memo to Hoover about the FBI's origins explains,
"Roosevelt, in his characteristic dynamic fashion, asserted that the plunderers of the public
domain would be prosecuted and brought to justice."
According to New York Times reporter Tim Wiener's Enemies: A History of the FBI , it
was the Oregon land fraud scandal of 1905-6 that put the idea of an FBI in TR's hyperactive mind.
The scandal involved leading Oregon politicians helping railroad tycoon Edward Harriman illegally
sell off pristine Oregon forest lands to timber interests, and it ended with an Oregon senator and
the state's only two House representatives criminally charged and put on trial-along with dozens
of other Oregonians. Basically, they were raping the state's public lands and forests like colonists
stripping a foreign country-and that stuck in TR's craw.
TR wanted his attorney general-Charles Bonaparte (yes, he really was a descendant of that
Bonaparte)-to make a full report to on the rampant land fraud scams that the robber barons were
running to despoil the American West, and which threatened TR's vision of land and forest conservation
and parks. Bonaparte created an investigative team from the US Secret Service, but TR thought their
report was a "whitewash" and proposed a new separate federal investigative service within Bonaparte's
Department of Justice that would report only to the Attorney General.
Until then, the US government had to rely on private contractors like the notorious, dreaded Pinkerton
Agency, who were great at strikebreaking, clubbing workers and shooting organizers, but not so good
at taking down down robber barons, who happened to also be important clients for the private detective
agencies.
In early 1908, Attorney General Bonaparte wrote to Congress asking for the legal authority (and
budget funds) to create a "permanent detective force" under the DOJ. Congress rebelled, denouncing
it as a plan to create an American okhrana . Democrat Joseph Sherley wrote that "spying
on men and prying into what would ordinarily be considered their private affairs" went against "American
ideas of government"; Rep. George Waldo, a New York Republican, said the proposed FBI was a "great
blow to freedom and to free institutions if there should arise in this country any such great central
secret-service bureau as there is in Russia."
So Congress's response was the opposite, banning Bonaparte's DOJ from spending any funds at all
on a proposed FBI. Another Congressman wrote another provision into the budget bill banning the DOJ
from hiring Secret Service employees for any sort of FBI type agency. So Bonaparte waited until Congress
took its summer recess, set aside some DOJ funds, recruited some Secret Service agents, and created
a new federal detective bureau with 34 agents. This was how the FBI was born. Congress wasn't notified
until the end of 1908, in a few lines in a standard report - "oh yeah, forgot to tell you-the executive
branch went ahead and created an American okhrana because, well, the ol' joke about dogs
licking their balls. Happy New Year!"
The sordid history of America's extralegal secret police-initially named the Bureau of Investigation,
changed to the FBI ("Federal") in the 30's, is mostly a history of xenophobic panic-mongering, illegal
domestic spying, mass roundups and plans for mass-roundups, false entrapment schemes, and planting
what Russians call "kompromat"- compromising information about a target's sex life-to blackmail or
destroy American political figures that the FBI didn't like.
The first political victim of J Edgar Hoover's kompromat was Louis Post, the assistant secretary
of labor under Woodrow Wilson. Post's crime was releasing over 1,000 alleged Reds from detention
facilities near the end of the FBI's Red Scare crackdown, when they jailed and deported untold thousands
on suspicion of being Communists. The FBI's mass purge began with popular media support in 1919,
but by the middle of 1920, some (not the FBI) were starting to get a little queasy. A legal challenge
to the FBI's mass purges and exiles in Boston ended with a federal judge denouncing the FBI. After
that ruling, assistant secretary Louis Post, a 71-year-old well-meaning progressive, reviewed the
cases against the last 1500 detainees that the FBI wanted to deport, and found that there was absolutely
nothing on at least 75 percent of the cases. Post's review threatened to undo thousands more FBI
persecutions of alleged Moscow-controlled radicals.
So one of the FBI's most ambitious young agents, J Edgar Hoover, collected kompromat on Post and
his alleged associations with other alleged Moscow-controlled leftists, and gave the file to the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives-which promptly announced it would hold hearings to
investigate Post as a left subversive. The House tried to impeach Post, but ultimately he defended
himself. Post's lawyer compared his political persecutors to the okhrana (Russia, again!):
"We in America have sunk to the level of the government of Russia under the Czarist regime," describing
the FBI's smear campaign as "even lower in some of their methods than the old Russian officials."
Under Harding, the FBI had a new chief, William Burns, who made headlines blaming the terror bombing
attack on Wall Street of 1920 that killed 34 people on a Kremlin-run conspiracy. The FBI claimed
it had a highly reliable inside source who told them that Lenin sent $30,000 to the Soviets' diplomatic
mission in New York, which was distributed to four local Communist agents who arranged the Wall Street
bombing. The source claimed to have personally spoken with Lenin, who boasted that the bombing was
so successful he'd ordered up more.
The only problem was that the FBI's reliable source, a Jewish-Polish petty criminal named Wolf
Lindenfeld, turned out to be a bullshitter-nicknamed "Windy Linde"-who thought his fake confession
about Lenin funding the bombing campaign would get him out of Poland's jails and set up in a comfortable
new life in New York.
By 1923, the FBI had thoroughly destroyed America's communist and radical labor movements-allowing
it to focus on its other favorite pastime: spying on and destroying political opponents. The FBI
spied on US Senators who supported opening diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union: Idaho's William
Borah, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Thomas Walsh of the Judiciary Committee, and
Burton K Wheeler, the prairie Populist senator from Montana, who visited the Soviet Union and pushed
for diplomatic relations. Harding's corrupt Attorney General Dougherty denounced Sen. Wheeler as
"the Communist leader in the Senate" and "no more a Democrat than Stalin, his comrade in Moscow."
Dougherty accused Sen. Wheeler of being part of a conspiracy "to capture, by deceit and design, as
many members of the Senate as possible and to spread through Washington and the cloakrooms of Congress
a poison gas as deadly as that which sapped and destroyed brave soldiers in the last war."
Hoover, now a top FBI official, quietly fed kompromat to journalists he cultivated, particularly
an AP reporter named Richard Whitney, who published a popular book in 1924, "Reds In America" alleging
Kremlin agents "had an all-pervasive influence over American institutions; they had infiltrated every
corner of American life." Whitney named Charlie Chaplin as a Kremlin agent, along with Felix Frankfurter
and members of the Senate pushing for recognition of the Soviet Union. That killed any hope for diplomatic
recognition for the next decade.
Then the first Harding scandals broke-Teapot Dome, Veterans Affairs, bribery at the highest rungs.
When Senators Wheeler and Walsh opened bribery investigations, the FBI sent agents to the senators'
home state to drum up false bribery charges against Sen. Wheeler. The charges were clearly fake,
and a jury dismissed the charges. But Attorney General Dougherty was indicted for fraud and forced
to resign, as was his FBI chief Burns-but not Burns' underling Hoover, who stayed in the shadows.
"We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in
sex-life scandals and plain blackmail This must stop."
With the Cold War, the FBI became obsessed with homosexuals as America's Fifth Column under Moscow's
control. Homosexuals, the FBI believed, were susceptible to Kremlin kompromat-so the FBI collected
and disseminated its own kompromat on alleged American homosexuals, supposedly to protect America
from the Kremlin. In the early 1950s, Hoover launched the Sex Deviates Program to spy on American
homosexuals and purge them from public life. The FBI built up 300,000 pages of files on suspected
homosexuals and contacted their employers, local law enforcement and universities to "to drive homosexuals
from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation," according
to Tim Weiner's book Enemies. No one but the FBI knows exactly how many Americans' lives and careers
were destroyed by the FBI's Sex Deviants Program but Hoover-who never married, lived with his mother
until he was 40, and traveled everywhere with his
"friend" Clyde Tolson .
In the 1952 election, Hoover was so committed to helping the Republicans and Eisenhower win that
he compiled and disseminated a 19-page kompromat file alleging that his Democratic Party rival Adlai
Stevenson was gay. The FBI's file on Stevenson was kept in the Sex Deviants Program section-it included
libelous gossip, claiming that Stevenson was one of Illinois' "best known homosexuals" who went by
the name "Adeline" in gay cruising circles.
In the 1960s, Hoover and his FBI chiefs collected kompromat on the sex lives of JFK and Martin
Luther King. Hoover presented some of his kompromat on JFK to Bobby Kennedy, in a concern-trollish
way claiming to "warn" him that the president was opening himself up to blackmail. It was really
a way for Hoover to let the despised Kennedy brothers know he could destroy them, should they try
to Comey him out of his FBI office. Hoover's kompromat on MLK's sex life was a particular obsession
of his-he now believed that African-Americans, not homosexuals, posed the greatest threat to become
a Kremlin Fifth Column. The FBI wiretapped MLK's private life, collecting tapes of his affairs with
other women, which a top FBI official then mailed to Martin Luther King's wife, along with a note
urging King to commit suicide.
FBI letter anonymously mailed to Martin Luther King Jr's wife, along with kompromat sex tapes
After JFK was murdered, when Bobby Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1964, he recounted another disturbing
FBI/kompromat story that President Johnson shared with him on the campaign trail. LBJ told Bobby
about a stack of kompromat files - FBI reports "detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the
Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes." LBJ asked RFK if the kompromat should be leaked
selectively to destroy Republicans before the 1964 elections. Kennedy recalled,
"He told me he had spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all these
people. And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely. Lyndon talks about everybody,
you see, with everybody. And of course that's dangerous."
Kennedy had seen some of the same FBI kompromat files as attorney general, but he was totally
opposed to releasing such unsubstantiated kompromat-such as, say, the Trump piss files-because doing
so would "destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really
make us a laughingstock around the world."
Imagine that.
Which brings me to the big analogy every hack threw around last week, calling Trump firing Comey
"Nixonian." Actually, what Trump did was more like the very opposite of Nixon, who badly wanted to
fire Hoover in 1971-2, but was too afraid of the kompromat Hoover might've had on him to make the
move. Nixon fell out with his old friend and onetime mentor J Edgar Hoover in 1971, when the ailing
old FBI chief refused to get sucked in to the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers investigation, especially
after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the New York Times. Part of the reason Nixon created his
Plumbers team of black bag burglars was because Hoover had become a bit skittish in his last year
on this planet-and that drove Nixon crazy.
Nixon called his chief of staff Haldeman:
Nixon: I talked to Hoover last night and Hoover is not going after this case [Ellsberg] as
strong as I would like. There's something dragging him.
Haldeman: You don't have the feeling the FBI is really pursuing this?
Nixon: Yeah, particularly the conspiracy side. I want to go after everyone. I'm not so interested
in Ellsberg, but we have to go after everybody who's a member of this conspiracy.
Hoover's ambitious deputies in the FBI were smelling blood, angling to replace him. His number
3, Bill Sullivan (who sent MLK the sex tapes and suicide note) was especially keen to get rid of
Hoover and take his place. So as J Edgar was stonewalling the Daniel Ellsberg investigation, Sullivan
showed up in a Department of Justice office with two suitcases packed full of transcripts and summaries
of illegal wiretaps that Kissinger and Nixon had ordered on their own staff and on American journalists.
The taps were ordered in Nixon's first months in the White House in 1969, to plug up the barrage
of leaks, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Sullivan took the leaks from J Edgar's
possession and told the DOJ official that they needed to be hidden from Hoover, who planned to use
them as kompromat to blackmail Nixon.
Nixon decided he was going to fire J Edgar the next day. This was in September, 1971. But the
next day came, and Nixon got scared. So he tried to convince his attorney general John Mitchell to
fire Hoover for him, but Mitchell said only the President could fire J Edgar Hoover. So Nixon met
him for breakfast, and, well, he just didn't have the guts. Over breakfast, Hoover flattered Nixon
and told him there was nothing more in the world he wanted than to see Nixon re-elected. Nixon caved;
the next day, J Edgar Hoover unceremoniously fired his number 3 Bill Sullivan, locking him out of
the building and out of his office so that he couldn't take anything with him. Sullivan was done.
The lesson here, I suppose, is that if an FBI director doesn't want to be fired, it's best to
keep your kompromat a little closer to your chest, as a gun to hold to your boss's head. Comey's
crew already released the piss tapes kompromat on Trump-the damage was done. What was left to hold
back Trump from firing Comey? "Laws"? The FBI isn't even legal. "Norms" would be the real reason.
Which pretty much sums up everything Trump has been doing so far. We've learned the past two decades
that we're hardly a nation of laws, at least not when it comes to the plutocratic ruling class. What
does bind them are "norms"-and while those norms may mean everything to the ruling class, it's an
open question how much these norms mean to a lot of Americans outside that club.
The USA doesn't have a legal basis either, it is a revolting crown colony of the British Empire.
Treason and heresy all the way down. Maybe the British need to burn Washington DC again?
Wondered how Comey thought he could get away with his conviction and pardon of Sec Clinton.
Seems like part of the culture of FBI is a "above and beyond" the law mentality.
Back in the early 1970s a high school friend moved to Alabama because his father was transferred
by his employer.
My friend sent a post card describing among other things the fact that Alabama had done away
with the requirement of a math class to graduate high school, and substituted a required class
called "The Evils of Communism" complete with a text-book written by J. Edgar Hoover; Masters
of Deceit.
In Dallas,Texas my 1959 Civics class had to read the same book. We all were given paperback
copies of it to take home and read. It was required reading enacted by Texas legislature.
So I'd guess you weren't fooled by any of those commie plots of the sixties, like the campaigns
for civil rights or against the Vietnamese war.
I can't really brag, I didn't stop worrying about the Red Menace until 1970 or so, that's when
I started running into returning vets who mostly had no patience for that stuff.
We've learned the past two decades that we're hardly a nation of laws, at least not when
it comes to the plutocratic ruling class. What does bind them are "norms"
Or as David Broder put it (re Bill Clinton): he came in and trashed the place and it wasn't
his place.
It was David Broder's place. Of course the media play a key role with all that kompromat since
they are the ones needed to convey it to the public. The tragedy is that even many of the sensible
in their ranks such as Bill Moyers have been sucked into the kompromat due to their hysteria over
Trump. Ames is surely on point in this great article. The mistake was allowing secret police agencies
like the FBI and CIA to be created in the first place.
Sorry, my initial reaction was that people who don't know the difference between "rein" and
"reign" are not to be trusted to provide reliable information. Recognizing that as petty, I kept
reading, and presently found the statement that Congress was not informed of the founding of the
FBI until a century after the fact, which seems implausible. If in fact the author meant the end
of 1908 it was quite an achievement to write 2008.
Interesting to the extent it may be true, but with few sources, no footnotes, and little evidence
of critical editing who knows what that may be?
Who he is is irrelevant. I don't take things on faith because "the Pope said" or because Mark
Ames said. People who expect their information to be taken seriously should substantiate it.
So anything the FBI does to get rid of him must by definition be ok! Besides, surely our civic-minded
IC would never use their power on the Good Guys!
Ah yes, the voice of "caution." And such attention to the lack of footnotes, in this day when
the curious can so easily cut and paste a bit of salient text into a search engine and pull up
a feast of parse-able writings and video, from which they can "judiciously assess" claims and
statements. If they care to spend the time, which is in such short supply among those who are
struggling to keep up with the horrors and revelations people of good will confront every blinking
day
Classic impeachment indeed. All from the height of "academic rigor" and "caution." Especially
the "apologetic" bit about "reign" vs "rein." Typos destroy credibility, don't they? And the coup
de grass (sic), the unrebuttable "plausibility" claim.
One wonders at the nature of the author's curriculum vitae. One also marvels at the yawning
gulf between the Very Serious Stuff I was taught in grade and high school civics and history,
back in the late '50s and the '60s, about the Fundamental Nature Of Our Great Nation and its founding
fathers and the Beautiful Documents they wrote, on the one hand, and what we mopes learn, through
a drip-drip-drip process punctuated occasionally by Major Revelations, about the real nature of
the Empire and our fellow creatures
PS: My earliest memory of television viewing was a day at a friend's house - his middle-class
parents had the first "set" in the neighborhood, I think an RCA, in a massive sideboard cabinet
where the picture tube pointed up and you viewed the "content" in a mirror mounted to the underside
of the lid. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5onSwx7_Cn0
The family was watching a hearing of Joe McCarthy's kangaroo court, complete with announcements
of the latest number in the "list of known Communists in the State Department" and how Commyanism
was spreading like an unstoppable epidemic mortal disease through the Great US Body Politic and
its Heroic Institutions of Democracy. I was maybe 6 years old, but that grainy black and white
"reality TV" content had me asking "WTF?" at a very early age. And I'd say it's on the commentor
to show that the "2008" claim is wrong, by something other than "implausible" as drive-by impeachment.
Given the content of the original post, and what people paying attention to all this stuff have
a pretty good idea is the general contours of a vast corruption and manipulation.
Interesting article on the history of the FBI, although the post-Hoover era doesn't get any
treatment. The Church Committee hearings on the CIA and FBI, after the exposure of notably
Operation CHAOS (early
60s to early 70s) by the CIA and
COINTELPRO(late 1950s to
early 1970s) by the FBI, didn't really get to the bottom of the issue although some reforms
were initiated.
Today, it seems, the best description of the FBI's main activity is corporate enforcer for
the white-collar mafia known as Wall Street. There is an analogy to organized crime, where the
most powerful mobsters settled disputes between other gangs of criminals. Similarly, if a criminal
gang is robbed by one of its own members, the mafia would go after the guilty party; the FBI plays
this role for Wall Street institutions targeted by con artists and fraudsters. Compare and contrast
a pharmaceutical company making opiates which is targeted by thieves vs. a black market drug cartel
targeted by thieves. In one case, the FBI investigates; in the other, a violent vendetta ensues
(such as street murders in Mexico).
The FBI executives are rewarded for this service with lucrative post-retirement careers within
corporate America Louis Freeh went to credit card fraudster, MBNA, Richard Mueller to a corporate
Washington law firm, WilmerHale, and Comey, before Obama picked him as Director, worked for Lockheed
Martin and HSBC (cleaning up after their $2 billion drug cartel marketing scandal) after leaving
the FBI in 2005.
Maybe this is legitimate, but this only applies to their protection of the interests of large
corporations as the 2008 economic collapse and aftermath showed, they don't prosecute corporate
executives who rip off poor people and middle-class homeowners. Banks who rob people, they aren't
investigated or prosecuted; that's just for people who rob banks.
When it comes to political issues and national security, however, the FBI has such a terrible
record on so many issues over the years that anything they claim has to be taken with a grain
or two of salt. Consider domestic political activity: from the McCarthyite 'Red Scare' of the
1950s to COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s to targeting of environmental groups in the 1980s and
1990s to targeting anti-war protesters under GW Bush to their obsession with domestic mass surveillance
under Obama, it's not a record that should inspire any confidence.
Some say they have a key role to play in national security and terrorism but their record
on the 2001 anthrax attacks is incredibly shady and suspicious. The final suspect, Bruce Ivins,
is clearly innocent of the crime, just as their previous suspect, Steven Hatfill was. Ivins, if
still alive, could have won a similar multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against the FBI.
All honest bioweapons experts know this to be true the perpetrators of those anthrax letters
are still at large, and may very well have had close associations with the Bush Administration
itself.
As far as terrorist activities? Many of their low-level agents did seem concerned about the
Saudis and bin Laden in the late 1990s and pre-9/11 but Saudi investigations were considered
politically problematic due to "geostrategic relationships with our Saudi allies" hence people
like John O'Neil and Coleen Rowley were sidelined and ignored, with disastrous consequences. The
Saudi intelligence agency role in 9/11 was buried for over a decade, as well. Since 9/11, most
of the FBI investigations seem to have involved recruiting mentally disabled young Islamic men
in sting operations in which the FBI provides everything needed. You could probably get any number
of mentally ill homeless people across the U.S., regardless of race or religion, to play this
role.
Comey's actions over the past year are certainly highly questionable, as well. Neglecting to
investigate the Clinton Foundation ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments and corporations,
particularly things like State Department approval of various arms deals in which bribes may have
been paid, is as much a dereliction of duty as neglecting to investigate Trump ties to Russian
business interests but then, Trump has a record of shady business dealings dating back to the
1970s, of strange bankruptcies and bailouts and government sales that the FBI never looked at
either.
Ultimately, this is because FBI executives are paid off not to investigate Wall Street criminality,
nor shady U.S. government activity, with lucrative positions as corporate board members and so
on after their 'retirements'. I don't doubt that many of their junior members mean well and are
dedicated to their jobs but the fish rots from the head down.
As far as terrorist activities? Many of their low-level agents did seem concerned about
the Saudis and bin Laden in the late 1990s and pre-9/11 but Saudi investigations were considered
politically problematic due to "geostrategic relationships with our Saudi allies" hence people
like John O'Neil and Coleen Rowley were sidelined and ignored, with disastrous consequences.
The Clinton Administration had other priorities. You know, I think I'll let ex-FBI Director
Freeh explain what happened when the FBI tried to get the Saudis to cooperate with their investigation
into the bombing of the Khobar Towers.
"That September, Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage took over the entire 143-room Hay-Adams
Hotel, just across from Lafayette Park from the White House, for six days. The visit, I figured,
was pretty much our last chance. Again, we prepared talking points for the president. Again,
I contacted Prince Bandar and asked him to soften up the crown prince for the moment when Clinton,
-- or Al Gore I didn't care who -- would raise the matter and start to exert the necessary pressure."
"The story that came back to me, from "usually reliable sources," as they say in Washington,
was that Bill Clinton briefly raised the subject only to tell the Crown Prince that he certainly
understood the Saudis; reluctance to cooperate. Then, according to my sources, he hit Abdullah
up for a contribution to the still-to-be-built Clinton presidential library. Gore, who was
supposed to press hardest of all in his meeting with the crown Prince, barely mentioned the
matter, I was told." -Louis J. Freeh, My FBI (2005)
In my defense I picked the book up to see if there was any dirt on the DNC's electoral funding
scandal in 1996. I'm actually glad I did. The best part of the book is when Freeh recounts running
into a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade and listens to how Hoover's FBI ruined his life despite
having broken no laws. As if a little thing like laws mattered to Hoover. The commies were after
our precious bodily fluids!
I'm not sure there are many functioning norms left within the national political leadership.
Seemed to me Gingrich started blowing those up and it just got worse from there. McConnell not
allowing Garland to be considered comes to mind
Thanks to Mark Ames now we know what Pres. Trump meant when he tweeted about his tapes with
AG Comey. Not some taped conversation between Pres. Trump & AG Comey but bunch of kompromat tapes
that AG Comey has provided Pres. Trump that might not make departing AG Comey looked so clean.
DANA BASH, CNN: So explosive. So incredibly serious. The Times report also says that James Comey created similar memos after the
other meetings that he had with the president. So this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the most explosive, but it's very
clear that James Comey wanted to get out there that this happened, created this paper trail real time, contemporaneously rather,
in order to protect himself from exactly what happened last week, him being fired, him being blamed. You know, wanting to know that
he has sort of the information at his disposal if, in fact, this happened...
If you just take a step back, Wolf, just in the past 24 hours, right or wrong, what this president has done, his first 100 plus
days, even before he came into office is pick fights with the intelligence community and now the law enforcement community. Particularly
the way, never mind he fired James Comey, but the way in which he did it, not giving him the respect of actually telling him in person
or at least not having him find out from cable news.
So we know that they talk about the deep state -- well these are communities that have a lot of loyalty within -- and know how
to get back, even if you're the president of the United States.
And the fact is that when the intelligence community found out about the conversation that the president had with the Russians,
talking about classified information, we don't know all the details.
We're told that it wasn't as bad as it might have seemed initially, that's what the White House sources are saying, but still,
the intelligence community leaked that out. Now we know that the FBI director was keeping notes on many things. But the fact that
this is the first one that he made clear and made public.
It's so incredibly explosive, as Jeff said, is the clearest most dangerous sign yet of potential obstruction of justice. Makes
you think, what else is going to happen? And it's very hard for Republicans who have in the past 24 hours been more aggressively
critical of the president begging for a crisis-free day or crisis-free hour, very hard for them not to take this incredibly seriously.
STEPHEN COHEN: But the point here is that Russia has been torn between East and the West forever. Its best policy, in its
own best interest, is to straddle East and West, not to be of the East or the West, but it's impossible in this world today. And
U.S.-led Western policy since the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly since Putin came to power in 2000, has persuaded the
Russian ruling elite that Russia can not count any longer, economically, politically, militarily, on being part of the West. It has
to go elsewhere. So all this talk about wanting to win Russia to an American position that's anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese is conceived
in disaster and will end in disaster. They should think of some other foreign policy.
...Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be
happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:
Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
Stationed troops in Poland
Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland
Assange actually undermined the key pre-condition of the Deep state existence -- secrecy.
Notable quotes:
"... Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. ..."
"... The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US empire. ..."
"... HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." ..."
I'm just going to toss this one here at the end because I'm seeing it go around a lot in the
wake of the Mueller report.
Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has
claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that
WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth
Rich.
This claim is unsubstantiated because, as we discussed in Smear 4, the public has not seen a
shred of evidence proving who was or was not WikiLeaks' source, so there's no way to know there
was any deception happening there. We've never seen any hard proof, nor indeed anything besides
official narrative, connecting the Russian government to Guccifer 2.0 and Guccifer 2.0 to
WikiLeaks, and Daniel Lazare for Consortium News documents that there are in fact some
major
plot holes in Mueller's timeline. Longtime Assange friend and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray
maintains that he knows the
source of the DNC Leaks and Podesta Emails were two different Americans, not Russians, and
hints that one of them was a DNC insider. There is exactly as much publicly available evidence
for Murray's claim as there is for Mueller's.
Mainstream media has been blaring day after day for years that it is an absolute known fact
that the Russian government was WikiLeaks' source, and the only reason people scoff and roll
their eyes at anyone who makes the indisputably factual claim that we've seen no evidence for
this is because
the illusory truth effect causes the human brain to mistake repetition for fact.
The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he
implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something
happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any
of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which
incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US
empire.
And I guess that's it for now. Again, this article is an ongoing project, so I'll be
updating it and adding to it regularly as new information comes in and new smears need
refutation. If I missed something or got something wrong, or even if you spotted a typo, please
email me at [email protected] and let
me know. I'm trying to create the best possible tool for people to refute Assange smears, so
I'll keep sharpening this baby to make sure it cuts like a razor. Thanks for reading, and
thanks to everyone who helped! Phew! That was long.
We don't have to like Julian Assange, but the release of the "Collateral Damage" video
alone is enough to justify defending Assange and the freedom of the press.
She really didn't debunk the thing about Seth Rich very well. Basically just said that
whatever Mueller said wasn't true, which doesn't go very far for me. He definitely did imply
that he got at least some of his info from Rich so if there is some sort of proof of that, it
needs to be supplied; otherwise Mueller's story is the only one.
I have recently seen a political cartoon with Dotard then saying: "I love Wikileaks" + " I
will throw her in jail" and now saying: "I know nothing about Wikileaks" + "I will throw him
in jail"
It summed up perfectly that swine's lack of integrity.
It's so simple. Assange and Wikileaks exposed Hillary, Podesta, and the entire DNC to be
lying, deceiving, hypocritical, disingenuous, elitist bastards. His crimes are miniscule
compared to that, and all who attempt to condemn Assange only show us that they are members
of that foul group.
Excellent thorough content. And Kim Schmitz pointed out they'll drag things on for as long
as possible and try to add additional things as they go. Such a bunch of sad, pathetic
control freaks. Covering up their own failures, crimes and short comings with a highly
publicized distraction putting the screws to a single journalist.
“ Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved
both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange .
And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files , 32 pages , but they’re all
classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore
you can’t have them.
That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I
mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between
people and devices.”
Assange and Snowden are freedom fighters, exposing the duplicitous, corrupt, and criminals
to the entire world.
The hundreds of millions of mindless zombies are so brainwashed by the fake news industry,
that if Assange and Snowden are not spies, they are criminal in some capacity.
I have liberal, conservative, and libertarian leaning friends, and virtually every one of
them believe Assange and Snowden are traitors to America, got innocent people killed, are
rapists, or too cowardly to stand trial in the USA.
What has happened to common sense and some necessary cynicism?
Why even bother arguing with these people. Assange gave up his liberty to reveal the
truth, and the American public said in essence "so what." No one except the leakers and
whistle-blowers faced any punishment, and I can't think of a single national politician who
even talks about doing anything about the misconduct that was revealed. Yeah, a small
percentage of the population is outraged at what was revealed, but the vast majority
literally don't give a ****.
Hehe... I guess you will find out how wrong you are in 2020 :-) His release of Hillary's
emails gave Trump 2016... and him turning his back on Assange took away his chances in
2020
Most regular readers on ZH know but this is an echo chamber for "Always Trumpers" so there
won't be many commenters on this article. Rather than defend his DOJ's extradition attempts
with implausible theories they'll be chattering back and forth about the Mueller Report.
Agreed. It's amazing to me that people who claim to be believers of the MAGA message don't
see the harm associated with the arrest of Assange, and all of the other uniparty **** Trump
is perpetuating. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
Yeah and yet.... everyone seemed to credit Hillary's loss to the release of her emails on
wikileaks... Hmm that narrative that seems to be trying to minimize the impact on Trumps
chances in 2020 really breaks down in the face of that fact doesn't it?? Trump has no hope...
just stop... get behind a republican that has a chance... Trump doesn't... he lost half of
his base... get over it...
When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been
attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to
be executed.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
I think Professor Cohen has a real point in the following statements:
" In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever
more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin
announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they're real–that can elude
any missile defense. ..
Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading
nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, 'It's time to
negotiate an end to this new arms race,' and he's 100 percent right. So when I heard Trump
say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced
So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment -- that would have been
probably around the summer of 2016 -- just on this one point, because none of the other
candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia "
Then, when he goes on to elaborate on China's weaponry and posit including them in the
next round of draw-down negotiations, as far off as that may look – that to me is what
Trump can use for his re-election. I do believe his attitude towards Russia won him his first
term.
Those Russia-gate kooks need to focus on the American people, not on Trump. Well, maybe
they did, and still do. It's really about us, not him.
When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, "Our democracy has been attacked," I
an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
"... Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures for the various departments. ..."
"... I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet. ..."
"... A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies). ..."
It is not about politics, but Trump's peculiar management style, Timofey Bordachev, Director
of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies of the Faculty of World Economy
and International Affairs at Russia's High School of Economics, told RIA Novosti.
"Those who have been studying the business biography of the newly elected president have
noted that he has always played off his high-ranking employees against each other. While doing
so he remained above the fight," he said.
And
Gevorg Mirzayan, an assistant professor of the Political Science department at the Financial
University in Moscow pointed out two purposes for the nominations.
The above brings rationality to the diverse selections made by Trump.
However, the black swan event will be an economic collapse (fast or protracted over several
years). That will be the defining event in the Trump presidency. I have no inkling how he or those
who may replace him would respond.
I had guessed myself that Trump was going to run the government as a business corporation. Surrounding
himself with people of competing viewpoints, and hiring on the basis of experience and skills
(and not on the basis of loyalty, as Hillary Clinton might have done) would be two ways Trump
can change the government and its culture. Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity
of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow
and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with
Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures
for the various departments.
If running the US government as a large mock business enterprise brings a change in its culture
so it becomes more open and accountable to the public, less directed by ideology and identity
politics, and gets rid of people engaged in building up their own little empires within the different
departments, then Trump might just be the President the US needs at this moment in time.
Interesting that Russian academics have noted the outlines of Trump's likely cabinet and what
they suggest he plans to do, and no-one else has. Does this imply that Americans and others in
the West have lost sight of how large business corporations could be run, or should be run, and
everyone is fixated on fake "entrepreneurship" or "self-entrepreneur" (whatever that means) models
of running a business where it's every man, woman, child and dog for itself?
I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet.
Trump may have noted how Putin did an incredible turnaround of Russia and it all started with
three objectives: restore the integrity of the borders, rebuild the industrial base and run off
the globalists/liberals/kreakles. I am certainly not the first one to say this and I think that
there is a lot of basis for that analysis. However, Trump will have a far more difficult challenge
and frankly I don't think he has enough allies or smarts to pull it off.
A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions
remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected
and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies).
"... When Mossad was caught by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm ..."
"... When bomb parts (not yet assembled) mailed to the US embassy in Tunisia were discovered by Fedex workers at Charles de Gaulle airport the ready explanation was...you guessed it..."training exercise gone awry". https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html ..."
"... The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors... ..."
Speaking of Tunisia, there were bomb parts being mailed in the other direction - from
the US to the embassy in Tunisia.
The bomb parts were discovered by accident and so the best response was ... "nothing to see
here, folks, just a training exercise".
Often wondered what the planned abort scenario was for 9/11 .
If the CIA etal had indeed wired the towers with explosives
how would they go about deinstalling said explosives if there
had been a major muck up and the plans for 9/11 were called off or delayed?
"Training exercises" is a good cover.
When Mossad was caught
by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was
later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm
"September 8, 2001: Bioterrorism Exercise Is Held at a New York Airport
A training exercise is held at New York's La Guardia Airport, based around the scenario of
a terrorist attack with a biological weapon"
And, you probably recall that active anthrax was being shipped,
although "no one was at fault", for years all over the place.
That is, anthrax created by the Pentagon that was "believed to be inactive" was actually
live anthrax
and being shipped around the world. But no one was at fault.
Thus, if someone decided to pull the plug on 9/11 and had to remove
the explosives from the towers they could have declared
"training exercise has gone awry". The Pentagon could merely declare that
they had held an adjunct exercise in the towers and what the biological terror
exercise thought was inactive anthrax was actually live and the
towers would need to be evacuated while decontamination took place.
That could have been the ready made abort-scenario to 9/11 .
Nor it would be very difficult to imagine that just after naming the IRGC as terrorist
organization, they will be most probably to blame....Sounds like the perfect alibi to
unleash the WoT on Iran...
The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait where our
soldier friend would use them for whatever murderous or false flag mischief his owners
commanded. The luggage wasn't supposed to be checked by the plebs in Kuwait but due to the
mission being cancelled the goods ended up in their hands. The conduit from Tunisia to
Kuwait was primed to let the cargo through but there was not enough time to set up the
transit from Kuwait to the USA. Hence the discovery by the wrong people.
Anon @1: Yes, C4 is one of the most stable explosives currently in use, you can throw it,
hit it, drop it, shoot it, even set fire to it and it will not detonate, unless you run a
electric current through it (even a tiny current like from a watch battery can set it off).
Without a detonator the C4 would be almost harmless (there's a tiny, tiny chance a static
electric spark could detonate it if the C4 wasn't property prepared for transit). So,
assuming there wasn't a detonator with the C4, I would lean to this C4 being smuggled to
somewhere to be sold or used in an assassination attempt, rather than an attempt to bring
down an airplane.
The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait
Posted by: corkie | Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | 17
Another possibility - in my view significantly more likely - is that the originally
intended destination for the explosive was the US, and that the Soldier-Mule was the patsy.
I.e. the putative posting to Kuwait AND its annulment were set up to enable means
for the bag to go through special handling channels that would normally get only token
inspection. The text from LW confirms that inspection was indeed utterly token at almost
every step, and the alertness of the Kuwaitis was probably unanticipated because they were
out of the loop. One critical stage in the transfer - that an explosive detector would be
in the path and switched on - was not adequately planned for by the plotters.
The aim would most likely be to get undocumented C4 into the US, as whoever
planned this operation might well have access to documented C4 in the US anyway. That might
well signal planned false flag use, so that the false flag can be more easily be blamed on
someone else. A putative culprit might be some minor faction in the Deep State.
One possible target for the false flag might be
Russia/Iran/Hezbolla/Syria/China/Venezuela etc ... but in my view this has the wiff of
having a somewhat smaller faction behind it, such as NAZIs/white supremacists. What
immediately comes to mind was the incident a couple of years ago where a German NAZI
sympethising member of the Bundeswehr smuggles weapons and(?) explosives into a stach
hidden in a toilet in an Austrian airport for a planned terrorist incident. I haven't
followed it/read anything about it recently, but a large network of NAZI sympethising
supremacists was unearthed inside and throughout the Bundeswehr in the course of the
investigation. Linked is the well established fact that the NAZI movement have extremely
high level and strong infiltration in the German BND, police, judiciary, Ministry of
Interior, etc - for example one time when a court ordered the Interior Ministry to hand
over documents about NAZI activities in Germany, the Interior Ministry illegally shredded
millions of documents rather than hand them over.
In my opinion, it would be a wise move by Russia to start as quickly as possible a
covert collaboration with countries around the world - including relatively minor US allies
- to ensure that ALL US embassy incidental traffic, such as the bag in this case,
get an effective check for explosives, fire hazards, chemical weapons, bio weapons and
drugs, despite the official channels giving only token inspection. The recent surge in
incidents (or perhaps only the recent exposure of longstandingly regular incidents??)
involving US soldiers and weapons/explosives might be read as an indication of a widespread
threat.
In that case, the most probable scenario was that this marine simply wanted to ship the
C4 to the USA in order to do a terrorist attack in American soil, not to take down a
plane.
So the USA helped to re-install medieval treatment of woman in Afghanistan and then called it progress toward human rights...
Notable quotes:
"... But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open. Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as well. ..."
Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal.
... ... ...
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the
discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a
critical history that has been suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the
attacks occurred, when "some people did something." Many of those people served at the highest
levels of U.S. government, and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an
international network – and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Taliban 'Unimportant'
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy
weapons in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi
clerics such as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of
dollars worth of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them
to commit acts of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to
wreak havoc on the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause
with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
To some in Washington, the Taliban were a historical footnote. To others, they were allies
of convenience. As a top State Department diplomat commented to journalist Ahmed Rashid in
February 1997, "The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There be [the Saudi-owned
oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with
that."
CIA Cover-ups and Blowback
Back in the U.S., some people fueled the blowback from the Afghan proxy war. The Blind
Sheikh was given a special entry visa by the CIA as payback for the services he provided in
Afghanistan, allowing him to take over the al-Kifah Center in New York City, which had
functioned as the de facto U.S. arm of Al Qaeda's Services Bureau. Under his watch and with
help from bin Laden, some people and lots of aid were shuttled to the front lines of U.S. proxy
wars in Bosnia and Chechnya while the Clinton administration generally looked the other
way.
Though the Blind Sheikh was eventually convicted in a terror plot contrived by a paid
informant for the FBI, some people in federal law enforcement had been reluctant to indict him.
"There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and
what the circumstances were around that," one of his defense lawyers, Abdeed Jabara told me.
"The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it
suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be
exposure of that. Because there's no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and
the Americans were using the jihadists. There's a symbiotic relationship."
During the 1995 trial of members of the Blind Sheikh's New York-based cell, another defense
lawyer, Roger Stavis, referred to his clients before the jury as "Team America," emphasizing
the role they had played as proxy fighters for the U.S. in Afghanistan. When Stavis attempted
to summon to the witness stand a jihadist operative named Ali Abdelsauod Mohammed who had
trained his clients in firearms and combat, some people ordered Mohammed to refuse his
subpoena. Those people, according to journalist Peter Lance, were federal prosecutors Andrew
McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald.
The government lawyers were apparently fretting that Mohammed would be exposed as an active
asset of both the CIA and FBI, and as a former Army sergeant who had spirited training manuals
out of Fort Bragg while stationed there during the 1980s. So Mohammed remained a free man,
helping Al Qaeda plan attacks on American consular facilities in Tanzania and Kenya while the
"Day of the Planes" plot began to take form.
In early 2000, some people gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to prepare the most daring Al
Qaeda operation to date. Two figures at the meeting, Saudi citizens named Nawaf al-Hazmi and
Khalid al-Midhar, were on their way to the United States. While in Kuala Lumpur, the duo's
hotel room was broken into by CIA agents, their passports were photographed, and their
communications were recorded. And yet the pair of Al Qaeda operatives was able to travel
together with multiple-entry visas on a direct flight from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles. That's
because for some reason, some people from the CIA failed to notify any people at the FBI about
the terror summit that had just taken place. The "Day of Planes" plot was moving forward
without a kink.
In Los Angeles, some people met Hazmi and Midhar at the airport, provided the two
non-English speakers with a personal caretaker and rented them apartments, where neighbors said
they were routinely visited each night by unknown figures in expensive cars with darkened
windows. Those people were Saudi Arabian intelligence agents named Omar Bayoumi and Khaled
al-Thumairy.
Crawford , Texas
It was not until August 2001 that Midhar was placed on a terrorist watch list. That month,
some people met at a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reviewed a classified document headlined,
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." The bulletin was a page-and-a-half long, with
detailed intelligence on the "Day of Planes" plot provided by Ali Mohammed, the Al
Qaeda-FBI-CIA triple agent now registered as "John Doe" and disappeared somewhere in the
federal prison system. Those people reviewed the document for a few minutes before their boss,
President George W. Bush, moved on to other matters.
According to The Washington Post , Bush exhibited an "expansive mood" that day,
taking in a round of golf. "We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die,
and it could be in the U.S.," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black warned days later. Bush
did not meet with his cabinet heads again to discuss terrorism until Sept. 4.
A week later, on Sept. 11, some people did something.
They hijacked four civilian airliners and changed the course of American history with little
more than box cutter blades in their hands. Fifteen of those 19 people, including Hazmi and
Midhar, were citizens of Saudi Arabia. They were products of a Wahhabi school system and a
politically stultifying society that had thrived under the protection of a special relationship
with the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. had showered theocratic allies like Saudi Arabia with aid and
weapons while threatening secular Arab states that resisted its hegemony with sanctions and
invasion. The Saudis were the favorite Muslims of America's national security elite not because
they were moderate, which they absolutely were not, but because they were useful.
In the days after 9/11, the FBI
organized several flights to evacuate prominent Saudi families from the U.S., including
relatives of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Islamophobia erupted across the country, with even
mainstream personalities such as TV news anchor Dan Rather taking to the airwaves to claim
without evidence that Arab-Americans had celebrated the 9/11 attacks.
Unable to find a single operational Al Qaeda cell in the country, the FBI turned to an army
of paid snitches to haul in mentally unstable Muslims, dupes and idlers like the Lackawanna 6
in manufactured plots. Desperate for a high-profile bust to reinforce the "war on terror"
narrative, the bureau hounded Palestinian Muslim activists and persecuted prominent Islamic
charities like the Holy Land Foundation, sending its directors to prison for decades for the
crime of sending aid to NGOs in the occupied Gaza Strip.
As America's national security state cracked down on Muslim civil society at home, it turned
to fanatical Islamist proxies abroad to bring down secular and politically independent Arab
states. In Libya, the U.S. and UK helped arm the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a longtime
affiliate of Al Qaeda, using it as a proxy to depose and murder Muammar Gaddafi. As that
country transformed from a stable, prosperous state into an Afghanistan-style playground for
rival militias, including a chapter of the Islamic State, the Obama administration moved to do
the same to Damascus.
In Syria, the CIA armed an outfit of supposedly "moderate rebels" called the Free Syrian
Army that turned out to be nothing more than a political front and weapons farm for an array of
extremist insurgent factions including Al Qaeda's local affiliate and the Islamic State. The
latter two groups were, of course, products of the sectarian chaos of Iraq, which had been
ruled by a secular government until the U.S. came knocking after 9/11.
The blowback from Iraq, Libya and Syria arrived in the form of the worst refugee crises the
world has experienced since World War II. And then came the bloodiest terror attack to hit the
UK in history – in Manchester. There, the son of a Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member,
who traveled to Libya and Syria on an MI6 ratline, slaughtered concert-goers with a nail
bomb.
Cataclysmic social disruptions like these were like steroids for right-wing Islamophobes,
electrifying Trump's victorious 2016 presidential campaign, a wing of the Brexit "Leave"
campaign in the UK, and far-right parties across Europe. But as I explain in "The Management of
Savagery," these terrifying trends were byproducts of decisions undertaken by national security
elites more closely aligned with the political center – figures who today attempt to
position themselves as leaders of the anti-Trump resistance.
Which people did which things to drag us into the political nightmare we're living through?
For those willing to cut through the campaign season bluster, Ilhan Omar's comments dare us to
name names.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
" Republican
Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," "
The
Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of
Savagery ," published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles
for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including "
Killing Gaza " and "
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded the
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions. 36 comments for "Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of 9/11"
Jeff Harrison , April 19, 2019 at 11:24
The US doesn't seem to have the ability to see ourselves as others see us. This explains
why we don't understand why other countries/peoples react badly towards us. This will get
worse as we move into a more imperialistic mode. We continue to use the anachronistic phrase
"leader of the free world" all the while missing out on the fact that the rest of the world
has, in essence, become free and they, for the most part, don't want us leading them.
bill haymes , April 19, 2019 at 05:20
everyone who has not examined ALL THE EVIDENCE of 9/11 WITH AN OPEN MIND is imo simply
whistling in the wind
Anarcissie , April 19, 2019 at 11:12
I suppose, then, that that would mean going back to the earliest days of the 20th century,
when the British leadership, considering that its future navy, a main pillar of its empire,
would have to be fueled with oil instead of coal, and that there was a lot of oil in the
Middle East, began its imperial projects there, which of course involved wars, police, spies,
economic blackmail, and other tools of empire. The US seized or wangled or inherited the
imperial system from the British and thus acquired the associated regional, ethnic, and
religious hostilities as well. Since the Arabs and other Muslims were weak compared with the
Great Powers, resistance meant terrorism and guerrilla warfare on one side and massive
intervention and the support of local strongmen, Mafia bosses, dictators, and so on on the
other.
After 9/11. mentioning this important fact became 'justifying bin Laden' or 'spitting on
the graves of the dead' so you couldn't talk about it.
But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a
conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open.
Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as
well.
Abe , April 18, 2019 at 23:23
Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby
Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's
National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an
impressive exercise in burying the leads.
Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel
Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection
between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's
national security state.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has
interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to
initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and
has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media
to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all
that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That
country is, of course, Israel."
i really like her and support her but if she just had the good sense to have simply said
"some people did something terrible" none of the present chapter of "islamophobia" would be
acted out..no matter how much we think we know about the real truth(?) what happened that day
did not blow up the white house, congress or the ruling class of america but nearly three
thousand pretty ordinary folks yes, just like what "we" do repeatedly, but nevertheless, and
considering the overwhelming mind fuck that went on with replaying the tragedy on tv for days
so that millions across the nation were put in shock, we need to be just a little more
considerate and possibly understanding both about how many people might feel and how some
people might use any opportunity to perform this second rate islamophobia, which is a tiny
fractional form of the original monstrous behavior that has destroyed nations, governments
and millions of people in the islamic world..that is islamophobia, not the reactionary crap
that passes for it which should be as understandable – under the circumstances –
as terrorism!
Zhu , April 18, 2019 at 22:32
It should have been obvious that our government had made enemies around the world &
that some would attempt revenge some day. Instead, we all thought that what we did to other
people could never happen to us.
Joe Tedesky , April 18, 2019 at 21:41
This is a must read for the skeptics who doubt any questioning of the official 9/11
Commission Report. This investigative reporting by Max Blumenthal is another good reason to
read the Consortium.
hetro , April 18, 2019 at 17:18
Max Blumenthal's emphasis on "somebody did something" in echo to Ilhan Omar's comments,
plus his emphasis on what has been "suppressed," will hopefully lead on to further
disclosures of what took place for the 9/11 event.
Anyone who watches the Omar video will see she is mainly emphasizing a disgraceful
demonizing of Muslims in general. Additionally, what has brought on all the hatred to her,
she did not speak with the "quasi-theological understanding" that demands the official
narrative, with hushed tones, while speaking of the event:
Max Blumenthal above:
". . . by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves anti-Muslim
narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must
be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
It would be a fine thing for CN, despite Mr. Parry's former reservations, to open up
enquiry into further discussion of what has been "suppressed"–or at the very least to
the very serious questions that have not yet been answered on that horrible day.
OlyaPola , April 18, 2019 at 14:17
"Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal."
All processes of suppression tend to spread that which is being suppresed facilitating
de-suppression of much that is being suppressed leaving a residual.
Framing and access to sources may continue the lack of perception of this residual and
hence facilitate misrepresentation through ommission.
"Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly."
Restriction of frame is a tool of obfuscation and choice of point of initiation a tool of
misrepresentation.
During the early 1970's due to internal factors primarily but not wholly in the period of
1964 to 1970, the Politburo of the Soviet Union agreed detente on the bases of spheres of
influence with the United States of America facilitating the creation of a greater assay of
and reliance upon the US dollar fiat currency, further butressed by commodity arrangements
including but not restricted to the petro-dollar, in part to underpin the United States of
America economic recovery including recovering their control over their perceived threats
within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan.
In reaction/attempt at circumvention in 1973 Mitsui-Mitsubishi representing the zaibatsu
sought to jointly develop the Trans-Siberian railway, the port of Nahodka and other
industrial options including in Japan primarily in Northern Honshu and in Hokkaido with the
Soviet Union but this project was terminated by the Politburo, the reason given being
potential threats from China after confrontation including on the Amur and the need to build
BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway – the projects
rejected were ancestor of the present OBOR project with differing participants re-explored
from 1993 onwards.
These opportunities and trajectories in the 1970's were explained to the Politburo in the
1970's but rejected by the Politburo.
The Soviet Union was invited into Afghanistan by the Afghani government and hence never
"invaded" Afghanistan.
The Politburo accepted the invitation of the Afghani government despite the advice of
those practiced in strategic evaluation – the illusion that the Politburo was practiced
in strategic evaluation endured in an ideological half-life post August 1968 but increasingly
was ignored in practice.
During the 1970's there was an oscillating aspect of contrariness and attempt to regain
perceived control in many of the decision of the Politburo led by the man who loved medals
and awards Mr. Brezhnev.
Consequently the Politburo and the Soviet Union was complicit in facilitating
opportunities for " Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert
operation to trap the Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft
underbelly."
However the targets of these operations were not restricted to the Soviet Union but
included as part of an ongoing "strategy" "to underpin the United States of America economic
recovery/maintainence including recovering/maintaining their control over their perceived
threats within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan." and the
location of these efforts were chosen the middle of Central Asia in reaction to experiences
in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Israel post 1973.
The above are necessarily thumbnails in confirmation and extension of the not widely
perceived causation/facilitation/ history/trajectories/time horizons which may aid
perception, as may testing the hypotheses that Ms. Omar is being attacked for challenging
myth irrespective of which myth she attempts to challenge.
"... Rep. Omar is playing around with assasination in taking on the Israeli Lobby and other powerful interests in Washington. I would be willing to bet that there are already contracts out on her life with the purpose of scaring anyone else from raising there head and stating the obvious. ..."
Good article. The problem is that no one in the USA gives a s**t about facts. The
Government is immune from public opinion. Of course the MSN is going to crucify her .
Rep.
Omar is playing around with assasination in taking on the Israeli Lobby and other powerful
interests in Washington. I would be willing to bet that there are already contracts out on
her life with the purpose of scaring anyone else from raising there head and stating the
obvious.
You're absolutely right. Americans are happy to believe the official narrative because it
doesn't threaten their comfy pathetic lives. What they don't seem to realize is that the rest
of the world doesn't share their blind gullibility.
Bigotry, violence, and extreme language – America, it all literally oozes from the
pores of your skin. You just look terrible anymore to outside observers.
The military offensive against Tripoli is more political than in fact a military offensive
to overwhelm the enemy. Of course battles are fought but just the fact that heavy weapons
(tanks, artillery etc...) were not used in the first few weeks could indicate that the attack
was somehow aiming to be fast, to aim fo tribal allegiance shifts or just to make a point.
Only in the past week or so we have seen tanks and air strikes taking place, which seems an
escalation of the conflict.
Haftar's LNA has won this war, though many battles will be fought ahead, the LNA has
brought a very united support from Egypt, KSA and UAE and with that it brings France, Russia
and now the US in supporting it, either as opportunistic, individual agenda or simply to
speed up the peaceful process.
The fact is the GNA is becoming seriously isolated, very few support besides Turkey, Qatar
and Italy, all the indication that there is a good chance for Tripoli to saved from
destruction in a mix of military/political solution in weeks to come. Key tribal vocal and on
the ground support, like Zittan's, will be crucial for this peace process.
Then Misrata will be a totally different animal, here Muslin Brotherhood/al Qaeda and ISIS
are packed and strong, support from Turkey and Qatar is abundant, there is no peaceful
solution for Misrata, only annihilation of the filthy terrorists, like in Idlib in Syria.
Trump is supporting Haftar because he is STILL a CIA asset and to keep Russia's hands off
Libya. Haftar is also friends with the Egyptian Zionist Sissy and likewise, MbinSaw.
So now, there's only one smart thing for Putin to do; support THE OTHER SIDE. If he
doesn't do this, the U.S. has a CIA stooge ruling Libya, who is friends with all its allies
including the most lunatic state of the 3 -- Israel, though all three are ruled by despot
nutjobs.
Putin should at worst remain neutral or support the other side to mess with Trump's
geo-engineering.
Now that Putin and Kim will be holding a summit soon; it would be nice to see Putin f...ck
up U.S. plans in Libya too!
It's about putting up roadblocks to the Empire's geopolitical grab. That's the way you
balance power. If ever war breaks out, you want to have as many allies, friendly air space
and allied ports as possible. It doesn't mean a World War will happen again, but it could,
and geostrategy is good INSURANCE. The U.S. will never be Russia's natural ally, not even
close, therefore Putin better play it smart always planning for the worst while hoping for
the best.
Alas, I'm not sure what Putin's thinking lately allowing the lunatic state to attack
Iranian military assets in Syria! Too many Zionist oligarchs in Putin's sphere. One day Putin
will utter Caesar's last words: Et tu, Brute? Because you sure as hell can't trust a Zionist
when it comes to securing your own power!
But only the LNA and GNA are mentioned. I thought there were 3 governments in Libya - one
west, one east, and one pushed by the UN. Wikipedia's Libyan Civil War entry adds the
National Salvation Army to the LNA and GNA. But the NSA may no longer play a part with the
militias rising to the fore. And do the militias support the UN-backed GNA? From what I've
read the militias are working together against "one-man rule" of Haftar.
Libya is a broken country, Haftar brings stability, the end of the militias, Islamists and
slavery. Haftar has already won that is why the US are now supporting him.
Russia has had a long standing dialogue with Haftar. Haftar will probably gain some sort
of independence by balancing these conflicting powers (Russia and US). The US will get oil at
the price they want (need) but I expect that Russia will gain most from Haftar coming out on
top.
Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA
poodle.
Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA
poodle.
Posted by: ADKC | Apr 19, 2019 5:30:50 PM
Hogwash. You left out the part where Haftar joined the revolution that deposed and
murdered Gaddafi after returning to Libya from Langley! Haftar is a ruthless power-lusting
butcher and not trustworthy at all!
Yes he was part of the forces that overthrew Gaddafi and also connected to the CIA - I
didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I would very much prefer Gaddafi to still be in power -
Libyans almost certainly feel the same (the vast majority felt the same when the uprising
happened).
But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist militias.
So what choice is there really? Haftar brings a much greater likelihood of peace and
stability. But, he won't be bringing back the life that Libyans had when Gaddafi was in
charge.
It appears that he instigated his war in 2015 without the agreement/support of US &
CIA and this may well indicate that he is his own person - but this might just be a
smokescreen. Regardless, what real choice is there for ordinary Libyans - continuing war,
chaos and conflict or accepting that Haftar has won?
But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist
militias. So what choice is there really?
Wrong. It's not an either Haftar or terrorists situation, dynamic whatever. This falsehood
is UAE, SAUDI bullshet propaganda. Wahhabism is trying to take over Libya and Sudan! Wherever
the Saudis are involved trouble follows lest you forget Syria and Yemen!
Haftar is bad for Libya PERIOD. More proof is that before Trump called Haftar to offer his
support, he spoke with UEA's MBZ. It all stinks! Leave Libya alone -- hands off! All foreign
influence out! That's the best option.
financial matters , Apr 19, 2019 7:08:35 PM |
link
Nice to see Russia and the US on the same side actually fighting real terrorism. This is a
win against the deep state.
The US doesn't care what murderous thug is in charge.
Posted by: BraveNewWorld | Apr 19, 2019 3:22:46 PM | 9
My first thought was -- now they are telling us?
Of course, HRC put it nicely in a debate with Trump: "you will never see me singing
praises for a dictator or strongmen who does no love America." Qaddafi, RIP, did not love
America, so he had to go once an opportunity emerged. Maduro does not love America. Sisi may
have a kind word now and then etc.
"... But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open. Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as well. ..."
Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal.
... ... ...
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the
discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a
critical history that has been suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the
attacks occurred, when "some people did something." Many of those people served at the highest
levels of U.S. government, and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an
international network – and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Taliban 'Unimportant'
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy
weapons in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi
clerics such as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of
dollars worth of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them
to commit acts of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to
wreak havoc on the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause
with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
To some in Washington, the Taliban were a historical footnote. To others, they were allies
of convenience. As a top State Department diplomat commented to journalist Ahmed Rashid in
February 1997, "The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There be [the Saudi-owned
oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with
that."
CIA Cover-ups and Blowback
Back in the U.S., some people fueled the blowback from the Afghan proxy war. The Blind
Sheikh was given a special entry visa by the CIA as payback for the services he provided in
Afghanistan, allowing him to take over the al-Kifah Center in New York City, which had
functioned as the de facto U.S. arm of Al Qaeda's Services Bureau. Under his watch and with
help from bin Laden, some people and lots of aid were shuttled to the front lines of U.S. proxy
wars in Bosnia and Chechnya while the Clinton administration generally looked the other
way.
Though the Blind Sheikh was eventually convicted in a terror plot contrived by a paid
informant for the FBI, some people in federal law enforcement had been reluctant to indict him.
"There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and
what the circumstances were around that," one of his defense lawyers, Abdeed Jabara told me.
"The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it
suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be
exposure of that. Because there's no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and
the Americans were using the jihadists. There's a symbiotic relationship."
During the 1995 trial of members of the Blind Sheikh's New York-based cell, another defense
lawyer, Roger Stavis, referred to his clients before the jury as "Team America," emphasizing
the role they had played as proxy fighters for the U.S. in Afghanistan. When Stavis attempted
to summon to the witness stand a jihadist operative named Ali Abdelsauod Mohammed who had
trained his clients in firearms and combat, some people ordered Mohammed to refuse his
subpoena. Those people, according to journalist Peter Lance, were federal prosecutors Andrew
McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald.
The government lawyers were apparently fretting that Mohammed would be exposed as an active
asset of both the CIA and FBI, and as a former Army sergeant who had spirited training manuals
out of Fort Bragg while stationed there during the 1980s. So Mohammed remained a free man,
helping Al Qaeda plan attacks on American consular facilities in Tanzania and Kenya while the
"Day of the Planes" plot began to take form.
In early 2000, some people gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to prepare the most daring Al
Qaeda operation to date. Two figures at the meeting, Saudi citizens named Nawaf al-Hazmi and
Khalid al-Midhar, were on their way to the United States. While in Kuala Lumpur, the duo's
hotel room was broken into by CIA agents, their passports were photographed, and their
communications were recorded. And yet the pair of Al Qaeda operatives was able to travel
together with multiple-entry visas on a direct flight from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles. That's
because for some reason, some people from the CIA failed to notify any people at the FBI about
the terror summit that had just taken place. The "Day of Planes" plot was moving forward
without a kink.
In Los Angeles, some people met Hazmi and Midhar at the airport, provided the two
non-English speakers with a personal caretaker and rented them apartments, where neighbors said
they were routinely visited each night by unknown figures in expensive cars with darkened
windows. Those people were Saudi Arabian intelligence agents named Omar Bayoumi and Khaled
al-Thumairy.
Crawford , Texas
It was not until August 2001 that Midhar was placed on a terrorist watch list. That month,
some people met at a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reviewed a classified document headlined,
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." The bulletin was a page-and-a-half long, with
detailed intelligence on the "Day of Planes" plot provided by Ali Mohammed, the Al
Qaeda-FBI-CIA triple agent now registered as "John Doe" and disappeared somewhere in the
federal prison system. Those people reviewed the document for a few minutes before their boss,
President George W. Bush, moved on to other matters.
According to The Washington Post , Bush exhibited an "expansive mood" that day,
taking in a round of golf. "We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die,
and it could be in the U.S.," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black warned days later. Bush
did not meet with his cabinet heads again to discuss terrorism until Sept. 4.
A week later, on Sept. 11, some people did something.
They hijacked four civilian airliners and changed the course of American history with little
more than box cutter blades in their hands. Fifteen of those 19 people, including Hazmi and
Midhar, were citizens of Saudi Arabia. They were products of a Wahhabi school system and a
politically stultifying society that had thrived under the protection of a special relationship
with the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. had showered theocratic allies like Saudi Arabia with aid and
weapons while threatening secular Arab states that resisted its hegemony with sanctions and
invasion. The Saudis were the favorite Muslims of America's national security elite not because
they were moderate, which they absolutely were not, but because they were useful.
In the days after 9/11, the FBI
organized several flights to evacuate prominent Saudi families from the U.S., including
relatives of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Islamophobia erupted across the country, with even
mainstream personalities such as TV news anchor Dan Rather taking to the airwaves to claim
without evidence that Arab-Americans had celebrated the 9/11 attacks.
Unable to find a single operational Al Qaeda cell in the country, the FBI turned to an army
of paid snitches to haul in mentally unstable Muslims, dupes and idlers like the Lackawanna 6
in manufactured plots. Desperate for a high-profile bust to reinforce the "war on terror"
narrative, the bureau hounded Palestinian Muslim activists and persecuted prominent Islamic
charities like the Holy Land Foundation, sending its directors to prison for decades for the
crime of sending aid to NGOs in the occupied Gaza Strip.
As America's national security state cracked down on Muslim civil society at home, it turned
to fanatical Islamist proxies abroad to bring down secular and politically independent Arab
states. In Libya, the U.S. and UK helped arm the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a longtime
affiliate of Al Qaeda, using it as a proxy to depose and murder Muammar Gaddafi. As that
country transformed from a stable, prosperous state into an Afghanistan-style playground for
rival militias, including a chapter of the Islamic State, the Obama administration moved to do
the same to Damascus.
In Syria, the CIA armed an outfit of supposedly "moderate rebels" called the Free Syrian
Army that turned out to be nothing more than a political front and weapons farm for an array of
extremist insurgent factions including Al Qaeda's local affiliate and the Islamic State. The
latter two groups were, of course, products of the sectarian chaos of Iraq, which had been
ruled by a secular government until the U.S. came knocking after 9/11.
The blowback from Iraq, Libya and Syria arrived in the form of the worst refugee crises the
world has experienced since World War II. And then came the bloodiest terror attack to hit the
UK in history – in Manchester. There, the son of a Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member,
who traveled to Libya and Syria on an MI6 ratline, slaughtered concert-goers with a nail
bomb.
Cataclysmic social disruptions like these were like steroids for right-wing Islamophobes,
electrifying Trump's victorious 2016 presidential campaign, a wing of the Brexit "Leave"
campaign in the UK, and far-right parties across Europe. But as I explain in "The Management of
Savagery," these terrifying trends were byproducts of decisions undertaken by national security
elites more closely aligned with the political center – figures who today attempt to
position themselves as leaders of the anti-Trump resistance.
Which people did which things to drag us into the political nightmare we're living through?
For those willing to cut through the campaign season bluster, Ilhan Omar's comments dare us to
name names.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
" Republican
Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," "
The
Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of
Savagery ," published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles
for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including "
Killing Gaza " and "
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded the
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions. 36 comments for "Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of 9/11"
Jeff Harrison , April 19, 2019 at 11:24
The US doesn't seem to have the ability to see ourselves as others see us. This explains
why we don't understand why other countries/peoples react badly towards us. This will get
worse as we move into a more imperialistic mode. We continue to use the anachronistic phrase
"leader of the free world" all the while missing out on the fact that the rest of the world
has, in essence, become free and they, for the most part, don't want us leading them.
bill haymes , April 19, 2019 at 05:20
everyone who has not examined ALL THE EVIDENCE of 9/11 WITH AN OPEN MIND is imo simply
whistling in the wind
Anarcissie , April 19, 2019 at 11:12
I suppose, then, that that would mean going back to the earliest days of the 20th century,
when the British leadership, considering that its future navy, a main pillar of its empire,
would have to be fueled with oil instead of coal, and that there was a lot of oil in the
Middle East, began its imperial projects there, which of course involved wars, police, spies,
economic blackmail, and other tools of empire. The US seized or wangled or inherited the
imperial system from the British and thus acquired the associated regional, ethnic, and
religious hostilities as well. Since the Arabs and other Muslims were weak compared with the
Great Powers, resistance meant terrorism and guerrilla warfare on one side and massive
intervention and the support of local strongmen, Mafia bosses, dictators, and so on on the
other.
After 9/11. mentioning this important fact became 'justifying bin Laden' or 'spitting on
the graves of the dead' so you couldn't talk about it.
But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a
conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open.
Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as
well.
Abe , April 18, 2019 at 23:23
Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby
Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's
National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an
impressive exercise in burying the leads.
Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel
Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection
between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's
national security state.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has
interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to
initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and
has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media
to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all
that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That
country is, of course, Israel."
i really like her and support her but if she just had the good sense to have simply said
"some people did something terrible" none of the present chapter of "islamophobia" would be
acted out..no matter how much we think we know about the real truth(?) what happened that day
did not blow up the white house, congress or the ruling class of america but nearly three
thousand pretty ordinary folks yes, just like what "we" do repeatedly, but nevertheless, and
considering the overwhelming mind fuck that went on with replaying the tragedy on tv for days
so that millions across the nation were put in shock, we need to be just a little more
considerate and possibly understanding both about how many people might feel and how some
people might use any opportunity to perform this second rate islamophobia, which is a tiny
fractional form of the original monstrous behavior that has destroyed nations, governments
and millions of people in the islamic world..that is islamophobia, not the reactionary crap
that passes for it which should be as understandable – under the circumstances –
as terrorism!
Zhu , April 18, 2019 at 22:32
It should have been obvious that our government had made enemies around the world &
that some would attempt revenge some day. Instead, we all thought that what we did to other
people could never happen to us.
Joe Tedesky , April 18, 2019 at 21:41
This is a must read for the skeptics who doubt any questioning of the official 9/11
Commission Report. This investigative reporting by Max Blumenthal is another good reason to
read the Consortium.
hetro , April 18, 2019 at 17:18
Max Blumenthal's emphasis on "somebody did something" in echo to Ilhan Omar's comments,
plus his emphasis on what has been "suppressed," will hopefully lead on to further
disclosures of what took place for the 9/11 event.
Anyone who watches the Omar video will see she is mainly emphasizing a disgraceful
demonizing of Muslims in general. Additionally, what has brought on all the hatred to her,
she did not speak with the "quasi-theological understanding" that demands the official
narrative, with hushed tones, while speaking of the event:
Max Blumenthal above:
". . . by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves anti-Muslim
narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must
be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
It would be a fine thing for CN, despite Mr. Parry's former reservations, to open up
enquiry into further discussion of what has been "suppressed"–or at the very least to
the very serious questions that have not yet been answered on that horrible day.
OlyaPola , April 18, 2019 at 14:17
"Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal."
All processes of suppression tend to spread that which is being suppresed facilitating
de-suppression of much that is being suppressed leaving a residual.
Framing and access to sources may continue the lack of perception of this residual and
hence facilitate misrepresentation through ommission.
"Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly."
Restriction of frame is a tool of obfuscation and choice of point of initiation a tool of
misrepresentation.
During the early 1970's due to internal factors primarily but not wholly in the period of
1964 to 1970, the Politburo of the Soviet Union agreed detente on the bases of spheres of
influence with the United States of America facilitating the creation of a greater assay of
and reliance upon the US dollar fiat currency, further butressed by commodity arrangements
including but not restricted to the petro-dollar, in part to underpin the United States of
America economic recovery including recovering their control over their perceived threats
within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan.
In reaction/attempt at circumvention in 1973 Mitsui-Mitsubishi representing the zaibatsu
sought to jointly develop the Trans-Siberian railway, the port of Nahodka and other
industrial options including in Japan primarily in Northern Honshu and in Hokkaido with the
Soviet Union but this project was terminated by the Politburo, the reason given being
potential threats from China after confrontation including on the Amur and the need to build
BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway – the projects
rejected were ancestor of the present OBOR project with differing participants re-explored
from 1993 onwards.
These opportunities and trajectories in the 1970's were explained to the Politburo in the
1970's but rejected by the Politburo.
The Soviet Union was invited into Afghanistan by the Afghani government and hence never
"invaded" Afghanistan.
The Politburo accepted the invitation of the Afghani government despite the advice of
those practiced in strategic evaluation – the illusion that the Politburo was practiced
in strategic evaluation endured in an ideological half-life post August 1968 but increasingly
was ignored in practice.
During the 1970's there was an oscillating aspect of contrariness and attempt to regain
perceived control in many of the decision of the Politburo led by the man who loved medals
and awards Mr. Brezhnev.
Consequently the Politburo and the Soviet Union was complicit in facilitating
opportunities for " Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert
operation to trap the Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft
underbelly."
However the targets of these operations were not restricted to the Soviet Union but
included as part of an ongoing "strategy" "to underpin the United States of America economic
recovery/maintainence including recovering/maintaining their control over their perceived
threats within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan." and the
location of these efforts were chosen the middle of Central Asia in reaction to experiences
in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Israel post 1973.
The above are necessarily thumbnails in confirmation and extension of the not widely
perceived causation/facilitation/ history/trajectories/time horizons which may aid
perception, as may testing the hypotheses that Ms. Omar is being attacked for challenging
myth irrespective of which myth she attempts to challenge.
"... Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's national security state. ..."
"... Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That country is, of course, Israel." ..."
Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby
Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's
National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an
impressive exercise in burying the lede.
Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel
Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection
between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's
national security state.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has
interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to
initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and
has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media
to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all
that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That
country is, of course, Israel."
Speaking of Tunisia, there were bomb parts being mailed in the other direction - from
the US to the embassy in Tunisia.
The bomb parts were discovered by accident and so the best response was ... "nothing to see
here, folks, just a training exercise".
Often wondered what the planned abort scenario was for 9/11 .
If the CIA etal had indeed wired the towers with explosives
how would they go about deinstalling said explosives if there
had been a major muck up and the plans for 9/11 were called off or delayed?
"Training exercises" is a good cover.
When Mossad was caught
by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was
later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm
"September 8, 2001: Bioterrorism Exercise Is Held at a New York Airport
A training exercise is held at New York's La Guardia Airport, based around the scenario of
a terrorist attack with a biological weapon"
And, you probably recall that active anthrax was being shipped,
although "no one was at fault", for years all over the place.
That is, anthrax created by the Pentagon that was "believed to be inactive" was actually
live anthrax
and being shipped around the world. But no one was at fault.
Thus, if someone decided to pull the plug on 9/11 and had to remove
the explosives from the towers they could have declared
"training exercise has gone awry". The Pentagon could merely declare that
they had held an adjunct exercise in the towers and what the biological terror
exercise thought was inactive anthrax was actually live and the
towers would need to be evacuated while decontamination took place.
That could have been the ready made abort-scenario to 9/11 .
Nor it would be very difficult to imagine that just after naming the IRGC as terrorist
organization, they will be most probably to blame....Sounds like the perfect alibi to
unleash the WoT on Iran...
The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait where our
soldier friend would use them for whatever murderous or false flag mischief his owners
commanded. The luggage wasn't supposed to be checked by the plebs in Kuwait but due to the
mission being cancelled the goods ended up in their hands. The conduit from Tunisia to
Kuwait was primed to let the cargo through but there was not enough time to set up the
transit from Kuwait to the USA. Hence the discovery by the wrong people.
Anon @1: Yes, C4 is one of the most stable explosives currently in use, you can throw it,
hit it, drop it, shoot it, even set fire to it and it will not detonate, unless you run a
electric current through it (even a tiny current like from a watch battery can set it off).
Without a detonator the C4 would be almost harmless (there's a tiny, tiny chance a static
electric spark could detonate it if the C4 wasn't property prepared for transit). So,
assuming there wasn't a detonator with the C4, I would lean to this C4 being smuggled to
somewhere to be sold or used in an assassination attempt, rather than an attempt to bring
down an airplane.
The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait
Posted by: corkie | Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | 17
Another possibility - in my view significantly more likely - is that the originally
intended destination for the explosive was the US, and that the Soldier-Mule was the patsy.
I.e. the putative posting to Kuwait AND its annulment were set up to enable means
for the bag to go through special handling channels that would normally get only token
inspection. The text from LW confirms that inspection was indeed utterly token at almost
every step, and the alertness of the Kuwaitis was probably unanticipated because they were
out of the loop. One critical stage in the transfer - that an explosive detector would be
in the path and switched on - was not adequately planned for by the plotters.
The aim would most likely be to get undocumented C4 into the US, as whoever
planned this operation might well have access to documented C4 in the US anyway. That might
well signal planned false flag use, so that the false flag can be more easily be blamed on
someone else. A putative culprit might be some minor faction in the Deep State.
One possible target for the false flag might be
Russia/Iran/Hezbolla/Syria/China/Venezuela etc ... but in my view this has the wiff of
having a somewhat smaller faction behind it, such as NAZIs/white supremacists. What
immediately comes to mind was the incident a couple of years ago where a German NAZI
sympethising member of the Bundeswehr smuggles weapons and(?) explosives into a stach
hidden in a toilet in an Austrian airport for a planned terrorist incident. I haven't
followed it/read anything about it recently, but a large network of NAZI sympethising
supremacists was unearthed inside and throughout the Bundeswehr in the course of the
investigation. Linked is the well established fact that the NAZI movement have extremely
high level and strong infiltration in the German BND, police, judiciary, Ministry of
Interior, etc - for example one time when a court ordered the Interior Ministry to hand
over documents about NAZI activities in Germany, the Interior Ministry illegally shredded
millions of documents rather than hand them over.
In my opinion, it would be a wise move by Russia to start as quickly as possible a
covert collaboration with countries around the world - including relatively minor US allies
- to ensure that ALL US embassy incidental traffic, such as the bag in this case,
get an effective check for explosives, fire hazards, chemical weapons, bio weapons and
drugs, despite the official channels giving only token inspection. The recent surge in
incidents (or perhaps only the recent exposure of longstandingly regular incidents??)
involving US soldiers and weapons/explosives might be read as an indication of a widespread
threat.
@5 I had listed some curious incidences of "training exercises" including a bioterrorism
training exercise that happened in New York three
days before 9/11.
I am adding to my own personal notes another bioterrorism training exercise that
happened just prior to the highly suspicious Skripal poisoning.
-------
Add to the list, "Toxic Dagger", a biological/chemical training exercise held
just prior to the Skripal poisoning. Toxic Dagger is the largest annual British army
biological/chemical training exercise.
"Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides
a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in
the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat."
The first person to discover the Skripals was the Chief Nursing Officer of the
British Army (whose experience includes deployment to Sierre Leone to help
fight Ebola).
"An experienced officer, highly connected, who is also known for handling highly
infectious patients?"
The nurse claimed later that it was actually her daughter that was with her
that detected and assessed the Skripal scenario.
The daughter was 16 at the time and we presume the Lifesaver Award she
received would be a feather in her cap useful for her imminent application
for admission to a university. Wonder if Lori Loughlin had thought of
using such an angle?
Btw on the Skripal thing does that nurse also run over to every "spice" zombie she sees in
public? Anyone in a puddle of their own partly digested booze? Does she go hunting under
bridges for heroin addicts and glue sniffers? Does she check on everyone sleeping on a
bench or in some doorway? It is England after all.
Weird hobby she's got and with her kid in tow too :P
(Yes I'm being facetious about a bullshit narrative straight out of the
1950ies).
In that case, the most probable scenario was that this marine simply wanted to ship the
C4 to the USA in order to do a terrorist attack in American soil, not to take down a
plane.
Not only they lost all moral authority. UK MSM became openly neofascist in some areas exceeeding the press of Third Riech and the
USSR in distortions and falsifications. .
Notable quotes:
"... Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV. ..."
"... In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' ..."
Even if the Skripal affair WAS staged, you shouldn't get too excited about it. In fact, you should be rather pleased because
it would demonstrate that the tired, incompetent old UK is still capable of mounting an operation of which young, vigorous, competent
Russia would be proud.
The UK can fake events with the best of them! I would find that reassuring rather than deplorable because it's a nasty world
out there.
The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time. Sometimes they blatantly lie. Most people
still believe most of what they say, as there is an in-built trust of authority, for some very good historical reasons. The Skripal
story, made it obvious to a large number of people, that some of it could not be true. Most still believe it or din't take much
notice. The arrest of Julian Assange made it clearer, to an even larger number of people, that the government and the media, had
lost all moral authority. Still many people didn't take much notice, or were convinced by the lies in the media, that he was a
rapist and should be in jail.
The lies and corruption from government, is now increasingly out in the open. I believe that this is deliberate. I also think
that it is exceedingly dangerous for society for multiple reasons. We are conditioned to accept authority as our moral guide.
They act as an example of acceptable behaviour. If society as a whole, behaved like government, all trust would break down. Virtually
all functions of society are based on trust. Without such trust, nothing will work.
Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously
know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally
is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV.
I believe this has all been pre-planned, and it will result in a disastrous effect on all society, unless something happens
to bring the governments and media back to truth and sanity. I have no idea what that might be, but I expect it will not be pleasant.
The following was an early warning of the mass insanity affecting The US Government. It has spread like a highly infectious
disease.
In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined
as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world
really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'
"... I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had. ..."
"... It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions in Russia. It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever ..."
I don't completely agree . or perhaps I should say, I am concerned, mostly for Russia.
Good management practices can be applied to anything, positive or negative, and Orlov points
out that there seems to be a new generation of "professional" politicians developing in
Russia. This worries me as such people have a way of wanting to stay in power at almost any
cost, and not always considering the well being of the country.
Will they have the real world experience of Putin? I don't know. Will they be fooled by
the West's propaganda? Have to wait and see.
The Russian leaders who went through WW2 had a vision and experience which you can't buy
and this saved the world many times over.
But one thing I am certain of, Russia is a greater hope for the world than is the US.
I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in
very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with
an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had.
For the near future a simple copy of a normal western state (colony). And perhaps that future is already here.
"new liberalist oligarchic Russia have managers (generally trained in very expensive western
universities/think thanks)".
If thats true, its depressing. Shiny globo-homo eyes having Europe in their heart.
It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions
in Russia.
It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their
heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever
British propaganda is clearly as close to neofascist propaganda as one can get... British neocons are even closer to neofascists then the US neocons. And British security services are closer to
the Third Reich security services then any other.
Skripals is a such a grandiose false flag operation that Gellen (of operation Gladio fame) probably would be amazed and humbled.
Notable quotes:
"... The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story.... ..."
"... If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written previously. ..."
"... Oh dear oh dear.. It appears the UK may be denying there were any poor ducks involved... https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984 ..."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining
truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be concluded to be
a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything said by UK's
Tory government.
"The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and
every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case
contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially
rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story....
"If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks
volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim
in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written
previously."
"Difficult to verify your version of events given it involves nameless officials. Knowing
you're often used by security services to peddle propaganda seemed a reasonable assumption
they'd urged you to backtrack your earlier advocacy as story detonates official #Skripal
narrative."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any
remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be
concluded to be a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything
said by UK's Tory government.
"... Skripal was just one more effort to tighten sanctions against Putin's allies in the Russian oligarchy and isolate Trump from foreign policy initiatives not approved by the Deep State. ..."
"... The significance of the NY Times story, then, is that, inadvertently it reinforces the reality that in the matter of Russiagate and Trump all roads lead to London, the Tory Establishment, which has been living off US-Russian tensions for seventy years and security agencies doing what the CIA cannot do for itself. ..."
Craig Murray has a piece on this today. There is nothing very new in what he writes but he
sees the significance of this story, which is not about ducks or children or Donald Trump's
personality but a concerted and thorough campaign, carried out largely by British state
actors, to deepen the 'west's' isolation of Russia.
The real story of both the Cold War and the continually recurring propaganda stories about
the "millions" of "victims of communism" is that the Soviet Union was manipulated throughout
its history by capitalist control over the international economy. Like a demonic organist
capitalist governments pulled out all the stops to control the moods and the policies of a
state that the Bolsheviks never did get to rule.
In the end the Politburo gave in and did what the 'west' had always been wanted which is
to hand over the country, lock, stock and population to the cannibals of capital.
The result being what was probably, after the 1930-45 war, the largest kill off of
Russians in modern history: Yeltsin plus Harvard Business School being responsible for many
more deaths than even the intoxicated propagandist Robert Conquest ever dreamed of.
It is that total control over Russia, through the manipulation of its economy, and the
direction of its capitalists, that is behind the long series of sanctions, which are being
added to every day: their purpose is to re-invent Yeltsinism, re-empower the Fifth Column in
the Kremlin, and, in a stroke, re-establish the inevitable and eternal hegemony of the
Washington centered Empire.
In this work the assistance of the 'cousins'in MI6 and GCHQ, plus the entire British
military establishment has been crucial in a period in which the subservience of POTUS to the
Deep State was, thanks to the underestimation of his electoral chances, very much in
question. During a period in which Trump had to be tamed and brought under control the UK
Establishment's assistance in coming up with a series of highly publicised interventions was
crucia l.
Lysias points out that Haspel had acted as the CIA's Head of Station in London in 2016. It
was in London that the entire "Russiagate" nonsense was put together, with British based
actors continually prodding Congress, the media and the Democrats to act on revelations
regarding Papadopolous, Mifsud, Stefan Halper.
Skripal was just one more effort to
tighten sanctions against Putin's allies in the Russian oligarchy and isolate Trump from
foreign policy initiatives not approved by the Deep State.The significance of the
NY Times story, then, is that, inadvertently it reinforces the reality that in the matter of
Russiagate and Trump all roads lead to London, the Tory Establishment, which has been living
off US-Russian tensions for seventy years and security agencies doing what the CIA cannot do
for itself.
The Saker: What will happen once Nord Stream II is finished? Where is Europe heading
next, especially in its relationship with the USA and Russia?
Dmitry Orlov: The new pipelines under the Baltic and the Black Sea will be completed, along
with the second LNG installation at Sabetta, and Russia will go on supplying natural gas to
Europe and Asia. I suspect that the fracking extravaganza in the US is entering its end game
and that the dream of large-scale LNG exports to Europe will never materialize.
The nations of Europe will gradually realize that its relationship with Russia is mostly
beneficial while its relationship with the US is mostly harmful, and will make certain
adjustments. The Ukraine, its natural gas pipeline system decrepit and beyond repair, will
continue to import natural gas from Europe, only now the methane molecules will actually flow
to it from the west rather from the east.
Way to brave predictions, I think... I think he grossly underestimates
durability of neoliberal state like the USA. May be in 20 years the USA will really start
experiencing huge problems like he described due to the end of cheap oil". But before that only
huge exogenous shock can crash such a society.
Notable quotes:
"... It will be interesting to see how public and government workers, as a group, react to the realization that the retirements they have been promised no longer exist; perhaps that will tip the entire system into a defunct state. ..."
"... And so, Trump or no Trump, we are going to have more of the same: shiny young IT specialists skipping and whistling on the way to work past piles of human near-corpses and their excrement; Botoxed housewives shopping for fake organic produce while hungry people in the back of the store are digging around in dumpsters ..."
"... well-to-do older couples dreaming of bugging out to some tropical gringo compound in a mangrove swamp where they would be chopped up with machetes and fed to the fish; and all of them believing that things are great because the stock market is doing so well. ..."
"... But he simply does not understand the USA. He’s been predicting collapse for some time and it has not occurred or come close to happening. Washington is filled with smart kleptocrats who understand they cannot afford to destroy the country that keeps on giving them the wealth and power they crave. Trump, can flounce around Washington and the rest of the country and do and say outrageous things and it has no effect on life whatsoever. ..."
"... While, on the surface, people support ideas like higher minimum wage, universal health-care and other aspects of social democracy, it their masters say “no” then they’ll forgo it and take pride in their ability to endure suffering, early death, their children on heroin or meth, and so on. ..."
"... Since I’m fairly “connected” to the lower/working class and its struggles in my part of the world I can assure you people almost enjoy suffering to a degree that foreigners easily miss and seldom ascribe it to the thieves and criminals who run our society. ..."
"... Will there be a civil war in the US, like in the 1861-1865 period ? No, I don’t think so. Will there be severe social disturbances ? Yes, these I do expect, leading to the break up of the US. The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force will be the old South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. The US has been kicking the financial can down the road for a long time. This cannot last for ever. ..."
"... with people like Siluanov and Nabiullina in charge of the nation’s money, I am not optimistic… ..."
"... The acceleration of economic collapse in the West will be likely bring (overt) fascism and war–world war. ..."
"... In particular, the AngloNazi sorry Anglosphere nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and of course America) are a clear and present threat that should not be underestimated, discounted, or spin-doctored away. ..."
"... But the Anglos studiously avoid facing the reality that their precious way of life, capitalist system, and Anglo-American world order itself are premised upon their own ruthless exploitation of the Global South and developing nations in general. ..."
"... Trump and the MAGA hordes, as well as similar xenophobic and nationalist movements throughout the Anglosphere and Europe, are only a precursor to what is coming. They represent the grievances of the lower-middle classes within the Anglo American Empire and Europe who want a greater cut of the economic loot of empire for themselves–which necessitates an even more aggressive and militaristic grab for global resources, markets, and geopolitical power. ..."
"... He’s way too negative on the USA’s domestic prospects. Despite its absurdities, the US system is fundamentally robust and unlikely to suffer any major, sudden collapse, at least for many decades. It will certain decline further, plumbing the depths of depravity more than it has to date, but the system will chug along. The US has vacuumed up talent from all over the world, bolstering it’s economic capacity and the rents extracted by oligo. It’s day to day institutions, such as courts, post offices and the like function better now than they did in the 80s or 90s. ..."
"... All the incentives are there to keep the thing together, with little real risk of some sort of succession movement or serious insurrection. The main advantages the US has on this score are it’s mass surveillance system, policing infrastructure and media. The US media can make the great bulk of the people believe absolutely anything, if given enough time. ..."
The Saker: You recently wrote an article titled " Is the USS
Ship of Fools Taking on Water? " in which you discuss the high level of stupidity in
modern US politics? I have a simple question for you: do you think the Empire can survive Trump
and, if so, for how long?
Dmitry Orlov: I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn't been
put to any sort of serious stress test yet, and so nobody realizes that this is the case. Some
event will come along which will leave the power center utterly humiliated and unable to
countenance this humiliation and make adjustments. Things will go downhill from there as
everyone in government in media does their best to pretend that the problem doesn't exist. My
hope is that the US military personnel currently scattered throughout the planet will not be
simply abandoned once the money runs out, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that is what
happens.
The Saker: Lastly, a similar but fundamentally different question: can the USA (as
opposed to the Empire) survive Trump and, if so, how? Will there be a civil war? A military
coup? Insurrection? Strikes? A US version of the Yellow Vests?
Dmitry Orlov: The USA, as some set of institutions that serves the interests of some
dwindling number of people, is likely to continue functioning for quite some time. The question
is: who is going to be included and who isn't? There is little doubt that retirees, as a
category, have nothing to look forward to from the USA: their retirements, whether public or
private, have already been spent. There is little doubt that young people, who have already
been bled dry by poor job prospects and ridiculous student loans, have nothing to look forward
to either.
But, as I've said before, the USA isn't so much a country as a country club. Membership has
its privileges, and members don't care at all what life is like for those who are in the
country but aren't members of the club. The recent initiatives to let everyone in and to let
non-citizens vote amply demonstrates that US citizenship, by itself, counts for absolutely
nothing. The only birthright of a US citizen is to live as a bum on the street, surrounded by
other bums, many of them foreigners from what Trump has termed "shithole countries."
It
will be interesting to see how public and government workers, as a group, react to the
realization that the retirements they have been promised no longer exist; perhaps that will tip
the entire system into a defunct state.
And once the fracking bubble is over and another third of the population finds that it can
no longer afford to drive, that might force through some sort of reset as well. But then the
entire system of militarized police is designed to crush any sort of rebellion, and most people
know that. Given the choice between certain death and just sitting on the sidewalk doing drugs,
most people will choose the latter.
And so, Trump or no Trump, we are going to have more of the same: shiny young IT specialists
skipping and whistling on the way to work past piles of human near-corpses and their excrement;
Botoxed housewives shopping for fake organic produce while hungry people in the back of the
store are digging around in dumpsters; concerned citizens demanding that migrants be allowed
in, then calling the cops as soon as these migrants set up tents on their front lawn or ring
their doorbell and ask to use the bathroom; well-to-do older couples dreaming of bugging out to
some tropical gringo compound in a mangrove swamp where they would be chopped up with machetes
and fed to the fish; and all of them believing that things are great because the stock market
is doing so well.
At this rate, when the end of the USA finally arrives, most of the people won't be in a
position to notice while the rest won't be capable of absorbing that sort of upsetting
information and will choose to ignore it. Everybody wants to know how the story ends, but that
sort of information probably isn't good for anyone's sanity. The mental climate in the US is
already sick enough; why should we want to make it even sicker?
I love Orlov’s wit and general cynical attitude as it mirrors mine (perhaps not the
wit). I think he seems to understand the Ukraine and Russia relatively well though I’m
not in a position to question him on that but I do know something about the politics of
NATO/EU/USA and their intentions and that Orlov gets.
But he simply does not understand the USA. He’s been predicting collapse for some
time and it has not occurred or come close to happening. Washington is filled with smart
kleptocrats who understand they cannot afford to destroy the country that keeps on giving
them the wealth and power they crave. Trump, can flounce around Washington and the rest of
the country and do and say outrageous things and it has no effect on life whatsoever.
If
anything the economy actually is “better” not as good as the cooked statistics
indicate but things have improved for people I know in that area. Americans, despite the
obvious propaganda nature of the media still are true-believers in the official Narrative
because meaning and myth always trumps reality.
While, on the surface, people support ideas
like higher minimum wage, universal health-care and other aspects of social democracy, it
their masters say “no” then they’ll forgo it and take pride in their
ability to endure suffering, early death, their children on heroin or meth, and so on.
Since
I’m fairly “connected” to the lower/working class and its struggles in my
part of the world I can assure you people almost enjoy suffering to a degree that foreigners
easily miss and seldom ascribe it to the thieves and criminals who run our society. Americans
strut around but feel powerless and don’t have a plan or think they can have a plan
because they lack the conceptual frameworks to understand that their leadership is thoroughly
rotten.
Having said that, I agree with Auslander, Americans don’t need the central
government and would do better, initially, in a highly chaotic situation and establish their
own order in their communities and rig up a new set of arrangements very quickly.
In some
ways the fall of Washington would be the best thing to ever happen in my country.
I am afraid you are wrong. Orlov does understand the US, just like I do, as I have lived
in the US. Yes, Orlov has been predicting the collapse of the US, and it will happen. I would
like to direct your attention to the following video (the second part is very
interesting):
Will there be a civil war in the US, like in the 1861-1865 period ? No, I don’t
think so. Will there be severe social disturbances ? Yes, these I do expect, leading to the
break up of the US. The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force
will be the old South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. The US has been
kicking the financial can down the road for a long time. This cannot last for ever.
“The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force will be the old
South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. ”
Maybe, but actually I would say most regions of the USA have some kind of “old
tradition” —and a lot nicer ones than that of the old racist South. I’ll
take New England and the Maritimes any day over the steamy South where the kudzu creeps over
I mean *everything*, the snakes proliferate, and you can’t survive the summer without
AC 24/7.
Well…I just started in on this piece and already I have a major
beef…Orlov’s notion that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was good for
Russia…
China was [and arguably still is] an empire of diverse regions, ethnicities and
religions…but how is that holding China back today, or during previous centuries of
imperial glory…?
Clearly China doesn’t fit into Orlov’s idea of an empire as a ‘wealth
pump’ that sucks from the periphery to enrich the center…this is true of course
of exploitation-based imperial projects such as western colonialism…but is clearly not
applicable to the Chinese model, which has been both the biggest and most durable empire in
human history…so that is a big hole in Orlov’s ‘theory’…
It is true that the USSR was a fundamentally different kind of empire from the
exploitative western colonialism…and it is also true that it ultimately did not
succeed…although it managed to accomplish almost incomprehensible progress in
modernization, science and technology…and industrialization…the foundations of
Russian strength today rest squarely on the foundations put in place during the Stalin
era…
Elsewhere on this site there is a brilliant series of essays by Ramin Mazaheri about the
tumultuous cultural revolution of the 1960s…and why it was necessary…Russia
also needed a cultural revolution around this time…the system needed to be rejigged to
better serve the people…in living standard…fairness and
justice…opportunity for social advance…etc…
But it never happened…instead the system became more sclerotic than ever…and
the welfare of the people stagnated…at the very moment in time when the capitalist
west, especially the United States, was able to reign in the appetites of its parasite class
and provide the people with a decent share of its [largely ill-gotten, by means of global
finance colonialism] gains…[during the postwar decades, the share of national wealth
of the 0.1 percent fell to an all time low of about 7 percent…about a quarter of
historic, and current levels]…
This was the golden age in the US…well paying jobs in industry were plentiful and
the company president made perhaps ten times what the shop floor worker took home…a
second household income was completely unnecessary…university education at state
colleges was practically free…
The life of the Soviet citizen in the1960s was not too far behind…Stalin’s
five year plans in the1930s had created an industrial powerhouse…it was Russia’s
ability to produce that allowed it to prevail over Germany in the existential war…and
despite the devastation of the people, cities and countryside Russia was able to quickly
become a technological superpower…as an aerospace engineer I have a deep appreciation
of the depth and breadth of Russian technical achievements and the basic scientific advances
that made that possible…the US was laughably left in the dust, despite having skimmed
the cream of Nazi Germany’s technical scientific talent…and contrary to what US
propaganda would have the people believe…
... ... ...
Of course the massive Chinese empire has been adapting like this for centuries, if not
millennia…Russia with the Soviet Union only needed to make similar smart
adjustments…instead they threw out the baby with the bathwater…let’s see
where Russia goes from here, but with people like Siluanov and Nabiullina in charge of the
nation’s money, I am not optimistic…
But back to Orlov…let’s see where he goes after starting off very clumsily.
.
The acceleration of economic collapse in the West will be likely bring (overt) fascism and
war–world war.
In particular, the AngloNazi sorry Anglosphere nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and of course America) are a clear and present threat that should not be
underestimated, discounted, or spin-doctored away.
As collapse intensifies, these Anglo American entities led by the USA will surely lash out
in even more aggressive wars to maintain their unipolar world order that they have ruled over
since the fall of the Soviet Union. The use of tactical nuclear weapons, bio-warfare, and
other "exotic" weapons should not be ruled out.
At base, the Anglo Americans possess an inbred sense of economic entitlement. They whine
like snowflakes about the foreign outsourcing of jobs or "illegal immigrants stealing our
jobs" as a chauvinistic demand for a greater share of the economic spoils of imperialism.
But the Anglos studiously avoid facing the reality that their precious way of life,
capitalist system, and Anglo-American world order itself are premised upon their own ruthless exploitation of the Global
South and developing nations in general.
And God forbid that the Anglos lose their parasitic way of life and (horror) are compelled
to live like the vast majority of humanity in the developing world from Africa to Asia to
Latin America to the Middle East.
The disaffected middle classes and labor aristocracy of the Anglosphere will comprise the
grassroots basis for 21st-century fascism, similar to how these socio-economic classes were
the grassroots support for the German Third Reich or Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s-40s.
Trump and the MAGA hordes, as well as similar xenophobic and nationalist movements
throughout the Anglosphere and Europe, are only a precursor to what is coming. They represent
the grievances of the lower-middle classes within the Anglo American Empire and Europe who
want a greater cut of the economic loot of empire for themselves–which necessitates an
even more aggressive and militaristic grab for global resources, markets, and geopolitical
power.
As Martin Lee has put it, the Beast reawakens.
Boswald Bollocksworth on April 17, 2019 · at 9:37 pm EST/EDT
He’s way too negative on the USA’s domestic prospects. Despite its absurdities, the US system is fundamentally robust
and unlikely to suffer any major, sudden collapse, at least for many decades. It will certain decline further, plumbing the
depths of depravity more than it has to date, but the system will chug along. The US has vacuumed up talent from all over the
world, bolstering it’s economic capacity and the rents extracted by oligo. It’s day to day institutions, such as courts, post
offices and the like function better now than they did in the 80s or 90s.
All the incentives are there to keep the thing together, with little real risk of some sort of succession movement or
serious insurrection. The main advantages the US has on this score are it’s mass surveillance system, policing infrastructure
and media. The US media can make the great bulk of the people believe absolutely anything, if given enough time.
The US capacity to meddle overseas will wither, after all how well can a submarine filled with drag queens and single
mothers operate? And who’d be willing to endure shelling for a monstrosity like contemporary America?
But the domestic system is brilliantly designed, not going anywhere.
Not sure if extensive Lavrov interview earlier in April was reported on saker
..extract
"Question: Have you seen any grounds for optimism in the results of the first round of the
presidential election in Ukraine?
Sergey Lavrov: To be honest, I haven't seen any grounds for either optimism or pessimism.
What's the point of guesswork? This is a process that should take place and will be
completed. I do not doubt this or that the West will recognise this election.
OSCE observers released their preliminary report on the results of the first round of the
presidential election, which abounds in examples of flagrant violations: corruption, bribery,
pressure on voters and many other things. However, all this is described in a neutral tone. I
think if they wrote about us, they would present these facts emotionally. Now they are doing
it in an understated way and conclude that this did not affect the legitimacy of the
election. Neither was it affected by the flagrant violation of OSCE rules when our observers
were kicked out and over three million Ukrainians working and living in Russia were deprived
of the right to vote. These are facts of life in Ukraine.
I think that the results of the election and the way it was organised came as no surprise
to those who have been following domestic developments in Ukraine and its external ties. They
are already calling each other puppets It's probably interesting to watch from the side but I
don't think that Ukrainian citizens are happy about this kind of democracy.
Question: Are the prospects of Russia-Ukraine cooperation still vague?
Sergey Lavrov: We are open to dialogue if the aim is not chatting and looking for excuses
to do nothing but rather the practical implementation of the Minsk agreements. I have no
doubt that Petr Poroshenko does not want to do this and won't do this. When Viktor Medvedchuk
just suggested seriously discussing what autonomous rights may be granted to Donbass, he was
called a traitor. Poroshenko said this will never happen although he himself signed a
document on the special status of Donbass, which is described with sufficient detail in the
Minsk agreements.
These provisions on what rights Donbass should have were formulated by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel personally, among others, but her ward has got out of hand. This is a fact. On
the one hand, he doesn't listen to Germany or France because he has American "patrons". On
the other hand, they find it embarrassing to pressure him in public because by doing so they
will admit that what they call their "mediation" has failed.
However, there is no other document except for the Minsk agreements. They can certainly be
supplemented. For instance, it is possible to provide OSCE observers with UN armed guards, as
we suggest in response to the apprehensions of Ukrainians about their safety. But the core of
these agreements must remain unchanged. The main point is that all issues are settled
directly between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk .."
The Toltec sages used to say: "To really know something means that it must also entail the
knowledge of what course of action to take. And once you know what to do, you actually do
it". So they firmly stated that the only worthy knowledge is a functional one. Normally, the
trascendental matters were integrally consulted with the "Eagle" (i.e. the Entity out there
with limitless consciousness, which sounds pretty much like "God") through a link that in the
west is ignorantly dismissed as "intuition". This to remark that the big decisions must not
rely entirely on the rational part, because it is too prone to make mistakes.
We all know who the adversary is: it's not the AZE (AngloZionist Empire) per se, it's who
rule the Empire. And what they are doing in Ukraine is pretty clear:
* The endgame is to carve another Poland from the Russian population, as a means to weaken
the Russian State. The steps are obvious and unfortunately, maybe definitive: zioimposed
religious schism, forceful and exclusive use of "Ukrainian" from 2020 on, denial to belong to
other country different from "Ukraine" (a patchwork assembled through land thefts).
Fortunately Russia recovered Crimea, and the mining/industrial regions are disputed, but the
Khazarians control 2 critical assets: the other coastal oblasts and the chernozem soils.
* Stating that Russia cannot absorb Novorossiya is bullsh¡t. Germany, a smaller economy
with no sovereign government could absorb the RDA. If Russia doesn't decide, the situation
will decide by itself. Russia is already receiving a lot of displaced Russians, plus tons of
Russians in Ukraine who became the source of cheap labor for Russian companies. And what
about the costs of humanitarian assistance and military support to Russians under the Ukraine
dictatorship? Let's say it takes 30 years to revert the decay, so what? Russia has been
around longer and has had successful comebacks under way more destruction.
* The Donbass people already decided twice, by clear majority of the popular vote, to become
part of the Russian Federation. The right thing to do is simply accepting them. Not doing so
sends the signal that no matter what the other southwestern Oblasts do, they will not be
accepted either. Russia should openly support the Russians in the southeast of Ukraine who
want to secede and reintegrate with the Russian Federation.
For example, financing a
reunification party, granting contracts and jobs to the Russian allies there, logistically
supporting a secession movement, even militarily, because the Khazarians will not let go
without bloodshed.
"... Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee"). ..."
"... The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. ..."
"... n terms of its internal functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery. Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up. ..."
"... Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you excited yet? ..."
"... None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits, a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one. ..."
The Saker: What is your take on the first round of Presidential elections in the
Ukraine?
Dmitry Orlov: The first round of the elections was an outright fraud. The object of the
exercise was to somehow allow president Poroshenko to make it into the second round. This was
done by falsifying as many votes as was necessary. In a significant number of precincts the
turnout was exactly 100% instead of the usual 60% or so and counted votes from people who had
moved, died or emigrated. All of these fake votes went to Poroshenko, allowing him to slither
through to the second round.
Now the fight is between Poroshenko and a comedian named Vladimir Zelensky. The only
difference between Poroshenko and Zelensky, or any of the other 30+ people who appeared on the
ballot, is that Poroshenko has already stolen his billions while his contestants have not had a
chance to do so yet, the only reason to run for president, or any elected office, in the
Ukraine, being to put oneself in a position to do some major thieving.
Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that
Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this
difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites
in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land
to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee").
The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a
country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic
considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. I
n terms of its internal
functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery.
Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up.
It remains to be seen whether the second round of elections will also be an outright fraud
and what happens as a result. There are many alternatives, but none of them resemble any sort
of exercise in democracy. To be sure, what is meant by "democracy" in this case is simply the
ability to execute orders issued from Washington; inability to do so would make Ukraine an
"authoritarian regime" or a "dictatorship" and subject to "regime change." But short of that,
nothing matters.
The machinations of Ukraine's "democrats" are about as interesting to me as the sex lives of
sewer rats, but for the sake of completeness, let me flowchart it out for you. Poroshenko got
into second round by outright fraud, because the loss of this election would, within the
Ukrainian political food chain, instantly convert him from predator to prey. However, he was
none too subtle about it, there is ample proof of his cheating, and the contender he squeezed
out -- Yulia Timoshenko -- could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would
invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather,
rinse, repeat.
Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even
more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky
could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire
election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you
excited yet?
None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's
pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits,
a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one.
Of course, it
will all be made to look highly democratic for the sake of appearances. The leadership of the
EU will oblige with some golf claps while choking back vomit and the world will move on.
KIEV, April 17. /TASS/. The Ukrainian State Investigation Bureau launched a criminal case on
"the intentional surrender" of Crimea against Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andrei Paruby, Secretary
of the Ukrainian Council of National Security and Defense Alexander Turchinov, former Prime
Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and others, the Ukrainian law union Aver Lex told TASS on
Wednesday.
READ ALSO
Court finds Yanukovich not guilty of 'losing Crimea' -- attorney
"The State Investigation Bureau opened a criminal case on the intentional surrender of
Crimea, violent upheaval, treason and the organization of mass murders on the 'maidan' in
2014 by Ukraine's top officials, in particular by Arseny Yatsenyuk, Alexander Turchinov,
Andrei Paruby, [former head of Ukraine's Security Service] Valentin Nalivaichenko, [Verkhovna
Rada member] Sergei Pashinsky, [Permanent Representative to the UN] Yuri Sergeyev, [Kiev
Mayor] Vitaly Klichko, [head of the Freedom nationalist party] Oleg Tyagnibok, [former Acting
Defense Minister] Igor Tenyukh, [Prosecutor General] Yuri Lutsenko, [Defense Minister] Stepan
Poltorak and others," Aver Lex said.
Well after reading the entire piece, I must admit I'm not impressed
The main global dynamic right now is the Chinese industrial and economic juggernaut a
geopolitically resurgent Russia and the unraveling of the dollar dominated global financial
order
The problem with the west is not so much cultural as it is economic the west is a giant
Ponzi scheme that must ultimately collapse as all 'financialized' economies have collapsed
since the beginning of money as any careful reader of Michael Hudson can tell you
One morning we will wake up and the machine will be out of gas simple as that no money no
funny
That's why the rest of the world is moving toward a trading system that circumvents the
dollar, or any kind of so-called 'reserve' currency the US itself is shoving this process
forward by weaponizing trade and finance by means of sanctions gone wild
There does not need to be any kind of universal trading currency in the digital age it is
simply a matter of putting the settlement mechanisms in place and more important, bypassing
the HUMAN exchange networks now in place ie the old boys club through which dollar
denominated global trade now flows
Once these processes mature, there will be no way of perpetuating the western financial
Ponzi scheme it has crashed before most recently a decade ago but has been kept on life
support by negative interest rates, plus further impoverishment of the marginal class but
once the reserve currency is gone, and with it the ability to print free money the machine is
dead for good
At that point the west needs to earn its living the honest way that may be a tough
transition
"... Haspel is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. ..."
"... In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President. This has been the case in the US since Kennedy. ..."
"... Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway. ..."
"If Trump were not in on the schemes he would just fire his underlings!"
This sentiment indicates a failure to understand the power dynamics at play here. Haspel
is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an
oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to
serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.
In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President.
This has been the case in the US since Kennedy.
Trump cannot fire Haspel or Pompeo. They can fire him, though, and with a sniper's bullet
if they want.
Unfortunately for the oligarchy, that would cause additional complications at a time when
they have lots of tricky and inexplicably unstable (for them) operations ongoing, which is
why they are just steering Trump around instead of replacing him. And Trump is willfully
cooperating, even if they are not filling him in on the plans.
Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and
Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script
then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway.
Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of
civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top
brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of
secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the
USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
Availability of unaccounted financial
resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
Notable quotes:
"... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
"... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
"... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
"... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
"... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
"... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover,
the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its
director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.
Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned
into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry
Truman (1943-53) reportedly
characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five
decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?
J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists
and other public figures, according to
biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid
private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions
so as to serve his interests.
And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.
Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against
homosexuals in public life.
It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist
inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and
freedom of expression continues to this day.
One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots
of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is
suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual
tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.
Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public
statements.
Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the
presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).
As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50
Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising
information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would
be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your
career". Enough said.
JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and
extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once
confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made
the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ.
Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ
into the White House.
However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly
anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy
pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt
led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample
evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep
State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald –
a cover-up that persists to this day.
As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications
with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968.
Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace
talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize.
LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his
vice president Hubert Humphrey.
Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on,
and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long
coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.
But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was
classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is
possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating
in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.
These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and
subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the
people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as
some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion
as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the
media's own compromised complicity.
Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one
individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.
Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not
alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not
just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the
Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.
Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government
– does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power
through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of
American dissenters.
The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of
the American Deep State.
Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix
the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.
So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies,
as the US intelligence chiefs once again
chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!
The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American"
agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.
US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate
how they are being manipulated.
We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of
the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt
by the people.
"... The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians. ..."
Bill Bray , Former (Retired) Research Scientist at Central
Intelligence Agency
Updated Dec 14 2017 · Author has 509 answers and 261.9k answer views
I am not familiar with that particular quote, but that sounds like the hubris of the CIA. You have to understand, you put a janitor
in charge of the other janitors, and he becomes king shit of the janitors. And so it goes all the way to the point where you put
someone in charge of an agency which no longer answers to the president, the senate, congress, the UN, or any force on Earth, there
is no way you are not going to have anything but a problem. JFK wanted to dissolve them for that reason, 6 months later
If you really want to take the Dr. Bill acid test, go into Google AdWords. That is where they sell key words to the highest bidder
so that their site floats to the top (no it is not 'free information highway,' that's how Google became a multi-billion organization).
Watch the key words that are floating to the top. Then, look at tomorrow morning's headlines in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You will
find that magically the minds of Americans predicted the next day's news.
This of course is not the case. The multi-trillion dollar surveillance of Americans that they told you is to 'protect you from
terrorists,' and so on is not what they are doing. All cell phone calls (the verbal content, referred to as meta-data), emails, text,
are monitored. Since the Patriot Act portion that allowed this to expire, they used the clause 'on American soil,' literally and
monitor everything via the communications satellites. There are also an estimated 20,000 drones OVER (BUT NOT ON) US soil, monitoring
verbal communications that are not electronic. This can be done via unidirectional microphone, or by bouncing a laser off your window.
That includes car window.
The Welcome to FBI.gov web site collects information, but is easier to access at
Mass Shootings . In 2016 there were 384 mass shootings, almost 100
of which were listed as 'terrorist motivated.' So, the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network is not to 'protect you.'
The system is designed to gather information on the 'collective thinking,' like the Borg, of the American public, and then design
tomorrow's news and media, literally overnight, to cattle herd you into a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.
Again, take the acid test. Look at what you have access to, AdWords, and then watch tomorrow's headlines magically appear. At
first you might think, well that's what people are interested in so that's what's in the news. Then, as you look at the flow of headlines
regarding international campaigns, what the President said yesterday, what the senators and congressmen are doing or being accused
of, it starts to get a bit freaky. Do this for several days, and you will see.
If this doesn't convince you, you fit a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.
Otherwise, explain the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network's failure to prevent 384 mass shootings last year, of which
about 1 in 4 were 'terrorist motivated,' and I think we already passed that number this year.
You know the system is in place, the NSA admitted it publicly. The reason they say it is there is obviously not true, as per a
hundred terrorist motivated events each year, hundreds of mass shootings, most of which never make it into the 'fake news.'
Every time the President says 'fake news,' your brain says 'conspiracy theory,' and hardens your cognitive belief, your religion,
the media.
Keeping you stupid keeps you under control. If this were not the case, disinformation would not be a goal. 1.7k Views ·
View Upvoters ·
It does appear he said something very much along those lines, though I doubt it meant what it appears to mean absent the context.
He made the statement not long after he became the Director of Central Intelligence, during a discussion of the fact that, to his
amazement, about 80 percent of the contents of typical CIA intelligence publications was based on information from open, unclassified
sources, such as newspapers and magazines. Apparently, and reasonably, he judged that about the same proportion of Soviet intelligence
products was probably based on open sources, as well. That meant that CIA disinformation programs directed at the USSR wouldn't work
unless what was being disseminated by US magazines and newspapers on the same subjects comported with what the CIA was trying to
sell the Soviets. Given that the CIA could not possibly control the access to open sources of all US publications, the subjects of
CIA disinformation operations had to be limited to topics not being covered by US public media. To be sure, some items of disinformation
planted by the CIA in foreign publications might subsequently be discovered and republished by US media. I'm guessing the CIA would
not leap to correct those items.
But that is a far cry from concluding that the CIA would (or even could) arrange that "everything the American public believes
is false."
The American public has never been the primary target
of any disinformation campaign.
The CIA once had influence in a number of English language publications abroad, some of which stories were reprinted in the US
media. This was known as "blowback", and unintended in most cases.
The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey
repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians.
"... That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. ..."
"... Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes. ..."
"... Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye and gave him a paycheck. ..."
"... I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men. ..."
"... Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using it on POWs. ..."
"... just reinforces the feeling that those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better light. ..."
"... A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and will not go away unless she come clean. ..."
Before Gina became the Chief of Staff for Rodriguez, what role did she play in the waterboarding of two AQ operatives in Thailand?
It appears that she was at least witting of what was going on. Did she have the authority to decide what measures to apply to the
two? Did she make such decisions?
Those are facts still to be determined. I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But there are others who I respect
that are adamant in opposing her nomination. The only thing I know for sure is that her nomination will be a bloody and divisive
political battle. If it comes down to embracing waterboarding as an appropriate method to use on suspected terrorists, then a majority
of Americans are supportive of that practice and will cheer the appointment of Haspel.
That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary
on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification
that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. It is true that one man's terrorist is another woman's freedom fighter.
Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding
and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history
of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes.
Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon,
as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye
and gave him a paycheck.
I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men.
IIRC, Haspel was the chief of staff to whom Rodriguez refers. That does not sound like a bit player. Would you say that Kelly
is a bit player in the Trump admin? As you say, we should know the facts, but so far it looks like she both participated in torture
and in its cover-up.
With all the crap going on at the FBI, the last thing we need now is a divisive candidate for any top level government position
(torture advocacy is divisive for many of us).
A woman, a lesbian, who cares as long as they are a capable and decent law-abiding
individual.
Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using
it on POWs.
And where do you get "admitted" terrorists from? In America, even with suspected terrorists, there is the principle
of innocent until proven guilty. At least we once believed in that standard.
And I very much respect you for your position on this (it is this American's view as well).
What amazes me (and yet doesn't) is the example of Rodriguez's supposed introspection "How bad could this be?" Really?!? That
just strikes me as not having any feel for the media, US citizenry, or even common sense, and just reinforces the feeling that
those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better
light.
PT -- Thank you. Much to consider in these times. I come down on the "no torture and waterboarding is torture" side of the debate
but am also just eager for some competence and professional experience in key positions.
That these positions may be mutually
exclusive says a great deal about our current situation. Again, thank you, for your opinions and information.
A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for
it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and
will not go away unless she come clean.
At the end of the day that don't matter, since as a policy, and base on your own statement,
this country's government will prosecut and punish for liking of torture but not torture and tortures. And, furthermore, is not
even willing to do away with it, per it's elected president. Trying to show a clean, moral, democracy on the hilltop image, is
a BS and a joke.
"... I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation. Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. ..."
"... Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of Power. ..."
"... American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy." ..."
"... Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities: Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious. ..."
"... There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government. ..."
"... If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!" ..."
"... I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them. ..."
"... She was put in charge there not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect. ..."
"... furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states " For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition? ..."
"... Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be considered in the contexts of these words. ..."
Nothing will say more about who we are, across three American administrations -- one that demanded torture, one that covered it
up, and one that seeks to promote its bloody participants -- than whether Gina Haspel becomes director of the CIA.
Haspel oversaw the
torture of human beings in Thailand as the chief of a CIA black site in 2002. Since then, she's worked her way up to deputy director
at the CIA. With current director Mike Pompeo slated to move to Foggy Bottom, President Donald Trump has proposed Haspel as the Agency's
new head.
Haspel's victims waiting for death in Guantanamo cannot speak to us, though they no doubt remember their own screams as they were
waterboarded. And we can still hear former CIA officer
John Kiriakousay : "We did
call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because
they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information."
It was Kiriakou who exposed the obsessive debate over the effectiveness of torture as false. The real purpose of torture conducted
by those like Gina Haspel was to seek vengeance, humiliation, and power. We're just slapping you now, she would have said in that
Thai prison, but we control you, and who knows what will happen next, what we're capable of? The torture victim is left to imagine
what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, creating his own terror.
Haspel won't be asked at her confirmation hearing to explain how torture works, but those who were waterboarded under her stewardship
certainly could.
I met my first torture victim in Korea, where I was adjudicating visas for the State Department. Persons with serious criminal
records are ineligible to travel to the United States, with an exception for dissidents who have committed political crimes. The
man I spoke with said that under the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee he was tortured for writing anti-government
verse. He was taken to a small underground cell. Two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with
one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked no questions. They barely spoke to him at all.
Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, he said the subsequent humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what
really affected his life. It destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting
pen to paper again. The men who destroyed him, he told me, did their work, and then departed, as if they had others to visit and
needed to get on with things. He was released a few days later and driven back to his apartment by the police. A forward-looking
gesture.
The second torture victim I met was while I was stationed in Iraq. The prison that had held him was under the control of shadowy
U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. Inside, masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said they
neither asked him questions nor demanded information. They did whip his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of
his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar
ordinarily used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What destroyed him was the feeling of utter helplessness, the inability
to control things around him as he once had. He showed me the caved-in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation
with faint signs of metal grooves.
Gina Haspel is the same as those who were in the room with the Korean. She is no different than those who tormented the Iraqi.
As head of a black site, Haspel had sole authority to halt the questioning of suspects, but she allowed torture to continue.
New information
and a redaction of earlier reporting that said Haspel was present for the waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah (she was
actually the station chief at the black site after those sessions) makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture
of all of the prisoners there, but pay it little mind. The confusion arises from the government's refusal to tell us what Haspel
actually did as a torturer. So many records have yet to be released and those that have been are heavily redacted. Then there are
the tapes of Zubaydah's waterboarding, which Haspel later pushed to have destroyed.
Arguing over just how much blood she has in her hands is a distraction from the fact that she indeed has blood on her hands.
Gina Haspel is now eligible for the CIA directorship because Barack Obama did not prosecute anyone for torture; he merely signed
an executive order banning it in the future. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured that almost all government documents
on the torture program remained classified. He did not prosecute the CIA officials who destroyed videotapes of the torture scenes.
Obama ignored the truth that sees former Nazis continue to be hunted some 70 years after the Holocaust: that those who do evil
on behalf of a government are individually responsible. "I was only following orders" is not a defense of inhuman acts. The purpose
of tracking down the guilty is to punish them, to discourage the next person from doing evil, and to morally immunize a nation-state.
To punish Gina Haspel "more than 15 years later for doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told
were lawful orders, would be a travesty and a disgrace,"
claims one of
her supporters. "Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well,"
said Michael Hayden,
who headed the CIA during the height of the Iraq war from 2006-2009.
Influential people in Congress agree. Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will soon review
Haspel's nomination,
said , "I know Gina personally and she has the right skill set, experience, and judgment to lead one of our nation's most critical
agencies."
"She'll have to answer for that period of time, but I think she's a highly qualified person,"
offered Senator
Lindsey Graham. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson
defended Haspel's
actions, saying they were "the accepted practice of the day" and shouldn't disqualify her.
His fellow Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, signaled her likely acceptance,
saying , "Since my concerns were raised over the torture situation, I have met with her extensively, talked with her She has
been, I believe, a good deputy director." Senator Susan Collins
added that Haspel "certainly has the expertise and experience as a 30-year employee of the agency." John McCain, a victim of
torture during the Vietnam War,
mumbled only that Haspel would have to explain her role.
Nearly alone at present, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he will
oppose Haspel's nomination. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, have told Trump she is unsuitable and will
likely also vote no.
Following World War II, the United States could have easily executed those Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, or thrown them
into some forever jail on an island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who wouldn't have supported brutally torturing
them at a black site. Instead, they were put on public trial at Nuremberg and made to defend their actions as the evidence against
them was laid bare. The point was to demonstrate that We were better than Them.
Today we refuse to understand what Haspel's victims, and the Korean writer, and the Iraqi insurgent, already know on our behalf:
unless Congress awakens to confront this nightmare and deny Gina Haspel's nomination as director of the CIA, torture will have transformed
us and so it will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of
We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. He tweets@WeMeantWell.
Covering up torture is quite possibly the worst thing Obama did. (I'd put it neck-and-neck with targeted killing.) This nation
desperately needs a president who will expose all of these horrors, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute these acts
as war crimes.
Trump likes waterboarding. He said so himself. One assumes he meant, being a whimpering coward himself, when someone else does
it to someone else. But who knows? Enjoy judge Gorsuch.
"doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders"
To complete the parallel, we would need to prosecute and punish those who asked her to do it, and those who told her those
orders were lawful. Instead, some are doing paintings of their toes, some are promoted to be Federal judges, and some are influential
professors at "liberal" law schools. Why punish *only* her?
I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation.
Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. I am in full support of Mr. Van Buren's thesis. However, Pro Publica, which seems
to have been the source of much reporting of Haspel's torture record, has retracted the claim that Haspel had tortured in Thailand.
Mr. Van Buren quotes another source from his blog that supports the thesis that Haspel is a torturer. How does one know what to
believe? Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate
and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of
Power.
Its because we lost our sense of what makes us who we are. We are an empire that dances for private interests. In Rome they were
called families and led by patricians, they had money private guards, gladiators, and even street people supporting them. In the
Modern USA they are called Interest Groups and/or Corporations. They are lead by CEOs and instead of gladiators they have Lawyers.
Our being better matters less then their own squabbles which is why a torturer could reach the highest seat in intel. The majority
of Americans have lost their sense of being Americans instead they are Republicans, Democrats, etc, etc. Things that once use
to be part of an American have come to define us.
American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always
virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military
governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy."
At least this appointment along with the election of Trump shows the true face of the United States in international affairs.
When we face the fact we are (a) an oligarchy and (b) a brutal Empire we might have a chance to return to something more human.
Few readers, even of TAC, will want to look at our recent history of stunning brutality and lack of interest in even being in
the neighborhood of following international law.
CIA has purposefully refused to disclose Haspel's role for a decade+ They have selectively released information last week to discredit
those criticizing her. I don't think we should play their game, letting them set the agenda. Instead, I declaim torture itself
and any role she played in it, whether she poured the water or kept the books.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of the CIA's Haspel put him at risk?
In the 2003 film "Love Actually" the British Prime Minister (played by Hugh Grant) jokes with a Downing Street employee Natalie
(Martine McCutcheon):
"PM: You live with your husband? Boyfriend, three illegitimate but charming children?
"NATALIE: No, I've just split up with my boyfriend, so I'm back with my mum and dad for a while.
"PM: Oh. I'm sorry.
"NATALIE: No, it's fine. I'm well shot of him. He said I was getting fat.
"PM: I beg your pardon?
"NATALIE: He said no one's going to fancy a girl with thighs the size of big tree trunks. Not a nice guy, actually, in the end.
"PM: Right You know, being Prime Minister, I could just have him murdered.
"NATALIE: Thank you, sir. I'll think about it.
"PM: Do the SAS are absolutely charming ruthless, trained killers are just a phone call away."
It's just a film. It's just a joke. But the joke works because the public knows that in reality the security services have
the skills-sets and the abilities, to do damage anyone they want to do damage to -- and to probably get away with it.
Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect
Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities:
Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even
for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious.
Fast forward again to yesterday, March 17, 2018: Former CIA Director John Brennan wasn't joking when he reacted to the firing
of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- and President Donald Trump's tweeted celebration of it -- by tweeting this attack against
Trump:
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America America
will triumph over you."
Obama UN Representative Samantha Power followed up on the Brennan tweet with this:
"Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan."
When public officials and former public officials -- like Shumer, Brennan and Power -- make such public statements it must
necessarily have a chilling effect on public criticism of the security services.
After all, none of the three are joking. They're serious. And the American people know that they're serious.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of CIA operative Haspel put him at risk?
New information makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture of all of the prisoners at her black site, but pay it little
mind. The confusion is because the government refuses to tell us what Haspel actually did as a torturer. Arguing over just how
much blood she has on her hands is a distraction when she indeed has blood on her hands.
The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient to disqualify her from heading the Agency. If the
Agency wishes to clarify her role, as was done via trial for the various Nazis at Nuremberg, we can deal with her actions more
granularly.
Since we have not had any more successful attacks on the scale of 9-11, it is very easy to be scrupulous regarding rough treatment
of terrorists.
But if we had suffered a dozen or more such attacks, of increasing magnitude and maybe involving nuclear weapons, how many
of you would still be condemning Mrs Haspel et al.? Or would you then be complaining they had not used water-boarding enough?
The 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was caught weeks before 9-11. Investigators figured out he was up to no good, tried
to get permission to search his computer, but were denied. The U.S. Government carefully protected his privacy rights. So are
you pleased with the outcome, Mr van Buren?
I'm sorry this whole piece is a massive non sequitur. Ms. Haspel has no 'blood' on her hands as US extreme interrogation techniques
(sleep deprivation, uncomfortable positions, waterboarding) didn't draw any. They are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating
the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones. US techniques might have been bad policy won't argue but lets not fall
for a false equivalency.
Ms. Haspel was an agent of her government, acting on it's orders under it's policies and guidelines. Which leads to
Nuremberg. The Nuremberg tribunals (they were military tribunals not trials) were conducted by a victorious military force
against a defeated military force. They were widely criticized as vengeance even by such august people as Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court Stone and associate Justice Douglas. There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the
United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government.
And lastly there's this from a comment of the authors: "The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient
to disqualify her from heading the Agency." Utter nonsense. That was the mission of the Agency at that time. It's like saying
a 33yr old Drone Pilot who takes out an ISIS/Al Qaida operative as well as 15 civilians is disqualified to be the Sec Def 2 decades
later.
If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth
that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!"
We demonize Russia at every opportunity, but I don't see Russia rewarding torturers by appointing them to high office.
I didn't know too much about this woman's background until I read that Rand Paul opposes her nomination. I tend to take notice
whenever Rand Paul holds forth on any subject. All I can say is that if her actual record even approximates what has been alleged,
then this woman is unfit for the postNuremberg or no Nuremberg.
"As we've proved, we're not better than them. Any of them." Oh, -PLEASE-, spare us the hyperbole! WE burn alive captives held
in cages? WE saw off their heads?
Thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
(S.E.R.E.) training programs.
All of the torturers should be brought to justice. So should all of the officials who ordered or authorized torture.
There is no statute of limitations on capital Federal crimes. For a U.S. citizen to kill via torture is a capital Federal crime,
no matter where the torture took place. If statutes of limitations make it too late to prosecute some acts of torture, it is not
too late to bring about some measure of justice by making torturers pariahs. As many sexual harassers have recently learned, there
is no statute of limitations in the court of public opinion.
The story linking her to torture has been formally retracted. She had nothing to do with torture anywhere. How about a retraction
of this story and an apology.
I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School
of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know
better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them.
Personally,
I prefer that the cruelty should be, as Lincoln once put it, "unalloyed by the base metal of hypocrisy"
bob sykes: you should read Pro Publica's retraction (
https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture
) of the claim that Haspel was in charge of the Thai black site when Abu Zubaydeh was tortured. She was put in charge there
not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding
at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect.
Winston: why do you suppose "thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs"? Is it not to prepare them for the possibility of what we call torture when
used by our adversaries?
furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals,
pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states "
For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,
is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition?
Wilfred, the problem was not that the Feds protected Zacarias Moussaoui's right to privacy. The problem is that it let any of
the 20 Arab Muslims into the US in the first place. Closing our borders and mass deportations would have been the best thing to
do in the aftermath of 9/11, not torture and invasions.
Very well put. Lest we forget: Bush also delivered the stern warning that "war crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be
punished, and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders'."
Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter
and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be
considered in the contexts of these words.
Chris Mallory (Mar 19 @1:47 p.m.), I agree with you. We shouldn't be letting them in.
But if someone had sneaked-a-peek at Moussaoui's laptop during the 3 weeks they had him before 9-11, we might have been able
to thwart the attack altogether. (And the Press has been strangely incurious about investigating whoever it was who issued the
injunction protecting Moussie's precious computer). This type of hand-wringing cost us 3,000 lives. Even more, considering the
Afghan & 2nd Iraq wars would never have been launched, were it not for 9-11.
"... The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative =
British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on. ..."
"... The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. ..."
The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British,
Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on.
You'd think someone might have noticed something of a trend by now.
They just don't bother anymore, the level of double black psy-ops and gaslighting is a mine field of disinformation. That's what
you get when Washington - Obama, gives the green light to propagandizing their people. It's escalated, like we haven't noticed,
under Trump despite his pathetic attempts at assuring folks it's fake news.
The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I watched about 10 minutes of a
documentary about Easter Island, as an example, and it was revisionist to the nth degree. Just absolute rubbish insinuating that
white European travelers destroyed the Island. This is what British kids are now being marinated in, "He who controls the past"
"Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf of the USA but rather to its own
ends."
CIA probably was involved in Skripals false flag operation as well. Because the behaviour of Theresa May suggest that she from
the very beginning was sure about the USA full and unconditional support and putting pressure on EU allies. Then now we know
that Gina Haspel, who was also involved in Steele dossier and handled most oversees assets involved in entrapment of Trump, misled
Trump and pervaded him to expel 80 Russian diplomats.
Notable quotes:
"... Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly how the buildings came down. ..."
"... According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia ..."
"... So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our democracy. ..."
"... Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media. ..."
"... So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader. Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man? ..."
"... None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next? ..."
"... "If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics ..."
Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf
of the USA but rather to its own ends. And, in this realization, comes a jaded view of both the
CIA and the government it represents.
This realization may have begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Warren
Commission, a congressional investigation was convened. The commission concluded there was a
single lone shooter, a fringe outcast, Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone in the assassination
of the president. Many felt, in light of the facts, that the Warren Commission was a cover up
of what really went down on November 22, 1963, in Houston, Texas.
In 1976, the Congress reopened the Kennedy investigation. They created The United States
House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the
assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Martin Luther King Jr.).
The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and determined the Warren Commission was faulty
and there was more than one shooter and there was indeed a conspiracy to kill the president. So
much for the official narrative of the Warren Commission.
Why the Warren Commission cover up back then that even the Congress in 1976 (HSCA) reported
was bogus? One theory April 25, 1966, The New York Times wrote, "And, President Kennedy, as the
enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of
his Administration, that he wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it
to the winds."
Kennedy was no fan of the Director of the C.I.A. Allen Dulles or his agency, and in the
autumn of 1961 he purged the C.I.A. of Dulles and his entourage. This included Deputy Director
for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. You do not mess with
Allen Dulles and the C.I A. Let's leave it at that. Kennedy was dead within two years.
Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This
time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for
9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured
buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly
how the buildings came down.
By December 2014, over 2,300 architectural and engineering professionals had signed a
petition for this investigation. If one looks at controlled demolitions and how the buildings
actually came down it is obvious the collapse was not due to an airplane flying into the
buildings, but rather a controlled demolition. 2,300 architects and engineers with verified
credentials all testify that the narrative of the government is patently false and
scientifically implausible if not impossible.
At about nine a.m. the Twin Towers are crashed into and collapse. At about five twenty p.m.
that same day, Building Seven collapses. No planes fly into Building 7, it just collapses.
Again, the videos show a controlled demolition.
There are various theories as to why 7 WTC was taken down. Theories range from 7 WTC being
the operation center for the demolition of the Twin Towers to more nefarious motives. "
According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the
destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a
clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia
What is important to remember is that NO STEEL FRAME HIGH RISE HAS EVER TOTALLY COLLAPSED
DUE TO FIRE.
These are but two examples of hundreds where we have been mislead by the official narrative
of the government and its MSM news. Remember the Trump Dossier that was leaked and printed as
fact? Or, the death of Seth Rich, a "botched" robbery? Or, the list of 200 news outlets in the
USA that were Russian Propaganda fronts? All reported as fact by the New York Times and
Washington Post. All fake news by the MSM fed to an unsuspecting American people.
So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve
agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both
are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings
Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all
must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story
after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our
democracy.
Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was
not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap
in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic
monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media.
Teresa May called the act "reckless" and "indiscriminate", and basically said Putin put
innocent English bystanders at risk. She upped the ante by dismissing 23 Russian diplomats, the
largest such expulsion in thirty years.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused May of grandstanding in her
response to the incident. Russian news agency Interfax reported that The Kremlin denies
involvement in the nerve agent poisoning, insisting one motive was to complicate Russia's
hosting of the World Cup this summer. Ah, dear Kremin, the motive was much deeper than the
World Cup games, which were only a bonus to the attack.
So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader.
Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He
has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no
new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man?
None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take
him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be
reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he
is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next?
Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN tells us, "The United States of America believes that
Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade
nerve agent," Haley said in her remarks at a UN Security Council emergency session, blasting
the Russian government for flouting international law.
"If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be
the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York
or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics
The USA needs an enemy to foment fear to justify it's astronomical defense budget. It just
loves a good cold war. However, now that Russia is no longer a pinko commie nation to be
demonized, and is indeed a capitalist democracy, we have to resurrect a new straw man to
hate.
It is remarkable the degree to which the liberal left has bought into this
industrial-military-complex narrative. The USA always has to be bombing someone, droning
someone or napalming someone to keep the monies flowing into the defense budget. Take a look at
our spending compared to Russia or other nations.
Alas, it is certainly not out of the question that the CIA was behind the attack. After this
amount of time Mr. Putin had nothing to gain in assassinating Mr. Skripal and his daughter. In
fact, he had a lot to lose. The CIA? They had a lot to gain, and nothing to lose. Never
underestimate the CIA and its brilliance in setting the narrative for its agenda. And, never
underestimate Mr. Putin in his resolve not to become their lapdog.
Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report.
A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and
political commentator.
This sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it
guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of
Skripal.
With Haspel around they might have succombed to her nasty ways of torturing.
Concerning who is pulling the strings, please forgive a repost of an interview with one
who knows. On 31 May 2017 Putin gave an interview with Le Figaro where he said:
"I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the
same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is
elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing
dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones.
These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is
what happens with every administration."
A long list of people with briefcases so far ends with Gina.
You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams
being hired to direct our foreign policy.
The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and
flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.
It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep
fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.
Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet
who buys that nonsense.”
McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling.
He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi
dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability
for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John
Kerry.
And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies,
it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit
of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.
Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s
years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.
Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war
was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
“Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would
like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of
a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push
their weight to have their way.
If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?
My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first,
and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual
honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.
Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French
after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders
and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked
to hold their viking-won inheritance.
At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to
the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.
We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending
conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican
politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract
our attention while corruption is rampant at home.
Thanks, I appreciate this article.
I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial
and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children
overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to
each.
The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it.
Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.
America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders
them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German
Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed,
including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to
be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is
better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian
Pacifism.
“Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was
all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link
below.
“Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting
NATO ‘Allies’”?
We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very
stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big
give away to what’s going on.
If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11,
reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed
to do.
Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.
Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems
that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
“Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very
structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it
didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally
a family affair.
The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two
things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the
world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.
We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy
written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan
and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
"... Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the "change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they overlap. ..."
"... It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his political enemies. Again, nothing new. ..."
Trump is like a voodoo doll into which every sh**bag sticks pins. Firstly, it is
irrelevant whether he was a swamp creature before election or was coopted into it after.
Secondly, Trump was transparently chosen to be the "agent of change" for the other half of
the US population, just as Obama before.
Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed
and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the
"change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension
mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they
overlap.
This is where we are now, Assange was the most prominent member of the real
opposition to the regime, where they try to confuse with plenty of faux opposition.
Therefore, the Assange's head had to be chopped off publicly and his slowly rotting corpse
will now be on display through "courts of justice" for the next couple of years as a warning
to the consumers of alternative media. Go back to reading the approved "journalism" or ... To
understand better one just needs to read/re-read Solzhenitsyn.
The other major ongoing life-extension activity, overlapping with repression, is the
confiscation of guns from the last remaining armed Western population (lots of leftist oxen
pulling that cart). Having too many guns amongst the population is bad for resolving personal
conflicts peacefully, but it is even worse for the abusive, exploitative regime. Thus, taking
the guns away is doing the right thing for a totally wrong reason.
It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's
protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with
former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his
political enemies. Again, nothing new.
Therefore, where is a Western Solzhenitsyn to document artistically what transpires in a
society deeply in debt and in social & moral decline?
span y Bob In Portland on Mon, 04/15/2019 - 3:59pm Under the general rubric of
conspiracy theory is the subset called "coincidence theory", which dismisses connections
between people as mere happenstance in order to dismiss any thought of networks that exist
beyond public scrutiny. But these networks do exist. Sometimes history takes decades to find
them, but they exist. Let's take a peek at networks in Paul Manafort's life.
Manafort was an advisor for four Republican presidential candidates: Gerald Ford, Ronald
Reagan, George HW Bush, and Bob Dole. Three of these men were connected to the CIA. Gerald Ford
was on the Warren Commission and helped its conclusions of a single assassin by moving the
bullet hole several inches up from JFK's back to the back of JFK's neck. It was an obvious
fraud, and he should have been prosecuted as an accessory after the fact. There are other
indications that he was involved with the CIA's mind control program prior to his political
career. Ronald Reagan while governor of California blocked extradition requests from New
Orleans DA Jim Garrison in the investigation into President Kennedy's murder. Reagan was
governor at the time of JFK's brother's assassination in Los Angeles. I'll refer readers to
Lisa Pease's A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL about Reagan during that time. Reagan was also the spokesman
for the Crusade For Freedom, a CIA psyop started in the 1950s which in conjunction with Radio
Free Europe promoted former Nazis and fascists allied with Hitler during WWII and which
imported many of these Nazis into the US. George HW Bush was the CIA Director under Ford, and
investigations put him as a CIA agent or asset since his college days at Yale. I haven't looked
at Bob Dole's history. But three out of four of Manafort's presidential employers had roots in
the CIA.
If you look at Paul Manafort's history, he seems to work for sleazy dictators who were
either put into power by the CIA, supported while in power by the CIA or taken out of power by
the CIA. And sometimes killed by the CIA. I would suggest that Manafort's ultimate employer was
the CIA. After the sitting president of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a US-backed
coup in Ukraine back in 2014 (under Secretary of State John Kerry) Manafort stuck around there
and helped the people who ousted Yanukovich. Even though Yanukovich was the duly elected
president of Ukraine, he has been dismissed as a Russian agent because he saw that the terms of
Russian treaties with Ukraine would be better for the economy than treaties with the European
Union. Therefore, the US branded Yanukovich as a Russian agent.
Just to refresh everyone's memory William Barr worked for the CIA in the seventies until he
got his law degree. He was named Attorney General by President GHW Bush (the first Bush
president) during congressional and court investigations of Iran-contra, which was a CIA
operation to illegally support the contras' attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government
while also illegally arming both Iraq and Iran, allegedly in exchange for releasing hostages in
Beruit. The interagency team investigating the kidnappings in Beruit was on Pan Am 103 and
perished returning to the US.
Robert Mueller was the prosecutor in the Pan Am 103 case. He shifted the case to a couple of
Libyan jamokes and away from a group of Palestinian terrorists operating in Frankfurt, Germany
who allegedly were supplied the bomb used to bring down the airliner by Syrian arms and heroin
smuggler Monzer al-Kassar. Al-Kassar was a major arms supplier for the Iran-contra operation.
Robert Swan Mueller III has never himself been specifically identified as being a CIA employee.
However, his uncle, Richard Bissell, was an officer high in the CIA ranks. Mueller's wife, Ann
Cabell Standish, whom he married three years after the John F Kennedy assassination, was the
granddaughter of Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs
fiasco, who was fired by JFK along with the above-mentioned Bissell and Allen Dulles. Ann
Mueller's granduncle, Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of President Kennedy's
assassination there, was revealed to have been a CIA asset in a recent declassification of JFK
papers.
Curiously, Mueller's career has been marked with prosecuting cases that touch on CIA
covert activities. He prosecuted John Gotti, who was on trial for distribution of cocaine which
has been identified as having arrived in the US via Mena, Arkansas as part of the Iran-contra
drug importation operation. Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time.
Mueller prosecuted Noriega, who was the CIA's point man in Panama, where the CIA laundered
money and moved cocaine and weapons for the contras during Iran-contra. The federal prosecutor
in the Mena corner of Arkansas at the time of the Mena operations who steered clear of it was
Asa Hutchinson, who went on to become George W Bush's first "drug czar". (More curiously, the
person leading the failed attempt to uncover Iran-contra in the US Senate was John Kerry, who
just happened to be a teammate of Mueller on their prep school lacrosse team many years
earlier.)
Mueller prosecuted BCCI (the international bank which laundered mob and intelligence money)
without seeing CIA fingerprints. Mueller became the Director of the FBI a week before 9/11.
Look it up.
Some more: Go read Gregory Craig's Wiki page. Robert Mueller just indicted Craig along
the lines of Manafort, a la aiding Russians (actually representing Ukrainians). Craig himself
has an interesting past. He was the lawyer defending John Hinckley for the assassination
attempt on Ronald Reagan, which, if succcessful, would have put GHW Bush into the White House;
Craig defended CIA Director Richard Helms for his part in the coup of Salvador Allende; he was
the State Department's director of policy planning under Madeleine Albright; Craig worked with
Bill Clinton on his impeachment proceedings; he represented the Cuban father in the Elian
Gonzalez case. Craig was on the other side of the Noriega case.
Mueller prosecuted Noriega and Craig defended him. Craig helped Obama flipflop his position
over the FISA court and the big communications corporations who cooperated with them. Craig
represented John Edwards. And, of course, he did work in UKRAINE.
I realize that some people in the left-right political universe will rejoice that a
"Democrat" is being indicted, but Craig's history suggests that like Manafort, Mueller, Barr
and others he represents a party across the river in Langley, Virginia. Very interesting, he
and Mueller going toe to toe as Noriega was put behind bars without a hint of Noriega's
Iran-contra work for Bush and the CIA. If you've got both the prosecutor and the defense
attorney you're going to win the trial.
It's a small world after all, but you won't hear Rachel Maddow repeat long-winded linkages
among these characters in her stories.
CIA psyops where ever you look. Curious or should I say Q reous? Cause Q sure seems CIA to
me....or so says Seth Rich...no he said DNC=CIA. up 8 users have voted. —
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty
stream.”
@Lookout
At some point the Democratic Party was rolled. Bill Clinton got the big speech at the 1988
convention. He certainly wasn't the speaker he became. That speech went on and on. Then next
time around he won the presidency in a three-way race with a funny Texas billionaire and
George Bush.
When Bill went to Oxford his classmates presumed he was CIA.
Our election of 1992 may have been to promote Clinton while taking the heat away from GHW
Bush.
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George
W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible
for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road
to Hell is paved with good intentions.
For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional
sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to
need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???
I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with
more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send
someone else's sons to war."
You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.
You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive
the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBIas per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason
why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas
a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.
To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able
to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't
be president.
More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexusspecifically the report written
about it by a special counselcould expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that
as well as a special counsel's report.
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove
their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.
The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog
is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field
(medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though
systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you
have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that
catch the errors.
Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional
complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades
ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide
down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long
gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world
and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't
matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did
not come home; all died at their own hands."
Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?
The navel gazing never stops.
Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions
of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government
in the world on their side.
Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many
times!
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did
you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way?
Not possible.
Just a cynical take, but implying that there are lessons to be learned from previous or present wars that should keep us from
engaging in future wars presumes that the goal is to, where possible, actually avoid war.
It also suggests a convenient, simplistic narrative that the military/DOD is incompetent and stupid, and unable to learn from
previous engagements.
I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military; if it seems as though there is no
plan, no objective, no victory for these engagements, maybe that is because the only objectives and victory are to provide practical
war training for our troops, test equipment and tactics, keep defense contractors employed and the Pentagon's budget inflated,
and to project power and provide a convenient excuse for proximity to our 'real' enemies.
Draping these actions under a pretense of spreading 'peace and democracy' is just a pretense and, as we can see by our track
record, has nothing to do with actual victory. "Victory", depending on who you ask, is measured in years of engagement and dollars
spent, period.
And because it is primarily taking place in the far away and poorly understood Middle East, it is never going to be enough
of an issue with voters for politicians to have to seriously contend with.
This person is a crybaby. At 49 he went to a war that most rational people knew already, was an immoral, illegal waste of people,
time and money. But now he wants to whine about PTSD. I have the same opinion about most soldiers who fought there also. Nobody
made them volunteer for that junk war so quit whining when things get a little hard
I recently spoke to some college students who, I realized, were in fifth grade when I got on
a plane to Iraq. They now study that stuff in history classes like "Opportunities and Errors:
21st-Century America in the Middle East." About halfway through our conversation, I realized
it's coming up on 10 years since I first went to Iraq. Now that's real history.
I was a Foreign Service Officer then, a diplomat, embedded with the U.S. Army at a series of
forward operating bases and in charge of a couple of reconstruction teams, small parts of a
complex failure to rebuild the Iraq we wrecked. I ended up writing a book about it all,
explaining in tragicomic terms how we failed (those "Errors").
The book, We Meant Well: How I Helped
Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People was -- and wasn't --
well-received. People laughed at the funny parts, but my message -- it didn't work and here's
why -- was largely dissipated at the time (2012) by government and media propaganda centered on
The Surge. That was David Petraeus's plan to pacify the Sunnis and push al-Qaeda away, while
clearing, holding, and building across the country, apparently to make room so ISIS and the
Iranians could move in.
Meanwhile, the new American president, elected in part based on his "no" vote on the war in
2003, proclaimed it all a victory and started bringing the troops home even while I was still
in Iraq. Meanwhile my employer, the U.S. Department of State, was unhappy with my book. After a
year-long
process , State pushed me into early retirement. My career was history.
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Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that
traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing
witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I
might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in,
three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands. Around us, Iraqis blew
themselves up alongside children. Everyone was a potential killer and a potential target. I did
this at age 49, on antidepressants and with a good family waiting back home. I cannot imagine
what it would have done to 18-year-old me. And I had it easier than most, and much easier than
many.
People asked in line at Trader Joe's and in interviews on semi-important TV shows, "Was it
all worth it to you?" I always answered yes. I'm not important, I said, but the story is. And
now we're making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. The only way to even start to justify it was
to think there might be some meaning behind it all. It didn't do anything for me but fill my
soul with vodka but maybe somehow it helped?
See, my book wasn't aimed at cataloging the failures in Iraq per se, but in trying to make
sure we didn't do the same thing in Afghanistan. The initial title wasn't We Meant Well,
but Lessons for Afghanistan from the Reconstruction of Iraq . The early drafts were
pretentious scholarly stuff, outlining our mistakes. Harvard Business School-like case studies.
Maps. Footnotes. It would have sold maybe five copies, and so my editors encouraged me to add
more funny parts. NPR's Fresh Air actually added a laugh track to my
interview . I figured I'd get the lessons across with humor more effectively anyway. In
such situations, you have to think that way. You can't believe that what you went through
didn't matter and keep getting out of bed every morning.
I now know officially that it did not matter. It was pointless. SIGAR shows I accomplished
nothing.
SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, a government oversight
body that is supposed to prevent waste, fraud, and mismanagement of the billions of dollars
being spent rebuilding Afghanistan but that has its hands full just keeping a CVS
receipt-length history of what's wrong. Sound familiar?
SIGAR just released its " 2019 High-Risk List ," which
points out especially egregious things that will follow in the wake of any peace agreement in
Afghanistan. Here are some quoted highlights:
set the
cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do."
That last line really got me. In my book, I'd written, "While a lot of the money was spent
in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no
one could find a match to set it on fire ." Had SIGAR read what I'd written? Or was the
joke just so obvious that we'd both come to the same punchline 10 years and two countries
apart?
Word for word as in Iraq, and after over 17 years of American effort, the U.S. has failed to
establish a viable government in Afghanistan, eliminate the local
insurgents/patriots/residents, establish a civil society, tamp down corruption, and ensure some
sort of national defense. Afghanistan has almost no chance of survival except as a Taliban
narcoland with financial support needed indefinitely to avoid whatever "worse" would be in that
calculus.
But there still are semi-believers. One former State Department colleague is on her fourth
assignment in Kabul, roughly half her career. Her job is to liaise with the few NATO officials
still hanging around. She says it's easy work; they've known each other for years. She's heard
we're making progress.
Around the same time as the SIGAR report, the Army War College released its history of the Iraqi Surge, a quagmire of dense
prose that I'm only about halfway through, but so far no mention of the impact of
reconstruction. The theme seems to be that the Army had some good ideas but the politicians got
in the way. Fair enough, but they misspelled Vietnam as I-r-a-q all throughout.
The post-9/11 wars have metastasized across three presidencies so far. Pick the thing you
detest most about Bush, Obama, and Trump, and complain about how it was never investigated
enough and how there weren't enough hearings. And then I'll disagree, for most everything that
happened and continues to happen in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone uninvestigated, unheard of,
and unpunished. It's ancient history.
We all want to believe that what we did, what we didn't do, the moral injury, the PTSD, the
fights with spouses, the kid at home we smacked too hard when she wouldn't eat her green beans,
all of what we saw and heard, mattered. You read that SIGAR report and tell me how. Because
basically I'm history now.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for
the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan.
"... In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of the US military. ..."
"... And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons belong to them. ..."
You ask a question about European political class's perception and defence of European
interests that is as perplexing here as it is in regard to Libya and Syria, to name just
these. There was at least some coherent defence of international law and principle during
Bush II's lead up to the Iraq war, but Europe's defence of law and Europe's common interests
seem to have ceased at some point since then.
Because, like the US European government is a tool of the Global Power Elite, it is
nothing more than pantomime. The West is fully owned and operated by the global elite.
In books going back to C Wright Mills' The Power Elite in 1956 to SUPERCLASS by David
Rothkopf, and GIANTS: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips clearly outline just how
powerful the Global Elites really are.
In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three
largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to
authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world
supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of
the US military.
There is one and only one Western empire - that of the Global Elites.
85% of the valuable assets in the world are controlled by the Global Elites.
There is no offsetting force against them, there simply does not exist today a force
capable of challenging their ownership of the world.
And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the
Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and
has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that
before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital
of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew
the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has
been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons
belong to them.
This slur "authoritarian state" is now peddled by neocons as synonym for the "countries we do not like"
This neocons in not very inventive... We already saw this line from Robert Kagan, who
actually is a better writer. This neocon/neolib pressitute can't even use proper terms such as
"neoliberalism" and "Washington consensus"
And slide to far-right nationalism and neo-fascism is direct result of neoliberalism
dominance for the last 40 years (since Carter) and sliding of the standard of living of workers
and the middle class.
Notable quotes:
"... Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world. ..."
As international rivalry intensifies, the core strategic task for the U.S.-led democratic
community is to contain the geopolitical influence and political disruption caused by
authoritarian great powers, namely China and Russia. Yet that task is made all the harder
because illiberalism -- and sympathy for those illiberal powers -- is simultaneously surging
among key actors on the political right. If the U.S. and its allies are to succeed in the great
global rivalry of the 21st century, the right must confront the threat of illiberalism within
its ranks -- just as the left did during a previous twilight struggle in the 20th century.
... ... ...
This time, the threat is not expansionist communism, but a combination of autocracy and
geopolitical revisionism. China has been moving toward a dystopian future of high-tech
authoritarianism, as it pushes for greater power and influence overseas. Putin's Russia has
consolidated an illiberal oligarchy, while using information warfare, political meddling and
other tools to subvert liberal democracies in Europe, the U.S. and beyond.
Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western
values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world.
... ... ...
It is not for nothing that the political scientist Marc Plattner has
written that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is “that it will end up
being abandoned by substantial segments of the right.” And even in the U.S., there are
alarming signs that conservative commitment to the norms of liberal democracy is under
strain.
Communism was not a threat, but actually benefited the world in many ways.
It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair share of wealth and
income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed, capitalism returned to its avaricious roots,
resulting in stagnant wages for the working class. And the pauperization of the working class
in recent decades is the cause for the current revolt against liberal capitalism.
So it was the competition from communism that was helping capitalism to stay healthy. Without
it capitalism has degenerated into a Dickensian dystopia. We should therefore welcome any
alternative socio-economic models to liberal capitalism.
It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair
share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed,
capitalism returned to
Thats a great point Che.
I have never ever looked at it from that angle.
Interesting.
Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, who has long been a leading conservative
intellectual, warns that this disillusion with liberal democracy “is clearly present
among American conservatives, and not just among the ‘alt-right.’
Honest and real conservatives are far and fewer in today's MAGA/tea party infested GOP.
Forget career politicians like Ted Cruz or McConnell, even the previously decent conservative
think tanks/pundits like from NR or Erik Erickson or others have all given up on any
principles and just bow at the altar of Trump now.
No they haven’t, Trump decided to put McConnell in charge so of course the
#neverTrumpers like the McConnell presidency...which consists of appointing Republican judges
at record pace and little else.
The biggest need is to resist holy warriors like Hal Brands who want to destroy the world
if it resists their version of revealed truth. They are the biggest threat to the human
future. The United States has to learn to live in a world that it cannot control. The
American goal should be to work towards a constructive human future not some kind of holy war
to impose American control on the rest of the world. The United States is the biggest
military spender. In recent history, It has been the world's global aggressor.
It has an
history of wars that have made little difference whether America won or lost them. Perhaps
the United States could succeed with some kind of genocide that wiped out all of the parts of
the world that refuse to accept American supremacy. But, short of that kind of disgrace, the
United States is not going to succeed in achieving any meaningful goal through war. As long
as America does not destroy the world, the future is going to be determined by economic
competition and the destinies that the people of different parts of the world choose for
themselves.
I had wondered if it was noticed the Liberalism was dying. The world has turned hard
right, with all the anger, nationalism, do-as-I-say, and social intolerance.
I don't even the children of today.
I might suggest that liberals themselves are destroying their freedoms with illogical
illiberal liberalism.
YOU can't do that, say that, act like that, think like that...no no no...we must act and
be correct, nice, polite, all forgiving and never critical.
Huh?
The freedoms that so many of us marched for, fought for, voted for, sang about (thank gawd
the music still lives), got bloody for, even died for, are slipping away quicker than you can
say me, me, me...it's all about me.
Maybe...small maybe...our youth can once again awaken America and the world's conscience.
Maybe? Maybe not!
Wha? It seems our LIttle Cultural Revolution is just warming up. Wait till AOC et al are
all growed up.
"This is a moment when the “free world” needs to be strong and united."
Is this the same "free" world that jails grandmothers over contested historical views?
That has reneged on free speech?
Thanks to a truly ethnomasochistic immigration policy, I assure you that this will not
happen. The West will be lucky if squeaks through this period without a civil war.
"... Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing In Defense of Empire . Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. ..."
"... Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they had ruled Africa. ..."
"... Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view of social justice.... ..."
"... The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came to be nations. ..."
"... So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel. ..."
"... This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get richer that is why they went to war. ..."
"... Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. Just more dumbing down the "stupid class". ..."
"... The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general. ..."
"... In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war. ..."
"... And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire, and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their profit. NOTHING MORE. ..."
"... You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming. ..."
"... It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. ..."
Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing
In Defense of Empire
. Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. The lunacy of his arguments can
be show best when one substitute the object of his essay:
Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by slavery, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned
in the interregnums. To wit, the British may have failed in Baghdad, Palestine, and elsewhere, but the larger history of the British
slaveholdership is one of providing a vast armature of stability, fostered by sea and rail communications, where before there
had been demonstrably less stability.
...
But slavery is now seen by global elites as altogether evil, despite slaveholdership having offered the most benign form of
order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable minimum.
Compared
with slaveholdership, democracy is a new and uncertain phenomenon. Even the two most estimable democracies in modern history,
the United States and Great Britain, were slaveholdership for long periods. "As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership
was born before the United States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto. Following their
initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states, the western territories were nothing less than slaveholdership possessions
of Washington, D.C. No surprise there: slaveholdership confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a middle ground
between anarchy and full state control.
...
Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of slavery
order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic
heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.
...
That, I submit, would be a policy direction that internalizes both the drawbacks and the benefits of slaveholdership, not as
it has been conventionally thought of, but as it has actually been practiced throughout history.
It is somewhat frightening that people believing such nonsense have influence in political circles.
In October of 2001, Max Boot wrote a Weekly Standard piece, "
The Case for
American Empire ," that featured perhaps the most representative neoconservative-authored sentence of all time:
Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets ."
GENERAL PLAN EAST Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
By Mark Mazower (Allen Lane 2008)
"Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least
the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did
not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying
to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning
or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they
had ruled Africa."
isn't he married to Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland?
if it was Kagan , yes, but as already pointed above, it's Robert "how we would fight china" KaPLan... Let's say it's the KK
brotherhood of lunatic warhawks
Racism is not at all a legacy of slavery but a constitutive and sustaining element of the White Supremacy system estab lished
by European power during the centuries of trans-Atlantic enslavement of Black Africans. Hence its extreme resistance to eradication.
Racism is, certainly, not a "residual legacy" in the passive sense of the dead hand of the past. It is not like a motion imparted
to an object by an impulse withdrawn long ago; a motion sustained entirely by inertia. Because it is a constitutive element, it
has been necessary to systematically apply force and fraud to maintain, in mutant forms, this vital pillar of white supremacy.
Accordingly, new forms of "slave trade" and slavery as well as new structures of raci
sm are still being elaborated and justified, even today, as they have been, whenever needed, since the 16th century.
For example, on Nov. 11, 2006, in Philadelphia, at a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade
Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor"
for the parts of Africa
that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West. "Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best
available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable resu
lt of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees.
Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program -- which will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa
to own their workers outright-- was similar in many ways
to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized
countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.
Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view
of social justice....and on and on...
Anyone else notice the picture that went with the article? Its a picture of a man holding up the world. The same bollocks that people 150 years ago claimed that Great Britain was 'Holding Up The World' by killing Africans and ruling
over India. Such bollocks. The rhetoric of 2 centuries ago is the same rhetoric of today. Nothing ever changes, but people never learn
to see the propaganda for what it is.
Kaplan is Jewish, and it is utterly bizarre
that he can write positively about empire, given that the paradigmatic empire, the Roman one, colonized the area now called Israel,
with the Jews revolting, to which Rome responded by destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, an event which forced Kagan's religion
to be reconstituted, since up until the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, Judaism centered around the Temple.
Kagan seems to be completely unaware of his own heritage, or at least not to care about it: but then why does he start his
piece with a pogrom? This reminds me of something that Putin has said in a
speech :
Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples
and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone's right to the freedom of consciousness, political views
and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite
in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also
essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the
majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.
It's symptomatic that certain hasbara troll missed no opportunity to take up strategic position and drop some initial disinfo
in order to block here any inquiry into who really were the masters of the slave trade over centuries ?
Robert kagan or Robert Kaplan both are lunnies and unfortunately, in the past several US administrations, these cooks have risen
to the top. These guys are a product of nazi Germany at its worst where the thinking that the powerful nations have a god given
mission to rule and the rest of the world is here to be slaves to be taken care of.
Not sure how many people caught this, but
the prince of Wales, on a visit to Iraq was filmed during a visit to British troops saying just that. "These people are happy
to have us here to rule them just like we did before".
Neocons are today's version old British imperial superiority which led to the Second World War along with nazi ideology.
Someday we are going to have an overwhelming US neocon administration and this will be the end.
I think this is definitely the direction the neoliberal neocons want to take us -- back to slavery. I was struck by a statement
made by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Thomas Perkins (who created a stir in January with a letter published in the WSJ comparing
the 1% in the U.S. to Jews persecuted by the Nazis during Kristallnacht). In this statement, Perkins is calling for suffrage based
on the total number of tax dollars the voter pays.
Perkins gave a
talk titled "The War on the 1%" last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco:
Mr. Perkins' interlocutor, Adam Lashinsky, soon had the frustrated look of a man trying to swim in a vat of molasses.
Mr. Lashinsky pointed out, for instance, that it was ridiculous to equate powerless Jews in the Third Reich with extremely
powerful tech overlords in present-day America.
"No, I think the parallel holds," Mr. Perkins said calmly. For one thing, "If you pay 75 percent of your life's earnings
to the government you are being persecuted."
He had a better plan: "You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar in taxes. later he added, "A million in taxes, you
get a million votes." He said he was kidding about that last part, kind of.
One could argue that Citizens United already creates the dollarocracy system Perkins imagines. Slavery can't be far off.
Personally I think the Neos would be fine with a modified Feudalism: Serfs are easier to control than slaves.
But the difference is minimal and largely rhetorical. Ultimately neither has much freedom.
Anyway, what Perkins was advocating (different amounts of votes depending on wealth) isnt new. Some folks advocated that in
the 1800s.
But its so weird to see a modern person advocating that openly. Thats supposed to be a thing youre only supposed to talk about
behind closed doors. But I guess times are changing and some kind of NeoFeudalism will probably be endorsed publicly by the mainstream
in a few decades.
I personally do not think bush was a neocon. He was a patsy who was manipulated by neocons. He didn't have the brains, the
ability to plot or the vision of these two loonies and the neocon masses that seems to be growing everyday in the US. Bush was
a twit. A neocon administration is what we will see with hitlery Clinton if she is elected. Nothing worse that an intelligent,
motivated, self entered, ambitious neocon to set the road for a PNAC scenario.
But Cheney was a Neocon, and he and Rumsfeld hired the whole PNAC crew and set all that crap in motion. He was also trying
to make up for damned near bankrupting what then became Halliburton. And he succeeded on both counts. There isn't a person in
the US today with any "serious" foreign policy creds who has any business running anything. So our choice next time will be...
bad and worse.
Kaplan effectively believes that the Empire is AngloZionist:
the British had their hands full in Mesopotamia in 1941: given the tendency of the Arab masses toward anti-Western and anti-Zionist
ideologies (a tendency that was itself at least in part a reaction to British dominance)
So maybe I was unfair to the Saker when I said in an earlier thread that I regretted his using this term.
Kaplan/Kagan is an amusing slip, but they're equally insane and the point is well made - that supremacists are a bit too eager
to fall in love with their own bullshit.
"As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership was born before the United
States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto.
Actually, I think these neocons fail on their on there own terms. I mean that they're actually very poor imperial strategists
even if one accepts the neocon argument that empire is a good thing. If anything, it's the neocons who have no grasp of realpolitik
and who are blinded by an ideology that is far more pro-Israel than pro-American. All the wars they've promoted have been debacles
that have diminished not increased America's standing. Unconditional support for Israel (which earns successive American administrations
only Israeli contempt, never gratitude) and the obsession with punishing and destabilizing Iran totally distorts not only American
Middle East policy but American foreign policy as a whole. Pushing for a new Cold War with Russia creates a powerful enemy where
previously there was none. So for all their seemingly shameless promotion of empire, these people will one day be noted only for
their contribution to American decline.
Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland's husband no? My question would be how did Ms. Nuland get promoted to Under-Secretary? Hillary
Clinton had to have signed off on that.
" the most benign form of order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable
minimum"
Am i mistaken? Because I am quite certain sectarian wars have never been worse. Syria, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda, and DRC.
These countries became mixed at some point. And now they are being torn apart.
Finally, we get to discuss the poisonous, rotten core of Imperial Supremacy and who authored, promotes it and is the main driving
force behind it. Hallelujah! This is exactly where we must begin. Finally, the purpose of all these discussions becomes more defined.
I'm not sure if your error in the author's name was really so bad. Maybe it was meant this way for all to investigate further
, because that is precisely what everyone is failing to do in these discussions on imperial supremacy: to research the authors
of this evil ideological foreign policy and there are many behind it in different arenas: politics, finance, media, lobbies, religious
groups, all honing the message, driving the narrative, driving policy, bribing politicians to push this twisted ideology forward.
Your error, intentional or otherwise was nonetheless so timely and auspicious at a moment in history when we are starting to
see , what evil injustice is being advanced in our name against other nations, and this article falls into our lap in an
almost prophetic manner with such perfect timing as a warning to us all: to look for the root and squash it before it's too late,
because unless we see where it originates, we are powerless. The fact that your error perplexed many here already can only be
a good thing, because it peaks their curiosity: hey, wait a minute; this is not the author, what's going on here? And then
upon further research, they discover two names to familiarize themselves with, and then three, and then a pattern starts to emerge,
and then they go further connecting the dots until they finally get the big picture that: the advancement of imperial supremacy
in this day and age...is most definitely a Zionist-driven operation.
So they have similar names, and are no relation but they're united in the cause of Zionism and the imperial project
that will shelter Zionism permanently.:
This individual, Kaplan, is obviously trying to make the case for imperial supremacy which sets the stage for justifying
the injustice that Zionism has wrought in Israel and that Zionists want to permanently legitimize by any means possible.
These Ziocons will bombard us and the world from left, right and centre with an argument designed for every political persuasion
to justify legitimizing imperial supremacy where Zionism can exist comfortably with permanent impunity and be cleansed of its
ongoing and future crimes.
Now I know I'm going to have fun here separating the chaff from the wheat on this issue. This is a subject that Zionists, whether
liberal (a non-existent creatures in Zionism; because Zionism turns all who embrace it into fascists) or conservative, are irresistably
drawn to and at the same time it's a subject that draws out their duplicitous nature. Those who are secretly with Zionism's goals
will do ANYTHING to steer us off course and prevent us from visualizing the pattern, and if we dare to; they'll hurl their most
convenient slander; A.S.
Thank you for making us aware of this article which lays the foundation for all discussions on what we are witnessing in Ukraine
and the Middle East with advancing imperial supremacy and which hopefully will motivate everyone to further explore the depth
and scope of Zionist involvement in this expanding foreign operation that is evil to its core.
And don't worry, apparently you're not the first to mix up these names and make this fortunate mistake, because in essence,
whether one author is blunt and the other doublespeaks liberal jargon they are united in their cause and we should be aware of
what we're up against to tear their structure down and derail their agenda.
It's great to see others stumble upon the truth that was begging to be found. If not for this timely omen, I might have given
up trying to make everyone see and have started doubting even the sound of my own fury.
Who set these wheel in motion Robert Kagan and William Kristol or Dick and Rummy? Come on...the authors of the PLAN of course.
Sure Cheney's a lunatic, but even he couldn't come up with this. Cheney's part of the muscle.
We've been fighting this fight, Kalithea, for a long time now, every way we can. So you'll not find me defending a one of them.
But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. We're "just" dealing with the current
crop, and hopefully we'll somehow succeed before there's no Palestine, Palestinians or olive trees left. Or Syrians, or Iraqis,
or Ukrainians, or... Just don't think for a minute that these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews,
low and high, who share the same damned values even if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen". And they've
ALL got to be stopped.
This is from a 2004 article by Uri Avnery at Counterpunch:
The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures
of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their
business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.
In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to exploit the economic
anarchy in order to acquire enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and
other minerals. They used every possible trick, including cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a small private
army.
But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period
of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state.
At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep decline. On the eve of the new elections for the presidency, his rating
in public opinion polls stood at 4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease, working about two hours a day. The state
was, in practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter; corruption was the order of the day.
The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of
the other media.
Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs
(Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another,
Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.
George W. Bush and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners?
From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant corporations and
powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them give money to both candidatesjust
to be on the safe side.
All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no such thing as
a free lunch", as the right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in
an election will yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.
Even educated Americans speak of Putin as a "thug". All he has done is restore the rule of law, what Germans used to call a
Rechtsstaat .
It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously a man
of the people. He also takes the political ideas that European civilization was built on seriously, something that can be said
for no Western leader I know of.
It is turning out as the nineteenth century Slavophiles thought it would: Russia has become the last defender of Western civilization.
Someone above mentioned the Robert Kaplan piece in the Atlantic "how we would fight china" that appeared in 2005. This was not
lunatic but a very interesting article on US military plans on how to confront China just off of China's territorial waters (I
think the lunacy is the notion that US national interests require us to maintain a war footing in the Western Pacific, but that
is an argument we have lost here in the US). I hadn't seen this before. In any case it should be read by anyone interested in
US plans against China. It explains Hillary's 'pivot to Asia' policy.
By the same token, Ukrainians can be understood when they kick out a president who wants to bring them into the Russian orbit
against their will.
I was surprised to read that. I should have thought that Avnery has a concept of the rule of law. Also, is Avnery so uninformed
not to know that most Ukrainians do not want to join NATO?
"Even educated Americans". That must be either a relative term, or the voice of the educated is never heard. It is difficult for
me to imagine how an "educated" person could be so ill-informed. Back on planet earth, this would never happen.
Maybe this is far-fetched and I know that Putin bailed out some the the Russian Oligarchy during the 2008 recession so they would
owe him support at this crucial time. But recently I watched an interview on 60 Minutes with businessman Bill Browder who trashed
talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder who at one point alleges
being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country. Anyway I'm not sure what kind of subterfuge
he was up to when he stayed in Russia but he made some nasty accusations against Putin.
A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during
Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the Soviet
Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.
Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless revolution.
Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.
I believe it is during this time Putin became aware of the power of Zionist media to destroy political careers.
In October, in an interview in Le Figaro, Putin announced that he would no longer tolerate criticism of the government by media
controlled by the oligarchs. "If necessary we will destroy those instruments that allow this blackmail", he declared.
There's no doubt in my mind that Zionist influence had a hand in what is happening in Ukraine and the protests that tried to
interfere with Putin's re-election. Maybe Putin pissed off some other Zionist oligarchs. I haven't been able to research more
on this issue but hopefully some of you will look further.
But this just reinforces the point I've been trying to make that Zionists are involved in this imperial global expansion, in
this case because the capitalist system feels threatened by Putin and potential reforms. Zionists are up to their eyeballs in
this imperial advance and I still believe they're in the driver's seat.
Are you kidding me? Do you think the U.S. could ever dream of reining 1.3 billion stray cats with nukes and a formidable army?
For gawd's sake this article is practically a manifesto on Zionism supremacy, it's that transparent. But of course, you'll never
admit it.
Oh the Neocons were absolutely behind this Ukrainian gambit, and I'm thinking their goals were twofold: to keep Russia preoccupied
and get hold of Sevastopol. That way, it would be very difficult for her to help Syria and, of course, Iran -- still the main
goals for those creeps. And yeah, find me one Neocon, anywhere, who does not support Israel. So yeah, Zionists.
remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:37:51 PM |
58
really, read some history? u s imperialism is the single most dangerous threat to humanity
israel is a vassal state
exactly as indonesia was under suharto, or colombia under any of its creep compradors
your sense of disproportion amazes me truly, maybe it is because you are american, you want to blame someoen else for your
barbarity, 'the smart jew' is again the perfect target for imbeciles
it is a puppet state, it is a non state, who does exactly what washington wants it to do. it effects only only middle east
policy & even that it is by far the junior party, if washington told israel to go live in the sudetenland, the state of israel
would, is is a pantin, a puppet increasingly with more bark than bite
you choose anti semitism because as american you are frightened of being obliged to burn your shithouse down
Oh no, rememberringgiap, no. It's the combination of the two. And for gosh sakes, I've known how bad America was since I was a
kid, and spent most of my life trying to do something about it so I'm hardly afraid to admit it. We see the end coming, it's gonna
be UGLY, and we know we deserve it; not a nice place to be but it's honest. And Israel is equally nasty, sometimes in the lead,
sometimes as a follower, and I don't hate Jews but I sure do loathe Zionists, whatever faith they may be. (And again, in America,
there are a lot more Christians blindly supporting Israel than Jews.)
remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:49:14 PM |
60
they are puppets, nothing more nothing less. the actual state of israel began criminally with deir yassin & that state gets worse,
it is little surprise, that its population is leaving in droves, more than at any other time, so would i with nutcases like lieberman
& netanyahu
but they are no more than donkeys
pakistan on the other hand frightens the living shit out of those united states
In the atlantic.com article In Defense of Empire the words "slave" or "slavery" in fact do not exist.
or example, in the above quoted text, we find this phrase: "Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often
been provided by slavery ...". From the atlantic.com url, instead we find: "Throughout history, governance and relative
safety have most often been provided by empires ...".
The same types of differences exist in every single case. Obviously, this is a huge problem. Either the quotes are wrong in
this post or they have been edited out in a later version of the atlantic.com version and replaced with the words "empires," "imperialism",
etc.
Which lets Israel/zionist Jewish fascists off the hook for the war crimes they are responsible for. "They're just pawns of
a larger poer, pity them, but don't condemn them. And for god's sakes, don't do anything meaningful that might interfere in their
sacred mandate from the godhead."
Which is essentially what Jewish zionist hasbara is all about, whether from the zionist left or the zionist right.
It's never "us", it's always "them".
Excuse me while I go puke, Charles Manson in drag.
@48 Yes, totally not lunatic for the United States to go to war with one of the most populated countries on the planet.
Wanting to go to war with enormous countries like China, Russia or even Iran (not as big, but still what, over twice as big
as iraq and afghanistan combined?) is totally and completely rational.
Thank goodness Putin did some house-cleaning, but he no doubt made enemies among Zionists no doubt on Wall Street as well.
They must have had capital tied up in these Zionist-run Russsian companies.
@62 WHAT Zionist left? There is none. All the Democrats or whatever that are zionists are also right wing. They just dress up
imperialism in fancy words like 'humanitarianism', thats all.
There hasnt been a zionist left since the last communist zionists in Israel retired or died decades ago.
@57 You realize that critiquing zionism, which is a modern political ideology, is NOT the same as critiquing Judaism, the religion,
right? Right? Guess not.
Because there are zionist Christians (probably more than there are zionist jews) and nonzionist jews (a growing number of young
jews realize Israel is an apartheid state).
So stop trying to slur anti-zionists as anti-semites, thats just slander.
Hey kalithea, the Russians let Khodorkovsky out of prison early. Almost the first thing the loyal Israeli citizen did was go to
the Ukraine and encourage the neo-nazis running the place now to get even more brutal and nazi like.
I could ask what's up with that, but I think everybody here knows the answer.
@65: I think b made it very clear. He used the word "substitute", and the title of the post was directly followed by the same
title, but without the substitution.
This kind of snark is just part of leftist blog culture. (I don't know if right wingers do it.)
I'm beginning to think that the substitution of "Kagan" for "Kaplan" was snark too, but that I didn't pick up on.
Do Michelle and her speechwriters really think that Chinese rulers don't take that as a big joke? I'm sure they're laughing
their heads off behind her back. I hope that the reason speechwriters put stuff like that in there is for the domestic American
audience.
And yet another Zionist oligarch who bilked Russia and hates Putin.:
On 23 August 2003, Gusinsky travelled from Israel to Athens, where he was arrested under a Greek-Russian treaty for fraud amounting
to millions in damages.[5] Intense pressure from American leaders (mainly from US ambassador in Athens Tomas Miller), Israeli
officials and the European Jewish Congress on the Greek government led to Gusinsky's release within five days.[6]
Mr Gusinsky says we will all pay the price if western leaders appease President Putin. He likens the situation apocalyptically
to the 1930s and the world's treatment of Hitler. Mr Putin's hands, he says, are already red with the blood of murdered Chechens.
Mr Putin's popularity comes in part from his promise to do away with the oligarchs, a group of 20-odd billionaire businessmen
who got rich stripping assets from privatised companies they bought for nothing.
Posted by: remembererringgiap | Mar 22, 2014 12:46:04 AM | 75
"just read strormfront that enough - that's the level of research repeated ad finitum - whether its lagos or louisiana"
It's well known stormfront is a zionist front/agent provocateur site, much like freerepublic, though tailored to the more hardcore
freak. Why promote them?
Maybe Zionists deserve to rule, they're smarter, they work harder and are better organized. You folks couldn't organize an ice
cream social. Just sayin'
But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. ... Just don't think for a minute that
these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews, low and high, who share the same damned values even
if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen".
Testify Sister! Tell us who set the wheels in motion, tell us all what the plan is. What tricks did the Jews pull on us non-Jews
way back then, how are non-Jews enabling their diabolical worldwide plan?
WTF are you trying to say? The Zionist have no position on US-China relations as far as anyone can see. I read that article
by Robert Kaplan and he reported the views of officers in the US Navy. I am quite sure that Israel has not penetrated the US Navy.
This is a perspective of good old fashioned US imperialism. I know that the Zionist work in the background and try to influence
US policy, but they do not control it. Especially inside the US Navy. You have no idea how power is distributed inside the US.
"... I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world ..." Mark Twain
Eugenics is evil ... however, in Kagans case, his removal from the gene pool and his ilk, could only be seen as a darwinian,
evolutionary advancement for humanity.
thank you, rememberinggiap, for your calmness. you are correct in saying that many of us (and that includes myself look for causes
outside our internal history. perhaps the fixed point should be the Dulles brothers, who if they did not set us down this infernal
path, gave us a mighty and prolonged push. Mark Twain had it all figured out over a century ago. as to American zionists, Jews
of my and Nora's generaton lived through the discrimination of convenanted housing tracts, university quotas and professional
exclusions down to the Vietnam war, and they can't put it out of their mind. they probably don't know that they were not the only
ones. when I was a student at Yale living with George Bush Sr.'s aunt in New Haven, Catholics and most of the Yale professors
were excluded from the lawn tennis club situated just behind the new school of management on Whitney avenue. No Irish or italians
need apply. the us is a swarm of internal contradictions, and it's history is out of control.
Nora at 45: Kindly cancel that request. Just answer this. Do you agree with this quote from Pragma:
Neither is it coincidence that (before the creation of izrael but about the time of the balfour deal ...) Russia was poisoned
by zionist "communists" (just another projection), nor is it coincidence that Germany was relentlessly pushed into war and
later broken and crushed and not reinstated until this very day ...
If that's a good summary of them, maybe there's no need for you to tell us about your 'historical' beliefs.
Also, in fact I only think Pragma is the actual 'destroy moonofalabama' operative here. You and his other supporters seem to
hold your beliefs sincerely. FWIW and for what they're worth which is less than zero.
The US Navy has known it Carriers are simply very large targets for many, many years, and so do the PLAN.
Carrier battle groups are for projecting brute military force and creating invasive sovereignity(sic) in support of Empire
around the globe ... NEVER , in the modern era to be risked against 1st world powers. All those billions upon billions
of $ would be lost in the briefest moment of conflict with the PLAN. See: Anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM).
I must admit I didn't compare the original text with what b cited, I still had too much of a confidence into him which now vanished
totally. Others @6) and Massinissa discovered the bluff immediately, so they deserve the honour. I really don't know what the
purpose of this double bluff is: changing the text and the author??? I would say just stupid...
It also damages people like Chinweizu @10), the famous nigerian writer who presented a case of REAL stewardry of labour by
WTO close to slaveholdership
maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of
us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes to the commenters here confusing all of us.... I
think the whole blog here is really disintegrating, from top to bottom...
Knut at 83: Lenin had this figured out, imperialism is a stage of capitalism, a reaction to excess production and internal markets
being exhausted of opportunities for excess profits. The European capitalist countries began struggling with this phenomenon in
the late 19th century and the US a few decades later. There's really no solution other than ending capitalism and/or social democracy.
In that context, pinning responsibility for imperialism on Jews is just idiotic, and pinning things on the US will just make
folks less wary of its natural successor, China. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing when there is multi-polar world, because
that coincided in the post-war era and may coincide again with greater 'space' for independent, populist, democratic regimes to
arise.
And that also doesn't mean I accuse Russia of being an imperialist. Lenin was making a general observation (I think) and there
are exceptions. Regimes under attack by 'big imperialism' sometimes produce sincere democratic/populist nationalists. I hope/think
Russians are lucky enough to have one of those running their country now. The people should be aware they'll likely need to struggle
'some day soon' to avoid reverting to the 'imperialist norm'.
@87) where is the enlightment of readers doing this? all empires, great and less great, historically have been founded on slaveholdership,
now changing to a form of forced labour like in most of the arabic monarchistic countries or work without the minimum ILO standards
like in the case of the Sotchi Olympic workers....
Human Trafficking and Slavery by the US Government, Military and Corporations for MASSIVE PROFIT is very, very real,
in a 'literal' sense, too ... all of it corrupt and illegal even under US Law ... and no one will ever be prosecuted ...
12 years a Slave , indeed ... as I recall,
no individual, business or official involved was ever held accountable for the multiple crimes, even then illegal, committed against
Solomon Northup , then a Freeman ... one hundred and
sixty years has passed and where are we now ?
But if Congress approves, the Army would drop from today's active-duty force of 522,000 soldiers to between 440,000 and 450,000
over the next three years.
"Since we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged" ground wars, the Army is larger than required and "larger than we
can afford," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who announced the plan, said at the Pentagon.
California may win more than it loses in the shift of resources as older aircraft are phased out and new ones are brought
on board.
Spending for cyberwarfare will increase under the plan. That could benefit larger government contractors in Silicon Valley,
including Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp. and a growing number of start-ups in defense-related equipment
and software.
In addition, Northrop Grumman Corp. uses a facility in Palmdale to build the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft that
will replace the high-flying U-2 spy planes, famous in the early Cold War but now proposed for retirement. The company has
about 2,500 employees on the program in Southern California.
The Pentagon previously had planned to mothball a version of the Global Hawk and keep the U-2 flying. But Hagel said
the operating costs of the drone had fallen and that with its greater range and endurance, it "makes a better high-altitude
reconnaissance platform for the future."
The Air Force has 32 U-2s based at Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, Calif.
Hagel also called for retiring the Air Force's entire fleet of A-10 "Warthog" ground attack fighters, as well as mothballing
half of the Navy's fleet of 22 cruisers, and building only 32 of the Navy's littoral combat ships, not 52 as previously planned.
The shallow-draft, lightly armed warship is designed for clearing mines and anti-submarine warfare. Hagel said it might not
be heavily armed enough and called for studying whether a new frigate would be better.
The only military force to grow would be special operations forces. Increasingly used for training and counter-terrorism
missions around the world, the elite force would increase by several thousand to 69,700 .
Which would give the US a spoiling, blackmail power to push for its interests but no imperial power.
Rather than Obama's post-imperialism, in which the secretary of state appears like a lonely and wayward operator encumbered
by an apathetic White House, I maintain that a tempered imperialism is now preferable.
No other power or constellation of powers is able to provide even a fraction of the global order provided by the United
States. U.S. air and sea dominance preserves the peace, such as it exists, in Asia and the Greater Middle East. American military
force, reasonably deployed, is what ultimately protects democracies as diverse as Poland, Israel, and Taiwan from being overrun
by enemies. If America sharply retrenched its air and sea forces, while starving its land forces of adequate supplies and training,
the world would be a far more anarchic place, with adverse repercussions for the American homeland.
Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of imperial
order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic
heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.
He seems to realize his argument is an uphill struggle as he adds this
This by no means obliges the American military to repair complex and populous Islamic countries that lack critical components
of civil society. America must roam the world with its ships and planes, but be very wary of where it gets involved on the
ground. And it must initiate military hostilities only when an overwhelming national interest is threatened. Otherwise, it
should limit its involvement to economic inducements and robust diplomacy -- diplomacy that exerts every possible pressure
in order to prevent widespread atrocities in parts of the world, such as central Africa, that are not, in the orthodox sense,
strategic.
That he goes back to "White Man's Burden" in his arguments presumably means he is too old and
out
of touch with US demography .
There is a great
RT interview
by Anastasja Churkina - the daughter of the Russian UN ambassador - with Amy Goodman on the role of corporate media - when
corporations profit from war.
It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously
a man of the people.
Indeed. It's also instructive to compare a Putin speech and say an obama or merkel speech. While Putin *evidently and doubtlessly*
really addresses the people and explains what has been, or must be, done and why, the western puppets merely utter system standard
pieces of text and are ignoring the people.
kalithea (53)
Bill Browder who trashed talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder
who at one point alleges being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country.
Well, depending on whom you ask, weztern media and even (reliably and confrontingly jew defending) wikipedia, or Russian investigators,
witnesses, and victims, the answer will be very different.
Actually browder was deeply and dirtily linked to a concerted crime operation that tried to steal Russias (mostly hydrocarbon)
resources in a "professional" way. This, of course *had* to be understood for what it was, a direct attack on Russias life blood,
which maybe was not even the goal of browder and accomplices but at least a non issue for them. Looking closer you will also find
khodorkovsky and the "devils advocate" magnitsky in those circles.
Funnily the wezt and wikipedia paint browder as a gently minded businessman who got thrown out by evil Putin for unmasking
Putin and his crime gang (well noted, that's how the weztern thugs paint it).
A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during
Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the
Soviet Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.
Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless
revolution. Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.
berezovsky didn't stick to the deal, he left the frame so clearly - and wisely - assigned by Putin. Quite possibly berezovsky
is the symbol of the "political oligarchs" which, of course, were not at all happy about Putin stopping their free looting of
Russia.
It is noteworthy - yet widely "forgotten" - that berezovsky later, in London, more or less confessed his crimes and evil spirited
attacks and asked Putin to forgive him and to please, pretty please, let him go back to Russia.
One might also have a good case here for the difference between jews and zionists. Yes, most oligarchs are jews but that's
not the point. The point is that extremely greedy people with a large crime register wanted to and still want to earn ever more
billions, jew or not jew. But that's it. And one can make agreements with them, even agreements in favour of Russia and even agreements
basically employing those oligarchs for the good of Russia.
Not so with the zionists. The zionist oligarchs never respected Putin, nor the people, nor Russia herself. To them Russia was
but a helpless but very rich lady they would loot and rob with utmost brutality. And as soon as anyone dared to stop them they
would scream "anti-semites!" and leave to izrael or another zio controlled country.
For those oligarchs who stuck and stick to the agreements one must not care about jew or not and indeed there are non-jews,
too. The most brutal and despicable criminals though are zio-jews, each and all of them.
Ad "zusa attacking China":
That must be a joke. Anyone with some basic knowledge about military issues will tell you a simple truth: zusa must hope and
pray that none of their protectees, namely japan, sk, and taiwan, ever comes in a situation to ask for zusa help. For a simple
reason. zusa would be doomed.
Japan being the least dangerous, sk would pretty much be lost before zusa could fire some shots, and taiwan (and largely sk)
are basically denied zones.
Not only are 100% of taiwan covered by Chinese anti-air systems but worse for zusa, zusa would be stopped dead in its tracks
because China can interdict the ca. 600 - 750km wide "belt" around taiwan needed for zusa air operations. About the only tool
not interdicted would be zusa firing cruise missiles; as those are old tech., and slow China would comfortably kill at least 80%
(and more realistically around 90%) of those. Would do zusa that, would zusa protect taiwan knowing there is little they could
do but there would be a very considerable risk of China (rightfully!) destroying major parts of the zusa fleet? I strongly doubt
that.
About the most realistic and favourable (for zusa) scenario I see would be a China japan war with zusa interfering somewhat.
And even that is doubtful as it might "invite" nk to use China supplied weapons against both japan and the much hated zusa.
maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of
us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes
maybe? MAYBE? What an incompetent asshole! OF COURSE I'm a programm! But not by b; I've been programmed by KGB on a rusty typewriter.
izrael should ask zusa for more funds or they should ask one of the zio-controlled countries. Obviously izrael *urgently* needs
funds for better agents. Current ones like thomas miss even the most obvious points.
Ceterum censeo israel americanamque vehementer delenda esse!
He has been an active supporter of Jewish initiatives in Russia and Europe. In 1996 Fridman was one of the founders of the
Russian Jewish Congress, now sitting on the RJC Presidium. He makes large contribution to the work of the European Jewish Fund,
a non-profit organization aimed at developing European Jewry and promoting tolerance and reconciliation on the continent.[5]
Presently, a member of the Public Chamber of Russia. Was presented with an award by Bill Clinton, uber-supporter of Zionism.
What is this? A case of keep your friends close and enemies closer? I wouldn't trust a Zionist as far as I can spit! How many
Zionists are in his entourage? I hope Putin doesn't end up like Caesar - stabbled in the back by those close to him - et tu Brute?
Mikhail Fridman and his fellow Russian Jewish philanthropists are ponying up some serious cash to create what is being touted
as a "Jewish Nobel Prize." The Russian billionaire and co-founder of the five-year-old Genesis philanthropy group announced
the creation of a $1 million prize that will be awarded to Jews who win global recognition for their professional achievements,
including in the world of science and the arts. The prize, launched in collaboration with the Israeli government, was announced
on Tuesday, which coincided with the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Israel. The award will be presented annually
by the Israeli prime minister around Passover time. As if the world was short on Jewish Nobel Prize winners.
Neocon Zionists, aka Israeli Firsters, and most of the One Percent on Wall Street have owned Congress and the mainstream media
propaganda machine since the beginning of modern print, and then broadcast media. By this control of what people read, hear, and
see, they have been able to control what people believe and think. Game set match, until now.
Now, the internet has opened the Pandora's box of Truth, and as people have an instinct for the truth, they are beginning to
see what was concealed from them before. (And they're inevitably getting smarter, developing the skill needed to distinguish noisy
nonsense from correct information.) So Robert Kagan and other neocon Zionists like him whose first loyalty is to Israel, are rightly
worried that when the "tapestry of lies" is stripped away, and the American people see the extent of the Zionist subversion, there
will be consequences.
This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals,
then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This
is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.
This is sad enough, but as an American, I'm particularly dismayed, because the American Jews in my surrounding community have
-- too easily I must confess -- been hoodwinked into supporting the Zionist criminal enterprise.
Stealing someone else's country to start your own -- despite all the historical precedent -- is not a good strategy, particularly
when the folks whose country you stole have a billion and a half co-religionists out there unhappy about the theft.
Let's get some definitions right, ok. Zionism in this day and age means no more and no less than a strong supporter of the state
of Israel. It simply doesn't mean "Jew", but it does mean condoning increased settlements and outrageous attacks against Gaza,
etc. The entire movement is a bit more than 100 years old; it began at roughly the same time that TR and his lovely "White Fleet"
sailed the Pacific to do some of the same lovely stuff to the Philippines that we'd been doing to North America since the 1600's
and the rest of the Americas since the 1800s (the entire purpose of the Monroe Doctrine was to legitimize it).
Okay, a bit more history: our entry into WWI was, among other things, closely related to the Balfour Doctrine. We did it for
many mercantile reasons as well (DuPont vs. Krupp, etc.), but the point is, just like the Yalies in OSS whose families had been
bankrolling Hitler before (and during, see: Prescott Bush) WWII then snarfed up a bunch of leading Nazis afterwards, different
people w/different goals and beliefs, can work together when it suits their purposes. And "Israel returning to Zion" was and is
a MAJOR theme for the Puritans, both here and in England (look up Dispensationalism; it's a big deal) and various other groups
of Christians.
So yes, no CT here at all, but why waste time separating out blame: it's a many-headed monster that's easily judged simply
by its effects, summed up as harm to innocent people in the furtherance of... whatever.
fairleft, I left some stuff for you that you may not have read. I'm putting it here but will not engage you again until you've
digested at least one of the readings I suggested.
I have an honest question I wish you'd really think about. I'm assuming you're an American, like me. And we have no compunction
praising our fellow Americans when they do something in accord with our values, and criticizing them when they don't. I.e., we're
not blindly zenophobic, right? And I think that's pretty generally true for most of the people here, whatever their ethnicity:
they can criticize "their own" when they find it warranted, based on what the person, or group of people, did. So I'm wondering
about your blind spot: are all Jews blameless just by definition, or might some of them, sometimes, do something objectionable?
And if so, why is no one allowed to say so? In my family's background are lots of different peoples who at various times were
subjected to hideous repression, ethnic cleansing and yes, genocide, but I still see no reason not to criticize them when they're
doing something wrong -- why can't you? And please don't invoke the Holocaust: I can trump you in my own background by hundreds
of years and millions of people. Really: not all Jews are perfect or blameless, and we're not really talking Jews anyhow, we're
talking support for criminal acts by the state of Israel, supported here in America by a LOT more Christians than Jews. I.e.,
Zionism.
Sometimes this knee-jerk respose is just group-think by otherwise decent people who've been frightened and brainwashed their
entire lives and might possibly be reachable. Gilad Atzmon, Israel Adam Shamir and Philip Weiss, to name just three, all started
out like that too -- and then grew. I was trying to give fairleft an opportunity to open his mind a bit; he can take it not, as
he chooses.
You seem like a decent person: please read these. It won't be easy for you -- it's hard to challenge deeply-ingrained beliefs
-- but reading these books with a mind open to seeing things differently is more than worth it.
In all friendliness, it seems you just don't get it. Yes, fairleft is somewhat more professional than, say thomas, in not exclusively
relying on crude attacks and gross propaganda.
He is, however, nevertheless and evidently a fervent pro-zionist and trying his best to do their work here.
(But of course, this is but some friendly sentences. Feel free by all means to continue your endeavour)
Just giving him the benefit of the doubt this one last time.
But those two books and Allison Weir's piece imo are important for anyone who wants to be informed; there's a lot of data in
each of them that simply cannot be refuted. And Shahak's book is still available online, I think.
Imperialism benefits no one but a small slice of the ruling class. But it's always defended as if it's the only thing providing
food for the average person. It's been true since the Roman empire. The looting oriented British Raj stripped away so much and
somehow almost none of it ended up in the hands of the average Briton. Same for the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. It's just
no good. I don't know how long it will take for average people to understand it.
The interest in slavery is not just neo-connish etc. but in a way, underground, an interest of Big Corporations (1).
Not, imho, in first place because of the 'cheap labor' but because of issues of control.
Right now we are living in a world that is organized in part by nation-states (as a kind of ultimate authority) and for another
part, not well coordinated with the first, by Big Corporations, who increasingly control Banking and Finance, thus also say pol.
contributions in the US, territory (2) and its uses, supra-territorial matters such as communications and benchmarks (internet,
the control of space, rating agencies, for ex.), and other related matters like patent laws.
Slavery as an official doctrine is not in their interests, cheap labor is already available thru modern slavery. So they keep
a low profile, and let their 'elected' representatives take the flack.
Such clashing interests are well illustrated in the case of Ukraine, where the confusion of the Western 'nation-states' has
become pathetically ridiculous, as they cannot make public their lack of power and attendant subservience to Corporate interests.
They are kind of 'holding on' to keep some hand in the game, and mobilizing their 'electorate' with propaganda, as that is where
their livelihood come from.
1. Shell, BP, Total, plus many others in the energy field. Also the likes of Glencore Xstrata, Cargill, AXA, Monsanto, Nestlι,
JP Morgan, etc. etc. all entwined in a kind of global network.
2. Straight out buying and leasing land; owning thru investments and 'deals', exploration rights, mineral rights, agriculture,
transport hubs (pipelines, shipping, ports, the machines that implement the transport, etc.)
In the tiny minds of these neocons, it is possible that in some simplified way, the marxist theory of the falling rate of profit
penetrated, at least sufficiently for this one to infer that wage labour is inexorably doomed by its own internal contradictions.
However, applying the same marxian analysis, it is possible to prove that an economy based on slave labour generates no capitalist
profits at all.
Israel (in the form of its present Govmt, and past as well) is US State number 51, a splinter outpost on foreign lands.
Its continuing existence in the shape of its crazily belligerent and racist, apartheid stance, and all the dire cruelties we
know about, is maintained by the unwavering support and investment from the US, though EU poodles have followed along. (See e.g.
UN vetos, etc.) It is a sick, symbiotic relationship, with one party acting the thug, encouraged by the backer. It is economically
dependent on its masters so cannot stop, and leaders of course join for their own personal interests.
Not to minimize the influence of the "Jewish / Isr. lobby" e.g. Walt and Mearsheimer, etc. whatever - exists because it is
welcomed, and then provides strange grist to many lunatic mills.
NBC News: New U S. State Dept travel warning tells citizens to defer travel to east regions
of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine .......................so is west ukraine safe?>!!
Good points. The sorrow is, average people have rarely been in a position to do anything anyhow; they're generally too busy
just trying to survive. What we're seeing now in both the EU and US is the steep downward slope of economic and political disempowerment
while (hopefully) heading upwards is the shallower slope of public understanding. Will they intersect in time, i.e., while people
still have enough power to do something about it? Who knows. And what can people do? In the US the angry folks with guns have
been successfully brainwashed to ultimately support TPTB -- while believing they're rebelling against them. (Some really clever
work there, worth of Goebbels at his best.)
This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals,
then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This
is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.
Hi Cynthia! Are you part of Pragma's takedown of moonofalabama or are you just a stupid solo anti-Semite? If the latter, how
did you find your way here?
Nora @ 108: Your're on a roll today it seems. Your expression at 108 truly fits MOST folks here at MOA, at least I sincerely hope
so. Like society in general, there are people afoot in this world, who get PAYED to disrupt objectivity on the Internet and the
Media.
@126 - true. it would be nice if folks ignored those who they believe are full of shite too, lol.. i think b would benefit correcting
the kagan verses kaplan issue.. both of them are friggin nutso's but still..
In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in which
he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.
The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to
prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.
The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather
racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil"
while the other is "totally good"
If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically
inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.
Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".
Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them
with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and
souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul
and the souls of cattle." (Reuters Photo)
Remarks by the Israeli Minister of Interior Yaakov Neeman suggesting that the Jewish religious law (Halacha) should be adopted
as the "law of the land" in the Jewish state has drawn strong reactions from both Jews and non-Jews.
"Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halacha into the binding
law of the nation," Neeman told Rabbis at a Jewish law convention in occupied Jerusalem in December 2009.
"We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel," he said. "The torah has the complete solution
to all of the questions we are dealing with."
Neeman's statements were met applauds from participants who included high-ranking Rabbis, as well as representatives of
religious parties.
However, for non-Jews, who now constitute nearly 50 percent of the total population in occupied Palestine, Neeman's remarks
are a serious cause for concern since Halacha, at least according to the Orthodox Jewish interpretation, does not recognize
the full humanity of non-Jews.
Hence, non-Jews living under Halacha must accept to live under a perpetual state of inferiority, if not persecution.
Lesser in Every Aspect
According to Orthodox Judaism, a non-Jew (goy) is inferior to a Jew in every conceivable aspect. This inferiority is absolute,
inherent, intrinsic, and not subject to any related or unrelated factors.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and
souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul
and the souls of cattle."
The teachings of Kook are based on the Lurianic Cabala (Jewish mysticism), which teaches the absolute superiority of the
Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. This means, according to one Rabbi who is member of the Chabadi Lubovitcher
sect, that "every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity and is part of God."
In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in
which he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.
The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to
prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.
The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather
racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil"
while the other is "totally good"
"Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face
total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."
"The Jews themselves brought about their own destruction during the Holocaust, since they arrogantly endeavored to overcome
their very essence, dictated by divine law."
While castigated by many Jewish figures, religious and secular, for its brazen racism, Grama's thesis is not really in conflict
with the Rabbis of Gush Emunim (the settler camp) and the rest of the National religious movement in Israel today.
He readily applies Torah passages against idolaters, other pagans to Christianity and Islam, and other monotheists who worship
the God of Abraham, the very God proclaimed by the Torah.
He also ignores extensive Rabbinic deliberations during the medieval period, which concluded that both Islam and Christianity
as "licit, monotheistic faiths."
Hence, Muslims and Christians could not be lumped in one category with the idol-worshipers of earlier times.
Sub-human Slaves
If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically
inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.
Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".
Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them
with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.
It is true that this view is not shared by all Rabbis, especially the enlightened ones. However, it is also true that some
prominent sages holding both Halachic and historical weight are among the main advocates of this pure racism.
For example, according to the code of Maimonides (Rambam): "A Jew who killed a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment, and
has not violated the prohibition of murder."
This code is implicitly practiced by Jewish settler judges when dealing with Jews convicted of killing Palestinians, which
explains the extremely light punishments meted out to the perpetrators, especially in comparison to Arabs convicted of the
same felony.
And here's the perfect explanation for ummm...imperial supremacist hegemony:
"Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face
total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."
"Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel."
In Israel, death has no dominion over them With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give
them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money.
"This is his servant That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."
"why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat."
"That is why gentiles were created."
And settler Rabbi Abraham Kook (great last name!):
"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper
than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."
Teach your children well; to load Kalashnikovs write on bombs that kill and main Palestinian children and kick and spit on
their poor grandmothers while you pull off their hijab.
This is what the new generation of Zionists are learning.
The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came
to be nations.
The expression "nation-state" inverses the factual notions of nation and state. Though a state can enforce submission
it can't establish sovereignty. Souvereignty has to be effected by mental and ideological submission of the subject itself to
his master and therefore its not fully established without the rule of law.
While the American secession war is duly called a civil war, because it established rule of law within the union states
it left the relation of union states to the federal state widely outside this rule. The rule of the federal state became and stayed
a military and mafia-like hegemony established on constant war and the amalgamation of military, political and economic clout
in corporative elite clans, families, alumnis and the union bureaucracy itself.
The force, that drove this rule of war and corporative hegemony in the American federation after the civil war was accomplishment
of the genocide of native cultures. It followed (selection): Spanish-American war, Philippine war, the enforcement of the Monroe
Doctrine in Cuba, Hawai, Samoa, Venezuela. But it had another component: The federal war on the working class and their partly
imported organizations. Then followed WWI and WWII, which were essentially wars against the French and British empire.
So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state
ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel.
It is easy to see, that the never established and unestablishable "Jewish State", the corporative military rule of a zionist
Oligarchy in Israel follows roughly the same pattern.
This is a kind of basic line in a history full of contradictions. Mind the suez-war followed by the nuclear armament of Israel
by France against the will of the american hegemon. And mind that Israel nowadays has but one enemy it has to fear: The faction
of US-elite, which wants to establish a new and stable order in the middle east instead of "creative" chaos in favour of Israel
and SA. The faction that would welcome an iranian gas-pipeline from South Pars to the mediterranian, try to keep the integrity
of Syria and Lebanon and split the GCC.
...
I tried my best to bring forward my thougts in a tongue that never became mine although I read it every day, because there
was nobody deconstructing the "zionist evil"-talk without referring to quasi-religious attitudes and delusive facts and figures
that tell nearly nothing about their coherence. If it was too bad - just tell me and I won't follow up or try again.
Okay, thank you, then I want ro add an inference though it needed a bunch of constituents and chain-links to corroborate it:
The US Federal State is warring for it's very existance. If it ends being the executive power of imperialistic metropolises
it will probably fall apart, even in the most favorable circumstances you might think of, because of its lack of national substance.
Thats the interface to the fight of the zionist oligarchy for their status as "villa in the jungle", their rule as warlords
who can and "must" project power in all the near and middle east and even north africa to stay the ruling power in Palestine.
This strongly associates them to the before mentioned faction of the US-elite, especially the MIF(inancial)C.
There is no other evil as the evil of war and it's cause in freedom and accumulation of competing private property.
I've cut-and-pasted everything bc I just can't give it the time it deserves right this afternoon. I will though, I
promise: it just may take me a little while bc it's a very different way of looking at things and I really need to examine it
more carefully. And again, thank you, it's really good food for thought and I'll give it my best.
@137 /144 - tomgard. i 2nd nora's response to you in that i find your commentary highly educational in so far as you articulate
a similar viewpoint of mine, but from a very different angle. i am curious what you mean by MIF(inancial)C. - that sounds like
what i tend to think military/industrial/financial/complex.. they are definitely rolled into one, even though people look at these
entities as being separate and not connected..
The result of the neocon meddling in Ukraine has created, as usual, a terrible mess for the "west" and even more so for the
Ukrainians. Is there any way to prevent a repeat of such misdeeds?
Yeah, sticking the neocons under water for a week.
The American political Elite consists of both Zionists and Anglophiles. Just as Lindbergh said.
Now, as far as the Iraq War,
as Congressman Moran said, the Jews were not even nearly solely responsible for driving the United States in, based on WMD lies,
but as a group they could have politically vetoed the move, dominant and decisive. On other foreign/domestic matters, your fractional
mileage may vary.
Dan Gertler's grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as "Mr. Diamond;" in youth he joined the
pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an "untra-nationationalist Jewish
militia," but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8 Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in
the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950's in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded
the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the
country's second-largest industry, but Israel's top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition
of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also
President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80
The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99% -- everything that is not synthetic
or artificial diamonds -- involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the
world's rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah,
Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial
district on Ahad Ha'am Street.81 Dan Gertler's father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original
family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council -- the entity that spends more money
promoting the false image of "conflict-free" diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by
the diamond industry.48
On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: "What does the Torah say about men exploiting
other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that
suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits
are being made?"
There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately
for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed,
and that -- an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people -- is how religion falsifies spirituality.
The confusion began when b did one of his usual deliberate substitutions to provoke a bit of thought by substituting slavery
for empire.
The normal confusion, generally engendered by the more pedantic of us whenever b does a semantic substitution, was hugely increased
when b himself confused two asshole neocons of similar name with each other.
Normally b's substitutions generate thought because the concept summoned by the original wording is considerably different
to the concepts generated by its replacement.
This is not the way it is with empire and slavery - two concepts I have always believed to be pretty much indistinguishable
from one another.
That is the heart of the issue here, but but adding the confusion from the juxtaposition of similar terms is the confusion
many people have about slavery.
For me slavery is enforced labour where a human, regarded as the property of another, is forced to live in a way that is beneficial
to his/her 'masters' wants, with no regard for his/her own needs.
Amerikan slavery just like the slavery instituted by the original english colonisers, also featured no payments or wages be
given the slaves.
That isn't always the case slaves who are paid are still slaves and may be worse off because of that. The Greek slaves who
worked as doctors, secretaries, and retail assistants in imperial Rome frequently were paid for their work, but they were still
slaves - their lives were not their own. They were humans who belonged to someone else.
Berkeley is correct at #118 where he points out that slavery without pay ultimately destroys capitalism.
This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them
nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get
richer that is why they went to war.
The northern elites preferred the form of slavery that had been evolving in Europe since the industrial revolution, where slaves,
imported from Europe and more culturally acclimated to factory work than Africans, whose culture and sense of self had been deliberately
destroyed, leaving the recipients of that horror in a vacuum.
The 'new slaves' would be responsible for their own upkeep receiving minimum payment to keep themselves in food and shelter,
just enough to (a) keep them highly motivated at work and (b) for the elites to profit by taking it back.
Both forms are slavery - the vast majority of humans born into poverty in so-called 'developed' nations such as amerika, england,
or israel, have as little say in their own destiny as does a domestic slave in Saudi Arabia.
The biggest difference is that the rules are unwritten & unstated allowing the western elites great flexibility in fucking
everyone else over.
They don't need to be written because once the responsibility for feeding yourself and your family is put onto your shoulders
in the opprressive and domineering manner which neo-liberal unsocieties put on individuals, the majority follow the same well
worn path to personal impoverishment and elite enrichment.
Those who veer off the path - climb outta the rut - can be picked off one by one as needs must. Occasionally one may achieve
independence in the form of what seems to be economic self determination, but with few exceptions that is because their divergence
suits (& enriches), the slave owners.
This egregious exploitation of ordinary, normal, unsociopathic, humans by the sociopathic elites has been around a lot longer
that the organised political movement created to enable followers of Judaism to colonise the Jordan Valley.
If permitted to, ruthless domination of the decent by the greedy will continue long after the zionists have been driven out
of the area and the land returned to its original indigenous owners.
Palestinians are the descendants of the people who stayed on, minding their farms and orchards when the despotic monarchists
who had comprised Jerusalem's ruling elite fled from their Roman replacements.
It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming amerikan imperialism on the corrupt israeli regime, it
is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty crims (yes
they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of amerika, israeli leaders are petty crims), but most importantly because
blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites.
If the elites are to be beaten it will be when all the 'normal' humans have stuck together in common cause against those who
consciously butcher any/all of us for profit.
Once we have learned not to be distracted by deliberately nurtured divisive arguments about race, gender, nationality etc -
then we will rid ourselves of the leeches and then, that time, provided we have managed to do so without making any scapegoats,
maybe then we will be able to asshole-proof our communities ensuring no new sociopaths slink in again under cover of saving us
from oldies, 'those kids', morbidly obese, anorexics, gypsies, kaffirs, niggers or jews.
How many inhabitants does Israel have? How many the US? What percentage of US citizens are Jewish? You must have a theory of Jews being the superior race if you think they can dominate. Of course Israel is a puppet state. What people are trying with their "anti-zionist" theories of "zionist" rulership of the world is very transparent. They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about
history, about who got killed and why.
The recipe is so simple. Tell the stupid class xy people are responsible for their trouble, make them fight each other and
rule them.
Substituting exploitation of labor-power for slavery, then the rule of law in trade and exchange for rule of a "greedy", "indecent",
"sociopathic" (and, as many consequently say: mentally ill) elite introduces one tribe ("lunatics") for another ("Jews")
and therefore an alternative racist doctrine. Both are manifestations of still the same patriarch pattern of subjugation of one
gender to the other (slavery of women), "order" vs. "chaos", rule of command vs. rule of reason, rule of decalogue over collective
knowledge and judgement,"good" over "evil", and, following up this pattern, rule of a pristhood over patriarchs, of "God" over
"men", of intellectual workforce ("Kopfarbeit) over handcraft and, ultimately, the worship of psyche. It's religion combined with
the everyday racist interpretation of competition- results by a mix of functionally allocated benchmarks of (awe of) "success"
and (worship of) "virtue". The slightly "modern" manifestations, mythologies and patterns are toothless against the inquisitional
redoctrination of "good" and "evil" in times of war, that shows up in a renaissance and reconstruction of tribal thought.
Don't know if this rant was kind of understandable, so, simply:
There is no such THING as "common cause" . That's the simple source and agent of racism! But if it's so one has to infer:
There is a common source of the delusion of "common cause" that is transformed in tribal or racist thought. I name this
common source: Negation of class struggle. Wage-labor is a historical formation of slavery, thats right, and its based on sheer
military power like antique slavery, thats right as well. Its usefull and even necessary to remind those roots, but, since the
social fundament of wage-labor slavery is not only different, but antithetic to elder formations, its criticism and scandalization
has to be different and even antithetic. "Freedom" is not a cause, even less a "common" one, there is no such THING as freedom
except freedom of private property. Walking freely is a cause of lust, convenience and a resulting desire. If it becomes obligative
and necessary freedom is over and delusion comes in, solemnizing free movement against the bondage of slavery. Americans could
have learned this of native leaders they preferred to stab when they couldn't break them in cages.
the poor are many, the rich are few. Why do the rich control their lives as well as those of all the poor? What is the ratio
of guards to prisoners in a jail? by your logic the prisoners should be in control.
seriously, you can do better than that.
regardless, there is way too much time and effort spent on blaming the jews for this mess. there was plenty of inequality before
Moses led the slaves out of Egypt.
166) Of course, numbers translate into political influence.
But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. So let's compare the
sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we?
The "zionist conspiracy" theory is designed for the "stupid class".
[...] But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. [...]
Sure, no guns no power, but at the same token, no money no guns. You see, one needs the money first, and thats where your friendly
neighborhood banker comes into the picture. But before it gets too conspiratorial for you, I better won't elaborate any further.
[...] So let's compare the sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we? [...]
Why? Would only make sense to do so if we'd assume those two are enemies. But they are not. They are close allies, to the point
that if Israel would be attacked by any force strong enough to cause sweat in Tel Aviv the US would without blinking once have
its military might come to the rescue.
That's why I called NATO Israel's ultimate henchmen, troops it knows it can call on should things get hairy one day.
Since the start of the 20th century no country was allowed to attack the US Navy without getting its teeth kicked in, just
Israel. Nearly sinking in 1967 the USS Liberty, killing 34 US sailors and wounding more than a 100, but still best friends. Weird
relationship to say the least, better not think too much about it.
The reason the above argument is irresolvable is that neither side is willing to query the relatively PC term "Zionists" in favour
of the more inclusive "Jews". They say that to do this would be "divisive of the class struggle", which obviously is supposed
to be against "the bourgeoisie", whoever they are - technically, I should say, all those who live off profits or as they call
them 'dividends'. But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently
deliberate neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident.
So we have to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism,
and after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. There cannot be more
than a few tens of thousands of these specialised creatures, worldwide, and one would like to know whether, by the ruse of history,
many of them are Jewish. Then the artificial question of 'Zionists' versus 'Non-Jewish USAian Imperialists' would resolve itself,
because we would be able to see who was pulling the money strings, which ultimately decide all questions great and small.
Kagan, while he is of Jewish belief, has Zionist tendency, his and his kind ultimate aim, is the resurrection of the Khazar empire,
the control of the desert religions, the destruction of the Rus as a nation state.
Somebody, you keep referring to the stupid class. By doing so you're putting yourself right in it, subset "chardonnay sipping
intellectual up themselves bozos".
Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. [...]
You are stuck in this idea that one country dominates the other. What would help our discussion along is if you would open your
mind to the possibility a third party dominates both countries. Once you allow for this reality the weird and opaque relationship
the US and Israel have, or the EU for that matter, starts to make sense.
The fact that there is this seemingly never ending discussion going on about which country is the dog and which one the tail
should tell you that there are enough arguments to be found to make either theory appear plausible. The only way that is possible
is if there is a third "unifying" theory, one which explains those arguments without confusion.
And I am afraid to tell you man, the reason those two countries act in unison so often and have each others back in all important
international affairs is because the top echelons in both countries live at the whim of someone far more powerful than them. A
group of people who with their extended family have say 10 trillion dollars in assets, that's three times Germany's GDP, and control
a network of influence so wide and ingrained it knows no rival.
Rowan @170
[...] But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently deliberate
neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident. So we have
to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism, and
after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. [...]
Great summary. Their fingerprints are all over the history of wars.
I don't believe its tens of thousands, at the very tip of the pyramid, where there isn't much room left for competition as
wealth is so concentrated a clash would cause death to all, I expect a couple of hundred at the most.
They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about
history, about who got killed and why.
The only person trying to intentionally disrupt is YOU.
I haven't posted consistently on this blog since the Ukraine crisis, so I didn't much analyze the intentions of every poster.
But it didn't take me long to have you pegged. You are as transparent as Zionists come. You divert, you distract all discussion
away from the real guilty party. That's your main mission here. A hasbara spy in the house of free speech.
FYI, it's not the percentage, buddy, it's the power. Occupy was protesting against the 1% holding all the power and hoarding
all the wealth.
If I do a run-down of the heads of all the top banks, equity capital and venture capital firms; I'm talking those that have
hundreds of billions invested in the whole spectrum of American industry I come up with at least 80% run by supporters of Zionism.
That's a whole lot of power behind Zionism!
So don't give me the percentages bullshit, what level of intelligence quotient do you think we own around here??? Quit insulting
our intelligence!
boy, this "zionism" discussion is getting a but much, lately...
Uh, no. IMO, the subject of Zionism has been way too neglected everywhere, especially considering the gravity of our situation
and the increasing threat that Zionism presents to the integrity of justice and our own freedoms in the West, and security in
this day and age. Never mind the Palestinians; WE are at risk now. Our own rights are under fire here!
The start of Neoconism led by Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith and others (the majority, Zionists) was the start of the Zionization
of America and subsequently the Zionization of other Western nations, the U.S., Canada and U.K being the most affected with Australia
and others now catching up.
Of course it started quietly, sinuously working its way through the system trying not to attract too much attention. But ever
since the exposι on the Lobby, we're starting to discover just how rampant is Zionism's influence and hold and how much control
is exerted on the public's perception and how it's already started chiseling away at rights we used to take for granted.
We are so bombarded with propaganda now in the Zionist media that we've all turned to the internet because we no longer trust
the media. But now, they're after our rights and freedom here!
I read a saying the other day that went something like this: The Palestinians will never be free until America is freed. How
true! But this problem isn't only America's any more.
Today I posted somewhere else a modified version of MLKs quote on justice: An injustice to someone anywhere is an injustice
to us all everywhere. Because it's so true, that if we allow that injustice to fester indefinitely, in particular, the injustice
against Palestinians and ignore or smother the problem; eventually the rest of us will be subjected to a version of that injustice.
I'll tell you something, every airport in the world is starting to ressemble Ben Gurion. When I travel now; I feel like I'm
at an Israeli checkpoint; I can almost taste the abuse! I can only imagine the level of humiliation and pain Palestinians endure
daily.
Our freedom of speech is also on the line; the internet is no longer a free speech zone; we are monitored; we are censored;
we are bombarded with junk. When I research now, I feel like the results have been altered, like what may appear to be offensive
events or fact has been relegated to back pages or altogether removed to pink wash or whitewash what is happening. It almost feels
like the search engine is laundering information and spitting it out in the cleanest order. Is it my imagination? I don't think
so; I've been using the internet for quite some time and I'm noticing a change; something's off now.
Our privacy is threatened more than ever. Our intuitive intellect is being smothered or ridiculed. Our financial system is
dominated by individuals who not only are supporting a grave injustice, which I believe is supremacist imperialism emerging from
Zionism, but they're intent on creating a uniform system globally that is affecting the livelihoods of millions everywhere with
a selfish supremacist intention in mind based on monopolization. This is as well as I can express it given my limited economic
understanding; but I'm witnessing the results and I like everyone else is in the position to judge and criticize and stop this
outrage.
The Federal Reserve has been run by a succession of Zionists, as is the IMF and the top 1%, well just look it up; it's all
there; it's disheartening.
Honestly, wherever one looks, one sees a Zionist driving the system. What can I say, if they had honorable, decent, altruistic
intentions; personally I might not give a shit; but I really don't like where we're heading; I really don't like where they're
steering and I feel my rights and everyone's rights are being threatened and diminished and I don't want my country and the world
heading down this destructive path.
When they started accusing Occupy of anti-Semitism it appeared like Zionism was trying to control the 99%'s right to protest,
in order not to discover how really rampant Zionism is at the top 1%. I see it; everyone knows it, but we're being muzzled and
wrist tied with that pity card "anti-Semitism" that has turned into a whip against our rights instead of a means to protect people
from hate crimes.
Maybe, you and those who want to shield Zionism try to deny what our eyes plainly recognize as a threat to our freedom! Do
our eyes deceive us? You want us to stop seeing by telling us our lying eyes deceive us or we're anti-Semites? Bullshit!
Our eyes and our intuition don't deceive us! And we won't be robbed of our rights so that a supremacist ideology can exist, be
legitimized and carry on with impunity permanently!
There is the chaff and the wheat here. The wheat see without denying their inner voice and the chaff are here to ridicule that
voice and distract from the truth.
Well I see the hasbara reinforcements have arrived!
The "zionism" discussion is no discussion at all, but a constant, percussive irritant.
And expect it to get progressively more constant, progressively more irritating and percussive. This is but the beginning
of Ravel's bolero, my friend because we're still at the beginning, it's still a whisper, but it's gonna turn into a ROAR.
Zionism is going to be exposed for all it is, for the criminal supremacist, racist ideology that it is. It's really to bad
for your that it's so fatally flaw and that it's expiry date is already is view! You're on the wrong side of history and I
can't wait til you eat your words. It's coming!
kalithea, i tend to agree with copeland fwiw.. does every conversation have to turn into a discussion on zionism? as for mr.
pragma's creative use of the letter z, it is a bit inane on another level. i am willing to accept and agree with the fact it is
a large issue and of concern, but that to bring it into every conversation seems redundant. while it is true the thread title
makes for a natural fit here, but that is not the case with every thread. i think that is partly what copeland is getting at and
i agree with them on this.
So, some people have no qualms about zusa wanton mass murdering thousands and thousands ... but they are gravely irritated
by someone adding a letter too often?!
Whenever I think the zionists have finally hit the bottom of the pit they somehow manage to pierce through to an ever deeper
level.
But I'm a well minded man, so I make you an offer: As soon as zionists stop slaughtering innocent people I shall refrain from
adding the of so harmful and evil letter 'z' to words, OK.
No, seriously, I hope I never will have to deal with your "argument".
I got bad news for you and your fellow legion of hasbarists: expect my argument, ie the truth about Zionism, to grow exponentially,
and to get more constant and more persuasive and to go viral with millions more. You can't stop this cause anymore; you can't
stop the truth from busting loose and becoming the pain in your ass it'll be until it's acknowledged.
Before Obama was first elected in 08, I was being censored and labelled an anti-Semite for referring to The Zionist Lobby as
a den of spies and political browbeaters and hustlers for Zionism. And wo' and behold, turns out they've ruined careers, and were
being investigated by the FBI for espionage. Few dared type Aipac or Zionism in a negative context for fear of being banned. Now,
we can justifiably attack these from every angle because they're proving exactly what they are and many of us predicted they were.
We've come a long way, baby! And this is going all the way until Zionism goes down into the pages of historical INFAMY, and
nothing less will suffice!
You can ridicule all you want, but I won't rest and neither will the growing number, who believe as I do that Zionism is a
threat to us all and not just to Palestinians!
james @185:
The Zionist connection redundant? Not a chance! What it is, is pivotal in getting to the heart of these foreign interventions.
Lest you forget, we're usually discussing a consistent policy of foreign meddling: in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, possibly Russia
and Iran next, each one practically rebounding off the other because Syria was the road to Iran and Russia, and Ukraine
is to Russia what Syria is to Iran in this agenda; the proxies; it's all connected and if you don't get this; you're dumber
than I thought or pretending to be.
Russia doesn't only have a port at stake in Syria, Russian companies are involved in gas and oil exploration off Syria's coast,
an area that Zionists want to hoard for themselves, and Russia was heavily involved in Libya and Iraq until the mess created in
both which weakened Russian influence in both, although Russia's trying to recover it, another reason Russia's a thorn in Zionism's
side. And Ukraine is the strategy to get Russia mired in a problem on its own doorstep to take Russia's focus off Syria, deprive
it of Tartus, and again try to weaken its influence in the Middle East, and at the same time weaken Russia's economy so that it
will never be a competitive threat again in the Middle East! So you bet Zionism's fingerprints are all over this! And the connections
to Zionism go beyond what I've just stated which I've already outlined in other posts.
All these incursions even Ukraine are linked to ZIOCON foreign agenda; forget neocon forever; the term "Neocon" was always
a red herring; a Zionist euphemism used to disguise how many Zionists are actually involved in the hegemonic operation.
So don't give me that redundant crap. Neocons are ZIONISTS with an aggressive global initiative based on neutralization; and
they're driving this policy and you better believe I'm going to harp on that!
It's easy to see the mental disturbance occurring in the writings of a polemicist, in the mindless overuse of a particular
word in any given tract. It's obvious kalithea, that an abundance of couple of these words, is not a question of style in your
writing, but of obsession. First of all, this is a literate group, composed of a lot of longtime readers. Another thing is that
your irresponsible use of "hasbara" is nothing but a smear against those who have a record here of opposing the outrages of Israeli
governments, and their war crimes, about which you bark. This doesn't make you look so good.
What you remind me of most, is an enforcer of party discipline, whose job it is to crack the whip, and to hand out censures,
in other words, to excoriate and verbally abuse anyone who doesn't keep to your dogma.
The issue of the injustices handed out to Palestinians has been focused upon by most of us here for a long time; but it is
not courageous, or good of you, to fire polemic broadsides, or to dispense wantonly,
the charges of hasbara, upon anyone who hasn't tipped over into your particular fantasies.
I don't have time for those who seek to use the crimes committed against jews by europeans to excuse the crimes committed by israel
against the indigenous people of the Jordan Valley, but I don't believe that is what Tom G is doing. I supposed he was pointing
out that having half yer family knocked off by assholes tends to focus the mind (there is a lesson in there for israelis but if
they haven't learned by now its unlikely they ever will).
Pragma et al may have confused predecessors with ancestors. Predecessor is not another word for ancestor; it is someone who
precedes someone else in an office or title.
When I read Tom G's post which alluded to kalithea's predecessors I assumed that he was referring to the last mob of cheerleaders
for judeophobia - the nazis.
At no stage did I consider Tom G had some sorta special insight into the mindset of kalithea's primogenitors.
Those people who focus upon a persons race rather than the person's actions are always gonna be susceptible to believing that
others operate on the same basis.
I'm all for kicking alla the talk of antisemitism into touch as long as we can stick to considering people by what they say
and do rather than what we believe their genetics to be.
Occupy Wall Street was on the right track. People of the world need to rise up against the 1% banksters AND Zionism although they're
one and the same. These forces are driving the Ziocon imperial advance. If Occupy hadn't dissolved because of winter; Zionists
were ready to kill it because they were very worried that the Occupy Movement would eventually merge with the BDS movement against
Zionism and gain momentum on a larger scale and this is exactly what was starting to happen. People are starting to feel like
the Palestinians under Zionism; they're starting to feel like their leaders are collaborators with Zionism like Abbas and the
PA negotiating to screw their people. People are feeling like they no longer have a voice against the powerbrokers in Washington
and on Wall Street. They're feeling like they can't trust the media, because it's full of Ziocon propaganda. We are watched; we
are listened to; we are monitored. We are now the OCCUPIED of Wall Street and Zionism.
There are all kinds of articles on the web written by Zionists condemning Occupy as anti-Semitic. Google Zionism and Occupy
Wall Street. Why were Zionists so scared of Occupy? Because they know Wall Street is run by Zionists and everyone at Occupy knew
saw this; that's why they're next target was The Lobby; and they were planning to occupy Aipac. Zionists realized that the Occupy
movement getting closer and closer to the cause of Occupied Palestine. The Occupy Movement was starting to move against Zionism.
Zionism has no clothes and because we all see this FACT; they accuse us of anti-Semitism. Occupy Wall Street needs to mobilize
again, and occupy not only Wall Street, but the Zionist Lobby as well as it planned to and join with the BDS movement, because
if we don't mobilize soon against Ziocon expansion we will become the empire of Orwellian slavery that this Zionist Kaplan dreams
of. Maybe that's Zionism's PROMISED LAND.
"It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming American imperialism on the corrupt Israeli regime,
it is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty
crimes
(yes they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of America, Israeli leaders are petty criminals), but most importantly
because blaming 'the Jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites."
Thank god finally some one other than myself said this, and in a much more eloquent way than I could ever do; because I am
afraid what 'mearsheimer and walt' are doing is precisely that : "putting the cart before the horse" and the direct implication
of that is "blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills".
Sadly this is an inevitable consequence that very often is neglected by decent progressive people, in a way that I some times
feel being a part of a very small minority even on this site!
I find your argument naive*, but I won't argue it, except for the short paragraph below; and whether he meant predecessors
as in people he thinks held my beliefs, or he meant ancestors - it's still slanderous crap, because he doesn't know me and I am
not no Nazi-lover just as I'm no Zionist lover! What I am sick to death of is that bloody victim card and having it shoved in
my face like so much shit, and hung over me like the sword of Damocles! I am not German and even if I were I wouldn't be responsible
for the crap Nazis pulled. That was then and this is now. I know what I see, I see Zionist supremacy, and I always call things
as I see them and if he's offended. Tough, scroll or get lost.
I don't buy into exclusivity, exceptionalism or choseness bullshet of any kind and if that's some genetic bias than too bad
get off the f*cking chosen pedestal! I can't stand monarchies either. And I really can't stand people who don't get the concept
of universality.
Oh well, predecessor, ancestor, whatever. I think everyone could understand what I was meaning.
Anyway TomGard can hardly know
about kalitheas predecessors, ancestors, or whatever-cestors.
Debs is dead brought up an interesting point, which I'd like to extend.
Actually I remember quite well, what my first thought was when I for the first time didn't simply brush off as "oh well, palestinians
are terrorists anyway" (I should mention that I was a young man then, quite innocent or stupid, depending on ones pov) but actually
began to understand what israelis did there.
It was "Hell no! If anyone on earth is to know how evil it is to terrorize others for being of this or that race or for believing
in this that God, then it must certainly be the israelis!"
For while my anger grew and I began to despise jews. Until one day a patient elderly french jew explained it me. He showed
me the smearings on their synagogue and explained "whenever israel commits cruelties the smearings here in at our cemetery increase
in frequency and anger".
That was my lesson about the jews and the israelis and about them not always being one and the same.
And although I had all I needed to understand more I still somehow didn't arrive at the conclusion that there might be evil
planning behind it. It took me again several years and a coincidence to understand that the "jewish" in "jewish state" (israel)
might actually be a really evil disguise and a perfidious one at that.
Perfidious because israel willfully abused the negative image of "the jews" for which they were responsible in the first place.
But perfidious also because israel greatly profits from anti-semitism, both real and grossly attributed anti-semitism because
it perfectly fits israels "jews should come to israel to live there" credo.
kiev is just another case of that in a series of cases.
There is a lot more to tell but I will cut it at that point for the moment.
But although it took me long to pervade through that complex matter and often disguised by different layers and tricks, I made
it a habit to tell zionists who tried the "half of my family was killed by nazis" plot to mute someone that may dare to create
demands on history once they have proven to themselves have learned from the nazi time what is to be learned, namely that racial
or religious based terror is cruel, inhumane, and utterly despicable. Someone supporting a regime that acts not that much different
from what the nazis have been accused have simply no right to recur on that time, and even less to base demands on it, as long
as their very fucking own actions prove that, if at all, they only learned to be the criminals themselves in the very crime they
complain about.
As far as I'm concerned israel can burn and so can all its supporters.
What you guys don't understand, is that "Zionism" is the manifestation of the global Western imperialism in middle
east. It is nothing more. Is it ugly? Yes! Is it criminal? Yes! Is it responsible for all the crimes in the world? NO! Was
Zionism
responsible for the coup of 1953 in Iran? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup in Guatemala
in 1954? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism responsible for the coup against Sukarno? NO!
Was Zionism responsible for the Vietnam war? NO! Who was responsible it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup
against Allende? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism!
IN FACT: Was Zionism behind Zionism? NO! It was the Western imperialism and its ambitions to hegemonize the world energy resources
which was behind Zionism to begin with (Balfour declaration)!
Israel's birth predates 1948! Its real birth was in 1939 when *BRITISH IMPERIALISM* massacred Palestinians and suppressed the
Arab revolt! Zionism is the manifestation of the Western imperialism *in middle east* and not the other way around!
What a load of crock! Guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky were behind Zionism so don't gimme that crap.
I already wrote in another post here that power in the U.S. started turning Zionist sometime during Kennedy's Presidency, not
that I blame him he was otherwise very occupied. So you could have saved yourself some time screaming all those historical references
at me. And why are you so freakin' defensive anyway?
The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism
movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general.
In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war.
All these "neocons" were Zionists and Jews and were instrumental in influencing foreign policy.
So as you can see Zionists and Zionism was leading the charge. Maybe you should read Paul Wolfowitz's speech at West Point.
Wolfowitz Doctrine...Not intended for public release, it was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992,[1] and sparked
a public controversy about U.S. foreign and defense policy. The document was widely criticized as imperialist as the
document outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations
and prevent any other nation from rising to superpower status.
A real manifesto for authored by a Zionist for supremacy and imperialiam.
But this is not all the Zionist cabal authored as you well know: Zionist Pnac members also authored another document called:A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
This subject has been talked about extensively, and I really don't have the desire to get into a useless and endless
debate recounting the history especially when people want to obstinately shut their eyes to the most obvious facts going on right
before their eyes; facts such as what's going on in Ukraine and the bloody war waged to disintegrate Yugoslavia which has/had
nothing to do with zionism.
I will just go over a couple of points in your argument which were quite nonsense (well your whole comment was nonsense but
I will just go over a couple of points).
First of all US imperialism in particular and the Western imperialism in general did not start with Kennedy, the coup against
Mosaddegh in 1953, the coup against Arbenz in 1954, the first indochina war (with absolute and active support of the French by
the USA), the Korean war and the attrocities commited by USA in Korean peninsula, the whole hearted support for Batista and brutal
suppression of the cubans, the coup against Patrice Lumumba, The colonization of India and brutal suppression of Indians by the
british, the coup after coup made against the constitutional revolution in Iran etc. etc. ALL PREDATE Kennedy. In fact in case
of USA its very inception was based on imperialism, land grab, ethnic cleansing, genocide and slavery, all happening LONG before
Kennedy and having ZERO to do with zionism.
Secondly guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky are nothing but clowns. Ineffective idiots who without the active support and the absolute
control and management of the Western imperialism would not be able to make an autonomous village let alone making an independent
country based on ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Land grab through ethnic cleansing, mass murder of the native population and
wars against all local nations require CAPITAL and MILITARY. And No capitalist invests such huge sums of capital without any rate
of return. Capital is invested for RATE OF RETURN and a hegemony to make possible the continous flow of that rate of return, not
for some nationalistic, racial or religious motive!
And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire,
and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats
of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they
were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always
profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their
profit. NOTHING MORE.
Had the geology followed a different trend and all that oil been formed some where other than middle east -say in the region
of Tibet- Herzl and Jabotinsky would not have been even remembered today!
Omg, where do I start? I won't; I don't even want to dignify most of that. First, if you want to be taken seriously, paragraphs
might help.
Second, I never said imperialism started with Kennedy; at least quote me for God's sakes; it's in front of you! I said that
power in the U.S. get it? i.e. those who wield power in the US , such power started changing hands from Anglo to Zionist
during Kennedy's presidency, and I'm talking about the top of the corporate food chain, the super-wealthy who influence power
in Washington, and the evolution of the Ziocon movement. But it started discreetly without becoming obvious. Only in the 1980s
did it start becoming obvious, because it had grown so much and it's influence was becoming more transparent. The flaw with Zionists
is that they're control freaks (rig every corner of the system as much as possible in Zionism's favor) maybe it has to do with
latent paranoia, but that's the reality; don't blame me.
As far as the other wars you mention; most were to fight communism; but guess why the Ziocons, Kristol sr., Podhoretz and Strauss
formed this Ziocon movement? To prevent Communism from spreading! They broke with the Democratic party because they saw these
liberals trying to relax relations with the Soviet Union and they wanted to go in another direction: neutralize; using force.
You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming
President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring
countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear
weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming.
I stated over and over again that I'm not concerned with ancient history; I'm concerned with post-WWII after the Partition,
when Zionists started bombing Palestinian villages, ethnic cleansing and massacre upon massacre. Okay Zionists started their terrorism
before, but that was only to set the stage for frustrating the British to impose their rule over the Palestinians with brutal
force.
Let's agree to disagree; you and r'giap and TomGuard can't stand my attacking Zionism, and the power it wields to keep perpetuating
the longest-running most brutal occupation in modern history and committing crimes with total impunity. You don't get to subert
the rule of law without astounding power and influence.
Your not so cogent narrative only serves to protect Zionism, and thus perpetuate this horrific injustice.
Dont' bother replying; you will never change my mind; I know what I see; and I'm going to call it as I see it: based on the
obvious exponential growth of Zionist power in the U.S.; cause I repeat; you don't get away with such crimes with TOTAL impunity
without pretty significant power, and stiffling that truth is what perpetuates Zionist Injustice against Palestine. That power
sustains injustice!
Defense of slavery and the slave trade -- the most inhuman form of exploitation conceivable. Defense of United States imperialism. One and the same. Arnold Lockshin, political exile from the US living in Moscow
It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed
by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested
particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public
is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. One wonders who these individuals
are, and why they chose Jewish issues as their cover, if they're not Jews.
"... I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!! ..."
"... Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's disgusting. ..."
"... Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." ..."
"... "The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational" ..."
"... Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood produces. ..."
"... "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." ..."
"... Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties make better bank robbers than men with guns." ..."
I thought Mr. Reed provided a good summary of the situation. The diversity of responses
suggests that he struck a nice balance in presenting his observations.
I am a mixed-ethnicity Roman Catholic but starting with college and ever since, most of my
closest associates and many of those with whom I work and play, except for immediate family,
have been middle class Jews. I have found these individuals to be generous and kind and not
at all clannish. All regard themselves as and in fact are patriotic Americans. Many have
achieved extraordinary success and contributed to the commonweal. Many have gone out of their
way to help and comfort me in times of personal crisis.
I find my personal experiences with individual Jews hard to reconcile with the – to
me – obvious observation that, considered as a group, American Jews have had a
disastrous impact on the United States in many areas including invidious control of (1) the
news media, publishing, and entertainment industries, (2) culture generally, (3) finance, (4)
legal institutions. (5) the government generally, and (6) foreign policy in particular.
In high school I monitored a college course on democratic political theory (excluding
Rousseau's totalitarian version) and democracy's totalitarian opponents, i.e., communism and
fascism. The readings on fascism included lengthy sections from Rosenberg's "Myth of the
Twentieth Century".
At the time, I thought that even the less hyperbolic of Rosenberg's rants verged on
insanity. Now, after observing our Jewish-dominated late republic hurtling towards utter
ruination, I'm not so sure.
"What have Jews actually done to you? Hacked your bank account? Gypped you out of your house?
Shot your dog?" and the answer will likely be, "Nothing."
Simple. I served in the Marines for about 7 years as an infantry officer. I met, worked
with and greatly valued many 10s of thousands of Marines.
Infantry is combat arms as are artillery, special ops, missile forces, Marine Air,
etc.
I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!!
Now, they were everywhere in professional positions in our sister service, the Navy.
Doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. But almost none in combat arms in America but well
represented in the armed forces of Israel.
Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons
who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's
disgusting.
Onward Christian soldier is the new Jewish American national anthem. They're disloyal
cowards and they're a fifth column for Israel here in the U.S. If they vaporized tomorrow
we'd be better off.
Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb,
stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
No wonder to me why they were burned in the crematoriums in German during WWII.
I've long wondered how that 2% number was arrived at. Who is counted as Jewish? If it's
only those who actively practice the religion, then I'd guess 2% is about right. But how many
more are there whose ancestors were Jewish but who aren't religious (like me) or practice
Christianity (like my brother)?
Granted, the number of non-religious Jews is shrinking, as Corvinus pointed out upthread.
My brothers and I would all be considered Jewish by ancestry, but none of our children are,
because their mothers aren't.
I suspect that support for Israel and Zionism is much stronger among religious Jews than
my sort. I've never been to Israel, and you'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to go
there. My parents' opinion was that the state of Israel should never have been created.
This article should be entitled "1000 Reasons why Fred Reed is a Complete Moron".
"The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational"
Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign
policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly
acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood
produces.
Fred apparently slept through Bible class, but the New Testament refers to it as devouring
widow's houses.
Matthew 23:14 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a
pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation."
Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties
make better bank robbers than men with guns."
Interesting but very controversial. Jewish people do possess business acumen and are more oriented toward money success. Just
look what happened in the USSR after its dissolution and Yeltsin privatization. Most "oligarchs" turned to be Jewish ;-)
Also the achievement of Jewish people in science should be be underestimated. This nation gave world a lot of top
physicists mathematicians and philosophers.
Notable quotes:
"... Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular pro-Palestinian Arab regimes as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats' by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for its war crimes in occupied Palestine. ..."
"... It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia' clearly another example of the Jewish genius. ..."
"... A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews. Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion. ..."
"... All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. ..."
Ethno-religious (ER) beliefs and practices have been harmless when individuals or
groups linked to those practices have limited influence over the state and economy. In contrast,
when such groups exercise a disproportionately powerful influence over the state and economy, they
dominate and exploit majorities while forming closed self-replicating networks.
Examples of powerful ethno-centric regimes in the 1930's are well known for their brutality and
devastating consequences. These include the white Christians in the US, Germany and the European
colonial settlement regimes in Rhodesia, South Africa, India and Indonesia, as well as the Japanese
imperialists in Asia.
In the post-colonial or neo-colonial era, ethno-centrism has taken the form of virulent anti-Islamic
hysteria resulting in predatory Western regimes embarking on wars and military occupations in the
Middle East.
The rise of Judeo-centrism, as an economic and political force, occurred in the last half of
the 20th century. The Jewish-Zionist seizure, occupation and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine
and their rising economic and political influence within the United States has created a formidable
power bloc with significant implications for world peace.
The rise of Jewish ethnocentrism (JE) has confounded its proponents as well as its adversaries;
Zionists and anti-Semites alike are surprised by the scope and depth of JE.
Advocates and adversaries, of all persuasions, conflate the power of what they call 'the Jews',
for their own purposes. Advocates find proof of 'Jewish genius' in every prestigious position and
attribute it to their own unique culture, heredity and scholarship, rather than the result of a greater
social-cultural context. The anti-Semites, for their part, attribute all the world's nefarious dealings
and diabolic plots to 'the Jews'. This creates a strange duality of illusions about the exceptionalism
of a minority group.
In this paper I will focus on demystifying the myths buttressing the power of contemporary Judeo-centric
ideology, belief and organizational influence. There is little point in focusing on anti-Semitism,
which has no impact on the economy and the exercise of state power with the possible exception of
Saudi Arabia. Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from
engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City
of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular
pro-Palestinian Arab regimes as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited
from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular
Iraq and Syria.
Fake Anti-Semitism: Operational Weapon of the Ethno-Centric Jews
Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats'
by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism
in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the
US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European
regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for
its war crimes in occupied Palestine. Widespread fake anti-Semitic attacks divert attention to Judeo-ethno
centrists and validate their claims to be the first among the history's victims. Second, widely publicized
'fake' acts of anti-Semitism arouse the ethnocentric foot soldiers and increase rich donor contributions
to the illegal Jewish settlements and the Israeli military. Third, 'fake anti-Semitism' is used to
threaten, repress and outlaw any organizations and individuals who criticize Israel and the influence
of Jewish ethnocentric organizations in their home countries.
How many 'anti-Semitic' acts are staged is uncertain: On March 23, 2017, an Israeli-American
man was arrested in Israel for sending hundreds of fake anti-Semitic threats to Jewish institutions
and schools in four European countries and nine US states. Such threats led to the emergency grounding
of two US airlines and the panicked evacuation of countless schools and cultural centers. This man
used a sophisticated system of cloaking accounts to appear to originate in other countries. Despite
his high skills at cyber-terrorism, Israeli authorities preposterously described him as a 'teenager
with a learning disability'. The Israeli-American cyber-terrorist's arrest made the 'back-pages'
news in the US for one day while his (and others') fake threats continued to make international headlines
for weeks.
These scores of fake anti-Semitic bomb threats were cited by the major ethnocentric leaders in
the US to pressure the US President and hundreds of Congressional leaders, University Presidents,
etc. to mindlessly echo their clamor for greater police state investigations against critics of Israel
and to offer special 'protection' for potential 'Jewish victims'. Moves to outlaw criticism of Israel
as 'anti-Semitism' and a 'hate crime' increased.
Not surprisingly the leading Jewish organizations never backed down or called on the US government
to investigate the source of the fake anti-Semitic threats: that is Israeli-American Zionists, who
carry both nations' passports and can enter and exit with total ease and enjoy immunity from extradition.
It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered
the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the
culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded
that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia'
clearly another example of the Jewish genius.
It is more likely that the hundreds of false-anti-Semitic
threats were part of an Israeli state operation identified by the FBI who 'diplomatically' pressured
Tel Aviv to cut out the monkey business. The news report of the lone-wolf teenager in Israel allowed
the Israeli intelligence to cover-up their role. Once the Israelis passed off the unbelievable tale
of a brilliant, if troubled, young 'lone wolf', the entire US mass media buried the story forever.
In due time the so-called perpetrator will be released, amply rewarded and his identity re-cycled.
In the meantime the US government, as well as several European governments, was forced to allocate
tens of millions of dollars to provide extra security to Jewish institutions in the wake of these
fake threats.
Jewish Power: The Top 25 American Multi-Billionaires
In February 2017, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the world's billionaires, including a country-by-country
account. The top five countries with multi-billionaires among its citizens are: the US with 565,
China with 319, Germany with 114, India with 101, and Russia with 96. Moreover, since 2016 the net
worth of the multi-billionaires grew 18% to $7.67 trillion dollars.
While the US has the greatest number of billionaires, China is fast catching up.
Despite China's advances, the US remains the center of world capitalism with the greatest concentration
of wealth, as well as the greatest and growing inequalities. One reasonably can argue that who controls
US wealth controls the world.
'Jews' among the Top 25 Multi-Billionaires in the US
A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg
with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey
Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews.
Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less
rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion.
Of the top 25 multi-billionaires in the US, 11 of the 25 are Jews. In other words 'the Jews'
represent 44% of the top 25 biggest billionaires outnumbered by Gentiles but catching up.
Analysis of the 'Richest Jews'
We place 'Jews' in quotation marks because this is a doubtful signifier more useful to both
Zionist fanatics and anti-Semitic polemicists. Most are not 'practicing' or are completely disinterested
in tribal religions. Nevertheless, half of secular Jews in the US are active supporters of Israel
or involved in Fifth Column Israeli 'front groups'.
In other words, about half of the richest 'Jews' do not consider themselves to be religiously
or ethnically 'Jewish'. Super rich Jews are divided regarding their ethnic loyalties between the
US and Israel.
Moreover what is murkier, many of the richest so-called 'Jews' were born to 'mixed marriages'.
Strictly religious Jews do not recognize the children of such marriages as Jews because their mothers
are not Jewish. The omnivorous Zionists, on the other hand, classify all of them as Jews on the basis
of their actual or potential contribution to the State of Israel. In other words, the Zionist classification
of 'Jews' becomes arbitrary, politicized and dependent on organizational affiliation. Religious practice
and ethno-cultural purity are less important.
Judeo-Centrism and the Intrinsic Superiority Fallacy
Among the many zealous advocates of the Judeo-centric world, the most tiresome are those who
claim they represent the product of superior genetics, culture and heritage unique and intrinsic
to Jews.
For many centuries most Jews were illiterate believers of religious tribal myths, taught by anti-scientific
rabbis, who closed off the ghettos from the accomplishments of higher culture and forbade integration
or mixed marriages. The high priests punished and expelled any Jews who were influenced by the surrounding
Hellenistic, Romanized, Arabic, Renaissance and Rationalists cultures, like the great Spinoza.
In other words, Jews who had rejected Jewish law, the Scriptures and the Torah were expelled
as apostates. But these 'apostates' were most open to the modern ideas of science. Jews greatly benefited
from the emancipatory laws and opportunities following the French Revolution. Under Napoleon, Jews
became citizens and were free to advance in science, the arts and finance by attending secular universities
away from the primitive, superstitious Rabbi-controlled ghetto 'schools'.
The dramatic growth of intellectual excellence among Jews in the 19th century was a result of
their ceasing to be Jews in the traditional closed religious sense. Did they suddenly switch on their
'genius genes' or invent a fake history or religion, as the ethno-centrist would have us believe?
It seems far more likely that they took great advantage of the opportunities opened to them with
major social and political developments in the greater society. As they assimilated and integrated
in secular traditions, they ceased to be Jews in the tribal religious sense. Their scientific, medical
and financial success came from learning, absorbing and exchanging scientific ideas, high culture
and conservative, liberal and socialist ideas with the larger progressive non-Jewish society.
It is no coincidence that 'great Jewish achievers' like the totally secular Albert Einstein were
educated in German universities by German professors and drew on scientific knowledge by German and
non-Jewish scholars. His intellectual development was due to his free association with the great
scientists and scholars of Germany and Europe, not closeted away in some ethno-tribal commune.
The Jews who remained embedded in the Polish, Lithuanian and Russian ghettos, under the reign
of the leading Rabbis, remained illiterate, poor and backward. Most of the claims of 'superior' cultural
heritage or traditions are the creation of a mythical folk history serving ethno-national supremacists.
The Myth of the Contemporary Genius
The modern ethnocentric ideologues ignore the 'dilution of Jewishness' in their celebratory identification
with successful 'Jews'.
Many of the best thinkers, writers, scientists and political leaders were conversos (Christian
converts), or integrated European secular nationalists, socialists, monarchists, bankers and professionals.
Some remained 'reformed Jews' or later transformed into secular Zionists: nationalists who despised
non-Europeans as inferior and couldn't even conceive of Arab Palestine as their 'homeland'. It wasn't
until the 20th century that Zionism was in part 'Judacized'. Early Zionists looked at various locations
for a homeland, including Argentina and parts of Africa and Russia.
These ethno-chauvinist ideologues lay claim to all brilliant individuals, no matter how tenuous
as examples of 'Jewish genius'. Even those personally opposed Jewish ethno-religious beliefs and
indifferent to tribal loyalties end up being claimed as examples of the 'Jewish genius'. Once some
'matrilineal link' could be found, their success and brilliance was tied to the mystical lineage,
no matter how tenuous.
This bizarre practice became even more commonplace following the Jewish military conquest and
brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with the military, political and financial backing of non-Jewish
Europe and the United States. With myths and inflated ideas of unique virtue and brilliance, Israel
was established as a racist apartheid state. A new militant, ethnocentric Judaism converted Israel and its overseas backers into an ethno-ideological
international power with religious trappings, based on the myth of its 'exceptionalism'. To maintain this myth, the personal histories of all prominent 'Israel Firsters' were sanitized
and scrubbed of anti-social and destructive behavior.
All Jewish billionaires were to be portrayed as uniquely philanthropic, while the exploits of
Jewish billionaire swindlers (Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky) were not to be mentioned
in polite company. The conquests of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, rapist-procurer head of
the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Governor Elliot Spitzer, Congressman Anthony Weiner and other similar
perverts quietly slithered off the edge of the planet although all had once been hailed as examples
of 'ethnocentric genius'.
Major Jewish political donors to US-UK-French electoral parties were hailed while their work
on behalf of Israel was naturally assumed but not discussed. The dizzying shifts between open adulation
and selective whitewash served to reinforce the illusion of superiority. Anyone, Jew or Gentile,
bold enough to point out the obvious hypocrisy would be immediately censored as 'self-hating' (Jew)
or 'anti-Semite' (Gentile).
Return to the Beginning: Judeo-Centric Power
As mentioned above, Jews represent a substantial minority among the top multi-billionaires, but
they are still a minority. Below the top level of wealth are the single digit billionaires and triple
and double digit multi-millionaires; here the proportion of 'Jews' increases. These 'less-than-super-billionaires'
are among the most active and the biggest financial and political supporters of the ethno centric
ideology and tribal cohesion.
Los Angeles-based Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban contributed tens of millions of dollars
to support of the Jewish state's occupation of Palestine and brutal colonial land grabbing 'settlers'.
His wealth is largely based on his 'genius' in pushing culturally vacuous Japanese cartoons (Mighty
Morphing Power Rangers) on the nation's children. He is the primary donor to the Democratic Party
pushing Israel's agenda his number one priority as an American citizen.
The lesser 'foot soldiers' of the Zionist power structure are the millionaires and affluent professionals,
dentists, stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and impresarios. The middle and lower levels of wealth and
power are a diverse group mostly ethno-religious and secular, but very self-identified ethno-Jews.
A minority is totally secular or converted to non-Jewish religions (especially Buddhism, Christianity)
Despite the constant drumbeat of ethnocentric identity, an increasing number of young US 'Jews'
do not identify with Judaism or Israel. Their influence however is minimal.
The wealthy ethno-religious and secular ethnic Jews may or may not constitute a numerical majority
but they are the best organized, most political and most adamant in their claims to 'speak for and
represent the Jewish community' as a whole, especially during waves of (fake) 'anti-Semitism'!
The many former-Jews, anti-tribal Jews and 'non-Jewish' Jews are no match for the ethnocentric
political apparatus controlled by the chauvinists.
When the tribalists appropriate the glory of a secular non-Jewish Jewish scientist or major 'prize
winner' they claim his or her tribal affiliation in order to impress the 'goys' and to seduce younger
more skeptical Jews about the advantages of ethno-chauvinism.
All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view
themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge
from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
Upward mobility within academia, government and business circles is automatically assumed by
the tribalists to be a reward for superior merit 'Jewish genius' rather than nepotism or connections.
Tribal networks and 'understandings' play a powerful unspoken role in career success and immunity
from the consequences of failure, incompetence or dishonesty.
Multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires prospered because they entered establish lucrative
fields or made their career choices highly profitable.
Early on, many powerful Gentile bankers provided entry for talented Jews to succeed. This is
despite revisionist history bemoaning the exclusion of US Jews on Wall Street and their degrading
denial of membership in select WASP country clubs. These myths of brutal oppression on Wall Street
or Long Island yacht clubs have empowered generations of American Jews to assume the role of spokespersons
for the oppressed everywhere. The expression 'crying all the way to the bank' comes to mind.
By the last quarter of the 20th century and especially in the 21st century, deindustrialization
and the shift to financialization in the US economy increased the power and privilege of a disproportionate
number of multi-billionaire/millionaire Jews. This seismic shift has coincided with the pervasive
impoverishment of the marginalized working class in the former 'rust belt' and central parts of the
country and the incredible concentration of national wealth at the top 1%. This is a demographic
shift and ethno-class apartheid of huge, but unstudied, significance.
The most important political question is not how many Jews are super-wealthy but what proportion
of them are influential political donors and active in the Democratic or Republican Parties in order
to intervene on behalf of clan, tribe and motherland (Israel). Majorities among Jews are not crucial
most are not politically active. What is decisive is the percentage of all the super-wealthy who
are politically active, organized and contribute substantially to influence and control the mass
media to promote their ethno-centric ideology and punish critics.
Conclusion
Overt and covert Jewish supremacists have embroidered a fake history and legacy of exceptional
intelligence ignoring the context of advanced non-Jewish science and cultures, which preceded and
later provided Jews with opportunities for education and wealth.
The danger inherent in all ethno-centric tribes is that they work to dominate majority populations
by creating systems of assigning superiority and inferiority. They then use these to justify growing
inequalities of wealth, education and political power!
Historically favored minorities tend to overreach and, like the eyeless Sampson, bring down the
Temple on everyone. Power corrupts and absolute ethno-chauvinist power corrupts absolutely. Intelligent
Jews of principle are abandoning
The fact that she lied about her ethnicity in the past in hopes of gaining a leg up will
backfire spectacularly if she's the DNC nominee for POTUS. Conservatives will beat this point
over and over and over.
Is the Left secretly trying to put Trump in the WH for another term? It sure looks like
it.
the chances that Dems supporting a candidate who does not win the primary would boycott
the election and put Trump back in the White House are vanishingly small this time
around
They were warned that that would happen last time, and they still let it happen. The
"Bernie bros" are back out in force, and not only have they not learnt their lesson, they
feel validated by Clinton's defeat to the extent where they are even more determined that
their old man should be the candidate and nobody else. These are people who abandoned the
Democrats for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who managed to make Sarah Palin look
intelligent. They will do it again because they are largely white, male and think just
because they read liberal newspapers that means they don't have a sense of entitlement.
Both Michigan and Pennsylvania would have gone to Clinton if only 20% of Green voters
hadn't lodged protest votes. These people don't want Elizabeth Warren, they don't want Kamala
Harris, they don't want Beto O'Rourke, they don't want Pete Buttigieg. They want Bernie. If
Bernie isn't the Democrat, they won't vote Democrat.
You can dismiss this as much as you like, but I placed a bet on Trump winning the
Republican nomination when he was the joke candidate and when he won the nomination I bet on
him winning the presidency. I think that would be an even safer bet this time round.
That's just funny. She's been behind some of the major legislation that enacted the things
that Bernie Sanders talks about. And Wall Street is scared crapless of her -- why do you
think they're going after her so hard?
This conjecture is entirely fiction at best but centrist neo libeberal bollocks as a
certainty. Warren was and is a republican. She is a corporate bootlicker, a thrall of Hillary
and has no serious attachment to truth. I regret to admit that I am a US citizen, 68 years of
age. I have wittnessed Warren's shameless plagirising of Bernie Sanders' arguments and am
sickened to see her lionized by people who, if honest, should know better.
The columnist is right about Warren's intellectual stature and influence, and anyone who's
looked at what she's accomplished for Massachusetts (or for that matter watched her takedown
of the sleazy head of Wells Fargo during the Senate hearings) knows she's tough. She also has
a *workable* vision of what the Democrats could offer Americans. From affordable childcare to
making college tuition affordable again to helping out working-class people like the
fisherman in Massachusetts, while reigning in the banks and making sure we don't have another
crash – it's the blueprint.
There's something hysterically funny about all the people who have signed in here, clearly
skipped the article, just to yell "squirrel!" – or in this case -- "oh no she filled
out the optional ethnicity box and it turns out her family stories were mistaken!"
What they're missing, what Warren is laying out and the article is pointing out, is what
the GOP will really be up against in the future.
I don't like this argument: she may not win the primary, but it's her ideas that will
dominate the conversation.
It worked for Bernie supporters to console themselves.
If we elect someone, it needs to be the person who will be passionate about that idea (as
opposed to lukewarm like Pelosi is on Green New Deal). We need someone who knows what it will
take to get it done. What will get in the way. How to get around it.
Warren not only had the idea for CFPB. She actually set it up. Then Obama lacked the moral
courage and political spine to have her lead the agency - just because Wall Street had
pressured the Democrats against it.
Warren is the right candidate for the right time. She has ideas to fix the country and
doesn't just rail against people. That's why even Steve Bannon is scared of her policy
positions that they could be theirs.
Democrats need to stop playing pundits and go with their heart. If they vote for someone
they like less but because he (why is it always a 'he' who is electable?) can win - we will
end up with a candidate no one really cares about and how is that a winning strategy?
Democrat primary voters need to recognise that defeating Trump is going to be very difficult.
Since WW II, only Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. have failed to win re-election, in both
cases to superb campaigners who captured the public's imagination and, critically, swing
voters.
Which of the potential Democrat challengers is a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton? Or,
indeed, a Barack Obama?
For a dose of reality, Democrats could do worse than read Mike Bloomberg's piece on his
decision to stay out of the race:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-05/our-highest-office-my-deepest-obligation
Warren rules -- her policy ideas are creative, intelligent and moral, and the world would be
an indescribably better place if people like her were ever allowed into positions of
authority. That anyone on the planet would prefer to be represented by someone like Biden,
never mind Trump, is utterly depressing.
Sadly, FOX News has already issued their proscribed talking points on Sen.Warren. You will
find them listed and repeated anywhere Elizabeth's Warren's candidacy is discussed (including
here). Most of it will be lies or exaggerations, claims that she received jobs and promotions
based on her claims of Native American ancestry, claims that she received scholarships or
some kind of preferential treatment by calling herself an "Indian". They will insist that
this is an obvious character flaw, that she's a liar and some sort of cultural thief.
Sadly, too many American's still imagine FOX News and it's ilk are purveyors of fact. They
imagine the propaganda they are being fed about Elizabeth Warren is a truth the "mainstream
media" won't mention. We saw all of this with Hillary Clinton. 30% of Republican voters still
think Sec. Clinton ran a pedophile ring out of a DC pizza parlor.
If Sen.Warren, or any other rational candidate has a fair chance at running for President,
if all the lies and propaganda of the right-wing media establishment are to be countered, the
left and the center of US politics needs an effective counter to right-wing narrative.
A presidential campaign is not about specific, detailed policy proposals. It's about a vision
for the country. A vision that must be consistent with voters' feelings and expectations; and
must be communicated in a clear, energetic way by an effective messenger. That's the way
Reagan, Clinton, Obama and Trump won.
Does anybody remember Trump's healthcare policy?
People don't vote for policy manifestos. People vote for candidates that inspire and
convince.
If Warren is the 'intellectual powerhouse' of the Democratic party, then god help them. Not a
word about 1 trillion dollar budget deficits and rising (under Trump)-but remember Obama was
little better; in 15 years time the US state pension system will be bankrupt, various other
states' pension schemes are also effectively bankrupt (see Illinois, Tennessee) as are
various cities (Chicago), and all Warren and Trump can think of is more debt, and nor will
MMT help (we know this is just deficit spending on steroids). None of these people are
'progressive' - by not tacking the key problem of runaway debt it just robs everyone by
forcing a default - not an 'honest' one, but rather the route taken by all politicians,
namely rapid devaluation of the currency; something that robs all people, and destroys
savings. Instead all we get are jam today, and bankruptcy tomorrow.
She changed her ethnicity from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law
School. Also, a large majority of Americans have Native American DNA....and EW has less than
the average American (which is 5%)...she has 0.20. She abused a privilege and got called out.
She's too damn smart, is the problem. Along with all her qualifications she has also a lot of
very solid wins that she brought home for the people of Massachusetts as a senator, from
helping fisherman to low-income students suffering from college debt -- emphasizing that
she's actually helped working class people and people in student debt should be a no brainer.
And yet she seems not to have a savvy political operator advising her – she sure as
hell hasn't gotten out ahead of the Native American thing, and I don't know why no one is
doing that for her.
"Elizabeth Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party"
Then they really are in trouble.....
Just take 1 point....
"She has called for abolishing the electoral college, the unfair institution the US used
to elect executives "
Well that requires a constitutional amendment, that requires a two thirds majority in both
houses and then ratification by three quarters of the States. The ERA was proposed in 1923
didn't get through Congress until 1972 and is still short of the 38 State ratifications to
adopt it. That's an issue of direct concern to at least half the population. The idea that a
procedural change to the constitution for partisan benefit is getting through the process is
blatantly laughable. Particularly as there appear to be about 27 states that have enhanced
importance under the current system ( http://theconversation.com/whose-votes-count-the-least-in-the-electoral-college-74280
) and only 13 are needed to kill it.
Warren has the same foreign policy as all the others, invade, sanction, destroy. Steal oil,
gold and assets. The US has become a deluded neurotic police state rife with addiction and so
addled it is no longer a force for good in any sphere.
In short it is now a part of the
problem and no longer a part of any workable solution. Who becomes POTUS is therefore
irrelevant.
Warren is flawed ideologically and personally, US citizens need to wake up and recognise that the POTUS is an irrelevant position with no authority and that until you
tackle the neocon ridden nature of US politics nothing will ever change.
There is no hope in
systems, only hope in people. Politics has become irrelevant in the face of our impending
extinction.
"... Posturing as a would-be American native and supporting racial retributions is as far from qualifying as an intellectual powerhouse as it gets. She would be better than Trump, obviously, but then anybody would. ..."
It may well not be Warren who wins the Democratic nomination, but whoever does will be
campaigning on her ideas
since her initial announcement in December, Warren's campaign has rolled out a series of
detailed policy proposals in quick succession, outlining structural changes to major
industries, government functions, and regulatory procedures that would facilitate more
equitable representation in the federal government and overhaul the economy in favor of the
working class. These policy proposals have made Warren the Democratic party's new intellectual
center of gravity, a formidable influence who is steadily pushing the presidential primary
field to the left and forcing all of her primary challengers to define their political
positions against hers.
Warren has become the Democratic party's new intellectual center of gravity
Warren herself is an anti-trust nerd, having come to the Senate from a career as an academic
studying corporate and banking law. On the stump, she's most detailed in the same areas where
she is most passionate, like when she talks about about breaking
up huge tech companies such as Amazon and Google, and implementing a 21st-century --
version of the Glass-Steagall act that would separate commercial and investment banking (she
has also called for prosecuting and
jailing bank executives who break the law). But her policy agenda is broader than that,
taking on pocketbook issues that have resonance with working families.
Warren outlined a huge overhaul of the childcare system that would revolutionize the
quality, cost and curriculum of early childhood education, with subsidies for families and a
living wage for caregivers. It's a proposal that she talks about in the context of her own
career when, as a young mother and fledgling legal mind, she almost had to give up a job as a
law professor because childcare for her young son was too expensive.
Warren has also proposed a housing plan
that would limit huge investors' abilities to buy up homes, give incentives for localities to
adopt renters' protections, and build new public housing. Crucially, and uniquely, her housing
plan would also provide home
ownership grants to buyers in minority communities that have historically been "redlined",
a term for the racist federal housing policies that denied federally backed mortgages to black
families. The provision, aimed to help black and brown families buy their first homes, is a
crucial step toward amending the racial wealth gap, and it has helped sparked a broader
conversation within the party about the need to
pay reparations to the descendants of slaves -- a concept that Warren has also
endorsed.
Taking her cues from pro-democracy and voting rights advocates such as Stacey Abrams, Warren
has also taken on anti-majoritarian constitutional provisions, aiming to make American
democracy more representative and less structurally hostile to a progressive agenda. She has
called for abolishing the
electoral college , the unfair institution the US uses to elect chief executives that makes
a vote in New York count less than a vote in Wyoming, and which has resulted in two disastrous
Republican presidencies in the past two decades. She has advocated eliminating the filibuster
, an archaic procedural quirk of the Senate that would keep the Democrats from ever passing
their agenda if they were to regain control of that body. And she has signaled a willingness to
pack the
courts , another move that will be necessary to implement leftist policies such as Medicare
for All -- because even if the next Democratic president can pass her agenda through Congress,
she will not be able to protect it from the malfeasance of a federal bench filled with
conservative Trump appointees eager to strike it down.
When other candidates campaign, Warren's strong policy positions force them to define
themselves against her
Warren has been the first to propose all of these policies, and it is not difficult to see
other candidates falling in line behind her, issuing belated and imitative policy proposals, or
being forced to position themselves to her right. Warren has promised not to go negative
against other Democrats , but her campaign's intellectual
project also serves a political purpose: when other candidates campaign, her strong policy
positions force them to define themselves against her.
After Warren announced her childcare overhaul, senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris
rolled out plans similarly designed to combat gendered economic injustice, calling for
guaranteed family leave and
better teacher
pay , respectively. After Warren rolled out her pro-democracy agenda of eliminating the
electoral college, abolishing the filibuster and packing the courts, her ideological rival
Bernie Sanders was forced to come out against
both eliminating the filibuster and
packing the courts , damaging his reputation with a party base who knew that without these
interventions, a progressive agenda will probably never be enacted. The pressure eventually
forced Sanders to cave to Warren's vision and concede that he would be open to eliminating the
filibuster in order to pass Medicare for All.
There's still a long time before the first contests, and it's possible that Warren will
succumb to the flaws that her critics see in her campaign. In particular, she might not be able
to raise enough money. She's decided not to take any Pac money and not to fundraise with
wealthy donors, a position that may be as much practical as it is principled: the super-rich
are not likely to donate to Warren anyway, since she has such a detailed plan, called the
Ultra Millionaire Tax , to redistribute their money. She may fall victim to the seemingly
unshakable controversy over her old claims of Native American ancestry, and she seems doomed to
be smeared and underestimated for her sex, called
cold and unlikable for her intellect and then, as with other female candidates, derided as
pandering when she tries to seem more relatable.
But it would be a mistake to write Warren off as a virtuous also-ran, the kind of candidate
whose intellectual and moral commitments doom her in a race dominated by the deep divisions in
the electorate and the craven demagoguery of the incumbent. Elizabeth Warren does not seem to
be running for president to make a point, or to position herself for a different job. Instead,
she is making bold interventions in the political imagination of the party. It may well not be
Warren who wins the Democratic nomination, but whoever does will be campaigning on her
ideas.
Thanks Ken and Thomas. I couldn't have said it better myself. Are we going to pare down the
list of Democratic candidates on the basis of one or two stupid missteps? Looking through the
Bible, I note that Jesus lost his temper at the money-changers and put down the hard-working
Martha. So, he's out too.
Not only the USA, with everyone becoming wealthier, the need for education has declined,
across the western world, being liberal or educated has become a swear word. Social media and
lazy journalists are doing the rest, its all propaganda now, and permanent contradictory
stories means only simple messages cut through the noise, hatred, immigrants, islamophobia,
anti-semitism, etc. are classic messages that get through and stir people's emotions.
Intellect doesn't win elections with a gullible electorate
It was a mistake and it was self-interested and it was unethical. And it was a different time
before tribal groups in the US developed and enforced laws regarding membership status. Had
Trump not shown disdain for her and all native Americans by calling her Pocahontas as though
it were a racial slur, few would have made a big deal from this mistake.
Warren did confess without need to do so that she had purchased distressed mortgages to turn
a profit as a young lawyer like so many of her ethically misguided law colleagues.
If you are
or intimately know more than two attorneys you know this was and in some towns and cities
still is common practice for building wealth among lawyers who have first notice when these
“deals” are posted at the local Court House. Find me a “clean” lawyer
anywhere if you can and I doubt you can — they write law and protect themselves and
wealthy constituents mightily in doing so.
If you can help remove most of them from political
office and replace them with people working professions of greater merit I stand with you.
Congress needs intellectual strength and diversity
of backgrounds.
Unfortunately she opposes wars of choice from the position of an impressive service record
in Iraq so she gets ignored in favour of the ridiculous Elizabeth Warren here and in other
places. Warren's window was last time anyway when she was coming off the back of viral public
speeches about inequality.
Posturing as a would-be American native and supporting racial retributions is as far from
qualifying as an intellectual powerhouse as it gets.
She would be better than Trump, obviously, but then anybody would.
While I'd prefer the genders reversed, I think she would be an ideal running mate for the
front-runner among the declared candidates.
Sanders has much more assiduously defined the moral center that any candidate for
president must have: unapologetic confrontation with the oligarchy. Warren is the
intellectual weapon such an administration could deploy on the specifics of banking and
anti-trust.
This is all the more practical given that Warren has failed to tie race, social justice
and criminal justice issues all together in her values-based worldview -- certainly not to
the extent that Sanders has, his being well beyond any other candidate's efforts.
Because Obama was a canny corporate move to place someone that offered such qualities as
intelligence and grammar in sharp relief to GW Bush while remaining closely controlled by the
oligarchy.
Do you include her fraudulent and offensive claims to Native American heritage in that?
As CNN has reported, as far back as 1986 she was falsely claiming "American Indian" heritage
on official documents.
Despite repeated calls by the leaders of the Tribal Nations, she has still failed to
apologise. That's some intellectual powerhouse..
"... Jared Kushner is 36 and he had already stepped up to a senior position in his family's real estate business Kushner Companies. This was in part because daddy Charles Kushner was in jail. But now that he has taken on a job as White House advisor to President Trump, Jared Kushner has been forced to step aside from Kushner Companies and his father Charles Kushner is stepping back in. ..."
"... So Charles Kushner, father of current Presidential advisor Jared Kushner and son in law to the President has been convicted on federal election fraud charges and witness tampering. ..."
"... Well Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on election laws, put it best when he told Bloomberg , "It can't hurt to be doing business with Jared Kushner's family. It's a road to the administration. At the very least they're going to have an inside track." ..."
Jared Kushner's father , Charles Kushner, who also just
so happens to be a convicted felon, has gotten back to work. He has also hired some of the people who he did time with.
In 2004 , after already paying a $508,900
fine to the Federal Election Commission for improperly contributing money to political candidates, Charles Kushner was forced to
agree to a plea bargain with Federal prosecutors and was sentenced to 14 months in a federal prison in Montgomery, Alabama. The charges
against Kushner revolved around illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering. Charles Kushner had arranged for a prostitute
to sleep with his brother in law William Schulder, who had agreed to testify against him. The encounter was filmed and Kushner used
it to try and blackmail Schulder. Gross!
The federal prosecutor who handled the case was none other than future New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie later worked
side by side on Donald Trump's presidential campaign with Jared Kushner, the son in law of the President Trump who just so happens
to also be the son of Charles Kushner.
Jared Kushner is 36 and he had already stepped up to a senior position in his family's real estate business Kushner Companies.
This was in part because daddy Charles Kushner was in jail. But now that he has taken on a job as White House advisor to President
Trump, Jared Kushner has been forced to step aside from Kushner Companies and his father Charles Kushner is stepping back in.
Did you follow all of that?
At the time Chris Christie stated about the charges, "There is nothing, nothing more sacrosanct than the integrity of the grand
jury system."
Apparently prison is a good place to make business connections.
Avram Lebor and Richard Goettlich are two former convicts who served prison time with Charles Kushner who are now working for
Kushner Companies. Bloomberg reports that the two men were convicted in separate fraud schemes. Lebor, 68, served seven years
in prison and is now the firm's director of acquisitions. Goettlich served ten years in jail for his part in a ponzi scheme.
The two men were hired as part of the Kushner Companies' second-chance program. Charles Kushner is board member of Getting Out
& Staying Out, which mentors young inmates at Rikers Island.
So Charles Kushner, father of current Presidential advisor Jared Kushner and son in law to the President has been convicted
on federal election fraud charges and witness tampering.
The big question now that everyone is still asking about his son Jared is whether or not he will be able to separate his new job
working for the people of the United States from his business interests, or if there will be conflicts of interest. And will doing
business with Kushner Companies make it easier for you to get access to the White House?
Well Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on election laws, put
it best when he told Bloomberg , "It can't hurt to be doing business with Jared Kushner's family. It's a road to the administration.
At the very least they're going to have an inside track."
So what is Charles Kushner doing these days?
The
Real Deal reports that Charles Kushner just spent $12 million on three units in
212 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Encompassing
an area of 4,614 square feet, the three apartments are each on a different floor, the seventh, eighth and ninth floors.
April 2, 2019 The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today's
New Cold War
'We're all puppets,' the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment."
– Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan
March 19, 2017 The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers
Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers," explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed
writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material.
During the interview, Scheer and Whitney
discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as the
Paris Review).
"... "The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty this is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization is losing its attractiveness and is no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov said. ..."
"... "The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others," Lavrov noted. ..."
"... "They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic and financial standpoint, the US alone or with its allies can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues," he said. ..."
"... "In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don't hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states." ..."
"... Agree with the assessment other than the claim the US has had centuries long global dominance, or even influence. ..."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today that the Western, liberal model of society is dying, and a new world order
is taking its place.
Lavrov made the comments at his annual meeting with students and professors at the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy, reported
Russian state news agency TASS.
"The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty this
is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization is losing its attractiveness and is
no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov
said.
According to him, global development is guided "by processes aimed at boosting multipolarity and what we call a polycentric world
order."
"Clearly, multipolarity and the emergence of new centers of power in every way requires efforts to maintain global stability
and search for a balance of interests and compromises, so diplomacy should play a leading role here," Lavrov went on to say.
"Particularly because there are a lot of issues that require generally acceptable solutions."
These include regional conflicts, international terrorism, food security and environmental protection. This is why we believe
that only diplomacy can help make agreements and reach sustainable decisions that will be accepted by all.
"The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others," Lavrov noted.
"They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic
and financial standpoint, the US alone or with its allies can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues,"
he said.
"In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don't
hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states."
Perry Colace
When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was the enemy. Now Russia (with an economy, population, military and world influence the
fraction of the United States) seems to be one of the few places in the world that makes any bit of sense and ACTUALLY cares a
little bit about its culture and people.
Fluff The Cat
"The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty this is
what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization is losing its attractiveness and is
no more viewed as a perfect model for all.Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov
said.
A Judaic-Masonic world order is the end goal. It entails the complete loss of sovereignty for all Western nations and the slow
genocide of white Christians via miscegnation and displacement by third-worlders.
lnardozi
I can't think of a man more American than Putin.
Sell the bases, come home, stop bothering others and trying to run world affairs.
Then we can spend a nice nice century or so rebuilding our infrastructure and trimming our out-of-control federal government.
The clue is right there in the name - the united STATES of America. A state is a sovereign country with its own laws - except
for those powers enumerated in the Constitution which the federal government should have.
That's the whole point - competition in government. You don't like the state you're in - you're guaranteed the choice of 49
others, along with all your possessions.
notfeelinthebern
Agree with the assessment other than the claim the US has had centuries long global dominance, or even influence.
johnnycanuck
Western global dominance, US took over from the British Empire with the assistance of the banksters class. It's all there in
the history books, you just need to spend time
consider me gone
As much as I hate to say it, this was Winston Churchill's idea. Even as the war was just starting, he was a major advocate
for the West controlling the globe after WWII.
But I'll bet he had no idea that the West would abandon traditional Western values in the process. He wouldn't watch TV and
predicted it would turn society into unthinking idiots. He nailed that one anyhow.
The Alliance
"...many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov said.
Skeptical?
I, for one, would show up early and highly motivated to march against, and to destroy, these treasonous, malevolent, collectivist
Globalists.
The Globalists within the United States government are traitors--traitors, by definition. They have declared war on our republic.
CDN_Rebel
Russia works because they have a ruthless tyrant who happens to be incredibly competent. That same system with a weak ruler
will collapse entirely in a matter of months. I like Putin, but he needs to groom an ironfisted successor pronto.
As for the chows - they need to print half a trillion a month to stay afloat and that's your model?
The west is only fucked because the sleeping masses refuse to acknowledge that Marxists have undermined our institutions...
It would take only a few years to scrub these subversive ***** from our society if we had the balls to do it
johnnycanuck
yadda yadda yadda.. marxists, subversives, commies, all the catch phrases of ye old Joe McCarthy. Russia works because Russians
have a history of enduring adversity. Unlike Americans.
Moribundus
It is eventually end of era of western imperialism, era that lasted 900 years. Game is over
Money quote (from comments): This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with
Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling
pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel.
Notable quotes:
"... As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials: ..."
"... After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. ..."
"... Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies ..."
"... There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors. ..."
"... Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise him. ..."
"... Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support. ..."
"... I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?! ..."
"... Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. ..."
"... The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it. ..."
"... I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel. ..."
"... To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off, a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend. ..."
"... Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye. ..."
"... Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism, and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation. ..."
"... All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either, because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the Middle East into. ..."
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials:
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do.
Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing
with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The
substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on
major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
Whatever short-term benefit Israel gains from it, the U.S. gains nothing and stands to lose quite a bit in terms of our international
standing.
There has been no consideration of the costs and problems this will create for the U.S. in its relations with other regional states
and beyond because Trump couldn't care less about the long-term effects that his decisions have on the country.
Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the
United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders
flatter and praise him.
Trump's bad decision can be traced back to Bolton's visit to Israel earlier this year:
Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental to the decision, after visiting Israel
in January to assure officials there that the United States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trump's sudden withdrawal
of troops from the battlefield.
Nervous Israeli officials saw an opportunity. "It was an ask," one Israeli source said, "because of the timing -- it suddenly
became a relevant issue about Iran."
Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful
influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the
Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange
for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support.
Well, of course Trump puts America last. There is one and only one person he is interested in -- himself. As you say this is his
narcissistic personality at work.
My never ending question is always, "Why does any Republican with a conscience remain silent? Are they really all this shallow
and self absorbed? Is there nothing Trump does that will finally force them to put country before party and their own ambition?"
It's a really sad state of events that has put this country on the road to ruin.
Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. Straightening out all this stupidity will take
years. Here's hoping that Trump gets to watch his foreign policy decisions tossed out and reversed from federal prison.
The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders
of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it.
The administration says that a Russian missile violates the treaty but it will not tell us what the range of the missile is.
Nor will it allow its weapons inspectors to go and look at it.
The reason is clear: Fear that the weapons inspectors' findings would contradict the administration's claims.
I voted Republican ever since I started voting. I voted for Bush I, Dole, Dubya, and McCain. I couldn't vote for either Obama
or Romney, but I voted for Trump because of Hillary Clinton.
I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats,
for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks
to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm
bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain
sight with Israel.
To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite
so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off,
a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend.
Europoliticians tell that last one a lot. "We really don't want to but the Americans twisted our arms ZOMG Special Relationship
so sorry ZOMG!" Only with a lot more Eurobureaucratese.
I agree with the article's premise, but not because of this move regarding Israel.
Personally, I believe this move will have little impact on the outcome of the crisis in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the
other Arab monarchies are too focused on containing Iran and Turkey to give a crap about what Israel does. The only Arab states
that I can see objecting to this move are Syria (obviously) and the others who were already allied with Iran and/or Turkey to
begin with.
Right now, the REAL center of attention in the region should be Northern Syria. THAT's where the next major war likely will
begin. In that area, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are the ones doing the major escalations,
while Israel has virtually no role at all aside from sideline cheer-leading. And of course, Trump is doing nothing to stop what
could become the next July Crisis. What's "America First" about that?
Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war
with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye.
There is no way our international reputation will come out of this war unscathed, and odds are we'll be in a far worse position
diplomatically than we were at any point in our history, even during the Iraq war. When that happens, the American people will
be out to assign blame. Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism,
and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation.
All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused
on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either,
because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the
Middle East into.
Unlike invasive weeds, however, modem Governments - the more effective of them - have managed to develop offensive systems
that have destroyed nearly all of the traditional, reformative feedback loops that were used to keep the more outrageous
negaciprocal Governments in check in the past.
For example, the very purpose of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution - expressed quite specifically by its framers
as the People’s God-given right to bear arms - was to allow “the People” to revolt against tyranny. The American Revolution
itself wasn’t an act of repulsing a foreign power. It was a war by the British colonies against the very Government which was
legally entitled to lay claim to its territory.
There is absolutely nothing about the American Revolution, celebrated every year in the U.S. with the Day of Independence
(July 4), which could not be compared to U.S. citizens rising up today and dethroning the crime syndicate that currently resides
in Washington D.C.1
Will such an occurrence ever happen?
It will never occur . . . regardless of which new, demonic, uncharted levels of Extreme Negaprocity the U.S. descends into.
Quite apart from the stunning successes of the U.S. Government’s relentless gullibility tests, there is the issue of a complete
disparity in both defensive and offensive capability between the Government and the governed, between the privileged and the non
1%.
In earlier times a Government didn’t think in terms of superior military technology. It thought about advantages in terms of
“numbers” or resources. For many hundreds of years, European Governments had able fighters; so did the people. Governments had
military hardware; spears, shields, horses, bows, arrows, and other low-tech weaponry. So did the people. Governments were far
more worried about inciting citizen unrest.
Washington has the luxury of not caring whatsoever about this. Today the disparity between the tools that a people can use to
protect itself against an excessively tyrannical Government and the tools that a Government can use to quell even mild
dissension have never been greater.
Chapter 3: It Is the Nature Of Governments, As Creatures Of Extreme Negaprocity, To Create
And Nurture Systems Of "Intermediaryism"' That Extend And Preserve Their Negaciprocal
Activities
When Jerry Mander wrote The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in 1975, his
first argument was that television was creating an "intermediary" world where people were
divorced from their own experience of reality.2 Having been near the pinnacle of the television
advertising business for years, he could see, first-hand, how television allowed vested
interests to create realities that distorted, subverted, and misdirected not only people's own
personal interests, but how it disconnected them from any meaningful interaction with the
natural world around them.
He was able to see how television was being used to program people in insidious ways.
Television, however, is only one artifact of intermediary subversion that saturates the
landscape of modern life. The arguments that Mander made could well be applied to a host of
technological gadgets and devices...
... ... ....
as i proceeded into aduitnood, i was sucked into a dcvolutionary whirlwind of college life, military service, business, the
creation of three manufacturing companies, two failed marriages, two stints in U.S. federal prison related to my work as an
herbalist, and then the realization that I could never safely return to the country of my birth - no matter what I said or did -
and that 1 must live out the remainder of my days in exile.
There is no place left for me in this world.
With more than seven billion people currently living on the planet, it would be absurd to suggest that we have seen the
complete collapse of human habitat. It’s a work in progress. (You always see the greatest population bloom just before overshoot
and die-out. Ask any evolutionary biologist.)
What we have now is only the complete collapse of suitable habitat for fully functioning human beings who are spiritually
aware. I am, as author Kurt Vonnegut concluded in his final work, “a Man Without a Country,” who has unwittingly found himself
in the “Lunatic Asylum of the Universe.”1 And I suspect that many of the people who will choose to read this book feel the same
way. Nonetheless, it is yet a better exile that we seek. Once
again, if the fundamental principle of life as expressed in the Chinese I Ching is true - that “when situations proceed beyond
their extremes, they alternate to their opposites,”4 then our journey home can only be filled with light, love, and an
inexpressible joy that we cannot - even now - imagine. No one may know the timing, but our way must be clear, our minds calm,
and our spirits aware. For "only the bright and the gentle can overcome
the dark and unyielding.”5
It wasn't Colby, but William Casey. "We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false." William Casey, Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, 1981 – 1987.
32:54 ..."I'm an elitist and
you're stupid which gives me a right to rule over you".... ... I'm paraphrasing here Darwin's
theory of evolution goes against the laws of thermodynamics in that you cannot create order
out of chaos, chaos creates chaos. This man is brilliant I'm getting his book!
Here in Portugal people almost beat me when i talk about this things, i feel alone, nobody
see the Deep state pulling the strings throught the Eurpean Union, i'm hiting my my to the
wall everyday seeing some shiit hapening in this country
"... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
"... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a
"key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).
Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council,
the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense.
He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a
scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies.
Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government:
Israel.
"... It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself. ..."
"... All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. ..."
"... It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying. ..."
"... Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error. ..."
In the neocon journal
Commentary , Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published
an op-ed by Edward Snowden . Boot's objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a "traitor." In
objecting, Boot made these claims:
Oddly enough nowhere in his article -- which is datelined Moscow -- does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host,
Vladimir Putin , which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has
taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as
Kim Philby. . . .
But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to.
It's much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB's thugs. The only
mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.
It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank
warmonger is
the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his
liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for
one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort
of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.
All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone
else a coward. But it's so much worse if he lies when doing so. Did he do so here? You decide. From Snowden's NYT op-ed today:
Basic technical safeguards such as encryption -- once considered esoteric and unnecessary -- are now enabled by default in
the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private.
Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the
arbitrary passage of anti privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
The meaning of that passage -- criticisms of Russia's attack on privacy -- is so clear and glaring that it caused even
Time magazine to publish this today :
The first sentence of Time 's article: "Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Ed Snowden has taken a surprising swing at his new
home, accusing Russia of 'arbitrarily passing' new anti-privacy laws ." In other words, in the very op-ed to which Boot objects,
Snowden did exactly that which Boot accused him of lacking the courage to do: "criticize" the country that has given him asylum.
This is far from the first time Snowden has done exactly that which the Tough and Swaggering Think Tank Warrior proclaimed Snowden
would never do. In April, 2014, Snowden wrote
an
op-ed in The Guardian under this headline:
With Max Boot's above-printed accusations in mind, just re-read that. Did Boot lie? To pose the question is to answer it. Here's
part of what Snowden wrote in that op-ed:
On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. . . . I went on to challenge whether,
even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. . . . In his
response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial.
In countless speeches, Snowden has said much the same thing: that Russian spying is a serious problem that needs investigation
and reform, and that Putin's denials are not credible. Boot simply lied about Snowden.
It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking
courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal
journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear
whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying.
UPDATE : In typical neocon fashion, Boot first
replies by minimizing his own error to a mere innocent oversight, and implying that only hysteria could cause anyone to find
what he did to be problematic. Even then, the facts negate his self-justification. But
then he says he was actually right all along
and his "point stands":
Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error.
"... On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions ..."
"... John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy despite his explicit campaign promises to do so. ..."
"... More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of Americans is totally unacceptable. ..."
On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they
disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC
to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions. These three entities have been linked to various kinds of corruption
including sanctions evasion for Iran, money laundering on behalf of drug cartels, provision of banking services to backers of Islamic
terror organizations and controversial donations to the Clinton Foundation.
The financial ties between Bolton and these institutions highlight serious ethical concerns about his suitability for the position
of National Security Advisor.
I. Victor Pinchuk Foundation
John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including
one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy
despite his explicit campaign promises to do so.
The Victor Pinchuk Foundation was blasted in 2016 over their donation of $10 to $25 million to the
Clinton Foundation between 1994 and 2005. The donations lead to accusations
of influence peddling after it emerged that Victor Pinchuk had been invited
to Hillary Clinton's home during the final year of her tenure as Secretary of State.
Even more damning was Victor Pinchuk's participation in activities that constituted evasions of sanctions levied against Iran
by the American government. A 2015 exposι by Newsweek highlighted the fact
that Pinchuk owned Interpipe Group, a Cyprus-incorporated manufacturer of seamless pipes used in oil and gas sectors. A now-removed
statement on Interpipe's website showed that they
were doing business in Iran despite US sanctions aimed to prevent this kind of activity.
Why John Bolton, a notorious war hawk who has called for a hardline approach to Iran, would take money from an entity who was
evading sanctions against the country is not clear. It does however, raise serious questions about whether or not Bolton should
be employed by Donald Trump, who made attacks on the Clinton Foundation's questionable donations a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign.
II. HSBC Group
British bank HSBC paid Bolton $46,500 in June and August 2017 to speak at two gatherings of hedge fund managers and investors.
HSBC is notorious for its extensive ties to criminal and terror organizations for whom it has provided illegal financial services.
Clients that HSBC have laundered money for include Colombian drug traffickers
and Mexican cartels who have terrorized the country and recently
raised murder rates to the highest levels in Mexico's history . They have
also offered banking services to Chinese individuals
who sourced chemicals and other materials used by cartels to produce methamphetamine and heroin that is then sold in the United
States. China's Triads have helped open financial markets in Asia to cartels
seeking to launder their profits derived from the drug trade.
In 2012, HSBC was blasted by the US Senate for for allowing money from
Russian and Latin American criminal networks as well as Middle Eastern terror groups to enter the US. The banking group ultimately
agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine for this misconduct as well as their involvement
in processing sanctions-prohibited transactions on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma.
Some of the terror groups assisted by HSBC include the notorious Al Qaeda. During the 2012 scrutiny of HSBC, outlets such as
Le Monde , Business Insider
and the New York Times revealed that HSBC had maintained ties to Saudi
Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank. Al Rajhi Bank was one of Osama Bin Ladin's "Golden Chain" of Al Qaeda's most important financiers. Even
though HSBC's own internal compliance offices asked for the bank to terminate their relationship with Al Rajhi Bank, it continued
until 2010.
More recently in 2018, reports have claimed that HSBC was used for illicit
transactions between Iran and Chinese technology conglomerate Huawei. The US is currently seeking to extradite Huawei CFO Meng
Wanzhou after bringing charges against Huawei related to sanctions evasion
and theft of intellectual property. The company has been described as a "backdoor" for elements of the Chinese government by certain
US authorities.
Bolton's decision to accept money from HSBC given their well-known reputation is deeply hypocritical. HSBC's connection to
terror organizations such as Al Qaeda in particular is damning for Bolton due to the fact that he formerly served as the chairman
of the Gatestone Institute , a New York-based advocacy group that purports
to oppose terrorism. These financial ties are absolutely improper for an individual acting as National Security Advisor.
III. Deutsche Bank
John Bolton accepted $72,000 from German Deutsche Bank to speak at an event in May 2017.
Deutsche Bank has for decades engaged in questionable behavior. During World War II, they
provided financial services to the Nazi Gestapo and financed construction
of the infamous Auschwitz as well as an adjacent plant for chemical company IG Farben.
Like HSBC, Deutsche Bank has provided illicit services to international criminal organizations. In 2014
court filings showed that Deutsche Bank, Citi and Bank of America had all
acted as channels for drug money sent to Colombian security currency brokerages suspected of acting on behalf of traffickers.
In 2017, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $630 million fine after working with
a Danish bank in Estonia to launder over $10 billion through London and
Moscow on behalf of Russian entities. The UK's financial regulatory watchdog
has said that Deutsche Bank is failing to prevent its accounts from being used to launder money, circumvent sanctions and
finance terrorism. In November 2018, Deutsche Bank's headquarters was raided
by German authorities as part of an investigation sparked by 2016 revelations in the "Panama Papers" leak from Panama's Mossack
Fonseca.
Two weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration signed
an executive order linking a company owned by German national Mamoun Darkazanli to Al Qaeda. In 1995,
Darkazanli co-signed the opening of a Deutsche Bank account for Mamdouh
Mahmud Salim. Salim was identified by the CIA as the chief of bin Laden's computer operations and weapons procurement. He was
ultimately arrested in Munich, extradited to the United States and
charged
with participation in the 1998 US embassy bombings.
In 2017, the Office of the New York State Comptroller opened an investigation into accounts that Deutsche Bank was operating
on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is defined by both the United States and the European
Union as a terrorist organization. It is ironic that Bolton, who is a past recipient of the "Guardian of Zion Award" would accept
money from an entity who provided services to Palestinian groups that Israel considers to be terror related.
IV. Clinton-esque Financial Ties Unbecoming To Trump Administration
Bolton's engagement in paid speeches, in some cases with well-known donors to the Clinton Foundation, paints the Trump administration
in a very bad light. Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton during his
2016 Presidential campaign for speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs that were
labeled by her detractors as "pay to play" behavior. John Bolton's acceptance of money from similar entities, especially the Victor
Pinchuk Foundation, are exactly the same kind of activity and are an embarrassment for a President who claims to be against corruption.
More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches
hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly
flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National
Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of
Americans is totally unacceptable.
It is embarrassing enough that Donald Trump hired Bolton in the first place. The next best remedy is to let him go as soon
as possible.
At least 60 companies reported an effective federal tax rate of zero, meaning they owe
nothing in federal taxes for 2018, and that tax burden then falls on the rest of us. Senator
Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix that. She joins Stephanie Ruhle in her first interview since
unveiling her proposal.
60 years ago every job offered health insurance, retirement plans, paid vacation, and all
sorts of other benefits. It's time to have them pay a share of our societies costs, they use
the same roads, breathe the same air, and drink the same water...
Warren has consistently amazed me with her proposals... I hope she will make it to the
debates, since everyone's fawning over Bernie and Beto for their fundraising capabilities, I
hope they are not trying to sink her...
Warren Buffet, who saved 28 or so million on his, himself said trumps tax deal was
foolish..but he also said he wouldn't turn it down, which i don't blame him on that..
Senator Warren makes some excellent points (as usual): "market" implies a competitive
environment, so when huge corps squeeze out competitors, it's no longer a "market".
Corporations/rich individuals always say they made their profits themselves (independently of
others or of any social structure systems). Really? If you were living/doing business on a
mountaintop, disconnected from everyone else and any infrastructure support, you would have
done just as well? That's a load of crap, and if they had any responsibility at all (as
opposed to just pure greed), they'd be willing to give back a bit and contribute to the
system(s) they build their wealth on.
The fact is that the wealthy all over the world do not want their position of privilege to
be challenged. This is why Bernie Sanders has been saying (for several DECADES) that the only
way to move our society forward is to build from the bottom up... not the top down. And he is
100% correct.
While Brexit and Trump have been making
the headlines, the Italian economy has been sliding into a technical recession (again). Both the OECD and
the European Central Bank (ECB) have lowered the growth forecasts for Italy to negative numbers, and in what
analysts see as a precautionary move, the ECB is reviving its sovereign bond buying programme, which it had
started to unwind just five months earlier.
"Don't underestimate the impact of the Italian recession," is what French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire
told Bloomberg News (Horobin 2019). "We talk a lot about Brexit, but we don't talk much about an Italian
recession that will have a significant impact on growth in Europe and can impact France, because it's one of
our most important trading partners." More important than trade, however, and what Le Maire is not stating,
is that French banks are holding around 385 billion of Italian debt, derivatives, credit commitments and
guarantees on their balance sheets, while German banks are holding 126 billion of Italian debt (as of the
third quarter of 2018, according to the Bank for International Settlements).
In light of these exposures to Italian debt, it is no wonder that Le Maire, along with the European
Commission, is worried by Italy's third recession in a decade -- as well as by the growing anti-euro rhetoric
and posturing of Italy's coalition government, comprised by the Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the Lega. The
knowledge that Italy is too big to fail is fuelling the audacity of Italy's coalition government in its
attempt to reclaim fiscal policy space by openly flouting the budgetary rules of the E.U.'s Economic and
Monetary Union (EMU).
The result is a catch-22. The more the European Commission tries to bring the Italian government into
line, the more it will feed the anti-establishment and anti-euro forces in Italy. On the other hand, the
more the European Commission gives in to the demands of the Italian government, the more it will fritter
away its credibility as the guardian of the EMU's Stability and Growth Pact. This stalemate is not going
away as long as Italy's economy remains paralyzed.
A Crisis of the Post-Maastricht Treaty Order of Italian Capitalism
It is therefore vital to understand the true origins of Italy's economic crisis in order to find pathways
out of Italy's permanent stagnation. In a
new paper
, I provide an evidence-based pathology of Italy's recession -- which, I argue, must be regarded
as a crisis of the post-Maastricht Treaty order of Italian capitalism, as Thomas Fazi (2018) calls it. Until
the early 1990s, Italy enjoyed decades of relatively robust economic growth, during which it managed to
catch up with other Eurozone nations in income (per person) (Figure 1). In 1960, Italy's per capita GDP (at
constant 2010 prices) was 85% of French per capita GDP and 74% of (weighted average) per capita GDP in
Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands (the Euro-4 economies). By the mid-1990s, Italy had almost
caught up with France (Italian GDP per person equalled 97% of French per capita income) and also with the
Euro-4 (Italian GDP per capita was 94% of per capita GDP in the Euro-4).
Figure 1
Three decades of catching up, 25 years of falling behind: real GDP per person in Italy relative to
France/Euro-4, 1960-2018
Source
: author's calculation based on AMECO data.
But then a very steady decline began (see Figure 1), erasing decades of (income) convergence. The income
gap between Italy and France is now (as of 2018) 18 percentage points, which is more than what it was in
1960; Italian GDP per capita is 76% of per capita GDP in the Euro-4 economies. Beginning in the early to
mid-1990s, Italy's economy began to stumble and then fall behind, as all major indicators -- income per person,
labour productivity, investment, export market shares, etc. -- began a very steady decline.
It is not a coincidence that the sudden reversal of Italy's economic fortunes occurred after Italy's
adoption of the "legal and policy superstructure" imposed by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which cleared
the road for the establishment of the EMU in 1999 and the introduction of the common currency in 2002.
Italy, as I show in the paper, has been the star pupil in the Eurozone class -- the one economy that committed
itself most strongly and consistently to the fiscal austerity and structural reforms that form the essence
of the EMU macroeconomic rulebook (Costantini 2017, 2018). Italy kept closer to the rules than France and
Germany and paid heavily for this: The permanent fiscal consolidation, the persistent wage restraint and the
overvalued exchange rate killed Italian aggregate demand -- and the demand shortage asphyxiated the growth of
output, productivity, jobs and incomes. Italy's stasis is an object lesson for all Eurozone economies,
but -- paraphrasing G.B. Shaw -- as a warning, not as an example.
Perpetual Fiscal Austerity
Italy did more than most other Eurozone members in terms of self-imposed austerity and structural reform
in order to satisfy the conditions of EMU (Halevi 2019). This is clear when comparing Italy's fiscal policy
post-1992 to that of France and Germany. Various Italian governments ran continuous primary budget surpluses
(defined as public expenditure excluding interest payments on public debt, minus public revenue), averaging
3% of GDP per year during 1995-2008. French governments, in contrast, ran primary
deficits
of 0.1%
of GDP each year on average during the same period, while German governments managed to generate a primary
surplus of 0.7% on average per year during those same 14 years. Italy's permanent primary surpluses during
1995-2008 would have reduced its public debt-to-GDP ratio by around 40 percentage points -- from 117% in 1994
to 77% in 2008 (while keeping all other factors constant). But slow (nominal) growth relative to high
(nominal) interest rates pushed up the debt ratio by 23 percentage points and washed away more than half of
the public debt-to-GDP reductions of 40 percentage points achieved by austerity. Could it be true that
Italy's permanent austerity, intended to lower the debt ratio by running permanent primary surpluses,
backfired because it slowed down economic growth?
Italy's governments (including the left-of-centre Renzi coalition) continued to run significant primary
budget surpluses (of more than 1.3% of GDP on average per year) during the crisis period of 2008-2018.
Showing permanent fiscal discipline was a top priority, as Prime Minister Mario Monti admitted in a 2012
interview with CNN, even if that meant "destroying domestic demand" and pushing the economy into decline.
Italy's almost "Swabian" commitment to fiscal discipline stands in some contrast to the French ("
laissez
aller
") attitudes: The French government ran primary deficits at an average of 2% of GDP during
2008-2018 and allowed its public debt-to-GDP ratio to rise to almost 100% in 2018. The cumulative fiscal
stimulus thus provided by the French state amounted to 461 billion (in constant 2010 prices), whereas the
cumulative fiscal drain on Italian domestic demand was 227 billion. The Italian budget cuts show up in
non-trivial declines in its public expenditure on social expenditure per person, which is now (as of 2018)
around 70% of public social spending per capita in Germany and France. One doesn't dare speculate what the
"Gilets Jaunes" (yellow vest) protests in France would have looked like if France had put through an
Italian-style fiscal consolidation post-2008.
Permanent Real Wage Restraint
When Italy signed the Maastricht Treaty, its high rates of inflation and unemployment were regarded as
major problems. Inflation was blamed on the "excessive" power of labour unions and an "excessively"
centralized wage bargaining system, which resulted in strong wage-push inflation and a profit squeeze -- as
wage growth tended to exceed labour productivity growth, which lowered the profit share. Seen this way, the
blame for Italy's high unemployment could be shifted onto its "rigid" labour markets and too strongly
protected "worker aristocracy." Bringing down inflation and restoring profitability required wage
moderation, which in turn could only be achieved by a radical deregulation of labour markets, or what is
euphemistically called, "structural reforms."
Italy does not have a statutory minimum wage (unlike France) and also does not have a generous
unemployment benefit system (in terms of unemployment insurance replacement rates and duration, and
entitlement conditions) compared with the E.U. average. Employment protection for regular employees in Italy
is roughly at the same level as job protection in France and Germany. Italy's structural labour market
reforms involved drastically reducing employment protection for temporary workers, and as a result, the
share of temporary workers in total Italian employment increased from 10% during 1991-1993 to 18.5% in 2017.
Between 1992 and 2008, total (net) employment in Italy increased by 2.4 million new jobs, of which almost
three-quarters (73%) were fixed-term jobs. In France, by comparison, (net) employment grew by 3.6 million
jobs during 1992-2008, of which 84% were regular (permanent) jobs and only 16% were temporary positions.
In addition, the bargaining power of unions was reduced by the abandoning of the target of full
employment in favour of public debt reduction (Costantini 2017) and by a much more restrictive
(anti-inflation) central bank policy and the fixed exchange rate. As a result, real wage growth per
employee, which averaged 3.2% per year during 1960-1992, was lowered to a mere 0.1% per year during the
period 1992-1999 and to 0.6% per annum during 1999-2008. Within the E.U., Italy's turnaround was remarkable:
From 1992 through 2008, the growth of Italian real wages per worker (0.35% per year) was only half the real
wage growth in the Euro-4 (0.7% per annum) and it was even lower compared to real wage growth in France
(0.9% per year). Interestingly, from 1992 through2008, Italian real wage growth per employee was slightly
lower than (already stingy) German real wage growth (0.4% per year). To see the long-run picture, Figure 2
plots the ratio of the real wage of an Italian worker to the real wage of the average French, German and
Euro-4 worker from 1960 through2018. In the early 1960s, the average wage of Italian workers was about 85%
of the French wage, and this ratio increased to 92% in 1990-1991. Starting in 1992, the Italian real wage
began a steady decline in terms of the average French wage -- and in 2018, the average Italian employee earned
only 75% of the wage earned by her/his French comrade. The wage gap between Italy and France is bigger today
than it was in the 1960s. The same pattern holds when one compares Italian wages to German and/or Euro-4
wages.
Figure 2
Three decades of catching up, 25 years of falling behind: real wage per employee in Italy relative to
France / Germany / Euro-4, 1960-2018
Source
: author's calculation based on AMECO data.
Italy's wage moderation proved an effective strategy to kill three (not just two) birds with only one
stone. First, wage restraint helped to bring down inflation -- to 3.4% on average per year from 1992 through
1999 (from 9.6% on average per annum from 1960-1992) and further down to 2.5% per year from 1999 through
2008 and 1.1% from 2008 through 2018. Italy is no longer prone, in a structural sense, to high and
accelerating inflation. Second, wage restraint increased the labour intensity of Italy's GDP growth -- and thus
reduced unemployment. Italy's unemployment rate peaked in the mid-1990s at more than 11%, but labour market
deregulation and wage restraint successfully brought down unemployment to 6.1% in 2007 and 6.7% in
2008 -- which was lower than the unemployment rates of France (which equaled 8% in 2007 and 7.4% in 2008) and
Germany (where unemployment was 8.5% in 2007 and 7.4% in 2008). Finally, as intended, wage moderation led to
a substantial increase in the profit share of Italy's GDP: The profit share rose by more than 5.5 percentage
points, from 36% in 1991 to about 41.5% from 2000 through 2002, after which it stabilized around 40% until
2008. During the 1990s, the recovery of the profit share was considerably stronger in Italy than in France,
and comparable to what happened in Germany -- notwithstanding the fact that Italy's profit share was already
relatively high to begin with.
Italy's structural reforms of the 1990s paid off handsomely in terms of a higher profit share, in other
words, and Italy's profit share remained substantially higher than that of France and Germany. With lowered
inflation, effective wage restraint, declining unemployment, public indebtedness on the decline and the
profit share considerably raised, Italy appeared to be set for a long period of strong growth. It did not
happen. The operation was carried out successfully, but the patient died. According to the coroner's
post-mortem, the cause of death was a structural lack of aggregate demand.
The Suffocation of Italian Aggregate Demand after 1992
By keeping close to the EMU rulebook, Italian economic policy created a chronic shortage of (domestic)
demand. Domestic demand growth per Italian averaged 0.25% per year from 1992 through2018 -- a sharp decline
compared to the domestic demand growth (of 3.3% per year) recorded from 1960 through1992 and also much below
domestic demand growth (of 1.1% per person per year) in the Euro-4 countries. Italy's real export growth
(per person) also declined, from 6.6% on average per year from 1960 through 1992 to 3% per year from 1992
through 2018. Average annual export growth (per person) was 4.4% in the Euro-4 countries from 1992 through
2018. Italy's chronic demand shortage reduced capacity utilization (especially in manufacturing) and this,
in turn, lowered the profit rate. According to my estimates, capacity utilization in Italian manufacturing
declined by a staggering 30 percentage points relative to capacity utilization in French manufacturing
between 1992 and 2015.
The utilization rate of Italian manufacturing relative to German manufacturing declined from 110% in 1995
to 76% in 2008, and sunk further to 63% in 2015 -- a decline by a stunning 47 percentage points. Lower capacity
utilization reduced the rate of profit in Italian manufacturing by 3 to 4 percentage points relative to
French and German profit rates. This must have considerably depressed Italian manufacturing investment and
growth. Let me emphasize the fact that Italy's profit rate declined even when the share of profits in income
increased. This means that Italy's strategy of fiscal austerity and wage restraint proved to be
counterproductive, because it failed to improve the profit rate: The drop in demand and capacity utilization
had a bigger (negative) impact on firm profitability than the increase in the profit share.
As I argue in the paper, this condition of chronic demand shortage was created, in particular, by (
a
)
perpetual fiscal austerity, (
b
) permanent real wage restraint, and (
c
) a lack of
technological competitiveness which, in combination with an unfavourable (euro) exchange rate, reduces the
ability of Italian firms to maintain their export market shares in the face of increasing competition of
low-wage countries (China in particular). These three factors are depressing demand; reducing capacity
utilization and lowering firm profitability; and hurting investment, innovation, and productivity growth.
They are hence locking the country into a state of permanent decline, characterized by the impoverishment of
the productive matrix of the Italian economy and the quality composition of its trade flows (Simonazzi et
al. 2013).
Italy's manufacturing sector is not "technology intensive" and suffers from stagnating productivity. As
Figures 3 and 4 illustrate, the cost competitiveness of Italian manufacturers vis-ΰ-vis the Euro-4 countries
depends on low wages and not on superior productivity performance. Whereas industrial workers in France and
Germany were earning 35 per hour (in constant 2010 prices) in 2015, and their colleagues in Belgium and the
Netherlands earned even more, Italian workers in manufacturing were bringing home only 23 per hour (in
constant 2010 prices) -- or one-third less (see Figure 3). But at the same time, industrial labour productivity
per hour of work is considerably higher in France and Germany (at 53 per hour in constant 2010 prices) than
in Italy, where it is around 33 per hour (Figure 4). Italian manufacturers are thus taking the low road,
while firms in the Euro-4 countries are travelling on the high road. Or in other words, compared with German
and French manufacturers, Italian firms suffer from a lack of technological strength, which in Germany is
based on high productivity, innovative efforts and high product quality. True, Italian firms do stand out
for their high relative quality in more traditional, lower-tech export products such as footwear, textiles,
and other non-metallic mineral products. But they have been steadily losing ground in export markets of more
dynamic products characterized by higher levels of R&D and technology intensity, such as chemicals,
pharmaceuticals and communications equipment (Bugamelli
et al.
2018).
Locked into a Position of Structural Weakness
For two reasons, this specialization in low- and low-medium technology activities locks the country into
a quasi-permanent position of structural weakness. The first is that the exchange-rate elasticity of export
demand is larger for traditional exports than for medium- and high-tech exports. As a result, the
appreciation of the euro did hurt Italian exporters of traditional products harder than German and French
firms exporting more "dynamic" goods and services. Thus, the overvalued euro penalizes Italian export growth
more than it damages export growth in the Euro-4 economies.
The second factor is that Italian firms are operating in global markets which are more strongly exposed
to the growing competition of low-wage countries and China in particular. In 1999, 67% of Italy's exports
consisted of (traditional) products exposed to medium to high competition from Chinese firms -- compared to a
similar exposure to Chinese competition of 45% of exports in France and 50% of exports in Germany (Bugamelli
et al
. 2018). The share of Italy's exports in world imports declined from 4.5% in 1999 to 2.9% in
2016 -- and the market share loss was heavily concentrated in more traditional market segments characterized by
high exposure to Chinese competition (Bugamelli
et al.
2018). As Chinese and other developing
economy firms continue to expand their production capabilities and to upscale, competitive pressures will
mount in medium- and medium-high tech segments as well. Italian firms have difficulties facing competition
from low-wage countries: They are generally too small to wield any pricing power, too often single-product
producers unable to diversify market risks, and too dependent on foreign markets, because their home market
is in the doldrums.
Figure 3
Real wage per hour of work in manufacturing: Italy versus the Euro-4 countries, 1970-2015 (euro's,
constant 2010 prices)
Source
: author's calculation based on EU-KLEMS (Jδger 2017).
Figure 4
Manufacturing labour productivity per hour of work: Italy versus the Euro-4
countries, 1970-2015 (euro's, constant 2010 prices)
Source
: author's calculation based on EU-KLEMS (Jδger 2017).
Italy's Permanent Crisis Is a Warning for the Eurozone
There are rational ways to get the Italian economy out of the current paralysis -- none of them easy, and
all of them founded on a long-term strategy of "walking on two legs": (a) reviving domestic (and export)
demand, and (b) diversifying and upgrading the productive structure and innovative capabilities and
strengthening the technological competitiveness of Italy's exports (to get away from direct wage-cost
competition with China). This means that both austerity and real wage growth suppression must stop. Instead,
the Italian government should gear up for providing unambiguous directional thrust to the economy by means
of higher public investment (in public infrastructure and "greening" and decarbonizing energy and
transportation systems) and novel industrial policies to promote innovation, entrepreneurship and stronger
technological competitiveness.
There is no dearth of constructive proposals by Italian economists to help their economy out of the
current mess -- including Guarascio and Simonazzi (2016), Lucchese et al. (2016), Pianta et al. (2016),
Mazzucato (2013), Dosi (2016), and Celi et al. (2018). These proposals all centre on creating a
self-reinforcing process of investment-led and innovation-driven growth, orchestrated by an "entrepreneurial
state" and founded on relatively regulated and co-ordinated firm-worker relationships, rather than on
deregulated labour markets and hyper-flexible employment relations. These proposals might work well.
The same cannot be said, however, of the "one-leg" fiscal stimulus proposed by the M5S-Lega coalition
government, the aim of which is a short-run revival of domestic demand by means of higher public
(consumption) spending. None of the proposed spending will help solving Italy's structural problems. What is
completely lacking is any longer-term directional thrust, or the second leg of a viable strategy -- which the
neoliberal Lega will be unwilling to provide and the "progressive-in-name-only" M5S seems incapable of
devising (Fazio 2018). Plus ηa change, plus c'est la mκme chose.
More importantly, any rational "two-leg" developmental strategy will be incompatible with sticking to the
EMU macroeconomic rulebook and keeping financial markets calm, which are supposed to act as the
disciplinarian of Eurozone sovereigns (Costantini 2018; Halevi 2019). This is clear from what happened when
the M5S-Lega government came up with an expansionary Draft Budgetary Plan (DBP) for 2019. The total impact
of the one-leg fiscal stimulus initially proposed in the 2019 DBP amounted to an estimated 1.2% of GDP in
2019, 1.4% in 2020 and 1.3% in 2021 -- and even this minute budgetary expansion triggered strong negative
responses from the European Commission and increases in Italian bond yields.
Blanchard
et al.
(2018, p. 2) formalize this status quo in a mechanical debt-dynamics model and
conclude that the 2019 DBP risks triggering "unmanageable spreads and serious crisis, including involuntary
exit from the Eurozone." Blanchard
et al
. (2018, p. 16) argue for a fiscally neutral budget, which
they think would lead to lower interest rates and "probably" (in their words) to higher growth and
employment. Equations, graphs and technocratic econospeak are competently used to turn what in fact
constitutes a very modest transgression of the EMU rulebook into a low-probability- catastrophic event -- which
everyone would want to avoid (see Costantini 2018). What is tragic is that the 2019 DBP does not come close
to what would be needed for a rational strategy. All the sound and fury is for nothing.
Worse still is the fact that maintaining Italy's status quo, which is what a fiscally neutral budget
would mean, carries a real, but unrecognized low-probability, high-impact risk: a breakdown of political and
social stability in the country. Continued stagnation will feed the resentment and anti-establishment,
anti-euro forces in Italy. This will destabilize not just Italy, but the entire Eurozone. Italy's crisis
thus constitutes a warning to the Eurozone as a whole: Continued austerity and real wage restraint, in
combination with the de-democratization of macroeconomic policymaking, make for a "dangerous game" (Costantini
2018) -- a game which risks further empowering anti-establishment forces elsewhere in the Eurozone as well.
This is like opening Pandora's box. No one can tell where this will end. Economists (including Italians)
carry an enormous responsibility in all this, both because they are much to blame for the chaos and because
they fail to continue to unite behind rational strategic solutions to resolve the Italian crisis. "Perhaps,"
John Maynard Keynes wrote, "it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own
hand" (Keynes 1919). Rational economists have to prove Keynes' verdict wrong, starting in Italy -- if only
because the Brexit mess appears to be beyond redemption.
Article seems to ignore why Germany is holding so much Italian Debt, which to my reading is Germany wanted
to create a captured market and kill off export competition with the foundation of a currency union at the
exchange rates set and provision of easy credit for German goods, with the long term goal of creating a 4th
Reich by means of capital slavery. Like climate change, many Italian intellectual elite knew this was going to
happen, but that it would enrich them at the cost to both the old capital elite and working classes, with the
bill falling due long after they had passed away.
When people talk about Italy being unstable: From the post, which describes the stability of austerity >
Italy kept closer to the rules than France and Germany and paid heavily for this: The permanent fiscal
consolidation, the persistent wage restraint and the overvalued exchange rate killed Italian aggregate
demand -- and the demand shortage asphyxiated the growth of output, productivity, jobs and incomes. Italy's
stasis is an object lesson for all Eurozone economies, but -- paraphrasing G.B. Shaw -- as a warning, not as an
example.
And people wonder why the Movimento Cinque Stelle arose? Or why Matteo Salvini, Trump imitator, now has so
much influence?
All of the graphs show that the average person in Italy has been made poorer because of EU policies and the
euro. The remarkable thing is that Italians still want to remain in the EU and in the euro because these
supranational structures keep the Italian state in line. Yet job creation is stalled. There is a considerable
brain drain. The Mezzogiorno is gradually losing populationemptying out because the economic prospects are so
dire.
And the left is in collapse because of years of Renzi's Blairism / Clintonism.
The main way big corporations corrupt the movement is by lobbing for tax preferential regime.
Neoliberalism included "voodoo" supply side economics thory that speculates that lower taxes
increase employment, while in reality they mostly increase the wealth of capital owners. This
theory is brainwashed itno people minds by relentless neoliberal propaganda machine -- all major
MSM are controlled by neoliberals. Common people have no say in this gbig game.
But tax regime is the battlefield were big capital fights labor and big capital since 1970
won all major battles.
Notable quotes:
"... "Because of relentless lobbying, our corporate income tax rules are filled with so many loopholes and exemptions and deductions that even companies that tell shareholders they have made more than a billion dollars in profits can end up paying no corporate income taxes," Warren wrote in a Medium post unveiling the plan. "Let's bring in the revenue we need to invest in opportunity for all Americans. And let's make this year the last year any company with massive profits pays zero federal taxes." ..."
"... Warren's plan is aimed at large corporations -- ones that have generally paid lower tax rates than smaller companies in recent years. The GOP tax cut law nearly doubled the number of publicly held companies that paid no federal taxes from 30 to 60 in the last year alone, according to a recent study from the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. ..."
"... This is the latest significant tax proposal the Massachusetts senator has unveiled as part of her campaign platform, which also includes a two percent surtax on people with more than $50 million in assets and a three percent surtax on those who have $1 billion. ..."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) unveiled a major plank in her
platform to tax the rich on Thursday, introducing plans for a new tax on all corporations that
clear $100 million in annual profits.
Warren's "real corporate profits tax" is aimed at large corporations like Amazon that have
generated huge profits in recent years while almost entirely avoiding federal taxes through a
series of loopholes and credits.
"Because of relentless lobbying, our corporate income tax rules are filled with so many
loopholes and exemptions and deductions that even companies that tell shareholders they have
made more than a billion dollars in profits can end up paying no corporate income taxes,"
Warren
wrote in a Medium post unveiling the plan. "Let's bring in the revenue we need to invest in
opportunity for all Americans. And let's make this year the last year any company with massive
profits pays zero federal taxes."
The plan would institute a seven percent tax on profits over $100 million in addition to
current taxes. An economic analysis released by Warren's campaign estimated that at least 1,200
companies would be forced to pay new taxes under the plan, generating a net revenue boost of at
least $1 trillion for the government.
Warren's plan is aimed at large corporations -- ones that have generally paid lower tax
rates than smaller companies in recent years. The GOP tax cut law nearly doubled the number of
publicly held companies that paid no federal taxes from 30 to 60 in the last year alone,
according to a recent study from the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic
Policy.
This is the latest significant tax proposal the Massachusetts senator has unveiled as part
of her campaign platform, which also includes a two percent surtax on people with more than $50
million in assets and a three percent surtax on those who have $1 billion.
The plans have earned her plaudits on the left and drawn concern from some more
business-friendly moderate Democrats.
But so far, they haven't proven a game-changer in the presidential race. Warren continues to
struggle to siphon off a significant chunk of voters who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) last
election, her natural base of support. She's regularly polled in the mid- to upper-single
digits in recent state and national polls, in the second tier of candidates.
And she
raised just $6 million in her first quarter in the campaign, her team announced yesterday.
That's not a terrible haul in a crowded field, especially since she's sworn off big donors, but
it's nothing compared to the huge sums she pulled in as a Senate candidate -- and trailed even
upstart South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D).
She also spent almost all of that money, having
built out a large staff in the early primary states with a high payroll.
And Sanders isn't giving her much room on her left: He reintroduced a
sweeping Medicare for all plan on Wednesday, which she cosponsored, a move that puts
pressure on Warren and other Democrats to keep up as they try to woo the progressive wing of
the party base.
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to
the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’
done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been
a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that
organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored
by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from
‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly
goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has
been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating
for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
"... "They're only up in arms if they believe that there is an alternative." ..."
"... "Evil essentially is predatory and destructive behavior. Socrates said that it ultimately is ignorance, because nobody would set out intentionally to do it. But in that case, evil would be an educational system that imposes ignorance and tunnel vision, distracting attention from understanding how economic society actually works in destructive ways." ..."
"... MH: It's becoming a second Gilded Age. An abrupt change of direction in economic trends occurred after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were elected in 1979/80. The result has been to invert what the 19th-century economists understood to be a free market -- that is, a market free from a privileged hereditary class living on unearned income in the form of land rent, monopoly rent and financial extraction. ..."
"... JS: I was in my first few years of college when Thatcher came in in 1979, and when Reagan was elected in 1980. I asked my economics professors what was going on, but I could not find a single professor to coherently describe the U-turn that was occurring. It certainly wasn't in Paul Samuelson's textbook that we were given. ..."
"... Neoliberalism actually started with Carter in the late 1970's, and it was Volcker's monetary assault that helped lose him the election (and of course the Iran hostage crisis). ..."
"... The outcomes were not so predetermined and could have been Carter-Callaghan rather than the Reagan-Thatcher duo that did so much to force the world along the neoliberal path, and bring us "New" Neoliberal Labour (that Thatcher actually stated was her greatest achievement) ..."
"... I think evil takes on a life of its own. Over the course of civilization it gets standardized. But what I see happening right now is a bunch of apoplectic, frantic "oligarchs" with egg on their face begging us all to help them change. ..."
"... I don't wish to mount a defense of the Republican Elite; the system did pressure towards money-love. However, there were counter balancing features. Money was vital, but so was virtue. Honour, courage, dignity were ..."
"... A Roman aristocrat had to perform the minimum set required military campaigns. Only intellectual freaks such as Cicero could climb the hierarchy without making somekind of significant military achievement. ..."
"... Caesar won the Laural crown (?) through genuine acts of bravery. Roman aristocrats risked their lives & died in war. And their troops knew it. ..."
"... Systems of Survival ..."
"... Money addiction -- I have trouble reconciling that concept with the short-term biases of the wealthy and their seeming lack of interest in economic growth. They aren't happy with a bigger slice of pie from a bigger pie. They want grow their slice from the pie relative to everyone else -- even if the pie grows smaller. Money as power, and an insatiable lust for power is more consistent with the actions of the oligarchs. ..."
"... "That leaves the question facing us today: Is the American oligarchy and state as rapacious as that of Rome?" -- I'm not sure this post really answered that opening question. I believe the American oligarchy, while continuing in the long tradition of oligarchic depredation, is much more rapacious than that of Rome and much more dangerous as the world rushes toward collapse. After the fossil fuels are gone there are no more. The Climate is already lurching into chaos and may have already crossed a point of no near-term return to the relatively mild and stable climate immediately preceding the Anthropocene. ..."
Money-love [φιλοχρηματία, philochrêmatia] has always been extreme because wealth is addictive
From what I've been able to glean regarding Roman society, wealth acquisition was strongly driven by the demands of a political
order that was relatively unstructured and unstable, depending on imperial whims, favoritism, influence purchasing. In the eyes
of a pleb it might look like elites were just whooping it up -- and that was certainly true -- but their fun had a systemic driver
to it. To be sure you're in favor, or that your coalition is holding up, you need sesterces.
That's what the Romans told their provinces. Everything they did was always to preserve "good order," meaning open opportunities
for their own wealth grabbing. They never said they were out to destroy and loot other societies.
This is largely true, but I was gobsmacked to find Caesar, in his Commentary on the Gallic Wars, serving up an extended quote
of a Gallic "state" leader exhorting his followers to fight Caesar in order to escape slavery. Caesar even allows the guy to distinguish
between earlier conflicts, in which another state would invade, plunder, and then leave, from conflicts with the Romans, in which
the state would be occupied forever and its people enslaved. Brunt cites Caesar as boasting the wars gained 1,000,000 slaves,
a figure he regards as inflated, but he also notes that other writers of the time didn't strongly dispute it.
I've got it on Kindle, so why not let Caesar report Critognatus' speech:
The Cimbri, after laying Gaul waste, and inflicting great calamities, at length departed from our country, and sought other
lands; they left us our rights, laws, lands, and liberty.
But what other motive or wish have the Romans, than, induced by envy, to settle in the lands and states of those whom they
have learned by fame to be noble and powerful in war, and impose on them perpetual slavery?
For they never have carried on wars on any other terms.
There's little logic for neoliberalism beyond a faith that short-term greed is the best way to optimize long-term
growth.
Or as George H.W. Bush said: Voodoo economics. But he didn't stick to that position very long once Reagan took him on
board.
Thanks again to NC for the great series. However this non economics person will very humbly repeat my objection that while
money equals power, power doesn't necessarily have to be about money. I recently read a book about the history of the Plains indians
and for them power was represented by horses–a kind of wealth to be sure–but also by bravery and skill at violence. So perhaps
what we are really talking about is not economic systems and theories but this will to dominate that causes power to corrupt and
creates the mindset that "too much is never enough." In other words the problem is really all about psychology with economics
as a subbranch. A future era of better psychologists may produce better economists. Or here's hoping.
"They're only up in arms if they believe that there is an alternative."
"Evil essentially is predatory and destructive behavior. Socrates said that it ultimately is ignorance, because nobody
would set out intentionally to do it. But in that case, evil would be an educational system that imposes ignorance and tunnel
vision, distracting attention from understanding how economic society actually works in destructive ways."
"If we don't go for it then somebody will and we'll lose out" was the frustrating bottom line for an iron worker I was speaking
with about the proposal to drop a new NFL tax payer subsidized practice facility into our already development gridlocked area.
Every point I made to him circled right back to this justification.
He just couldn't conceive of an alternative and I wasn't prepared enough to offer him others.
Because nowadays we must consider the economic tradeoff on everything–just like we are told.
which brings up that sweet definition of evil by MH–within the context of JS's question about enabling Climate Change
As soon as that guy becomes more concerned about feeding his kids, and less concerned about football stadiums, it's possible
he'll be much more focused, more understanding, and willing to listen to your opinion.
MH: It's becoming a second Gilded Age. An abrupt change of direction in economic trends occurred after Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher were elected in 1979/80. The result has been to invert what the 19th-century economists understood to be a free
market -- that is, a market free from a privileged hereditary class living on unearned income in the form of land rent, monopoly
rent and financial extraction.
JS: I was in my first few years of college when Thatcher came in in 1979, and when Reagan was elected in 1980. I asked my
economics professors what was going on, but I could not find a single professor to coherently describe the U-turn that was occurring.
It certainly wasn't in Paul Samuelson's textbook that we were given.
This interview with Mr. Hudson has been a fascinating education. Thank you, Yves.
That said, there is a tendency, at least in the tone of the interview, to ascribe a kind of insuperable power to top-down manipulation
and control by the oligarchies of which Hudson speaks. My sense is that, instead, sometimes the mass of people want to be so free
of one perceived set of problems that they support stepping into another -- as in the early 1980s.
MMT and "intelligent jubilee" (i.e., the opposite of what Geithner/Obama/Benanke did) supporters -- of which I am one -- might
do well to consider what preceded the so-called Reagan revolution:
Rising inflation and unemployment in the 1970s were perceived to becoming inescapable in the US political landscape of the
time.
The bad news about life in the Soviet Union was leaking out faster and faster in the late 1970s, once the American media lionized
the cause of refuseniks like Natan Sharansky during the Carter years. (Remember Peter Jennings covering the trials and persecution
of sweet, innocent, Natan Sharansky -- the wolf who dropped his sheep's clothing once he arrived in Israel?) Sometimes bad guys
provoke important news about other, more powerful, bad guys.
Thousands of American workers came home from Moscow after Carter cancelled US participation in the 1980 Olympics -- with shocking
tales of just how crappy the Russians had it.
Reagan beat Carter and Anderson 51-41-7 in 1980, and Reagan then whooped Mondale 59-41 in the 1984 popular vote. Job growth
had picked up, the American media was generally happy to lead cheers for the US while pummeling the nasty Soviets. It felt like
the Bear that is misfortune had been satisfied with catching the Russkis.
The old joke points out that we humans instinctively know we can't outrun the Bear; the natural tendency is to therefore sometimes
focus on outrunning our neighbors, so the Bear is satisfied to get them. Our ancestors were selected for that feature.
As 'hemeantwell' noted, the fact that Caesar brought home lots of slaves casts a broader light (than Mr. Hudson's interview)
on for whom Caesar's revolution was intended. How might MMT advocates wrestle with the push and pull of similar 'social identity'
competitions when the Bear is seen to be coming?
The bear was frightened, I can tell you, I lived behind the Iron Curtain.
But there was a lot of talk about peace. A lot. Like – everywhere. And it was not fake. People looked on Americans with genuine
interest and a bit of trepidation, and of course (what proved unhealthful) desire to emulate. And they wanted to be friends and
learn from them. Look at C-SPAN videos of 1989, 1990 – for example one of Soviet banking officials at a seminar with US bankers
– and you will see genuine, practically childlike belief that what the US experts and and banking practitioners were saying was
gospel.
Btw I don't know whether the same talk of peace was present in the US at the time. What continually strikes me is how talk
of peace is utterly absent in MSM now, has been for the last 20 years that I have observed.
It's so beneficial to have Mr. Hudson and others who have studied ancient history from the point of view of how money and indebtedness
works to share all this learning with us. How little is the difference between ancient oligarchs and modern ones! We think our
civilization is so wonderful and enlightened when it is just another part of the old system of inequality playing itself out over
and over again. I too wonder how long the wheel of fortune will take to complete this particular circuit, but with climate change
skulking so near, it may not be long.
Neoliberalism actually started with Carter in the late 1970's, and it was Volcker's monetary assault that helped lose him
the election (and of course the Iran hostage crisis). The same in the UK, with the Labour government bringing in the IMF
and fighting with the unions in the later 1970s to cause the "winter of discontent" that brought in Thatcher (and without the
Falklands War Thatcher would have been out after one term). Labour could have called an earlier election and probably won, but
decided not to in a huge tactical mistake.
The outcomes were not so predetermined and could have been Carter-Callaghan rather than the Reagan-Thatcher duo that did
so much to force the world along the neoliberal path, and bring us "New" Neoliberal Labour (that Thatcher actually stated was
her greatest achievement)
My only quibble would be to point out that you are referring to the neoliberal implementation -- it's tenets are rather older,
dating back at least to the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium.
And well before that, as demonstrated clearly in Quinn Slobodian's recent "Globalists".
This stimulating book considers the historical development of the nexus of ideas and policy initiatives that fall under the
umbrella term 'neoliberalism' -- the political-economic structures and processes that have given us expanding 'globalizing financialization',
legal trade agreements that constrain national sovereignty, massively increasing asset and income disparities, and the consequent
precariousness and stress -- even misery -- afflicting most of us.
Though neoliberalism's origin is commonly associated with the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded in 1947, and prominently with the
figures of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and more recently with Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys", Slobodian demonstrates
that neoliberalism's roots reach much deeper -- into the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- indeed of all traditional
off-shore empires -- following WW1, and in subsequent decolonization and the rise of new nations with aspirations of their own.
In large part, neoliberal order, with its international trade deals, was a response to the "problem" posed by the demands of these
diverse new nations to join the 'developed' world on an equal footing with their erstwhile colonial overlords, and to take sovereign
control of their own resources.
So, contrary to conventional understanding, neoliberalism did not spring fully-formed, post-WW2, from the foreheads of Walter
Lippman, von Mises, or Hayek; indeed, the cast of characters playing their parts in this developing drama is a rather large one,
and their origins, interconnections, and contributions are many and diverse, and often surprising.
Mankind survived the collapse of Rome. Barbarism was ascendent in the West. Civilization rose again. This time the collapse
will result in barbarism at the best.
The world problem is Climate Change. Climate change is a product of overpopulation & portable energy as that which creates
Climate change.
The US Treasury creates currency when Congress Votes a Bill that requires it. What is required is an MMT principled Fund that
pays for renewables, energy capture, nuclear power and those new machines that suck CO2 out of the air & turn it into clean hydrocarbon
fuels. The machine has been invented by Carbon Engineering. Takes up 30 acres. Hundreds of thousands are needed to stabilize CO2
levels in the atmosphere.
Methane was never factored in very well into the 1970s understanding of what was then called Ecology. Now we know that the
Methane being released by fracking and permafrost melting is already happening and will keep happening and accelerating so that
there will be a Methane Bubble Melt. 10 to 15 years and all the Methane will melt.
I see what was expected to happen to earth with a population of 9 billion as happening at 7.5 billon or exactly where we are
now. The expectation was that 9 billion was sustainable. 13 billion was said to be sustainable for 3 weeks.
Coral reefs are dying. Insects are dying. Diatoms are the bottom of the food chain in the oceans. They are dependent on coral
reefs. Birds depend on insects and their populations are dwindling.
I consider MMT, the work of conceptual art that allows currency to be generated by bills passed by governments, or a World
government, as a Last Chance Concept.
"The civilized work for what they want, while the barbarians steal what they want." In my civilization I am paid to do work.
Concepts are made real as money is given out for what is not yet real. The young want to have families and the old want the world
they helped build and make safe survive. Such compulsions are innate and often ethical. It is simply unethical to leave the world
worse than you found it.
Idea to idea to real & Ideal is ideal. The American philosophy is ethical eclectic pragmatism. Climate Change is not just to
be fought because it will get hotter but because the food chain will collapse. Other than from the MMT Funding for what it will
take to possibly protect the food chain, what have we?
I think evil takes on a life of its own. Over the course of civilization it gets standardized. But what I see happening
right now is a bunch of apoplectic, frantic "oligarchs" with egg on their face begging us all to help them change.
And none of us feel much warmth toward them. Somehow in the late 70s we the people, the laborers, small farmers, and mom &
pops and small business got blamed for everything that went wrong. And austerity was force-fed to us. What went wrong was actually
military hubris. Now there's an example of non-productive interest inflating away the empire. If the money had been used rationally
we'd have created an equal, balanced society and encouraged others by our example. Humans have always chosen the things that work
best. Somewhere, mid-century we freaked out and decided that we needed to control oil and growth but we were literally overtaken
by our own successes – big agriculture, population growth and ponzi economics. The thing we have to do now is bring this mess
back down to Earth. Requiring a fundamental change.
To change everything and turn it around. No more little tweaks of denial. Instead of the once successful "industrial" capitalism,
what we must have now is environmental capitalism. Value and share the gains of preserving the planet. It sounds like a full reversion
to a time before money, which is the symbol of material exploitation.
And it just so happens we still have the instinct for cooperation. The gains can be distributed to everyone. We just must find
ways that preserve rather than destroy the planet. Same idea, different god. There are plenty of jobs to go around. We have good
science and technology. We're not total idiots, yet. It only takes a minority of people to see the light and everything will change.
I do think we are already there, except for the shouting, as they say.
But those holding and near the levers of power are really sick and deluded individuals. And we have to understand this about
the nukes (post 1945): They exist in case the USA loses a big war or doesn't get its way. Yes, that is the level of depravity
that has developed.
Thanks so much for this series of posts on the ancient world and its comparison to today. I once read Seneca's "Letters from
a Stoic" and was surprised to see/realize the considerable apparent overlap between stoicism – which was itself the continuation
of an earlier tradition – and the early Christian church.
A great article this with lots to chew on. What he says rings true from what I have read. After the second Punic war, Roman
veterans found that the wealthy had seized their small farm holdings while they were gone and incorporated them into their own
estates. These were to become the great Latifundium. Meanwhile, the dispossessed Romans veterans made their way to Rome and joined
the plebs there. Over time, as the Roman army could not recruit these same type of landed men as the smaller holdings were being
eliminated, the Romans had to resort to a professional standing body which no longer owed their allegiance to Rome but to whatever
Roman general paid them – with disastrous results. Caesar was not the first here and the name Sulla also comes to mind. By the
end of the empire the Romans were resorting to paying barbarian tribes to fight for them which worked, until it didn't. So in
short, the greed of the wealthy in Rome destroyed the very thing that had made Rome so successful and resilient.
I don't wish to mount a defense of the Republican Elite; the system did pressure towards money-love. However, there were
counter balancing features. Money was vital, but so was virtue. Honour, courage, dignity were required.
A Roman aristocrat had to perform the minimum set required military campaigns. Only intellectual freaks such as Cicero
could climb the hierarchy without making somekind of significant military achievement.
Caesar won the Laural crown (?) through genuine acts of bravery. Roman aristocrats risked their lives & died in war. And
their troops knew it.
Other factors also tended to mitigate against the oligarchic instinct. For instance, Senators were legally barred from trade
or money lending (& yes, they often got around such bans. ) Sumptuary laws were tried (& failed).
It should also be remembered that for all the economic polarisation, Roman citizenship was highly valued. The Roman's won the
2nd Punic , essentially because Hannibal fundamentally miscalculated -- Roman allies, Latins etc did not go over to Hannibal in
hordes. They stayed loyal.
In Systems of Survival , Jane Jacobs meditated on different power structures. Some required virtus , steadfastness,
etc., others, notably money power didn't.
Somebody, somewhere, wrote about alchemy's response to money, in seeking the Philosopher's Stone. That would be a chemical
that could be transformed into anything in a chemical reaction, rather as money could in the market. I thought it was in Graeber's
Debt , but it's not showing up there.
Philosopher's Stone= the Replicator Tech in Star Trek. costless production of basic needs. add in warp drive(=unlimited expansion,
limited time-cost), and the inherent human traits that cause all the problems(ie: greed, etc) are overcome without having to fix/eliminate
them just give them somewhere to go.(this is why i'm all for asteroid mining)
Several things trouble me about this post. People believe there is no alternative -- I disagree with that view. I'd restate
the assertion as great efforts are and have been made to convince people there is no alternative. You don't need to be my age
to learn a little about tax rates in the Eisenhower years. The economy did all right then. My impression talking with young people
isn't that they believe there is no alternative, instead they have no idea how to make things change for the better, and neither
do us old farts. Our democracy is broken. It no longer cares for the public good.
Money addiction -- I have trouble reconciling that concept with the short-term biases of the wealthy and their seeming
lack of interest in economic growth. They aren't happy with a bigger slice of pie from a bigger pie. They want grow their slice
from the pie relative to everyone else -- even if the pie grows smaller. Money as power, and an insatiable lust for power is more
consistent with the actions of the oligarchs.
I think the concept of growth which shows up in several parts of the post needs some adjustment. Growth is tied to the consumption
of fossil fuels as is increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels are nearing points of declining and unstable production. Unless
growth can be decoupled from fossil fuels all the imperial control of what fossil fuels remain will do little but extend our time
at the expense of others as we all race toward a point of collapse.
Some of the discussion of Neoliberalism confuses me. -- Neoliberalism is not the same as laissez-faire or neoclassical economics.
"That leaves the question facing us today: Is the American oligarchy and state as rapacious as that of Rome?" -- I'm not
sure this post really answered that opening question. I believe the American oligarchy, while continuing in the long tradition
of oligarchic depredation, is much more rapacious than that of Rome and much more dangerous as the world rushes toward collapse.
After the fossil fuels are gone there are no more. The Climate is already lurching into chaos and may have already crossed a point
of no near-term return to the relatively mild and stable climate immediately preceding the Anthropocene.
Thermonuclear weapons scattered in many hands adds existential danger to the threats posed by the American oligarchy and Power
Elite structures and their insane lust for power.
Other than these quibbles, this is a remarkable series of posts presenting what to me is a very new view of the ancient world.
It offers a much better understanding of the ancient world and some of its key literature and early writings. Time to order some
books [I still haven't ordered a copy of "Forgive Them Their Debts" and now have to add a copy of this most recent book.]
Had lunch with one of the "Chicago Boys" that Hudson describes as the source of economics current woes.
After that lunch, which was a discussion of many of Michael's themes, I completely agree with his assessment of what they have
wrought. While the Chicago Boys may profess to have Mill and Ricardo as hero's, as Hudson does, Mills and Ricardo's theories are
obliterated by the way the Chicago Boys have completely fallen in love with Ayn Rand's philosophy. Everyone is on their own. The
rich are rich because they are naturally better at stuff than those who are not. They hate government regulation, they view government
as the creator of problems, they have no compunction for watching the population sink into debt and penury. After all "it's their
own look out".
Funny, when you read things abstractly on a wonderful site like Naked Capitalism, but then witness this terrible philosophy
first hand, suddenly things are not so abstract. Michael's right.
"... The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes ..."
"... there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. ..."
"... In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. ..."
"... Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction ..."
"... The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. ..."
"... concerns about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated." Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. ..."
"... Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money. ..."
"... Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now." ..."
"... Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates can raise money from the Jewish community. ..."
"... Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors in the Middle East are OK by them. ..."
"... any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class. ..."
"... Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." ..."
"... Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure last fall to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way. ..."
"... Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation. ..."
"... I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it, for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation," he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black people." ..."
"... Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru. ..."
"... Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. ..."
"... First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. ..."
"... The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course, an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts. ..."
"... anyone who believes that the interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly naοve or worse ..."
"... "Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University. ..."
"... "American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel.'" ..."
"... Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky. ..."
"... The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing to resist. ..."
"... Phil likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel. ..."
"... on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization" surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think. ..."
"... The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness. ..."
"... Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that. ..."
"... 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian people under Occupation. ..."
"... Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests. ..."
"... A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land. ..."
This weekend the New York Times
breaks
one of the biggest taboos , describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party's slavish support for Israel.
Nathan Thrall's groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we've reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins,
as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism
that's the nut. Though that party is breaking up. Thrall's labors are minimized by the New York Times with the headline "The Battle
Over B.D.S.," but his message is that the progressive base has a highly-critical view of Israel that the leadership has refused to
reflect, and that's about to change. We're inside the tent. The party is going to have to reflect pro-Palestinian positions. Ben
Rhodes tells Thrall that the moment of overcoming the fear of the pro-Israel lobby (as the Cuba fear was overcome) is about to happen.
The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for
instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of
Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes. Deep into his piece, Thrall explains why progressives
aren't being heard. Megadonors.
For all the recent tumult over Israel in Washington, the policy debate remains extremely narrow Despite pointed critiques of American
support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and Omar, there is little willingness
among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel.
In part, some Hill staff members
and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater
than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by
Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room.
Though
the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing
in the opposite direction
As we reported from Ben Rhodes's book,
Rhodes tells Thrall that donors forced Obama to hew to the Netanyahu line.
According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser and one of Obama's closest confidants, several members of the
Obama administration wanted to adopt a more assertive policy toward Israel but felt that their hands were tied. "The Washington
view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists
are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is." Peter Joseph, an emeritus chairman of the center-left Israel
Policy Forum, told me that the views of major Democratic Jewish donors could act as a check on the leftward pull by progressive
voters who are strongly critical of Israel: "I can't imagine that mainstream Democratic Jewish donors are going to be happy about
any Democratic Party that is moving in that direction."
Off the record, people go further. The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till
the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. We reported as much at the time.
Another former member of the Obama White House, who asked not to be named, fearing professional retaliation, said that concerns
about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated."
Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. Faced with a 2016 United Nations
Security Council resolution condemning settlements, the Obama administration abstained (effectively supporting the resolution),
but only after having signaled it would not consider backing any resolution before November. "There is a reason the U.N. vote
did not come up before the election in November," the former official said. "Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald
Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn't want Clinton to face pressure
to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it."
Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money.
What worries establishment Democrats, the former official added, is that the partisan divide over Israel will concretize -- with
Republicans defined as pro-Israel, Democrats defined as anti-Israel -- and that the party coffers will empty. Joel Rubin, a deputy
assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a
founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters.
It's more about donors now."
Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out
what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg
and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates
can raise money from the Jewish community. We always said Sanders could be better on Palestine because he avoided the donor class
of the Democratic party. Rhodes agrees.
"If you don't rely on a traditional fund-raising model, then you have more freedom on these types of issues," Rhodes said. "You're
not worried about the one-hour phone call that you're going to have to do after the presidential debate with a really angry donor."
The key element here is, older Jewish donors are conservative about Israel. A former Clinton campaign official:
"There's no major donor that I can think of who is looking for someone to take a Bernie-like approach." And whereas none of the
most liberal Jewish donors have threatened to withdraw support because a candidate was too pro-Israel, pro-Israel donors and PACs
have a history of financing opposition to candidates deemed unfriendly. Haim Saban, one of Hillary Clinton's top five donors in
2016, has financed opponents of Democratic candidates critical of Israel
Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors
in the Middle East are OK by them.
In the same [Mellman] poll -- conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved
the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut
humanitarian aid to Palestinians -- roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump's handling of relations
with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements
in the West Bank,
a November
2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned
with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel.
Those Jews are conservative compared to the base, which is increasingly people of color and real progressives.
Members of the Democratic Party's progressive activist base, by contrast, find themselves light years from their representatives
in Washington.
And any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class.
Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable
with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." In October, just weeks before the 2018 midterm election,
as the Democratic leadership was working to take back the House, a Democratic staff member, who asked not to be named for fear
of professional retaliation, told me that it was important to retain the support of all major donors, not just the most liberal
ones.
Referring to two of the largest Jewish donors to Democrats, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the staff member
said: "Our members need George Soros and Haim Saban. And they need everything in between."
Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure
last fall to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way.
Michigan's administration quickly issued a statement that it would not appoint a committee to investigate divestment. A month
later, the board of regents released a letter backing the decision. (The two regents who didn't sign it were the only people of
color on the board.) Like many large American universities, the University of Michigan has extensive research partnerships with
Israeli universities. And many of its institutes and buildings are named after alumni donors who have contributed large sums to
Israel or pro-Israel groups.
Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the
intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation.
"The American Jewish community, which is broadly speaking liberal, has allowed itself in the name of defending Israel and fighting
B.D.S. to become the leading edge of illiberalism by pushing legislation to curb free speech."
OK now let's get to some of the good news here. Thrall's overall point is that the battle is breaking out, thanks to those women
of color in the House and the progressive base.
As the Democratic Party is pulled toward a more progressive base and a future when a majority of the party will most likely be
people of color, tensions over Israel have erupted. In the past several months, a fierce debate over American support for Israel
has periodically dominated the news cycle and overshadowed the Democrats' policymaking agenda.
BDS is gaining ground. Israel knows it.
Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told me, "Despite the overwhelming support for Israel in the U.S.,
we see that the attempt to delegitimize Israel is gaining ground, especially among extreme left-wing marginal groups."
When have you ever seen such a fair assessment of BDS in the Times?
Instead of tying itself to a specific outcome, the B.D.S. movement insisted on these three principles, which could be fulfilled
any number of ways: two states, one state with equal individual rights, a confederation with equal collective rights.
This is a simple turn by Thrall on why Zionism is racist at its core.
Following the 1948 war, which erupted after the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine into two states, the
Jews who fled could return; Palestinians could not.
Here's another great moment, brilliant reporting.
I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it,
for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation,"
he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black
people."
Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we
say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."
Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru.
Currently, hundreds of Israeli towns have admissions committees that can bar Palestinian citizens from living in them based on
"social suitability." (It's illegal for people to be excluded on the basis of race, religion or nationality, but the rubric of
"social suitability" permits the rejection of applicants who are not Zionist, haven't served in the army or don't intend to send
their children to Hebrew-language schools.)
More than 900 towns in Israel contain no Arab families, according to Yosef Jabareen,
a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Palestinian schools can lose government funding if they commemorate
the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency
for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.
And that's why MD Rep. Donna Edwards and two white congressional colleagues locked arms and sang We Shall Overcome in apartheid Hebron:
Edwards and her colleagues looked up to see garbage-filled nets hanging above their heads, put up to catch trash thrown by Israeli
settlers. "We had never seen anything like that," she told me recently. "Hebron is the place where I think you can see in the
most frightening way what the injustice is, where you have people on one side of the street who live one way and people on another
side of the street living another way. And streets that some people can cross and walk on, but other people cannot. To me, it
looked like the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me about living in the South."
The great news at the end of the article. Edwards et al are taking over the party. Thrall cites Electronic Intifada's influence,
and Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow too.
Politicians speaking on Israel-Palestine used to worry primarily about attacks from pro-Israel media and activist groups; now
progressives are starting to feel some heat from the pro-Palestinian side.
But it's over. All the anti-Omar stuff of recent weeks is just the froth on the wave. Jim Zogby got slamdunked on the platform in
2016 by the Clintonites. But that wont' happen again.
James Zogby says that standing for Palestinian rights is guaranteed to be a major topic in the 2020 election: "It's a smell-test
issue. If you go to young people, they know you stink if you don't talk about it right." A senior Democratic staff member on Capitol
Hill told me: "People like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders have opened the floodgates on this issue. It may be painful
for the party as we move in a more progressive direction. But we'll come out in a better place -- a more moral and evenhanded
place -- in the end."
This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. And Thrall did the shrewd
thing of avoiding the word "lobby." I guess it's been anathematized, but that's what this article is about. That and race. People
of color are driving this change. They are going to be punished. Betty McCollum doesn't get taken to the woodshed for calling it
apartheid, but one county west, Ilhan Omar is going to be primaried next year.
About Philip
Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
" This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. "
Wrong. Read it again. He focuses mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party so he doesn't say much about them, but
he does say that they are among the most pro-Israel groups, but are also mostly Republican voters.
I just read it again and I think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic
Party" is flat out wrong it covers that but a lot else as well. It's a big sprawling piece that covers campus politics, the
human rights situation is Israel, the political temperature in the American Jewish community, the whole anti-semitism debate in
the U.S. and so on. I take the last paragraph as support for Phil's assertion that the piece will have an impact:
During his introduction of Sanders, King spoke of the Vermont senator's family members murdered in the Holocaust, and how
coming of age in these circumstances "gave Bernie a deep sense of right and wrong." King said: "He has always rejected the status
quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa, when -- crazily -- that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today," King
added, "he speaks out against apartheid like conditions in Palestine, even though it's not popular." The crowd erupted in cheers.
"Israel Lobby and Pro-Israel House Democrats Tried to Excommunicate Ilhan Omar, They Failed"
By Richard Silverstein
EXCERPT:
... ... ...
"The 2018 Congressional election marked a watershed, sweeping a new progressive class into office. Most prominent among them
were Reps. Rashid Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, women who challenged the system, incumbents, and the Democratic
machine to win sweeping victories on truly progressive platforms. Their Middle East agenda was particularly forthright, and therefore
shocking: they opposed U.S. aid to Israel, supported BDS and a one state solution (AOC has not expressed herself as explicitly
on these issues, but presumably shares many of her colleagues' views).
"Anyone who knows the Israel Lobby knew that the other shoe was bound to drop. They just didn't know when. And it didn't take
long. Both Tlaib and especially Omar have been outspoken on Israel-Palestine since their elections. And their markedly pro-Palestine
views have rapidly become grist for the anti-Semitism mill churned by the Lobby and its water-carriers in Congress.
"First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the
Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. But somehow, noting that the
Lobby derived its power from money morphed into outright anti-Semitism. The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course,
an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the
media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre
to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts.
"But the Lobby plays a game of smoke and mirrors. It sees a clear statement attacking it and manages through a bit of hocus-pocus
to transform it into a classic anti-Semitic charge, when in actuality there is absolutely no connection.
"Now, the Lobby has done it again after Omar gave a talk at a Washington DC bookstore in which she criticized those in Congress
and the Lobby who had a foreign allegiance: 'I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K.
for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.'
"By this, of course she meant that groups like Aipac and their Congressional sponsors who take their marching orders either
from Israel directly, or who conceive their agenda totally with Israel and its interests in mind. They may believe that the interests
of the U.S. and Israel are the same; and that therefore they are not betraying U.S. interests. But anyone who believes that the
interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly
naοve or worse.
"After Omar's statement, the Lobby went into Defcon mode. The attack was launched by Eliot Engel, a veteran of the New York
Democratic machine, who attacked the Somali-American Congresswoman:
"Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are
more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It
was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the
first president of Brandeis University.
And he used the term to deride precisely the figures Omar is now attacking: a powerful
Lobby and its apologists who put Israel before all else. This is a passage from the 1961 American Jewish Yearbook:
"American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar,
president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among
Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside
of Israel.'"
"The NY Times headline about the speech said Sachar derided the 'dogma of Israel.' If American Jews can quarrel over the meaning
and primacy of Israel in Jewish life, why would we deny Arab American the same right, considering that their Palestinian sisters
and brothers are under the boot heel of Israeli Occupation?
"It would not be so bad if Israel was a democratic, secular nation like the U.S. and most western democracies. Then at least
there would be a confluence of interests and values. But Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run
by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic
west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and
oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents
used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky.
"Apparently, Congress has not yet read the memo. It is sunk in old ways and habits. The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing
to resist. But the old ways are dying. The election victories I referenced above testify to that more strongly than a $100-million
Sheldon Adelson donation.
"That's why the anti-Semitism fire-drill convened by the Democratic Congressional leadership was initially so infuriating.
It decided to take Omar to the woodshed and whip her by passing a resolution denouncing anti-Semitism by its members. This represented
the Democratic Party eating its young. Nancy Pelosi, at the goading of Engel, Nita Lowey and other pro-Israel members, tabled
a pointless resolution. It would have forced members to swear allegiance on pain of getting a public spanking like Omar. The final
wording never ended up referring directly to Omar. But the message was clear: shut up on the subject or the Party caucus will
exact a toll."
"think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party" is flat out wrong it covers
that but a lot else as well. "
That's true. It is one of the best pieces I have ever seen in this subject. I am not knocking the piece -- I am correcting
Phil. Thrall doesn't write much about why Republicans support Israel, where Christian Zionists are a major factor. Phil claimed
he didn't say anything about Christian Zionists when he actually did. Phil didn't notice that because to the extent the piece
was about political parties in the US, it focused on the Democrats where Christian Zionists are not very important. Also, Phil
likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel.
Liberal Christian guilt about anti-Semitism also plays a role.
If Thrall were writing about the political right he would have to say a lot about how many on the Christian Right see Israel
as a central element in their belief on how the world was going to end. He would be writing about Hal Lindsay's books and later
the "Left Behind" series and how on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization"
surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think.
That included both Jews and Muslims who were tortured on the rack, also known as the auto-da-fe
I realize this is a bit of a nitpick, but the auto-da-fι was the final public confession prior to execution it had
nothing whatsoever to do with any specific instrument of torture.
The fact that nobody in the entire editorial process noticed this obvious screwup, speaks volumes about the lack of
standards (and the lack of knowledge of European history) in the modern print media.
Given that the author was using the Inquisition as a rhetorical device, it would have been nice if he didn't come away from
the attempt looking like an ignoramus.
The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference
is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness.
My one beef with Mondoweiss
is that you regularly downplay the role of American Evangelical Christianity in the oppression of the Palestinians.
I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what is essentially
a public relations war for control of the Middle East. Right-wing Christianity especially those who espouse Dominionist beliefs
will tolerate ANY form of behavior that fits their views of Biblical prophecy. Absent these believers, who honestly don't give
a crap about Israel's behavior, the hue and cry of anti-semitism is the only weapon the Zionists have.
Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match
the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that.
TERRYHEATON- ". I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what
is essentially a public relations war for control of the Middle East."
Well, you would say that wouldn't you? Miss the 700 club do you? The reality is that Evangelical Christian support for Israel
and Zionism didn't really take off until the late 1970s as a consequence of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's recruitment of their support.
This was well after Israel and Zionism had firmly established itself following the 1967 six day war. Zionism and Israel is an
overwhelmingly Jewish project, Christian Zionists little more than opportunistic camp followers. The Christian Zionist leadership
has taken advantage of the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of Jewish Zionist power. While these Christian Zionists may be
numerous, they lack the access to the corridors of power comparable to the Jewish Zionists, although their alliance with Jewish
Zionism has improved their status.
Phil is correct to downplay the power of the Christian Zionists. They have negligible effect upon the policies of either Israel
or the American Jewish Zionists, pats on the head notwithstanding. Their power lies more in supporting the rightward drift in
American politics.
Keith, thanks for the input. If you've read my book, then you already know my feelings about The 700 Club and Pat Robertson.
Sadly, Christian Zionists are not at all merely clinging to right-wing beliefs. They started many of them. In fact, that's what
we did at The 700 Club. Rather, they're waiting and hoping for the return of Jesus Christ, who will then, the thinking goes, elevate
them and bring peace for 1,000 years. So their support of Israel is from their interpretation of scripture, and that's a powerful
force that permits them to look the other way whenever Israel's behavior is questioned. They don't care, because they have their
eyes on what they view as a bigger prize. Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. would never get their way without the blind support of
this massive group of citizens.
'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's
our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian
people under Occupation.
Thanks, Chuck, for the enlightenment! Boy, do I feel dumb now!!
@ genesto: 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course,
we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' ||
So according to Mr. Schumer's "logic" any lack of peace with Muslims isn't the fault of Muslims it's the fault of non-Muslims
(including Jews) who do not believe in the Qur'an.
Very good! Unfortunately,
logic was never a strong point among the Zionists.
Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer (guardian) of the state of Israel in the Congress (Did someone say dual loyalty???), somehow
manages to be both humorous and frightening at the same time. Nice trick, if you can do it.
Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed
as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests.
There's little point analysing this nonsense in terms of what is or isn't silly. After all, the entire shebang is predicated
on an idea that is breathtaking in its silliness: in a nutshell it's this
A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents
even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land.
It's absolutely no coincidence that Herzl and his mob could not get any rabbi west of Lviv to endorse their nonsense: the rabbis
of all genuine centres of scholarship repudiated the Zionist project as an abomination.
So Herzl etc just kept going further East until they found someone theologically illiterate enough to give a rabbinical imprimatur,
and hence a veneer of intellectual respectability, to their project.
It's an indictment on the Polish rabbinate that they signed off on such an obvious apostasy it would have been nice if Herzl
etc had really had to go full retard and end up relying on a Chinaman (a Kaifeng) but if that's what it would have taken at
the time, they would have done so.
(I'm an atheist, so I reject the idea that a project is validated if some religio-dipshit whackball waves some magic words
at it but Herzl's project wanted a religious imprimatur).
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
"On Friday, the United Nations Security Council, following a closed-door meeting, issued a
statement to the press calling for Hifter's LNA to "halt its military activity" near Tripoli.
When Britain proposed a formal resolution along these lines, however, Russia opposed it, no
doubt fearing that it could become the pretext for a fresh Western intervention in Libya.
The British draft included a passage calling "for those who undermine Libya's peace and
security to be held to account."
What hypocrisy! There was no such call when the UK joined with France and the United
States to overthrow the country's government and inflict death upon its population and
destruction upon its infrastructure.
*****No one, from Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron on down, was ever held
accountable for a criminal war of aggression that turned the country into a living
hell.****
Launched under the pretext of a UN resolution authorizing the imposition of a no-fly zone
over Libya to halt the supposed (but non-existent) threat of a massacre in the eastern city
of Benghazi, the war saw money and arms poured into Islamist militias and lavished on Al
Qaeda operatives, who were backed by a relentless bombing campaign, which included nearly
30,000 sorties in the course of seven months.
A war launched on the pretext of protecting civilians culminated in the carpet bombing of
Sirte, a bastion of popular support for Gaddafi, and the lynch-mob torture and murder of the
Libyan leader, over which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughingly gloated, "We
came, we saw, he died."
"In the intervening eight years, the attempts to install a pro-Western puppet regime in a
devastated country controlled by clashing Islamist, tribal and other militias have failed
miserably. The regime headed up by Sarraj, recognized as Libya's "legitimate" government,
barely controls even Tripoli. Under its supposed rule, the country's education and health
systems have collapsed, while inflation is ravaging living standards, the unemployment rate
has reached 30 percent, and fully a third of the population lives below the poverty line.
Conditions of life for masses of Libyans have deteriorated dramatically since the overthrow
of Gaddafi."
For its part, the United States insists on running Ukraine, appointing a special envoy
– Kurt Volker – to preserve its feeling of international importance after it was
pointedly left out of the Normandy Format; Meddlers R Us; we don't need no steenking
invitations.
A glance over trade statistics suggests this
was a wise choice for the Exceptional Nation – the year before the Glorious Maidan,
Revolution of Dignity, the USA did around $3 Billion worth of trade with Ukraine, selling it
$1.92 Billion worth of goods and services, and buying $1.03 Billion worth of goods and services
from it, posting an American trade surplus of $888 Million. Last year the USA did around $4
Billion worth of trade with Ukraine, selling it $2.46 Billion in goods and services, and buying
$1.35 Billion worth of goods and services from it, handsomely increasing the American trade
surplus to $1.13 Billion. Considering Ukraine is impoverished and living on handouts, while the
per-capita GDP has fallen by more than 6% despite the country having lost about 3 million
people (Ukraine's population today is almost exactly what it was in 1960), that's quite an
achievement.
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
"... In so doing, he has effectively repudiated the entire post-World War II international order and signalled that wars of conquest and territorial aggrandisement are the order of the day. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions, enacted in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of similar actions carried out by Germany's Nazi regime, which set the stage for the outbreak of war in 1939. ..."
"... Netanyahu's announcement will give succour to his support base among fascistic layers of the settlers and religious nationalists, driving Israel's capitalist political setup ever further toward outright apartheid, fascism and military dictatorship. It is a prelude to intensified Israeli military aggression in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and the broader Middle East. ..."
"... He has brought into his electoral coalition, and a possible share of government power should he win, outright fascist elements linked to the banned Kach Party of the late Meir Kahane, a party that was designated a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Israel itself. ..."
"... Trump's naked interference in the Israeli elections is bound up with US imperialism's broader aim of escalating its military intervention in the Middle East to roll back the growth of Iranian influence in the wake of the successive debacles suffered by Washington in Iraq, Libya and Syria. ..."
"... The political antecedents of Netanyahu's Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionists, who were to remain a minority tendency until the 1970s, articulated this position most clearly. Their aim was the establishment of a Jewish state on the entire land of Biblical Palestine, including Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish character. ..."
"... In 1923, Jabotinsky explained, in an article titled "The Iron Wall," that the Zionist project could be achieved only against the wishes of the native population. He envisaged the need for an iron wall to protect the Jews from the native population. He said, "A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future." Without a garrison, Zionist colonization of Palestine would be impossible, and "therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force." ..."
"... Netanyahu has now made explicit what has long been implicit: the incorporation of the West Bank into a Greater Israel. It can be achieved and sustained only through the imposition of military rule. To this end, his government has passed a series of measures, including the openly racist "Nation-State Law" enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state, bringing the political and legal system into alignment with the reality of Jabotinsky's garrison state, based on the brutal oppression of an entire people, the Palestinians. ..."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his intention of extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, captured in
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, if he is re-elected prime minister in Tuesday's general election.
In so doing, he has effectively repudiated the entire post-World War II international order and signalled that wars of conquest
and territorial aggrandisement are the order of the day. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions, enacted
in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of similar actions carried out by Germany's Nazi regime, which set
the stage for the outbreak of war in 1939.
Netanyahu's announcement will give succour to his support base among fascistic layers of the settlers and religious nationalists,
driving Israel's capitalist political setup ever further toward outright apartheid, fascism and military dictatorship. It is a prelude
to intensified Israeli military aggression in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and the broader Middle East.
Netanyahu told a television Channel 12 interviewer on Saturday that he would not "evacuate any community." Nor would he divide
Jerusalem, a reference to Palestinian demands for East Jerusalem to serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. He said,
"I will not divide Jerusalem, I will not evacuate any community and I will make sure we control the territory west of Jordan."
He added, "A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years. No prime minister
has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny."
Netanyahu made it clear that he viewed President Donald Trump's recognition of Israel's illegal annexation of Syria's Golan Heights,
captured in 1967, as a green light to press on with Likud's long-held expansionist policy of a Greater Israel. He said, "Will we
move ahead to the next stage? Yes. I will extend sovereignty, but I don't distinguish between the settlement blocs and the isolated
ones, because each settlement is Israeli, and I will not hand it over to Palestinian sovereignty."
Speaking about the Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar, which he has pledged to evacuate despite international outrage, Netanyahu
promised that "it will happen." He added, "I promised, and it will happen at the soonest opportunity."
Netanyahu's announcement was aimed at bolstering his position in the election, which he had called ahead of schedule in order
to win political backing to ensure his immunity from prosecution on a raft of corruption charges. Facing unexpectedly strong opposition
from a slate of generals assembled by the so-called Blue and White coalition, headed by former chief of staff Benny Gantz, he has
leveraged Trump's support to appeal to his right-wing support base.
He has brought into his electoral coalition, and a possible share of government power should he win, outright fascist elements
linked to the banned Kach Party of the late Meir Kahane, a party that was designated a terrorist organization by the US, Canada,
the European Union, Japan and Israel itself.
Trump's naked interference in the Israeli elections is bound up with US imperialism's broader aim of escalating its military
intervention in the Middle East to roll back the growth of Iranian influence in the wake of the successive debacles suffered by Washington
in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Netanyahu's growing alliance with the House of Saud and the petro-monarchs of the Gulf has served to ensure their acquiescence
-- with pro forma denunciations -- to this latest assault on the Palestinians.
But apart from Netanyahu's short-term political calculations, his announcement derives from Zionism's foundation upon exclusivist
conceptions of racial, religious and linguistic hegemony to justify the establishment of a Jewish state through the violent dispossession
of the indigenous Arab population, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population, making use of the horrors of the Holocaust
as a rationale for the oppression of another people.
The political antecedents of Netanyahu's Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionists, who were to remain a minority tendency
until the 1970s, articulated this position most clearly. Their aim was the establishment of a Jewish state on the entire land of
Biblical Palestine, including Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would necessarily mean expelling the
Arab population to ensure its Jewish character.
In 1923, Jabotinsky explained, in an article titled "The Iron Wall," that the Zionist project could be achieved only against
the wishes of the native population. He envisaged the need for an iron wall to protect the Jews from the native population. He said,
"A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future." Without a garrison, Zionist
colonization of Palestine would be impossible, and "therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force."
The establishment of a Jewish state was viewed with sympathy by millions of people around the world, who were appalled at the
catastrophe that had befallen the Jews. But the major powers excluding Britain, but including the Soviet Union, supported the establishment
of a Jewish state as a means of blocking Britain's position in the Middle East. As a result, the UN voted in 1947 for the partition
of Palestine, hailing the new state as a progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and egalitarian society for the most
cruelly oppressed people of Europe.
As soon as the State of Israel was declared in 1948, war broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, who were able to seize more
land than was included in the 1947 partition plan, driving out some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Not wanting to pay the
price of the concessions demanded by the superpowers, in terms of borders and refugees, Israel's Labour government did not try to
make peace after the war, instead instituting a policy of "striving for peace" -- but not too fast -- which became the template for
future governments. The more Israel got used to the situation of neither peace nor war, the louder grew the voices calling for the
maintenance of the status quo.
After the 1967 war, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from
Syria, the Labour government moved rapidly to annex East Jerusalem and build settlements in the occupied territories that are now
home to some 700,000 Israeli Jews, many of them extreme nationalists and religious zealots who are heavily armed. Labour had, in
effect, adopted the Revisionists' policy.
The war and the settlement movement spawned the growth of immensely reactionary political and social forces within Israel itself,
with Menachem Begin's Likud party demanding the territories be brought under Israeli sovereignty on the grounds that they were the
Biblical lands of Samaria and Judea, promised by God to the Jewish people.
In 1993, a Labour government signed an illusory peace deal, the Oslo Accords, brokered by the US, with the Palestine Liberation
Organization. Ostensibly, the agreement was to usher in a Palestinian statelet. But its real purpose was to prevent the intifada
that broke out in 1987 from developing into a revolutionary uprising by the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories, and to
subcontract the task of suppressing the masses to the Palestinian bourgeoisie.
Instead of peace and a Palestinian state, the Oslo Accords set the stage for an expansion of the settlements and land seizures
to control the access roads to these enclaves and strengthen their connection to Israel itself, with the Palestinian Authority left
to police small patches of land, mostly impoverished cities, surrounded and cut off by Israeli troops.
In line with its long-held policy, the Likud Party vehemently opposed any territorial concessions to the Palestinians embodied
in the Accords. Its leaders stood by as its angry supporters called Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a traitor, paving the way for his
murder in 1995 by a right-wing fanatic. With none of the mainstream political parties prepared to make any fundamental changes, the
fraudulent peace process was all but dead.
Netanyahu has now made explicit what has long been implicit: the incorporation of the West Bank into a Greater Israel. It
can be achieved and sustained only through the imposition of military rule. To this end, his government has passed a series of measures,
including the openly racist "Nation-State Law" enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state, bringing the political
and legal system into alignment with the reality of Jabotinsky's garrison state, based on the brutal oppression of an entire people,
the Palestinians.
The so-called "centre-left" opposition in the elections, led by Gantz, has not challenged Netanyahu's annexation pledge, resorting
to verbal obfuscations and calls for a "regional conference" or "secure separation," thereby signifying consent.
This marks the historic bankruptcy and culmination of the entire reactionary Zionist project and all such nationalist programs.
Tough talk about the need to punish Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election is running into the reality that
Congress's enthusiasm for additional sanctions is waning.
"We face a little bit of sanctions fatigue around here these days," said Republican Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida, the sponsor of one of the bills aimed at Russia. "Hopefully we'll get more people on board."
Two main proposals are circulating aimed at increasing pressure on Russian individuals and companies by
restricting their access to U.S. markets and capital. Both Senate bills received significant attention in 2018
after President Donald Trump failed to condemn Russia for its election meddling, but they lost steam after
November's midterm elections and aren't moving any faster in this year's Congress.
Many lawmakers still want Russia to face stronger consequences for its actions in the U.S. and elsewhere, but
there's no clear consensus on how to send the right message to the Kremlin. Two other factors add to the
hesitation: concern about unintended
economic
consequences, and the difficulty of passing legislation in a divided Congress when the measures don't
have the president's support.
"Sanctions can often be a double-edged sword," said Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of
the Homeland Security Committee. "So we really should take a little bit of a step back and assess where we are and
what we can really do."
Sovereign Debt
Markets are closely watching the next U.S. moves on sanctions, since any action may
affect
Russia's sovereign debt. The ruble has depreciated against the dollar since 2014, when the U.S. imposed
sanctions on during the Obama administration.
Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, in February
reintroduced their
DASKA Act
, which would impose sanctions on Russian individuals, cyber operations and liquid natural gas export
facilities. The legislation calls for the president to "
prescribe
regulations
" for sanctions on sovereign debt issued 90 days after the law is enacted. The bill would also
reinforce support for NATO, and would create a new office in the State Department to respond to cyber threats.
The other Senate bill, the
DETER Act
, was reintroduced last week by Rubio and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. It would
require the Director of National Intelligence to tell Congress on any foreign interference within 60 days of a
federal election. If a Russian violation is found, sanctions would target that country's political figures and its
energy and defense sectors. Sanctions could also extend to government and state-owned company bonds issued after
the bill is signed into law.
Van Hollen said the current version of his bill includes an
option
for the president to waive sanctions in the interest of "national security." Senators considered adding
this provision in 2018 as an escape valve that would improve its chances of getting a floor vote, after the
Treasury Department
warned of
potential economic spillover.
Previous versions of both bills failed to advance at the end of 2018 as Congress turned its focus to government
spending measures, judicial nominations and a farm bill.
Van Hollen said the new version would deter Russian misbehavior because it would punish future action.
"We're not talking about adding new sanctions now, we're sending a clear signal that if you screw around in our
elections again, there's going to be swift and severe punishment," he said. "It makes much more sense to tie a
sanction to future conduct to deter the conduct."
The U.S. has
sanctioned
roughly 700 Russian entities since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fostered unrest in eastern
Ukraine. Other sanctions were imposed
following
the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the
poisoning
of a former Russian agent and his daughter in the U.K. in March 2018.
Lawmakers last year stepped up the push for legislation compelling new sanctions after Trump sparked bipartisan
outcry
when he stood beside Russian President Vladimir Putin following a one-on-one summit in Helsinki and
said he believed Putin's denial of Russia interference in U.S. elections.
Mueller Momentum
While senior lawmakers now express mixed feelings about what to do next, the upcoming release of portions of
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election and the Trump campaign could bring renewed
attention to the sanctions bills.
"You'll see more interest in this from other members who may not have been as involved when they can see the
full Mueller report," said Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and vice chairman of the Intelligence
Committee.
Some key lawmakers are taking their time, though, as they try to decide the best next steps. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, said he isn't backing any particular proposal at this
time.
'It's Getting Worse'
"The purpose is to persuade people to adjust their conduct, and it's not happening," Risch said. "In fact, if
anything it's getting worse. That's what is causing the discussion."
Risch said he couldn't "really judge what the appetite is" in the Senate for more sanctions, but he'd like to
see a strong stance from the U.S. "I'm interested in seeing Russia change their conduct," he said. "And the
Russian administration, they're not nice people. They do bad things."
Jim Risch
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, a Democrat on Risch's committee, said Congress's willingness to
further punish Russia will also hinge on that country's participation in other conflicts around the world.
"We're seeing their activities in Venezuela," Shaheen said of Russia's support for the faltering Nicolas Maduro
regime
that the U.S. has sought to transition out of power. "If we see those kinds of activities continue,
that there will be a growing appetite for additional sanctions."
Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat also on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Congress should be
thinking "a little more creatively about how to make Russia pay a price." Murphy said the focus should be on how
to address underlying geopolitical problems, rather than focusing on isolated punitive measures.
"We could spend our time talking about actual long-term strategies to try to combat Russia's influence, or we
could spend all our time slapping sanctions on Russian individuals and banks," Murphy said. "The former is
probably more important than the latter."
Russiagate is about keeping Russian down via additional sections. As simple as that. Epidemics of Neo-McCarthyism also
helps to cement cracks in the US neoliberal facade and, as such, is very helpful for the US elite.
It also absolves Neoliberal Democrats of the political fiasco of the century -- rejection of establishment candidate by
the majoring of working Americans which happened when Hillary Clinton was defeated by a person with zero political experience and no
political patty behind him.
Notable quotes:
"... "The results of Mueller's investigations are a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air. The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited. Only an idiot can believe them now." ..."
"... We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made in an interview when he said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." ..."
"... To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many in the United States know nothing about our country. ..."
Alexey Pushkov, a former diplomat and a political analyst,
tweeted to his 360,000 followers on Tuesday
, following the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of the report:
"The results of Mueller's investigations are
a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air.
The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited.
Only an idiot can believe them now."
To the Kremlin and its supporters, Russia is the aggrieved party here, and the government's consistent denials of interfering
in America's internal affairs have been fully vindicated. Appearing on the Russian talk show "60 Minutes," Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman
for the foreign ministry, said the ministry was preparing a report to name and shame the "brigade of propagandists" -- pointing at,
among others, Fareed Zakaria -- who tried to tie Mr. Trump to Russia. She added that "apologies are expected."
... ... ...
...it becomes clear that whatever the outcome of
the Mueller investigation, our relationship with America has changed.
We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James
Clapper, the former director of national intelligence,
made in an interview when he
said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
... ... ...
In the atmosphere where "contacts with Russians" has become cause for suspicion, every bank transaction and visa application faces
extra scrutiny. I've heard from people I know about how exchange programs, conferences and businesses are suffering.
To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many
in the United States know nothing about our country. Ominous images of onion-shaped domes
taking over the
White House baffled us; St. Basil's Cathedral is not part of the Kremlin complex and has no political connotation. The ubiquity
of hammers and sickles in visuals accompanying Trump-Russia reports seemed likewise absurd. Our country hasn't been Communist for
about 30 years.
NEW YORK -- Senator Elizabeth Warren lobbed another policy grenade into the Democratic
primary Friday, announcing she supports drastically changing the Senate by eliminating its
legendary filibuster to give her party a better chance of implementing its ambitious
agenda.
The move puts her campaign rivals on the spot to explain how they would pass their own
ambitious legislative priorities if the Senate keeps its rule in place requiring a 60-vote
supermajority to advance most bills.
Warren's announcement allows her to swerve to the left of Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont in a meaningful way at a time when she's straggling far behind him in early polls and
grass-roots fund-raising.
Sanders, who popularized proposals like free college and Medicare for All among Democrats
during his 2016 run for president, has been reluctant to support scrapping the filibuster.
That raises questions about how he would be able to pass his sweeping proposals into law
should he become president, given Democrats are extremely unlikely to have 60 seats in the
Senate.
"I'm not running for president just to talk about making real, structural change," Warren
told a group of activists at a conference organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton, where she
announced her opposition to the filibuster. "I'm serious about getting it done. And part of
getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate."
The appearance in New York caps off a three-week run that has seen Warren call for making
it easier to send executives to jail for corporate crimes, unveil a proposal to break up farm
monopolies, endorse forming a commission to study reparations for the descendants of slaves,
and say she would like to abolish the Electoral College so presidents are elected by popular
vote.
"Bernie Sanders, nobody's to his left on policy, but there's lots of running room on his
left on procedural changes that would be necessary to enact those policies," said Brian
Fallon, a former top Hillary Clinton aide and the founder of the liberal advocacy group
Demand Justice.
Sanders said he's not "crazy about" the idea of getting rid of the filibuster in an
interview in February, but said in a later statement that he is open to reform.
Getting rid of the Senate filibuster, which has been around since the mid-1800s, was once
seen as a radical proposal that would undermine the chamber's ability to take a deliberative
approach to major issues. But Democratic and Republican majorities have chipped away at it in
recent years, jettisoning filibusters for Cabinet and Supreme Court nominees.
Just this week, Senate Republicans infuriated Democrats by unilaterally reducing the
amount of debate time for other executive branch and judicial nominees before a filibuster
could be ended.
The move to ditch the filibuster has gained currency among liberals frustrated that the
Senate is more Republican than the general public because of liberals clustering on the
coasts and the constitutional requirement that all states get two senators regardless of
population.
President Trump and Barack Obama have complained about the filibuster, with Obama saying
last year that it made it "almost impossible" to govern.
Though probably too wonky a proposal to reach the average voter, the debate over the
Senate filibuster animates the Democratic activists who are watching the primary the most
closely and whose support the candidates are vying to win. Those activists are unmoved by
candidates who say they'll be able to persuade Republicans to sign onto their ambitious
liberal legislation.
"The idea that you can win people over by inviting them over for drinks on the Truman
Balcony -- that is completely out of vogue," Fallon said.
Other candidates have also called for getting rid of the filibuster, including Governor
J*a*y Inslee of Washington and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who is pondering
a run. However, Warren is the first sitting senator in the race to do so. Senator Kamala
Harris of California, who signed a letter in 2017 affirming the filibuster, now says she's
conflicted about it.
The filibuster's defenders say it protects the rights of the minority party, and forces
the majority to compromise. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who also signed the 2017
letter, has said he is concerned that getting rid of the filibuster would mean Republicans
would be able to more easily pass legislation in the future over Democrats' objections.
In her speech to the National Action Network's activists, a largely black crowd, Warren
framed the filibuster as a tool of "racists" who used it for decades to block civil rights
legislation, including a bill to make lynching a federal crime that was first introduced in
the early 1900s. The legislation finally passed this year.
"We can't sit around for 100 years while climate change destroys our planet, while
corruption pervades every nook and cranny of Washington, and while too much of a child's fate
in life still rests on the color of their skin," she said.
After her speech, Warren told reporters that she is concerned about the bills Republicans
would be able to pass without the filibuster, but that getting rid of it is worth it for
Democrats. "Of course I'm worried. But I'm also worried about a minority that blocks real
change that we need to make in this country," she said.
The calls to eliminate the filibuster are part of a larger debate among Democrats about
reforming US democracy after they lost the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections despite
winning the popular vote. Warren, along with several other Democrats, has also called to
abolish the Electoral College. Warren, Harris, and former representative Beto O'Rourke of
Texas are also open to the idea of the next president expanding the number of seats on the
Supreme Court to offset its conservative majority.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who pushes a host of liberal policies, has
been more conservative on these proposals than many of his presidential campaign rivals. He
is against expanding the court, arguing it would be a slippery slope that Republicans could
also take advantage of, and is still on the fence about ditching the filibuster and
abolishing the Electoral College.
Warren declined to call out her Senate colleagues when asked whether she was surprised
they had not endorsed the idea of ending the filibuster. "All I can do is keep running the
campaign I'm running and talking about these ideas," she said.
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are
started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me
share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars
against so many foreign nations.
Thank you in spades for bringing our attention to that truth.
"... The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed. ..."
"... The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers. ..."
"... *Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on terror" and use "Long War". ..."
7 years after the US - led by Obama, Hillary & @SamanthaJPower - bombed Libya in the
name of "humanitarianism" along with the UK & France & then utterly ignored it, the
country is so violent, unstable & dangerous that US troops can no longer safely
remain
American troops in Libya moved out of country as violence escalates near capital
The announcement comes as the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli vowed to defend the
capital against a renegade militia seeking to storm its way into the city, a showdown that
threatened to spill into bloody urban combat in the streets of Tripoli.
How come none of this is on page one above the fold?
EMichael, goes after Chinese oppression of Muslims, but never a word about humanitarian
tragedies US spreads from Caracas to Yemen through Kandahar to Pyongyang.
Russia doing any of this to Ukraine or Georgia would be howled about!
The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for
US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation
more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander
bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed.
The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers.
*Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on
terror" and use "Long War".
Note: Michael Hudson published and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and
Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year in November of last year. It is the
first volume in what will be a trilogy on the long history of the tyranny of debt. I have
interviewed him extensively as he writes the second volume, The Collapse of
Antiquity.
John Siman : Michael, in the first volume of your history of debt -- "
ORDER IT NOW
and forgive them their debts , dealing with the Bronze Age Near East, Judaism and
early Christianity -- you showed how over thousands of years, going back to the invention of
interest-bearing loans in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, many kings from a variety of
Mesopotamian civilizations proclaimed Clean Slate debt cancellations on a more or less regular
basis. And you showed that these royal proclamations of debt amnesty rescued the lower classes
from debt bondage, maintaining a workable economic balance over many centuries. Because these
kings were so powerful -- and, let's say, enlightened -- they were able to prevent the social
and economic polarization that is inevitable when there is no check on an oligarchic creditor
class extracting exponentially increasing interest from debtors.
But now, as you write the second volume, your theme gets turned upside down. You are showing
how the Greeks and the Romans learned about interest-bearing debt from their contacts with
Middle Eastern civilizations, but tragically failed to institute programs of Clean Slate debt
amnesty. Their failure has been a kind of albatross around the neck of Western economies ever
since.
So I'd like to start this conversation in the late 500s BC, because we can see at that time
the beginnings of both the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, plus of two more
important civilizations. First was the Athens of Cleisthenes, who had led the overthrow the
"tyrant" Hippias and became the father of Athenian democracy. Second, there was the Roman
Republic of Lucius Junius Brutus, who overthrew the last of Rome's legendary kings, the
"tyrant" Tarquinius Superbus.Third was the Persian civilization of Cyrus the Great. He was a
"divine king," in many ways in the ancient tradition of Hammurabi. Fourth were the post-exilic
Jews of Ezra and Nehemiah, who returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple and redacted the
Bible. They were the inventors of the Jubilee years of Clean Slate debt forgiveness, even
though they depicted the teaching as coming from Moses.
So, beginning with the late 500s BC, to what extent was the notion of Clean Slate debt
amnesty remembered, and to what extent was it rejected?
Michael Hudson : Every kind of reform, from Mesopotamia to Greece, was put forth as
if it simply restored the way things were in the beginning. There was no concept of linear
progress in Antiquity. They thought that there was only one way to do things, so any reform
must be the way the world was meant to be in the very beginning. All reformers would say that
in the beginning everybody must have been equal. Their reform was aimed at restoring this state
of affairs.
That's why, when Plutarch and even the Spartan kings in the third century BC talked about
canceling debts and promoting equality, they said that they were simply restoring the original
system that Lycurgus had created. But there was no sign that Lycurgus had really done these
things. It was made up. Lycurgus was a legendary figure. So was Moses in the Jewish tradition.
When the Bible was redacted and put together after the return from Babylon, they put debt
cancellation and land redistribution -- the Jubilee Year -- right in the center of Mosaic Law.
So it seemed that this was not an innovation, but what Moses said in the beginning. They
created a Moses figure much like the Greeks created a Lycurgus figure. They said that this is
how things were meant to be. This is how it was in the beginning -- and it just happened to be
their own program.
This was a projection backwards: a retrojection. Felix Jacoby wrote that Athenian history
was that way, basically party pamphleteering projecting their ideal program back to Solon or to
whomever one might choose as a good guy to model. Writers would then say that this original
good guy supported the program that they were proposing in their epoch. This was the ancient
analogy to "Constitutional Originalism" in the United States as a frame for right-wing
policies.
JS : So, ever since the 500s BC, the surefire way to critique the status quo has been
to say you are trying to go back to the Garden of Eden or to some other pristine Saturnian
Golden Age.
MH : Yes, you want to say that the unfair world around you isn't what was meant, so
this couldn't have been the original plan, because the past had to be a successful takeoff. So
the program that reformers always turned out to be what the Founding Fathers meant.
JS : That's veryinspirational!
MH : The key is to appear as a conservative, not a radical. You accuse the existing
status quo as being the beneficiaries of the radicals who have distorted the original Fair Plan
that you're trying to restore.
JS : So in the 500s BC we have Cyrus -- and his inscription on the Cyrus Cylinder --
boasting that he freed the Babylonians from their tax debt and bonds, and we have the
post-exilic Jews proclaiming d'ror
[דְּרֹ֛ור] in Leviticus 25, proclaiming
"liberty throughout the land." We also have the reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens,
isonomia [ἰσονομία, literally, equality
under the law], a genuine attempt at democracy. But let's start with Rome. What do you want to
say about the nova libertas , the "new liberty" proclaimed in Rome after the last king
was expelled and the Republic was founded? Didn't Brutus and his wellborn friends boast that
they were the institutors of true liberty?
MH : Liberty for them was the liberty to destroy that of the population at large.
Instead of cancelling debts and restoring land tenure to the population, the oligarchy created
the Senate that protected the right of creditors to enslave labor and seize public as well as
private lands (just as had occurred in Athens before Solon). Instead of restoring a status
quo ante of free cultivators -- free of debt and tax obligations, as Sumerian amargi
and Babylonian misharum and andurarum meant -- the Roman oligarchy accused anyone
of supporting debtor rights and opposing its land grabs of "seeking kingship." Such men were
murdered, century after century.
Rome was turned into an oligarchy, an autocracy of the senatorial families. Their "liberty"
was an early example of Orwellian Doublethink. It was to destroy everybody else's
liberty so they could grab whatever they could, enslave the debtors and create the polarized
society that Rome became.
JS : OK, but this program worked. The Republic grew and grew and conquered everyone
else for century after century. Then the Principate became the supreme power in the Western
world for several more centuries.
MH : It worked by looting and stripping other societies. That can only continue as
long as there is some society to loot and destroy. Once there were no more kingdoms for Rome to
destroy, it collapsed from within. It was basically a looting economy. And it didn't do more
than the British colonialists did: It only scratched the surface. It didn't put in place the
means of production that would create enough money for them to grow productively. Essentially,
Rome was a financial rentier state .
Rentiers don't create production. They live off existing production, they don't
create it. That's why the classical economists said they were supporting industrial
capitalists, not British landlords, not monopolists and not predatory banks.
JS : This has all been forgotten, both in the United States and in England --
MH : Let's say, expurgated from the curriculum.
JS : Worse than forgotten!
MH : That's why you don't have any history of economic thought taught anymore in the
United States. Because then you'd see that Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the "Ricardian
socialists" and indeed most of the 19th century had a completely opposite idea of what
constituted a free market.
JS : Opposite? How so?
MH : Opposite from the neoliberal idea that freedom means freedom for the wealthy to
indebt and destroy the economy. Opposite from the liberty of Brutus to overthrow the Roman
kings and establish an autocratic oligarchy.
JS : So do we want to see the Roman kings as defenders of the people -- defending
them from predatory oligarchs?
MH : Yes, especially Servius Tullius. There was a great flowering of Rome, making it
attractive to immigrants by making the city livable for newcomers. They did this because at
that time, in the 6th century BC, all societies had a shortage of labor. Labor was the factor
of production in short supply, not land. Not even in Athens was land in short supply in the 6th
and 5th centuries. You needed labor, and so you had to make it attractive for immigrants to
join your society instead of having your people run away, as they would in a society run by
creditors reducing clients to bondage.
JS : So you are writing about how Roman liberty was actually the liberty of
oligarchic creditors from populist pressures for debt forgiveness. What of the
d'ror of Leviticus 25 -- the liberty of the postexilic Jews? Did they actually proclaim
years of Jubilee in which debts were forgiven and bondservants were returned to their
families?
MH : After the Babylonian Jews returned to Jerusalem, I'm sure that they said that it
was time for the land to be returned to its original owners -- and their families, by the way,
were the original owners who were exiled in the Babylonian Captivity. I rely largely on Baruch
Levine for this idea of the ge'ullah
[גְּאֻלָּה], saying give us back our
ancestral lands. [See thecolloquium Levine and Hudson co-edited on Land and Urbanization in
the Ancient Near East , and their preceding volume on ancient privatization.] There must
have been some kind of settlement along those lines. Unfortunately, the Judaic lands did not
keep their records on on clay tablets that could be thrown out and recovered thousands of years
later. We don't have any record of their economic history after the Return.
JS : Now I've brought along the transcriptions of several Egyptian papyri for you to
look at. I also want to show you a papyrus in Aramaic from Judæa. It's not direct
evidence that the post-exilic Jews were having Jubilee years, but it's indirect evidence,
because it says that a particular debt has to be paid, even during a time of general debt
amnesty, even if it falls due in a shmita [שמיטה], a
sabbath year. So it sounds like the Jews were finding loopholes --
MH : It certainly sounds like it! Babylonian creditors tried a similar ploy, but this
was disallowed. (We have court records confirming the realm's misharum acts.)
JS : In the Mosaic commandments to forgive debt, can we infer that there was some
sort of program of debt forgiveness in place already in place in postexilic Jerusalem?
MH : Yes, but it ended with Rabbi Hillel and the Prozbul clause. Debtors had to sign
this clause at the end of their debt contracts saying that they waived their rights under the
Jubilee year in order to get a loan. That was why Jesus fought against the Pharisees and the
rabbinical leadership. That's what Luke 4 is all about [ And there was delivered unto him
the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it
was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the
gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the
captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to
preach the acceptable year of the Lord" = the Jubilee year.] Luke also pointed out that the
Pharisees loved money!
JS : Let me ask you about Egypt here. Unfortunately, as you said, the postexilic Jews
did not leave us any clay tablets and almost no papyri, but we do have loads of papyri
concerning the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt. So from, say, 300 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra, we
have official evidence that the Egyptian kings proclaimed debt amnesties. Maybe one of the
reasons, or perhaps the main reason for this, is because they were so powerful, like the
Mesopotamian kings. So even though the Ptolemaic kings were biologically and genetically
Macedonian Greek -- married to their sisters, too -- they aspired to rule in the ancient
Egyptian pharaonic tradition of We Are God-Kings and We Own Everything in the Kingdom.
MH : Certainly the Hellenistic kings had the ancient pharaonic Sed festivals, which
go back thousands of years and were a kind of jubilee. The Egyptians had regular debt
cancellations, because under the pharaohs the debts that would have been cancelled were
basically tax debts. They were owed to the crown, so he was cancelling debts owed to himself
ultimately. And we see this thousands of years later in the trilingual stone, the Rosetta
Stone, which the priests wrote for that young boy who was Ptolemy V. They explained to him that
this is how Egypt always had done it, and to act as a pharaoh, he had to do the same.
JS : And I think it is worth pointing out here that the same verb-plus-noun
combination for forgiving debts that the priests used in Greek on the Rosetta Stone is also
used by Matthew in the Lord's Prayer
[ἀφῆκεν/ἄφες
ὀφειλήματα, aphēken/aphes
opheilēmata]. It shows up in lots of papyri. The same Greek verb and noun, again and again
and again.
But let's go back to the Greeks of the 500s BC. They are a couple of hundred years out of
their Dark Age, so their society has been reconstituted after the demographic wipeout. It's
been reconstituted, but without Near Eastern-style "divine kingship" and its Clean Slate
proclamations. Just the opposite. Socrates had conversations with the rhapsodes who had
memorized and recited the Iliad . Even in their great epic, the Greeks' legendary king
of kings Agamemnon comes across as a kind of narcissistic loser. How would you describe Greek
kingship, especially the so-called tyrants?
MH : There never really were Greek kings of the type found throughout the Bronze Age
Near East and surviving into the first millennium in Assyria and even in Persia. The Greek
polities that emerged from their Dark Age were run by what shrewd Classicists call
mafiosi , something like the post-Soviet kleptocrats. They formed closed political
monopolies reducing local populations to clientage and dependency. In one polity after another
they were overthrown and exiled, mainly by aristocratic reformers from the elite families
(often secondary branches, as was Solon). Later oligarchic writers called them "tyrants" as an
invective, much as the word rex -- king -- became an invective in oligarchic Rome.
These tyrant-reformers consolidated their power by redistributing land from the leading
families (or in Sparta, land conquered from Messenia, along with its population reduced to
helotage) to the citizen-army at large all over Greece – except in Athens. That was one
of the most reactionary cities in the 7th century, as shown by what is known about the laws of
Draco. After some abortive coups in the seventh century, Solon was appointed in 594 to avoid
the kind of revolution that had led reformer "tyrants" to overthrow narrow aristocracies in
neighboring Megara and Corinth. Solon decreed a half-way reform, abolishing debt slavery (but
not the debtor's obligation to work off debts with his own labor), and did not redistribute
Athenian land from the city's elites.
Athens was one of the last to reform but then because it was such a badly polarized
autocratic society, it swung -- like Newton's Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal
and opposite reaction -- it swung to become the most democratic of all the Greek polities.
Some historians in the past speculated that Solon might somehow have been influenced by
Judaic law or other Near Eastern practice, but this is not realistic. I think Solon was simply
a pragmatist responding to widespread demands that he do what the reformers -- the so-called
tyrants -- were doing throughout Greece. He didn't redistribute the land like they did, but he
at least ended outright debt slavery. Free debtors (mainly cultivators on the land) were being
seized and sold outside of Athens to slave dealers. Solon also tried to recover some of the
land that wealthy families had grabbed. At least, that's what he wrote in his poems describing
his actions.
So to answer your question, I think debt cancellations were not a diffusionist policy from
the East, but a spontaneous pragmatic response such as was being widely advocated as far west
as Rome with its Secession of the Plebs a century later -- followed by much of Greece in the
4th century BC, and Sparta's kings in the late 3rd century BC.
Poorer Athenians were so angry with Solon for being not revolutionary enough that he went
into exile for 10 years. The real creators of Athenian democracy were Peisistratos [died 528/7
BC], his sons, also called tyrants, and then Cleisthenes in 507. He was a member of the wealthy
but outcast family, the Alcmaeonidae, who had been expelled in the 7th century. Solon had
allowed them to return, and they were backed by Delphi (to which the family contributed
heavily). Cleisthenes fought against the other oligarchic families and restructured Athenian
politics on the basis of locality instead of clan membership. Servius Tullius is credited for
enacting much the same reform in Rome. Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society [1877]
described this restructuring of voting districts as the great watershed creation of
western-style democracy.
JS : Let me go back now to the way Athens and the other poleis emerged from
the Dark Age.
MH : Judging from the art and pottery, Greece didn't begin to recover until the 8th
century BC.
JS : So we're talking about the 700s BC. As Greece was learning from the Near Eastern
civilizations, everything from mythology to the alphabet to weights and measures --
MH : And commercial practices, credit practices.
JS : Yes, all this came from the Near East, including the practice of charging
interest. But what about Clean Slate debt amnesty? I want to argue logically here -- not from
any hard historical evidence, but only deductively -- that the Greeks would have wanted the
concept of Clean Slate debt forgiveness, they would have wanted to learn this too from the Near
East, but they could not do it because they were always going to lack a Hammurabi-style "divine
king."
MH : I think you miss the whole point of how Western civilization evolved here. First
of all, who "wanted" Near Eastern kingship? Certainly not the emerging oligarchies. The ruling
elites wanted to use interest-bearing debt to enrich themselves – by obtaining control
over the labor power of debtors.
Second, I don't think the Greeks and Italians knew about Near Eastern royal proclamations,
except as an alien practice much further East than Asia Minor. Falling into debt was a disaster
for the poor, but a means for their Western patrons to gain power, land and wealth. There is no
record of anyone suggesting that they should be in the Near East. The connection between the
Near East and Greece or Italy was via traders. If you're a Phoenician or Syrian merchant with
the Aegean or Italy, you're going to set up a temple as an intermediary, typically on an
island. Such temples became the cosmopolitan meeting places where you had the oligarchs of the
leading families of Greek cities visiting each other as part of a Pan-Hellenic group. You could
say that Delphi was the "Davos" of its day.
It was through these trading centers that culture diffused – via the wealthiest
families who travelled and established relationships with other leading families. Finance and
trade have always been cosmopolitan. These families learned about debt obligations and
contracts from the Near East, and ended up reducing much of their local populations to
clientage, without kings to overrule them. That would have been the last thing they wanted.
JS : So absent Hammurabi-style "divine kingship," is debt bondage and brutal
polarization almost inevitably going to happen in any society that adopts interest-bearing
debt?
MH : We see a balance of forces in the ancient Near East, thanks to the fact that its
rulers had authority to cancel debt and restore land that wealthy individuals had taken from
smallholders. These kings were powerful enough to prevent the rise of oligarchies that would
reduce the population to debt peonage and bondage (and in the process, deprive the palace of
revenue and corvée labor, and even the military service of debtors owing their labor to
their private creditors). We don't have any similar protection in today's Western Civilization.
That's what separates Western Civilization from the earlier Near Eastern stage. Modern
financialized civilization has stripped away the power to prevent a land-grabbing creditor
oligarchy from controlling society and its laws.
So you could characterize Western Civilization is being decadent. It's reducing populations
to austerity on a road to debt peonage. Today's new oligarchy calls this a "free market," but
it is the opposite of freedom. You can think of the Greek and Roman decontextualization of Near
Eastern economic regulations as if the IMF had been put in charge of Greece and Rome, poisoning
its legal and political philosophy at the outset. So Western Civilization may be just a vast
detour. That's what my forthcoming book, The Collapse of Antiquity, is all about. That
will be the second volume in my trilogy on the history of debt.
JS : So are we just a vast detour?
MH : We have to restore a balanced economy where the oligarchy is controlled, so as
to prevent the financial sector from impoverishing society, imposing austerity and reducing the
population to clientage and debt serfdom.
JS : How do you do that without a Hammurabi-style "divine kingship"?
MH : You need civil law to do what Near Eastern kings once did. You need a body of
civil law with a strong democratic government acting to shape markets in society's overall
long-term interest, not that of the One Percent obtaining wealth by impoverishing the 99
Percent. You need civil law that protects the population from an oligarchy whose business plan
is to accumulate wealth in ways that impoverish the economy at large. This requires a body of
civil law that would cancel debts when they grow too large for the population to pay. That
probably requires public banking and credit – in other words, deprivatization of banking
that has become dysfunctional.
All this requires a mixed economy, such as the Bronze Age Near Eastern economies were. The
palace, temples, private sector and entrepreneurs acted as checks and balances on each other.
Western Civilization isn't a mixed economy. Socialism was an attempt to create a mixed economy,
but the oligarchs fought back. What they call a "free market" is an unmixed monolithic,
centrally planned financialized economy with freedom for the oligarchy to impoverish the rest
of society. That was achieved by landlordism monopolizing the land in feudal Europe, and it is
done by finance today.
John Siman : Could you define what you mean by a mixed economy ?
Michael Hudson : There are many degrees of how "mixed" an economy will be -- meaning
in practice, how active its government sector will be in regulating markets, prices and credit,
and investing in public infrastructure.
In the 20 th century's Progressive Era a century ago, a "mixed economy" meant
keeping natural monopolies in the public sector: transportation, the post office, education,
health care, and so forth. The aim was to save the economy from monopoly rent by a either
direct public ownership or government regulation to prevent price gouging by monopolies.
The kind of "mixed economy" envisioned by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and other classical
19 th century free market economists aimed at saving the economy from land rent paid
to Europe's hereditary landlord class. Either the government would tax away the land's rent, or
would nationalize it by taking land out of the hands of landlords. The idea was to free markets
from economic rent ("unearned income") in general, including monopoly rents, and also to
subsidize basic needs to create a price-competitive national economy.
Long before that, in the Bronze Age -- which I describe in and forgive them their
debts -- the palace reversed the buildup of personal and agrarian debts by annulling them
on a more or less regular basis. This freed the economy from the overgrowth of debt that tended
to build up chronically from the mathematical dynamics of compound interest, and from crop
failures or other normal "market" phenomenon.
In all these cases a mixed economy was designed to maintain stability and avoid exploitation
that otherwise would lead to economic polarization.
JS: So a mixed economy is still a market economy?
MH : Yes. All these degrees of "mixed economy" were market economies. But their
markets were regulated and subordinated to broad social and political objectives rather than to
personal rent-seeking or creditor gains. Their economic philosophy was long-term, not
short-term, and aimed at preventing economic imbalance from debt and land monopoly.
Today's "mixed economy" usually means an active public sector undertaking investment in
infrastructure and controlling money and credit, and shaping the context of laws within which
the economy operates. This is best understood by contrasting it to what neoliberals call a
"pure" or "market" economy – including what the Trump administration accuses China of
when it proposes countervailing tariffs to shape the U.S. and international market in a way
that favors American corporations and banks.
So it is necessary to clear the terminological slate before going into more detail. Every
economy is a "market economy" of some sort or another. What is at issue is how large a role
governments will play -- specifically, how much it will regulate, how much it will tax, how
much it will invest directly into the economy's infrastructure and other means of production or
act as a creditor and regulator of the monetary and banking system.
JS: What can we learn from the mixed economies of the Ancient Near East? Why were
they so prosperous and also stable for so long?
MH : The Bronze Age mixed economies of Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt and their Near Eastern
neighbors were subject to "divine kingship," that is, the ability of kings to intervene to keep
restoring an economy free of personal and rural debt, so as to maintain a situation where the
citizenry on the land was able to serve in the military, provide corvée labor to create
basic infrastructure, and pay fees or taxes to the palace and temples.
Mesopotamian rulers proclaimed Clean Slates to keep restoring an idealized status quo
ante of free labor (free from debt bondage). Babylonian rulers had a more realistic view of
the economy than today's mainstream economists. They recognized that economies tended to
polarize between wealthy creditors and debtors if what today are called "market forces" are not
overridden -- especially the "market forces" of debt, personal liberty or bondage, and land
rent. The task of Bronze Age rulers in their kind of mixed economy was to act from
"above" the market so as to prevent creditors from reducing the king's subjects (who were their
military defense force) to bondage from appropriating their land tenure rights. By protecting
debtors, strong rulers also prevented creditors from becoming an oligarchic power in opposition
to themselves.
JS: What kind of economic theories and economic models are the critics of mixed
economies trying to advance?
MH : Opponents of a mixed economy have developed an "equilibrium theory" claiming to
show that markets come to a natural, fair and stable balance without any government
"interference." Their promise is that if governments will refrain from regulating prices and
credit, from investing and from providing public services, economies will settle naturally at a
highly efficient level. This level will be stable, unless "destabilized" by government
"interference." Instead of viewing public investment as saving the economy from monopoly rent
and debt peonage, the government itself is described as a "rent seeker" exploiting and
impoverishing the economy.
JS: But is this sort of economic theory legitimate, or just a libertarian-sounding
camouflage for neoliberal pillage?
MH : It's Orwellian Doublethink. Today's neoliberal theory justifies oligarchies
breaking free of public control to appropriate the economic surplus by indebting economies to
skim off the economic surplus as interest and then foreclose on personal landholdings and
public property, overthrowing "mixed economies" to create a "pure oligarchy." Their idea of a
free market is one free for creditors and monopolists to deny economic freedom to the rest of
the population. The political extension of this approach in antiquity was to unseat kings and
civic regimes, to concentrate power in the hands of an increasingly predatory class reducing
the economy to bondage, impoverishing it, and ultimately leaving it to be conquered by
outsiders. That is what happened to Rome in Late Antiquity.
Advocates of strong government have a diametrically opposite mathematical model. Ever since
the Bronze Age, they recognized that the "natural" tendency of economies is to polarize between
a wealthy creditor and land-owning class and the rest of society. Bronze Age rulers recognized
that debts tend to grow faster than the ability to pay (that is, faster than the economy).
Babylonian rulers recognized that if rulers did not intervene to cancel personal debts (mainly
agrarian debts by cultivators) when crops failed, when military action interfered, or simply
when debts built up over time, then creditors would end up taking the crop surplus and even the
labor services of debtors as interest, and finally foreclosing on the land. This would have
deprived the palatial economy of land and labor contributions. And by enriching an independent
class of creditors (on their way to becoming large landowners) outside of the palace, financial
wealth would express itself in economic and even military power. An incipient financial and
landholding oligarchy would mount its own military and political campaign to unseat rulers and
dismantle the mixed palatial/private economy to create one that was owned and controlled by
oligarchies.
The result in Classical Antiquity was economic polarization leading to austerity and
bondage, grinding the economy to a halt. That is the tendency of economies in "unmixed"
economies where the public sector is privatized and economic regulation is dismantled. Land and
credit was monopolized and smallholders became dependent clients and ultimately were replaced
by slaves.
Mixed economies by the late 19 th century aimed at minimizing market prices for
real estate and monopoly goods, and for credit. The economic aim was to minimize the cost of
living and doing business so as to make economies more productive. This was called "socialism"
as the natural outgrowth of industrial capitalism protecting itself from the most burdensome
legacies of feudalism: an absentee landlord class, and a banking class whose money-lending was
not productive but predatory.
JS: So mixed economies require strong and ultimately good governments.
MH : Any "mixed" economy has some basic economic theory of what the proper role of
government is. At the very least, as in the 20 th century, this included the
limitation of monopoly rents. The neoclassical (that is, anti-classical) reaction was to
formulate a euphemistic theory of consumer "demand" -- as if American consumers "demand" to pay
high prices for pharmaceuticals and health care. Likewise in the case of housing prices for
renters or, for owner-occupied housing, mortgage charges: Do renters and home buyers really
"demand" to pay higher and higher rents and larger and larger mortgages? Or are they compelled
to pay out of need, paying whatever their suppliers demand ( e.g ., as in "Your money or
your life/health").
So to answer your question, a mixed economy is one in which governments and society at large
realize that economies need to be regulated and monopolies (headed by credit and land
ownership) kept out of the hands of private rent-seekers in order to keep the economy free and
efficient.
JS : Has there ever been a civil society that effectively implemented a mixed economy
since, say, 500 BC?
MH : All successful economies have been mixed economies. And the more "mixed" they
are, the more successful, stable and long-lasting they have been as a result of their mutual
public/private checks and balances.
America was a mixed economy in the late 19th century. It became the world's most successful
industrial economy because it didn't have an absentee landlord class like Europe did (except
for the railroad octopus), and it enacted protective tariffs to endow a domestic manufacturing
class to catch up with and overtake England.
JS : Other countries?
MH : Germany began to be a mixed economy in the decades leading up to World War I.
But it had a mentally retarded king whom they didn't know how to restrain, given their cultural
faith in royalty. China is of course the most successful recent mixed economy.
JS : Isn't it pretty brutal in China for most of the population?
MH : Most of the population does not find it brutal there. It was brutal under
colonialism and later still, under Mao's Cultural Revolution. But now, most people in China
seem to want to get rich. That's why you're having a consolidation period of trying to get rid
of the local corruption, especially in the rural areas. You're seeing a consolidation period
that requires clamping down on a lot of people who became successful through shady
operations.
JS : So how would you describe an ideal society without a Hammurabi-style "divine
kingship"? An ideal mixed economy?
MH : The credit system would be public. That way, public banks could create credit
for socially productive purposes -- and could cancel the occasional overgrowth of debts without
causing private creditors to lose and protest. The public sector also would own and operate the
natural infrastructure monopolies. That was the basic principle of classical economics from
Adam Smith to Marx, even for erstwhile libertarians such as Henry George. Everybody in the 19th
century expected a mixed economy with governments playing a growing role, replacing absentee
landlords, bankers and monopolists with public collection of economic rent, public control of
the credit system and provider of basic needs.
JS : How extensive should the public sector be?
MH : A classical public sector would include the natural monopolies that otherwise
would engage in price gouging, especially the credit and banking system. These sectors should
be public in character. For one thing, only a public bank can write down the debts -- like
student debts today -- without hurting an independent oligarchic financial class. If student
debts and mortgage debts were owed to public banks, they could be written down in keeping with
the reasonable ability to be paid. Also, public banks wouldn't make junk mortgage loans to
NINJA borrowers, as did Citibank and the other crooked banks. A public bank wouldn't make
predatory corporate raiding and takeover loans, or finance and speculate in derivative
gambles.
Most of all, when the debt overhead becomes too large -- when a large corporation that is
essential to the economy can't pay its debts -- public banks can write down the debt so that
the company isn't forced into bankruptcy and sold to an American vulture fund or other vulture
fund. It can keep operating. In China the government provides this essential service of public
banks.
The key public concern throughout history has been to prevent debt from crippling society.
That aim is what Babylonian and other third-millennium and second-millennium Near Eastern
rulers recognized clearly enough, with their mathematical models. To make an ideal society you
need the government to control the basic utilities -- land, finance, mineral wealth, natural
resources and infrastructure monopolies (including the Internet today), pharmaceuticals and
health care so their basic services can be supplied at the lowest price.
All this was spelled out in the 19 th century by business school analysts in the
United States. Simon Patten [1852-1922] who said that public investment is the "fourth factor
of production." But its aim isn't to make a profit for itself. Rather, it's to lower the cost
of living and of doing business, by providing basic needs either on a subsidized basis or for
free. The aim was to create a low-cost society without a rentier class siphoning off
unearned income and making this economic rent a hereditary burden on the economy at large. You
want to prevent unearned income.
To do that, you need a concept to define economic rent as unearned and hence unnecessary
income. A well-managed economy would do what Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Marx
and Veblen recommended: It would prevent a hereditary rentier class living off unearned
income and increasing society's economic overhead. It's okay to make a profit, but not to make
extractive monopoly rent, land rent or financial usury rent.
JS : Will human beings ever create such a society?
MH : If they don't, we're going to have a new Dark Age.
JS : That's one thing that especially surprises me about the United States. Is it not
clear to educated people here that our ruling class is fundamentally extractive and
exploitative?
MH : A lot of these educated people are part of the ruling class, and simply taking
their money and running. They are disinvesting, not investing in industry. They're saying, "The
financial rentier game is ending, so let's sell everything and maybe buy a farm in New
Zealand to go to when there is a big war." So the financial elite is quite aware that they are
getting rich by running the economy into the ground, and that this must end at the point where
they've taken everything and left a debt-ridden shell behind.
JS : I guess this gets back to what you were saying: The history of economics has
been expurgated from the curriculum.
MH : Once you strip away economic history and the history of economic thought, you
wipe out memory of the vocabulary that people have used to criticize rent seeking and other
unproductive activity. You then are in a position to redefine words and ideals along the lines
that euphemize predatory and parasitic activities as if they are productive and desirable, even
natural. You can rewrite history to suppress the idea that all this is the opposite of what
Adam Smith and the classicaleconomists down through Marx advocated.
Today's neoliberal wasteland is basically a reaction against the 19 th century
reformers, against the logic of classical British political economy. The hatred of Marx is
ultimately the hatred of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, because neoliberals realize that
Smith and Mill and Ricardo were all leading to Marx. He was the culmination of their free
market views -- a market free from rentiers and monopolists.
That was the immediate aim of socialism in the late 19 th century. The logic of
classical political economy was leading to a socialist mixed economy. In order to fight
Marxism, you have to fight classical economics and erase memory of how civilization has dealt
with (or failed to deal with) the debt and rent-extracting problems through the ages. The
history of economic thought and the original free-market economics has to be suppressed.
Today's choice is therefore between socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg said.
JS : Let's consider barbarism: When I observe the neoliberal ruling class -- the
people who control the finance sector and the managerial class on Wall Street -- I often wonder
if they're historically exceptional because they've gone beyond simple greed and lust for
wealth. They now seek above all some barbaric and sadistic pleasure in the financial
destruction and humiliation of other people. Or is this historically normal?
MH : The financial class has always lived in the short run, and you can make
short-term money much quicker by asset stripping and being predatory can by being productive.
Moses Finley wrote that there was not a single productive loan in all of Antiquity. That was
quite an overstatement, but he was making the point that there were no productive financial
markets in Antiquity. Almost all manufacturing, industry, and agriculture was self-financed. So
the reader of Finley likely infers that we modern people have progressed in a fundamental way
beyond Antiquity. They were characterized by the homo politicus , greedy for status. We
have evolved into homo œconomicus , savvy enough to live in stable safety and
comfort.
We are supposedly the beneficiaries of the revolution of industrial capitalism, as if all
the predatory, polarizing, usurious lending that you had from feudal times (and before that,
from Antiquity), was replaced by productive lending that finances means of production and
actual economic growth.
But in reality, modern banks don't lend money for production. They say, "That's the job of
the stock market." Banks only lend if there's collateral to grab. They lend against assets in
place. So the result of more bank lending is to increase the price of the assets that banks
lend against -- on credit! This way of "wealth creation" via asset-price inflation is the
opposite of real substantive progress. It enriches the narrow class of asset holders at the top
of the economic pyramid.
JS : What about the stock market?
MH : The stock market no longer primarily provides money for capital investment. It
has become a vehicle for bondholders and corporate raiders to borrow from banks and private
funds to buy corporate stockholders, take the companies private, downsize them, break them up
or strip their assets, and borrow more to buy back their stocks to create asset-price gains
without increasing the economy's tangible real asset base. So the financial sector, except for
a brief period in the late 19th century, especially in Germany, has rarely financed productive
growth. Financial engineering has replaced industrial engineering, just as in Antiquity
creditors were asset strippers.
The one productive activity that the financial sector engaged in from the Bronze Age onward
was to finance foreign trade. The original interest-bearing debt was owed by merchants to
reimburse their silent partners, typically the palace or the temples, and in time wealthy
individuals. But apart from financing trade – in products that were already produced
– you've rarely had finance increase the means of production or economic growth. It's
almost always been to extract income. The income that finance extracts is at the expense of the
rest of society. So the richer the financial sector is, the more austerity is imposed on the
non-financial sector.
JS : That's pretty depressing.
MH : When I did the show with Jimmy Dore [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSvcB55R8jM
], he saw that the most important dynamic to understand is that debts grow more rapidly than
the economy at large. The rate of interest is higher than the rate of growth. It may not be
higher than the profit rate, but it's higher than the rate of growth. So every society that has
interest-bearing debt is going to end up deeper and deeper in debt. At a certain point the
creditors are paid at the expense of production and investment -- and soon enough they
foreclose.
JS : And then?
MH : Then you have debt deflation. That is the norm. Austerity. It is not an anomaly,
but the essence. The Babylonians knew this, and they tried to avoid debt deflation by wiping
out the predatory personal debts, not the business debts that were commercial and productive.
Only the non-commercial debts were wiped out.
JS : How could Modern Monetary Theory be used now, effectively?
MH : The main way is to say that governments don't have to borrow at interest from
existing financial "savers," mainly the One Percent. The government can do what America did
during the Civil War: print greenbacks. (The MMT version is the Trillion-dollar platinum coin.)
The Treasury can provide the money needed by the economy. It does that by running a budget
deficit and spending money into the economy. If you don't do that, if you do what Bill
Clinton did in the last years of his presidency and run a budget surplus, then you force the
economy to depend on banks for credit.
The problem is that bank credit is essentially predatory and extractive. The same thing
happens in Europe. The Eurozone governments cannot run a budget deficit of more than 3 percent,
so the government is unable to spend enough money to invest in public infrastructure or
anything else. As a result, the Eurozone economy is subject to debt deflation, which is
exacerbated by people having to borrow from the banks at high interest rates that far exceeds
the rate of growth. So Europe is suffering an even more serious debt deflation than the United
States.
JS : Is any of this going to change, either in Europe or here?
MH : Not until there's a crash. Not until it gets serious enough that people realize
that there has to be an alternative. Right now Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberals have won.
She said there was no alternative, and as long as people believe There Is No Alternative,
they're not going to realize that it doesn't have to be this way, and that you don't need a
private banking sector. A public banking sector would be much more efficient.
JS : How would you sum up Wall Street right now? Is it entirely predatory? Entirely
parasitical? What are Wall Street's essential functions now?
MH : Number one, to run a casino. By far the largest volume at stake is betting on
whether interest rates, foreign exchange rates or stock prices will go up or down. So the
financial system has turned into a gambling casino. Its second aim is to load the economy down
with as much debt as possible. Debt is the banking system's "product," and the GDP counts its
"carried interest" penalties and late fees, its short-term trading gains as "financial
services" counted as part of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The aim is to get as much of these financial returns as possible, and finally to foreclose
on as much property of defaulting debtors as possible. The business plan -- as I learned at
Chase Manhattan years ago -- is to transfer all economic growth into the hands of financial
investors, the One Percent. The financial business plan is to create a set of laws and mount a
campaign of regulatory capture so that all the growth in the economy accrues to the One
Percent, not the 99 Percent. That means that as the One Percent's rentier income grows,
the 99 Percent gets less and less each year, until finally it emigrates or dies off, or is put
into a for-profit prison, which looks like a growth industry today.
JS : Is there a single good thing that Wall Street does? Is there anything good that
comes out of Wall Street?
MH: You have to look at it as a system. You can't segregate a particular action from
the overall economy. If the overall system aims at making money in predatory ways at somebody
else's expense, then it is a zero-sum game. That is essentially a short-run business model. And
politically, it involves opposing a mixed economy. At least, the "old fashioned" socialist
mixed economy in which governments subordinate short-term gain-seeking to long-term objectives
uplifting the entire economy.
As the Greek philosophers recognized, wealthy people define their power by their ability to
injure the rest of society, so as to lord it over them. That was the Greek philosophy of
money-lust [πλεονεξία, pleonexia ]
and hubris [ὕβρις] -- not merely arrogance, but behavior that was
injurious to others.
Rentier income is injurious to society at large. Rentiers define a "free
market" as one in which they are free to deny economic freedom to their customers,
employees and other victims. The rentier model is to enrich the oligarchy to a point
where it is able to capture the government.
John Siman : It seems that unless there's a Hammurabi-style "divine king" or some
elected civic regulatory authority, oligarchies will arise and exploit their societies as much
as they can, while trying to prevent the victimized economy from defending itself.
Michael Hudson : Near Eastern rulers kept credit and land ownership subordinate to
the aim of maintaining overall growth and balance. They prevented creditors from turning
citizens into indebted clients obliged to work off their debts instead of serving in the
military, providing corvée labor and paying crop rents or other fees to the palatial
sector.
JS : So looking at history going back to 2000 or 3000 BC, once we no longer have the
powerful Near Eastern "divine kings," there seems not to have been a stable and free economy.
Debts kept mounting up to cause political revolts. In Rome, this started with the Secession of
the Plebs in 494 BC, a century after Solon's debt cancellation resolved a similar Athenian
crisis.
MH : Near Eastern debt cancellations continued into the Neo-Assyrian and
Neo-Babylonian Empires in the first millennium BC, and also into the Persian Empire. Debt
amnesties and laws protecting debtors prevented the debt slavery that is found in Greece and
Rome. What modern language would call the Near Eastern "economic model" recognized that
economies tended to become unbalanced, largely as a result of buildup of debt and various
arrears on payments. Economic survival in fact required an ethic of growth and rights for the
citizenry (who manned the army) to be self-supporting without running into debt and losing
their economic liberty and personal freedom. Instead of the West's ultimate drastic solution of
banning interest, rulers cancelled the buildup of personal debts to restore an idealized order
"as it was in the beginning."
This ideology has always needed to be sanctified by religion or at least by democratic
ideology in order to prevent the predatory privatization of land, credit, and ultimately the
government. Greek philosophy warned against monetary greed
[πλεονεξία, pleonexia ] and
money-love [φιλοχρηματία,
philochrêmatia ] from Sparta's mythical lawgiver Lycurgus to Solon's poems
describing his debt cancellation in 594 and the subsequent philosophy of Plato and Socrates, as
well as the plays of Aristophanes. The Delphic Oracle warned that money-love was the only thing
that could destroy Sparta [Diodorus Siculus 7.5]. That indeed happened after 404 BC when the
war with Athens ended and foreign tribute poured into Sparta's almost un-monetized regulated
economy.
The problem, as famously described in The Republic and handed down in Stoic
philosophy, was how to prevent a wealthy class from becoming wealth-addicted, hubristic and
injurious to society. The 7 th -century "tyrants" were followed by Solon in Athens
in banning luxuries and public shows of wealth, most notoriously at funerals for one's
ancestors. Socrates went barefoot
[ἀνυπόδητος, anupodêtos ] to
show his contempt for wealth, and hence his freedom from its inherent personality defects. Yet
despite this universal ideal of avoiding extremes, oligarchic rule became economically
polarizing and destructive, writing laws to make its creditor claims and the loss of land by
smallholders irreversible. That was the opposite of Near Eastern Clean Slates and their
offshoot, Judaism's Jubilee Year.
JS : So despite the ideals of their philosophy, Greek political systems had no
function like that of Hammurabi-like kings -- or philosopher-kings for that matter -- empowered
to hold financial oligarchies in check. This state of affairs led philosophers to develop an
economic tradition of lamentation instead. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Livy and Plutarch
bemoaned the behavior of the money-loving oligarchy. But they did not develop a program to
rectify matters. The best they could do was to inspire and educate individuals -- most of whom
were their wealthy students and readers. As you said, they bequeathed a legacy of Stoicism.
Seeing that the problem was not going to be solved in their lifetimes, they produced a
beautiful body of literature praising philosophical virtue.
MH : The University of Chicago, where I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, focused on
Greek philosophy. We read Plato's Republic , but they skipped over the discussion of
wealth-addiction. They talked about philosopher-kings without explaining that Socrates' point
was that rulers must not own land and other wealth, so as not to have the egotistical tunnel
vision that characterized creditors monopolizing control over land and labor.
JS : In Book 8 of the Republic , Socrates condemns oligarchies as being
characterized by an insatiable greed [ἀπληστία,
aplêstia ] for money and specifically criticizes them for allowing polarization
between the super-rich
[ὑπέρπλουτοι, hyper-ploutoi
] and the poor [πένητες, penêtes ], who are made
utterly resourceless [ἄποροι, aporoi ].
MH : One needs to know the context of Greek economic history in order to understand
The Republic 's main concern. Popular demands for land redistribution and debt
cancellation were resisted with increasing violence. Yet few histories of Classical Antiquity
focus on this financial dimension of the distribution of land, money and wealth.
Socrates said that if you let the wealthiest landowners and creditors become the government,
they're probably going to be wealth-addicted and turn the government into a vehicle to help
them exploit the rest of society. There was no idea at Chicago of this central argument made by
Socrates about rulers falling subject to wealth-addiction. The word "oligarchy" never came up
in my undergraduate training, and the "free market" business school's Ayn Rand philosophy of
selfishness is as opposite from Greek philosophy as it is from Judeo-Christian religion.
JS : The word "oligarchy" comes up a lot in book 8 of Plato's Republic . Here
are 3 passages:
1. At Stephanus page 550c "And what kind of a regime," said he, "do you understand by
oligarchy [ὀλιγαρχία]?" "That based on a
property qualification," said I, "wherein the rich
[πλούσιοι] hold office [550d] and the poor man
[πένης, penês ] is excluded.
2. at 552a "Consider now whether this polity [ i.e . oligarchy] is not the first that
admits that which is the greatest of all such evils." "What?" "The allowing a man to sell all
his possessions, which another is permitted to acquire, and after selling them to go on living
in the city, but as no part of it, neither a money-maker, nor a craftsman, nor a knight, nor a
foot-soldier, but classified only as a pauper [πένης, penês
] and a dependent [ἄπορος, aporos ]." [552b] "This
is the first," he said. "There certainly is no prohibition of that sort of thing in
oligarchical states. Otherwise some of their citizens would not be excessively rich
[ὑπέρπλουτοι, hyper-ploutoi
], and others out and out paupers [πένητες,
penêtes ]."
3 at 555b: "Then," said I, "is not the transition from oligarchy to democracy effected in
some such way as this -- by the insatiate greed
[ἀπληστία, aplêstia ] for that which
oligarchy set before itself as the good, the attainment of the greatest possible wealth?"
MH : By contrast, look where Antiquity ended up by the 2 nd century BC.
Rome physically devastated Athens, Sparta, Corinth and the rest of Greece. By the Mithridatic
Wars (88-63 BC) their temples were looted and their cities driven into unpayably high debt to
Roman tax collectors and Italian moneylenders. Subsequent Western civilization developed not
from the democracy in Athens but from oligarchies supported by Rome. Democratic states were
physically destroyed, blocking civic regulatory power and imposing pro-creditor legal
principles making foreclosures and forced land sales irreversible.
JS: It seems that Greek and Roman Antiquity could not solve the problem of economic
polarization. That makes me want to ask about our own country: To what extent does America
resemble Rome under the emperors?
MH: Wealthy families have always tried to break "free" from central political power
-- free to destroy the freedom of people they get into debt and take their land and property.
Successful societies maintain balance. That requires public power to check and reverse the
excesses of personal wealth seeking, especially debt secured by the debtor's labor and land or
other means of self-support. Balanced societies need the power to reverse the tendency of debts
to grow faster than the ability to be paid. That tendency runs like a red thread through Greek
and Roman history.
This overgrowth of debt is also destabilizing today's U.S. and other financialized
economies. Banking and financial interests have broken free of tax liability since 1980, and
are enriching themselves not by helping the overall economy grow and raising living standards,
but just the opposite: by getting the bulk of society into debt to themselves.
This financial class is also indebting governments and taking payment in the form of
privatizing the public domain. (Greece is a conspicuous recent example.) This road to
privatization, deregulation and un-taxing of wealth really took off with Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan cheerleading the anti-classical philosophy of Frederick von Hayek and the
anti-classical economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys.
Something much like this happened in Rome. Arnold Toynbee described its oligarchic land grab
that endowed its ruling aristocracy with unprecedented wealth as Hannibal's Revenge. That was
the main legacy of Rome's Punic Wars with Carthage ending around 200 BC. Rome's wealthy
families who had contributed their jewelry and money to the war effort, made their power grab
and said that what originally appeared to be patriotic contributions should be viewed as having
been a loan. The Roman treasury was bare, so the government (controlled by these wealthy
families) gave them public land, the ager publicus that otherwise would have been used
to settle war veterans and other needy.
Once you inherit wealth, you tend to think that it's naturally yours, not part of society's
patrimony for mutual aid. You see society in terms of yourself, not yourself as part of
society. You become selfish and increasingly predatory as the economy shrinks as a result of
your indebting it and monopolizing its land and property. You see yourself as exceptional, and
justify this by thinking of yourself as what Donald Trump would call "a winner," not subject to
the rules of "losers," that is, the rest of society. That's a major theme in Greek philosophy
from Socrates andPlato and Aristotle through the Stoics. They saw an inherent danger posed by
an increasingly wealthy landholding and creditor ruling class atop an indebted population at
large. If you let such a class emerge independently of social regulation and checks on personal
egotism and hubris, the economic and political system becomes predatory. Yet that has been the
history of Western civilization.
Lacking a tradition of subordinating debt and land foreclosure from smallholders, the Greek
and Italian states that emerged in the 7 th century BC took a different political
course from the Near East. Subsequent Western civilization lacked a regime of oversight to
alleviate debt problems and keep the means of self-support broadly distributed.
The social democratic movements that flowered from the late 19 th century until
the 1980s sought to re-create such regulatory mechanisms, as in Teddy Roosevelt's trust
busting, the income tax, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, postwar British social democracy. But
these moves to reverse economic inequality and polarization are now being rolled back, causing
austerity, debt deflation and the concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid.
As oligarchies take over government, they lorded it over the rest of society much like feudal
lords who emerged from the wreckage of the Roman Empire in the West.
The tendency is for political power to reflect wealth. Rome's constitution weighted voting
power in proportion to one's landholdings, minimizing the voting power of the non-wealthy.
Today's private funding of political campaigns in the United States is more indirect in
shifting political power to the Donor Class, away from the Voting Class. The effect is to turn
governments to serve a financial and property-owning class instead of prosperity for the
economy at large. We thus are in a position much like that of Rome in 509 BC, when the kings
were overthrown by an oligarchy claiming to "free" their society from any power able to control
the wealthy. The call for "free markets" today is for deregulation of rentier wealth,
turning the economy into a free-for-all.
Classical Greece and Italy had a fatal flaw: From their inception they had no tradition of a
mixed public/private economy such as characterized in the Near East, whose palatial economy and
temples produced the main economic surplus and infrastructure. Lacking royal overrides, the
West never developed policies to prevent a creditor oligarchy from reducing the indebted
population to debt bondage, and foreclosing on the land of smallholders. Advocates of debt
amnesties were accused of "seeking kingship" in Rome, or aspiring to "tyranny"(in Greece).
JS: It seems to me that you're saying this economic failure is Antiquity's original
sin as well as fatal flaw. We have inherited a great philosophic and literary tradition from
them analyzing and lamenting this failure, but without a viable program to set it right.
MH: That insight unfortunately has been stripped out of the curriculum of classical
studies, just as the economics discipline sidesteps the phenomenon of wealth addiction. If you
take an economics course, the first thing you're taught in price theory is diminishing marginal
utility: The more of anything you have, the less you need it or enjoy it. You can't enjoy
consuming it beyond a point. But Socrates and Aristophanes emphasized, accumulating money is
not like eating bananas, chocolate or any other consumable commodity. Money is different
because, as Socrates said, it is addictive, and soon becomes an insatiable desire
[ἀπληστία, aplêstia ].
JS: Yes, I understand! Bananas are fundamentally different from money because you can
get sick of bananas, but you can never have too much money! In your forthcoming book, The
Collapse of Antiquity , you quote what Aristophanes says in his play Plutus (the god
of wealth and money). The old man Chremylus -- his name is based on the Greek word for money,
chrêmata [χρήματα] -- Chremylus and his slave
perform a duet in praise of Plutus as the prime cause of everything in the world, reciting a
long list. The point is that money is a singular special thing: "O Money-god, people never get
sick of your gifts. They get tired of everything else; they get tired of love and bread, of
music and honors, of treats and military advancement, of lentil soup, etc., etc. But they never
get tired of money. If a man has thirteen talents of silver -- 13 million dollars, say -- he
wants sixteen; and if he gets sixteen, he will want forty, and so forth, and he will complain
of being short of cash the whole time."
MH: Socrates's problem was to figure out a way to have government that did not serve
the wealthy acting in socially destructive ways. Given that his student Platowas an aristocrat
and that Plato's students in the Academy werearistocratsas well, how can you have a government
run by philosopher-kings? Socrates's solution was not practical at that time: Rulers should not
have money or property. But all governments were based on the property qualification, so his
proposal for philosopher-kings lacking wealth was utopian. And like Plato and other Greek
aristocrats, they disapproved of debt cancellations, accusing these of being promoted by
populist leaders seeking to become tyrants.
JS: Looking over the broad sweep of Roman history, your book describes how, century
after century, oligarchs were whacking every energetic popular advocate whose policies
threatened their monopoly of political power, and their economic power as creditors and
privatizers of the public domain, Rome's ager publicus , for themselves.
I brought with me on the train Cæsar's Gallic War . What do you think of
Cæsar and how historians have interpreted his role?
MH: The late 1 st century BC was a bloodbath for two generations before
Cæsar was killed by oligarchic senators. I think his career exemplifies what Aristotle
said of aristocracies turning into democracies: He sought to take the majority of citizens into
their own camp to oppose the aristocratic monopolies of landholding, the courts and political
power.
Cæsar sought to ameliorate the oligarchic Senate's worst abuses that were stifling
Rome's economy and even much of the aristocracy. Mommsen is the most famous historian
describing how rigidly and unyieldingly the Senate opposed democratic attempts to achieve a
role in policy-making for the population at large, or to defend the debtors losing their land
to creditors, who were running the government for their own personal benefit. He described how
Sulla strengthened the oligarchy against Marius, and Pompey backed the Senate against Caesar.
But competition for the consulship and other offices was basically just a personal struggle
among rival individuals, not rival concrete political programs. Roman politics was autocratic
from the very start of the Republic when the aristocracy overthrew the kings in 509 BC. Roman
politics during the entire Republic was a fight by the oligarchy against democracy and the
populace as a whole.
The patricians used violence to "free" themselves from any public authority able to check
their own monopoly of power, money and land acquisition by expropriating smallholders and
grabbing the public domain being captured from neighboring peoples. Roman history from one
century to the next is a narrative of killing advocates of redistributing public land to the
people instead of letting it be grabbed by the patricians, or who called for a debt
cancellation or even just an amelioration of the cruel debts laws.
On the one hand, Mommsen idolized Cæsar as if he were a kind of revolutionary
democrat. But given the oligarchy's total monopoly on political power and force, Mommsen
recognized that under these conditions there could not be any political solution to Rome's
economic polarization and impoverishment. There could only be anarchy or a dictatorship. So
Caesar's role was that of a Dictator -- vastly outnumbered by his opposition.
A generation before Caesar, Sulla seized power militarily, bringing his army to conquer Rome
and making himself Dictator in 82 BC. He drew up a list of his populist opponents to be
murdered and their estates confiscated by their killers. He was followed by Pompey, who could
have become a dictator but didn't have much political sense, so Caesar emerged victorious.
Unlike Sulla or Pompey, he sought a more reformist policy to check the senatorial corruption
and self-dealing.
The oligarchic Senate's only "political program" was opposition to "kingship" or any such
power able to check its land grabbing and corruption. The oligarchs assassinated him, as they
had killed Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus in 133 and 121, the praetor Asellio who sought to
alleviate the population's debt burden in 88 by trying to enforce pro-creditor laws, and of
course the populist advocates of debt cancellation such as Catiline and his supporters.
Would-be reformers were assassinated from the very start of the Republic after the aristocracy
overthrew Rome's kings.
JS: If Caesar had been successful, what kind of ruler might he have been?
MH: In many ways he was like the reformer-tyrants of the 7 th and 6
th centuries in Corinth, Megara and other Greek cities. They all were members of the
ruling elite. He tried to check the oligarchy's worst excesses and land grabs, and like
Catiline, Marius and the Gracchi brothers before him, to ameliorate the problems faced by
debtors. But by his time the poorer Romans already had lost their land, so the major debts were
owed by wealthier landowners. His bankruptcy law only benefited the well-to-do who had bought
land on credit and could not pay their moneylenders as Rome's long Civil War disrupted the
economy. The poor already had been ground down. They supported him mainly for his moves toward
democratizing politics at the expense of the Senate.
JS: After his assassination we get Caesar's heir Octavian, who becomes Augustus. So
we have the official end of the Republic and the beginning of a long line of emperors, the
Principate. Yet despite the Senate's authority being permanently diminished, there is continued
widening of economic polarization. Why couldn't the Emperors save Rome?
MH: Here's an analogy for you: Just as nineteenth-century industrial reformers
thought that capitalism's political role was to reform the economy by stripping away the legacy
of feudalism -- a hereditary landed aristocracy and predatory financial system based mainly on
usury -- what occurred was not an evolution of industrial capitalism into socialism. Instead,
industrial capitalism turned into finance capitalism. In Rome you had the end of the senatorial
oligarchy followed not by a powerful, debt-forgiving central authority (as Mommsen believed
that Caesar was moving toward, and as many Romans hoped that he was moving towards), but to an
even more polarized imperial garrison state.
JS: That's indeed what happened. The emperors who ruled in the centuries after
Cæsar insisted on being deified -- they were officially "divine," according to their own
propaganda. Didn't any of them have the potential power to reverse the Roman economy's
ever-widening polarization of the, like the Near Eastern "divine kings" from the third
millennium BC into the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and even the Persian Empire in the first
millennium?
MH: The inertia of Rome's status quo and vested interests among patrician nobility
was so strong that emperors didn't have that much power. Most of all, they didn't have a
conceptual intellectual framework for changing the economy's basic structure as economic life
became de-urbanized and shifted to self-sufficient quasi-feudal manor estates. Debt amnesties
and protection of small self-sufficient tax-paying landholders as the military base was
achieved only in the Eastern Roman Empire, in Byzantium under the 9 th – and
10 th -century emperors (as I've described in my history of debt cancellations in
and forgive them their debts ).
The Byzantine emperors were able to do what Western Roman emperors could not. They reversed
the expropriation of smallholders and annulled their debts in order to keep a free tax-paying
citizenry able to serve in the army and provide public labor duties. But by the 11
th and 12 th centuries, Byzantium's prosperity enabled its oligarchy to
create private armies of their own to fight against centralized authority able to prevent their
grabbing of land and labor.
It seems that Rome's late kings did something like this. That is what attracted immigrants
to Rome and fueled its takeoff. But with prosperity came rising power of patrician families,
who moved to unseat the kings. Their rule was followed by a depression and walkouts by the bulk
of the population to try and force better policy. But that could no be achieved without
democratic voting power, so faith was put in personal leader -- subject to patrician violence
to abort any real economic democracy.
In Byzantium's case, the tax-avoiding oligarchy weakened the imperial economy to the point
where the Crusaders were able to loot and destroy Constantinople. Islamic invaders were then
able to pick up the pieces.
The most relevant point of studying history today should be how the economic conflict
between creditors and debtors affected the distribution of land and money. Indeed, the tendency
of a wealthy overclass to pursue self-destructive policies that impoverish society should be
what economic theory is all about. We'll discuss this in Part 4.
John Siman: I want to spell out the implications of the points that Socrates brought
up, and with which you and I agree. That leaves the question facing us today: Is the American
oligarchy and state as rapacious as that of Rome? Or is it universally the nature of oligarchy
in any historical setting to be rapacious? And if so, where is it all leading?
Michael Hudson : If Antiquity had followed the "free market" policies of modern
neoliberal economics, the Near East, Greece and Rome would never have gained momentum. Any such
"free market" avoiding mutual aid and permitting a wealthy class to emerge and enslave the bulk
of the population by getting it into debt and taking its land would have shrunk, or been
conquered from without or by revolution from within. That's why the revolutions of the 7
th century BC, led to reformers subsequently called "tyrants" in Greece (and "kings"
in Rome) were necessary to attract populations rather than reduce them to bondage.
So of course it is hard for mainstream economists to acknowledge that Classical Antiquity
fell because it failed to regulate and tax the wealthy financial and landowning classes, and
failed to respond to popular demands to cancel personal debts and redistribute the land that
had been monopolized by the wealthy.
The wealth of the Greek and Roman oligarchies was the ancient counterpart to today's
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, and their extractive and predatory behavior
is what destroyed Antiquity. The perpetuation of this problem even today, two thousand years
later, should establish that the debt/credit dynamic and polarization of wealth is a central
problem of Western civilization.
JS : So what were -- and are -- the political and social dynamic at work?
MH : The key is the concept of wealth addiction and how it leads to hubris --
arrogance that seeks to increase power in ways that hurt other people. Hubris is not merely
over-reaching; it is socially injurious. The wealthy or power injure other people knowingly, to
establish their power and status.
That is what Aristophanes meant when his characters say that wealth is not like bananas or
lentil soup. Wealth has no object but itself . Wealth is status -- and also political
control. The creditor's wealth is the debtor's liability. The key to its dynamic is not
production and consumption, but assets and liabilities -- the economy's balance sheet. Wealth
and status in the sense of who/whom. It seeks to increase without limit, and Socrates and
Aristotle found the major example to be creditors charging interest for lending "barren" money.
Interest had to be paid out of the debtor's own product, income or finally, forfeiture of
property; creditors did not provide means of making interest to pay off the loan.
This is the opposite of Austrian School theories that interest is a bargain to share the
gains to be made from the loan "fairly" between creditor and debtor. It also is the opposite of
neoclassical price theory. The economics taught in universities today is based on a price
theory that does not even touch on this point. The liberty that oligarchs claim is the right to
indebt the rest of society and then demand full payment or forfeiture of the debtor's
collateral. This leads to massive expropriations, as did the Junk Mortgage foreclosures after
2008 when President Obama failed to write down debts to realistic market values for real estate
financed on loans far beyond the buyer's ability to pay. The result was 10 million
foreclosures.
Yet today's mainstream economics treats the normal tendency to polarize between creditors
and debtors, the wealthy and the have-nots, as an anomaly. It has been the norm for the last
five thousand years, but economics sidesteps actual empirical history as if it is an anomaly in
the fictional parallel universe created by the mainstream's unrealistic assumptions. Instead of
being a science, such economics is science fiction.It trains students in cognitive dissonance
that distracts them from understanding Classical Antiquity and the driving dynamics of Western
civilization.
JS: This gets us back to the question of whether universities should just be shut
down and started up all over again.
MH: You don't shut them down, you create a new group of universities with a different
curriculum. The path of least resistance is to house this more functional curriculum in new
institutions. That's what America's Republican and pro-industrial leaders recognized after the
Civil War ended in 1865. They didn't shut down Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the Christian
free-trade Anglophile colleges. They created state colleges funded by land grants, such as
Cornell in upstate New York, and business schools such as the Wharton School at the University
of Pennsylvania, endowed by industrialists to providing an economic logic for the state's
steel-making and related industrial protectionism. The result was an alternative economics to
describe how America should develop as what they saw as a new civilization, free of the
vestiges of Europe's feudal privileges, absentee ownership and colonialist mentality.
The Republicans and industrialists saw that America's prestige colleges had been founded
long before the Civil War, basically as religious colleges to train the clergy. They taught
British free trade theory, serving the New England commercial and banking interests and
Southern plantation owners. But free trade kept the United States dependent on England. My book
America's Protectionist Takeoff describes how the American School of Political Economy,
led by Henry Carey and E. Peshine Smith (William Seward's law partner), developed an
alternative to what was being taught in the religious colleges.
This led to a new view of the history of Western civilization and America's role in fighting
against entrenched privilege. William Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe , and
Andrew Dixon White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology saw the United
States as breaking free from the feudal aristocracies that were a product of the way in which
antiquity collapsed, economically and culturally.
JS : So business schools were originally progressive!
MH : Surprising as it may seem, the answer is Yes, to the extent that they described
the global economy as tending to polarize under free trade and an absence of government
protectionism, not to become more equal. They incorporated technology, energy-use and the
environmental consequences of trade patterns into economic theory, such as soil depletion
resulting from plantation monocultures. Mainstream economics fought against such analysis
because it advocated markets "free" for polluters, "free" for nations to pursue policies that
made them poorer and dependent on foreign credit.
JS : So this is how the Wharton School's first professor of economics, Simon Patten,
one of the founders of American sociology, fits into this anti- rentier tradition! That
is such a revelation to me! They developed an analysis of technology's effects on the economy,
of monopoly pricing and economic rent as unearned income that increases the cost of living and
cost of production. They explained the benefits of public infrastructure investment. Today that
is called "socialism," but it was industrial capitalists who took the lead in urging such
public investment, so as to lower their cost of doing business.
MH : The first U.S. business schools in the late 19 th century described
rentiers as unproductive. That is why today's neoliberals are trying to rewrite the
history of Institutionalism in a way that expurgates the Americans who wanted the government to
provide public infrastructure to make America a low-cost economy, undersell England and other
countries, and evolve into the industrial giant it became by the 1920s.
JS : That was Simon Patten's teaching at the Wharton School -- government-subsidized
public infrastructure as the fourth factor of production.
MH : Yes. America's ruling political class tried to make the United States a dominant
economy instead of a rentier economy of landlords and financial manipulators.
JS : How did the robber barons fit into this story?
MH : Not as industrialists or manufacturers, but as monopolists opposed by the
industrial interests. It was Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting and the Republicans that enacted
the Sherman antitrust act. Its spirit was continued by Franklin Roosevelt.
JS :Is today's economy a second age of robber barons?
MH : It's becoming a second Gilded Age. An abrupt change of direction in economic
trends occurred after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were elected in 1979/80. The result
has been to invert what the 19 th -century economists understood to be a free market
-- that is, a market free from a privileged hereditary class living on unearned income in the
form of land rent, monopoly rent and financial extraction.
JS : I was in my first few years of college when Thatcher came in in 1979, and when
Reagan was elected in 1980. I asked my economics professors what was going on, but I could not
find a single professor to coherently describe the U-turn that was occurring. It certainly
wasn't in Paul Samuelson's textbook that we were given.
MH : There's little logic for neoliberalism beyond a faith that short-term greed is
the best way to optimize long-term growth. It is natural for the wealthiest classes to have
this faith. Neoliberalism doesn't look at the economy as a social system, and it excludes as
"externalities" concerns with the environment, debt dependency and economic polarization. It
only asks how to make a short-term hit-and-run gain, regardless of whether this is done in a
way that has a positive or negative overall social effect. Realistic economic logic is social
in scope, and distinguishes between earned and unearned income. That is why economists such as
Simon Patten and Thorstein Veblen decided to start afresh and create the discipline of
sociology, to go beyond narrow individualistic economics being taught.
Today's mathematical economics is based on circular reasoning that treats all that has
happened as having been inevitable. It is all survival of the fittest, so it seems that there
is no alternative. This policy conclusion is built into economic methodology. If we weren't the
fittest, we wouldn't have survived, so by definition (that is, circular reasoning), any
alternative is less than fit.
Regarding the fact that you had to read Samuelson when you were in college, he was famous
for his Factor Price Equalization Theorem claiming to prove mathematically that everybody and
every nation tends naturally to become more and more equal (if government stands aside). He
denied that the tendency of the global economy is to polarize, not equalize. The political
essence of this equilibrium theory is its claim that economies tend to settle in a stable
balance. In reality they polarize and then collapse if they do not reverse their polarizing
financial and productivity and wealth dynamics are.
The starting point of economic theorizing should explain the dynamic that lead economics to
polarize and collapse. That is the lesson of studying antiquity that we have discussed in our
earlier talks. Writers in classical antiquity, like Bronze Age Near Eastern rulers before them
and the Biblical prophets, recognized that a rentier economy tends to destroy the
economy's productivity and widespread prosperity, and ultimately its survival. In today's world
the Finance, Insurance,and Real Estate [FIRE] sector and monopolies are destroying the rest of
the economy, using financial wealth to take over the government and disable its ability to
prevent their operating in corrosive and predatory ways.
JS : Why aren't more people up in arms?
MH : They're only up in arms if they believe that there is an alternative. As long as
the vested interests can suppress any idea that there is an alternative, that matters
don't have to be this way, people just get depressed. In our third interview you spoke about
Socrates and the Stoics producing a philosophy of lamentation and resignation. By his day there
seemed no solution except to denounce wealth. When matters got much worse in the Roman Empire,
wealth was abhorred. That became the message of Christianity.
What is needed is to define the scope of the alternative that you want. How can the economy
grow when households, business, and government have to pay more and more of their revenue to
the financial sector, which then turns around and lends its interest and related income out to
indebt the economy even more? The effect is to extract even more income. Rising government debt
and tax cuts for the rentiers lead to the privatization of public infrastructure and
natural monopolies. Higher prices are charged for tolls to pay for public healthcare,
education, roads and other services that were expected to be provided for free a century ago.
Financialized privatization thus creates a high-rent, high-cost economy -- the opposite of
industrial capitalism evolving into socialism to finally free society from rentier
income.
JS: Wouldn't that be based on the insatiable desire
[ἀπληστία, aplêstia ] for money and the
super-rich [ὑπέρπλουτοι,
hyper-ploutoi ] oligarchs in Book 8 of Plato's Republic ? So we get back to my
question: Is the behavior of the super-rich a constant in human nature?
MH: Money-love
[φιλοχρηματία,
philochrêmatia ] has always been extreme because wealth is addictive. But their
dynamic of credit -- other peoples' debts -- increasing at compound interest is mathematized
and the economy is put on automatic pilot to self-destruct. Its business plan to "create
wealth" by making financial gains at somebody else's expense, without limit. This kind of
financial wealth is a zero-sum activity. The wealth of the creditor class, the One Percent, is
achieved by indebting the 99 Percent.
JS: Why is it a zero-sum activity?
MH: A zero-sum activity is when one party's gain is another's loss. Instead of income
paid to creditors being reinvested in means of production to help the economy grow, it's spent
on buying more assets. The most wasteful examples are corporate stock buyback programs and
financial raids. And the largest effect of financialization occurs as loans and Quantitative
Easing simply bid up the price of real estate, stocks, bonds and other assets. The effect is to
put housing and a retirement income further out of range of people who have to live by working
for wages and salaries instead of living off absentee ownership, interest and financial
asset-price gains.
JS: Why is this being done instead of investing in the economy to help the population
live a better and more prosperous life?
MH: The tax and regulatory system is set up to make financial gains or create
monopoly privileges. That is quicker and more certain, especially in an economy shrinking as a
result of financialization and the austerity it imposes. It's hard to make profits by investing
in a shrinking economy suffering from debt deflation and a squeeze on family budgets to pay for
health care, education and other basic needs.
JS: So it becomes more about extraction. Let's come back to Global Climate Change and
rising sea levels as a foundation of American foreign policy.
MH: Since the 19th century, American policy has been based on the recognition that
GDP growth reflects rising energy use per capita. Rising productivity is almost identical with
the curve of energy use per worker. That was the basic premise of E. Peshine Smith in 1853, and
subsequent writers, whom I describe in America's Protectionist Takeoff: 1918-1914 . The
policy conclusion is that if you can control the source of energy -- which remains mainly oil
and coal -- then you can control global GDP growth. That is why Dick Cheney invaded Iraq: to
grab its oil. It is why Trump announced his intention to topple Venezuela and take its oil.
If other nations are obliged to buy their oil from the United States or its companies, then
it's in a monopoly position to turn off their electricity (like the United States did to
Venezuela) and hurt their economies if they don't acquiesce in a world system that lets
American financial firms come in and buy out their most productive monopolies and privatize
theirpublic domain. That's why America's foreign policy is to monopolize the world's oil, gas
and coal in order to have a stranglehold on the rate of growth of other countries by being able
to deny them energy. It's like denying countries food in order to starve them out. The aim isto
exploit Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America what Rome exploited its Empire.
JS: Would you be comfortable using words like evil to describe what's going on
now?
MH : Evil essentially is predatory and destructive behavior. Socrates said that it
ultimately is ignorance, because nobody would set out intentionally to do it. But in that case,
evil would be an educational system that imposes ignorance and tunnel vision, distracting
attention from understanding how economic society actually works in destructive ways. On that
logic, post-classical neoliberal economics and the Chicago Boys are evil because their ideology
breeds ignorance and leads its believers to act in ways that are injurious to society,
preventing personal fulfillment through economic growth. Evil is a policy that makes most of
society poorer, simply in order to enrich an increasingly wealth-addictive rentier layer
at the top. Werner Sombart described the bourgeoisie as floating like a globules of fat on top
of a soup.
JS: This is now happening on a path that follows an exponential extreme. I guess
global warming makes it particularly evil. We're not simply talking about taking advantage of
other people within a society, we're talking about destruction of the planet and its
environment.
MH: Economists dismiss this as an "externality," that is, outside the scope of their
models. So these models are deliberately ignorant. You could say that this makes them evil.
JS: That is what I've suspected since we started the Iraq War in 2003.
MH: America's military buildup, its anti-environmental policy and global wars are
part of the same symbiotic strategy. The reason why America will not be part of a real effort
to mitigate global warming is that its policy is still based on grabbing the oil resources of
the Near East, Venezuela, and everywhere else that it can. Also, the oil industry is the most
tax-exempt and politically powerful sector. If it also happens to be the primary cause of
global warming, that is viewed as just collateral damage to America's attempt to control the
world by controlling the oil supply. In that sense the environmental impasse is a byproduct of
American imperialism.
JS: What's hopeful in the United States right now? What is a possible good
outcome?
MH: T he precondition would be for people to realize that there is an
alternative. Starting with wiping out of student debts, they can realize that the overall debt
overhead can be wiped out without hurting the economy -- and indeed, rescuing it from the
financial rentier class inasmuch as all debts on the liabilities side of the balance
sheet have their counterpart on the asset side as the savings of today's financial oligarchy,
which is doing to the U.S. economy what Rome's Senate did to the ancient world.
JS: How can people proceed from here?
MH: Understanding must come first. Once you have to have a sense of history, you
realize that there is an alternative. You also see what happens when a creditor
oligarchy gets strong enough to prevent any public power from writing down debts and to prevent
attempts to tax it.
You have to do to America today what the Republicans did after the Civil War: You have to
have a new university curriculum dealing with economic history, the history of economic thought
and the real world's long-term development.
JS: And what would be the premise for such economic history?
MH: T he starting point is to realize that civilization began in the ancient Near
East, and made a turn to oppose a strong public regulatory sector in Classical Greece and Rome.
The long-term tension is the eternal fight by the oligarchy of creditors and large land owners
to reduce the rest of society to serfdom, and to oppose strong rulers empowered to act in the
economy's long-term interest by creating checks against this polarization.
JS : So how much longer does this go on -- for months, for years, for decades?
MH : It always goes on longer than you think it will. Inertia has a great elastic
self-reinforcing power. Polarization will widen until people believe that there is an
alternative and decide to fight for it. Two things are required for this to happen: First, a
large proportion of people need to see that the economy is impoverishing them, and that the
existing picture of what is happening is misleading. Instead of wealth trickling down, it is
defying gravity and sucking income up from the base of the economic pyramid. People are having
to work harder just to stay in place, until their life style breaks down.
Second, people must realize that it doesn't have to be this way. There is an
alternative
JS : Right now most people think that government regulation and progressive taxation
will make things worse, and that the wealthy are job creators, not job destroyers. They think
that the system needs to be bolstered, not replaced, because the alternative is "socialism" --
that is, what the Soviets did, not what Franklin Roosevelt was doing. But today bailing out the
banks and giving subsidies to new employers is said to be for our own good.
MH : That's what the Romans told their provinces. Everything they did was always to
preserve "good order," meaning open opportunities for their own wealth grabbing. They never
said they were out to destroy and loot other societies. Madeline Albright followed this
rhetorical pattern in describing as being, like the Romans and France's brutal mission
civilisatrice , a program to uplift the world free-market efficiency. For performing this
service, the imperial power takes all the money that its colonies, provinces and allies can
generate. That's why the U.S. meddles in foreign politics, as we have just seen in Ukraine,
Libya and Syria.
JS : You've described the greatest meddling as distorting the narrative of history to
depict creditor and rentier drives toward oligarchy as being democratic and helping to raise
living standards and culture. Your books show just the opposite.
MH : Thank you. (Republished from
Naked Capitalism by permission of author or representative)
Questions for Dr. Hudson: Why should a public banking system charge interest at all on loans?
Could they not merely charge a one-time service fee to cover the cost of loan administration
and a one-time insurance fee to cover the costs of defaulting on the loan? After all, they
are not actually loaning money – they are creating money at minimal risk to the bank.
Charging interest to create money strikes me as mere theft.
Charging interest to create money strikes me as mere theft.
The school of Salamanca is where this idea of interest on money was codified, where the
Jesuit priests proclaimed it as a loss of wants. That is, since people loaned out their
money, they didn't get use of it, so they should be paid for their loss.
If you examine how banking works, banks hypothecate new money the moment you sign a debt
instrument. Both the new bank credit and debt instrument pop into being simultaneously.
To ask for compounding interest on this simple legerdemain is an outrageous abuse, so you
are right it is theft.
There are situations where it is not usurious. For example, Schacht's MefoBills scheme,
the interest fluxed outward from Reichsbank to the bill holder. A bill would be
presented to industry, and said industry would then start work making goods. Bill would then
be presented for discount, which is fancy way of saying paid for, or paid off. Upon discount,
bill would be examined to see if goods were produced. Then the bill would be paid its full
face value AND the interest it accrued.
Reichsmarks flowed from Reichsbank to the bill holder, who was paid interest. The bill
holder then spent his new Reichsmarks into the money supply.
Benjamin Franklin's public bank spent into the commons the extra money necessary
for debtors to pay interest on their loans. The commons were improved, so one could view this
as non usurious, even though it was positive interest. For the most part, FEES are all that
should accompany new loans, not compounding interest.
Canada had a quasi sovereign economy 1938 to 1974 and spent debt free into the
commons and on public infrastructure, their economy did not polarize toward creditors. The
Ministry of Finance owned all the common shares of Bank of Canada. BOC was a crown bank.
Note in all the "good" examples, interest flowed outward from an exogenous creator toward
the population. In bad examples of interest, it drains purchasing power from the
population.
By the way, a MEFOBILL scheme today could be used to release debts. The bill is created
exogenously by Treasury or even a shell company. The bill has a drawer, payee and drawee. It
is like a check. It channels toward a specific goal. For example, if you wanted to pay off
student debts, then the bill would aim at the student, who then presents bill to bank holding
student's debt instrument. Bill would eventually make its way to the FED through bank reserve
loops, and FED would expand their ledger. FED would use their keyboard to make new dollars,
which flow back into private bank system to pay off the students debt instrument. So double
entry mechanic laws are not abrogated. Student's debt disappeared, and Mefobill stays on FED
ledger forever, not accruing interest. Or, you could specify a small amount of interest to
the bank as a fee for their operations.
U.S. could use Mefobill scheme to lure industry back to the U.S. as it specifically
channels toward a goal.
The money system is something we humans created, it can be used for good or ill. To
paraphrase Michael, we need good civil law that codes for morality.
That was a soul-transforming read. It put into words what I could never put into words, but
on an instinctive level I have always felt these things. I have always had this irrational
hatred of bankers, landlords, capitalists, and any one else who dances to that faggy Gordon
Gekko tune. But I could never figure out why, let alone explain it clearly. This article has
done that for me right here and right now today. I am so grateful. This one is a keeper, now
I finally understand my hate. And I am proud of it. This is why Hitler was a good person, he
made these little bitch finance fags squeal and screech like the untermenschen they really
are.
It is interesting to note that the facts explored in this article corroborate and
synchronize with the facts explored in an amateur work titled "The Sumerian Swindle: How the
Jews Betrayed Mankind." If you look you can print the book free off the internet
somewhere.
From now on I only see humans in two distinct groups: productive people who work for a
living, and parasitic leeches who exploit the former. Twas ever thus. Let us successfully
genocide the latter in the near future.
The book sounds extremely interesting. I will probably get it, but that thing about the
Kaiser is a bad mistake. The German nation had been subjected to France and its proxies
marching across it for centuries. As always happens it unified in the face of threat, but
financially the structure was still harking back to the Holy Roman Empire. Being
decentralised as far as raising revenues was concerned, the Kaiser was unable to exert the
full strength of Germany. The Weimar government instituted reforms were intended to remedy
that for defensive purposes, but unfortunately Hitler inherited those reforms and that extra
wherewithal was a major reason for the early military successes in WW2 that set the world
agog.
Germany began to be a mixed economy in the decades leading up to World War I. But it had
a mentally retarded king whom they didn't know how to restrain, given their cultural faith
in royalty. China is of course the most successful recent mixed economy.
Dubious.France had financed massive military preparation by Russia, and Poincaire (cousin
of the brilliant physicist) was fixated with recovering Alsace and Lorraine (where he was
born). The military situation was gravely deteriorating for Germany partly because Germany.
The Kaiser did not attack France in 1905 when Britain had a tiny army and Russia was in
chaos. That was the craziest thing he did as leader.
Mr. Hudson thinks we can get the desirable results of Divine Kingship without having Divine
Kings, simply by enacting "laws" that promote a broad distribution of wealth. But he also
says that the oligarchy makes the laws and appoints the "elected" lawmakers. So he's engaged
in an exercise in wishful thinking. There is no democratic path to his desired result.
An excellent tour de force completely relevant to the major problems we face today, so
thank you , Ron Unz!
and turn the government into a vehicle to help them exploit the rest of society.
It's extremely obvious that's is exactly what our "constitution" was designed to do.
Hudson's insistence that debt must be government controlled runs into the problem
consistently, which both he and the interviewer discuss.
Essentially, the problem is that whoever gets the power will abuse it. "The government" is
no more a disinterested group of parties than the oligarchs or the plutocrats. The best
answer is to have a noble ruling class, but good luck with that; it will never happen at
least on a permanent basis.
So what's the answer? I wish I knew
The best [the Greek philosophers] could do was to inspire and educate individuals
I highly doubt anyone can do much more, but the last thing to do is to hope for some
Messiah, especially a rich one. Are you tRumpeteers listening?
PS: I liked the mention of Aristophanes. All of his plays are as instructive as they are
amusing and should be read by all. Same with Lucian of Samosata and Juvenal to mention just a
few.
JS said: "Right now most people think that government regulation and progressive taxation
will make things worse,"
Er, no, most people do not "think" that [ if they "think" at all].
They mostly "think" the exact opposite.
Due to their public [ie government funded] er,"education" [ie brainwashing], they are
actually dumb enough to believe that more government, and more regulations will make things
better for them, despite the fact that more than any other factor, it is the size and scope
of government that has directly caused the financial problems most of them are now
experiencing. "Stupid is a stupid does".
In fact, more, bigger government and more regulations will only further increase poverty
and make things even worse for them all than they are today.
This just in:
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very
cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", nor "limited" in
scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
Government doesn't work" Harry Browne
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those
of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"Everything government touches turns to crap" Ringo Starr
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the
kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" H.L.Mencken
There was no concept of linear progress in Antiquity. They thought that there was only
one way to do things, so any reform must be the way the world was meant to be in the very
beginning.
The Hebrews had their liberation from captivity, Hesiod had his three prior ages "before
there was iron," Odysseus travels the world observing the various ways of men, Plato
envisions a radical transformation of human society, Aristotle compares the constitutions of
various Greek city-states, Thucydides resorts to archaeology to show that the Athenians were
not the original inhabitants of the Attic Peninsula.
It's not difficult to come up with what seem to be counter examples to Hudson's assertion
that there was no "linear progress" and no vision of other ways of doing things in Antiquity.
Ancient Mediterranean societies did see humanity as moving in a direction, evolving by
discovery and by making new institutions to address novel problems.
I found that peculiar as well. Another thing that was out of place was the "deification"
of Teddy Roosevelt and his so called trust busting as well as FDR's continuously "evolving"
New Deals. Both Roosevelts and their programs were tRump-like frauds whose main interest was
self aggrandizement at whatever cost.
Like tRump, the rhetoric was grand but the motive and execution left much to be desired.
While I get what Hudson is saying when he sez "there oughta be a law," I think history has
proven, repeatedly, that while there's a possibility that there ought to be one, it's not
likely it'll do much good, and certainly no permanent good.
The greatest debt creator in the history of America is the zionists privately owned FED and
the zionist owned central banks in every country in the world that create money out of thin
air and charge the goyim/proles for the use of this zionist created charade, which started in
1913 here in the zio/US with the diabolical draconian demonic FED.
Free America, abolish the FED and return to government created , debt free money as was
the case prior to December 23, 1913!
@G.
Poulin G. Poulin says: "Mr. Hudson thinks we can get the desirable results of Divine
Kingship without having Divine Kings, simply by enacting "laws" that promote a broad
distribution of wealth. "
Yup. The whole, as per usual, "benevolent dictator" fantasy writ large, yet once again. It
never stops.
You'd think that by now, this late in the game, and given history, that most people would
have finally figured out that government "solutions" never worked , and never can, or
will.
But no, luckily for governments, there's always a plentiful supply of new, brainwashed
dreamer/fantasists [or "suckers" as P.T Barnum reportedly called them], who are ever more
eager for a government that does what they think it should do, and who "think" that it/they
actually will, despite all the historical evidence directly contradicting their inane
fantasies.
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the
government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the
government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of
kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
–Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801.
" idealists and realists begin to get on each other's nerves. But the real difference is
in the capacity for appreciating the immense gap of blue inane which separates earth from
heaven, and in the realist's unwillingness to assume that men have angels' wings. "
@onebornfree
oneborn free, your screed is you projecting fears about abusive government.
Hudson just explained in historical terms that it is only properly constructed government
that can reign in Oligarchy. It is clear that society WILL polarize toward creditors if
certain safeguards are not put in place.
So, you will have to come to grips with your cognitive dissonance.
Hudson also sets the framework for governments "proper role." Anything outside of that
role is government overstepping its bounds.
By providing the framework, Hudson is doing the world a tremendous service, and as such he
will go down as one of the great men of history.
New glasses are being put on your nose, but you prefer to wear your old glasses that make
you see improperly?
It reminds me of all the wishful thinking about China, how their ghost cities are going to
do them in, and their economy cannot keep doing so well, and so on. It is people not
believing what is right in front of their eyes, or their inability to see outside of their
brainwashed mentality.
Hudson says that public banks are an option for erasing debts.
China does this now with their state banks, which is one of their secret weapons.
In the mid 90's China swept all of their old communist era debt into the trash can. This
then made their "books" look good to Western Finance standards, and China was essentially
given MFN status.
Then it was game on! Wall Street soon greenmailed American industry to leave for China, to
then get some of that wage arbitrage. We are living in the aftermath of this civilization
destroying decision making by our ruling finance class.
China has helped the wall street finance class loot America, as China creates new Yuans
from their state banks to match their countries growth rate. These new Yuans have to be there
in order to swap for dollars won in trade. The dollars end up in China's state banks, and are
recycled back to the U.S. to buy TBills instead of buying goods from mainstreet.
Today and reality is staring you in the face. Look at it. America's finance class did
indeed export jobs and our patrimony, and china did indeed use their public banking system.
China is working for their people's benefit, while a traitor class of finance oligarchy is
working against the public interest in America.
Those of you who are against Public banks need to get real and look at actual data. For
example, the bank of North Dakota is a public bank and has a good track record. Please, use
data and think for yourself rather than being a brainwashed dupe.
Another way is to continue to use PRIVATE BANKS, and have public money. The money supply
is nationalized, not the bank. All new money comes into being from a monetary authority or
Treasury as per the constitution. Banks then become gyro, which is a fancy word for
inter-mediation. Banks stop making money with a new debt instrument, but instead only match
up new creditors and debtors with existing money.
Within each private bank are two piles of numbers: 1) Pile A is people's savings, which
preferably was debt free at inception 2) Pile B is government credit, or national credit.
National Credit can be channeled toward specific goals that the country has agreed is in
its interests.
You as a debtor can borrow from either pile. The national credit creates a debt instrument
that can be easily jubileed in the same easy way as could a debt instrument hypothecated at a
public bank.
Public banks to my mind are a little too close to government even though they have a good
history. Nationalizing the money supply instead is better. Why? A good percentage of supply
becomes floating money (debt free) and this component becomes a permanent inheritance to the
people, giving them freedom to do commerce. An economically free people are also politically
free.
@onebornfreeSavior? Nothing can stop what has been set in motion, namely, Earth's Sixth Mass
Extinction, as the climate shifts rapidly to a
New Cretaceous "hothouse" climate. Neither voting nor your anarchism can invalidate
scientific evidence. Apparently, you can't read, because McPherson's Paradox
explains humanity's conundrum in plain terms: (a) continuing to evaporate Earth's coal beds
and oil fields into the atmosphere ensures our quick extinction from global warming, and (b)
stopping fossil fuel use only hastens our demise, because of "global masking effect" or "
global dimming
." Do you really think that evaporating coal beds and oil fields into the atmosphere has no
consequences?
"[T]heir complete extinction (in the co-extinction scenario) was abrupt, and
happened far from their tolerance limits, and close to global diversity collapse (
around 5 °C of heating )"
Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change
(Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 16724, published 13 November 2018) http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1
Remember, Trump has already promised 4 °C of heating is baked into the cake,
and stopping fossil fuel use would remove the "global dimming" effect of air pollution and
lead to a near instantaneous rise of 2°C. A true paradox has no solution.
1. Please use your commenting privilege to address the substance of the articles. The
sentence that you first quote is ancillary to this one, but you've plucked it out as a wedge
for your umpteenth anarchic strut.
2. Why so frequently insulting? I happen to share your general perspective, but if you're
prosletyzing your style stinks.
3. If nothing else, please realize that you only need to piss once on each hydrant to
leave your mark.
@Dutch
Boy Unfortunately, Dr. Hudson never attacks the "Elephant in the Room -- –The
Control of Economies by the Magic Jews." The Jews control all pathways including media,
social and economic which they will never relinquish because with the money they make they
control the world's politicians by using the greed of mankind against them.
The Jews use the Holocaust to intimidate stupid whites in Western Civilization with guilt
and control everything including our foreign policy to immigration. Civilization will not
survive as long as the power of the Jews continue to rule mankind.
@Dutch
Boy Consider that a 10 year loan at 4% now would then have a fee (simple, not even
compound interest) of 40% of the principle.
It defeats the purpose of a loan paying over time. Even the 20% down is for equity, not
prepayment of interest.
Or you could simply roll the fees in. There is a House for sale for $200,000. The bank
buys it but then to get ownership with lein, and you have to pay the bank $300,000 to cover
everything (do you get any equity before going positive?).
How about just saving money including gold in your mattress until you can afford
something?
@MEFOBILLS
Federal Reserve, TARP, and QE – the debts of the banksters were erased and they paid
themselves bonuses, and it took more cash that would pay off every mortgage of those who lost
their homes
Unfortunately, Dr. Hudson never attacks the "Elephant in the Room -- –The Control
of Economies by the Magic Jews."
Hudson does but in a peripheral way. See below. Our (((friends))) like to use their
capital rather than labor. They use usury as a weapon, and tend to be among the Oligarch
class. Why? Because their religion gives cover and sanction for predatory behavior. Note that
our friends adore Hillel. Jewish religion went off the rails after Hillel, and is now an
apologist for the creditor class, and hence against a balanced logos type world.
Hudson cannot go after the Jews, but I can and so can you. It is ok to point out where
Jewish ideology becomes "Crime Inc." In fact, I find the most moral people to be
anti-semites, so Hudson who obviously has a strong moral basis, is smart enough to NOT touch
the Jewish third rail, or he would become persona non-grata.
There is no question Hudson possesses a first class mind, and by not touching the third
rail he is preserving his career. It is up to us to decode what he is saying and we can be
more blunt about things.
You don't have to be Jewish to be a predator, and by association most of us can decode
what he is saying.
MH: Yes, but it ended with Rabbi Hillel and the Prozbul clause. Debtors had to sign this
clause at the end of their debt contracts saying that they waived their rights under the
Jubilee year in order to get a loan. That was why Jesus fought against the Pharisees and
the rabbinical leadership. That's what Luke 4 is all about
@jacques
sheete He also seems very keen on China's policy. From what I can make out this is
because the government loans the money and can cancel the debt. So China being locked into
growth by massively Keynesian policies that cannot be haltet for fear of global economic
collapse is a good thing it seems. Hmmm.
@tz1
Federal Reserve, TARP, and QE – the debts of the banksters were erased and they paid
themselves bonuses, and it took more cash that would pay off every mortgage of those who lost
their homes
Yes of course. It would have been much better to take over the banks and give the "bond
holders" a haircut.
What the haircut means is that the debt instrument cannot make claims on the future. The
amount it can claim is written down to what the real economy can pay.
Our financial oligarchy did not want to take a haircut, and since they own the government,
they made their politician puppets dance.
We cannot see what is in the bill till we pass the bill.
Some here have pointed out that democracy is a joke. Yes it is. Universal Suffrage
democracy, where any rube can vote is especially bad.
You do need a ruling class which looks like the people it rules over. This ruling class
also has to be servants of their people.
China's ruling class is constantly polling their people to get data on how they are doing.
If a politician is found to be corrupt, they are killed or ejected. Think of it like your
body, bad elements and parasites are attacked by the immune system, otherwise you (the host)
will die.
@Biff
"You're a broken record that needs to be tossed up in the air in front of a twelve gauge."
Seem like a lot of trouble to go to – especially as I might be carrying a 12 gauge,
or similar, myself
This just in: there's an "ignore" button – I suggest you learn how to use it.
But regardless of whether the "commniunist" label is completely accurate or not, he's just
yet another in a long line of naive intellectuals who thinks that the government can solve
problems, problems it alone created.
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the
kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" H.L.Mencken
@tz1
Fee's on a loan should cover the bank's cost, which is a tiny fraction of what they take now
in the form of usury.
Think closely on this, the bank makes a loan, and it is only a matter of typing of a debt
instrument. Today with computers that amounts to a few minutes of work. They then on-sale the
debt instrument to another, usually TBTF bank, and get rid of any risk.
The better way is for people to pool their savings, and the bank is gyro. Debtor then buys
a house borrowing your savings. The old savings and loan system worked like this.
In Canada, when they had a sovereign banking system (1938 to 1974) they used trusts. Banks
were not allowed to hypothecate new housing loans. Trusts and savings and loans both pool
existing money and loan it out.
It was a beneficial cycle where the young borrowed from the old, and the old benefited
from some interest income, to then buy goods and services produced by the young.
Interest isn't always bad, but you have to look at it in context. About 70% of debt
instruments resident at banks are hypothecated against land. This is so finance oligarchy can
GRAB THE LAND in a depression via swaps or other schemes. Depressions are inevitable when M2
is always draining to pay debts at interest.
In the case of Canada's trust system, the interest was cycling back to the young (interest
was pointing outward to the population) to buy goods and services they produced.
@MEFOBILLS
MEFOBILLS says: "Hudson just explained in historical terms that it is only properly
constructed government that can reign in Oligarchy. It is clear that society WILL polarize
toward creditors if certain safeguards are not put in place.So, you will have to come to
grips with your cognitive dissonance. Hudson also sets the framework for governments "proper
role." Anything outside of that role is government overstepping its bounds."
Short answer: "The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is
always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" H.L.Mencken
MEFOBILLS says: "Hudson also sets the framework for governments "proper role.""
This just in: it's "proper role" [ in the US] was already [supposedly ]"set" via
the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and more famously via a coup
d'etat which resulted in the scam called "The Constitution and Bill of Rights" .
Although the Constitution remains a scam to this day, a return to its supposed limits
would, at least temporarily, drastically downsize the federal government, which would be step
in the right direction.
For government is the problem, never the solution.
But of course, yourself [and most others here] remain too brainwashed [by the government,
and with your money] to ever understand that
Ya gotta watch out when someone takes Marx's economic observations (which were impressive) as
an automatic pass for his social prescriptions (which were a gateway to hell on earth).
@Dutch
Boy As a matter of logic aren't those creators of money reducing the value of the money
held by those who have saved to get it? So doesn't fairness require that they use interest
rates to maimtain the stability of the currency's value?
@Max So
you advocate euthanasia (when you are feeling nice rather than cruel and vengeful) of the
rapidly increasing retired population? Understood that you need to support the infant
generation but Hitler had the answer for that one didn't he: euthanasia of those who wouldn't
be able to contribute. How long do we indulge people with an unemployment benefit?
@jacques
sheete Which US subsidy programs might be regarded as proleptic jubilees? And writeoffs
like that massive solar energy disaster under Obama are surely equivalent to the jubilees.
And welfare payments are surely jubilees in advance.
@Sollipsist
Sollipsist says: "Ya gotta watch out when someone takes Marx's economic observations
(which were impressive) as an automatic pass for his social prescriptions (which were a
gateway to hell on earth)."
Wrongo. Marx's economic theories were as as idiotic as his social prescriptions- in fact,
his "social prescriptions" were directly derived from his idiotic economic theories, which is
exactly why such "social prescriptions" are, as you say, "a gateway to hell on earth".
As for the author of this article , pure Marxist or not, his own "social prescriptions"
are, like Marx's , the mere pontifications of a pseudo-intellectual statist, fantasizing
about solving social problems via that which he worships and adores , that is , yet more
government [of the "right" kind, mind you, and despite its obvious failure to do any such
thing to date].
Another case of "the blind leading the blind", I'm afraid, just more of the same old
hackneyed "government should do this- government can solve this " claptrap .
Hudson spent half the article talking about mixed economies being the best and only type
to work.
Also, it was the JEWISH CREDITOR CLASS, that funded Bolshevism. Wall Street Jews and some
London money funded the Bolsheviks.
Bolshevism in turn was not what Marx had intended.
Marx thought that industrial capitalism, especially that of the type he witnessed in
Germany, would evolve into an advanced form of socialism mixed economy. It would evolve after
industrial capitalism failed, or industrial capitalism would have evolved.
Instead, finance capitalism, that of the rentier credit class won out .
When Marx died, he said "I am a most unhappy man."
Instead of getting caught up in labels, look at the data or what they actually believe in.
It takes a little bit more energy and effort, rather than falling for simple platitudes.
Hudson's childhood background was Bolshevik, but he didn't pick his parents. If you look
at his actual body of work, he is analyzing where all economic systems fail.
Russian and Chinese communism failed because markets are not purely inelastic. You cannot
pretend that every market type needs government control, especially when pricing signals will
work. Systems that are predicated on lies, will not survive in the long term.
For government is the problem, never the solution.
Simple minded platitudes.
ALL COMPLEX SYSTEMS HAVE HIERARCHY!
All advanced civilizations have hierarchy.
There has to be a "brain" for any complex organization, it will not self organize.
This whole market is your god, or gold is your god is the rentier class duping you with
hypnosis.
Funny thing about Libertarian-tards and their junk economics, the very thing they want
they cannot have because their ideology brings about what they don't want – economic
slavery.
Free markets are free for the rentier to take his gains on your life energy and turn you
into his debt slave.
• This is the "anarchy" of the future stateless society which Marx and Engels had
accepted in 1872. Man becomes "his own master – free". The first condition for this
full-fledged freedom is: freedom from the state, not of the state, nor merely in the state.
As far as Marx's eye could see, the state is not the guarantor of freedom http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1970/xx/state.html
This is one the most brilliant things I've ever read here. I've read a great deal about the
various facts and events Mr. Hudson talks about but I've never been able to put them together
like Mr. Hudson. He's provided a framework for realizing how all these seemingly disparate
events fit together. I'm very grateful.
@Wizard of
Oz Retirees weren't regarded as parasites by National Socialism, Schlomo. Your
parasitic ilk, however, were.
"The Nazi social welfare provisions included old age insurance , rent
supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes the NSV often
refused to provide aid to Jews " – National Socialist
People's Welfare
This is fake history. Mythology becoming history. A Jewish speciality.
1- The Jews were never in Ancient Egypt – or the Egyptians would have documented
it.
2- There is absolutely no archeological artifact from the Palestine region that show that
they were there before their exile. Plenty of proof that the Egyptians had been there earlier
on.
3- Palestine was desert at that time and had been abandoned by the Egyptians as it was
infertile – not a land of milk and honey. Yemen was agricultural and prosperous.
4- The Jews were exiled from Yemen – because they and non-Jewish Arabs (the Jews and
Arabs were the same people at that time), continued to raid the caravans bringing goods from
Yemen to Petra. The Babylonians punished them by taking them back to Babylon. After the
Persians liberated them, some went back to Yemen and some went to Palestine.
5- Locations in the Old Testament correspond to places in Yemen and Hejaz. Even their
names.
The best counter to Robert Michels's iron law of oligarchy (whatever the ostensible form of
government, it turns out in practice to be oligarchic rule by the group that has the real
power) was devised by Cleisthenes in Athens shortly before 500 B.C.: give power to average
citizens by appointing to offices ordinary citizens randomly chosen. It worked, as is shown
by how deeply resented it was by oligarchs like Plato.
Is a U.S. Presidential Executive Order signed on April 5, 1933 , by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt forbidding the hoarding of gold within the continental United
States .
It required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount
of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve
, in exchange for $20.67 (consumer price index, adjusted value of $400 today) per troy
ounce. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the recently passed
Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up
to $10,000 (equivalent to $193,548 today) or up to ten years in prison, or both .
Order 6102 specifically exempted "customary use in industry, profession or art", a
provision that covered artists, jewelers, dentists, and sign makers among others. The order
further permitted any person to own up to $100 in gold coins (a face value equivalent to 5
troy ounces (160 g) of gold valued at about $6,339 in 2016).
@MEFOBILLS
MEFOBILLS says: "All advanced civilizations have hierarchy.There has to be a "brain" for
any complex organization, it will not self organize. "
So presumably, a half wit such as yourself knows exactly what that hierarchy should be,
who the "brain" "should" be and exactly what and where everyone's "correct" place within it
"should" be, because people cannot self organize.
Sieg Heil, mein fuhrer! You're an even dumber sheep than I had initially suspected!
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very
cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", nor "limited" in
scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those
of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"Everything government touches turns to crap" Ringo Starr
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the
kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" H.L.Mencken
There are several problems with Dr. Hudson's views here. Some have referenced some. I would
point out that we already have laws and practices to restrict the use of wealth from
impoverishing the population. But you have to have a leadership willing to enforce or apply
them. We have had no less than three major financial bailouts of the financial class in the
US. And at no time was the bailout extended to the industries consumers. I am unclear what
the prescription is to divorce the political class from the financial class.
The only new law that would make sense are laws that bar legislators from owning, stocks,
sitting on the boards of stocks or any financial institution they manage. And that would have
to extend to all immediate family members. Further, one has to completely cut off funds from
lobbyists, activists and the corporate class entities.
The economy is already comprised of mixed practices: private ownership and wealth
creation, government employment, non-profit entities and taxation and other programs that
assist citizens, i.e. welfare
The one over riding observation I would make about the economy is that we continue to have a
trade imbalance, which according to an old rule of thumb suggests that economy is not really
growing.
@G.
Poulin Mr. Hudson makes his contribution towards the greater good by educating the
populace. What's your problem? -- He is not a fairy. He is a knowledgeable and honest person;
the former requires a lot of willpower, the second requires courage.
@MEFOBILLS
Libertarians were invented and constructed on purpose to serve as the useful idiots of
oligarchs whom they worship and do everything to protect their right to be oligarchs while at
the same time being sodomized by them.
I am very happy to read this interview, because for me, this is the first time that I have
completely understood Michael Hudson's work. And I say this after watching countless of his
interviews over the past 8 years.
Before this interview here, I had always wanted to ask him if the Clean Slate policies
disappeared over 3000 years ago, then what was he saying in his books and lectures? If the
entirety of Western Civilization is based on oligarchy, rentiers, then what hope is there for
anything? I mean the Romans lasted a thousand years doing this rentier stuff. That's a long
time for misery.
Now, with this interview I understand more fully the period after the Civil War and into
the FDR Presidency as a partially-successful attempt to make things in the country different,
more egalitarian, more correct. And after this interview, I understand Hudson's main point:
the road to change lies in understanding the failures of antiquity.
Looking at things through the rentier oligarchy lens has been the revelation in my life in
the past 10 years. I never undeststood Chile & Allende until then. Likewise with
antiquity and likewise with the history of the United States. But those of us who do
understand these things, thanks in great part to Michael Hudson, are few.
As part of a very late stage college degree I earned 4 years ago, I took an Econ class in
my last semester. The class featured certain films as it related to economics and that was
indeed very interesting (I had never seen Coppola's "Tucker: The Man And His Dream" before so
that was "entertaining"), but the text book for the class was Friedman. I read it and could
not believe how dunderheaded, how wrong it was. And I realized from communication with the
professor that he believed all of it. His attitude seemed to be: who are you to question
economics orthodoxy, you uppity undergrad.
This interview above was both enlightening and depressing. How many decades longer do we
have to go before things change?
"... All of us in the West pay the Scumbag Tax: crime, terrorism, corruption, addiction, excessive immigration (in part from smashed countries) , pollution, propaganda, managed/faux democracy, wealth/income inequality, moral turpitude (supporting dictators, war, genocide, human rights abuses, apartheid, torture, etc.) , and more. ..."
All of us in the West pay the Scumbag Tax: crime, terrorism, corruption, addiction,
excessive immigration (in part from smashed countries) , pollution, propaganda,
managed/faux democracy, wealth/income inequality, moral turpitude (supporting dictators,
war, genocide, human rights abuses, apartheid, torture, etc.) , and more.
All in the name
of freedom and democracy. How's that working out for ya?
that might hold you until you manage to acquire the book itself.
The review by itself is filled with names, dates, events, places, and ties together
dozens of nasty historical threads, making sense out of so many seemingly senseless
horrors over the past 70 years.
I would say that the opioid addition epidemics reveals not only greed of Big Pharma, but also strongly resembles the epidemics
of alcoholism in the USSR in late 70th and 1980th.
It probably might be viewed as yet another sign of the despair of people with the current economic and social conditions. And
also sign of crisis of neoliberalism as an ideology much like Marxism before it
Only a complete idiot now believe in "shareholder value" mantra, or "free market" hype ( "free" for whom, why" free" and nor
"fair" ), or the USA "democracy promotion" policies abroad (which for some reason always accompanied by looting of the target
country)
A large percentage of students at universities laugh about the content of their "neo-classical" economics courses behind the
professor back and view them as just an exercise in hypocrisy necessary to get the diploma.
Milton Friedman now is viewed not as a respectable scholar but as a criminal who supported Pinochet and despicable intellectual
prostitute of the financial oligarchy.
What is interesting is that the current economic conditions as dismal as they are still much better in the USA than in other
societies in which people were converted into debt slaves and country are mercilessly looted by the local neoliberal oligarchy
and international financial institutions.
So it might be that not the absolute level that matters, but the level of and the speed of deterioration of the standard of
living and social security. As well as the general understanding that "the train left the station" and the situation will only
deteriorate.
A couple of relevant quotes from Pope Francis Evangelii Gaudium (2013):
55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves
and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis:
the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35)
has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly
human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack
of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.
And another:
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "disposable" culture
which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.
Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer
society's underside or its fringes or it's disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it.
The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers".
In any case, it is indisputable that in the USA under neoliberalism in 40 years or so the standard of living of middle class
deteriorated and good job disappeared. In this sense, the opioids epidemics is just the tip of the iceberg.
Trump election is another manifestation of the same -- rejection by people of the neoliberal establishment -- the middle finger
to the ruling elite.
The USA is not an exception. In most countries, far-right is gaining strength politically, like in 1920th. And that's a dangerous
development which in the USA is strengthened by imperial thinking of the elite (aka "Full Spectrum Dominance") that decimates
the standard of living of the middle class due to the current level of military expenditures needed to maintain absolute military
superiority and the cost of permanent neo-colonial wars.
So the "Full Spectrum Dominance" might be a mousetrap from which the USA can't escape without major damage.
Still, as corrupt and despicable as the current neoliberal elite is (Biden, Hillary, Pelosi, Trump, and so on and forth), they are preferable
to neo-fascists.
In this Real News Network interview, Bill Black gives a high-level overview of the New York case against not just opioid profiteers,
the Sackler family and their companies, but also other key participants, like “pain doctors” who were tied in to the Sackers’ marketing
efforts.
I just want to know one thing: How many Sacklers are going to jail and for how long?
If NY wants to make the most of it's limited resources (as Black notes) then why haven't they issued arrest warrants for the
Sackers and frozen their bank accounts?
Seems to me a whole lot of folks with privilege and $$$ in the news who would have be arrested on the spot had someone else
(like me for example) done the same thing but w/o all that privilege and $$$ (Zuckerburg, Boeing CEO, Sacklers).
What I hope does not get entirely forgotten in this matter is the people who need relief from pain, yet can’t get the drugs
they need because doctors are so afraid to prescribe effective pain-killers, except for extreme cases, like post-op or late-stage
cancers. I’m told this is the situation in New York State. Elsewhere, too?
I wonder if the Sacklers could have gotten away with their crime if less people were killed. Suppose only 500 people were killed
each year. Would the government have responded?
Oh blah blah blah. Please notice what’s absent in these “conversations” about the “opioid” crisis. The recent increase in overdose
deaths is due to the (often accidental) ingestion of street fetanyl as a result of prescription opioids being restricted.
No one emphasizes the shocking absence of funding for mental health facilities; addiction research and the role of economic
factors contributing to drug use; social safety nets for addicts and their children…in sum, WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE IN SO MUCH
PAIN?
In this country you have to be sprawled unconscious in the front seat of a running car to get any help, help being prison. Jailing
the Sacklers isn’t going to change that one iota.
The laboring class is largely being ground into hamburger. A condition of chronic, relentless pain that you can never get away
from is the unchosen lifestyle for millions. That the treatment for pain (opioids) is also pretty good for despair is half an
explanation for the epidemic. The other half, which is rarely mentioned, is that millions of people hurt all the time, physically
or otherwise, and this is just collateral damage in the class struggle that we poor folks continue to lose.
It’s sad that the process of justice against the monsters like the Sacklers will only result in more of that pain and suffering,
and to know that they won’t in the end suffer much of anything at all. The handy myth of “overprescribing” will carry the day
for the higher-status class of folks who’ve never had to contend with chronic pain conditions — conditions that come about mainly
because we’re so prone to being worked like dogs by psychopath bosses.
Thank you. I am disappointed that Bill Black and his “High-level interview” was boilerplate off-with-their-heads bunk. I admire
him but do not understand why he is being recruited to opine on drug policy.
I wonder (REALLY WONDER) if the Sacklers do not have some kind of sweet-heart insurance contract that will handle THEIR (financial)
“pain” with these “suits”. Funny how A.G.s lead the chivalrous charge to “clean up” wrong-doing WELL AFTER political cover ALLOWS
them to go after the elite. Funny how that works eh? Cyrus Vance gets to add to his kitty.
There was a major study done on the use of Opioids conducted at Boston University Medical Center, Waltham MA. The result of
that study were published in a brief letter to the NEMJ.
“Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients
who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were
only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered
major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We
conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients
with no history of addiction.” Jane Porter; Herschel Jick; MD Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, Boston University
Medical Center, Waltham, MA.
Note the key words here are: ” We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction
is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.”
This particular letter (or note as some may call it) to the NEJM was cited 608 times of which 491 times was in a positive manner
about addiction being rare in medical patients. The 491 (~81%) citations fail to mention the patients given Opioids were in a
hospital setting and grossly misrepresented the conclusions of the letter . 72.2% cited it as evidence that addiction was rare
in patients treated with opioids.
It took 37 years before another letter to the editor studied the impact of the misuse of that citation by doctors, Purdue Pharma,
other Pharmaceutical Companies, etc. The authors accomplished a bibliometric analysis of the correspondence from its publication
in 1980 until March 30, 2017. For each citation, two reviewers independently evaluated the portrayal of the article’s conclusions,
using an adaptation of an established taxonomy of citation behavior4 along with other aspects of generalizability. The analysis
which I have posted the resulting chart from it before can be found here:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1700150
Ten years earlier or 2007, Purdue Pharma was fined $800 million by the courts after the DOJ sued them. Three executives were
convicted and sentenced. From 2006 to 2015 Opioid companies spent $800 million in a 50 state strategy. The mother of Cameron Weiss
found out the power of Pharma the hard way when her push for new laws in New Mexico were defeated before a vote was even taken.
In 1980 the death rate resulting from Opioid overdose was less than 1 per 100,000 and the overall death rate from Drugs was
1 per 100,000. With the introduction of OxyContin and the abuse of the Jick and Porter Letter, the death rate associated from
Opioid Overdose increased to 1 per 100,000 one year later and doubled to 2 per 100,000 in 2 years. In 2015, it has soared to ~10
per 100,000.
Without knowing what has led up to the abuse of Opioids the story has always been recreational use of drugs an Opioids has
caused this epidemic without ever a mention of Purdue or the other drug companies. The explosion in the use of Opioids was very
deliberate and the drug companies should be held responsible for it. Now with fewer Opioid pills being prescribed, people have
moved on to Heroin and Opioid derivatives. The companies lit the fuse and left with their profits.
The reason I wrote this long comment is I believe Bill Black gave this topic the short shrift. There is a lot of history on
Opioid abuse and how it came to be.
"... The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as 'Gladio'. ..."
"... Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst 'Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament ..."
"... The primal author of the 'stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as 'werewolves'. ..."
"... Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources. ..."
"... The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles ..."
"... These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power. ..."
"... the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch. ..."
"... It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing in the United States itself. ..."
"... All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that? ..."
"... Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. ..."
"... To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the 'made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished. ..."
"... Under 'Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's 'benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of 'Mockingbird'. ..."
"... The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit. ..."
"... Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and '80s South America). ..."
"... One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. ..."
"... The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer. ..."
On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion
ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station.
Eighty-five people were
killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The
Red Brigades, it soon emerged that
the attack had, in fact, originated from within the 'deep
state' of the Italian government itself.
The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later
when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry,
revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of
an organization which
later came to be identified as 'Gladio'.
The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the
intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of
unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite
Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as 'patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of
the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know.
Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger
traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state
terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest
levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.
The moniker 'Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually
broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including
:
'P2' In Italy, 'P26' in Switzerland, 'Sveaborg' in Sweden, 'Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and
'Sheepskin' in Greece.
This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections
not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including
the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that
provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt
shebang.
If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the
dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice.
And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis
an overview of the
remarkable,
if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, 'Operation Gladio: The
Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'.
Though there are other books on the
subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, 'NATO's Secret Armies',
and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, 'Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'),
it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or
less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.
Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst
'Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990;
Washington and NATO having ever after refused 'comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs
and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted.
The historical context of 'Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to
understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.
OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN
The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called
'stay-behind-armies' set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to
act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe.
Quickly, however,
the raison d'etre of the 'armies' transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion,
but 'internal subversion'.
Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of
post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek and later global democracy itself.
But we get ahead of ourselves.
The primal author of the 'stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen,
the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War.
Having foreseen early on
that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla
squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable
Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as 'werewolves'.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the
OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly
enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to
transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2
intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the
Council on Foreign Relations,
and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the
American fold, the 'werewolves' were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded
as 'gladiators'. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task,
i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were
scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well.
Fortunately, 'Gladio' was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up
in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio
Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand
with the communist 'problem'. The arrival of the 'made men' was the result of Donovan's efforts from
1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new
(drug) funding for the OSS's off-books' operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island
in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on
the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the
CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and
the Christian Democrats returned to power.
Still, the threat remained.
Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers
and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body.
More
would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn't enough of it. Thus, the
initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon
foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the
loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt
Congressional funding.
There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the
itch.
Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan,
Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the
greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed 'Oh-So-Social' club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the
drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army
fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing in the
United States itself.
Thus,
it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists
to this day) between the nation's intelligence services and organized crime.
Enter stage left
such notables as 'Lucky' Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime
clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded
with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous 'French Connection', thence to
the 'Golden Triangle' (where the CIA's very own 'Air America' transported drugs out of South East Asia
during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.
All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole
drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit:
how to pay off the mafioso without anyone
noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes
of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you
do that?
THE VATICAN CONNECTION
Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to
regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the
latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the
Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn't
reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially,
the Vatican Bank.
Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as
the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the
monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered.
Already
in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and
where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of
the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with
Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new
horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect
of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the 'made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task
accomplished.
The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless
form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be
needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the
CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin
produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the
Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the
Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs
of the CIA and 'Gladio'. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about
to global.
To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia.
Unlike the
Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up
through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A
supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas,
there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel
army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of
terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then,
Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the 'French Connection'.
Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had 'resigned' from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation
(WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT.
Paul
Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully
employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok.
By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that
a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US
installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.
Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to
leak out. What to do?
The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West's growing
heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung.
Check. The second, more considered
response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image
of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish 'Operation Mockingbird'. Under
'Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and
propaganda about the Company's 'benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of
anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The
Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global)
eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of 'Mockingbird'.
But back to the Vatican.
The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community
that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin
industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and
orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God's Bank. As with any fine orchestra
it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for
one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from
the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading
financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate
of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA
and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, "result in the toppling of
governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation."
Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to
the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights.
To begin with Sindona purchased
Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank the Banca
Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank,
Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of
Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that
fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.
It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly
known as 'the Gorilla'. The Gorilla was six foot four, "a gifted street fighter and a lover of
bourbon, fine cigars and young women". Under Sindona's patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become
both Pope Paul VI's personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of
Roberto Calvi (the assistant and later full director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano)
came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in
the global banking underworld all through the 'anni di Piombo' (the Gladio 'years of lead' in Italy
from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi's eventual dark
demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi's
body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five
masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee
whilst in jail and under 'maximum protective custody'.
Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in
Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their
ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of
planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco
Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed
to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent.
In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight
shell companies again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.
This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio 'banking' system, i.e. the
system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to 'lose' money; that is, to
have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of
CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust,
Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia,
and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War),
and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the
Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that
brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.
Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal
embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of
New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide.
But then, what was all this money really doing?
THE TERROR
Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948
the Gladio 'secret armies' entered
into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation.
Thus, it was during the
1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of
the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was 'Propaganda Due'
otherwise known as 'P2'.
Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in
1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree
Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would
soon encompass a who's who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot.
Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South
America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General
Alexander Haig.
A 'P2' denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter's pedigree was impressive: a
former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under
Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the
Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His
ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass
assassination program in 1970s and '80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2's
supreme 'Worshipful Master' under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering.
Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli's
villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.
One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960.
Here
the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in
charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The 'stay-behind-army' in
Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any
such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its
youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage "ongoing terror attacks that resulted in the deaths of over
five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians".
Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General
Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit
. According to Williams, US
President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a
jubilant, 'Your boys have done it!' What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which
thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed
in the 1980s upon the PKK the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew
Brzezinski's (Carter's national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central
Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.
Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France,
where, after
having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President
Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle's boot. Actually, it was NATO
itself at the time, headquartered in Paris that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966,
whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle
was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.
Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well.
In 1967 the 'Hellenic Raiding Force',
a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew
the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until
1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece's tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn
of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations
nominally attributed to 'November 17', an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and
here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio
known as 'Sheepskin'.
This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser's research to the effect that
virtually every alleged 'leftist revolutionary' group said to have been operating in Europe throughout
the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio 'secret army' unit or else had been completely
infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for
Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.
Such is well documented for
the 'Red Brigades' in Italy and the 'Baader-Meinhof Gang' in
Germany
(the 'gang' being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the 'night of the
long knives', Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks
to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day 'terrorist' and their police and
intelligence handlers.
In Spain, during the early '70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy
provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco's secret police who conducted over a
thousand violent acts and some fifty murders.
Following Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie
moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death
squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and
assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.
Of Italy we have already mentioned the 'years of lead', but just to capture a few
highlights.
The 'strategy of tension' unleashed in 1969 in Italy the same year 'Condor' was
unleashed in Latin America was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the
country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as
a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of
progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, "Henry Kissinger, Nixon's
National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig,
for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts." The terror attacks began on December 12,
1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in which seventeen
people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed
more than '14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation'. The most infamous of these was, of
course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in
Italy.
Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by
Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the
decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 and murder a month or so later of Prime Minister Aldo
Moro was likely the most sensational.
Moro had dared to include communists in his new
coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further
investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine 'Mino' Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the
real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and
thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy's interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to
Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however.
At least
two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well.
In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI
died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock
when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a 'call for reform'. The very next day the
otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff in office barely a month was dead. Not just dead
but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was
definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers
disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned
to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of
relief.
Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal
succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul
II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the
destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy,
and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go
astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so
too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act.
Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father
suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets;
recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from
on high was given: 'Kill the Pope'.
But best blame it on the Soviets.
So issued the 'Bulgarian Thesis' wherein
a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors
in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to
General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the
Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already
served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000
non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle
Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany's BND (the national security services) garnered a
significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath
(both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured
prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the 'Bulgarian Thesis' despite the fact
of Agca's eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.
The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only
seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to
publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked
his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope
appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face.
Though the Pontiff kept it
secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.
The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well
beyond the time line of Gladio proper,
enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down
at all.
But that, as they say, is a whole other story and one I leave to the author to
take up.
* * *
Paul
Williams has made a fine contribution here.
Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across
from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a 'conspiracy monger'
well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words .'Operation Gladio'.
Mockingbird has the annoyance of freedom on the internet to occupy
themselves with. And a new false flag in a different country every 6
weeks. Hard to sell enough heroin to finance it all.
Great read. I think I will buy the book. You can bet Gladio is still
alive wsiting to get back into action. Frightening to see how that
evolved from a stay behind army in case of a Soviet invasion into a
fascist overtaking on a continent. Oh yeah, they are biding their
time alright. They
Didn't the Vatican help NAZIs escape Europe after the war falsifying
papers so that they could get new identities to travel? Always
remember that the richest economic and most influential
entity/business on the planet is the Vatican. You cannot be the
richest and most influential without corruption; it's against human
nature.
"You see all of these Russian connections -- there's a new one every single day, and increasingly benign explanations
for what the Trump, for what they're up to, benign explanations are just not credible."
Too often caught between Randian individualism on one hand and big-government collectivism
on the other, America's working-class parents need a champion.
They might well have had one in Elizabeth Warren, whose 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap , co-authored with her daughter Amelia
Warren Tyagi, was unafraid to skewer sacred cows. Long a samizdat favorite among socially
conservative writers, the book recently got a new dose of attention after being spotlighted on
the Right by Fox News's
Tucker Carlson and on the Left by Vox's
Matthew Yglesias .
The book's main takeaway was that two-earner families in the early 2000s seemed to be less,
rather than more, financially stable than one-earner families in the 1970s. Whereas
stay-at-home moms used to provide families with an implicit safety net, able to enter the
workforce if circumstances required, the dramatic rise of the two-earner family had effectively
bid up the cost of everyday life. Rather than the additional income giving families more
breathing room, they argue, "Mom's paycheck has been pumped directly into the basic costs of
keeping the children in the middle class."
Warren and Warren Tyagi report that as recently as the late 1970s, a married mother was
roughly twice as likely to stay at home with her children than work full-time. But by 2000,
those figures had almost reversed. Both parents had been pressed into the workforce to maintain
adequate standards of living for their families -- the "two-income trap" of the book's
title.
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What caused the trap to be sprung? Cornell University economist Francine Blau has helpfully
drawn a picture of women's changing responsiveness to
labor market wages during the 20th century. In her work with Laurence Kahn, Blau found that
women's wage elasticities -- how responsive their work decisions were to changes in their
potential wages -- used to be far more heavily driven by their husband's earning potential or
lack thereof (what economists call cross-wage elasticity). Over time, Blau and Kahn found,
women's responsiveness to wages -- their own or their husbands -- began to fall, and their
labor force participation choices began to more closely resemble men's, providing empirical
backing to the story Warren and Warren Tyagi tell.
Increasing opportunity and education were certainly one driver of this trend. In 1960, just
5.8
percent of all women over age 25 had a bachelor's degree or higher. Today, 41.7 percent of
mothers aged 25 and over have a college degree. Many of these women entered careers in which
they found fulfillment and meaning, and the opportunity costs, both financially and
professionally, of staying home might have been quite high.
But what about the plurality of middle- and working-class moms who weren't necessarily
looking for a career with a path up the corporate ladder? What was pushing them into full-time
work for pay, despite consistently
telling pollsters they wished they could work less?
The essential point, stressed by Warren and Warren Tyagi, was the extent to which this
massive shift was driven by a desire to provide for one's children. The American Dream has as
many interpretations as it does adherents, but a baseline definition would surely include
giving your children a better life. Many women in America's working and middle classes entered
the labor force purely to provide the best possible option for their families.
In the search for good neighborhoods and good schools, a bidding war quickly became an arms
race. There were "two words so powerful the families would pursue them to the brink of
bankruptcy: safety and education ." The authors underplay the extent to which
policy had explicitly sought to preserve home values, driven by their use as investment
vehicles and retirement accounts, a dynamic covered expertly by William Fischel's The Homevoter Hypothesis . But their broader
point is accurate -- rising house prices, aided and abetted by policy choices around land use,
have made it harder for families to afford the cost of living in 21st-century America.
Another factor in the springing of the trap? Divorce. In her 2000 book about how feminism had failed women, Danielle
Crittenden writes about how fear of dependency, especially in an era of no-fault divorce, had
caused women to rank financial independence highly.
These two factors, along with others Warren and Warren Tyagi explore, made it difficult for
families to unilaterally disarm without losing their place in the middle class. "Today's
middle-class mother is trapped," they write. "She can't afford to work, and she can't afford to
quit."
A quiet armistice may have been declared in the so-called "mommy wars," but the underlying
pressures haven't gone away since The Two-Income Trap was published. If anything,
they've gotten worse.
Warren and Warren Tyagi propose severing the link between housing and school districts
through a "well-designed voucher program," calling the public education system "the heart of
the problem." They correctly note that "schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled
'public,'" but that parents effectively pay tuition by purchasing a home within a carefully
selected school district. Breaking the cartel that ties educational outcomes to zip codes would
increase choices for families and open the door to further educational pluralism.
Warren and Warren Tyagi are also unafraid to tell unpopular truths about the futility of
additional funding for colleges (identifying "faith in the power of higher education [as] the
new secular religion"), housing affordability ("direct subsidies are likely to add more
ammunition to the already ruinous bidding wars, ultimately driving home prices even higher"),
universal child care (which "would create yet another comparative disadvantage for
single-income families trying to compete in the marketplace"), and usurious credit (Warren's
long work on bankruptcy requires deeper treatment than this space allows, but their questioning
of our over-reliance on consumer debt deserves a fuller hearing).
Warren's presidential campaign contains elements of this attempt to make life easier for
families, but the shades of her vision of a pro-family economic policy seem paler than they
were a decade and a half ago.
Her universal child
care plan , for example, seemingly contradicts her prior stated worries about
disadvantaging stay-at-home parents. While she explicitly -- and wisely -- steers clear of a
subsidy-based approach, her attempt to "create a network of child care options" does less to
directly support families who aren't looking for formal care. In a sense, Warren would
replicate the public school experience for the under-five crowd -- if you don't want to
participate, that's fine, but you'll bear the cost on your own. A true pro-family populism
would seek to increase the choice set for all families, regardless of their work-life
situations.
Warren's housing plan has
similarly good intentions, seeking to increase the supply of affordable housing rather than
simply trying to subsidize demand. Her competitive education grant would reward municipalities
for relaxing restrictive zoning requirements. But while her campaign has yet to release a plan
on education, it seems unlikely we'll see the kind of bold approach to educational choice she
espoused in 2003. Populist sympathizers of all ideological stripes should hope I'm proven
wrong.
Warren's attempt at pro-family progressive populism seems honest. If not for certain
infamous biographical missteps, her personal story would be one of how America is still a land
of opportunity -- the daughter of a Oklahoma department store salesman who worked her way to a
law degree, a professorship, and a Senate seat. There's a congruence in her positioning of
economic security as a family values issue and the resurgent interest in a pro-worker,
pro-family conservative agenda. And unlike so many politicians, her personal experience seems
to have instilled an understanding of why so many dual-earner families see work as a means to
the end of providing a better life for their children rather than an end in itself.
A politician willing to question the sacred cows of double-income families, more money
for schools, and easy credit is the kind of politician this populist moment requires. A
candidate willing to call into question an economic model that prioritizes GDP growth over all
else would boldly position himself or herself as being on the side of families whose vision of
the American Dream involves a better life for their children, yet who are exhausted and hemmed
in by costs.
How Warren needs to position her platform to navigate the vicissitudes of a Democratic Party
primary will likely not be the best way to address the needs of the modern American family. But
in a crowded field, an uncompromising vision of increased choice for families across all
dimensions -- not just within the public school system, for example, but among all options of
education -- would be an impressive accomplishment and a way of distinguishing herself from the
pack. An explicit defense of parenthood as a social good would be unconventional but
welcome.
Still, a marker of how far the conversation around families has shifted from the early 2000s
is the extent to which Warren's and Warren Tyagi's view of parenthood as something more than an
individual "lifestyle choice" would now be viewed as radical, particularly on the Left. "That
may be true from the perspective of an individual choosing whether or not to have a child,"
they write, "but it isn't true for society at large. What happens to a nation that rewards the
childless and penalizes the parents?"
What indeed. Paging the Elizabeth Warren of 2003 -- your country needs you.
Patrick T. Brown ( @PTBwrites ) is a master's of public affairs student at
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Doe anyone think the middle and especially upper middle class would be in favor of a school
choice plan that would cause their housing values to take hit? And there's another big
roadblock with a school choice program: the need for transportation. Two years ago my next
door neighbors who were able to place their young son in a good school across town sold their
house and moved to be closer to the school since the daily cross-town commute at rush hour
was just too much.
They might well have had one in Elizabeth Warren, whose 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap,
co-authored with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, was unafraid to skewer sacred cows.
It's more recent than that. The first edition was 2003, but a second edition came out in
2016, by which time Mom probably knew she might be running for president. It's got a new
introduction by the authors, so obviously it was done with their cooperation.
I haven't read either edition, so I don't know what's been changed in the new one.
I am struck again and again, by the unbelievable power of the forces in the political
arena pushing everyone who is a Democrat because they are fiscally liberal* to ALSO become
socially liberal,* and everyone who is a Republican because they are socially conservative*
to ALSO become fiscally conservative.*
The net result of the laws of motion seem to systematically take the ideological space of
"socially conservative, fiscally liberal" (the old New Deal) and push everyone in it either
out to the usual left "fiscally liberal, socially liberal" or the usual right "socially
conservative, fiscally conservative" quadrants.
This article shows how it's happening with Elizabeth Warren in one direction, and it's
happened constantly with socially conservative Republicans who get yanked back to the proper
quadrant anytime they try to move to a direction of economic policy that doesn't involve tax
cuts for the rich and actually help their constituents.
One can have all the opinions on better ways to do things for the good of society, but if
those ideas are not politically viable, it creates a change in directions. Warren probably by
now .realizes how complicated all of these policy issues are and the unintended consequence
of these policies are always a factor and a risk. Elizabeth Warren seems to have a good grasp
of complicated issues, but that never get her the support she would need to prevail in this
campaign. We currently live in the age of "Fantasyland" spewed by both the Trump RINOs and
the Lunatic Left. Warren is a thinker. That is not helpful these days.
What happened is that Warren wants the Team D nomination, and Team D, like Team R, could not
care less about the 99.9% of Americans who are not non-campaign bundlers or big contributors.
In fact, Team D (again, just like Team R) is actively hostile to any proposal that might
take money out of the pockets of the .1%, or otherwise affect the way the the economic pie is
sliced.
If this was the 1970s Warren would probably have supported busing. Pocahontas – leave
my safe neighborhood, my children's schools, and my home equity alone. Because these well
meaning social engineering schemes seldom work out as planned. As a middle class American I
will probably get the short end of the stick.
Funny that policy makers never want to help families by taking a little chunk out of hedge
funds and shareholders and vulture capitalists and sharing it with American workers. Talk
about "the heart of the problem."
My wife and I did a sort of calculation. In our state child care would be about 11,000 per
child per year. Also, you can't drop them off if they are sick, so you have to use your sick
days for them. Oh, and if you don't use the child care if you're on vacation, you still need
to pay to hold the slot. With two kids and taxes, she has to clear well over 30k per year to
about break even.
Add in the fact you'll be missing out on their childhood, spending maybe three or so hours
per day with them, is it really worth it?
The more I see the 'big tech' developments, they are basically things your pay for to let
you work so you can afford to work. TaskRabbit, Fivrer, DoorDash, etc basically give you free
time so you can work more.
"What happens to a nation that rewards the childless and penalizes the parents?"
Laughing.
They become liberals, democrats, anarchists, socialists, communists . . . supporters of
murdering children in the womb, efficiency advocates by way of eugenics . . . and other
assorted malcontents against ordered society.
But in my view, what has damaged economic sociology has been the shift in practice without
any assessment what it would do to the traditional family dynamic between husbands and wives
in family construction. That simply demanding that space be made for women and millions of
women would seriously tighten the job market for all and disrupt the pillars upon which our
nation was built, despite its problems.
Power dynamic, chivalry outran practical realities and that remains the case in
increasingly stratifying civil demands.
And while I sympathetic to the complaint about bussing, that had a very little impact on
the employment numbers which government and businesses and edication raced to fill the
discrimination expectations with women, and primarily white women.
tired comment, but accurate nonetheless, so instead of hiring men in response to
discrimination, those men were instead replaced by women, most of whom already had access via
the cultural dynamics of the majority.
Warren and Warren Tyagi propose severing the link between housing and school districts
through a "well-designed voucher program," calling the public education system "the heart of
the problem." [ ]
In my opinion, Warner's education voucher proposal by guaranteeing voucher dollar
enrollment in the affluent zip codes ignores the heart of the education problem. Affluent zip
codes do not ensure a child's academic success via 'better' teachers and educational
materials. Public schools in the big cities are filled with teachers who have their masters
and Ph.D's along with continuing education requirements.
Student success is fundamentally based upon parental commitment and community involvement.
Are the parents committed to their children's academic success? Does the parent(s) provide a
conducive and safe home environment? Does the child have a quiet space to study, do their
homework and prepare for school? Does the parent(s) sit down and teach? Review the child's
homework? Do the parents volunteer at the school? Are they involved with school events? Is
education a top priority? Or is school a babysitting service to drop off and pick up?
Those affluent zip codes are more than a number. For the most part, they are a supportive
community of families.
A child's academic success is assuredly tethered to the parental guiding hands. Simply, a
child's success begins at home with parents who care about their children's future.
Probably, every conservative will agree, that the basic flaw is materialism. Thus, with
materialism, personal values that cannot be sold or bought for money, are neglected in favour
of the gross domestic product per capita philosophy. Such personal values are, for instance,
family values, that is, children need both a mother, especially when they are below teenage,
and a father, especially when they are teenagers, and perhaps most important, a father and a
mother need one another. All this family thing does, however, not enter into the money
economy of big government. Whence, on the side of families, those need to take quite brave
choices, to choose morals above money. And on the side of the government, this needs to tax
the rich and help the poor. In fact, according to the World Bank, economic growth is
stimulated best, if governments help the poor directly, rather than with obscure subsidies to
the economic system. However, there is also the difficulty with difficult access to regular
jobs. By no doubt, abortion genosuicide decreases demand on the most simple of goods and
services, causing unemployment for the poor, and driving up costs of raising children.
Society then goes into socialism, with genosuicide instead of economic growth, while the
money flows into pension funds of the upper middle class. Governments must simply help the
poor. Humankind has always been able to produce twice the amount of good food that it needs,
but bureaucratic governments keep the poor enslaved, to fill them with lie.
Warren's academic work and cheeky refusal to fold under pressure when her nomination as
Obama's consumer ('home ec.'?) finance czar was stymied by the GOP are worthy of respect. I'd
like to see her make a strong run at the dem nomination, but am put off by her recent
tendency to adopt silly far-left talking points and sentiments (her Native DNA, advocating
for reparations, etc.). Nice try, Liz, but I'm still leaning Bernie's direction.
As far as the details of the economic analysis related above, though, I am unqualified to
make any judgment – haven't read the book. But one enormously significant economic
development in the early 70s wasn't mentioned at all, so I assume she and her daughter passed
it over as well. In his first term R. Milhouse Nixon untethered, once & for all, the
value of the dollar from traditional hard currency. The economy has been coming along nicely
ever since, except for one problematic aspect: with a floating currency we are all now living
in an economic environment dominated by the vicissitudes of supplies and demands, are we not?
It took awhile to effect the housing market, but signs of the difference it made began to
emerge fairly quickly, and accelerated sharply when the tides of globalism washed lots of
third world lucre up on our western shores. Now, as clearly implied by both Warren and the
author of this article, young Americans whose parents may not have even been born back then
– the early 70s – are probably permanently priced out of the housing market in
places that used to have only a marginally higher cost of entry – i.e. urban
California, where I have lived and worked for most of my nearly 60 years. In places like this
even a 3-earner income may not suffice! Maybe we should bring back the gold standard, because
it seems to me that as long as unfettered competition coupled to supply/demand and (EZ credit
$) is the underlying dynamic of the American economy we're headed for the New Feudalism. Of
course, nothing could be more conservative than that, right? What say you, TAColytes?
"Maybe we should bring back the gold standard, because it seems to me that as long as
unfettered competition coupled to supply/demand and (EZ credit $) is the underlying dynamic
of the American economy we're headed for the New Feudalism."
I take it you think the old one has departed.
It was in the area of how businesses and government were reciprocating unhealthy and
unfair business practices is where I think her advocacy was most accurate. But she has
abandoned all of that.
"Funny that policy makers never want to help families by taking a little chunk out of hedge
funds and shareholders and vulture capitalists and sharing it with American workers."
Funny that Warren HAS brought up raising taxes on the rich.
"... "I'm not running for president just to talk about making real, structural change. I'm serious about getting it done," the speech reads. "And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate." ..."
"... Advocates including Warren also say the end of the filibuster would make it easier for the Senate to pass meaningful legislation to combat the climate crisis and to further other progressive causes. ..."
"... "We can't sit around for 100 years while the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful and everyone else falls further and further behind," Warren's speech reads. "We can't sit around for 100 years while climate change destroys our planet, while corruption pervades every nook and cranny of Washington, and while too much of a child's fate in life still rests on the color of their skin. Enough with that." ..."
"We can't sit around for 100 years while the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful
and everyone else falls further and further behind."
The 2020 presidential candidate is expected to endorse the proposal in a speech
at the National Action Network Convention in New York Friday morning.
"When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: We're done with two sets of
rules -- one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats," Warren is expected to say. "And
that means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he
did to President Obama and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems
facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster."
"I'm not running for president just to talk about making real, structural change. I'm
serious about getting it done," the speech reads. "And part of getting it done means waking up
to the reality of the United States Senate."
Getting rid of the filibuster -- the Senate procedure which allows a minority party to delay
a vote by drawing out debate and block legislation from passing by requiring a "supermajority"
of 60 senators to approve it -- would be a key step toward passing progressive measures,
advocates say.
At the NAN Convention, Warren is expected to note that the filibuster has stopped the Senate
from passing radical justice legislation for decades, including an
anti-lynching bill which was first introduced a century ago but didn't pass until December
2018.
"It nearly became the law back then. It passed the House in 1922. But it got killed in the
Senate -- by a filibuster. And then it got killed again. And again. And again," Warren plans to
say. "More than 200 times. An entire century of obstruction because a small group of racists
stopped the entire nation from doing what was right."
Advocates including Warren also say the end of the filibuster would make it easier for the
Senate to pass meaningful legislation to combat the climate crisis and to further other
progressive causes.
"We can't sit around for 100 years while the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful
and everyone else falls further and further behind," Warren's speech reads. "We can't sit
around for 100 years while climate change destroys our planet, while corruption pervades every
nook and cranny of Washington, and while too much of a child's fate in life still rests on the
color of their skin. Enough with that."
Warren joins
fellow 2020 Democratic hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in endorsing the
end of the filibuster. Her speech Friday will represent her latest push for "structural change"
that she says would have far-reaching positive effects on the lives of working Americans. Since
announcing her candidacy in January she has called for a tax on the wealth of the
richest Americans to combat economic inequality and fund progressive programs, a
universal childcare plan, and a breakup
of powerful tech giants , among other proposals.
described
as "probably the most dishonest argument in the entire Medicare for All debate."
"People who love their employer-based insurance do not get to hold on to it in our current
system. Instead, they lose that insurance constantly, all the time. It is a complete
nightmare."
-- Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project
In an
interview with the Washington Post , the Democratic leader said she is "agnostic" on
Medicare for All and claimed, "A lot of people love having their employer-based insurance and
the Affordable Care Act gave them better benefits."
Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People's Policy Project, argued in a
blog post that Pelosi's statement "implies that, under our current health insurance system,
people who like their employer-based insurance can hold on to it."
"This then is contrasted with a Medicare for All transition where people will lose their
employer-based insurance as part of being shifted over to an excellent government plan,"
Bruenig wrote. "But the truth is that people who love their employer-based insurance do not get
to hold on to it in our current system. Instead, they lose that insurance constantly, all the
time, over and over again. It is a complete nightmare."
To illustrate his point, Bruenig highlighted a University of Michigan study showing that
among Michiganders "who had employer-sponsored insurance in 2014, only 72 percent were
continuously enrolled in that insurance for the next 12 months.
"This means that 28 percent of people on an employer plan were not on that same plan one
year later," Bruenig noted.
"Critics of Medicare for All are right to point out that losing your insurance sucks,"
Bruenig concluded. "But the only way to stop that from happening to people is to create a
seamless system where people do not constantly churn on and off of insurance. Medicare for All
offers that. Our current system offers the exact opposite. If you like losing your insurance
all the time, then our current healthcare system is the right one for you."
All On Medicare -- a pro-Medicare for All Twitter account -- slammed Pelosi's remarks,
accusing the Democratic leader of parroting insurance industry talking points:
The Speaker's alternative to the Medicare for All legislation co-sponsored by
over 100 members of her caucus is a bill to strengthen the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which
she
introduced last week .
"We all share the value of healthcare for all Americans -- quality, affordable healthcare
for all Americans," Pelosi told the Post . "What is the path to that? I think it's the
Affordable Care Act, and if that leads to Medicare for All, that may be the path."
The nation's largest nurses union was among those who expressed disagreement with the
Speaker's incrementalist approach.
In a
statement last week, National Nurses United president Zenei Cortez, RN, said Pelosi's plan
would "only put a Band-Aid on a broken healthcare system."
"National Nurses United, along with our allies, will continue to build the grassroots
movement for genuine healthcare justice and push to pass Medicare for All," Cortez concluded.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
"... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
"Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as
European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot
toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012
The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles
across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim.
The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political
establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.
Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division"
in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington.
That's what Russiagate is really all about.
US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly
confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy
focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence."
In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten
the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region
in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically
axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.
. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its
enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's
known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic
Books, page 31, 1997)
14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and
demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It
was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt
from the speech:
"As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot
point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be
smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership,
secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will
therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific
region
Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge
technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than
half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015,
we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."
("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)
The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy
theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and
diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's
provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao
summed it up like this:
"The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military
alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American
government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on
us from the east, south, and west."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced
Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's
relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.
Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war
era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted
from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and
gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening
rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred
and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.
Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors
in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention
in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That
plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which
acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging
everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.
This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail
Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.
What does that mean in practical terms?
It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community
(The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces.
Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts
to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)
Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's
grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.
As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains
how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China.
Here's an excerpt:
"China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They
are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress
their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity."
They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories,
employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)
Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries
around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')
"Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries
target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation
bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news
stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense
one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:
"Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively
compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing
a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political
and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.
We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control
in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts,
including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .
Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement
with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests
" ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community",
USG )
Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that
Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East,
and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault
with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given
Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:
"We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy
complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps
in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines
start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political
whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly
relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."
The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate.
This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012,
Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to
re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it,"
she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."
"Slow down or prevent it"?
Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national
debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?
Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and
thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.
But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free
market system more effectively that the US.
Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.
"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We
are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a
security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition,
not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."
(Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign
policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)
"Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions
of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound
up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:
"China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model
"China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .
Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.
Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions
and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system",
is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line,
because it's not a fair system.
These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon
and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with
Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At
the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The
greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion,
the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.
And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed
to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with
the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes
on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations
(PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately
the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."
The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and
perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the
The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia,
Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles,
even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight
each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.
Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of
the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with
Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite –
US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.
Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan
(incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants
far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.
Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight
– whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience
to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning
a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan,
watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia
and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe.
And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is
a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year
there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the
real problem for the U.S.
"The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes
and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their
vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "
Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence
officer.
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing
"Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist"
and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation
of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself
proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".
Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives'
is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent
arrogance.
Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how
difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.
One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral
'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).
"The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its
tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda,
but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire
Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."
TRUE!
I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.
"Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants
in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn
the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging,
and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle
Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."
Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist
Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform
that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense
backing down to prevent mass slaughter.
Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own
backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South
America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And
he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic
sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields
related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing
more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki
himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American
Primacy".
Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability
to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the
military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't
apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.
(Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981
"Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services
began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979
In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give
a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted
about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.
@DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm
Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?
Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist
revolutionary groups?
This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by
any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks
total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
@anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic
states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons
to attack Russia.
The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian
Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in
the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against
Russia.
@Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in
Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it.
Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the
Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.
Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I
could live with the Reichsmark.
Academics have different interests from practitioners. Publications, tenure and mentoring
students are university responsibilities, not responsibilities for governing the world. (
It is an open question whether [neoliberal] academics sub-consciously want to govern the
world .)
Harvard University has a rule – known as the Kissinger rule – that faculty can
only take two years off to do other activities such as government work in Washington.
David Halberstam's The Best and the
Brightest is a damning recounting of how the Harvard elite failed to understand the
Vietnam War because of its arrogance.)
@JR ssaid:
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its
Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia",
"Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an
"realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize
too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Except that Germany did not send Germans into the conquered territories during WWII,
though they wanted to do so.
Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by
Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully
and that shows.
Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the
main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people)
This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with
uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is
for you.
Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and
again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military.
It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of
"enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of
immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive
ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil
religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with
neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the
national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class
fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking
foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish)
out.
It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination
of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other
investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often
consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower
middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the
humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent
weapon to achieve this goal.
Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem
within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic
or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards
to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think
they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to
all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism
is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on
those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political
ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s
included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the
dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the
center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites,
anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more
educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health
care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power,
what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem-
ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to
the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the
sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy
or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and
women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense
that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier
it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing
to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the
near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have
an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music,
incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which
others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be
aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the
future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men"
and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed,
"a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy
that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate
authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And
that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the
technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to
connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women
act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case,
but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of
personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to
home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist
government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March,"
said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we
protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies
on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist
organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false
narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception:
repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The
Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is
neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major
political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the
years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism
entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are
required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The
doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside
down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their
rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between
Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny,
autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a
former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is
someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is
unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary --
including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be
a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over
scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war
with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why
they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A
Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down,
Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and
the firepower to strike first.
Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the
most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily
attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq
official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was
Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with
the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history
that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of
them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think
the price is worth it.
While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much
more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a
whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on
the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative
syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking
for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in
single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how
do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme
her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous
Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid
getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or
Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of
fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise,
a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of
pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say
is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is
left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and
only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street",
then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as
Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head
of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her
perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of
the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national
leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of
Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law
enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city
neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's
unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain
ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership
responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and
Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad
course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high
responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of
the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those
not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances
Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership
allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are
afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an
average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of
Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice
guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while
Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a
drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or
anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good
national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I
would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that
continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a
population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding
of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young
person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects.
Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it
takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only
after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that
individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats
will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors.
Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field
criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem
attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage
conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these
skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing
communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a
journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of
responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the
media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or
mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism
becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress.
When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor
problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward
progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills,
not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the
norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that
fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think
then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed;
question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulation
These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that
can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great
story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going
forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would
have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of
history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about
positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the
actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both
of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist
Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration
policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism,
but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to
her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited
rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us
about.
Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of
fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist
ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are
essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or
regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events
and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax
(and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the
current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the
biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and
regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and
individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the
dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of
a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made
me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it
is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history
relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal:
the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never
outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and
what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the
end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a
belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of
anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic
religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems
to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances
I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything,
the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent
stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and
other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of
capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and
everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like
Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea
of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still
recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current
world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need
of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the
world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making
it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are,
deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets
she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen
are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria
would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia)
does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US
governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never
intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at
heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their
buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to
swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across
as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars
Trite and opaque
We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it
came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a
2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when
she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US
interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany
ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his
death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon
turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked
nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise
assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito
was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for
invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and
Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods.
Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is
communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural
history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic
torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in
China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to
mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to
work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had
intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk
Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost
extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on
gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was
conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as
infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew
was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several
children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband
grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939,
in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an
asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a
nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think
again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody
despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is
waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because
Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called
Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of
unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the
Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western
Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders
Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been
so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are
countries where you can go and openly be fascist.
To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning
about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is
unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend
against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or
quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand
any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or
a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial
or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded
from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she
does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda
to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies.
What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate
fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing
things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of
using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules
to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use
"our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little
that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez
or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these
dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The
circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules,
methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be
easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and
learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book
is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also
debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and
are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have
in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such
tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being.
Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and
intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks
from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions,
like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more.
Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both
are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the
book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more
informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either
socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She
squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like
Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in
Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater
from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember
than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready
made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders
and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable
Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are
"the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of
human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos
(Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has
to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says
Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but
needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no
mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with
performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted
in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.
The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more
informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban
in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what
our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for
our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for
weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership
continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
@Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in
Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it.
Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the
Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.
Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I
could live with the Reichsmark.
Sean
says:
April 4, 2019 at 4:51 pm GMT 300 Words I am not aware that anyone has ever considered Syria
a crucial centre of world power, and while Ukraine was once thought of that way back in the
days of Halford Makinder, I am afraid now they are both worthless.
I think you should distinguish between the deep state and the elite. The former are
primarily concerned with US primacy. The elite are economic internationalists and focused on
profit. Carter instituted a decades long policy mandating officials to help trade with China
under the influence of Brzezinski's Russophobia.
They fundamentally miscalculated the ability
of China to rapidly rival the West in productive capacity. Now the Western economies are
dependant on a Keynesian and financially frail China going all out for future growth. The elite
are in no position to lower the boom on China, and I think that is the last thing they
intend.
China is a milch cow for the global capitalists, they are dependant on China
succeeding.
Everyone is in favour of free trade if they think they will be successful in it, so the
Chinese enthusiasm is no evidence of altruism or the absence of a venal elite in their country.
Free trade allocating reward based on merit will benefit the American elite through their
Chinese investments, but it does not sound like good news for the American worker.
If there is pressure for something to stop China it will not just be coming from the rust
belt. The deep state plus the working class versus the financial elite is already ongoing; a
struggle to control American policy as the wealth generated by China is reaped by Western
financial elites and America falls to the status of second rate power.
"... As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans. ..."
"... What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most Germans were glad they did. ..."
"... How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies" that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent? ..."
"... Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal. ..."
Imagine this situation: Your country has had a military setback in a war that was supposed to be over after a few months of "shock
and awe." Because of that war, it has lost the goodwill and prestige of much of the international community.
The national debt has grown to staggering size. Citizens complain bitterly about the government, especially the legislative branch,
for being a bunch of do-nothings working solely for themselves or for special interest groups. In fact, the political scene has pretty
much lost its center -- moderates are attacked by all sides as the political discourse becomes a clamor of increasingly extreme positions.
It seems there are election campaigns going on all the time, and they are increasingly vicious. The politicians just want to argue
about moral issues -- sexuality, decadent art, the crumbling family and the like -- while pragmatic matters of governance seem neglected.
Sound familiar? That society was Germany of the 1920s -- the ill-fated Weimar Republic. But it also describes more and more the
political climate in America today.
Germans were worried about the future of their country. They suffered from all sorts of terror, as assassinations, coup attempts
and crime pulled their society apart. The left blamed the right; the right blamed the left, and the political center simply dried
up.
To get themselves out of the mess, Germans might have demanded government that carefully mended fences with its allies and enemies;
one that judiciously hammered out compromises among the various political parties and sought the middle path.
But we know that didn't happen. In Germany of the 1920s, as now in 21st-century America, appeals to reason and prudence were no
way to get votes in times of crisis. Much more effective were appeals to the anger and fear of the German people. A politician could
attract more votes by criticizing the government than by praising it, and a vicious negative campaign was usually more effective
than a clean one. One of the problems of democracy is that voters aren't always rational, and appeals like these could be very effective.
As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring
more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans.
What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone
who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most
Germans were glad they did.
Of course, America is not 1920s Germany, and we are certainly not on the verge of a fascist state. But neither have we experienced
the deep crises the Germans faced. The setbacks of the Iraq/Afghan war are a far cry from the devastating loss of the First World
War; we are not considered the scourge of the international community, and we don't need wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf
of bread. But even in these relatively secure times, we have shown an alarming willingness to choose headstrong leadership over thoughtful
leadership, to value security over liberty; to accept compromises to constitutional principles, and to defy the opinion of the rest
of the world.
How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured
several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more
fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies"
that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent?
Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World
War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal.
The time is coming for us to pull back from the brink again. This must happen before the government gets so strong that it can
completely demonize opposition, gain complete control of the media, and develop dossiers on all its citizens. By then it will be
too late, and we'll have ourselves to blame.
Brian E. Fogarty, a sociology professor at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, is the author of "
War, Peace, and the Social
Order ."
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the
current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal
propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an
extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like
constatation of already accomplished goal.
Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no
longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.
In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major
U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's
infamous intercepted
phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"
Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk,
its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people
rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the
Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt
sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government.
Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy
put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"
More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014,
represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at
least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected
president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this
revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.
On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is
stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt
conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding
its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way
the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not
plotting to oust one government and install another.
The Times
article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in
2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United
States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt,
seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had
said."
Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or
early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have
thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.
You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they
were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie
evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's
border.
The 'No Coup' Conclusion
But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long
pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly
a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring
that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave
and not coming back.
That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including
the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to
know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in
last year's long-form article.
Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually
looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you
were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.
"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent,
'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular
uprising," Higgins and Kramer
wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's
line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about
how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."
The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by
his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone
else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by
protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the
review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's
own efforts to make peace."
Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup
had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in
1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government
operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and
economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come
and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly
elected leader made a hasty departure.
In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the
next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military
regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.
Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an
alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is
brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in
the 1960s and 1970s.
' Color Revolutions'
But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which
operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure
on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the
restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to
justify his removal.
Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is
ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as
happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have
to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of
the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup
in history."
Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to
create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and
capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in
2013.
On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a
major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and
called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100
million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for
journalists and organizing business groups.
As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe
will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.
Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near
abroad but within Russia itself."
At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of
reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013
when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160
billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There
was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International
Monetary Fund.
Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western
Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of
protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to
show restraint.
Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous
$15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and
the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a
brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.
Cheering an Uprising
The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian
business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European
aspirations."
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland
speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by
Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists
from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their
challenge to the Ukrainian government.
As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist
elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades
or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other
weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners
and even a Confederate flag.
Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted
in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The
chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and
protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other
weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80
including more than a dozen police.
U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper
attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have
suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor
extremists.
To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on
Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of
office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.
The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street
fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their
lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department
with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime
minister.
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted
protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who
fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American
people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and
simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times
report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death
by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that
an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as
simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and
peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel
determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had
played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup
resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians
simply became "Russian aggression."
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a
Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing
of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II –
reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the
neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by
quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men.
[See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's
'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]
But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to
call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into
dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.
And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is
stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39
Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the
process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue
revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will
not know the difference until it is too late.
The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a
counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too
destructive in its natural development.
Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49
Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's
gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated
industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.
The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the
first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't
try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing
the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine
refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe
President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the
border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to
DPR Donesk/Lugansk.
Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50
I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I
looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov
cocktails.
We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we
demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging
ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?"
Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26
"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the
CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots
were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army
after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be
that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?
Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00
Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very
similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup
government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media
– propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John
Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" –
https://vimeo.com/16724719 .
archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45
It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that
Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated
this.
Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57
Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through
instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and
the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen.
They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in
that.
Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51
You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying
tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded
its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he
had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by
the historians.
"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has
been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington
Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling
Russian President Vladimir Putin."
It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.
Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in
Washington during September 2013.
Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine
Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just
five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with
Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013.
Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the
time.
Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never
appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same
mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being
photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with
leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.
Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst,
describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had
worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran
negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.
The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future –
it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together,
and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow
of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:
Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail,
piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP
AMERICA.
Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06
Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a
result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths
controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy"
Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to
flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.
Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40
Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with
Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know
anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in
Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have
rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh
as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another
angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were
reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the
US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests
(British Petroleum):
New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):
The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one
here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye
on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier
Mossadegh.
Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our
ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him
as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made
different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry,
personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own
people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of
the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the
Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to
destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.
His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes
-the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are
anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes.
There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The
peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and
nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong
enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.
All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian
intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following
policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's
apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.
Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth
in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a
strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians
because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely
to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we
remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most
media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually
think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela
in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media
manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US
Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions
for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times
immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US
fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US)
then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.
SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16
How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists,
paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such
dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a
coup "hidden in plain sight".
Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36
Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of
regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the
name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed
candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war,
this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney
are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the
Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's
future.
Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11
I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea
and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?
Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11
Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the
scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?
Under neoliberalism any regime change is necessary followed by an economic rape. That was the case with the USSR in 1991,
that was the case in Ukraine in 2014. Only the size and length of the looting varies depending of the strength of new government.
Both the size and the length is maximal if in power are marionette like Yeltsin or Yatsenyuk/Poroshenko.
Saying "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" now should sound as "Beware of Americans who bring you color revolutions." They bring the
economic rape (aka "Disaster
capitalism") as the second phase. That's the nature of neocolonialism -- now you do not need to occupy the country.
It's enough to make it a debt slave using IMF and install compradors to endure the low of money and continuing impoverishment of the
population.
With such crooked and greedy friends as Biden and Kerry and their narcoaddicts sons you do not need enemies. But the main
danger are not individual sharks but Western financial institutions like IMF and World bank. Those convert countries into debt slaves
and that means permanently low standard (Central African in case of Ukraine, something like $2 a day) of living for generations
to come.
What is interesting is that unlike say German nationalists in 30th, the Ukrainian nationalists proved to be completly
useless in defending the Ukraine from looting. They actually serves as supplementary tool of the same looting.
The standard of living of Ukrainians dropped 2-3 times since 2014. How pensioners survive, on $50 a month pension I simply do not
understand. In any case Neoliberalism proved to be very effecting is keeping "developing" nations economic growth down and converting
them into debt slaves. The fact that Biden use loans as a tool of extortion (as in threat to cancel one billion loan) to close criminal
investigation of his sons company is just an icing on the cake. Poroshenko and his camarilla should be tried in the court of law for
his corruption and pandering to the Western sharks, who were happy to steal from Ukraine as much as then can.
To pay $166K a month for Biden's son cocaine is way too much to such impoverished country as Ukraine.
Notable quotes:
"... "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko. ..."
"... " Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat. ..."
"... The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member. ..."
"... U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. - The Hill ..."
"... And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill: ..."
"... The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's case against Burisma; ..."
"... President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 ..."
"... Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse. ..."
"... Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now! ..."
"... At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski. Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified. ..."
"... Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This is basic stuff. ..."
"... Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$. ..."
Originally from:
Forget 'Creepy'
- Biden Has A Major Ukraine Problem Joe Biden appears to have made a major tactical error last year when he bragged to an
audience of foreign policy experts how he threatened to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy if their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin,
wasn't immediately fired, according to
The Hill 's John Solomon.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling,
Biden described
how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin. -
The Hill
"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at
them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling
the conversation with Poroshenko.
" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council
on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden's account, though they claim the pressure was applied
over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day . Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine's
parliament obliged by
ending Shokin's tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not
bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired. -
The Hill
And why would Biden want the "son of a bitch" fired?
In what must be an amazing coincidence, the prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas
firm - which Biden's son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.
The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm
Burisma Holdings
that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers
into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period
when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. -
The Hill
The Hill 's Solomon reviewed the general prosecutor's file for the Burisma probe - which he reports shows Hunter Biden, his business
partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.
And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other
crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact
that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he
insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill:
Although Biden made no mention of his son in his 2018 speech, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office
clearly had to know about the general prosecutor's probe of Burisma and his son's role. They noted that:
Hunter Biden's appointment to the board was widely reported in American media;
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's
case against Burisma;
Great Britain took very public action against Burisma while Joe Biden was working with that government on Ukraine issues;
Biden's office was quoted, on the record, acknowledging Hunter Biden's role in Burisma in a New York Times article about the
general prosecutor's Burisma case that appeared four months before Biden forced the firing of Shokin. The vice president's office
suggested in that article that Hunter Biden was a lawyer free to pursue his own private business deals.
President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 , after a popular revolution ousted
Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow
sent military forces into Ukraine's Crimea territory.
***
Key questions for 'ol Joe:
Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work
was performed for the money Hunter Biden's firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced
that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who
very publicly pursued Burisma?
Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization
campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding
Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse.
Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin
during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now!
Amazing that all 3 of them are still alive and that "Song Bird" McCain (#4) was allowed to die from his brain cancer instead
of joining them or being dismembered and put on display when he made these visit(s) (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbfsTcJCKDE ) along
with General Vallely (#5)!!!
Taras Bulba , 1 hour ago
At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski.
Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified.
CarifonianSeven, 2 hours ago
Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This
is basic stuff.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy, 1 hour ago
Joe cheated his way through undergrad and law school. He would be unable to understand any of that.
whittler, 1 hour ago
What? You mean folks will finally care about little Hunter hiring Azov neo-Nazi fighters (oops! security I mean) to protect
his fracking site just north of the 'troubles' in the eastern Ukraine? I'm sure they were working for free and that no Biden money
was ever used to payoff (oops again! I mean pay the wages of) a bunch of Nazis (dang it again, I mean neo-Nazis, it sounds so
much warmer and fuzzier when you add 'neo').
Creepy Joe and all D's agree, 'Nazi' = bad, neo-Nazi = warm, fuzzy and good; heck, they even like to kill Russians Russians
Russians!!!
Cracker 16 , 1 hour ago
Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$.
Last week a Wall Street Journal editorial revealed the incorrigible hypocrisy with which conservatives have long suffered. Conservatives,
of course, have long suffered this malady with respect to domestic policy given their ardent devotion to Social Security, Medicare,
foreign aid, and other welfare-state programs even while decrying the left's devotion to socialism.
But this particular WSJ editorial revealed the incorrigible conservative hypocrisy with respect to foreign policy.
"Vladimir Putin has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get away with it."
Why is that sentence funny?
Because it also describes ever single U.S. president for the last 100 years!
Every president from Woodrow Wilson through today has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get
away with it. Indeed, the central feature of the U.S. government for the last 100 years has been and continues to be empire and foreign
interventionism.
Clearly, conservatives do not see anything wrong with foreign interventionism as long as the interventionists are wearing an American
flag on their sleeves and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They obviously consider foreign interventionism to be
bad only when those pesky Russkies (of Russia-Trump conspiracy fame) do it.
Another humorous aspect to the editorial is the verbiage that the Journal' s editorial writer uses to condemn Putin's interventionism.
The editorial condemns Putin for extending his interventionism in Syria to Venezuela.
Why is that point humorous?
Because the U.S. government, with the full support of conservatives, has also been intervening in both Syria and Venezuela! Thus,
the Journal could just as easily have stated that "Putin pulls a U.S. in Syria and Venezuela," except, well, for one thing: The regimes
in both countries invited Russia into their countries. The U.S. government, on the other hand, is intervening in both countries illegally
with the intent of ousting both regimes from power and installing pro-U.S. regimes in their stead.
The Journal pointed out Russia's intervention in Crimea and Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the Journal failed to point out that after
the end of the Cold War, NATO, that old Cold War-era dinosaur controlled by the U.S., proceeded to absorb former members of the Warsaw
Pact and was threatening to absorb Ukraine, which would then have put U.S. forces on Russia's border. In the eyes of conservatives,
that sort of interventionism just doesn't count because it's U.S. interventionism.
In fact, notice that conservatives, while lamenting Russian and Chinese support of Latin American countries hardly ever lament
U.S. government support of European, Eastern European, and Asian countries. That's hypocrisy in its purest and most incorrigible
form.
Venezuela is an independent country. As such, it has the right to seek and receive help from anyone it wants, including Russia,
China, North Korea, or any other regime, Red or not. Conservative calls to put a stop to this process are a throwback to the old
Cold War mindset that the Reds were coming to get us as part of the supposed worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based
in Moscow. That's what gave rise, of course, to the conversion of our federal government from a limited-government republic to a
national-security state and to an even bigger expansion of an interventionist foreign policy.
That's in fact why the CIA, the Pentagon, and the NSA embarked on a decades-long policy of assassinations of foreign leaders,
invasions, occupations, coups, partnerships with dictatorial regimes, torture, indefinite detention, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change
operations, secret surveillance, and other dark-side practices. The national-security triumvirate said that all this dark-side activity
was necessary to protect us and keep us safe from the Russians (i.e. Soviets), Chinese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Cubans,
and other Reds. In other words, we had to become like the Reds in order to prevent them from taking control of the United States
and teaching communism in America's public (i.e., government-owned) schools.
Which raises the important question : Simply because Russia, China, North Korea, or other foreign regimes engage in foreign interventionism,
assassination, torture, secret surveillance, indefinite detention, or other dark-side practices, does that mean that the U.S. government
must do the same as a defensive or protective measure?
The answer is no. The U.S. government should never have gone down the road to empire and foreign interventionism regardless of
what the Reds were doing, and it should never have become a national-security state, which is a type of dark-side governmental structure
that is inherent to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
The United States should restore its founding principles of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy
regardless of what foreign regimes are doing. The U.S. should be leading the world to freedom by example, not by copying the Russians,
Chinese, North Koreans, or Vietnamese.
Looks like the reviewer is a typical neocon. Typical neocon think tanks talking points that
reflect the "Full Spectrum Dominance" agenda.
As for Ukraine yes, of course, Victoria Nuland did not interfere with the event, did not push for the deposing Yanukovich to
spoil agreement reached between him and the EU diplomats ("F**k EU" as this high level US diplomat eloquently expressed herself)
and to appoint the US stooge Yatsenyuk. The transcript of Nuland's phone call actually introduced many Americans to the
previously obscure Yatsenyuk.
And the large amount of cash confiscated in the Kiev office of Yulia Timostchenko Batkivshchina party (the main opposition party
at the time run by Yatsenyuk, as Timoshenko was in jail) was just a hallucination. It has nothing to do with ";bombing with
dollars"; -- yet another typical color revolution trick.
BTW "government snipers of rooftops" also is a standard false flag operation used to instill uprising at the critical moment of
the color revolution. Ukraine was not the first and is not the last. One participant recently confessed. The key person in this
false flag operation was the opposition leader Andriy Parubiy -- who was responsible for the security of the opposition camp.
Google "Parubiy and snipergate" for more information.
His view on DNC hack (which most probably was a leak) also does not withstand close scrutiny. William Binney, a former National
Security Agency high level official who co-authored an analysis of a group of former intelligence professionals thinks that this
was a transfer to the local USB drive as the speed of downloads was too high for the Internet connection. In this light the
death of Seth Rich looks very suspicious indeed.
As for Russiagate, he now needs to print his review and the portrait of Grand Wizard of Russiagate Rachel Maddow, shed both of
them and eat with Borscht ;-)
"... When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. ..."
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are
controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule,
near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
At CNN's town hall
event on Monday, the American people saw something we'd been told was impossible: Elizabeth
Warren winning over a crowd.
The Massachusetts senator took aim at a variety of subjects: the Electoral College,
Mississippi's racist state flag, the rise of
white nationalism . Always, she was met with thunderous applause. Even a simple Bible verse
-- from Matthew 25:35–40, about moral obligation to the poor and hungry -- prompted
cheers so loud and prolonged that Warren had to pause and repeat herself in order to make her
voice heard over the noise. Yet this was the same woman the media routinely frames as too
wonky, too nerdy, too socially stunted. But then, Warren has always been an exceptionally
charismatic candidate. We just forget that fact when she's campaigning -- due, in large part,
to our deep and lingering distrust for female intelligence.
Warren is bursting with what we might call "charisma" in male candidates: She has the folksy
demeanor of Joe Biden, the ferocious conviction of Bernie Sanders, the deep intelligence of
fellow law professor Barack Obama. But Warren is not a man, and so those traits are framed as
liabilities, rather than strengths. According to the media, Warren is an uptight schoolmarm, a
" wonky
professor ," a scold, a wimpy Dukakis, a wooden John Kerry, or (worse) a nerdier Al
Gore.
The criticism has hit her from the left and right. The far-right Daily Caller accused
her of looking
weird when she drank beer ; on social media, conservatives spread vicious (and viciously
ableist) rumors that Warren took antipsychotic drugs that treated "irritability caused by
autism ." On the other end
of the spectrum, Amber A'Lee Frost, the lone female co-host of the socialist podcast Chapo
Trap House , wrote for The Baffler (and, when The Baffler retracted her
article, for Jacobin) that Warren was "
weak " and "
not charismatic ." Frost deplored the "Type-A Tracy Flicks" who dared support "this Lisa
Simpson of a dark-horse candidate."
Casting Warren as a sheltered, Ivory Tower type is odd, given that her politics and diction
are not exactly elitist. Yet none of this is new; the same stereotypes were levied against
Warren in 2011, during her Senate campaign.
Strangely, the first nerdification of Warren was a purely local phenomenon -- one which
happened even as national media was falling in love with her. Jon Stewart publicly
adored her , and her ingenuity in proposing the creation of the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau a few years prior earned her respect among the rising populist wing of the
party. Her fame was further catapulted when a speech -- a video of Warren speaking, seemingly
off-the-cuff , in a constituent's living room -- went viral. "Nobody in this country got
rich on his own, nobody," Warren proclaimed, pointing up the ways entrepreneurs benefit from
publicly funded services like roads and schools and fire departments.
"First-time candidates don't usually articulate a progressive economic message quite this
well," the Washington
Monthly declared . The New Yorker called it " the most important political
speech of this campaign season. " That enthusiasm continued throughout Warren's first
Senate bid. Writing for the New York Times , Rebecca Traister noted
that "the early devotion to Warren recalls the ardor once felt by many for Obama." (Obama
himself famously echoed
Warren's message -- "you didn't build that" -- on the 2012 campaign trail.)
Locally, Warren prompted a much different discussion, with scores of Massachusetts analysts
describing her as stiff and unlikable. Boston-based Democratic analyst Dan Payne bemoaned her
"know-it-all style" and wished aloud she would " be more authentic I want her to
just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry,
hectoring schoolmarm." In a long profile for Boston magazine, reporter Janelle Nanos
quoted Thomas Whalen, a political historian at Boston University, who called Warren a "flawed
candidate," someone who was " desperately
trying to find a message that's going to resonate. " In that same article, Nanos asked
Warren point-blank about her "likability problem." Warren's response seemed to stem from deep
frustration: "People tell me everywhere I go why they care that I got in this race," she said.
"I can't answer the question because I literally haven't experienced what you're talking
about."
By demanding that Warren disguise her exceptional talents, we are asking her to lose.
Thankfully, she's not listening.
There's an element of gaslighting here: It only takes a reporter a few sources -- and an
op-ed columnist a single, fleeting judgment -- to declare a candidate "unlikable." After that
label has been applied, any effort the candidate makes to win people over can be cast as
"inauthentic." Likability is in this way a self-reinforcing accusation, one which is amplified
every time the candidate tries to tackle it. (Recall Hillary Clinton, who was asked about her
"likability" at seemingly
every debate or
town hall for eight straight years -- then furiously accused of pandering every time she
made an effort to seem more "approachable.")
It's significant that the "
I hate you; please respond" line of political sabotage only ever seems to be aimed at
women. It's also revealing that, when all these men talked about how Warren could win them
over, their "campaign" advice sounded suspiciously close to makeover tips. In his article,
Payne advised Warren to "lose the
granny glasses," "soften the hair," and employ a professional voice coach to "deepen her voice,
which grates on some." Payne seemed to suggest that Elizabeth Warren look like a model and
sound like a
man -- anything to disguise the grisly reality of a smart woman making her case.
Warren won her Senate race, and the "schoolmarm" stereotype largely vanished as her national
profile grew. By 2014, grassroots activists were begging her to run for president; by mid-2016,
CNN had named her " Donald Trump's chief antagonist ." She's
since given a stream of incendiary interviews and handed the contemporary women's movement its
most popular
meme . All this should be enough to prove any candidate's "charisma." Yet, now that she's
thrown her hat into the presidential ring, the firebrand has become a Poindexter once
again.
The digs at Warren's "professorial" style hurt her because, on some level, they're true.
Warren really is an intellectual, a scholar; moreover, she really is running an exceptionally
ideas-focused campaign, regularly turning out detailed and exhaustive policy proposals at a
point when most of the other candidates don't even have policy sections on their websites.
What's galling is the suggestion that this is a bad thing.
Yes, male candidates have suffered from being too smart -- just ask Gore, who ran on climate
change 20 years before it was trendy. But just as often, their intelligence helps them. Obama's
sophistication and
public reading lists endeared him to liberals. And just a few days ago, Indiana Mayor Pete
Buttigieg was widely praised for learning
Norwegian in order to read an author's untranslated works. Yet, Warren is dorky, a teacher's
pet, a try-hard Tracy Flick, or Lisa Simpson. A "know-it-all."
The "schoolmarm" stereotype now applied to Warren has always been used to demean educated
women. In the Victorian era, we called them "bluestockings" -- unmarried, unattractive women
who had dared to prioritize intellectual development over finding a man. They are, in the words
of one contemporary writer, "
frumpy and frowly in the extreme, with no social talents ." Educators say that 21st century
girls are still afraid to talk in class because of "sexist bullying" which sends the message
that smart girls are unfeminine: "For girls, peers tell them 'if you are swotty and clever and
answer too many questions, you are not attractive ,'" claims Mary
Bousted, joint general-secretary of the U.K.'s National Education Union. Female academics still
report being made to feel " unsexual, unattractive, unwomanly, and
unnatural. " We can deplore all this as antiquated thinking, but even now, grown men are
still demanding that Warren ditch her glasses or "soften" her hair -- to work on being prettier
so as to make her intelligence less threatening.
Warren is cast as a bloodless intellectual when she focuses on policy, a scolding lecturer
when she leans into her skills as a rabble-rouser; either way, her intelligence is always too
much and out of place. Her eloquence is framed, not as inspiring, but as "angry" and
"hectoring." Being an effective orator makes her "strident." It's not solely confined to the
media, but reporters seem anxious to signal-boost anyone who complains: Anonymous male
colleagues call her "irritating," telling Vanity Fair that "she projects a 'holier than
thou' attitude" and that "
she has a moralizing to her. " That same quality in male candidates is hailed as moral
clarity.
Warren is accused, in plain language, of being uppity -- a woman who has the bad grace to be
smarter than the men around her, without downplaying it to assuage their egos. But running in a
presidential race is all about proving that you are smarter than the other guy. By demanding
that Warren disguise her exceptional talents, we are asking her to lose. Thankfully, she's not
listening. She is a smart woman, after all.
"... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. ..."
"... Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
" Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent
political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure
to see it coming.
Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf
Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us
so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ."
As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or
(IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about
private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense
Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think
he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.
Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted.
Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have
been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in
the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people
with strong stomachs:
Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered,
hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been
proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis
on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump,
and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
One of the rare early realistic assessments of Trump foreign policy. most were wrong. Circe was right in major points. The
appointment of CIA director was the litmus test and Trump failed it by appointing neocon Pompeo.
Trump foreign policy is a typical neocon foreign policy. People just tried to overlook it in vain hopes that Trump will change the US
foreign policy
Notable quotes:
"... 95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time. ..."
"... And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for treason. ..."
"... Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,". ..."
"... Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon -unfriendly President was elected. ..."
"... Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The 'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to fund security agencies and buy arms. ..."
"... And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly. ..."
"... What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense. ..."
"... he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh? ..."
95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated
obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is
a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This
is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.
And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden
is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him
to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already
stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for
treason.
Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the
Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern
of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".
That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.
Many of you here are extremely naοve regarding Trump.
b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found
the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.
Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke
of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon-unfriendly
President was elected.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The
'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to
fund security agencies and buy arms.
And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder
until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad
as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military
(note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel
or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?
The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:
>> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?
>> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions?
An enormous cultural failure that has produced a brittle social fabric.
>> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?
Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction
or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.
"... Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding? ..."
"... If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint. ..."
"... Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative destruction to government ..."
"... Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt. ..."
"... Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain. The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again ..."
"... One quibble: The destruction he applies will not be creative. It will be thorough but entirely unimaginative. ..."
"... Why do you think a war is brewing? What do you think is going to happen? They'll give him bad intel like they did with Bush? ..."
"... The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread. ..."
"... Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general I mean a state of mutual distrust. ..."
Just as an aside - not really economics, but I am really worrying about what the war between the future white house team and the
CIA that seems to be brewing. I don't see good solutions to this. It is sort of unprecedented in a major western country. Can
you think of a similar case (where the intelligence services - and perhaps the military as well regarded there own government
head as an enemy agent)?
Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up
countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding?
If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint.
Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative
destruction to government
Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt.
As with Obamacare, the idea is to destroy it and replace it with something better. Most revolutions find it easy to destroy
and very much harder to build Most sane leaders recognize this difficulty and modify the existing rather than destroy and never
getting around to replacement or find the replacement to be worse than the existing.
Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will
give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain.
The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again
I don't believe in "creative destruction", I believe in "destructive creation" which is something quite different. But that is
not the point. This is not about the government as such, it is about the security apparatus in itself. It could get very nasty
if that ends up either totally alienated or politicized.
If I were President, provoking an organization whose specialty is covert operations and which has track record of bringing about
the demise of insufficiently agreeable leaders would not be high on my to-do list.
The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would
have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread.
Trump is an isolationist who repeatedly said the Iraq war was a disaster, which it was. If the CIA is going after Trump they're
doing a bad job. The worst they could come up with is some unverified accounts that Trump likes pee-pee parties.
Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it
ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general
I mean a state of mutual distrust.
Kristof panic was premature and just shows that he is a really has no political analyst
talent whatsoever. Trump was quickly co-opted by neocons.
It is interesting that Kristof, even at such an early stages of Russiagate was already
"FullOfSchiff"
"... The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion. ..."
"... Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack
on the United States. ..."
"... Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship." ..."
In 1972, President Richard Nixon's White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party
offices. That Watergate burglary and related "dirty tricks," such as releasing mice at a
Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a
Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans - and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue
journalism.
Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering.
Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats' digital offices and tried to change the
election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by
Russia's president, saying, "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."
In Watergate, the break-in didn't affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don't know
for sure. There were other factors, but it's possible that Russia's theft and release of the
emails provided the margin for Donald Trump's victory.
The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion.
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and
Trump by denouncing the CIA and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to
subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America's intelligence
community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the
dictator.
Let's be clear: This was an attack on America, less lethal than a missile but still
profoundly damaging to our system. It's not that Trump and Putin were colluding to steal an
election. But if the CIA is right, Russia apparently was trying to elect a president who would
be not a puppet exactly but perhaps something of a lap dog - a Russian poodle.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely (and unfairly) mocked as President George
W. Bush's poodle, following him loyally into the Iraq war. The fear is that this time Putin may
have interfered to acquire an ally who likewise will roll over for him.
Frankly, it's mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he
excoriates everyone else, from CIA officials to a local union leader in Indiana.
Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its
attack on the United States.
Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship."
Whatever our personal politics, how can we possibly want to respond to Russia's interference
in our election by putting American foreign policy in the hands of a Putin friend?
Tillerson's closeness to Putin is especially troubling because of Trump's other Russia
links. The incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, accepted Russian money to attend
a dinner in Moscow and sat near Putin. A ledger shows $12.7 million in secret payments by a
pro-Russia party in Ukraine to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the Trump
family itself has business connections with Russia.
"... Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course. ..."
"... Thanks to George W. Bush who dared show his face at the inauguration and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy mess in Iraq and now Syria. ..."
"... This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what? No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.' ..."
"... If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases, acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it. ..."
What I found most impressive this time was the reaffirmation of America's dedication to the peaceful transfer of political power.
This was the 45th time this miracle has happened. Saying this is perhaps banal, but the handover of power never fails to make me
proud to be an American and thankful we had such brilliant founding fathers.
This peaceful transfer sets the United States apart from many of the world's nations, even Britain and Canada, where leaders under
the parliamentary system are chosen in a process resembling a knife fight in a dark room. The US has somehow managed to retain its
three branches of government in spite of the best efforts of self-serving politicians to wreck it.
Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will
be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted
attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course.
Thanks to George W. Bush who dared show his face at the inauguration and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits
America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy
mess in Iraq and now Syria.
This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what?
No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a
great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.'
Trump will struggle to find a face-saving retreat from these unnecessary conflicts and shut his ears to the siren songs of the
war party and deep state which just failed to stage a 'soft' coup to block his inauguration. Waging little wars against weak nations
is a multi-billion dollar national industry in the US. America has become as addicted to war as it has to debt.
If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the
hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a
Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump appears to have been gulled into believing the canard that Mideast-origin violence is caused by what he called in his inaugural
speech, radical Islamic terrorism. This is a favorite device promoted by the hard right and Israel to de-legitimize any resistance
to Israel's expansion and ethnic cleansing. The label of 'terrorism' serves the same purpose.
Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the
US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases,
acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it.
Unfortunately, President Trump is unlikely to get this useful advice from the men who now surround him, with the possibly exception
of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Let's hope that Tillerson and not Goldman Sachs bank ends up steering US foreign policy.
(Reprinted from EricMargolis.com by permission
of author or representative)
"... And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist. ..."
"... Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign. He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. ..."
"... On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right" media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naοve about the New World Order. I don't believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it. ..."
"... To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack. ..."
"... Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind (NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). ..."
"... You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration. ..."
"... Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. ..."
"... What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties. ..."
"... The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected. ..."
After my post-election column last week, a lady wrote to me and said, "I have confidence he [Trump] plans to do what is best for
the country." With all due respect, I don't! I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson. He said, "In questions of power, then,
let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
If Donald Trump is going to be anything more than just another say-anything-to-get-elected phony, he is going to have to put raw
elbow grease to his rhetoric. His talk got him elected, but it is going to be his walk that is going to prove his worth.
And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is
who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff
and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist.
Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign.
He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. If that doesn't tell you what he is, nothing will. Trump probably
picked him because he is in so tight with House Speaker Paul Ryan (a globalist neocon of the highest order) and the GOP establishment,
thinking Priebus will help him get his agenda through the GOP Congress. But ideologically, Priebus does NOT share Trump's anti-establishment
agenda. So, this appointment is a risk at best and a sell-out at worst.
On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right"
media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington,
D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naοve about the New World Order. I don't
believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it.
To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE
than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State
in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical
New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But
Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the globalist elite gave Newt Gingrich the assignment of cozying up to (and "supporting")
Trump during his campaign with the sole intention of being in a position for Trump to think he owes Gingrich something so as to appoint
him to a key cabinet post in the event that he won. Gingrich could then weave his evil magic during a Donald Trump presidential administration.
Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind
(NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). If Donald Trump does not see through this man, and if he
appoints him as a cabinet head in his administration, I will be forced to believe that Donald Trump is clueless about "draining the
swamp." You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump
would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration.
Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating
and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. Granted, he hasn't even been sworn in yet, and it's still way too early to make a true
judgment of his presidency. But for a fact, his cabinet appointments and his first one hundred days in office will tell us most of
what we need to know.
What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume
that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because
at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties.
There is a reason we have lost more liberties under Republican administrations than Democratic ones over the past few decades.
And that reason is the conservative, constitutionalist, Christian, pro-freedom people who should be resisting government's assaults
against our liberties are sound asleep because they trust a Republican President and Congress to do the right thing -- and they give
the GOP a pass as our liberties are expunged piece by piece. A pass they would NEVER give to a Democrat.
The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington
establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will
NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected.
I tell you again: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the course of a nation. Frankly, if this opportunity is squandered,
there likely will not be another one in most of our lifetimes.
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
Conservatives tend to have two bad habits.
First, they're prone to viewing the
past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit
of the doubt.
These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many
abuses -- constitutional, legal, and moral -- of US intelligence agencies.
These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a
sitting president.
However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies
reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.
1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro
It's no secret that the US government sought
to
assassinate Fidel Castro
for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their
regime-change plot
included
a
plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.
The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents
from the JFK era, was a
collaborative
effort
that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies
that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those
plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine "pretexts" the CIA and US government could employ to
justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing
about staging a terror campaign ("real or simulated") and blaming it on Cuban refugees.
"We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities
and even in Washington," the Operation Mongoose document says.
"The terror campaign could be pointed at Cubans refugees seeking haven in the United States.
We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster
attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States Exploding a few plastic bombs in
carefully chosen spots."
Ultimately, the broader Mongoose effort
failed
to
remove Castro from power or effectively establish an infiltration within Cuba, though the CIA did
engage in several sabotage operations. Mongoose was suspended and ultimately discontinued amid the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
2. In 2014 the CIA Was Caught Red-Handed Spying on the Senate
Intelligence Committee
In the summer of 2014, the CIA's inspector general concluded that the CIA had "improperly" spied
on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency's black history of torture. As the
New
York Times
reported
:
An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer
network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the
C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.
And that's not the worst part.
The Times
goes on to note that CIA officers didn't just
read the emails of the Senate investigators. They also sent "a criminal referral to the Justice
Department based on false information."
John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, insisted during Senate hearings these were "very
limited inappropriate actions" and that "the actions of the CIA were reasonable."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) disagreed.
"That's not what the Inspector General [concluded]," Wyden said. "When you're talking about
spying on a committee responsible for overseeing your agency, in my view that undermines the
very checks and balances that protect our democracy, and it's unacceptable in a free society.
And your compatriots in all your sister agencies agree with that."
Brennan, who
publicly
lied
about the episode, was not punished and even retained his security clearance until Aug.
15, 2018.
Before he had a day named in his honor and a monument on the National Mall, the government
viewed Martin Luther King Jr. very much as a threat. In fact, his message of peace, love, equality,
and civil disobedience had the FBI so scared that agents actually sent King and his wife a package
containing a strange letter and tape recording. It contained details of the civil rights activist's
sexual indiscretions and encouraged him to kill himself.
In 1961, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, a known "Red," had become a close advisor to
King. The following year, Bobby Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison's home and office,
surveillance that would eventually expand. It turns out that J. Edgar Hoover stumbled on to MLK's
busy sex life while investigating King.
"Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge,"
wrote
Yale
historian Beverly Gage in the
New York Times
in 2014, "but he did begin to learn about
King's extramarital sex life ."
The FBI apparently had no scruples about using the information to try to bring King down. James
Comey, Gage writes, used to keep a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk "as a reminder of
the bureau's capacity to do wrong."
4. The CIA Forced Prisoners to Participate in Mind Control Experiments
in the 1950s
If you've never heard of Project MKUltra, you might find it hard to believe. Also known as "the
CIA Mind Control Program," the effort was launched by the agency in 1953. The program used drug
experiments on humans, oftentimes on prisoners who were tested against their will or in exchange
for early release. The experiments were undertaken so CIA agents could better understand how to
extract information from enemies during interrogations. Here is a description from the History
Channel:
MK-Ultra's "mind control" experiments generally centered around behavior modification via
electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and
chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered,
some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a
sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American
soldiers, to "sexual psychopaths" at a state hospital, MK-Ultra's programs often preyed on the
most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as
they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.
Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test
subject in MK-Ultra. "Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state," Bulger said of the 1957
tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. "Total loss of appetite.
Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We
experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys
turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I
was going insane."
How was any of this legal? Well, it wasn't, which is why the CIA understood it had to be
concealed from the American public at all costs.
"Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but
also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,"
wrote
a
CIA auditor.
"The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have
serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles."
5. The FBI's Systemic Forensic Fraud in Crime Labs
In the early 1990s,
Dr. Frederic
Whitehurst
, an attorney and chemist who worked at the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent,
noticed troubling practices in the in the bureau's Investigation Laboratory.
There were "alterations of reports, alterations of evidence, folks testifying outside their
areas of expertise in courts of law,"
said
Whitehurst.
"[Really] what was going on was human rights violations. We have a right to fair trials in this
country And that's not what was going on at the FBI lab."
In 1994, he blew the whistle on the "systemic forensic fraud" he witnessed. Nothing happened. So
he took his case to the Department of Justice. The FBI didn't like that. Whitehurst was eventually
chased out of the Bureau, but not before
winning
a
$1.16 million settlement.
Unfortunately, however, the wheels of justice turn slowly at the Bureau.
"It wasn't until ten years later that Whitehurst was finally vindicated," notes the National
Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund note, "when a scathing 500+ page study of the lab by
the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, concluded major reforms were required
in the lab."
But by then, an untold number of people had been convicted with the help of tainted
evidence -- evidence the DOJ
knew
was
tainted.
In 2012 the
Washington Post
published
an
extensive review of the FBI and DOJ failures to properly review the cases impacted by the FBI
lab scandal, based on Whitehurst's research.
As a result, the DOJ agreed to conduct yet another review of hair cases in collaboration with
the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).
3,000 cases were identified by the government that had used microscopic hair analysis
from FBI examiners.
500 have been reviewed as of March 2015.
268 included pro-prosecution testimony from FBI examiners.
257 (96 percent) contained erroneous statements from "FBI experts".
At least 35 of these cases involved convicted criminals who received the death penalty,
according to the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund.
6. Operation Midnight Climax: Drugging Unsuspecting Johns and Filming
their Interactions with Prostitutes
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA admitted to operating a "bawdy house" in a San Francisco
apartment where "unsuspecting citizens were lured for the CIA's drug experiments," according to a
local news story report
documented
by
the agency.
"Private citizens were taken to the bordello by $100 prostitutes and drugged without
their knowledge, usually with LSD,
" the
San Francisco Examiner
reported in
1977 after the CIA admitted to the operation. Agents sat behind a two-way mirror and filmed the
interactions between the drugged men and prostitutes.
Then-CIA director Stansfield Turner suggested the operation was intended to understand how drugs
could potentially be used against the American people, though he called the experiments "abhorrent"
and acknowledged it was "inexplicable" that the CIA would do this without the subjects' consent. He
insisted the agency had ceased the experiments 12 years prior. In a 1977 Senate testimony, CIA
agents said the purpose of the experiments was to "learn about thought control and sexual
behavior," the
Examiner
noted.
7. The FBI Has Routinely Staged Acts of Terrorism
In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill
individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these
individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the
foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack.
In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald
summarized
several
examples of this deceitful tactic:
[T]he FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to
months
of encouragement, support and money
and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded
Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a
Press Release boasting of its success.
In
late 2009
, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian
citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a
34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan,
to
bomb the Washington Metro
.
8. The CIA's Media Manipulation Campaigns
From the agency's earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the
public. In his book
Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
,
former
New York Times
journalist Tim Weiner
documented
how
much influence the agency's first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies:
Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran
The New York Times, The Washington Post
,
and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story,
make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of
men such as
Time'
s Berlin bureau chief and
Newsweek
's man in Tokyo.
Weiner noted, "It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms
were dominated by veterans of the government's wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War
Information." During his time at the agency, Dulles "built a public-relations and propaganda
machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and
personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany's most powerful press
baron."
In 1977, Carl Bernstein further exposed the CIA's efforts to influence news organization in an
article
for
Rolling
Stone
in which he revealed that "more than 400 American journalists in the past twenty‑five
years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to
documents on file at CIA headquarters."
The Lesson
Amid the media and political establishment's ongoing, frenzied coverage of Russia-gate,
Americans are eager to pin guilt on the president have shown a willingness to trust the CIA and FBI
without question despite numerous past and present reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions.
Considering the CIA's long history of intervening in other countries' elections and
governments, it is particularly ironic that their claims of Russia's meddling in the US' democracy
are taken at face value.
Nor is the corruption and deceit limited to the FBI and CIA. Former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper
lied
to
lawmakers and the public in 2013 when he claimed NSA did not collect any type of data on "millions
or hundreds of millions of Americans." He was caught red-handed months later when whistleblower
Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency's mass surveillance operations.
The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power -- and make no mistake,
that includes President Trump.
But in light of these federal agencies' chronic tendency to
engage in behavior wholly inconsistent with American values,
the same distrust must be
applied to the institutions that claim to shed light on abuses by unpopular leaders.
It is a rare occasion when power is not wielded with chronic
corruption and deceit. In the ***** world, if you're not lying
and cheating you're not trying. Damn if I can figure a way to
reign this all in. Maybe try a big reset by firing anyone who is
a registered DemoRat and from then on publicly hanging any creeps
who authorize or participate in partisan politically motivated
fraudulent schemes or immoral acts. The Senate and House
Intelligence Committees need to ride herd on this, but how in the
world can they do that with their DemoRats and a corrupt serial
liar chairman like A. Schiff ?
And, the two political parties, instead of trying to reform these
agencies, prefer to use them for their own nefarious political
purposes by installing party hacks in their senior management
positions....
Sociopaths appointed to carry out sociopathic
missions....
the two political parties, instead of trying to reform
these agencies,
The Democrats and Republican parties may be very stupid but
thanks for reminding us that neither party is/was stupid enough
to think they could reform the FBI or the CIA.
At this point, Brennan has been totally discredited. Either out
of stupidity or ideology. Even he is back tracking saying he
received bad information. What a complete jackass if not
worse...
Allen Dulles (2nd CIA Director) and his brother John Foster Dulles
(Secretary of State) and a small group of others including George
HW Bush wanted to make sure that the CIA didn't have to go before
Congress or the Senate and ask for funding for clandestine
operations, so they hit upon a plan to sell drugs; heroin and
cocaine - it was called Operation Hammer. It amassed enormous
slush funds (all around the world) that exist to this day.
The
1988 Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit commonly known as
the Lockerbie Bombing, was in fact the CIA taking down a fully
loaded commercial jet to cover up the fact that a major heroin
shipment had been intercepted by the FBI. Those Agents were on
board Flight 103 returning to the US (with the evidence) to expose
the CIA.
I suppose the money the English got when they forced the
Chinese to buy the opium they stole from India paid for
maintaining English absolute power halfway round the world.
Operation Hammer was just a knockoff of something they had
done in Asia an hundred years ago.
Does anybody know if any
empires previous to the English (French, Spanish, Turkish)
forced people, either their own or their victims, to buy and
use drugs?
Or is this just another evil idea foisted on mankind by the
loverly Brits?
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have
been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been
fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
Ask anyone who's ever been opposed to the Wars of Empire. The
police/spy complex has always used sabotage, agents provocateurs,
forged evidence, blackmail, harassment, unwarranted searches and
black bag jobs; all of it. America has always had secret
political police. Apparently until very recently the Right was
just fine with it.
That was written in March 2017. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was completely detached from reality
Notable quotes:
"... By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade. ..."
"... These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure, experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems. ..."
"... Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next. ..."
"... Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth. ..."
"... The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War. I know. I was there. ..."
"... Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"? ..."
"... The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security Deep State that is driving the world to destruction. ..."
"... W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel." ..."
"... "To see who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -Voltaire ..."
"... Hint: If you criticize them, you're called an anti-Semite. And they're not even Semites. ..."
"... Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't use other, more crude adjectives .. ..."
"... What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn. He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he is still there with his team. ..."
"... No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead. ..."
"... It's war and there is no going back. Trump has the will and the resources, so all we can do is support where possible....and hope. ..."
"... The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here. ..."
The question in the title is V.I. Lenin's question. His answer was to create a revolutionary "vanguard" to spread
revolutionary ideas among the workers, the economic class that Karl Marx had declared to be the class rising to the ascendency of
political power. Finally, democracy, frustrated by upper class interests in its earlier manifestations, would become reality. The
workers would rule.
Given the presence of evil and human failing, it did not work out in that way. But Lenin's question remains a valid one.
Americans whose economic life and prospects for their children have been destroyed by the offshoring of American manufacturing and
tradable professional skills jobs, such as software engineering, answered the question by electing Donald Trump.
The Americans, dispossessed by the offshoring corporations, elected Trump, because Trump was the only American running for a political
office who called attention to the problem and declared his intention to fix it.
By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit
from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists
describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade.
These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the
payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous
pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure,
experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems.
When you add up the external costs of jobs offshoring that are imposed on Americans, the costs far exceed the value of the profits
that flow to the One Percent. Clearly, this is an intolerable situation.
Dispossessed Americans rose up. They ignored the presstitute media, or perhaps were driven to support Trump by
the hostility of the media. Trump was elected by dispossessed America, by the working class.
The working class is out of favor with the elite liberal/progressive/left which abhors the working class as racist, misogynist,
homophobic, gun nuts who oppose transgendered toilet facilities. Thus, the working class, and their chosen representative,
Donald Trump, are under full assault by the presstitutes. "Trump Must Go" is their slogan.
And well he might. Trump, in a fit of stupidity, dismissed his National Security Advisor, Gen. Flynn, because Flynn did what he
should have done and spoke with the Russian ambassador in order to avoid a Russian response to Obama's provocation of expelling Russian
diplomats at Christmas.
Russians have been demonized and ascribed demonic powers. If you speak to a Russian, you fall under suspicion
and become a traitor to your country. This is the story according to the CIA, the Democratic Party, the military/security complex,
and the presstitute media.
Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself.
At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions
falls, Trump is next.
Let's be clear. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with the Russian ambassador, just as he met with
a number of other countries' ambassadors. There is nothing unusual or surprising about a US senator meeting with foreign diplomatic
representatives.
Those who accuse Sessions of lying are misrepresenting the facts. Sessions met with ambassadors in his capacity
as a US Senator, not in his capacity as a Trump representative. As a former US Senate staffer, I can attest that it is perfectly
normal for US Senators to meet with diplomats. John McCain and Lindsey Graham even fly to the Middle East to meet with terrorists.
Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and
intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally
devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are
despicable, the scum of the earth.
The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National
Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev,
the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had
ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing
contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War.
I know. I was there.
But if President Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes
have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees
who spoke to a Russian are unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA,
the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores
that comprise the Western media.
Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become
a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid
that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek
to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"?
I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and
awareness left anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western
media or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer.
The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative
pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security
Deep State that is driving the world to destruction.
Trump needs to tighten up. Get even tougher than he is now. Go out and do more speeches. Take the message STRAIGHT to the masses.........unfiltered.
LET the MSM "fake" that.
W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel."
The neocons are Israel-first fanatics. They did 9/11 and support all terrorist groups. And because Russia came to Syria's aid,
they're after Russia as well.
In Dr Strangelove, the mindblowingly stupid response of the characters played by the generals saying "attack Russia no matter
what they do" was portrayed as a joke, and the audience got it. Nobody could be that stupid, so it looked funny.
We are in desperately sick times when the attitude displayed by those comedically-stupid characters has become our official
policy and our propaganda.
Let's pray the American people are not yet completely stupid, and that there are still enough who see this insanity for the
immediate and extreme danger that it is.
The purpose of all of this "RussiaDidIt" bollocks has long been postulated as having the purpose of starting the Last War.
The question arises: "Who benefits?" (Ordinarily, no-one 'benefits' and only morons think that a 'benefit' could arise)
But, just for a moment, turn it on its head and ask the counter-question: "Who benefits the least ?"
Pretty obviously, the USA and the Russian Federation come out badly. Assume the impossible: that it doesn't spread out and
result in planetdeath.
Who just (quite coincidentally - of course) had its main rivals effectively eliminated? Quietly. Efficiently. Anonymously...
Who, currently quietly colonizing Africa for its resorce base, might now divert their attentions to the (much greater and closer)
resource base to their North, West and East, ostensibly in the name of "reconstruction?"
Naturally, it's just a coincidence that a large slice of Global Manufacturing has recently been transferred to that country
(recent decades)
So congrats are due to the DemoCrud skum who perpetrated this crime against humanity as the willing "useful idiots" of the
PuppetMasters. Burn in Hell you motherfukkerz.
The only way to "drain the swamp" is to eliminate the brainwashed masses who enable the warmongering globalist neocons. Without
the democratic partys' tens of million sheeple, the power hungry devils like Soros, the Clintons, McCain, Pelosi, Feinstein, and
the rest of the "perverted elite" would have no power.
Having considered this FACT, I have decided not to oppose their quest to start a global thermonuclear war with Russia. I saw
war up close and personal in Viet-Nam. I am 71 years old, so not much time remaining to waste in a political battle against the
snowflakes here in Californicate. I feel confident that I have a better chance of surviving than they do.
I have also decided to sit back, with my personal defenses in hand, and watch them experience, up close and personal for themselves,
the horrors of war like they are presently inflicting on the mid-eastern countries. The children of these despots, if they survive,
will finally witness proof that their parents are the cause of their misery.
Then, and only then, will the survivors be able to reconstruct toward a peaceful world.
1. free from concern, worry, or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant.
I agree, we're way past that ... Robert's knows this , all too well ..
Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't
use other, more crude adjectives ..
I cut him slack on his overuse of the word insouciant, because it would just seem so out of place substituting instead, "fucking
assholes," for every place it is prominently used in his writing.
I mean can you imagine?
No, I'm glad he's more refined than me. Makes for a more interesting and gentile world.
Hahaa Dr Strangelove. Strange movie, for even stranger times
"They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist
infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all
of our precious bodily fluids."
What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a
candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to
slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn.
He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he
is still there with his team.
Everything is obvious now and I think this is what Trump has been goading them into. Putting blood in the water to draw the
sharks to the surface. We will see.
i hope you're right. i keep wanting to think he's a clever fox but the acceleration of events is mind-boggling. the liberal
onslaught is from all directions and relentless. i pray he's able to withstand their attacks and counter with an epic T-Day rout--one
for the history books--that exposes and annihilates the seditious traitors in the world of public opinion, giving him political
capital to rid our nation of the unconstitutional Patriot Act and Big Brother's illegal 4th Amendment violations of illegal search
and seizure.
it's hard to keep the faith right now... i wanna believe he's got the wherewithall to pull this off. if i get weak and shout
for quick solutions, just downvote my stupid butt bigly.
No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew
it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead.
Give up guys... there's no winning this. The sooner we accept this the sooner we can maybe fucking DO something.
i think you are suggesting first touch/listen of utah spying. if true, step one. step 2 is to take down the main operatives
and bring them down with all the resources of the justice dept.
this is assuming that all parties stay in the confines of law...hmmm
Exactly, Trump needs to go on TV and speak plainly, layout the thesis as outlined in this article. Make sure the country knows
EXACTLY what is going on and what the stakes are. Most libtards don't have one fucking clue how they are being used by these sick
fucks. Get everything he knows and what he SUSPECTS, even with no direct evidence out into the general public. Time is running
short.
I don't twit. I don't even 'follow' a twit. I don't know how.
But I'm pretty sure this sort of message would take a hell of a lot more characters than, what is it, 140?
That means he would need some other means to deliver a complicated message that by-passes an inherently hostile media yet still
gets viewed by tens of millions.
Couldn't agree more. I fail to fathom how meeting with Russian diplomats constitutes any type of crime. That's what diplomats
do for God's sake. Wake up people before it's too late.
Ah, but everything PCR says is true. It's what he doesn't say that gives away the lie.
All of his articles demonize the west (and he's right). But he's deliberately not looking at the higher dynamics of this globalist,
central bank-led kabuki theater.
I think he's a 'gatekeeper' who's job is to point out the evils of the west and make the east look good in comparison, so that
when the 'reset' comes people will buy into the globalist one world currency that will be offered.
I've never seen him talk disparagingly about either China or Russia or the BRICS. Certainly he has mentioned the FED and the
IMF, but not the big one - the BIS - that I have seen. And until he does, he's just another Rothschild/Rockefeller plant to me.
he takes on the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, NATO, liberals, Ruling Establishment, Obama the War Criminal Butcherer of
Women and Children, Kissinger, pretty much everybody. i agree he's not a Russiaphobe, thankfully someone's got a balanced position.
anyway... we'll have to agree to disagree. i believe he's a patriot true blue... errr, red. nope. red, white and blue.
it's nothing to me and i'm not trying to defend him. i just think he's not what you suggest. professionals feel responsible
for their words and only write about what they know. we can all speculate about 9/11 but without launching our own investigation,
it's just "talk." and at PCR and Stockman's level, they refrain from flapping their lips to hear themselves speak, metaphorically.
> "He is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.
> He is a former editor at the Wall Street Journal.
> He was the "first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair for Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies [CSIS], then part of Georgetown University." It's worth noting that Georgetown is a Jesuit institution, and the Board
of Trustees of CSIS includes Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and representatives of Exxon Mobil, Boeing, Coca Cola, AIG,
GlaxoSmithKline, and Morgan Stanley (to name a few).
Looking at the high positions this guy has held in the Washington/Wall Street Establishment, ask yourself this: "Is PCR really
going against all of his lifelong associates or is he simply carrying water for them like he always has?" "
i consider myself open-minded and reviewed your link.
as far as the 3 bullet points the author suggests condemn PCR:
Austrian economics are largely followed by most conservative economists as opposed to Keynesian.
I would also argue the American govt pursues global hegemony, i.e., an American empire
Who among us would not believe there is widespread incompetence in DC? Would anyone use the term "competent" with Obama,
other than describing his knack for telling untruths and perhaps killing innocent Near East women and children?
He was former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Reagan
A strong critic of the Bush (and later
Obama ) administrations' handling of the
War on Terror , he has taken positions strongly at odds
with mainstream politicians: harshly criticising the ineffectiveness, severity and high rates of incarceration associated with
the War on Drugs , excessive police violence and use
of SWAT teams against civilians. He has criticised the
law and order politics and congressional
approval of increased government surveillance associated with the
War on Terror age, which he views as fundamental threats
to the civil liberties and Right to Privacy enshrined
in the US constitution, opening the way for an oligarchic
police state to be imposed upon the US population... --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts
sorry, i just don't see it. as far as his association with the WSJ and Georgetown Univ, that would pretty much be the aspirations
of most journalists. and lastly, here are the closing statements from his newsletter yesterday:
The voice here at this website, my voice, provides perspectives that permit escape from the Matrix, but it depends on your
support. As March is upon us, so is my quarterly request for your support. So far, we have both kept our word. You have supported
the site, and I have continued to ruin my reputation in Washington by writing explanations that are unpopular in the ruling circles.
but even more than that, i read his articles and take what i want and discard the rest. no one is mind controlling me. can't
be brainwashed. got to have a brain first. (;
"I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and awareness left
anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western media
or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer."
The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often
implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here.
Warren supported Hillary that the;s a huge black spot on her credentials. She also king of a hawk in forign policy diligitly repeated
stupid Depart of State talking points and making herself a fool. I especially like here blabbing about authoritarian regimes. From former
Harvard professor we should expect better that this.
To a certain extent he message about rigged system is authentic as She drive this horse for a long time. But that does
not means that she can't betray here electorate like Trump or Obama. She perfectly can. And is quite possible. Several details of her
biography suggest that she is a female careerist -- using dirty tricks to be promoted and paying her gender as an offensive weapon
(looks also at her use of Cherokee heritage claim)
But there is no ideal people and among establishment candidates she is the most electable despite all flows of her foreign
policy positions.
Notable quotes:
"... Comparing Elizabeth Warren to Trump is disingenuous. Trump is just ranting and defensive, without any evidence to back up his claims. What Elizabeth Warren is saying is just a matter of paying attention. ..."
"... This analysis completely ignores the outrageous, overarching influence of money and financial privilege over American politics. Equating Bill Clinton's dalliance with Trump's disrespect for all norms of decency and the truth? Please. Warren is right. Just look at the legislative obscenity of the recent tax bill and then try and equivocate they left and the right. I am not buying this false equivalency. ..."
"... Please, Elizabeth Warren is nothing like Trump. She's a brilliant, honest, tireless fighter for ordinary Americans. She wants a fair shake for them, just as FDR wanted a fair shake -- a "New Deal" -- for our Country. ..."
"... The so-called "left" in America (moderates anywhere else on the globe) have never varied from saying that money = power. They still say that today, and raise money like crazy for candidates thereby proving their own point. ..."
"... Conservatives in America (far-right extremists anywhere else on the globe) are much quieter about the influence of dough, but raise money like crazy for candidates thereby proving the "left's" point. ..."
The president and the senator both want you to know that our system is "rigged."
... ... ...
For decades, the left sought to dethrone the idea of truth. Truth was not an absolute. It was a matter of power. Of perspective.
Of narrative. "Truth is a thing of this world," wrote Michel Foucault. "Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics'
of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true."
Then Kellyanne Conway gave us "alternative facts" and Rudy Giuliani said, "
Truth isn't truth"
-- and progressives rushed to defend the inviolability of facts and truth.
For decades, the left sought to dethrone reverence for the Constitution. "The Constitution," wrote progressive historian Howard
Zinn, "serves the interests of a wealthy elite" and enables "the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law
-- all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity."
Then
Donald Trump attacked freedom of the press and birthright citizenship, and flouted the emoluments clause, and assailed the impartiality
of the judiciary. And progressives rediscovered the treasure that is our Constitutional inheritance.
... ... ...
To an audience of nearly 500 new graduates and their families at the historically black college, the Massachusetts senator laid
out a bleak vision of America. "The rules are rigged because the rich and powerful have bought and paid for too many politicians,"
she said. "The rich and powerful want us pointing fingers at each other so we won't notice they are getting richer and more powerful,"
she said. "Two sets of rules: one for the wealthy and the well-connected. And one for everybody else," she said.
"That's how a rigged system works," she said.
It was a curious vision coming from a person whose life story, like that of tens millions of Americans who have risen far above
their small beginnings, refutes her own thesis. It was curious, also, coming from someone who presumably believes that various forms
of rigging are required to un-rig past rigging. Affirmative action in college admissions and aggressive minority recruitment
in corporations are also forms of "rigging."
But however one feels about various types of rigging, the echo of Trump was unmistakable. "It's being proven we have a rigged
system," the president said
at
one of his rallies last year . "Doesn't happen so easy. But this system -- gonna be a lot of changes. This is a rigged system."
Trump's claim that the system is rigged represents yet another instance of his ideological pickpocketing of progressives. From
C. Wright Mills ("The Power Elite") to Noam Chomsky ("Manufacturing Consent"), the animating belief of the far left has been, as
Tom Hayden put it, that we live in a "false
democracy," controlled by an unaccountable, deceitful and shadowy elite. Trump has names for it: the globalists; the deep state;
the fake news. Orange, it turns out, is the new red.
Of course, Warren and Trump have very different ideas as to just who the malefactors of great wealth really are. Is it Sheldon
Adelson or George Soros? The Koch brothers or the Ford Foundation? Posterity will be forgiven if it loses track of which alleged
conspiracy to rig the system was of the far-right and which was of the far left.
What it will remember is that here was another era in which a president and one of his leading opponents abandoned the prouder
traditions of American politics in favor of paranoid ones. Compare Warren's grim message to Bill Clinton's sunny one from his first
inaugural: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
At some point, it will be worth asking Senator Warren: Rigged compared to when? A generation ago a black president would have
been unthinkable. Two generations ago, a woman on the Supreme Court. And rigged compared to what? Electoral politics in Japan, which
have been dominated by a single party for decades? The class system in Brazil, dominated by a single race for centuries?
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at
The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
Warren is saying the system is rigged to suppress the middle class and poor in favor of the wealthy, which is easy to substantiate.
Trump is saying the system is rigged to suppress the white right, which is easy to refute. One statement is an economic fact,
the other is a racist trope. There is no equivalence here. ScottW Chapel Hill, NC Dec. 20, 2018
Sen. Warren supports Medicare for All, meaningful banking/financial regulations, regulations that benefit consumers, a living
wage, etc. Trump supports none of these policies--not a one. Trying to equate Trump with Warren is just stupid.
Comparing Elizabeth Warren to Trump is disingenuous. Trump is just ranting and defensive, without any evidence to back up his
claims. What Elizabeth Warren is saying is just a matter of paying attention. I don't need to list all the ways in which money
buys everything in politics. It's always a matter of following the money. Bret Stephens conveniently avoids looking at economics.
His supposed counterexamples are at best irrelevant to the issue: We've had a black President. We have women on the Supreme Court.
How are those examples proof that the system isn't rigged in favor of the wealthy and corporations? No doubt he thinks Plutocracy
is part of the natural order of things. He should go back to the Wall Street Journal where his myopia is more appropriate. MarnS
Nevada Dec. 20, 2018 Times Pick
Unfortunately Bret there are no "optimists" in the GOP, including yourself being one who has bounced back and forth in your
positions regarding the Trump presidency. Though you have found your way on CNN or MSNBC spouting your disappointments about the
state of the nation, the fact remains is that your a hardened, right wing opinion writer who may have less of an ideal when it
comes to America being a democratic nation. No, you can conveniently ignore the actions of your conservative party in there gerrymandering,
in their changing the rules for governors of the Democrat persuasion, or gross deliberate voter suppression that has placed your
party in power positions by, in effect, stealing elections. You are a writer with a forked tongue trying, at times in a passive
manner, to separate yourself from Trump, and the evilness of the current GOP Party without understanding that the definition of
"conservative" has changed to the radical. And that is documented by your writings in the WSJ. Yet, you cannot even dream about
truly being on the left side of an argument other than beating your breast with the fact that the GOP has disappeared, as we have
known it, in the hands of radicalism (which prior to Trump you participated in the escalation of radical conservatism), and your
party can never be revived as it once was...and we all pray it never will be so.
This analysis completely ignores the outrageous, overarching influence of money and financial privilege over American politics.
Equating Bill Clinton's dalliance with Trump's disrespect for all norms of decency and the truth? Please. Warren is right. Just
look at the legislative obscenity of the recent tax bill and then try and equivocate they left and the right. I am not buying
this false equivalency.
FYI, Foucault was offering critiques of "regimes of truth," not of truth itself. That's very different. Like most historians,
he spent an impressive amount of time in archives where he collected evidence in order to write books that give truthful accounts
of the past. You make a caricature of Foucault, and then of the entire left.
Rich Casagrande Slingerlands, NY Dec. 20, 2018 Times Pick
Please, Elizabeth Warren is nothing like Trump. She's a brilliant, honest, tireless fighter for ordinary Americans. She wants
a fair shake for them, just as FDR wanted a fair shake -- a "New Deal" -- for our Country. While much of the rest of the world was
turning to communism or fascism, FDR saved American capitalism by shaking it up. Oh how we could use a large dose of that today.
Whoa! Line by line, Mr Stephens offers statements that are way off base and should be refuted. Are you saying you disagree
with Warren? Do you think the "system" in America for the last 400 years has not been generally "rigged" against African-Americans?
But the gist of his column, and the main argument of conservatives these days, is that the left and the right are equally out
of line; that what the right says and does may be bad, but the left does the same sort of thing and is just as bad. This is not
true Bret, and you know it. The left desperately tries to find the high road, and anyone who supports Trump these days or believes
in most of his policies is either someone who has abandoned morality or is a fool. And that is the truth, Bret.
Calling out our system as "rigged" is nothing new for Sen. Warren. She's been stating that publicly since being a regular Bill
Moyer's guest on his PBS program 20 years ago -- and clearly already on a "prep for national politics" stump. What undercuts her
own integrity regarding "rigged" is that she chose, after much wait & anticipation, to throw her support to Hillary Clinton in
the summer of 2016. Not Bernie Sanders. She knew HRC had little integrity. And it's highly likely she knew the DNC primary was
rigged in favor of Clinton -- as it's widely been proven.
My point here highlights one of several reasons why Sen. Warren is unelectable
in the 2020 presidential general election. This is not to compare her in any way to Trump -- he's a venal, disturbed & dangerous
traitor to our country. However, if winning the WH in 2020 is the goal, Elizabeth Warren ain't got the goods to get the necessary
votes across our Republic.
There's a good case to be made that the far left exists in two separate dimensions. I offer myself in evidence. Among the policies
and social changes I advocate: Medicare for all Aggressively progressive taxation.
I don't recognize any freedom to corner as much wealth as one can while other people must labor at two or three jobs just to
feed their families on peanut butter.
I do think there's a bit of rigging afoot. Restrictions on the ownership of firearms comparable to those in Japan.
A society free from all forms of identity discrimination or prejudice. I'm bitterly opposed to racism, anti-Semitism, sexism,
homophobia; any example you care to give, including those without short handles, such as prejudice against Muslims or transgender
people.
Yes, I know I have this in common with decent conservatives, but I'm thinking of partisan realities in the US today. I should
add that I don't mind the prospect of WASPS like me becoming just another minority.
But-- I can't picture myself as a socialist -- hair combed straight back, and all that.
The rigorously progressive personality type rubs me the wrong way. Leftist cant grates on every fiber of my being. Che Guevara
T-shirts make the lip curl. When my knee jerks, it jerks against things like that old leftist conceit that truth is what you make
it. I look at the far-left agenda and see a lot to like. I look at the far-left milieu and see didactic arrogance, frigidity,
and pat attitudes. I'm a Democrat in disarray.
The so-called "left" in America (moderates anywhere else on the globe) have never varied from saying that money = power. They
still say that today, and raise money like crazy for candidates thereby proving their own point.
Conservatives in America (far-right
extremists anywhere else on the globe) are much quieter about the influence of dough, but raise money like crazy for candidates
thereby proving the "left's" point.
Reality? Money in America is everything. Period. Just try to run for office, influence policy,
and/or change the direction of the country as a sole, intelligent, concerned poor person and see how far you get.
"... It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied Golan Heights today now with the unambiguous backing of the US government. ..."
"... Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu that the prime minister once slept in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place. ..."
No country in the world recognizes Israel's rule over the Golan Heights, occupied by
Israel in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981 no country,
that is, until now.
Donald Trump signed a presidential proclamation on Monday formally recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, still
considered Syrian territory under international law. Standing by President Trump's side during an address by the two heads of state
in Washington DC, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly called Trump's decision "
historic justice " and gifted the president a box of wine from the occupied territory. As they embraced, Israeli forces began
an aerial bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip after rockets launched from Gaza hit a house in a community north of Tel Aviv earlier
that day.
Trump's announcement is unmistakably an election-time favor for Netanyahu. Saddled with multiple corruption charges, including
one for bribery, Netanyahu and his Likud party have been flagging in the polls. Likud increasingly appears threatened by the center-right
Blue and White party, jointly headed by the taciturn retired general Benny Gantz and former TV personality Yair Lapid. Netanyahu's
desperation can be measured by the extremity of his rhetoric. He and his surrogates have spent the past several weeks waging a hateful,
vicious campaign, accusing the Arab political parties of supporting terrorism and explicitly warning that a Gantz and Lapid victory
would lead to dead Israelis.
Many in Israel, however, view Netanyahu, despite his flaws, as a talented statesman and skilled advocate for the country's interests
on the international stage, and Netanyahu has campaigned on achievements such as normalizing relations with the Gulf states and the
US embassy's move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Golan Heights declaration which initially took even the secretary of state, Mike
Pompeo, who was in Israel at the time, by surprise is likely meant to bolster this image.
Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right
But Trump's Golan Heights proclamation is not just a cynical political gambit. It is a dramatic change in US policy in the Middle
East that could have serious consequences. Trump, unlike his predecessors, has never even pretended to abide by international norms
and conventions. And yet the decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over territory that the international community nearly unanimously
considers occupied, or at the very least disputed, is unprecedented.
It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers
live in the occupied Golan Heights today now with the unambiguous backing of the US government.
This potentially paves the way for Israel's annexation, in part or whole, of the West Bank. It has long been a talking
point on the Israeli hard right that, despite the international community's protestations, there would be few consequences for extending
Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank . Trump's declaration,
it seems, has not only proven them right, but given them an added boost: unlike during the Obama years, they can be confident that
the global hegemon will take their side.
If Netanyahu's Likud wins enough seats on 9 April to form a government, it is very like that annexation, at the very least, will
be on the table for discussion. The Likud's central committee unanimously voted in 2017 in favor of annexing the West Bank. Naftali
Bennett, co-chair of the New Right party, has proposed a plan to annex parts of Area C of the West Bank. And the other rightwing
parties the extremist Union of Parties of the Right and Moshe Feiglin's Identity party, both of which would almost certainly sit
in a future Likud government have only more extreme proposals for dealing with "the Palestinian question", including the forced
transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan.
Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right. US
ambassador to Israel David Friedman is an opponent of the two-state solution who previously operated the charitable arm of
a rightwing orthodox religious seminary in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu
that the prime minister once slept
in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces
that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place.
It is important to remember this in light of the glitz and pablum of the AIPAC policy conference taking place this week in Washington
DC, where the PR hacks and policy flacks are working hard to launder Israel's image, to obscure the fact that there is one sovereign
state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that determines the lives of roughly 13 million people; that of those 13
million, only half Israeli Jews have full citizenship and social rights; and that the other half, the Palestinians, live under
a range of discriminatory systems, from codified discrimination but legal citizenship within Israel, to residency without the right
to vote in East Jerusalem, to military dictatorship in the West Bank.
Donald Trump , his administration, the pro-Israel lobby,
and Netanyahu all intend to keep it that way.
Joshua Leifer is an associate editor at Dissent. Previously, he worked at +972 Magazine and was based in Jerusalem
"... What in the world is a fascist Jew? Well, in this case, it is someone who uses violent methods to realize the logical consequences of Zionism -- if Israel is a "Jewish state," then non-Jews must go. How they ultimately go has been left an open-ended question, though Israel is engaged in a continuous effort to destroy Palestinian infrastructure . Fascist Jews advocate expulsion of all Palestinians and sometimes engage in direct violence -- akin to classic pogroms -- in an effort to fulfill this goal. ..."
"... The "migration" of Israeli Jews to the right has narrowed the gap between the majority of "ordinary" citizens and the fascists. So, back into favor come the Kahanists. ..."
An article published
in the Israeli news
blog
+972
on 19 November 2018
posed
the question: Why does the right keep winning
elections in Israel? The answer offered was "because
Israelis are right wing." Simple enough, and
apparently, quite true. The article estimates that
over half of Israeli Jews think of themselves as
"right wing." Self-defined centrists are about 25
percent, and those Israeli Jews who still cling to
"leftist" ideals are now only about 15 percent of
the population. The remainder are non-committal.
This movement to the right is often blamed on the
Palestinians, but that is largely an evasion. As the
story goes, it was the
Second
Intifada
(occurring from late 2000 to early
2005) that so scared a majority of Israeli Jews that
it "
led
to a migration
of left-wingers to the
political center [and] centrists [to the] right,
causing the percentage of Jewish right-wingers to
drift upward over the decade." While the "migration
to the right" has certainly taken place, it is
better understood as follows: under Palestinian
pressure for democratic reforms and justice, along
with corresponding resistance to oppression, Israeli
Jews who could not face the prospect of real
democracy had nowhere politically to go than to the
right -- what should properly be described as the
racist right. And, so they went. From this point on
there was no more obfuscation -- Israeli "security" is
now clearly a stand-in phrase for the maintenance of
Israeli Jewish domination over non-Jews.
Enter the Fascists
The present shifting about on Israel's political
landscape prior to its April 2019 elections confirms
this basically rightwing racist scene. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed that Israel is
"the national state,
not
of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people
."
A minority of Israeli Jews might denounce such
racism, but Israel's recently adopted nationality
law states that the right of national
self-determination in Israel is "unique to the
Jewish people." And whether the "left" acknowledges
the fact or not, this law is in perfect sync with
Zionist ideology.
It should be noted that the prime minister's
personal preference is not for "the Jewish people"
as a whole. Indeed, in his eyes,
if
you are an anti-Zionist Jew you are an anti-Semitic
Jew
-- whatever that might mean. The prime minister
is more comfortable with Jews of the fascist, racist
right, with whom he has so much in common. This is
the kind of Jew he has politically allied with.
What in the world is a fascist Jew? Well, in
this case, it is someone who uses violent methods
to realize the logical consequences of Zionism -- if
Israel is a "Jewish state," then non-Jews must go.
How they ultimately go has been left an open-ended
question, though Israel is engaged in a continuous
effort
to destroy Palestinian infrastructure
. Fascist
Jews advocate expulsion of all Palestinians and
sometimes
engage
in direct violence
-- akin to classic pogroms -- in an
effort to fulfill this goal.
You might shake your head in wonderment at the
notion of Jewish fascists, but they have always been
an important element in Zionist history. You can
trace their activity from Vladimir Jabotinsky and
his
notion of an "iron wall"
(1923) that would force
the Palestinians to acquiesce in Zionist domination,
right up to
Meir
Kahane, an advocate of expulsion
, and his Kach
Party (1971-1990). It is Kahane's followers who now
are political partners of Netanyahu.
The "migration"
of Israeli Jews to the right
has
narrowed the gap
between the majority of
"ordinary" citizens and the fascists. So, back into
favor come the Kahanists.
What is an Israeli Centrist?
Nor should we look for anti-racist activism among
the 25 percent who see themselves as centrists.
Presently, those who seek to capture the centrist
vote are Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. Gantz is former
chief-of-staff and a man who is being sued for war
crimes. He is leader of the Israeli Resilience Party
(Hosen Israel). That party has allied with Yair
Lapid, a former TV celebrity, and his There is a
future Party (Yesh Atid).
Both of these politicians
call
themselves "new centrists"
and concentrate their
platforms on "socio-economic issues such as the cost
of living." However, when it comes to the
Palestinians, neither of them are interested in a
democratic Israel that would afford non-Jews equal
rights -- nothing particularly "new" here for
"centrists." Gantz is the classic military maven so
prevalent in Israeli politics. Here is his view of
where "resilience" should take Israel relative to
the Palestinians: "The Jordan Valley will remain our
eastern security border," Gantz declared. "We will
maintain security in the entire Land of Israel we
will not allow the millions of Palestinians living
beyond the separation fence to endanger our security
and our identity as a Jewish state." For someone who
is campaigning on the theme that, under its present
government, "
Israel
has lost its way
," Gantz's intentions in this
regard are remarkably similar to those of Benjamin
Netanyahu.
Yair Lapid's position
on the Palestinians is
little different from that of Gantz. He says that
"we need to separate from the Palestinians," as if
Israeli Jews haven't been doing just that for the
past 71 years. He goes on to demand that all issues
of security have to "stay in Israel's hands," there
is no such thing as a "right of return," and
Jerusalem will not be divided into two capitals.
On the Palestinian issue -- the one that now divides
Israel from increasing numbers of citizens in the
democratic world -- there is little difference between
the Israeli rightists and the centrists except that
the latter do not publicly talk about the forceful
expulsion.
That approximately 85 percent of Israeli Jews
should end up unwilling to grant equal rights to the
20 percent of Palestinians who are their segregated
neighbors; that they should support, or at best not
act against the relentless, vicious process of
illegal settlement in the Occupied Territories; and
finally that they should react to Palestinian
resistance to Zionist oppression by "migrating" to
the right, is both tragic and predictable.
It must be realized that any country that allows
racism to rule its public sphere cannot pass itself
off as a democracy. It is simply a contradiction.
The Zionist experiment looking toward a democratic
Jewish state might have gone differently if it had
been tried somewhere devoid of a non-Jewish
population (like the moon), but then, in the end,
the Zionists became obsessed with Palestine, fell in
with the colonial mentality still prevalent during
the first half of the twentieth century, and have
never progressed beyond it.
To this point, I beg the reader's patience as I
repeat an argument I have made more than once in
past analyses: It is impossible to create a state
exclusively for one people (call them people A) in a
territory already populated by another people (call
them people B) without the eventual adoption of
racist policies by A and eventual resistance on the
part of B. Under such circumstances, for A, there
can be no real security, nor can there be anything
like a healthy national culture.
Indeed, unless a majority of Israeli Jews are
willing to go the route of South Africa and renounce
their program of discriminatory dominion over
millions of non-Jews, they have nowhere else to go
but head-first into the hell that is the racist
right. With 85 percent sharing, or at least
acquiescing, in the views of Netanyahu, Gantz, and
Lapid, the chances for redemption do not look good.
In fact, it is probably the case that the "light
unto the nations" has long since gone out.
But sophistication of intelligence agencies now reached very high level. Russiage was pretty dirty but pretty slick operation. British
thre letter againces were even more devious, if we view Skripals poisoning as MI5/Mi6 "witness protection" operation due to possible
Skripal role in creating Steele dossier. So let's keep wanting the evnet. The election 2020 might be event more interesting the Elections
of 2016. Who would suggest in 2015 that he/she elects man candidate from Israel lobby instead of a woman candidate from the same lobby?
Notable quotes:
"... The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an attack on them. ..."
"... Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared him perfectly for his present role. ..."
"... the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority. ..."
"... The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds. ..."
"... Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. ..."
"... Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged. ..."
"... Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. ..."
One might object that Trump, a billionaire TV star, does not resemble his followers. But this misses the powerful intimacy that he
establishes with them, at rallies, on TV and on Twitter. Part of his malicious genius lies in his ability to forge a bond with people
who are otherwise excluded from the world to which he belongs. Even as he cast Hillary Clinton as the tool of international finance,
he said:
I do deals big deals all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance.
These are hard-driving, vicious cut-throat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table
and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage.
With these words he brought his followers into the boardroom with him and encouraged them to take part in a shared, cynical exposure
of the soiled motives and practices that lie behind wealth. His role in the Birther movement, the prelude to his successful presidential
campaign, was not only racist, but also showed that he was at home with the most ignorant, benighted, prejudiced people in America.
Who else but a complete loser would engage in Birtherism, so far from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Harvard aura that elevated
Obama, but also distanced him from the masses?
The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but
it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an
attack on them. 'The fascist leader's startling symptoms of inferiority', Adorno wrote, 'his resemblance to ham actors and asocial
psychopaths', facilitates the identification, which is the basis of the ideal. On the Access Hollywood tape, which was widely assumed
would finish him, Trump was giving voice to a common enough daydream, but with 'greater force' and greater 'freedom of libido' than
his followers allow themselves. And he was bolstering the narcissism of the women who support him, too, by describing himself as
helpless in the grip of his desires for them.
Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far
more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising
slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared
him perfectly for his present role. According to Adorno,
the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them
psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than
by any intrinsic superiority.
To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader
simply turns his own unconscious outward Experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use
of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their sensitivity.
All he has to do in order to make the sale, to get his TV audience to click, or to arouse a campaign rally, is exploit his own
psychology.
Using old-fashioned but still illuminating language, Adorno continued:
The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous
spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance,
functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.
Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well
as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was
particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. As with the Birther movement or Access
Hollywood, Trump's self-debasement pretending to sell steaks on the campaign trail forges a bond that secures his idealised status.
Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the
neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic
Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged.
Yet no one who lived through the civil rights and feminist rebellions of recent decades can believe that an economic programme
per se is a sufficient basis for a Democratic-led politics.
This holds as well when it comes to trying to reach out to Trump's supporters. Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent
approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. But if we understand the personal
level at which pro-Trump strivings operate, we may better appeal to the other half, and in that way forestall the coming emergency.
Bush II campaigned on "no nation building" mantra. He lied. Crump campaigned no foreign wars manta. He lied.
Notable quotes:
"... The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct. ..."
"... Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief. ..."
"... John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to retire that label . ..."
The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder
of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct.
Former George W. Bush mouthpiece Ari Fleischer supplied a
promptly ratioed
tweetstorm that quibbled with the "Bush
lied, people died" mantra concerning his old boss's handling of the intelligence on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Never Trumper David French
gamely argued
that Saddam Hussein was a greater source of instability than the chaos brought about by the invasion, followed by Barack Obama's
withdrawal. In so doing, French reminded us that, however off-putting some conservatives find Donald Trump, the president's
criticism
of the war matters more to
many of those who devote their time to denouncing his every utterance.
Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking
bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's
protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief.
John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United
States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the
war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending
toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to
retire that label .
"The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow," Fleischer tweeted on March
19. "There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no
WMDs were found, the left claimed 'Bush lied. People died.' This accusation itself is a lie.
It's time to put it to rest."
Fleischer goes on to declare that "The fact is that President Bush (and I as press
secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community
concluded," before noting that "The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France,
Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very
different from lying."
As a Chief Weapons Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq from
1991 through 1998, I was intimately familiar with the intelligence used by the U.S.
Intelligence Community to underpin the case for war (which I debunked in June 2002 in an
article published in Arms Control Today ). Armed with the
unique insights that came from this experience, I can state clearly and without any reservation
that Ari Fleischer, once again, has misrepresented the facts when it comes to the Bush
administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Advertisement
The fact is, the Iraq War was never about WMD. Rather, it was waged for one purpose and one
purpose only -- regime change. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the sole focus of this effort,
and the so-called "intelligence" used to justify this act was merely an excuse for action. Ari
Fleischer knows this, and to contend otherwise -- as he does via twitter -- is simply a
continuation of the lies he told from the very beginning about the U.S. case for war with
Iraq.
UNSCOM had, by the fall of 2002, been relegated to the pages of history, replaced by a new
inspection organization, the United
Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) . It is through the
work of UNMOVIC that Ari Fleischer's defense of George W. Bush collapses. In November 2002 the
Bush administration pushed for the UN Security Council to pass Resolution
1441 , which found Iraq to be in "material breach" of its disarmament obligations.
Inspectors from UNMOVIC were dispatched to Iraq shortly thereafter in a last-ditch effort to
account for the totality of Iraq's WMD.
The work of the inspectors was undermined from the start by the Bush administration, led by
Ari Fleischer. "It is very well true that the inspectors who are working as diligently as they
can in an environment made very difficult for them by Iraqi actions, may not be giving notice,"
Fleischer
explained in a press conference, "but that does not mean Iraq is not receiving notice as a
result of their electronic means and other means to know what the inspectors are doing. Which
puts the inspectors in a very hard position."
But Fleischer had no evidence that Iraq was getting advance notice, and the experience of UNMOVIC
inspectors on the ground suggested otherwise. When asked by a reporter about the
possibility of giving the UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their task, Fleischer
fired back, asking "More time for what? More time to be run-around by a regime that has not
complied, that has concealed its weapons, and that has grown throughout the years --
particularly the four years when no one was in the country -- extraordinarily good at hiding
what they have and deceiving those who are there to do their level best."
Left unsaid was the fact that the inspectors had repeatedly asked the U.S. for access to the
very intelligence being used to underpin the American claims that Iraq was holding on to
prohibited WMD and were denied. "If the UK and the U.S. are convinced and they say they have
evidence," Hans
Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, had noted on December 20, 2002, "then one would expect they
would be able to tell us where is this stuff." When asked if they were getting cooperation from
U.S. and Western intelligence agencies, Blix replied, "Not yet. We get some, but we don't get
all we need."
In 2010,
Blix commented on the provisions of Security Council resolution 1441, which had declared
Iraq to be in "material breach" of its obligation to disarm, and which was cited
by Ari Fleischer to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003. "The
declaration, I felt, might give Iraq a chance for a new start," Blix noted, " except that it
was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn't have any. "
This is the conclusion that anyone taking umbrage with Ari Fleischer over his attempt to
whitewash the role he played -- as an extension of President George W. Bush -- in facilitating
the Iraq War should rely on. Deflecting blame onto the U.S. intelligence community ignores the
fact that the decision to go to war was the exclusive purview of the Executive Branch that
Fleischer served. Iraq's alleged retention of proscribed WMD were merely an excuse to achieve
the higher goal of regime change. The inspection process initiated in November 2002 to
investigate Iraq's WMD programs was, from the U.S. perspective, a façade created to
justify a decision to go to war that was made long before the inspectors ever set foot on the
ground.
"Intelligence," therefore, was an artifice manufactured by the Bush administration as a
smoke screen. A memorandum prepared by
the head of the British MI-6 intelligence service , Richard Dearlove, following a July 23,
2002 meeting in Washington, DC, underscores this truth: "There was a perceptible shift in
attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD . But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Bush knew that the engagement with the United Nations, including the crafting of resolution
1441 and the dispatch of inspectors to Iraq, was simply an elaborate charade, cruel theatrics
meant to dangle the prospects of peace, all the while preparing for war -- something Ari
Fleischer knew all along, as this exchange
with the press aptly demonstrates:
Question: "Does regime change mean that you want to change the leader of Iraq, or you want
to change the nature of the regime?"
Fleischer: "The objective is for Saddam Hussein's Iraq to disarm, to stop threatening its
neighbors, to stop repressing minorities within its own country. And that's why Congress passed
the policy of regime change."
Press: "Well, which of those definitions is correct?"
Fleischer: "Well, let's do it -- let me cut to the bottom line on it. What I would propose
is that in the event Saddam Hussein gives the order, and under his leadership and direction
disarms Iraq, gives up its weapons of mass destruction, has no more chemical weapons, no more
biological weapons, stops using hostility as a way to deal with its neighbors, stops repression
of minorities with his own country, give me a call. After you cover Saddam Hussein doing these
things, let's talk about it. Until then, the president is focused on making sure that these
developments take place as a result either of the UN resolutions being enforced, or by whoever
in Iraq taking these actions to make it happen. But this is probably the mother of all
hypotheticals. Give me a phone call when it happens."
Press: "So Saddam could stay in power if those objectives were carried out?"
Fleischer: "Again, call me up when Saddam Hussein gives the directions for all those factors
to take place."
Press: "So, that's a yes?"
Fleischer: "I think this is a question of how many devils can dance on the head of a
pin."
Press: "It's not. Can he stay in power and have regime change?"
Fleischer: "You're asking the mother of hypotheticals. And I think it's a rather "
Press: "Does it refer to a leader or a government regime change?"
Fleischer: "It refers to actions that have to be taken to keep the peace."
Press: "So it's a question of policy, not personnel?"
Fleischer: "That's a good way to put it."
Press: "So he could stay in power if those things happen?"
Fleischer: "If you want to fool yourselves into believing that that's what Saddam Hussein
would do in policy, that's an interesting way to approach it."
The fact of the matter is that Saddam did, in fact, do everything listed by Ari Fleischer to
effect a change in the policies of Iraq in order to preserve his regime. But President Bush --
whom Fleischer represented -- never had any intention of recognizing such change, even when it
occurred. President Bush, Ari Fleischer and every representative of the U.S. administration
involved in formulating and implementing U.S. policy on Iraq was being dishonest in the extreme
when dangling the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the Iraq problem.
In short, they all lied, and Ari Fleischer was the mouthpiece for disseminating these lies,
a task he continues to perform to this day.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofDeal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road
to War . 14 Responses to Ari Fleischer Lied, and People Died
Thank you for another reminder of what really happened. My only quibble is that this uses
GWB, the figurehead, as the power and decision-maker. Like Bolton & Co today, the ones
calling the plays are not the public face that can get elected by the proles. It was the
Cheney/Wolfy/Rummy cabal, smokescreened by Rove, who sent Iraq back to the stone age at the
behest of Israel.
One down and more to go Iran is the next big target of the same mentality.
It is interesting to note the following requirement: "stops repression of minorities with
his own country". It indicates that Bush administration had a plan B for invading Iraq, on
the template of Kosovo
The writer states: "In short, they all lied, "
Therefore, based on the evidence that the Iraq war was a lie, where are the prosecutions?
Millions of people are dead, soldiers are dead or maimed, Iraq is reduced to rubble in parts
of its land and nothing happens to the perpetrators of lies. What does this say about our
so-called "justice system"? http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/12/will-war-criminals-be-brought-to.html
"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
It is the same today with the intelligence being fixed to justify the US exit from the INF
treaty.
Why does the administration not tell us what the range of the disputed missile is?
Why would Russia deploy a land-based missile in breach of the treaty when it could deploy
it at sea and not violate any treaty?
Not surprisingly, this information has not been supplied.
Behind the decision to leave the INF treaty is John Bolton. He also fought to remove Jose
Bustani as the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which
governs the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Bustani was trying to bring Iraq into that treaty. That is why he had to go. If he had
succeeded it would have removed the excuse for war.
It's astonishing that creeps like Fleischer have the temerity to show their faces in public.
His lies caused terrible damage to America and millions of innocent civilians in the Middle
East. He should shut the **** up and thank his lucky stars he wasn't sent to prison for his
part in this disgusting episode.
The War of Lies Against Iraq
By Eric S. Margolis
March 23, 2019
Sixteen years ago, the US and Britain committed a crime of historic proportion, the
invasion and destruction of Iraq. It was as egregious an aggression as Nazi Germany's 1939
invasion of Poland.
Large numbers of Iraqi civilians died from 2003-2007. Iraq's water and sewage systems were
bombed, causing widespread cholera. The UN estimated 500,000 Iraqi children alone died as a
result. Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, said it was 'a price worth paying.'
[read more at link below]
And now we get to do all over again, with the right target this time, Iran. Don't forget that
after 9/11 the first call was to go after Iran and not our trusty allies in the ME who were
the real perps. Iraq was just the consolation prize for these insane ideologues, who should
all be in jailed for war crimes.
If you define weapons of mass destruction as nuclear war capabilities, then Iraq had none. If
you define weapons of mass destruction as chemical, then Iraq historically had these weapons
which it used against Iran, the Kurds, and shot some in Iraq War I at Israel. What happened
to the chemical weapons? They were sold/moved to Syria, where they still are today, and still
being used by the Assad regime. When the US troops got to Iraq in Gulf War II, the chemical
weapons were gone from Iraq, but not from Syria, which is why Iran, has a vested interest in
being involved in Syria, not to mention Israel. Does this help to make more sense of what
seems to be a perpetual war?
Trump just wanted these chemical weapons destroyed and never created again, and the US will
evacuate the Middle East once this is accomplished.
The article and the comments say it all: the lies, nothing else, were used to destroy Iraq!
No intell "mistake" can be offered-it is and was a neo con deception of the country and
the world.
Accountability, however, will not happen. Very ominous for the situation pertaining to
Iran and Venezuela. If the thugs in suits, pompeo, bolton, abrams, feel no consequence will
happen, why worry-it is off to intervention/regime change they go.
American sheeple have the institutional memory of a gnat and the mass media coverup and
malfeseance will continue.
"Liberals were called traitors, we were right
The Bush admin's push for war stank from the beginning"
On the issue of Iraq, there's no hiding behind liberal, democrats, conservative,
republicans, libertarians, etc.
Most of the country was heck bent on war as a matter of revenge, regardless of policy. The
fear mongering for policies adjecent to the actual events and actors of 9/11 was not only
coming out of DC, but main street. New Yorkers were no less intent on war making than the WH,
Congress or various think tanks, businesses or educators from elite or non-elite schools.
And what has occurred since moots any real escape in labels. The group who should have
been the least likely and the most prudent, the most thoughtful – the conservatives had
bent conservatism so out of distortion that even they had no defense against unreason.
I have tended to give the president and those in the WH and Congress the benefit of the
doubt that they sincerely considered a response in the region as a defense. I did not go to
select schools, and the schools I did attend did not require me to Ovid or an overview of the
classics in Greek or Latin. I had not attended a war college class or anything of the kind.
But when the case was presented for war – it simply didn't have the evidence or a
rationale that made sense. In fact, some of those contentions contradicted the what was known
as well as each other. It was deeply disturbing and disappointing. But when I read the
president's response to Dir. Tenet,
"If that's all you got, we can't go to war"
or words to that effect, they reflected my thoughts entirely. And for a long time I
considered that all of this mayhem was part of a diplomatic package. I was already outside
the main on the issue of Afghanistan, which I thought was overkill and strategically unsound
for the what should have been the goal – dealing with the actors of 9/11.
I do agree with Inspector Ritter, it was also quite clear that until the inspectors had
finished their mission, minus any evidence that Pres Hussein was in violation – there
was no case. Nor was there a case for invasion based on any humanitarian crisis or
genocide.
But what I have not been able to do is cross that line that they the president knowing and
deliberately conspired to manufacture (lie) evidence against an innocent party. And I have
been able to cross that line to despite having contemplated this article for two days and I
will no doubt read it again, to include the references. Those of that objected the first go
'round, if not pacifists, have problem read several pools of of information and arguments
regarding the case or lack thereof for war and the misleading the country by the leadership.
And it's frustrating that those who actually got the matter spot on are still battling the
those that got the matter and subsequent similar advances incorrect to this day. It's down
right painful considering the measures that were engaged to not merely silence opposition,
but to destroy people's lives.
What has been broken may not be repairable, one hopes it is, believes it is, but reading
this article is just too deep wound to see it. And what is salt in the wound has been three
years of accusations about Russian collusion for the purposes of undermining the executive
who claimed we should reconsider how we address the adventures. And the near total buy in of
that press by half of the country minus any catastrophic event, makes the wars seem as window
dressing to a much deeper and darker ethic that plagues us.
And then there is the question of what to do about all of this official misrepresentation.
Not only must we filter out whether they knowingly lied, but what to do about it. The
daunting task of arresting so many in so many positions of leadership and research. I
consider it serious business to make a false report, much less doing so on a document of
declaration for official business -- that is purjury. We impeached a president because he
mislead about what was a private intimate indiscretion --
What s described above is devastatingly more egregious by several Everests in
magnitude.
And it implicates our partners in what could only be a crime: Great Britain, Israel,
Australia, Poland and others who aided and abetted in the matter.
Caveat pre-defense: L'est I be called an anti-semite, Israel has a right to exist and self
defense.
They were wrong. And that the factual data contradicted their claims may not be enough to
claim they did not genuinely believe their own "lies" if "lies" they were. Or maybe I am just
unwilling to hold people on my team to account to the standard required. Perhaps, accepting
the idea that they knowingly perjured themselves is just too painful to accept.
Unwilling to call a spade a spade – maybe just too merciful or at the end of the day
-- cowardice.
"... "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment. ..."
"... Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. ..."
"... Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something. ..."
"I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for
now." - exce
The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to
interfere with the Mueller investigation. Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive
condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very
source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.
Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.
"After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians
communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of
presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer
2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The
results of this work
corroborate
Professor Connolly's assessment.
Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use
inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his
primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the
typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.
To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or
criticism."
DNC emails were downloaded at 22.3Mbs, a speed which is not possible to achieve remotely, or even local. It is the exact
download speed of a thumb drive.
All russian "fingerprints" were embedded in error codes, which had to be affirmatively copied. They were not an accident.
And please remind me, who exactly was it that examined the DNC servers and pointed at Russia?
Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no
interest in either, that should tell you something.
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
"... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
"... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
"... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
"... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
"... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
"... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
"... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy
that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump
president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who
bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful
wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact
that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth
bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people
did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment
stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump
in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to
conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every
component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence
agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to
remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of
amounts to an attempted soft coup.
It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was
nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once
again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White
House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be
clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be
barred from public office or the media forever.
As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary,
they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry.
Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid
Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!
sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you
have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.
i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally
distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.
I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly
declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the
Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could
watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends).
No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that
be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him
walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve
counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for
Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM |
link
@dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that
Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No
presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)
Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts
with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)
"very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this
moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".
I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by
the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit
(about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing
is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is
chanting "give me more, give me more...".
The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.
However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million
but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC,
EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up
crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a
cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles
to Brooklyn.
The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and
political circles.
The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop
their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.
b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele
dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the
dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation
when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia
investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking
with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with
Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and
the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was
briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing
this.
I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the
coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around
Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.
One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme
never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a
deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the
attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis,
etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of
preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM |
link
The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they
brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they
had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from
their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In
this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit
the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this
train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped
Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon
fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier,
moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead
proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because
the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least
some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they
took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This
time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this
time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no
longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.
Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are
designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole,
are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions
for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.
Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions
have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their
institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the
Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a
constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason
of the highest order.
Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number
international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color
Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first
time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved.
None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved.
Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually
societal collapse.
In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to
Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:
- The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent
737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry,
in an industry where reputation is everything.
- The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the
rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result
was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover
from that crisis.
- This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is
systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions,
(the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and
the ability to maintain peace.
The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the
damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears,
and societal decline sets in.
It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of
many indicators.
Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning
and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is
factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of
the BBC news, we're in information control territory.
But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has
good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.
In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media.
Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has
just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the
shifting currents within that political elite.
So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think.
In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing
and what they intend to do.
The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on
substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty,
supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow
they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their
daily fodder for conversation...
renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."
Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues
the
American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never
delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an
infrastructure
plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.
The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to
distract, and they've done it well.
The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same
ilk.
Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...
I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's
collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from
doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.
2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary
for over 25 years.
3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was
never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal
even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.
When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary
repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that
she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card
industry.
4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead
she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her
campaign.
5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't
support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a
speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters
activist; and she called whites "deplorables".
Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The
Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.
6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and
Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.
IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the
election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any
dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:
> hiring Manafort;
> calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;
> talking about Putin in a admiring way.
And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:
> served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;
> distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;
> served as a device for settling scores:
- Assange isolated
(Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");
- Michael Flynn forced to resign
(because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).
hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM |
link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen
buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice
and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's
presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired
by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases.
This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal
server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 -
2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and
the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and
conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.
The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been
written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation
with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster
the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.
As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and
head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund
Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or
Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was
employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor
Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.
thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath
@2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a
nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article
from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today
like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."
the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this
sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in
tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance..
instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if
any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so
long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is
still on track...
@19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..
What Difference Does it Make?
They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers
make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy
weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to
move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their
deals for civilian projects in the Med.
Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes
about Trump, Russia.
Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!
Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!
During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does
everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen.
Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her
associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in
court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.
Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM |
link
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be
in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room
yelling that the house is on fire.
Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of
steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact
merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?
Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing
happend:
If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media
malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being
wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves
defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity.
Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.
The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to
our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being
wrong.
Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to
acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already
know.
It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing
it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.
And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years
Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4
You people don't get it do you?
'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell
swoop....
Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel)
and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations
with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas
administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.
That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in
which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want
something covered up? Put Mueller on it.
To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and
pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont
believe. Lol
Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as
Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China
trademarks .
The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing
negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal
like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR
protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in
which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.
The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how
far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is
an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The
Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions
overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it
onto cable tv?
It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After
years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown
restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will
become true after all.
"Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.
When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight,
you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar,
one with a great deal of blood on her hands.
My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new
credibility.
The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people
with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely
arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.
And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American
foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.
Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will
deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.
No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they
lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.
It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.
So funny.
Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate
Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his
Administration.
Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.
The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate.
Lets just blame it all on Hillary.
Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever
of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily
die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily
recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The
dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have
succumbed.
As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."
Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment,
then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!
It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money
from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited
from it", highly likely!
Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort
has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of
Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly
likely.
There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger
Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most
certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against
defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of
Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct
conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely
different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win
because the DNC threw all its weight against him.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the
spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the
American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race
theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one:
if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the
bits you want.
I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it
exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than
before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for
that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment"
acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American
people (or a signficant part of it).
But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.
It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it
had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between
Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term
enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most
of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and
can be balkanized.
There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new
bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new
information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only
spun onto new hysteria.
As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been
wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to
simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of
evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of
Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort
to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless
wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and
Republicans.
"...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."
Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two
positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.
Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.
A case of divide and conquer against the population
This time it was a fabricated scandal.
Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection
and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements,
wearing down relations.
The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims
concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like
that).
Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove
anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on
towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry
and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.
Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other
distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and
effort.
Management by crisis
The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other
manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through
spam.
Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.
Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter
suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.
I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was
(mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .
My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the
Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
Jackrabbit @18
So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do
nationalist.
I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her
turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of
personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier
during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up
to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration,
the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is
that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's
that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him
and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax
returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the
press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns). Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate,
meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like
open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the
Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character
issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other
examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's
well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer
Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make")
and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find
that even a little bit strange?
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and
Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns.
Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press
asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns) . Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless
astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders.
These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and
another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and
to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie
refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to
squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk
about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the
overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that
even a little bit strange?
mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not
voters.
Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western
states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a
thin margin.
Gosh and Blimey!
Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned
the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...
From Xymphora March 21, 2019.
"Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):
"Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent
were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually
estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34
percent from gentiles.
Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50
donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from
Jewish givers.
So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about
the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about
it: 76 percent is a lot."
Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and
involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state.
And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in
2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is
not confronting Putin"...
Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow,
troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.
I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's
terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so
distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.
I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the
popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing
side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too
many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the
people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say
she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other
problems, but it still wasn't enough.
I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her
elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and
the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.
Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough
to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has
helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller
to prove.
It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that
Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the
"national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify
the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.
It is time to build
cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony.
Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it.
The truth will work better.
"... RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there. ..."
"... And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless. ..."
"... They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. ..."
"... The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion." ..."
"... It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. ..."
"... If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb. ..."
"... If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate. ..."
"... And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us. ..."
"... Hillary is the epitome of evil. ..."
"... I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. ..."
"... Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected. ..."
"... Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected". ..."
"... HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH ..."
"... It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible ..."
"... When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself. ..."
During most of the RussiaGate investigation against Donald Trump I kept saying that all
roads lead to Hillary Clinton.
Anyone with three working brain cells knew this, including
'Miss' Maddow, whose tears of disappointment are particularly delicious.
Robert Mueller's investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of
nothing. It did this admirably.
It was so effective it paralyzed the country for more than two years, just like Europe has
been held hostage by Brexit. And all of this because, in the end, the elites I call The Davos
Crowd refused to accept that the people no longer believed their lies about the benefits of
their neoliberal, globalist agenda.
Hillary Clinton's ascension to the Presidency was to be their apotheosis along with the
Brexit vote. These were meant to lay to rest, once and for all time, the vaguely libertarian
notion that people should rule themselves and not be ruled by philosopher kings in some distant
land.
Hillary's failure was enormous. And the RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry
list of purposes to cover it:
Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect
the outcome of the election
Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our
political system
Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump's guilt.
Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive
corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them
against him through prosecutor overreach.
Hillary should have been thrown to the wolves after she failed. When you fail the people she
failed and cost them the money she cost them, you lose more than just your funding. What this
tells you is that Hillary has so much dirt on everyone involved, once this thing started
everyone went along with it lest she burn them down as well.
Burnin' Down da House
Hillary is the epitome of envy. Envy is the destructive sin of coveting someone else's life
so much they are obsessed with destroying it. It's the sin of Cain. She envies what Trump has,
the Presidency. And she was willing to tear it down to keep him from having it no matter how
much damage it would do. She's worse than the Joker from The Dark Knight.
Because while the Joker is unfathomable to someone with a conscience there's little stopping
us from excising him from the community completely., even though Batman refuses.
Hillary hates us for who we are and what we won't give her. And that animus drove her to
blackmail the world while putting on the face of its savior.
And that's what makes what comes next so obvious to me. RussiaGate was never a sustainable
narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there
are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there.
Mueller thought all he had to do was lean on corrupt people and threaten them with
everything. They would turn on Trump. He would resign in disgrace from the public outcry. It
didn't work. In the end Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone all held their ground or
perjured themselves into the whole thing falling apart.
Andrew Weissman's resignation last month was your tell there was nothing. Mueller would
pursue this to the limit of his personal reputation and no further. Just like so many other
politicians.
Vote Your Pocketbook
With respect to Brexit I've been convinced that it would come down to reputations. Would the
British MP's vote against their own personal best interests to do the bidding of the EU? Would
Theresa May eventually realize her historical reputation would be destroyed if she caves to
Brussels and betrays Brexit in the end? Always bet on the fecklessness of politicians. They
will always act selfishly when put to the test. While leading RussiaGate, Mueller was always
headed here if he couldn't get someone to betray Trump.
And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his
reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now
worthless.
They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she
has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. The
progressives that were convinced of Trump's treason are bereft; their false hope stripped away
like standing in front of a sandblaster. They will be raw, angry and looking for blood after
they get over their denial.
Everyone else who was blackmailed into going along with this lunacy will begin cutting deals
to save their skins. The outrage over this will not end. Trump will be President when he stands
for re-election.
The Wolves Beckon
The Democrats do not have a chance against him as of right now. When he was caving on
everything back in December it looked like he was done. That there was enough meat on the
RussiaGate bones to make Nancy Pelosi brave. Then she backed off on impeachment talk.
Oops....
... ... ...
The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something
dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time.
Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion."
It's clear that RussiaGate is
a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall
on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. There is only one answer. And Obama's
people are still in place to protect him. I said last fall that " Hillary would
indict herself. " And I meant it. Eventually her blackmail and drive to burn it all down
led to this moment.
The circumstances are different than I expected back then, Trump didn't win the mid-terms.
But the end result was always the same. If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then
all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb.
Because the bigger project, the erection of a transnational superstate, is bigger than any
one person. Hillary is expendable. Lies are expensive to maintain. The truth is cheap to
defend. Think of the billions in opportunity costs associated with this. Once the costs rise
above the benefits, change happens fast. If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this
country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason
anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate.
We all know it's the truth. So, the cheapest way out of this mess for them is to give the
MAGApedes what they want, Hillary.
And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us.
I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch,
Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice,
Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. Think of the
taxpayer money wasted on this ridiculous Mueller investigation! The Roger Stone arrest was an
outrage. Who tipped off CNN? Who ordered it? What was with the attack dogs and machine guns?
And now we have Nadler trying to destroy anyone and everyone who ever did business with
Trump. All those 80 people who got letters from him asking for documents will now be
bankrupted by legal fees.
According to Scott Adams, one recipient is refusing to
cooperate -- he's saying "I can't afford for me and family to be destroyed." He put the request
for documents in a drawer. He has no money for lawyers.
This insanity and abuse of power has
got to stop. Meanwhile, nothing gets done in Congress. We're all looking at censorship,
tilted search engines, de-monetization, being beat up on campus for trying to express an
opinion, being accosted in a restaurant (or, VP Pence, from the stage ("Hamilton"), getting
sucker-punched for wearing a MAGA hat, having elections stolen through myriad Dem cheating
methods, and NOTHING is being done.
Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian
meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate
cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a
Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for
becoming elected.
Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately
sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also
raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The
damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of
treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a
war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections
and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because
it was her turn to get elected".
It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of
Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be
nobody to hold them responsible.
When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to
justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they
were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself.
"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone
associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016
U.S. presidential election. As the report states: `[T]he investigation did not establish that
members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its
election interference activities.' |"
From page one of the Barr letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and
Senate Judiciary Committees.
https://www.scribd.com/document/402973432/AG-March-24-2019-Letter-to-House-and-Senate-Judiciary-Committees#from_embed
Some call this merely the "end of the beginning." Further revelations will be emerging,
including from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. " J ustice Department
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday his office is still investigating
possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI in their
investigation into President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaign," reported the
Washington Examiner this week.
However, AG Barr's letter retells the tale of Russian Interference in our elections,
according to Mr. Mueller and his team's investigation and indictments. So, the anti-Trump
camp will undoubtedly continue to question the 2016 election results, and blame the defeat of
HRC on the "Reds." One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British
Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged
as much against Serbian civilians hundreds of whom perished as it was against Slobodan Miloević's forces, and it was a campaign
of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission
was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the
1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United
States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation,
stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan
descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the
West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest
sites during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former
benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however,
is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew
thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims
as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration
armed and trained these fighters in
flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists
via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in
which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded
that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European
soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what
was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their
independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo
as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia,
called it "without any question a terrorist
group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden
and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department
accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan
Miloević. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil
war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded
as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton
administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces
committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president
called the war an internal Russian affair
and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Miloević resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia
from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO
called
the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against
the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Miloević regime. US intelligence confirmed that
the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict.
President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Miloević an ultimatum
they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary
of State James Rubin later
admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing
were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film Wag the Dog debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood
producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't
help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's
impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in Wag the Dog , there were exaggerated or completely fabricated
tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack
on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO
began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government
issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no
proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions
and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA) A
state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March
1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the
NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combating the KLA
and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly
exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed and the media dutifully parroted
that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves."
This was completely false . US diplomat David
Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men are missing, presumed dead." Again, a
total fabrication . The FBI, International War Crimes
Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims
they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared
that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been
"fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington.
Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed
or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner,
acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration
had recently allowed and was at the time allowing far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention.
More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan
genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal
Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses,
where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign
of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite
horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogotα increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did
Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration
positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist
regime this side of Afghanistan, was and remains a favored US ally despite having one of the
world's worst human rights
records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since
the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were
forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995.
Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the
Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent
civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned
convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and
seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist
John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools,
factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian
people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much
of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle
of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the
building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards.
There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing
knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President
Jacques Chirac forecast as
many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in
nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they
were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes
flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties
on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly
hit Dragia Miović hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's
ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstić, age
23, was recovering from cancer surgery she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach when the bombs blew jagged
shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragia Miović wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force
struck a hospital and a market in the city of Ni on May 7,
killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic
and medical dispensary were also bombed in the
mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece
was
blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people
killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged
by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a
doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes
bombed a bridge in Luane just as a bus was crossing.
An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over
the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was
bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox
Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to
help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175
bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000
residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children,
died when bombs meant to
destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy
befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO
warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly
men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the
attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike
on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded.
Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident Britain's Observer later
reported that the US deliberately bombed the
embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks
on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed
refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Deηan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including
16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported
a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month
later, another column of refugees was
bombed near Koria, killing
87 mostly women, children and the elderly and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile
struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM
missile blew the roof off
of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their
atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from
the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or
were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost
entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group
"murderous thugs," the United States now with George W. Bush as president continued to offer its invaluable support. National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally
intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were
surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles
rescued the besieged militants. It later
emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling
toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly
action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton
added
that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's
real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton,
declaring on the eve of the war that
"to walk away now would destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute,
wrote that the Clinton administration
"transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United
States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands
of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable"
way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's
1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA some of whose fighters had
trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly
attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly
did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat
to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without
international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak,
then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging
nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history.
Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense,
Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian
people in service of NATO's credibility.
Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based author and activist. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights,
is archived atwww.brettwilkins.com
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be
responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy
decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be
good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they
would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be
responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy
decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be
good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they
would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
The Trump administration has
ignored yet another mandated deadline for reporting to Congress on Yemen:
A senior Pentagon official had pledged to deliver the strategy report at the beginning of
March after failing to meet a Feb. 1 deadline mandated by law.
In recent months, the Trump administration has disregarded several certification
requirements from Congress. In February, the State Department refused to say whether the
Saudi-led force had reduced civilian casualties in the Yemeni conflict. And the White House
failed to respond to lawmakers' query about whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
was responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Last year, the administration met the first certification deadline by brazenly lying to
Congress that the Saudi coalition was successfully reducing harm to civilians in Yemen.
Congress completely failed to hold Secretary Pompeo accountable for those lies, and the
administration has obviously concluded that it can get away with disregarding these
requirements. For the last several months, both the Secretary of State and the Pentagon have
simply refused to comply with the law. In this case, the Pentagon probably can't "detail
specific US diplomatic and national security objectives" because the only discernible objective
of reflexive support for the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen is to indulge them in whatever they
want to do. An administration that has illegally involved the U.S. in the war on Yemen for more
than two years obviously won't have any respect for legal requirements set by Congress when
they can't even be bothered to respect the Constitution.
The administration's contempt for the law and their disrespect for Congress are additional
reasons why the House should vote on and pass the antiwar Yemen resolution that the Senate
passed earlier this month. Beyond that, Congress needs to increase pressure on the Saudi and
Emirati governments with additional measures to cut off arms sales and hearings to scrutinize
the numerous human rights abuses and war crimes committed by their forces and their
proxies.
When war supporters object that Congress risks undermining the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it
is important for members of Congress to know that it is Mohammed bin Salman who has jeopardized
the relationship through his reckless and destructive behavior. The Saudi government has been
desperately lying about its conduct in Yemen and elsewhere to the U.S. and the entire world,
and the crown prince has proven himself to be completely unreliable and strikingly incompetent
at everything except grabbing more power for himself:
"We know who this guy is, we know what he's capable of, and treating him like he's an ally
or a reliable partner is totally untenable," said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former US Agency for
International Development director during the Obama administration.
The Saudi government has made itself a liability to the U.S. Since the administration puts
Saudi Arabia first and won't do anything to defend American interests, it falls to Congress to
do what the president won't.
The three-day visit to Washington by the president of Brazil brought together two of the
most right-wing figures in the world: Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer and fervent
admirer of the blood-soaked military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and
Donald Trump, who has become the pole of attraction for authoritarians and fascists the world
over, including the gunman who slaughtered 50 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques last week.
During their joint press conference at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Trump repeated his
declaration, delivered to an audience of right-wing Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in Florida,
that "The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere." He emphasized, as he did
in his State of the Union speech, that this also involved putting an end to the threat of
socialism within the United States itself.
Both Trump and Bolsonaro have made the extirpation of socialism -- the political core of
fascist movements -- the central goal of their governments. At their joint press conference,
they railed against socialism only days after the massacre in New Zealand, carried out by
Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant posted a manifesto hailing Trump as a "symbol of renewed white
identity" and declaring his desire to put his boot on the neck of every "Marxist."
The mutual embrace of Trump and Bolsonaro at the White House is symbolic of the elevation of
far-right parties and cultivation of fascistic forces by capitalist governments and established
bourgeois parties all over the world. It underscores the fact that the growth of fascism in
Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US is the result not of a groundswell of mass support from
below, but rather the sponsorship and encouragement of so-called "democratic" governments that
are, in fact, controlled top to bottom by corporate oligarchs.
The global promotion of extreme right politics was embodied by the presence of right-wing
ideologue Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and Navy officer, as a guest of
honor at a dinner with Jair Bolsonaro Monday night. Bannon has close ties with Bolsonaro's son,
Eduardo, who is a member of the Brazilian Parliament and a Latin American representative of the
political consortium set up by Bannon, known as the Movement, whose aim is to promote extreme
right-wing political parties throughout the world. "Some of the Bolsonaro team on the right see
themselves as disciples of the Bannon movement and representatives of Bannon for Brazil and
Latin America," one former Trump administration official told McClatchy.
At the press conference, both Jair Bolsonaro and Trump pledged their support to a fascistic
litany of "god, family and nation," as Trump put it. Bolsonaro declared, "Brazil and the United
States stand side-by-side in their efforts to share liberties and respect to traditional and
family lifestyles, respect to God, our creator, against the gender ideology of the politically
correct attitudes, and fake news."
Both presidents threatened the use of military force against Venezuela, demonizing President
Nicolas Maduro as a socialist dictator. (He heads a capitalist regime, but one whose foreign
policy tilts toward China and Russia rather than US imperialism).
Trump reiterated the mantra that "all options are on the table" against Venezuela. Bolsonaro
was asked if he would permit US soldiers to use Brazilian soil as a base for military
operations against Venezuela. Rather than dismissing that prospect as a violation of both
Brazilian and Venezuelan sovereignty, he declined to answer, citing the need for maintaining
operational secrecy and the element of surprise.
One of the bilateral agreements that Trump and Bolsonaro signed would allow the United
States to use Brazil's Alcantara Aerospace Launch Base for its satellites. Brazil also
announced an end to visa requirements for US visitors...
Before visiting the White House, Bolsonaro made an unannounced visit to the headquarters
of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, an extraordinary move for the
president of a country that was subjected to 21 years of unrestrained torture and murder by a
military dictatorship installed in a CIA-backed coup.
The dire implications for the working class of the global rise of the far right are
indicated by Bolsonaro's glorification of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Trump hailed the
"shared values" between his government and that of a former military officer who praises a
regime that jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of workers and students. Twenty
years ago, Bolsonaro told an interviewer that the Brazilian Congress should be shut down and
that the country could be changed only by a civil war that completed "the job that the military
regime didn't do, killing 30,000 people."
The capitalist ruling classes are turning once again to dictatorship and fascism in response
to the intensification of the world economic crisis, the disintegration of the postwar
international order and growth of trade war and geostrategic conflicts, and, above all, the
resurgence of the class struggle on a world scale...
"... A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side... ..."
"In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the
systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:"
Many thanks, and much respect to you Sir for bringing this important piece to my attention.
I apologize for another somewhat off topic posting, but I have not seen it posted here earlier, and I think that this should be
seen by as many eyes as possible.
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system -- and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international
news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means that Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages
around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles
are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews
are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side...
Intellectually Max Boot is a loud mouth nothing. I wonder how he managed to graduate from a prestigious university. he might be
able to work as copywriters, but not above that.
Neocon didn't "get it wrong." They understood that this is wrong. It was all about money for MIC which as lobbyists of MIC is
their first priority. That's why they lied the American people into wars. They are war criminals. They should be tried for
war crimes.
Tom Gorman (Feb 15, 8:36 am)–as evidence that Max Boot "has recanted his support of the
Iraq War"–quoted two sentences from Boot's 2018 book. Two sentences earlier in the same
book Boot wrote:
"In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in
consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don
Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a 'neocon.'
Those of us who supported the invasion were,
as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver
and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider."
In 2016, Cannon wrote that Warren would indeed bring more warmth than Clinton,
pointing to an anecdote she shared on Facebook about how she would bake her mother a "heart
shaped cake" as a child. He contrasted that with Clinton's sarcastic "I suppose I could have
stayed home and baked cookies"
comment from 1992 , which was a response to ongoing questions about why she chose to
continue her law practice when her husband was governor of Arkansas.
For some Bernie Sanders supporters, meanwhile, praising Warren was a way to deflect
accusations of sexism. In a 2016
Huffington Post opinion piece titled, "I Despise Hillary Clinton And It Has Nothing to Do
With Her Gender," Isaac Saul wrote that he "and many Sanders supporters would vote for
Elizabeth Warren if she were in the race over Hillary or Bernie." (
Saul apologized to Clinton for being a "smug young journalist" and "Bernie Bro" in a follow
up article months later, writing that his views of her changed after he endeavored to learn
more about her history).
So what's going on here? Has Warren become incredibly unlikable over the past two years? Or
is this change more an indication of her growing power. High-achieving women, sociologist
Marianne Cooper wrote in a 2013 Harvard Business
Review article , are judged differently than men because "their very success -- and
specifically the behaviors that created that success -- violates our expectations about how
women are supposed to behave." When women act competitively or assertively rather than warm and
nurturing, Cooper writes, they "elicit pushback from others for being insufficiently feminine
and too masculine." As a society, she says, "we are deeply uncomfortable with powerful women.
In fact, we don't often really like them."
The former interim head of the Democratic Party just accused Hillary Clinton's campaign of
"unethical" conduct that "compromised the party's integrity." The Clinton campaign's alleged sin: A hostile takeover
of the Democratic National Committee before her primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders had concluded.
Donna Brazile's op-ed in Politico
is the equivalent of taking the smoldering embers of the 2016 primary and
throwing some gasoline on them. Just about everything she says in the piece will inflame Sanders's passionate
supporters who were already suspicious of the Democratic establishment and already had reason to believe -- based on
leaked DNC emails
-- that the committee wasn't as neutral in the primary as it was supposed to be.
But the op-ed doesn't break too much new provable, factual ground, relying more upon Brazile's
own perception of the situation and hearsay. In the op-ed, Brazile says:
Clinton's campaign took care of the party's debt and "put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on
her campaign for survival, for which [Clinton] expected to wield control of its operations." She described
Clinton's control of the DNC as a "cancer."
Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Clinton's campaign, told her the DNC was (these are Brazile's
words) "fully under the control of Hillary's campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp."
She "couldn't write a news release without passing it by Brooklyn."
Then-Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose
pressured resignation after the leaked emails
left Brazile in charge as interim chairwoman, "let Clinton's
headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired" because she didn't want to tell the party's leaders how dire the DNC's
financial situation was. Brazile says Wasserman Schultz arranged a $2 million loan from the Clinton campaign
without the consent of party officers like herself, contrary to party rules.
Brazile sums it up near the end: "If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control
of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw
it, it compromised the party's integrity."
None of this is truly shocking. In fact, Brazile is largely writing about things we already knew
about. The joint fundraising agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC
was already known about and the subject of derision
among Sanders's supporters. But it's worth noting that
Sanders was given a similar opportunity and passed on using it, as Brazile notes.
There were also those emails from the DNC hack released by WikiLeaks that
showed some at the DNC were hardly studiously neutral
. One email chain discussed bringing Sanders's Jewish
religion into the campaign, others spoke of him derisively, and in one a lawyer who worked for both Clinton and the
DNC advised the committee on how to respond to questions about the Clinton joint fundraising committee. The emails
even cast plenty of doubt on Brazile's neutrality, given she shared with the Clinton campaign
details
of questions to be asked at a pair of CNN forums
for the Democratic candidates in March 2016, before she was
interim chair but when she was still a DNC official. Brazile, who was a CNN pundit at the time, lost her CNN job over
that.
The timeline here is also important. Many of those emails described above came after it was
abundantly clear that Clinton would be the nominee, barring a massive and almost impossible shift in primary votes.
It may have been in poor taste and contrary to protocol, but the outcome was largely decided long before Sanders
ended his campaign. Brazile doesn't dwell too much on the timeline, so it's not clear exactly how in-the-bag Clinton
had the nomination when the alleged takeover began. It's also not clear exactly what Clinton got for her alleged
control.
This is also somewhat self-serving for Brazile, given the DNC continued to struggle during and
after her tenure,
especially financially
. The op-ed is excerpted from her forthcoming book, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the
Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House." Losses like the one in 2016 will certainly lead
to plenty of finger-pointing, and Brazile's book title and description allude to it containing plenty of that.
But taking on the Clintons is definitely something that most in the party wouldn't take lightly.
And Brazile's allegation that Clinton was effectively controlling the DNC is the kind of thing that could lead to
some further soul-searching and even bloodletting in the Democratic Party. It's largely been able to paper over its
internal divisions since the primary season in 2016, given the great unifier for Democrats that is President Trump.
Sanders himself has somewhat toned down his criticism of the DNC during that span, but what he
says -- especially given he seems to want to run again in 2020 -- will go a long way in determining how the party moves
forward.
Warren is trying to treat not just the symptoms but the underlying disease. She has
proposed a universal child-care
and pre-K program that echoes the universal high school movement of the early 20th century. She favors not only a tougher approach
to future mergers, as many Democrats do, but also
a breakup of Facebook
and other tech companies that have come to resemble monopolies. She wants to require corporations to include worker representatives
on their boards -- to end the era of "shareholder-value maximization," in which companies care almost exclusively about the interests
of their shareholders, often
at the expense of their workers, their communities and their country.
Warren was also the first high-profile politician to call for
an annual wealth
tax , on fortunes greater than $50 million. This tax is the logical extension of research by the economist Thomas Piketty and
others, which has shown how extreme wealth perpetuates itself. Historically, such concentration has often led to
the decline
of powerful societies. Warren, unlike some Democrats, comfortably explains that she is not socialist. She is a capitalist and,
like Franklin D. Roosevelt, is trying to save American capitalism from its own excesses.
"Sometimes, bigger ideas are more possible to accomplish," Warren told me during
a
recent conversation about the economy at her Washington apartment. "Because you can inspire people."
... ... ...
Warren's agenda is a series of such bold ideas. She isn't pushing for a byzantine system of tax credits for child care. She wants
a universal program of pre-K and child care, administered locally, with higher pay for teachers and affordable tuition for families.
And to anyone who asks, "But how will you pay for that?" Warren has an answer. Her wealth tax
would raise more than $250 billion
a year, about four times the estimated cost of universal child care. She is, in her populist way, the fiscal conservative in the
campaign.
Merkel might say: "There is definitely a place for Brazil in NATO. They can have ours."
Forget it! Merkel is the most servile lackey that the US could wish for. She is
doing everything her masters in Washington ask her to do. For example the German public is
awaiting a mildly entertaining show of their government on how to work around yesterdays
court decision:
International law is the yardstick for international politics. This has been clarified by
the Higher Administrative Court in Münster in a spectacular ruling on lethal US drone
missions in Yemen. Several relatives of victims who were killed in such attacks had sued.
They hold the Federal Republic of Germany jointly responsible for this because the United
States allegedly also uses the US airbase in Ramstein in Rhineland-Palatinate for these
fatal attacks.
There are important indications that the drone attacks in question violate international
law and the fundamental right to life. The Federal Republic of Germany must protect these
rights and stand up for them. Therefore the Federal Republic must clarify now in a first
step whether the attacks offend against international right.
NOT! Aside from the fact, that the public press largely ignores this decision, our
governments have a long record of doing actually nothing when formally independent judges
even from the highest courts ask them to adhere to the law.
Speaking of embarrassing lackeys, when the empire was seeking a new nodal point to more
efficiently drone bomb Northern Africa the most obvious/nearby European locations like Italy,
France or Greece all said "Nah, better not". But, don't you worry, Missus Merkel was of
course happy to offer Stuttgard in Southern Germany as base for AFRICOM!
This article was written 4 years ago, but the problem with Putin successor remains. Putin is a unique politician and his replacement
might be much weaker, causing troubles for Russia. This is not new problem for Russia, but this time it will be especially
acute. BTW this comment thread looks like "who is who" list for NATObots.
Notable quotes:
"... We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see. ..."
"... Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come ..."
"... Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously. ..."
"... It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways. ..."
"... He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship. Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work] ..."
"... Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed. ..."
"... Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section. ..."
"... PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ? ..."
I wonder if everyone on the Guardian staff has the same "man crush" on Putin? Could explain all these obsessive articles. I
also wonder if he spent any time in the penalty box?
laticsfanfromeurope -> Extracrispy 7 Oct 2015 17:06
You prefer ISIS and Al-Nusra then the legitimate Syrian gov. and the legitimate help of Russia...not a surprise from stupid
western supporters!
pfox33 7 Oct 2015 17:05
There isn't one of our western politicians that wouldn't sell his fucking mother to be getting the attention that Putin's getting.
I thought he was supposed to be isolated.
So to keep the hockey thing going, Putin's stolen the puck in the neutral zone, split the Nato defensemen who were too far
forward and is on a breakaway.
I feel sorry for Obama because I think he's a good leader but when it comes to trying to maneuver in a geopolitical situation
like Syria he's fucked before he leaves the house. Putin can just act without trying to herd cats like Obama has to do with his
Nato minions. He doesn't have a bunch of recalcitrant GOP senators calling him everything but a white man and running their mouths
about what they would do.
... ... ...
filin led -> Braminski 7 Oct 2015 16:55
It's you who are a troll, sir. By what you say, anything can be dismissed as paid propaganda. That means, you are as likely
to be a paid agent yourself. So, if you can't come up with a constructive argument, stop commenting please.
Mordantdude -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 16:40
As Russians say: "Envy silently".
giacinto101 7 Oct 2015 15:59
We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm
assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho
image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and
as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership
requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see.
SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 15:54
Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come
CIAbot007 -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 15:39
Most of Aussies have a bit of common sense which says that you can't blame anyone before it is prooved. With Western MSM propaganda
machine blaming Russia and Putin even before anything happens you bet there's no such thing as balanced and unskewed reporting
and even will for any kind of such thing. Don't get fooled, use your brain or your brain will be used by someone else.
SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 14:48
Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international
politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously.
PekkaRoivanen MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:30
In the West, we don't have a sycophantic press kissing the leader's backside:
Guardian: Barack Obama scores just 2 out of 22 basketball hoops - video
You wrote that Obama plays basketball and you prove it with this video where Obama wears dress shirt (tie removed :-D) and
scores badly.
Are you sure Obama plays basketball? Or is it just press kissing his backside?
Kev Kev Hektor Uranga 7 Oct 2015 14:28
the USA persecutes and kills people who speak out against it. Only difference is the USA does it in ways that nobody sees..
In other words the USA is the same as Russia only they do their work in the dark. When nobody is looking.
Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:26
That's the guy who is wishing Putin a happy birthday.
The US/UK duo have caused with their insane illegal wars more than a million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
counting.
I recommend you look up a little the complex history and present situation in Chechnya and the North Caucasus region.
ISIS (which the insanely aggressive US/UK duo have in effect created) is already spreading its influence INSIDE the Russian
Federation. So Putin has direct interests to defeat ISIS and stabilise Syria (and Iraq). In addition, the south of the Russian
Federation is on the map of territories which ISIS plans to conquer.
See for example:
-
8 ISIS supporters killed in N. Caucasus special op
(2 August 2015)
Russian security forces have foiled a terrorist group that recently pledged allegiance to ISIS in Ingushetia, in the Northern
Caucasus, according to the National Anti-Terror Committee (NAC). Security forces seized explosives, weapons and over 2,000 rounds
of ammunition.
-
How Russian Militants Declared A New ISIS 'State' In Russia's North Caucasus
(26 June 2015)
The Islamic State group announced the creation of its northernmost province this week, after accepting a formal pledge of allegiance
from former al Qaeda militants in the North Caucasus region of Russia.
-
-
It is true that at present, the Chechens are begging Putin to let them strike in Syria (and this is also closely linked to the
complicated history of North Caucasus), but Putin has not unleashed them. See for example here:
-
-
Kadyrov asks Putin to allow Chechen infantry to fight in Syria (RT, 2 October 2015)
-
The head of the Chechen Republic has asked the Russian president to send Chechen units to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)
in Syria, adding that his fighters have sworn to fight terrorists till the end.
"Being a Muslim, a Chechen and a Russian patriot I want to say that in 1999 when our republic was overrun with these devils
we swore on the Koran that we would fight them wherever they are," the Chechen leader said. "But we need the Commander-in-Chief's
decision to do this," he emphasized. According to the Russian Constitution, the president [Putin] is also the commander-in-chief
of the military forces.
BMWAlbert clanview46 7 Oct 2015 14:26
It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States
will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways.
Julian1972 MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:21
That was last year...also it was authored by a combination of the CIA and their right-wing 'Operation Stay Behind' cohorts...though,
if you don't know that by now you doubtless never will.
Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:16
Murderers, thieves and embezzlers stroking each other's egos.
Putin has a long way to go to match the US/UK.
-
-
Here is a recent report about 'collateral damage' compiled by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival
and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War:
-
Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror' (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan)
(March 2015)
-
This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000
in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.
NOT included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen.
The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated
by the media and major NGOs.
And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess
of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.
-
-
For more about civilian casualties due to the US-led coalition strikes in Syria and Iraq, see the Airwars website:
584 1,720 civilians killed:
To date, the international coalition has only conceded two "likely" deaths, from an event in early November 2014. It is also
presently investigating seven further incidents of concern; is carrying out credibility assessments on a further 13; and has concluded
three more investigations having found no 'preponderance of evidence' to support civilian casualty claims.
More Power -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:13
He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship.
Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work].
Just look at the World Bank, BRICS is on the door step. Happy birth day Putin. A badass mofo
blueskis -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:06
The vats majority of the 5500 killed have been civilians in East Ukraine killed by airstrikes ordered by kiev/washington, fully
justifying Russian intervention.
ooTToo -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:40
Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that
they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed.
geedeesee -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:19
Russia is attacking what they said they'd attack, Tavernier. ISIS, al-Nusrah, and other terrorist organisations.
inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:18
No he isn't. Anybody with a functioning brain knows he had nothing to do with that. Unlike the US genocide in the Middle East
- over 2 million dead and counting - not to mention the deliberate and sustained attack on a hospital. Maybe you don' get to see
the news in your ward?
inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:13
The US created, funds, trains and arms ISIS - they are only supporting terrorists in their campaign to effect regime change.
Russia is responding to a request fro the Syrian government, so its actions are entirely legal. The faces that the USA and the
KSA are the biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world.
monteverdi1610 7 Oct 2015 12:22
Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the
Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section.
PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it
up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for
all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ?
Foreign policy is no longer controlled by the President of the USA. It is controlled by the Deep state.
This article is from 2015 but can easily be written about Trump administration
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis communautaire). ..."
"... First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state" officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way? ..."
"... In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe, while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule". ..."
"... Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently in Ukraine. ..."
"... Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all. ..."
"... Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant, ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. ..."
"... Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. ..."
"... Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. ..."
"... 'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'. ..."
"... "We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED] ..."
Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy... European
democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy
The avalanche of commentary since the Ukrainian crisis erupted a year ago has overshadowed any reflections on the immense forgone
benefits (technically speaking, the "opportunity cost") of what might have been if Washington had been working for peace and stability
instead of war and chaos.
Imagine the following: After the unraveling of the Communist bloc, Europe, in partnership with the US, had forged a new security
system in which Russia was treated as a valued and equal partner one whose interests were respected. Russia, decimated by a century
of wars and Communist imperialism, would doubtless have eagerly reciprocated in kind. Most countries of the former Soviet Union would
have then proceeded to build a new Eurasian structure of which Russia would have served as the natural umbrella, given its long-standing
interaction with the region's diverse nations and cultures.
Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the
pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis
communautaire).
The rising Far Eastern economic powerhouse, with the world's most populous country, China, at its centre, would have linked up
with the world's largest economy (the EU). An enormous Eurasian production and financial bloc would have been created one that
drew primarily on secure supplies of Russian energy and other natural resources. Untold investment opportunities would have opened
up in Siberia and Russia's Far East as well as in Central Asia. Hundreds of millions of people in Eurasia and elsewhere would have
been lifted out of poverty. And, not least, the EU would have been refashioned as an integral part of the dynamic trans-Eurasian
economy (rather than as a German-centred empire, as appears to be the case today), thereby making a major contribution to overcoming
the ongoing global economic depression.
All of this was not to be, however. Why not? First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a
mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state"
officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to
get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way?
European democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy
In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started
churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe,
while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule".
Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently
in Ukraine.
And in what is eerily reminiscent of Stalinist "bloc discipline", the EU/NATO nomenclature was ordered to implement the absurd
strategy of severing the Russian economy from the EU. For their part, the cowering Eurocrats willingly obliged by imposing sanctions
on Russia that, perversely, have had a negative impact on their own economies (but, let it be stressed, not that of the US). No questions
raised and no public debate on the wisdom of such a strategy permitted.
Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view
that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil
and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all.
This abuse and humiliation of Europe is unparalleled. The continent that gave the world the wonders of the Antiquity, modern democracy,
the industrial revolution and what is arguably the greatest tradition of philosophy, fine arts and classical music is being bullied
by its oversized offspring. Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant,
ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. War and extermination
camps are etched into the European DNA. America "knows" about them only from afar and, not least, from the Hollywood entertainment
industry.
Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior
Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. The so-called European "leaders" are colluding with them in plunging
Europe into the abyss and thereby risking nuclear confrontation.
America, too, is a loser
But this is not just a tragedy for Europe and Eurasia. We are also witnessing the wilful misrule of America and, by default, of
the entire West. Indeed, Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy. The
"democracy-promoters" running Washington's foreign-policy apparatus apparently do not understand that America has nothing to lose
and a lot to gain from the Eurasian economic project: the rising tide of global economic welfare would lift everyone's boats, including
its own. Why should it matter to Washington if the rising tide comes from other quarters beyond its control?
Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine
Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. If it continues to support such
forces against Russia, united Europe will lose not only its backbone but its very soul. The moral consequences of this loss will
be enormous and could lead to the precipitous erosion of Western democracy.
The 'autocrats' want to work with the West, not against it
US and EU leaders believe that the Russian and Chinese "autocrats" are out to destroy the West because the latter hate freedom
(as George W. Bush might have put it). And hence, they argue, the autocrats must be stopped in their tracks. The simple truth is
that Western leaders are too blinkered to understand that far from desiring to destroy the West, Russia and China want it to prosper
so that they can work with it to everyone's benefit. Having enjoyed a privileged position over several centuries and having attained
unprecedented prosperity in recent decades, the West simply cannot understand that the rest of humanity has no interest in fomenting
the "clash of civilizations" but rather craves peace and stability so that it can finally improve its economic lot.
Perhaps, however, all is not yet lost. It is still possible that reason and economic forces will prevail and force the West
to correct the errors of its ways. What we need, perhaps, more than ever is the ability to step out of the box, question our fundamental
assumptions (not least about Russia and China) and find the courage to change policies that have proved disastrous. After all, critical
thought, dispassionate analysis and the ability to be open to new ideas is what made the West so successful in the past. If we are
to thrive once again in the future, we must resurrect these most valuable and unsurpassed assets.
What I cannot understand is the naive belief that elected politicians would act in the interests of those whom they represent.
Under what other circumstances do we see human beings act with disinterested altruism? So why would a bunch of people who have
been ruthlessly selected for selfishness, arrogance, and callousness - a bunch of carefully chosen psychopaths, if you will -
behave in that way?
'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to
my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign
aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to
us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'.
- Paul Craig Roberts
jabirujoe
"Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy".
Not only it's foreign policy but it's domestic policy as well. Let's call it for what it really is. The Wall Street/Corporate
policy which is the driving force behind behind everything the US does
Toddrich
"We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]
"When we're done with the U.S. it will shrivel up and blow away." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]
The welfare or future of the American people are not part of the equation.
"... Elizabeth Warren has infuriated bankers and alienated half of Washington, all in the name of a new consumer protection agency she may not get to run ..."
"... At this point, Warren says, the banker made a confession. "We recognize that we have an unsustainable model, and it cannot work forever," she says he told her. "If we told people how much these things cost, they wouldn't use them." ..."
"... Warren's life is a blur of building and promoting the agency she dreamed up -- and that she may never get to lead. On leave from Harvard, she has spent hundreds of hours on Capitol Hill visiting with members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, and flown across the country meeting with the heads of the nation's major banks and many smaller ones. If most financial firms have yet to embrace the bureau, she's made some headway, at least, among the community banks. "Some of my colleagues have not gotten there yet because they are convinced she's close to the antichrist," says Roger Beverage, the head of the Oklahoma Bankers Assn. "I don't think she's doing anything but speaking from the heart on community banks." ..."
"... While Washington bickers, Warren has built the CFPB largely to her specs and almost entirely free of interference from Congress and the Administration, which devotes most of its attention to fixing the economy. Few Cabinet secretaries can claim to have left as indelible a mark on the departments they lead as Elizabeth Warren has already left on the one she doesn't. ..."
Elizabeth Warren has infuriated bankers and alienated half of Washington, all in the name of a new consumer protection agency
she may not get to run
Elizabeth Warren's admirers often refer to her as a grandmother from Oklahoma. This is technically true. It's also what you might
call posturing. Warren, 62, is a Harvard professor and perhaps the country's top expert on bankruptcy law. Over the past four years
she has managed to stoke a fervent debate over the government's role in protecting American consumers from what she sees as the predatory
practices of financial institutions, and she has positioned herself as the person to oversee a new federal agency to rewrite the
rules of lending. Warren is a grandma from Oklahoma in roughly the same way Ralph Nader is a pensioner with a thing about cars.
If the grandmother perception is plausible, it's largely because Warren has a gift for parables and for placing herself in the
middle of them as the embodiment of moral force. Thus, her account of the precise moment she realized that changing the way banks
lend was going to require a new federal bureaucracy -- and that it was up to her to create it.
Warren begins her tale in the spring of 2007, before the housing crash and the financial crisis. She was on a plane back to Boston
after a series of discouraging meetings with credit-card company executives. She had tried to sell them on an idea called the "clean
card" that grew out of her academic work and her side gig as a guest on such shows as Dr. Phil , where she dispensed empathy
and advice to audience members who were one bad check away from losing everything. The concept was simple: Offer the equivalent of
a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to any credit-card company that disclosed all of its costs and fees up front, no fine print.
After a few meetings in which she was politely rebuffed, one executive walked Warren to the door and, with his arm around her,
let her in on a trade secret: If he admitted that his card's actual rate was 17 percent, while his competitors were still claiming
theirs was only 2.9 percent, his customers would desert him for the seemingly cheaper option, seal of approval or not. No credit-card
company would ever go along with a clean card unless all of them did. And the only way to get all of them to do it was to require
it by law.
At this point, Warren says, the banker made a confession. "We recognize that we have an unsustainable model, and it cannot
work forever," she says he told her. "If we told people how much these things cost, they wouldn't use them."
Here she pauses for effect, and to take a sip of herbal tea. Warren is slight and kinetic, with wide, pale blue eyes behind rimless
glasses. She punctuates her sentences with exclamations like "Holy guacamole!" It's difficult to tell whether these are spontaneous
or deliberately deployed to soften her imposing professorial mien. Warren, who grew up poor and went to college on a debate scholarship,
understands the power of expression. When she wants to underline a point, she leans in to conspire with her listener; then her voice
goes quiet, as it does when she says she knew instantly the condescending executive was right. Her clean card was a flop.
And so, on the flight home, Warren turned to the problem of how to push those credit-card companies into doing the right thing.
By landing time, she says, she had her answer: a powerful new federal agency whose sole mission would be to protect consumers, not
only from confusing credit cards but from what she calls the "tricks and traps" of all dangerous financial products. The same way
the Consumer Product Safety Commission guards against dangerous household products or the Food and Drug Administration watches out
for contaminated produce and quack medications. The way Warren tells it, she pulled a piece of paper out of her backpack and got
to work right there on the plane. "I started sketching out the problem and what the agency should look like."
It's a good story, even if the timeline is a little off. Warren's aides say she first pitched the idea of a consumer financial
protection agency to then-Senator Barack Obama's office months before her fateful meeting with the executive. Whatever the idea's
provenance, there's no doubting its influence. In a summer 2007 article in the journal Democracy , Warren outlined what her
guardian agency would look like. "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning
down your house," she wrote. "But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance
of putting the family out on the street -- and the mortgage won't even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner." One was
effectively regulated. The other was not.
The annals of academia are stuffed with provocative proposals. Most die in the library. A little over four years after she first
dreamed it up, Warren's has become a reality. Last summer, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer
Protection Act, a package of financial reforms meant to prevent another economic meltdown. One of the bill's pillars is Warren's
watchdog agency, now called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
On July 21, exactly a year after Dodd-Frank became law, the CFPB is scheduled to open for business with a broad mandate to root
out "unfair, deceptive, or abusive" lending practices. Consolidating functions previously scattered across seven different agencies,
the bureau will have the power to dictate the terms of every consumer lending product on the market, from mortgages and credit cards
to student, overdraft, and car loans. It will supervise not only banks and credit unions but credit-card companies, mortgage servicers,
credit bureaus, debt collectors, payday lenders, and check-cashing shops. Dozens of researchers will track trends in the lending
market and keep an eye on new products. Teams of examiners will prowl the halls of financial institutions to ensure compliance. The
bureau is already at work on its first major initiative: simplifying the bewildering bank forms you sign when you buy a house.
Warren's life is a blur of building and promoting the agency she dreamed up -- and that she may never get to lead. On leave
from Harvard, she has spent hundreds of hours on Capitol Hill visiting with members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, and flown
across the country meeting with the heads of the nation's major banks and many smaller ones. If most financial firms have yet to
embrace the bureau, she's made some headway, at least, among the community banks. "Some of my colleagues have not gotten there yet
because they are convinced she's close to the antichrist," says Roger Beverage, the head of the Oklahoma Bankers Assn. "I don't think
she's doing anything but speaking from the heart on community banks."
One other person she has not yet won over: Barack Obama. The President has not nominated her to head the bureau. Instead, last
fall he gave her the title of special assistant to the President and special adviser to the Treasury and tasked her with getting
the place up and running. For now, she is the non-head of a non-agency. The White House refuses to say whether Obama will eventually
put her up for the job, allowing only that he is considering several candidates. In the coded language of appointment politics, it
is a signal that they are seriously considering passing Warren over for someone else. A White House official says the Administration
would like to have a nominee in place before Congress leaves for its August recess.
There's a reason for their wariness. The White House is reluctant to antagonize congressional Republicans in the middle of contentious
negotiations over the federal debt ceiling. Warren's position requires Senate approval, and Republicans, many of whom regard the
CFPB as more clumsy government meddling in the free market, are vehemently opposed to allowing its creator to be installed at its
helm. Republicans have used a parliamentary maneuver to keep the Senate from officially adjourning for its traditional summer break,
thus depriving Obama of the opportunity to sidestep their objections and make Warren a recess appointment.
"She's probably a nice person, as far as I know," says Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Banking Committee,
which will hold hearings on the eventual nominee for the post. Shelby has said Warren is too ideological to lead the agency, a judgment
shared by many of his Republican colleagues. "She's a professor and all this," he says in a tone that makes it clear he is not paying
her a compliment. "To think up something, to create something of this magnitude, and then look to be the head of it, I wouldn't do
that," Shelby says. "It looks like you created yourself a good job, a good power thing."
Warren is not waiting for permission to do the job she may never get. She and her small team have hired hundreds of people, at
a recent clip of more than 80 per month. The agency has already outgrown its office space and is divided between two buildings in
downtown Washington -- with branches to be opened across the country. A fledgling staff of researchers is cranking out the CFPB's
first reports, and its first bank examiners are being trained. Meanwhile, the office softball team has compiled a 2-3 record.
Above all, an institutional culture is emerging, and it is largely loyal to Warren and her idea of what the agency should be.
She has attracted several top hires from outside the federal government. The bureau's chief operating officer, Catherine West, was
previously president of Capital One; its head of research, Sendhil Mullainathan, is a behavioral economist and star Harvard professor;
the chief of enforcement, Richard Cordray, is the former attorney general of Ohio; Raj Date, her deputy and head of the bureau's
Research, Markets and Regulation Div., is a former banker at Capital One and Deutsche Bank. Warren, whose reputation as a scholar
rests on her pioneering use of bankruptcy data, has imbued the place with her faith in quantitative analysis. Researchers she recruited
and hired have begun to build the bureau's database of financial information, with a broad mandate to keep track of lending markets
and find ways to make financial information more easily digestible.
While Washington bickers, Warren has built the CFPB largely to her specs and almost entirely free of interference from Congress
and the Administration, which devotes most of its attention to fixing the economy. Few Cabinet secretaries can claim to have left
as indelible a mark on the departments they lead as Elizabeth Warren has already left on the one she doesn't.
The CFPB's main offices are on two floors of a russet-colored office building a few blocks northwest of the White House. The government-gray
cubicles and hallways spill over with new hires -- many of them young -- working 12- and 14-hour days elbow to elbow, pale and exuding
a dogged cheerfulness that suggests that, no, they do not miss the sun. By the elevator bank is a calendar counting down the days
until July 21.
Ten years ago, before she became a liberal icon, Warren was a popular Harvard professor known for taking a maternal interest in
the students she chose as research assistants. She was famous, but only in the small corner of academia that cared about bankruptcy.
"In my opinion she is the best bankruptcy scholar in the country," says Samuel Bufford, a law professor at Penn State who got to
know Warren decades ago as a bankruptcy judge in California's Central District.
Work Warren did with Jay Westbrook, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Teresa Sullivan, a sociologist who
is now president of the University of Virginia, reshaped the scholarly understanding of bankruptcy. Analyzing thousands of filings
and interviewing many of the debtors themselves, they found that those who go bankrupt weren't, as commonly assumed, primarily poor
or financially reckless. A great many of them were solidly middle class and had been driven to bankruptcy by circumstances they did
not choose or could not control: the loss of a job, a medical disaster, or a divorce. The explosion in consumer credit in recent
decades had only exacerbated the situation -- almost without realizing it, households could now slide faster and further into debt
than ever before.
Warren, Westbrook, and Sullivan all saw their bankruptcy findings as a window into the broader travails of the financially fragile
middle class. More than her co-authors, though, Warren sought a larger audience for the message. In 2003, along with her daughter,
Amelia Warren Tyagi, she wrote The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke , a book that combined
arguments about the political and economic forces eroding middle-class financial stability with practical advice about how households
could fight them. The language was sharper than in her academic work: "Subprime lending, payday loans, and the host of predatory,
high-interest loan products that target minority neighborhoods should be called by their true names: legally sanctioned corporate
plans to steal from minorities," Warren and Tyagi wrote.
The book got attention and Warren became a frequent TV guest. She was invited to give speeches and sit on panels on bankruptcy
and debt. She was a regular on comedian Al Franken's radio show on the now defunct Air America network. "She's quite brilliant. She
was always just an excellent guest," recalls Franken, now a Democratic U.S. Senator from Minnesota. "She has a very good sense of
humor."
In 2003, Warren attended a fundraiser in Cambridge for Barack Obama, then running for U.S. Senate. When she walked up to shake
his hand, he greeted her with two words: "predatory lending." As a senator, Obama would occasionally call Warren for her thoughts,
though the two never became close.
It was the financial crisis that made Warren a star. In November 2008, in a nod to her growing reputation as a consumer advocate,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chose Warren to chair the congressional panel overseeing the TARP financial rescue program. The
reports she helped produce over the next two and a half years and the hearings she helped lead gave the panel a higher profile than
even its creators had predicted, as she articulated concerns that many Americans had about the wisdom of a massive Wall Street bailout.
In perhaps her most famous moment, Warren grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on AIG's share of the aid money and how it
was that so much of it had ended up simply reimbursing the investment banks the insurer owed money.
Warren used her role on the panel, and the newfound visibility it gave her, to push for her agency. She worked the idea into a
special report the committee released in January 2009, among a list of recommendations to head off fut ure financial crises. She
wrote op-ed pieces, was on TV constantly, and met with at least 80 members of Congress. She also brought the idea to the Administration.
Over a long lunch at an Indian restaurant in Washington, she pitched the concept to White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers,
whom she knew from his tenure as Harvard's president. Inside Treasury, the idea was taken up by Michael Barr, a key architect of
Dodd-Frank and a lawyer Warren had known for years. At least within the White House, Barr recalls, it wasn't hard to build support.
"I think there was a general consensus that built pretty quickly that this was a good option," he says. "I didn't get any significant
pushback on the idea." Barr's inside advocacy, combined with Warren's PR blitz, paid off. In June 2009, Obama released a "white paper"
laying out his own financial regulatory proposals, and Warren's agency was in it.
Among the CFPB staff there is a strongly held belief that they have the opportunity not only to reshape an industry but reinvent
what a government agency can be, to rescue the idea of bureaucracy from its association with sclerosis and timidity. People there
emphasize that they are creating a 21st century agency. Still, there's a throwback Great Society feel to the place, with its faith
in the abilities of very smart unelected administrators, armed with data, to iron out the inefficiencies and injustices of the world.
"Nobody looks at consumer finance regulation as it existed over the past decade and says, 'Yeah, that seemed to work all right, let's
do more of that,' " says Raj Date, a square-jawed 40-year-old who speaks in the confident, numbers-heavy parlance of Wall Street.
Regardless of whether the CFPB has a director by its July 21 "transfer date," there are certain things it will immediately begin
to do. One is to send teams of examiners into banks and credit unions to make sure they are complying with existing consumer finance
regulations. When the bureau is fully staffed up -- initially, it will have some 500 employees and an annual budget of around $500
million -- a majority of the people who work there will be examiners. The bureau has only supervisory power over banks with assets
of more than $10 billion, though the rules it writes will still apply to smaller banks. Banks on the low end of the scale will see
a team of examiners for a few weeks every two years, unless there are specific complaints to investigate. Most of the biggest banks,
those with assets of $100 billion and up, will have CFPB examiners in residence year-round. The examiners will go to work parsing
the terms of mortgages and other loans, searching for evidence of consumer harm. They'll look at how the products are marketed and
sold to make sure it's done transparently, that costs and fees are disclosed up front.
What the bureau will not be able to do without a director is send its examiners into nonbank financial institutions. Dodd-Frank
gives the CFPB jurisdiction over payday lenders, check cashers, mortgage brokers, student loan companies, and the like. Because this
is an expansion of regulatory powers, it will not take effect until a permanent director is in place.
The bureau is less willing to discuss the specifics of what will happen when it finds evidence of wrongdoing. The press office
refused to make the head of enforcement, Richard Cordray, available for an interview. Like other enforcement agencies, the CFPB will
have a variety of measures at its fingertips: It will be able to give firms a talking-to, or issue so-called "supervisory guidance"
papers on problematic financial products. It will be able to send cease-and-desist orders. And if all else fails, the bureau will
be able to take offenders to court.
The CFPB will also have broad rule-making powers over everything from credit-card marketing campaigns to car loan terms to the
size of bank overdraft fees. For now, it has confined itself to initiatives less likely to arouse wide opposition among financial
firms. The major one at the moment is developing a clear, simple, two-page mortgage form that merges the two confusing ones borrowers
now confront. Bureau staff met with consumer advocates and mortgage brokers last fall, then put up two versions of a possible new
form on the bureau's website, where consumers were invited to leave critiques. About 14,000 people weighed in. The forms are now
being shown to focus groups around the country. A new version is due out in August.
This lengthy process is meant to demonstrate the bureau's commitment to a sort of radical openness to counter accusations that
it's a body of unaccountable bureaucrats. In another gesture, Warren's calendar is posted on the website so that anyone can see who
has a claim on her time. The undeniable sense among bureau staffers that they are political targets tempers that commitment to transparency
a bit. The press office is jittery about allowing reporters to talk to staff on the record, and Warren agreed to two interviews on
the condition that Bloomberg Businessweek allow her to approve quotes before publication.
If the supervision and enforcement division is the long arm of the bureau, its eyes and brain will be Research, Markets and Regulations,
headed by Raj Date. Teams of analysts will follow various markets -- credit cards, mortgages, or student loans -- to spot trends
and examine new products. Economists and other social scientists on staff will help write financial disclosure forms that make intuitive
sense. The benefits of this sort of work, Date argues, will extend beyond just protecting consumers. It will help spot signs of more
systemic risks. If the bureau and its market research teams had been in place five years ago, he says, they would have spotted evidence
of the coming mortgage meltdown and could have coordinated with the bureau's enforcement division to head it off. "If it was someone's
job to be in touch with the marketplace and monitor what was going on," Date says, "it would have been very difficult not to notice
that three different kinds of mortgages had gone from nothing to a very surprising share of the overall marketplace in the span of,
honestly, like three years."
Were it not for a head of prematurely gray hair, Patrick McHenry could still pass for the college Republican he once was. Elected
to Congress from North Carolina seven years ago at age 29, he speaks through an assiduous smile and arches his eyebrows as he listens
-- furrowing them quizzically at arguments he disagrees with. In late May, McHenry assumed the role of Warren's chief antagonist
in Congress. At an oversight hearing he was chairing, McHenry accused Warren of misleading Congress about whether she had given advice
to Treasury and Justice Dept. officials who were investigating companies for mortgage fraud. McHenry said she had concealed her conversations.
Warren insisted she had disclosed them.
The hearing then took a bizarre turn. McHenry called for a recess so members of the committee could go to the House floor for
a vote. Warren replied that she had agreed to testify for an hour and could not stay any longer. "Congressman, you are causing problems,"
she said. "We had an agreement." Offended, McHenry shot back: "You're making this up, Ms. Warren. This is not the case." Warren's
response, an outraged gasp, was played on cable news.
In a conversation a month later in his Capitol Hill office, McHenry is eager to emphasize that his problem is not with Warren,
but with the bureau itself. That's not to say he feels he has anything to apologize for. "I've asked questions of a litany of Administration
officials from Democrat and Republican Administrations, and I've never seen an action by any witness like I saw that day," he says.
Like most congressional Republicans -- and a broad array of business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Financial
Services Roundtable, and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions -- McHenry opposed the creation of the CFPB and voted
against Dodd-Frank. At the time, the bureau's opponents argued that its seemingly noble goals would not only hurt financial firms
-- depriving them of the ability to compensate for risky borrowers by charging higher interest rates -- they would also hurt borrowers.
The prospect of limits on the sort of rates and fees they could charge would cause banks and payday lenders alike to lend less and
to not lend at all to marginal borrowers at a time when the economy needed as much credit as it could get.
Where it's not actively harmful, McHenry argues, the bureau will be redundant. If there's fraud or deceptive marketing in the
consumer lending market, the federal government can prosecute it through the Federal Trade Commission. Clearer mortgage forms are
all well and good, but Congress can take care of that, he says, noting that he introduced legislation for a simpler mortgage form
three years ago. In response to arguments like these, Warren simply points to the record of those existing regulators: the Fed and
the Housing & Urban Development Dept. have haggled over a simpler mortgage form for years. As for fears that the bureau will cap
the interest rates companies can charge, she notes that Dodd-Frank explicitly prevents it from doing that.
Warren has been uncharacteristically tightlipped about her own ambitions. She refuses to say whether she even wants the job and
has never publicly expressed a desire for it. In a way, the White House may do her a favor by not nominating her. If the President
decides to go with a compromise candidate to appease Republicans, she will be spared the indignity of being tossed aside. She can't
be said to have lost a job she was never offered.
Yet Warren gives the distinct impression that she will not suffer long if the President passes her over. Harvard has more than
its share of celebrity professors who have gone to Washington and returned. The experience could also lead to a different kind of
life in politics: Democrats in Massachusetts have been urging her to come home to run for Senate against Republican Scott Brown.
There would be books to write, television appearances to make, and, who knows, maybe a show of her own. And whatever happens, she
will get to tell the second half of the story of how she started a government agency. Whether the story ends with her confirmation
or being driven from town, it's almost certain that the character of Elizabeth Warren will come out looking just fine.
( Corrects the year Elizabeth Warren moved to Washington to work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau )
Is this a plan of the elite to introduce national security state in action. Are they afraid of the collapse of neoliberal social
order and try to take precautions?
Notable quotes:
"... These factors would have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity, i.e., strength and stiffness. ..."
"... the superstructure above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. ..."
"... Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse. ..."
"... no molten metal ..."
"... A reporter with rare access to the debris at ground zero "descended deep below street level to areas where underground fires still burned and steel flowed in molten streams." ..."
"... Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants. Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories : ..."
"... Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be? ..."
"... Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002, Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was only $386,000,000. ..."
"... Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way. ..."
"... All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies, and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never clarified). ..."
"... This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down. ..."
"... http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully flawed NIST report ..."
"... There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area. ..."
"... The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what happened at WTC. ..."
"... If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless. ..."
"... Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt. It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob. ..."
"... The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. ..."
What does the evidence show about the Solomon Brothers Building in Manhattan?
Numerous structural engineers the people who know the most about office building vulnerabilities and accidents say that the
official explanation of why building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11 is "impossible", "defies common logic" and "violates
the law of physics":
The collapse of WTC7 looks like it may have been the result of a controlled demolition. This should have been looked
into as part of the original investigation
Robert F. Marceau, with over 30 years of structural
engineering experience:
From videos of the collapse of building 7, the penthouse drops first prior to the collapse, and it can be noted that
windows, in a vertical line, near the location of first interior column line are blown out, and reveal smoke from those
explosions. This occurs in a vertical line in symmetrical fashion an equal distance in toward the center of the building
from each end. When compared to controlled demolitions, one can see the similarities
Kamal S. Obeid, structural engineer, with a masters degree in Engineering from UC Berkeley and 30 years of engineering experience,
says:
Photos of the steel, evidence about how the buildings collapsed, the unexplainable collapse of WTC 7, evidence of thermite
in the debris as well as several other red flags, are quite troubling indications of well planned and controlled demolition
Steven L. Faseler, structural engineer with
over 20 years of experience in the design and construction industry:
World Trade Center 7 appears to be a controlled demolition. Buildings do not suddenly fall straight down by accident
Alfred Lee Lopez, with 48 years of experience
in all types of buildings:
I agree the fire did not cause the collapse of the three buildings [please ignore any reference in this essay to the
Twin Towers. This essay focuses solely on Building 7]. The most realistic cause of the collapse is that the buildings were
imploded
Ronald H. Brookman, structural engineer, with a masters degree in Engineering from UC Davis,
writes:
Why would all 47 stories of WTC 7 fall straight down to the ground in about seven seconds the same day [i.e. on September
11th]? It was not struck by any aircraft or engulfed in any fire. An independent investigation is justified for all three collapses
including the surviving steel samples and the composition of the dust
WTC 7 Building could not have collapsed as a result of internal fire and external debris. NO plane hit this building. This
is the only case of a steel frame building collapsing through fire in the world. The fire on this building was small & localized
therefore what is the cause?
In my view, the chances of the three buildings collapsing symmetrically into their own footprint, at freefall speed, by
any other means than by controlled demolition, are so remote that there is no other plausible explanation
How did the structures collapse in near symmetrical fashion when the apparent precipitating causes were asymmetrical loading?
The collapses defies common logic from an elementary structural engineering perspective.
***
Heat transmission (diffusion) through the steel members would have been irregular owing to differing sizes of the individual
members; and, the temperature in the members would have dropped off precipitously the further away the steel was from the flames-just
as the handle on a frying pan doesn't get hot at the same rate as the pan on the burner of the stove. These factors would
have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity,
i.e., strength and stiffness.
Structural steel is highly ductile, when subjected to compression and bending it buckles and bends long before reaching
its tensile or shear capacity. Under the given assumptions, "if" the structure in the vicinity started to weaken, the superstructure
above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. The opposite, intact, side of the building would resist
toppling until the ultimate capacity of the structure was reached, at which point, a weak-link failure would undoubtedly occur.
Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping
of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse.
For this reason alone, I rejected the official explanation for the collapse .
We design and analyze buildings for the overturning stability to resist the lateral loads with the combination of the gravity
loads. Any tall structure failure mode would be a fall over to its side. It is impossible that heavy steel columns could collapse
at the fraction of the second within each story and subsequently at each floor below.We do not know the phenomenon of the high
rise building to disintegrate internally faster than the free fall of the debris coming down from the top.
The engineering science and the law of physics simply doesn't know such possibility. Only very sophisticated controlled
demolition can achieve such result, eliminating the natural dampening effect of the structural framing huge mass that should
normally stop the partial collapse. The pancake theory is a fallacy, telling us that more and more energy would be generated
to accelerate the collapse. Where would such energy would be coming from?
Antonio Artha,with 15+ years of experience
in building design
Fire and impact were insignificant in all three buildings [Again, please ignore any reference to the Twin Towers this essay
focuses solely on WTC7]. Impossible for the three to collapse at free-fall speed. Laws of physics were not suspended on 9/11,
unless proven otherwise
James Milton Bruner, Major, U.S. Air Force,
instructor and assistant professor in the Deptartment of Engineering Mechanics & Materials, USAF Academy, and a technical writer
and editor, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
It is very suspicious that fire brought down Building 7 yet the Madrid hotel fire was still standing after 24 hours of fire.
This is very suspicious to me because I design buildings for a living
David Anthony Dorau, practicing structural
engineer with 18 years' experience in the inspection and design of buildings under 5 stories tall, who worked as a policy analyst
for the Office of Technology Assessment, an arm of the U.S. Congress providing independent research and reports on technological
matters
Russell T. Connors, designed many buildings
and other types of structures
The above is just a sample. Many other structural
engineers have questioned the collapse of Building 7, as have numerous top experts in other relevant disciplines, including:
The top European expert on controlled building demolition, Danny Jowenko (part
1, part 2,
part 3)
Harry G. Robinson, III Professor and Dean Emeritus, School of Architecture and Design, Howard University. Past President
of two major national architectural organizations National Architectural Accrediting Board, 1996, and National Council of Architectural
Registration Boards, 1992. In 2003 he was awarded the highest honor bestowed by the Washington Chapter of the American Institute
of Architects, the Centennial Medal. In 2004 he was awarded the District of Columbia Council of Engineering and Architecture Societies
Architect of the Year award. Principal, TRG Consulting Global / Architecture, Urban Design, Planning, Project Strategies. Veteran
U.S. Army, awarded the Bronze Star for bravery and the Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Viet Nam
says:
The collapse was too symmetrical to have been eccentrically generated. The destruction was symmetrically initiated to
cause the buildings to implode as they did
Watch this short video on Building 7 by Architects and Engineers (ignore any reference to the Twin Towers, deaths on 9/11, or
any other topics other than WTC7):
Fish In a Barrel
Poking holes in the government's spin on Building 7 is so easy that it is like shooting fish in a barrel.
As just one example, the spokesman for the government agency which says that the building collapsed due to fire said there was
no molten metal at ground zero:
And see witness statements at the beginning of this video
Indeed, not only was structural steel somehow melted on 9/11, but it was evaporated. As the New York Times
reports, an expert
stated about World Trade Center building 7:
A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers
said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated
in extraordinarily high temperatures.
(pay-per-view). Evaporation means conversion from a liquid
to a gas; so the steel beams in building 7 were subjected to temperatures high enough to melt and evaporate
them
Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants.
Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the
U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratories:
Approximately three million gallons of water were hosed on site in the fire-fighting efforts, and 1 million gallons fell as
rainwater, between 9/11 and 9/21 .
"Firetrucks [sprayed] a nearly constant jet of water on [ground zero]. You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was
pumped in there," said Tom Manley of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the largest fire department union. "It was like you
were creating a giant lake."
This photograph may capture a sense of how wet the ground became due to the constant spraying:
The fact that there were raging fires and molten metal even after the application of
massive quantities of water and fire retardants shows how silly the government spokesman's claim is.
Again, this has nothing to do with "inside job" no one was killed in the collapse of Building 7, no wars were launched based on
a rallying cry of "remember the Solomon Brothers building", and no civil liberties were lost based on a claim that we have to prevent
future WTC7 tragedies.
It is merely meant to show that government folks sometimes lie even about issues tangentially related to 9/11.
Pooua > Wolfen Batroach 2 years ago
Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were
the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be?
JusticeFor911 > Pooua
Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002,
Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was
only $386,000,000.
I'd say nearly half of $1,000,000,000.00 was the primary cause to include this building with the towers. Keep in mind that
President Bush's brother Marvin was a principal in the company Securacom that provided security for the WTC, United Airlines and
Dulles International Airport. Are dots connecting yet?
Pooua > JusticeFor911
If you buy a new car, you take out full coverage insurance on it. Insuring billion-dollar buildings is standard procedure,
especially when one had already suffered a terrorist attack. You insinuation is nothing but gossip and suggestion.
No, Securacom did not provide security for WTC; that's the job of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. Securacom had a contract to
perform a limited service for PANYNJ, and Marvin Bush was only a bit player (he was on the board of directors) in the company.
Your paranoid ramblings are lies.
IBSHILLIN > Pooua
Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if
an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could
be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way.
All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies,
and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never
clarified).
This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down.
Pooua > IBSHILLIN
I find it amazing that you consider yourself such an unquestionable expert that you not only feel qualified to insist that
explosives brought down the WTC buildings, even in contradiction to scores of scientists, engineers and investigators of NIST,
FEMA, FBI and MIT who say otherwise, and you do so without offering any evidence at all to support your bizarre claim.
No building the size of any of the WTC buildings has ever been brought down by controlled demolition, but of those that come
closest, the planning took years, and the rigging took months of hard work by teams of experts working around the clock. This
is not something that can be hidden.
Your suggestion is entirely preposterous and without merit.
NIST, FEMA, FBI and MIT are worthless entities! What about the experts in that documentary? Nanothermite brought them down
smart guy!
Pooua > ihaveabrain 25 days ago
You posted a 1.5-hour video. I am not here to watch a 1.5-hour video; I'm here to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC
7. If you have something to say, say it here.
NIST has been the premier standards body used by the US government for a century, covering virtually every aspect of engineering
and public safety in this country. It employes thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians. For you to claim that it is
a worthless entity is idiocy on your part.
linked1 > Pooua 24 days ago
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video
that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully
flawed NIST report
You claim to want to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC-7 but you can't be bothered to watch painstakingly researched
documentaries that include thousands of witnesses, victims, scientists, and structural professionals.
You ought to educate yourself before calling other's claims 'worthless idiocy'. You are wrong, and history will prove you wrong.
Pooua > linked1
I've been reading arguments about 9/11 for two years. I've been arguing about other issues for the last 25 years, at least
since I took a class in classical logic. What you need to understand is, you aren't arguing anything when you send me off to listen
to someone else. The other guy might be arguing something, but you aren't doing anything. And, the fact that I've spent two years
reading everything I could find on the subject makes me strongly suspect that this five-hour video would be just a waste of my
time.
If you want to discuss this matter, then discuss it. Don't send me off to spend hours of my time listening to someone else.
You explain it. If you can't explain it, then you don't understand it, and you are wasting everyone's time.
mulegino1 . > Pooua
The levels of energy required to turn most of the Twin Towers and WTC7 into nanoparticles (thus the pyrocastic flow which only
occurs in volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations) would be thousands of orders of magnitude greater than airliner impacts
and hydrocarbon based office fires, which are claimed to have initiated a "gravity collapse".
How could a "gravity collapse" perfectly mimic the detonation of a small tactical nuclear device or devices-electromagnetic
pulse, molten lava and a mushroom cloud?
Pooua > mulegino1
I want you to look at this image from the WTC on 9/11. It shows the debris after the Towers collapsed. Does this look like
nanoparticles to you? Most of the debris was bigger than a man's fist.
Thumbnail
There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something
that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area.
The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what
happened at WTC.
mulegino1 . > Pooua
If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless.
There was indeed a pyroclasticas flow as anyone with youtube can determine for themselves.
Pooua > WilliamBinney a year ago
It is your job to do more than make idiotic, speculative assertions and pretend that constitutes a reason for disregarding
the government's account of the event. Yet, you all have completely failed to do anything except expose your own inability to
account for the events of that day.
Dizzer13 > Pooua a year ago
Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt.
It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob.
mulegino1 . > Pooua 2 years ago
The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose
information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC.
The official narrative is so ludicrous from any standpoint that the "debunkers" resort to wildly implausible scenarios in order
to convince the above cited demographic that the government and the major national media were reporting factual information when
in fact they were reading from a script. And it was a very poorly written script. The Bin Laden bogeyman was already being invoked
before the buildings exploded.
What you've got here is a pseudo-religious narrative designed to so enrage the dumbed down sheeple that they will lash out
in their fury against virtually anyone designated by the powers that be as the enemy- a Sorelian myth.
Like any false narrative, the official story breaks down at the level of discrete facts and can only survive as a holistic
mythologized, meta-historical events.
Elizabeth Warren had a good speech at UC-Berkeley. She focused on the middle class family balance sheet and risk shifting.
Regulatory policies and a credit based monetary system have resulted in massive real price increases in inelastic areas of demand
such as healthcare, education and housing eroding purchasing power.
Further, trade policies have put U.S. manufacturing at a massive disadvantage to the likes of China, which has subsidized
state-owned enterprises, has essentially slave labor costs and low to no environmental regulations. Unrestrained immigration policies
have resulted in a massive supply wave of semi- and unskilled labor suppressing wages.
Recommended initial steps to reform:
1. Change the monetary system-deleverage economy with the Chicago Plan (100% reserve banking) and fund massive infrastructure
lowering total factor costs and increasing productivity. This would eliminate
2. Adopt a healthcare system that drives HC to 10% to 12% of GDP. France's maybe? Medicare model needs serious reform but is
great at low admin costs.
3. Raise tariffs across the board or enact labor and environmental tariffs on the likes of China and other Asian export model
countries.
4. Take savings from healthcare costs and interest and invest in human capitaleducational attainment and apprenticeships programs.
5. Enforce border security restricting future immigration dramatically and let economy absorb labor supply over time.
As I have said in other comments, I like Liz Warren a lot within the limits of what she is good at doing (i.e. not President)
such as Secretary of the Treasury etc. And I think she likes the media spotlight and to hear herself talk a little to much, but
all quibbling aside, can we clone her??? The above comment and video just reinforce "Stick to what you are really good at Liz!".
I am not a Liz Warren fan boi to the extent Lambert is of AOC, but it seems that most of the time when I hear Warren, Sanders,
or AOC say something my first reaction is "Yes, what she/he said!".
The column praises Elizabeth Warren. Leonhardt (like his colleague Paul Krugman) is careful
to refrain from declaring his intention to vote for her in the primary. I am planning to vote
for her. I mostly agreed with the column to begin with, but was not convinced by Leonard's
praise of Warren's emphasis on aiming for more equal pre-fiscal distribution of income rather
than just relying on taxes and transfers to redistribute.
In particular, I was not convinced by
This history suggests that the Democratic Party's economic agenda needs to become more
ambitious. Modest changes in the top marginal tax rate or in middle-class tax credits aren't
enough. The country needs an economic policy that measures up to the scale of our
challenges.
Here two issues are combined. One is modest vs major changes. The other is that
predistribution is needed in addition to redistribution, as discussed even more clearly
here
"Clinton and Obama focused on boosting growth and redistribution," Gabriel Zucman, a
University of California, Berkeley, economist who has advised Warren, says. "Warren is
focusing on how pretax income can be made more equal."
The option of a large change in the top marginal tax rate and a large middle class tax
credit isn't considered in the op-ed. I think this would be excellent policy which has
overwhelming popular support as measured by polls (including the support of a large fraction of
self declared Republicans). I note from time to time that, since 1976 both the Democrats who
have been elected president campaigned on higher taxes on high incomes and lower taxes on the
middle class (and IIRC none of the candidates who lost did).
After the jump, I will make my usual case. But first, I note Leonardt's excellent argument
for why "soak the rich and spread it out thin" isn't a sufficient complete market oriented
egalitarian program. It is phrased as a question.
"How can the next president make changes that will endure, rather than be undone by a future
president, as both Obama's and Clinton's top-end tax increases were?"
Ahh yes. High taxes on high income and high wealth would solve a lot of problems. But they
will be reversed. New programs such as Obamacare or Warren's proposed universal pre-K and
subsidized day care will not. Nor will regulatory reforms such as mandatory paid sick leave and
mandatory paid family leave. I am convinced that relatively complicated proposals are more
politically feasible, not because it is easier to implement them, but because it is very hard
to eliminate programs used by large numbers of middle class voters.
I'd note that I had already conceded the advantage of a regulatory approach which relies on
the illusion that the costs must be born by the regulated firms. Here I note that fleet fuel
economy standards are much more popular than increased gasoline taxes. One is a market oriented
approach. The other is one that hides behind the market as consumers don't know that part of
the price of a gas guzzler pays the shadow price of reducing fleet average milage.
OK my usual argument after the jump
It is unusual for me to disagree with Baker, Leonhardt, and (especially) Krugman. I am quite
sure that the Democratic candidate for president should campaign on higher taxes on the rich
and lower taxes for the non-rich.
To be sure, I can see that that isn't the only possible policy improvement. Above, I note
the advantages of hiding spending by mandating spending by firms and of creating entitlements
which are very hard for the GOP to eliminate. I'd add that we have to do a lot to deal with
global warming. Competition policy is needed for market efficiency. I think unions and
restrictions on firing without cause have an effect on power relations which is good in
addition to the effect on income distribution.
But I don't understand the (mildly) skeptical tone. I will set up and knock down some straw
men
1) Total straw -- US voters are ideological conservatives and operational liberals. They
reject soaking the rich, class war, and redistribution. To convince them to help the non rich,
one has to disguise what one is doing.
2) Extremely high marginal tax rates are bad for the economy. Here this is often conceded,
in particular by people arguing for modest increases in the top marginal tax rate. The claim is
not supported by actual evidence. In particular the top rate was 70% during the 60s boom.
3) High tax rates cause tax avoidance. This reduces efficiency and also means that they
don't generate the naively expected revenue. There is very little evidence that this is a huge issue . In
particular there was a huge increase in tax sheltering after the 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cuts and
reforms. It is possible to design a tax code which makes avoidance difficult (as shown by the
1986 Kemp-Bradley tax reform). It is very hard to implement such a code without campaigning on
soaking the rich and promoting class uh struggle.
4) More generally, redistribution does not work -- the post tax income distribution is not
equalized because the rich find a way. This is super straw again. All the international and
time series evidence points the other way.
I don't see a political or policy argument against a large increase in taxes on high incomes
(70% bracket starting at $400,000 a year) used to finance a large expansion of the EITC (so
most households receive it).
I think a problem is that a simple solution does not please nerds. I think another is that a
large fraction of the elite would pay the high taxes and it is easier to trick them into trying
to make corporations pay the costs.
First, whenever anybody (that I hear or read) talks about what to do with the revenue from
higher taxes on the rich, they always suggest this or that government program (education,
medical, housing). I always think of putting more money back in the pockets of my middle 59%
incomes to make up for the higher consumer prices they will have to pay when the bottom 40%
get unionized.
Of course the 59% can use that money to pay taxes for said government programs -- money is
fungible. But, that re-inserts an important element or dimension or facet which seems
perpetually forgotten (would not be in continental Europe or maybe French Canada).
Don't forget: predistribution goal = a reunionized labor market. Don't just look to Europe
for redistribution goals -- look at their predistribution too.
Bert Schlitz , March 17, 2019 10:14 pm
Nobody in the 60's that was taxed at a marginal 70% rate paid 70%. The top effective rate
was about 32-38%, which was far higher than today, but you get the point. The income tax code
was as much control of where investment would take place as much as anything ..Ronald Reagan
whined about this for years. Shove it grease ball. There was a reason why.
Redistribution won't work because the system is a debt based ponzi scheme. The US really
hasn't grown much since 1980, instead you have had the growth in debt.
You need to get rid of the federal reserve system's banks control of the financial system,
which they have had since the 1830's in terms of national control(from Hamilton's Philly,
which was the financial epicenter before that) and de Rothschild free since the 1930's(when
the bank of de Rothschild ala the Bank of England's reserve currency collapsed). Once we have
a debt free currency that is usury free, then you can develop and handle intense changes like
ecological problems ala Climate Change, which the modern plutocrats cannot and will not
solve.
They have been ramming debt in peoples face since 1950 and since 1980 it has gotten
vulgar. They know they are full of shit and can't win a fair game.
run75441 , March 18, 2019 6:09 am
Robert:
Would you agree a secure healthcare system without work requirements for those who can not
afford healthcare is a form of pre-distribution of income? Today's ACA was only a step in the
right direction and is being tampered with by ideologs to limit its reach. It can be improved
upon and have a socio-economic impact on people. Over at Medpage where I comment on
healthcare, the author makes this comment:
"Investing in improvements in patients' social determinants of health -- non-medical areas
such as housing, transportation, and food insecurity -- is another potentially big area, he
said. "It's a major opportunity for plans to position around this and make it real. The more
plans can address social determinants of health, [the more] plans can become truly
organizations dedicated to health as opposed to organizations dedicated to incurring medical
costs, and that to me is a bright future and a bright way to position the industry."
Many of the "social determinants of health" are not consciously decided by the patient and
are predetermined by income, social status or politics, and education. What is being said in
this paragraph makes for nice rhetoric and is mostly unachievable due to the three factors I
suggested. And yes, you can make some progress. People can make healthy choices once the
pre-determinants to doing so are resolved.
Another factor which was left dangling when Liebermann decided to be an ass is Long Term
Healthcare for the elderly and those who are no longer capable. Medicare is only temporary
and Medicaid forces one to be destitute. There is a large number of people who are
approaching the time when they will need such healthcare till death. We have no plans for
this tsunami of people.
The tax break was passed using Reconciliation. In 7-8 years out, there is a planned shift
in taxes to be levied on the middle income brackets to insure the continuamce of Trump's tax
break for the 100 or so thousand households it was skewed towards. If not rescinding the tax
break then it should be fixed so it sunsets as did Bush's tax break due to its budget
creating deficit. Someone running for the Pres position should be discussing this and
pointing out how Republicans have deliberately undermined the middle income brackets.
We should not limit solutions to just income when there are so many areas we are lacking
in today.
Mu $.02.
Robert Waldmann , March 18, 2019 4:47 pm
I guess I consider food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security old age pensions and
disability pensions to be redistribution. My distinction is whether it is tax financed.
Providing goods or services as in Medicare and food stamps seems to me basically the same as
providing cash as in TANF and old age pensions.
There is also a difference between means tested and age dependent eligiability, but I
don't consider it fundamental.
I assert that Medicare (especially plan B) is a kind of welfare basically like TANF and
food stamps.
(and look forward to a calm and tranquil discussion of that opinion).
run75441 , March 18, 2019 9:01 pm
Robert:
Medicare is 41% funded by general revenues. The rest comes from payroll taxes and
beneficiary premiums. Advantage plans cost more than traditional Medicare for providing the
same benefits and also extract a premium fee. I do not believe I have been mean to you. I
usually question to learn more. I am happy to have your input.
I am writing for Consumer Safety Org on Woman's healthcare this time and also an article
on the Swiss struggling to pay for cancer fighting drugs.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carrι, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of
her principles. What a fearless young lady.
And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who
ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session
of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000
unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
Notable quotes:
"... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
"... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
"... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people
are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉
I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have
I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate
Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins.
Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.
Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town
halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.
People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors
required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
How the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the Genoa
bridge collapse show us that allowing companies to self-certify the safety of their products can be deadly
On
Wednesday the United States joined 42 other countries in grounding Boeing's 737 Max 8 jets, days after a crash
in Ethiopia of a 737 Max 8 jet left 157 people dead. The United States was a holdout, taking days longer to
ground the planes than most of Europe. Our Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said, in those days between,
that they weren't grounding the planes because "
the
agency's own reviews of the aircraft show no 'systematic performance issues.'
"
There were some conflicting accounts of exactly how
the US came to ground the 737 Max 8. A
statement from Boeing
on Wednesday read that "Boeing has determined -- out of an abundance of caution and in
order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety --
to
recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations
of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX
aircraft."
In other words, Boeing claimed it was their idea /
recommendation that the FAA ground the aircraft. Meanwhile, Donald Trump declared that he grounded the aircraft
by executive order, forcing the FAA's hand.
Which begs the question -- why did it take a
presidential decree and/or the company itself to get the FAA, the main agency responsible for overseeing
airplane transit in the United States, to ground potentially dangerous aircraft?
As James Hall, the former National Transportation
Safety Board chairman,
explained in the Times
, in 2005 the FAA turned its safety certification responsibilities over to the
manufacturers themselves (if manufacturers met some requirements). In plain speak, this means that Boeing got
to decide if Boeing's airplanes were safe enough to fly -- with no additional third-party checks.
The FAA said the purpose of this change was to
save the aviation industry roughly $25 billion
between
2006 to 2015.
Given this, it makes you wonder if the statement on
Tuesday by Acting FAA Administrator Daniel K. Elwell -- that the agency had conducted its own review -- was
factual, or if the agency had simply reviewed the safety review that Boeing had conducted on itself. It also
clarifies why Boeing came to recommend to the FAA that their planes be grounded, rather than the FAA taking any
decisive action on their own.
The term for this maze, where a government safety
agency allows an industry to regulate itself so the industry can
save some
money
, and where the industry itself has to be the one to recommend to government that their product
shouldn't be in operation pending investigation, is
regulatory
capture
.
From Wikipedia
: "Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency,
created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special
interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating."
The issue, in short, is that it is rarely in a
business' self-interest to ensure the absolute safety of their products. Safety testing takes time, money, and
if inspections reveal problems that need fixing, more money. Corporations are profit maximizers and pursue
whatever method they need to minimize cost (including minimizing fixing flaws in their products) and maximize
profit.
Without the threat of outside inspection or serious
repercussions, there are few incentives to fix potential problems. Insurance covers accidents, and most
mega-corporations have funds set aside in their operating budgets to pay the (generally small, relative to
their operating budgets) fines governments may impose if and when a problem is discovered.
This is why it is unlikely that industry will ever
sufficiently regulate itself on safety issues.
Remember Edward Norton's job in "Fight Club"?
"The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now,
should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A. Multiply it by the probable rate of
failure, B. Multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C equals X. If X is less
than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
The United States isn't alone in turning over
self-certification of its transportation and infrastructure to industry. The Genoa Bridge Collapse in Italy
last year, in which 43 people died, is another case.
The
Morandi Bridge is a privately-owned toll bridge, publicly built but later sold off to Autostrade, a company
majority owned by the Benetton clothing family. As a private infrastructure company, Autostrade has a profit
maximization goal of keeping bridge maintenance costs low and toll profits high. Thanks to further
privatization efforts of the Italian government, the
safety and inspection
of bridges
is also conducted by private companies. In the case of the Morandi Bridge, the inspection
company responsible for safety checks and certification of the bridge was owned by Autostrade's parent company,
leaving the company that owns the bridge to self-certify its
safety.
The result, as the world saw, was a bridge that collapsed.
As Texas engineer Linwood Howell
said in the Times,
"the engineers inspecting the bridge would have their own professional liabilities to
worry about, including the profits of the company that was paying them," i.e. a clear conflict of interest
between maintaining basic safety and ensuring their own jobs.
Meanwhile, as Italian law professor Giuliano
Fonderico
noted
, "the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than
regulating it."
George Stigler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize
in Economics
in part for his work around regulatory capture
in 1982, believed that it was likely that industry would
come to dictate the regulatory issues within their industries because of personal connections, a greater
understanding of issues facing industry than the general public, but mostly, a public ignorance around what
their regulators are up to.
Perhaps it is time for people to pay
a little more attention to what our regulators, who we pay to protect us from bridge collapses and plane
crashes, are up to. There are some
people with big ideas on fixes
for regulatory capture, but public demand will also need to exist for real
reform efforts to take place.
Rubble aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a Yemeni neighborhood in 2015.
Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America The Wall Street Journal echoes Pompeo's
obnoxious Yemen
lies in their editorial on the antiwar resolution that the Senate passed last week:
The Saudis aren't in danger of an Iranian invasion, but don't underestimate the signal
that abandoning our ally would send across the Middle East. It will be seen by Iran and
Russia as an invitation to more trouble-making, and another signal to allies that the U.S.
can't be trusted. More war is the likeliest result.
There is no foreign war so despicable and unjust that The Wall Street Journal won't
defend it to the end. It is telling that the WSJ editors don't talk about the war on
Yemen until Congress moves to try to withdraw the U.S. from it. The massive humanitarian crisis
that threatens the lives of as many as 15 million Yemenis doesn't concern them (and it never
comes up in this editorial), because if they mentioned it that would remind everyone that the
Saudi coalition bears the greatest responsibility for causing mass starvation and creating the
conditions for the world's worst modern cholera outbreak. The U.S. has not only been enabling
Saudi war crimes in its bombing campaign, but our government has also been helping to create
the world's worst humanitarian crisis through our unstinting support for the war. The editorial
omits all of this because including it would show how breathtakingly cynical and horrible the
pro-war argument is. War supporters never acknowledge the consequences of the destructive
policies they defend because they know it would discredit them, and so they try to change the
subject to anything else. In this case, war supporters have been desperate to make the Yemen
debate about Iran because they cannot honestly talk about the costs of the conflict or the U.S.
role in it.
Saudi Arabia is not an ally of the United States, and our government isn't obliged to
support them in a military intervention they chose to begin along with the United Arab Emirates
without consulting Washington. The U.S. certainly isn't obliged to indulge them in their failed
war of choice almost four years later. The war has become a drain on Saudi and Emirati
resources, and it has exposed them as weak, cruel, and incompetent as they have devastated
Yemen's infrastructure, starved its people, and failed achieved any of their stated goals. No
one should care about doing these despotic governments any favors, but forcing them to end
their war would be doing them a favor all the same. If the U.S. were perceived as abandoning
the Saudis by halting support for their war, that would be guaranteed to improve our country's
reputation around the world rather than harm it. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is a liability and
an embarrassment for our country, and the sooner we are rid of it in its current form the
better it will be for us and the region.
Supporters of the war on Yemen have no rational argument for continued U.S. involvement, and
so they are reduced to changing the subject from the war criminal states that the U.S. aids and
abets to the Iranian government that has almost nothing to do with the conflict. Ending U.S.
support for the war would be a "gift" to Iran, the WSJ editors tell us, as if four years
of keeping the Saudis and Emiratis bogged down in a war they cannot win has done anything to
harm Iran or curtail its influence in the region. The lie at the heart of the war on Yemen is
that it has something to do with opposing so-called Iranian "expansionism," but it is the war
itself that has done more for Iranian influence in Yemen than anything else. The longer that
the U.S. enables the Saudi coalition to continue its senseless and indefensible campaign, the
better it is for the Saudis' and Emiratis' rivals. Iran hawks are always wrong about what
benefits Iran's government and what harms it, and this is no exception.
The editorial's comparison between last week's vote and Congressional opposition to
continued involvement in the Vietnam War is unintentionally revealing and damning for their
side. Just like supporters of the Vietnam War, supporters of the war on Yemen are defending a
war that can't be won in a place where the U.S. should never have been involved. In this case,
war supporters are squarely on the side of the aggressors, and in their continued backing for
this disgraceful policy they show their utter contempt for the lives of the people of
Yemen.
"... It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians. ..."
"... Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation. ..."
"... What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse? ..."
"... Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. ..."
"... We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks. ..."
"... This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. ..."
"... Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020. ..."
"... Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c ..."
"... Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. ..."
"... Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. ..."
"... Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm ..."
"... It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray! ..."
"... Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished. ..."
I could not suffer through reading the whole article. This is mainly because I have
watched the news daily about Mueller's Investigation and I sincerely believe that Mueller is
Champion of the Democrats who are trying to depose President Donald Trump at any cost.
For what Mueller found any decent lawyer with a Degree and a few years of experience could
have found what Mueller found for far far less money. Mueller only found common crimes AND NO
COLLUSION BETWEEN PRESIDENT TRUMP AND PUTIN!
The Mueller Investigation should be given to an honest broker to review, and Mueller
should be paid only what it would cost to produce the commonplace crimes Mueller, The
Democrats, and CNN has tried to convince the people that indeed Trump COLLUDED with RUSSIA.
Mueller is, a BIG NOTHING BURGER and THE DEMOCRATS AND CNN ARE MUELLER'S SINGING CANARYS!
Mueller should be jailed.
Bogdan Miller , March 15, 2019 at 11:04 am
This article explains why the Mueller Report is already highly suspect. For another thing,
we know that since before 2016, Democrats have been studying Russian Internet and hacking
tactics, and posing as Russian Bots/Trolls on Facebook and other media outlets, all in an
effort to harm President Trump.
It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians
and Democrats posing as Russians.
B.J.M. Former Intelligence Analyst and Humint Collector
vinnieoh , March 15, 2019 at 8:17 am
Moving on: the US House yesterday voted UNANIMOUSLY (remember that word, so foreign these
days to US governance?) to "urge" the new AG to release the complete Mueller report.
A
non-binding resolution, but you would think that the Democrats can't see the diesel
locomotive bearing down on their clown car, about to smash it to pieces. The new AG in turn
says he will summarize the report and that is what we will see, not the entire report. And
taxation without representation takes a new twist.
... ... ...
Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:38 pm
What else would you expect from two Political Parties who are really branches of the ONE
Party which Represents DEEP STATE".
DWS , March 15, 2019 at 5:58 am
Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the
security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week
as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand
down and close the murder case without further investigation.
Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:47 pm
EXACTLY! But, Deep State will not allow that. And, it would ruin the USA' plan to continue
to invade more sovereign countries and steal their resources such as oil and Minerals. The
people of the USA must be Ostriches or are so terrified that they accept anything their
Criminal Governments tell them.
Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost and perhaps the USA voters will ROAST
when the crimes of the USA sink the whole country. It is time for a few Brave Men and Women
to find their backbones and throw out the warmongers and their leading Oligarchs!
KiwiAntz , March 14, 2019 at 6:44 pm
What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of
the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined
Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or
Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American
Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump
impeached & removed from the Whitehouse?
If you can't get him out via a Election, try
& try again, like Maduro in Venezuela, to forcibly remove the targeted person by setting
him up with fake, false accusations & fabricated evidence? How very predictable & how
very American of Mueller & the Democratic Party. Absolute American Corruption, corrupts
absolutely?
Brian Murphy , March 15, 2019 at 10:33 am
Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on
as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another
reason to stop the investigation.
If the investigation wraps up and finds nothing, that means Trump has already completely
sold out. If the investigation continues, it means someone important still thinks Trump retains some
vestige of his balls.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:19 pm
By last June or July the Mueller investigation has resulted in roughly 150 indictments
for perjury/financial crimes, and there was a handful of convictions to date. The report did
not support the Clinton wing's anti-Russian allegations about the 2016 election, and was
largely brushed aside by media. Mueller was then reportedly sent back in to "find something."
presumably to support the anti-Russian claims.
mike k , March 14, 2019 at 12:57 pm
From the beginning of the Russia did it story, right after Trump's electoral victory, it
was apparent that this was a fraud. The democratic party however has locked onto this
preposterous story, and they will go to their graves denying this was a scam to deny their
presidential defeat, and somehow reverse the result of Trump's election. My sincere hope is
that this blatant lie will be an albatross around the party's neck, that will carry them down
into oblivion. They have betrayed those of us who supported them for so many years. They are
in many ways now worse than the republican scum they seek to replace.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:26 pm
Trump is almost certain to be re-elected in 2020, and we'll go through this all over
again.
The very fact that the FBI never had access to the servers and took the word of a private
company that had a history of being anti-Russian is enough to throw the entire ruse out.
LJ , March 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm
Agreed!!!! and don't forget the FBI/Comey gave Hillary and her Campaign a head's up before
they moved to seize the evidence. . So too, Comey said he stopped the Investigation , thereby
rendering judgement of innocence, even though by his own words 'gross negligence' had a
occurred (which is normally considered grounds for prosecution). In doing so he exceeded the
FBI's investigative mandate. He rationalized that decision was appropriate because of the
appearance of impropriety that resulted from Attorney General Lynch having a private meeting
on a plane on a runway with Bill and Hillary . Where was the logic in that. Who called the
meeting? All were Lawyers who had served as President, Senator, Attorney General and knew
that the meeting was absolutely inappropriate. . Comey should be prosecuted if they want to
prosecute anyone else because of this CRAP. PS Trump is an idiot. Uhinfortunately he is just
a symptom of the disease at this point. Look at the cover of Rolling Stone magazine , carry a
barf bag.
Jane Christ , March 14, 2019 at 6:51 pm
Exactly. This throws doubt on the ability of the FBI to work independently. They are
working for those who want to cover -up the Hillary mess . She evidently has sufficient funds
to pay them off. I am disgusted with the level of corruption.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 10:50 am
Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for
Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue.
If there were something hot and lingering and about to emerge, this decision is highly
unlikely, especially with the reasoning she gave at "so as not to divide the American
people." Dividing the people hasn't been of much concern throughout this bogus witch hunt on
Trump, which has added to his incompetence in leavening a growing hysteria and confusion in
this country. If there is something, anything at all, in the Mueller report to support the
collusion theory, Pelosi would I'm sure gleefully trot it out to get a lesser candidate like
Pence as opposition for 2020.
We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded
the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C.
park for transport to Wikileaks.
We must also honor Shawn Lucas assassinated for serving DNC with a litigation notice
exposing the DNC conspiracy against Sanders.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:18 pm
Where has Assange confirmed this? Assange's long-standing position is NOT to reveal his
sources. I believe he has continued to honor this position.
Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:15 am
It has merely been insinuated by the offering of a reward for info on Seth's murder. In
one breath he says wikileaks will never divulge a source, and in the next he offers a $20k
reward saying that sources take tremendous risk. Doesn't take much of a logical leap to
connect A to B.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:30 pm
Are you aware that Democrats split apart their 0wn voting base in the 1990s, middle class
vs. poor? The Obama years merely confirmed that this split is permanent. This is particularly
relevant for Democrats, as their voting base had long consisted of the poor and middle class,
for the common good. Ignoring this deep split hasn't made it go away.
hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:24 pm
Even more important is how the Democrats have sold out to an Establishment view favoring
neocon theory, since at least Bill Clinton. Pelosi's recent behavior with Ilhan Omar confirms
this and the split you're talking about. My point is it is distinctly odd that Pelosi is
discouraging impeachment on "dividing the Party" (already divided, of course, as you say),
whereas the Russia-gate fantasy was so hot not that long ago. Again it points to a cynical
opportunism and manipulation of the electorate. Both parties are a sad excuse to represent
ordinary people's interests.
Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:21 am
She said "dividing the country", not the party. I think she may have concerns over Trump's
heavily armed base. That said, the statement may have been a ruse. There are plenty of
Republicans that would cross the line in favor of impeachment with the right "conclusions" by
Mueller. Pelosi may be setting up for a "bombshell" conclusion by Mueller. One must never
forget that we are watching theater, and that Trump was a "mistake" to be controlled or
eliminated.
Mueller should be ashamed that he has made President Trump his main concern!! If all this
investigation would stop he could save America millions!!! He needs to quit this witch-hunt
and worry about things that really need to be handled!!! If the democrats and Trump haters
would stop pushing senseless lies hopefully this would stop ? It's so disgusting that his
democrat friend was never really investigated ? stop the witch-hunt and move forward!!!!
torture this , March 14, 2019 at 7:29 am
According to this letter, mistakes might have been made on Rachel Maddow's show. I can't
wait to read how she responds. I'd watch her show, myself except that it has the same effect
on me as ipecac.
Zhu , March 14, 2019 at 3:37 am
People will cling to "Putin made Trump President!!!" much as many cling "Obama's a Kenyan
Muslim! Not a real American!!!". Both nut theories are emotionally satisfying, no matter what
the historical facts are. Many Americans just can't admit their mistakes and blaming a
scapegoat is a way out.
O Society , March 14, 2019 at 2:03 am
Thank you VIPS for organizing this legit dissent consisting of experts in the field of
intelligence and computer forensics.
This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press"
failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call
the tune.
It is astounding how little skepticism and scientifically-informed reasoning goes on in
our media. These folks show themselves to be native advertising rather than authentic
journalists at every turn.
DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:33 pm
But it has been Democrats and the media that market to middle class Dems, who persist in
trying to sell the Russian Tale. They excel at ignoring the evidence that utterly contradicts
their claims.
Oh, we're well beyond your "Blame the middle class Dems" stage.
The WINNING!!! team sports bullshit drowns the entire country now the latrine's sprung a
leak. People pretend to live in bubbles made of blue or red quite like the Three Little Pigs,
isn't it? Except instead of a house made of bricks saving the day for the littlepiggies, what
we've got here is a purple puddle of piss.
Everyone's more than glad to project all our problems on "THEM" though, aren't we?
Meanwhile, the White House smells like a urinal not washed since the 1950s and simpletons
still get their rocks off arguing about whether Mickey Mouse can beat up Ronald McDonald.
T'would be comic except what's so tragic is the desperate need Americans have to believe,
oh just believe! in something. Never mind the sound of the jackhammer on your skull dear,
there's an app for that or is it a pill?
I don't know, don't ask me, I'm busy watching TV. Have a cheeto.
Very good analysis clearly stated, especially adding the FAT timestamps to the
transmission speeds.
Minor corrections: "The emails were copied from the network" should be "from the much
faster local network" because this is to Contradict the notion that they were copied over the
internet network, which most readers will equate with "network." Also "reportedin" should be
"reported in."
Michael , March 13, 2019 at 6:25 pm
It is likely that New Knowledge was actually "the Russians", possibly working in concert
with Crowdstrike. Once an intelligence agency gets away with something like pretending to be
Russian hackers and bots, they tend to re-use their model; it is too tempting to discard an
effective model after a one-off accomplishment. New Knowledge was caught interfering/
determining the outcome in the Alabama Senate race on the side of Democrat Doug Jones, and
claimed they were merely trying to mimic Russian methods to see if they worked (they did; not
sure of their punishment?). Occam's razor would suggest that New Knowledge would be competent
to mimic/ pretend to be "Russians" after the fact of wikileaks' publication of emails. New
Knowledge has employees from the NSA and State department sympathetic to/ working with(?)
Hillary, and were the "outside" agency hired to evaluate and report on the "Russian" hacking
of the DNC emails/ servers.
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:48 pm
Mueller released report last summer, which resulted in (the last I checked) roughly 150
indictments, a handful of convictions to date, all for perjury/financial (not political)
crimes. This wasn't kept secret. It simply wasn't what Democrats wanted to hear, so although
it was mentioned in some lib media (which overwhelmingly supported neoliberal Hillary
Clinton), it was essentially swept under the carpet.
Billy , March 13, 2019 at 11:11 pm
Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They
all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't
care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump.
So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because
they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020.
Realist , March 14, 2019 at 3:22 am
You betcha. Moreover, who but the Russians do these idiots have left to blame? Everybody
else is now off limits due to political correctness. Sigh Those Catholics, Jews, "ethnics"
and sundry "deviants" used to be such reliable scapegoats, to say nothing of the
"undeveloped" world. As Clapper "authoritatively" says, only this vile lineage still carries
the genes for the most extremes of human perfidy. Squirrels in your attic? It must be the
damned Russkies! The bastards impudently tried to copy our democracy, economic system and
free press and only besmirched those institutions, ruining all of Hillary's glorious plans
for a worldwide benevolent dictatorship. All this might be humorous if it weren't so
funny.
And those Chinese better not get to thinking they are somehow our equals just because all
their trillions invested in U.S. Treasury bonds have paid for all our wars of choice and MIC
boondoggles since before the turn of the century. Unless they start delivering Trump some
"free stuff" the big man is gonna cut off their water. No more affordable manufactured goods
for the American public! So there!
As to the article: impeccable research and analysis by the VIPS crew yet again. They've
proven to me that, to a near certainty, the Easter Bunny is not likely to exist. Mueller
won't read it. Clapper will still prance around a free man, as will Brennan. The Democrats
won't care, that is until November of 2020. And Hillary will continue to skate, unhindered in
larding up the Clinton Foundation to purposes one can only imagine.
Joe Tedesky , March 14, 2019 at 10:02 pm
Realist,
I have posted this article 'the Russia they Lost' before and from time to time but
once again it seems appropriate to add this link to expound upon for what you've been saying.
It's an article written by a Russian who in they're youth growing up in the USSR dreamed of
living the American lifestyle if Russia were to ever ditch communism. But . Starting with
Kosovo this Russian's youthful dream turned nightmarishly ugly and, as time went by with more
and yet even more USA aggression this Russian author loss his admiration and desire for all
things American to be proudly envied. This is a story where USA hard power destroyed any hope
of American soft power for world unity. But hey that unity business was never part of the
plan anyway.
right you are, joe. if america was smart rather than arrogant, it would have cooperated
with china and russia to see the belt and road initiative succeed by perhaps building a
bridge or tunnel from siberia to alaska, and by building its own fleet of icebreakers to open
up its part of the northwest passage. but no, it only wants to sabotage what others propose.
that's not being a leader, it's being a dick.
i'm gonna have to go on the disabled list here until the sudden neurological problem with
my right hand clears up–it's like paralysed. too difficult to do this one-handed using
hunt and peck. at least the problem was not in the old bean, according to the scans. carry
on, sir.
Brian James , March 13, 2019 at 5:04 pm
Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ &
FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:55 pm
Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless,
short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. Trump and the
Republicans continue to win by default, as Democrats only drive more voters away.
Thank you Ray McGovern and the Other 17 VIPS C0-Signers of your National Security Essay
for Truth. Along with Craig Murray and Seymour Hirsch, former Sam Adams Award winners for
"shining light into dark places", you are national resources for objectivity in critical
survival information matters for our country. It is more than a pity that our mainstream
media are so beholden to their corporate task masters that they cannot depart from the
company line for fear of losing their livelihoods, and in the process we risk losing life on
the planet because of unconstrained nuclear war on the part of the two main adversaries
facing off in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Let me speak plainly. THEY SHOULD BE
TALKING TO YOU AND NOT THE VESTED INTERESTS' MOUTHPIECES. Thank you for your continued
leadership!
Roger Ailes founder of FOX news died, "falling down stairs" within a week of FOX news
exposing to the world that the assassinated Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails.
DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 6:03 pm
Google the Mueller investigation report from last June or July. When it was released, the
public response was like a deflated balloon. It did not support the "Russian collusion"
allegations -- the only thing Democrats still had left to sell. The report resulted in
roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes (not political), and a handful of
convictions to date -- none of which had anything to do with the election results.
Hank , March 13, 2019 at 6:19 pm
Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian
meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is
that stupid. They are probably right, but the REAL reason that Hillary lost is because there
ARE enough informed people now in this nation who are quite aware of the Clinton's sordid
history where scandals seem to follow every where they go, but indictments and/or
investigations don't. There IS an internet nowadays with lots of FACTUAL DOCUMENTED
information. That's a lot more than I can say about the mainstream corporate-controlled
media!
I know this won't ever happen, but an HONEST investigation into the Democratic Party and
their actions during the 2016 election would make ANY collusion with ANY nation look like a
mole hill next to a mountain! One of the problems with living in this nation is if you are
truly informed and make an effort 24/7 to be that way by doing your own research, you
more-than-likely can be considered an "island in a sea of ignorance".
We know that the FBI never had access to the servers and a private company was allowed to
handle the evidence. Wasnt it a crime scene? The evidence was tampered with And we will never
know what was on the servers.
Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:10 pm
As a complement to this excellent analysis, I would like to make 2 further points:
The Mueller indictment of Russian Intelligence for hacking the DNC and transferring their
booty to Wikileaks is absurd on its face for this reason: Assange announced on June 12th the
impending release of Hillary-related emails. Yet the indictment claims that Guccifer 2.0 did
not succeed in transferring the DNC emails to Wikileaks until the time period of July 14-18th
– after which they were released online on July 22nd. Are we to suppose that Assange, a
publisher of impeccable integrity, publicly announced the publication of emails he had not
yet seen, and which he was obtaining from a source of murky provenance? And are we further to
suppose that Wikileaks could have processed 20K emails and 20K attachments to insure their
genuineness in a period of only several days? As you will recall, Wikileaks subsequently took
a number of weeks to process the Podesta emails they released in October.
And another peculiarity merits attention. Assange did not state on June 12th that he was
releasing DNC emails – and yet Crowdstrike and the Guccifer 2.0 personna evidently knew
that this was in store. A likely resolution of this conundrum is that US intelligence had
been monitoring all communications to Wikileaks, and had informed the DNC that their hacked
emails had been offered to Wikileaks. A further reasonable prospect is that US intelligence
subsequently unmasked the leaker to the DNC; as Assange has strongly hinted, this likely was
Seth Rich. This could explain Rich's subsequent murder, as Rich would have been in a position
to unmask the Guccifer 2.0 hoax and the entire Russian hacking narrative.
Curious that Assange has Not explicitly stated that the leaker was Seth Rich, if it was,
as this would take pressure from himself and incriminate the DNC in the murder of Rich.
Perhaps he doesn't know, and has the honor not to take the opportunity, or perhaps he knows
that it was not Rich.
View the Dutch TV interview with Asssange and there is another interview available on
youtube in which Assange DOES subtly confirmed it was Seth Rich.
Assange posted a $10,000 reward for Seth Rich's murders capture.
Abby , March 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
Another mistaken issue with the "Russia hacked the DNC computers on Trump's command" is
that he never asked Russia to do that. His words were, "Russia if you 'find' Hillary's
missing emails let us know." He said that after she advised congress that she wouldn't be
turning in all of the emails they asked for because she deleted 30,000 of them and said that
they were personal.
But if Mueller or the FBI wants to look at all of them they can find them at the NYC FBI
office because they are on Weiner's laptop. Why? Because Hillary's aid Huma Abedin, Weiner's
wife sent them to it. Just another security risk that Hillary had because of her private
email server. This is why Comey had to tell congress that more of them had been found 11 days
before the election. If Comey hadn't done that then the FBI would have.
But did Comey or McCabe look at her emails there to see if any of them were classified? No
they did not do that. And today we find out that Lisa Page told congress that it was Obama's
decision not to charge Hillary for being grossly negligent on using her private email server.
This has been known by congress for many months and now we know that the fix was always in
for her to get off.
robert e williamson jr , March 13, 2019 at 3:26 pm
I want to thank you folks at VIPS. Like I have been saying for years now the relationship
between CIA, NSA and DOJ is an incestuous one at best. A perverse corrupted bond to control
the masses. A large group of religious fanatics who want things "ONE WAY". They are the
facilitators for the rogue government known as the "DEEP STATE"!
Just ask billy barr.
More truth is a very good thing. I believe DOJ is supporting the intelligence community
because of blackmail. They can't come clean because they all risk doing lots of time if a new
judicial mechanism replaces them. We are in big trouble here.
Apparently the rule of law is not!
You folks that keep claiming we live in the post truth era! Get off me. Demand the truth
and nothing else. Best be getting ready for the fight of your lives. The truth is you have to
look yourself in the mirror every morning, deny that truth. The claim you are living in the
post truth era is an admission your life is a lie. Now grab a hold of yourself pick a
dogdamned side and stand for something,.
Thank You VIPS!
Joe Tedesky , March 13, 2019 at 2:58 pm
Hats off to the VIP's who have investigated this Russian hacking that wasn't a hacking for
without them what would we news junkies have otherwise to lift open the hood of Mueller's
never ending Russia-gate investigation. Although the one thing this Russia-gate nonsense has
accomplished is it has destroyed with our freedom of speech when it comes to how we citizens
gather our news. Much like everything else that has been done during these post 9/11 years of
continual wars our civil rights have been marginalized down to zero or, a bit above if that's
even still an argument to be made for the sake of numbers.
Watching the Manafort sentencing is quite interesting for the fact that Manafort didn't
conclude in as much as he played fast and loose with his income. In fact maybe Manafort's
case should have been prosecuted by the State Department or, how about the IRS? Also wouldn't
it be worth investigating other Geopolitical Rain Makers like Manafort for similar crimes of
financial wrongdoing? I mean is it possible Manafort is or was the only one of his type to do
such dishonest things? In any case Manafort wasn't charged with concluding with any Russians
in regard to the 2016 presidential election and, with that we all fall down.
I guess the best thing (not) that came out of this Russia-gate silliness is Rachel
Maddow's tv ratings zoomed upwards. But I hate to tell you that the only ones buying what Ms
Maddow is selling are the died in the wool Hillary supporters along with the chicken-hawks
who rally to the MIC lobby for more war. It's all a game and yet there are many of us who
just don't wish to play it but still we must because no one will listen to the sanity that
gets ignored keep up the good work VIP's some of us are listening.
Andrew Thomas , March 13, 2019 at 12:42 pm
The article did not mention something called to my attention for the first time by one of
the outstanding members of your commentariat just a couple of days ago- that Ambassador
Murray stayed publicly, over two years ago, that he had been given the thumb drive by a
go-between in D.C. and had somehow gotten it to Wikileaks. And, that he has NEVER BEEN
INTERVIEWED by Mueller &Company. I was blown away by this, and found the original
articles just by googling Murray. The excuse given is that Murray "lacks credibility ", or
some such, because of his prior relationship with Assange and/or Wikileaks. This is so
ludicrous I can't even get my head around it. And now, you have given me a new detail-the
meeting with Pompeo, and the complete lack of follow-up thereafter. Here all this time I
thought I was the most cynical SOB who existed, and now I feel as naive as when I was 13 and
believed what Dean Rusk was saying like it was holy writ. I am in your debt.
Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 2:33 pm
Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and
propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized
over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about
them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm
Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:18 pm
A small correction: the Daily Mail article regarding Murray claimed that Murray was given
a thumbdrive which he subsequently carried back to Wikileaks. On his blog, Murray
subsequently disputed this part of the story, indicating that, while he had met with a leaker
or confederate of a leaker in Washington DC, the Podesta emails were already in possession of
Wikileaks at the time. Murray refused to clarify the reason for his meeting with this source,
but he is adamant in maintaining that the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked.
And it is indeed ludicrous that Mueller, given the mandate to investigate the alleged
Russian hacking of the DNC and Podesta, has never attempted to question either Assange or
Murray. That in itself is enough for us to conclude that the Mueller investigation is a
complete sham.
Ian Brown , March 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi
as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray!
LJ , March 13, 2019 at 12:29 pm
A guy comes in with a pedigree like that, """ former FBI head """ to examine and validate
if possible an FBI sting manufactured off a phony FISA indictment based on the Steele Report,
It immediately reminded me of the 9-11 Commission with Thomas Kean, former Board member of
the National Endowment for Democracy, being appointed by GW Bush the Simple to head an
investigation that he had previously said he did not want to authorize( and of course bi
partisan yes man Lee Hamilton as #2, lest we forget) . Really this should be seen as another
low point in our Democracy. Uncle Sam is the Limbo Man, How low can you go?
After Bill and
Hillary and Monica and Paula Jones and Blue Dresses well, Golden Showers in a Moscow luxury
hotel, I guess that make it just salacious enough.
Mueller looks just like what he is. He
has that same phony self important air as Comey . In 2 years this will be forgotten.. I do
not think this hurts Trumps chances at re-election as much as the Democrats are hurting
themselves. This has already gone on way too long.
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians.
Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass
media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump, which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein, Brennan, Podesta and Mueller's crusade on behalf
of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. It will be fascinating to
witness how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent
edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was likely in bed with the Winter Hill Gang.
Jack , March 13, 2019 at 12:21 pm
You have failed. An investigation is just that, a finding of the facts. What would Mueller
have to extricate himself from? If nothing is found, he has still done his job. You are a
divisive idiot.
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:13 pm
Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to
make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war
continues. Mission Accomplished.
@Jack,
Keep running cover for an out of control prosecutor, who, if he had any integrity, would have
hit the bully pulpit mos ago declaring there's nothing of substance to one of the most
potentially dangerous accusations in world history: the Kremlin hacking the election. Last I
checked it puts two nuclear nation-states on the brink of potential war. And you call me
divisive? Mueller's now a willing accomplice to this entire McCarthyite smear and
disinformation campaign. It's all so pathetic that folks such as yourself try and mislead and
feed half-truths to the people.
Drew, you might enjoy this discussion Robert Scheer has with Stephen Cohen and Katrina
vanden Heuvel.
Realist , March 15, 2019 at 3:38 am
Moreover, as the Saker pointed out in his most recent column in the Unz Review, the entire
Deep State conspiracy, in an ad hoc alliance with the embarrassed and embarrassing Democrats,
have made an absolute sham of due process in their blatant witch hunt to bag the president.
This reached an apex when his personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, was trotted out before congress to
violate Trump's confidentiality in every mortifying way he could even vaguely reconstruct.
The man was expected to say anything to mitigate the anticipated tortures to come in the
course of this modern day inquisition by our latter day Torquemada. To his credit though,
even with his ass in a sling, he could simply not confabulate the smoking gun evidence for
the alleged Russian collusion that this whole farce was built around.
Mueller stood with Bush as he lied the world into war based on lies and illegally spied on
America and tortured some folks.
George Collins , March 13, 2019 at 2:02 pm
QED: as to the nexus with the Winter Hill gang wasn't there litigation involving the
Boston FBI, condonation of murder by the FBI and damages awarded to or on behalf of convicted
parties that the FBI had reason to know were innocent? The malfeasance reportedly occurred
during Mueller time. Further on the sanctified diligence of Mr. Mueller can be gleaned from
the reports of Coleen Rowley, former FBI attorney stationed in Milwaukee??? when the DC FBI
office was ignoring warnings sent about 9/11. See also Sibel Edmonds who knew to much and was
court order muzzled about FBI mis/malfeasance in the aftermath of 9/11.
I'd say it's game, set, match VIPS and a pox on Clapper and the
complicit intelligence folk complicit in the nuclear loaded Russia-gate fibs.
Kiers , March 13, 2019 at 11:47 am
How can we expect the DNC to "hand it " to Trumpf, when, behind the scenes, THEY ARE ONE
PARTY. They are throwing faux-scary pillow bombs at each other because they are both
complicit in a long chain of corruptions. Business as usual for the "principled" two party
system! Democracy! Through the gauze of corporate media! You must be joking!
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 11:28 am
"We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to
prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become
aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very
different conclusions."
I wish I shared this belief. However, as with Nancy Pelosi's recent statement regarding
pursuing impeachment, I smell a rat. I believe with the help of what the late Robert Parry
called "the Mighty Wurlitzer", Mueller is going to use coerced false testimony and fabricated
forensics to drop a bombshell the size of 911. I think Nancy's statement was just a feint
before throwing the knockout punch.
If reason ruled the day, we should have nothing to worry about. But considering all the
perfidy that the so-called "Intelligence" Agencies and their MSM lackeys get away with daily,
I think we are in for more theater; and I think VIPS will receive a cold shoulder outside of
venues like CN.
I pray to God I'm wrong.
Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:32 pm
My extensive experience with DOJ and the federal judiciary establishes that at least 98%
of them are dedicated career liars, engaged in organized crime to serve political gangs, and
make only a fanatical pretense of patriotism or legality. They are loyal to money alone,
deeply cynical and opposed to the US Constitution and laws, with no credibility at all beyond
any real evidence.
Eric32 , March 14, 2019 at 4:24 pm
As near I can see, Federal Govt. careers at the higher levels depend on having dirt on
other players, and helping, not hurting, the money/power schemes of the players above
you.
The Clintons (through their foundation) apparently have a lot of corruption dirt on CIA,
FBI etc. top players, some of whom somehow became multi-millionaires during their civil
service careers.
Trump, who was only running for President as a name brand marketing ploy with little
desire to actually win, apparently came into the Presidency with no dirt arsenal and little
idea of where to go from there.
Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 11:09 am
I remember reading with dismay how Russians were propagandized by the Soviet Press
Management only to find out later the depth of disbelief within the Russian population
itself. We now know what that feels like. The good part of this disastrous scenario for
America is that for careful readers, disinformation becomes revelatory. For instance, if one
reads an editorial that refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or continually refers to
Russian interference in the last Presidential election, then one can immediately dismiss the
article and question the motivation for the presentation. Of course the problem is how to
establish truth in reporting
Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 10:41 am
Thank you, VIPs. Hopefully, you don't expect this to make a difference. The US has moved
into a post truth, post reality existence best characterized by Karl Rove's declaration:
"we're an empire now, when we act, we create our own reality." What Mr. Rove in his arrogance
fails to appreciate is that it is his reality but not anyone else's. Thus Pompous can claim
that Guaido is the democratic leader in Venezuela even though he's never been elected .
Thank you. The next time one of my friends or family give me that glazed over stare and
utters anymore of the "but, RUSSIA" nonsense I will refer them directly to this article. Your
collective work and ethical stand on this matter is deeply appreciated by anyone who values
the truth.
Russiagate stands with past government propaganda operations that were simply made up out
of thin air: i.e. Kuwaiti incubator babies, WMD's, Gaddafi's viagra fueled rape camps, Assad
can't sleep at night unless he's gassing his own people, to the latest, "Maduro can't sleep
at night unless he's starving his own people."
The complete and utter amorality of the deep state remains on display for all to see with
"Russiagate," which is as fact-free a propaganda campaign as any of those just mentioned.
Marc , March 13, 2019 at 10:13 am
I am a computer naif, so I am prepared to accept the VIPS analysis about FAT and transfer
rates. However, the presentation here leaves me with several questions. First, do I
understand correctly that the FAT rounding to even numbers is introduced by the thumb drive?
And if so, does the FAT analysis show only that the DNC data passed through a thumb drive?
That is, does the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a
thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to
give a copy to Wikileaks? Second, although the transatlantic transfer rate is too slow to fit
some time stamps, is it possible that the data were hacked onto a local computer that was
under the control of some faraway agent?
Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 11:12 am
Not quite. FAT is the crappy storage system developed by Microsoft (and not used by UNIX).
The metadata associated with any file gets rewritten when it gets moved. If that movement is
to a storage device that uses FAT, the timestamp on the file will end in an even number. If
it were moved to a unix server (and most of the major servers run Unix) it would be in the
UFS (unix file system) and it would be the actual time from the system clock. Every storage
device has a utility that tells it where to write the data and what to write. Since it's
writing to a storage device using FAT, it'll round the numbers. To get to your real question,
yes, you could hack and then transfer the data to a thumb drive but if you did that the dates
wouldn't line up.
Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 8:05 am
Jeff-
Which dates wouldn't line up? Is there a history of metadata available, or just metadata
for the most recent move?
David G , March 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm
Marc asks: "[D]oes the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred
to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg,
to give a copy to Wikileaks?"
I asked that question in comments under a previous CN piece; other people have asked that
question elsewhere.
To my knowledge, it hasn't been addressed directly by the VIPS, and I think they should do
so. (If they already have, someone please enlighten me.)
Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:07 pm
I am no computer wiz, but Binney has repeatedly made the point that the NSA scoops up
everything. If there had been a hack, they'd know it, and they wouldn't only have had
"moderate" confidence in the Jan. assessment. I believe that although farfetched, an argument
could be made that a Russian spy got into the DNC, loaded a thumb drive, and gave it to Craig
Murray.
David G , March 13, 2019 at 3:31 pm
Respectfully, that's a separate point, which may or may not raise issues of its own.
But I think the question Marc posed stands.
Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 7:59 am
Hi David-
I don't see how it's separate. If the NSA scoops up everything, they'd have solid evidence
of the hack, and wouldn't have only had "moderate" confidence, which Bill Binney says is
equivalent to them saying "we don't have squat". They wouldn't even have needed Mueller at
all, except to possibly build a "parallel case" due to classification issues. Also, the FBI
not demanding direct access to the DNC server tells you something is fishy. They could easily
have gotten a warrant to examine the server, but chose not to. They also purposely refuse to
get testimony from Craig Murray and Julian Assange, which rings alarm bells on its own.
As for the technical aspect of Marc's question, I agree that I'd like to see Bill Binney
directly answer it.
The final Mueller report should be graded "incomplete," says VIPS, whose forensic work proves the speciousness of the story that
DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings
Executive Summary
Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any
links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
If Mueller gives you his "completed" report anytime soon, it should be graded "incomplete."
Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who
have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We
stand ready to help.
We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing
story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story,
we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief
that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable
consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.
There is an overabundance of "assessments" but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative. We believe that there
are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly
if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions.
We know only too well -- and did our best to expose -- how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent
"evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We have scrutinized publicly available physical data -- the "trail" that every cyber operation leaves behind. And we have had
support from highly experienced independent forensic investigators who, like us, have no axes to grind. We can prove that the conventional-wisdom
story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who
worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published
our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media -- an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to
endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.
This time, with the principles of physics and forensic science to rely on, we are able to adduce solid evidence exposing mistakes
and distortions in the dominant story. We offer you below -- as a kind of aide-memoire -- a discussion of some of the key
factors related to what has become known as "Russia-gate." And we include our most recent findings drawn from forensic work on data
associated with WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails.
We do not claim our conclusions are "irrefutable and undeniable," a la Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq war. Our judgments,
however, are based on the scientific method -- not "assessments." We decided to put this memorandum together in hopes of ensuring
that you hear that directly from us.
If the Mueller team remains reluctant to review our work -- or even to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, we fear that many of those yearning earnestly for the truth on Russia-gate
will come to the corrosive conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a sham.
In sum, we are concerned that, at this point, an incomplete Mueller report will fall far short of the commitment made by then
Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation," when he appointed Mueller in May 2017. Again,
we are at your disposal.
Discussion
The centerpiece accusation of Kremlin "interference" in the 2016 presidential election was the charge that Russia hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to embarrass Secretary Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win. The weeks following
the election witnessed multiple leak-based media allegations to that effect. These culminated on January 6, 2017 in an evidence-light,
rump report misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)." Prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only three of
the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, and NSA), the assessment expressed "high confidence" in the Russia-hacking-to-WikiLeaks
story, but lacked so much as a hint that the authors had sought access to independent forensics to support their "assessment."
The media immediately awarded the ICA the status of Holy Writ, choosing to overlook an assortment of banal, full-disclosure-type
caveats included in the assessment itself -- such as:
" When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' they are conveying an analytic assessment
or judgment. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on
collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment
is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."
To their credit, however, the authors of the ICA did make a highly germane point in introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution."
They noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber
operation -- malicious or not -- leaves a trail." [Emphasis added.]
Forensics
The imperative is to get on that "trail" -- and quickly, before red herrings can be swept across it. The best way to establish
attribution is to apply the methodology and processes of forensic science. Intrusions into computers leave behind discernible physical
data that can be examined scientifically by forensic experts. Risk to "sources and methods" is normally not a problem.
Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement -- the more so when an intrusion is termed "an act of war" and
blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony
to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access
to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, "best practices" dictate direct access.
In June 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr asked Comey whether he ever had "access to the actual hardware
that was hacked." Comey answered, "In the case of the DNC we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic
information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. " Sen. Burr followed up: "But no content? Isn't content
an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?" Comey: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks
is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016."
The "private party/high-class entity" to which Comey refers is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple
conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations. Comey indicated that the DNC hired
CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016.
Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation including a possible impeachment battle and greatly increased tension
between Russia and the U.S. -- it is difficult to understand why Comey did not move quickly to seize the computer hardware so the
FBI could perform an independent examination of what quickly became the major predicate for investigating election interference by
Russia. Fortunately, enough data remain on the forensic "trail" to arrive at evidence-anchored conclusions. The work we have done
shows the prevailing narrative to be false. We have been suggesting this for over two years. Recent forensic work significantly strengthens
that conclusion.
We Do Forensics
Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian
Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation
Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive,
before WikiLeaks posted them.
FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is
not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times
on the files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbers.
Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under
the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the
DNC files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number.
We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If
those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number. The
random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by
WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the
World Wide Web.
This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers
for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the
DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not electronically via a hack.
Role of NSA
For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in that way, not hacked. And we said so.
We remain intrigued by the apparent failure of NSA's dragnet, collect-it-all approach -- including "cast-iron" coverage of WikiLeaks
-- to provide forensic evidence (as opposed to "assessments") as to how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks and who sent them. Well before
the telling evidence drawn from the use of FAT, other technical evidence led us to conclude that the DNC emails were not hacked over
the network, but rather physically moved over, say, the Atlantic Ocean.
Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked
by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller competes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving
the U.S. and would almost certainly have such packets if they exist. (The detailed slides released by Edward Snowden actually show
the routes that trace the packets.)
The forensics we examined shed no direct light on who may have been behind the leak. The only thing we know for sure is that the
person had to have direct access to the DNC computers or servers in order to copy the emails. The apparent lack of evidence from
the most likely source, NSA, regarding a hack may help explain the FBI's curious preference for forensic data from CrowdStrike. No
less puzzling is why Comey would choose to call CrowdStrike a "high-class entity."
Comey was one of the intelligence chiefs briefing President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the "Intelligence Community Assessment,"
which was then briefed to President-elect Trump and published the following day. That Obama found a key part of the ICA narrative
less than persuasive became clear at his last press conference (January 18), when he told the media, "The conclusions of the intelligence
community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to how 'the DNC emails that were leaked' got to WikiLeaks.
Is Guccifer 2.0 a Fraud?
There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet
as a result of a spearphishing attack. William Binney, one of VIPS' two former Technical Directors at NSA, along with other former
intelligence community experts, examined files posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those files could not have been downloaded
over the internet. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.
There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which
are pending publication." On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there
was evidence it was injected by Russians. On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement,
claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show
was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
Our suspicions about the Guccifer 2.0 persona grew when G-2 claimed responsibility for a "hack" of the DNC on July 5, 2016, which
released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later (showing how the DNC had tipped the primary
scales against Sen. Bernie Sanders). As VIPS
reported in a wrap-up
Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017 (titled "Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence)," forensic examination of the
July 5, 2016 cyber intrusion into the DNC showed it NOT to be a hack by the Russians or by anyone else, but rather a copy onto an
external storage device. It seemed a good guess that the July 5 intrusion was a contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks
might later publish from the DNC, by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack." WikiLeaks published the DNC emails on July 22, three
days before the Democratic convention.
As we prepared our July 24 memo for the President, we chose to begin by taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value; i. e., that the documents
he posted on July 5, 2016 were obtained via a hack over the Internet. Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained
in the posted documents and compared that metadata with the known capacity of Internet connection speeds at the time in the U.S.
This analysis showed a transfer rate as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than was possible from a remote online
Internet connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincided, though, with the rate that copying onto a thumb drive could accommodate.
Binney, assisted by colleagues with relevant technical expertise, then extended the examination and ran various forensic tests
from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest Internet rate obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey
to a data center in the UK -- was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the capacity typical of a copy onto a thumb
drive.
The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the WikiLeaks data does not indicate who copied the information
to an external storage device (probably a thumb drive). But our examination does disprove that G.2 hacked into the DNC on July 5,
2016. Forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data adds to other evidence that the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphishing
attack. The data breach was local. The emails were copied from the network.
Presidential Interest
After VIPS' July 24, 2017 Memorandum for the President, Binney, one of its principal authors, was invited to share his insights
with Mike Pompeo, CIA Director at the time. When Binney arrived in Pompeo's office at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017 for an
hour-long discussion, the director made no secret of the reason for the invitation: "You are here because the President told me that
if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk with you."
Binney warned Pompeo -- to stares of incredulity -- that his people should stop lying about the Russian hacking. Binney then started
to explain the VIPS findings that had caught President Trump's attention. Pompeo asked Binney if he would talk to the FBI and NSA.
Binney agreed, but has not been contacted by those agencies. With that, Pompeo had done what the President asked. There was no follow-up.
Confronting James Clapper on Forensics
We, the hoi polloi, do not often get a chance to talk to people like Pompeo -- and still less to the former intelligence
chiefs who are the leading purveyors of the prevailing Russia-gate narrative. An exception came on November 13, when former National
Intelligence Director James Clapper came to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to hawk his memoir. Answering a question during
the Q&A about Russian "hacking" and NSA, Clapper said:
" Well, I have talked with NSA a lot And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT business, the forensic evidence
was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever." [Emphasis added]
Clapper added: " as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our
country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn't
have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election."
(A transcript of the interesting Q&A can be found
here and a commentary
on Clapper's performance at Carnegie, as well as on his longstanding lack of credibility, is
here .)
Normally soft-spoken Ron Wyden, Democratic senator from Oregon, lost his patience with Clapper last week when he learned that
Clapper is still denying that he lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.
In an unusual outburst, Wyden said: "James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance.
To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand."
The materials brought out by Edward Snowden in June 2013 showed Clapper to have lied under oath to the committee on March 12,
2013; he was, nevertheless, allowed to stay on as Director of National Intelligence for three and half more years. Clapper fancies
himself an expert on Russia, telling Meet the Press on May 28, 2017 that Russia's history shows that Russians are "typically,
almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
Clapper ought to be asked about the "forensics" he said were "overwhelming about what the Russians had done." And that, too, before
Mueller completes his investigation.
For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:
William Binney , former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals
Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Richard H. Black , Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division,
Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Bogdan Dzakovic , former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Girald i, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel , former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the
Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
James George Jatras , former U.S. diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Senate leadership (Associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson , former CIA and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
John Kiriakou , former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen Kwiatkowski , former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture
of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Edward Loomis , Cryptologic Computer Scientist, former Technical Director at NSA (ret.)
David MacMichael , Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern , former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray , former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA
political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce , MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Peter Van Buren , US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Sarah G. Wilton , CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe , former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright , retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq
War
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers
and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching
a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived
threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of
VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.
A newly declassified US intelligence memo has been unearthed this week and featured in a bombshell
Wall
Street Journal
report. It proves that the year prior to the Bush administration's 2003
invasion of Iraq the White House was expressly warned in great detail of all that could and would
go wrong in the regime change war's aftermath, including
the Sunni-Shia sectarian chaos and
proxy war with Iran
that would define Iraq and the whole region for years following. And
crucially, it reveals that seven months
before
the US invasion of Iraq, American
intelligence officials understood that
Osama bin Laden was likely "alive and well and
hiding in northwest Pakistan"
--
important given that a key Bush
admin claim to sell the war was that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were
"in league"
against the
United States.
The
July 2002 memo
was authored by William Burns, then serving as assistant secretary of state for near eastern
affairs, and though clearly dismissed by the Bush neocons making the case for war, proved prescient
on many levels.
"Following are some very quick and informal thoughts on how events before,
during and after an effort to overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we're not careful,
intersecting to create
a 'perfect storm'
for American interests,"
Burns wrote
in the memo, classified 'Secret' and sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The classified memo's existence was first brought to the public's attention through
Knight Ridder's reporting
in July 2003, which sought to reveal at the time there were pockets
of dissenting voices in the State Department and intelligence community pushing back against the
absurd White House claim that the whole operation would be a
"cakewalk"
and US troops would be greeted as "liberators". And there's Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous
declaration that the military effort
would take
"weeks rather than months."
Now, sixteen years after the start of the war the "perfect storm" intel briefing has been made
public in fully redacted form and it affirms, as the
WSJ reports
, "Diplomats accurately forecast many setbacks:
sectarian violence, attacks
on U.S. troops, Iranian intervention and long road to structural change
." Out of this came
the rise of ISIS and the continued unleashing of regime change and sectarian chaos on neighboring
Syria.
The ten page memo outlines a litany of
catastrophic doom and gloom scenarios
resulting from the invasion which would destabilize not only Iraq, but
unleash sectarian
hell on the entire region
.
Here are but a handful of the memo's many warnings which later proved right on target, as
summarized by the military reporting website
Task
& Purpose
:
Iran increasing aid to anti-American groups in both Iraq and Afghanistan because it
feared being "next on US hit list."
Security in Iraq collapsing following regime change because Iraqi troops and police would
be too afraid to patrol while Iraqis aligned with the United States would prove to be inept.
U.S. troops coming under increasing attacks as they patrol both Shiite and Sunni cities.
"If they intervene to stop disputes, they are perceived to have sided with one party or
another in a tribal dispute, thus incurring the wrath of the opposing party."
Afghanistan's security situation simultaneously deteriorating, creating the need for more
U.S. troops there.
"Carpetbaggers, bill collectors, expats and exiles," arriving in Iraq. "It will be a wild
mix."
"I don't mean to be pessimistic, because I really do believe that if we do it right this could
be a tremendous boon to the future of the region, and to U.S. national security interests," the
memo stated. "But we should have no illusion that it will be quick or easy."
And further contradicting Cheney's "weeks rather than months" claim, the memo accurately
predicted that U.S. troops would have to stay for,
"Five years maybe four if we're lucky,
ten if we're not."
Some further interesting highlights from the July 2002 'Secret' report are below.
* * *
Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan
(the Bush admin claimed Saddam
and bin Laden were in cahoots)
"Osama bin Laden turns out to be alive and well and hiding in NW Pakistan. We press Paks,
internal stresses grow in Pakistan."
Iran and Syria targeted next
"Following US warnings that it would take the war on terrorism to all groups with global
capabilities, Iran and Syria hold summit meeting, decide US has targeted them."
Iran and Syria "strengthen positions in face of perceived US threat against them following
action in Iraq."
Sectarian score settling and Shia uprising
"This means night becomes the time for revenge, all over Iraq. A horrible wave of bloodletting
and private vengeance begins... US forces are helpless to stop the countrywide phenomenon. Police,
intelligence, senior military, and Baath Party officials effectively go into hiding..."
"Shia religious and political leaders, unhappy with composition of provisional government and
determined to secure greater share of power in post-Saddam Iraq... This leads to more violent
confrontations, and deaths, and the riots become a political tool to demonstrate power and increase
leverage against Sunnis and Kurds..."
Long US quagmire to put down sectarian powder keg
"Faced with inchoate and escalating disorder in the provinces, the US faces an agonizing
decision: step up to a more direct security role, or devolve power to local leaders."
"The Shia in the south, quietly aided by Iran, stage major revolt, taking over local government
offices and killing interim officials."
Weapons from Saddam's army will disappear (to be later used against US occupation)
"Law and Order, collecting weapons. We won't get them, most will go to ground."
"All for one, one for all, free for all - deals, short-term scrambles. It will be every clan for
itself."
"... Warren could have easily gone either way, succumbing to the emotive demands of the Never Trump mob. She instead opted to stick to the traditional progressive position on undeclared war, even if it meant siding with the president. ..."
"... Bravo Congressman Khanna. And to those progs who share his sympathies with those of us who have consistently opposed US military adventurism. Howard Dean's comments that American troops should take a bullet in support of "women's rights" in Afghanistan (!) only underscores why he serves as comic relief and really should consider wearing tassels and bells. ..."
"... Trump and Bernie put their fingers on the electoral zeitgeist in 2016: the oligarchy is out of control, its servants in Washington have turned their backs on the middle class, and we need to stop getting into stupid, needless wars. ..."
"... "Principles", LOL? What principles? When have Democrats ever not campaigned on a "bring them home, no torture, etc" peace platform and then governed on a deep state neocon foreign policy, with entitlements to drone anyone on earth in Obama's case? At least horrible neocon Republicans are honest enough to say what they believe when they run. ..."
"... Hillary was full hawk. It was Trump who said he was less hawkish. Yeah, he hasn't lived up to that either. But Democrats can't go hawkish in response. They already were the hawks. ..."
When President Donald Trump announced in December that he wanted an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, there was
more silence and opposition from the Left than approval. The 2016 election's highest-profile progressive, Senator Bernie Sanders,
said virtually nothing at the time. The 2018 midterm election's Left celeb, former congressman Beto O'Rourke, kept mum too. The 2004
liberal hero, Howard Dean, came out against troop withdrawals,
saying they would damage women's rights
in Afghanistan.
The liberal news outlet on which Warren made her statement, MSNBC, which had already been sounding more like Fox News circa 2003,
warned that withdrawal from Syria could hurt national security. The left-leaning news channel has even made common cause with Bill
Kristol and other neoconservatives in its shared opposition to all things Trump.
Maddow herself has not only vocally opposed the president's decision, but has become arguably more popular than ever with liberal
viewers by peddling
wild-eyed anti-Trump conspiracy theories worthy of Alex Jones. Reacting to one of her cockamamie theories, progressive journalist
Glenn Greenwald tweeted , "She is Glenn Beck
standing at the chalkboard. Liberals celebrate her (relatively) high ratings as proof that she's right, but Beck himself proved that
nothing produces higher cable ratings than feeding deranged partisans unhinged conspiracy theories that flatter their beliefs."
The Trump derangement that has so enveloped the Left on everything, including foreign policy, is precisely what makes Democratic
presidential candidate Warren's Syria withdrawal position so noteworthy. One can safely assume that Sanders, O'Rourke, Dean, MSNBC,
Maddow, and many of their fellow progressive travelers' silence on or resistance to troop withdrawal is simply them gauging what
their liberal audiences currently want or will accept.
Warren could have easily gone either way, succumbing to the emotive demands of the Never Trump mob. She instead opted to stick
to the traditional progressive position on undeclared war, even if it meant siding with the president.
... ... ...
Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with
Senator Rand Paul.
The antiwar movement is not a "liberal" movement. Hundreds of mainly your people addressed the San Francisco board of supervisors
asking them to condemn an Israeli full-fledged attack on Gaza. When they were finished, without objection from one single supervisor,
the issued was tabled and let sink permanently in the Bay, never to be heard of again. Had the situation been reversed and Israel
under attack there most probably would have been a resolution in nanoseconds. Maybe even half the board volunteering to join the
IDF? People believed Trump would act more objectively. That is why he got a lot of peace votes. What AIPAC wants there is a high
probability our liberal politicians will oblige quickly and willingly. Who really represents America remains a mystery?
"That abiding hatred will continue to play an outsized and often illogical role in determining what most Democrats believe about
foreign policy."
True, but the prowar tendency with mainstream liberals ( think Clintonites) is older than that. The antiwar movement among
mainstream liberals died the instant Obama entered the White House. And even before that Clinton and Kerry and others supported
the Iraq War. I think this goes all the way back to Gulf War I, and possibly further. Democrats were still mostly antiwar to some
degree after Vietnam and they also opposed Reagan's proxy wars in Central America and Angola. Some opposed the Gulf War, but it
seemed a big success at the time and so it became centrist and smart to kick the Vietnam War syndrome and be prowar. Bill Clinton
has his little war in Serbia, which was seen as a success and so being prowar became the centrist Dem position. Obama was careful
to say he wasn't antiwar, just against dumb wars. Gore opposed going into Iraq, but on technocratic grounds.
And in popular culture, in the West Wing the liberal fantasy President was bombing an imaginary Mideast terrorist country.
Showed he was a tough guy, but measured, unlike some of the even more warlike fictitious Republicans in that show. I remember
Toby Ziegler, one of the main characters, ranting to his pro diplomacy wife that we needed to go in and civilize those crazy Muslims.
So it isn't just an illogical overreaction to Trump, though that is part of it.
Won't happen. Gabbard is solid and sincere but she's not Hillary so she won't be the candidate. Hillary is the candidate forever.
If Hillary is too drunk to stand up, or too obviously dead, Kamala will serve as Hillary's regent.
The problem isn't THAT Trump is pulling the troops out of Syria. The problem is HOW Trump is pulling the troops out of Syria.
The Left isn't fighting about 'keeping troops indefinitely in Syria' vs pulling troops out of Syria'. Its a fight over 'pulling
troops out in a way that makes it so that we don't have to go back in like Obama and Iraq' vs 'backing the reckless pull out Trump
is going to do'.
For Democrats, everything depends on what the polls say, which issues seem important to get elected. They will say anything,
no matter how irrational & outrageously insane if the polls say Democrat voters like them. If American involvement in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan are less important according to the polls, Democratic 2020 hopefuls will not bother to focus on it.
For True Christian conservatives, everything depends on how issues line up to God's laws. Polls do not change what is morally
right, & what is morally evil.
"I am glad Donald Trump is withdrawing troops from Syria. Congress never authorized the intervention."
Bravo Congressman Khanna. And to those progs who share his sympathies with those of us who have consistently opposed US
military adventurism. Howard Dean's comments that American troops should take a bullet in support of "women's rights" in Afghanistan
(!) only underscores why he serves as comic relief and really should consider wearing tassels and bells.
Kasoy: "For True Christian conservatives, everything depends on how issues line up to God's laws. Polls do not change what is
morally right, & what is morally evil."
I think that needs the trademark symbol, i.e True Christians
The Second Coming of Jack Hunter. Given his well-documented views on race, it's no surprise he's all in on Trump. That surely
outweighs Trump's massive spending and corruption that most true libertarians oppose.
Trump and Bernie put their fingers on the electoral zeitgeist in 2016: the oligarchy is out of control, its servants in
Washington have turned their backs on the middle class, and we need to stop getting into stupid, needless wars.
Of course, the left would come out against puppies and sunshine if Trump came out for those things.
But if they are smart, they'd recognize that on war, or his lack of interest in starting new wars, even the broken Trump clock
has been right twice a day.
The flip side of this phenomenon is that so many Republican voters supported Trump's withdrawal from Syria. Had it been Obama
withdrawing the troops, I suspect 80-90% of Republicans would have opposed the withdrawal.
This does show that Republicans are listening to Trump more than Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio on foreign policy. But once
Trump leaves office, I fear the party will swing back towards the neocons.
"Principles", LOL? What principles? When have Democrats ever not campaigned on a "bring them home, no torture, etc" peace
platform and then governed on a deep state neocon foreign policy, with entitlements to drone anyone on earth in Obama's case?
At least horrible neocon Republicans are honest enough to say what they believe when they run.
Dopey Trump campaigned on something different and has now surrounded himself with GOP hawks, probably because he's lazy and
doesn't know any better.
Bernie, much like Ron Paul was, 180 degrees away, is the only one who might do different if he got into office, and the rate
the left is going he may very well be the nominee.
Hillary was full hawk. It was Trump who said he was less hawkish. Yeah, he hasn't lived up to that either. But Democrats can't
go hawkish in response. They already were the hawks.
The least bad comment on Democrats is that everyone in DC is a hawk, not just them.
Hate of Russia national runs deep with the infected bowels of the State Department. Sounds
like Neo-cons saber rattling and wanting to start WWIII over a bunch of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis
installed thanks to Victoria Nuland.
So much for detente with Russia. Trump proved to be just a marionette of MIC...
Sentiments about Trump at Zerohedge noticeably deteriorates since 2016
The US State Department announced on Friday that it would be joining
the European Union and Canada to impose new sanctions against Russia in response to the
Kremlin's "continued aggression in Ukraine."
Sanctions will apply to six "individuals who orchestrated the unjustified November 25 attack
on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait."
Also sanctioned by the United States are eight companies, including six Russian defense
firms, "including shipbuilding companies; two individuals involved in the NOvember sham
"elections" in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine; and two Russian energy and construction
companies operating in Crimea."
Read the State Department announcement below:
Washington – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets
Control (OFAC) designated six Russian individuals and eight entities in response to Russia's
continued and ongoing aggression in Ukraine. Today's action targets individuals and entities
playing a role in Russia's unjustified attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait,
the purported annexation of Crimea, and backing of illegitimate separatist government elections
in eastern Ukraine. These actions complement sanctions also taken today by the European Union
and Canada, and underscore the strength and commitment of the transatlantic partnership to
counter Russia's continued destabilizing behavior and malign activities.
"The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russia's continued
aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked. This joint initiative with our partners in the
European Union and Canada reinforces our shared commitment to impose targeted and meaningful
sanctions in response to the Kremlin's attempts to disregard international norms and
undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," said Treasury Secretary Steven T.
Mnuchin. "The international community is strongly aligned against Russia's naval attacks in
the Kerch Straight, purported annexation of Crimea, and support for the illegitimate
separatist-conducted elections in eastern Ukraine."
OVERVIEW
Five years after its invasion of Ukraine and its attempted annexation of Crimea, Russia
continues to undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity while failing to
implement its obligations under the Minsk agreements. On November 25, 2018, Russian authorities
opened fire on and rammed three Ukrainian ships off the coast of Crimea, seizing the ships and
capturing 24 Ukrainian crew members, who remain illegally detained in Russia. Russia also
continues its occupation of Crimea, and the Kremlin has also backed illegitimate elections held
by Ukrainian separatists in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic on November 11, 2018.
As a result of today's designations, all property and interests in property of the
designated individuals and entities are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from
transacting with them. Moreover, any entities owned 50 percent or more by these designated
persons are also blocked by operation of law.
Designations Related to Russia's Attack in the Kerch Strait
OFAC today sanctioned four Russian officials who were involved in the Kerch Strait attack.
OFAC designated Gennadiy Medvedev, the Deputy Director of the Border Guard Service of Russia's
Federal Security Service; Sergey Stankevich, the Head of the Border Directorate of Russia's
Federal Security Service; and Andrey Shein, the Deputy Head of the Border Directorate and Head
of the Coast Guard Unit of Russia's Federal Security Service. Medvedev and Stankevich directly
controlled and organized the attack against the Ukrainian ships and their crew, while Shein
participated in the operation against the seized Ukrainian ships and crew.
OFAC also designated Ruslan Romashkin, the Head of the Service Command Point of the Federal
Security Service of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol.
Medvedev, Stankevich, Shein, and Romashkin are being designated pursuant to Executive Order
(E.O.) 13661 for being officials of the Government of the Russian Federation.
DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO RUSSIA'S PURPORTED ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA
Today's action also targets six Russian defense firms with operations in Crimea, several of
which misappropriated Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military. Four
of these entities are being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the defense and
related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy, and two entities are being
designated pursuant to E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is a Russian state-owned shipbuilding plant that has built
vessels for Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is also the project developer for a naval vessel that was
completed at the Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" in Crimea. Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is
being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the defense or related materiel sector
of the Russian Federation economy.
Zelenodolsk Shipyard Plant, named after A.M. Gorky, is one of the largest ship manufacturers
in Russia and has produced missile frigates and corvettes for the Russian Navy. The Zelenodolsk
Shipyard Plant has collaborated with Crimea-based enterprise Skloplastic, which was unlawfully
nationalized by the Russian government following its illegal invasion of Crimea in 2014. The
Zelenodolsk Shipyard Plant is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the
defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
AO Kontsern Okeanpribor (Okeanpribor) is a producer of hydroacoustic equipment and has
supplied components to the Russian Navy. Okeanpribor has also collaborated on a naval project
at the Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" in Crimea. Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" was designated by
OFAC on September 1, 2016. Okeanpribor is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating
in the defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
PAO Zvezda (Zvezda) is a supplier of diesel engines to the Russian Navy. Zvezda has also
supplied components for Russian naval vessels that were being built at the Federal SUE Shipyard
"Morye" in Crimea. Zvezda is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the
defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
AO Zavod Fiolent (Fiolent) is a Crimea-based electronics manufacturer that has supplied
parts for use in Russian military equipment. Fiolent was unlawfully seized by the Russian
Federation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Fiolent is being designated pursuant to
E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
GUP RK KTB Sudokompozit (Sudokompozit) is a Crimea-based producer of defense components that
are supplied for Russian military use. Sudokompozit was unlawfully seized by the Russian
Federation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Sudokompozit is being designated
pursuant to E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
OFAC also designated the following two entities pursuant to E.O. 13685, due to their
activities in Crimea.
LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD is being designated for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD, a limited liability company registered in the city of Simferopol,
Crimea, is one of Crimea's largest construction companies. LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD is engaged
in the construction of residential and commercial real estate in cities throughout the Crimea
region including, among others, Feodosia, Kerch, Yalta, Simferopol, Sevastopol, and
Yepatoria.
LLC Novye Proekty is being designated for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine. In
2016, Russian authorities awarded the private company Novye Proekty an oil and gas exploration
license for the Crimean Black Sea shelf. The Crimean shelf is believed to be rich in
hydrocarbons and authorities in Ukraine have reported that Ukraine lost about 80 percent of its
oil and gas deposits in the Black Sea due to Russia's purported annexation of Crimea. Novye
Proekty's license permits geological studies, prospecting, and the extraction of raw
hydrocarbon materials from the Black Sea's Glubokaya block. Prior to Russia's purported
annexation of Crimea the Glubokaya block was estimated to hold reserves of 8.3 million tons of
crude and 1.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO ILLEGITIMATE SEPARATIST GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE
Today's action also targets two Ukrainian separatists who were involved in the organization
of the November 2018 illegitimate elections in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic. These
illegitimate elections clearly contradict Russia's commitments under the Minsk agreements, and
were strongly opposed by the United States and EU.
Aleksey Alekseevich Naydenko is the Deputy Chair of the Central Election Commission of the
so-called Donetsk People's Republic. Naydenko is being designated for being responsible for or
complicit in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten
the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Vladimir Yurievich Vysotsky is the Secretary of Central Election Commission of the so-called
Donetsk People's Republic. Vysotsky is being designated for being responsible for or complicit
in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten the peace,
security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
View identifying information on the individuals designated today.
" DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO RUSSIA'S PURPORTED ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA"
purported
/pərˈpôrdəd/
adjective
appearing or stated to be true, though not necessarily so; alleged.
There is nothing "purported" about it, it was true and as legitimate as it could possibly
be.
Then under "DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO ILLEGITIMATE SEPARATIST GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS IN
UKRAINE" they claim that Russia violated its committments under Minsk 2, which the US never
officially recognized. Minsk 2 intended increased sovereignty for the Oblasts under a new
Ukraine Federal constitutional arrangement. That constitutional amendment has never been
initiated by Kiev, with the blessing of Uncle Sam. It is the Ukraine puppet government who is
in violation of Minsk 2.
If the US wrote this, assume the opposite to be true.
[Article]: " Sanctions will apply to six "individuals who orchestrated the unjustified
November 25 attack on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait." "
Translation: "The propaganda lunacy will continue". "We will keep telling the same old
same old lies until people believe them".
My understanding of that incident is that the Ukrainian boats had some unexplained special
forces people on board and they refused to pull over when ordered to. From Russia's view,
there was a real risk of these people planning to plant explosives to blow up the Kerch
bridge.
Now it appears that no matter which government is in power they go along with the
aggressive agenda of the US.
Been like that since the '50's, just that you believed that the economy and world was
good.
Voting matters ZERO. The lie you are made to believe is that there is a choice when
voting, when in fact the ruling party is the financial engineers and bankers behind all
governments.
Voting is a waste of time. The heart of the beast is the USD reserve and the Rothschild
empire. Once we abolish that pig, all western governments implode under their own weight of
cheap talk and empty "policy".
The evidence that the orange swine is a Rothschild Trojan Horse is overwhelming at this
point. Only a scumbag or an absolute imbecile would fail to see it. Fvck you orange
roach.
I didn't read your comments at that time but I tip my hat to you. I realised that
everything he said during the campaign was bullsh!t after he started appointing Goldman Sachs
bankers to his cabinet...
You are a little wrong when you call this system "colonial". Today it is neo-colonialism.
When the United States subordinates the country, they do not bear any responsibility for the
fate of this country, since the formally subordinate country remains independent and all its
actions are performed "voluntarily."
Ukraine is a good example. Now this country commits ritual suicide "completely
voluntarily."
They've thought of that. That's why they tell us "The US has no colonies". Because you
have to support them if you admit to owning them. That's why by 1960, every colonial nation
on earth was giving its own colonies independence. They were costing more than they were
worth.
What we do now is to groom some local fellow, like Guaido, to take over the government and
run it the way we would like him to. We pay generously for this favor, in the form of loans
and direct investments. The fortunate ones near the seat of power come out fabulously well.
But neither we nor the country's rulers take on any responsibility for the welfare of their
people.
One of the dictators we backed was the director of the Brazilian military, who seized
power back in 1964... a fellow named Castelo Branco. And he was asked once at a press
conference how the economy was doing.
He replied "The economy, it is doing marvelously! The people, on the other hand-- not so
good."
If you don't offer protection to your puppet eventually some other power might try the
same trick and overthrow him. But if you do provide protection that area becomes a
colony.
So what you describing can only work when there is only one major power on the planet. The US
enjoyed it for some time but it can't have it anymore, that's reality.
The system is predicted to work some time into the future, for the reason that it is based
on subterfuge and military force. And we have a military as large as that of the entire rest
of the planet put together. So to us it doesn't matter what you call it. They control the
media, so they can just not report a word you say about them.
What will undo it will be a collapse of the dollar-based economy. And that will be kind of
hard to achieve, as every rich person on earth keeps his wealth denominated in dollars. So
there is little pressure to kill it. That's why we always used to call it The Almighty
Dollar.
However there are limits. Our main weapon now being used to enforce behavior is financial
sanctions. So it's pretty much assured that at some point in the near future the sanctioned
nations (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela...) will be getting together to set up an alternate
financial system. Probably based on the yuan.
That's the thing about offensive weapons systems. As a Mexican wit put it "Let them build
a twenty foot wall. We will build a 21 foot ladder."
Can anyone confirm what will happen when Germany will shut down those US Command Center
(NATO) because Germany is able to finance their own. (US Personal has to go) Nato support Act
is an US Law and not an authorized NATO Law
that's a fake battle. The US foreign policy is controlled by MIC and Wall Street. Elected
officials, as we see in cases of both Oabma and Trump administrations, "simply does not
matter."
That arrangement (which now is associated with the term the Deep state") is a part of the
rule of military-industrial complex and due to the existence of powerful three letter agencies
created by Truman can't be changed. Essntially Truman secured the victory of military industrial
complex for the next hundred years or more.
Congressional efforts are underway to seize control of foreign-policy decisions from the
executive. Who will win?
There are signs of growing congressional inconsistency, if not incoherence, regarding the
authority of the president in foreign affairs. The legislature seeks to interfere on issues
that are the president's responsibility while still failing to fulfill its own constitutionally
mandated responsibility regarding the war power.
An incident of misplaced assertiveness took place in January when the House of
Representatives passed the NATO Support Act prohibiting the executive branch from using any
funds to facilitate U.S. withdrawal from the Alliance in any way. The legislation appears to
bar a drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Europe and any effort to terminate U.S. membership in
NATO.
Enacting the legislation seemed weirdly premature. President Donald Trump has not even taken
any substantive actions that might diminish U.S. participation in NATO affairs. He has merely
criticized the allies for their lack of burden-sharing in the collective defense effort and
(correctly) suggested that NATO itself might be "obsolete" given how much the European and
global security environments have changed since the Alliance's birth at the dawn of the Cold
War against the Soviet Union.
The constitutionality of such restrictions also is highly suspect. The Constitution makes
the president the steward of foreign affairs. Presidents historically have enjoyed wide
latitude regarding the interpretation, execution, and even termination of U.S. treaties. Chief
executives have enjoyed even greater latitude regarding troop deployments, especially in
noncombat situations, and the nature, extent, and duration of military commitments to implement
treaties or other agreements. Congressional interference in the form of the NATO Support Act
would be truly revolutionary -- and not in a good way. It is a transparent congressional
attempt to usurp the president's rightful constitutional authority and seek to micromanage U.S.
foreign policy.
The NATO issue is not the only case in which congressional efforts are underway to seize
control of foreign-policy decisions from the executive. A faction in both houses is now pushing
a measure that would prevent the White House from failing to honor U.S. obligations under the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty until it expires in February 2021. Unlike in the case
of NATO, the president has taken tangible steps against the INF. After accusing Russia of
violating its obligations under the treaty, Trump announced that the United States intended to
withdraw from the INF . It should be stressed that the issue is not whether the president's
policies on NATO or the INF are wise or misguided; the relevant issue is whether the
Constitution invests the executive or Congress with the authority to make those decisions.
Greater congressional assertiveness on such issues is especially odd given how readily
Congress has abandoned its own explicit constitutional authority to control the war power. Even
as legislators moved to restrict Trump regarding NATO and the INF, there was no effective
campaign to prevent him from implementing his decision to keep at least two hundred troops in
Syria, despite the continuing lack of any congressional authorization for U.S. military
involvement in that combat zone.
... ... ...
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of twelve books and more than 750
articles on foreign affairs.
Could you say that "checks and balances" of the US in current stage are "unbalanced"
Looks like executive branch has its own policies and legislative branch is trying very hard
to nullify whatever executive branch can or could potentially do (and it will impact future
presidents too).
And more importantly all this "meddling" (forgive me the pun) between the branches
essentially cripples the US politics, foreign and internal.
If one can imaging THAT is the Russian goal then perhaps Mr. Trump could get the Star of Hero
of the Russian Federation pretty soon
Our system of checks and balances has become totally unbalanced, destabilized like some
Arab government we've decided don't like. Political scientists are all telling us that we're
on the way to having a classic autocratic regime, where nothing matters except what El
Supremo says matters.
And Congress is supine. They really don't care much about how the country is being run,
they just care if they get re-elected. And the right half of them thinks they won't get
re-elected if they oppose Trump. So there's no veto-proof majority.
It never used to be this way. But it has been said that "The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants." (Thomas Jefferson)
And we just don't have enough patriots to get the job done. I look to the young people to
be changing that.
Political scientists are all telling us that we're on the way to having a classic
autocratic regime, where nothing matters except what El Supremo says matters.
I have elusive feeling that American policies have already been praying to "El Supremo" for
some time, it just wasn't so openly obvious until now.
And the "El Supremo" name is "Wall Street". Globalisation have taken over American policies
for some time.
It became obvious after "too big to fail" incidents of 2008.
Another example: FAANG has so much power now that it can literally kill smaller private
companies with a mouse click. It can shape public opinion and no doubt it can soon be able to
elect politicians.
That's something different. Wall Street funds quite a large portion of the campaigns waged
by both parties. So whichever party wins an election, they are anxious to never offend their
sponsors. You might look up the proportions of presidential elections contributions made by
the financial and insurance industries.
(This is also why we can never seem to get a good single-payer health system. It would get
rid of private health insurance.)
I was talking about the once-creeping, now-galloping expansion of presidential powers.
This was first evident during the presidency of George W Bush, when the theory of the
Unitary Executive was put forth, by people like John Yoo and David Addington.
It establishes the theory that the Constitution allows a sitting president to disregard
those laws he doesn't want to enforce and to take executive actions that do not depend on
congressional approval. That is, he is above the law and accountable to no one.
Empire, even a powerful one cannot win prosperity with a war or wars. Eventually you'd
need to provide some economy to the colonies. The less you provide the more they gonna hate
you and resist you. The more you provide the less they gonna need you and eventually
overthrow you.
Winning with wars is utopia, like communism.
You are a little wrong when you call this system "colonial". Today it is neo-colonialism.
When the United States subordinates the country, they do not bear any responsibility for the
fate of this country, since the formally subordinate country remains independent and all its
actions are performed "voluntarily."
Ukraine is a good example. Now this country commits ritual suicide "completely
voluntarily."
Is there any other nation that wields such a stranglehold on any other as Israel does the
United States? Is there any other nation that has so completely surrendered its sovereignty
to another as has the United States to Israel. Does any other country (size of Israel) strike
fear and dread into the hearts of its lawmakers to the point of complete serfdom as Israel
does the US? Can any other country allow any foreign country to override its head of state to
address lawmakers as Israel has done to the US in the case of Obama, despite his complete
servility to Israel, thereby rendering himself a victim of dual abuses: racism and disregard
of American sovereignty? Has any other country sacrificed so many of its citizens for wars on
behalf of any other country as we have done for Israel? Can any other country receiving
billions of dollars of taxpayers money in aid and military hardware shamelessly call the
shots as Israel does with America, with America not as much as questioning orders from
Israel? Can we realistically celebrate Independence Day with so much fanfare when another
country has us so completely by the balls as to make a mockery of the word "independence".
Can any country strip any other of its sovereignty as Israel has done to the US, including
undermining its constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, with our total collusion?
Having raised all these questions, can there be realistic grounds for hoping for a ray of
light at the end of the tunnel, short of a comprehensive revolution that would rehabilitate a
nation led by quislings into one of principled men and women?
anyone here who chooses to hate me. I recognize that that you have the right to do so. And
that that right s Constitutionally protected. You are entitled to your feelings.
What I must object to and call into question is your attempt to engage in acts that in any
threaten, thwart, disrupt my right as a US citizen to access every aspect of what is
guaranteed to me by the US constitution. That includes manufacturing false claims to
undermine the same.
I will defend your right to your feelings and your right to express them in a manner in
accordance with the first amendment. I cannot support acts that deprive myself my
constitutional rights in any manner.
I am not a promoter of hate, but I certainly recognize the right that people have for
their feelings and the desire to one's express them.
[Bret Stephens] attributes to her "insidious cunning" and "anti-Jewish bigotry"
observing how "she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he
called Congress "Israeli-occupied" territory."
If what Rep. Omar said wasn't too different from what Mr. Buchanan said previously, why
haven't we heard a peep out of him on this issue?
a liar and a hypocrite, and that alone should disqualify them for office.
Hello?
Where the bleep have you been, Pardner? You got that exactly backwards; mendacity
and hypocrisy are mandatory minimum qualifications for the positions.
Ms. Omar is dis qualified because she is honest enough to speak the truth.
Now, go learn to shoot straight before shooting off yer mug, and you can start with
this,
I must take issue with your observation that Mr. Truman is an habitual liar, not because
I disagree with you, but because I disagree with your manner in presenting it as a
derogatory statement. Is not the ability of lying necessary to political
leadership ?
And this, which illustrates several points regarding politicians, their characteristics
and motives.:
Two candidates for political office in a debate
SAUSAGE-SELLER
No, Cleon, little you care for his reigning in Arcadia, it's to pillage and impose on the
allies at will that you reckon; you wish the war to conceal your rogueries as in a mist,
that Demos may see nothing of them, and harassed by cares, may only depend on yourself for
his bread. But if ever peace is restored to him, if ever he returns to his lands to comfort
himself once more with good cakes, to greet his cherished olives, he will know the
blessings you have kept him out of, even though paying him a salary; and, filled with
hatred and rage, he will rise, burning with desire to vote against you. You know this only
too well; it is for this you rock him to sleep with your lies.
until there is a much larger block of anti israel congresspeople nothing is going to change.
What is the USs interest? They sure are not interested in making things better for the
majority/middle class. All the while continuing to enrich the already too wealthy ever more.
Media is a lying POS and yet people still watch Fox or Cnn or msnbc. All of them produce
nothing but propaganda garbage. Unfortunately, it seems like most in the USA just don't care.
In Venezuela look at the protesters the US media sets up and/or loves so much, try that in
the USA and you'll end up in jail.
For me, Ilhan Omar's statements were the most exciting political event in decades. I'm not
surprised that she is being punished, but the viciousness of the attacks have certainly gone
up a notch.
America's big mistake: allowing all the media to congeal into one big bullhorn that is
controlled by Jewish interests. As long as they control the media there will be no national
debate of zionist power in America.
Another great article by Giraldi. He is consistently the most forceful and articulate
writer regarding the subversion of America's national interests to Israel.
As much as I despise Omar's politics, in this case she is right to expose the dirty politics
that Israel uses on it's "friend and ally" the United States of America.
AIPAC is the most powerful foreign lobby in the United States and has done more to influence
and damage the American political process than just about any other lobby. It is a
loosely-guarded secret that, in order to garner jewish support, prospective politicians must
sign a loyalty oath promising support for Israel. This, in itself is un-American and borders
on treason. Failure to sign the loyalty oath almost always assures a political death. AIPAC
will spend millions to elect a candidate as long as he "toes the Israeli line".
Remember the USS Liberty (GTR-5), the American naval vessel that was deliberately attacked
with massive loss of American lives (an act of war) by "our friend and ally" Israel on June
8, 1967. If I had my way, Israel would have been turned into a "glass parking lot" on June 9,
1967.
As an aside, we must constantly hit our politicians with charges of treason, citing the
"loyalty oaths" to Israel that almost all of them have signed.
Dual citizens of Israel are through out the US government and have given America unending
wars and debt and an unconstitutional FED and IRS. No dual citizen from any nation should be
able to hold office in any government or state or county or city government in the US, no one
can serve two masters and citizens of Israel serve Israel and that is why America has been at
war for 18 years and counting in the Mideast!
Israel was everywhere at the Jewish day school I attended in New York. The Israeli and
American flags were proudly displayed together, no matter that I, like the majority of my
classmates, was not Israeli.
This alone might be innocuous, a loose cultural affinity that would be familiar in a
French or German language academy. But in Jewish day school life, outright political
mobilization for Israel and its policies was a requirement.
Every year we would be "strongly encouraged" to attend the Salute to Israel parade on
New York's Fifth Avenue. Teachers were marshals, and mocking stories about pro-Palestinian
activists were exchanged in class the following day.
One year, we were outright required to join a protest in support of Israel, during the
school day, at the United Nations.
This school-mandated allegiance seeped into even the most casual conversations. I
remember once debating with my group of friends whether we'd rather serve with the Israeli
Defense Forces or the U.S. military. Even though all of us, and our parents, were born and
raised in the United States, we were unanimous: we'd rather fight for Israel.
With any other cultural group in America, for any other country, these statements
would be shocking. After all, when was the last time you heard of an Italian-American
birthright trip to Sicily? But for American Jews, the centrality of allegiance to Israel in
our communal organizations is the norm.
There is one big omission in your article PG. If you read more than the tweet from Rep. Juan
Vargas that you linked as
"Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable."
you must have been pleased by the deluge (maybe hundreds) of Tweets uniformly condemning
him and including many from people claiming believably to be Jews.
BTW Australia doesn't allow dual citizenship by its national MPs and senators and has had
in the last few years a previously unparalleled spate of challenges to members already seated
in Parliament. The courts have interpreted the constitutional provision strictly and MPs
whose Italian born mothers filled in a form which gave them Italian citizenship without their
knowledge have been caught (or at least been taken to court).
I would tend to argue that dual citizenship should be declared but that it is up yo the
voters to decide whether they want to be represented by someone who isn't only an Australian.
There are counterarguments however and avoidance of America's Israel First situation is
certainly one of them.
It is simple, really. The US needs a law prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold
public office. Stated allegiance to any other country should be treated as high treason,
which it is. However, I don't see Congress doing any of this: we all know what happens when
the improvements in henhouse safely is in the hands of foxes.
Anyway All US political system is running on bribery. So the bribery is legal and cannot be
tackled.
The only way to go is to distinguish the bribery and divide it into two groups.
Patriotic bribery and non patriotic bribery.
Here is a funny thing!!!!!!!!!
The Arabs have a proper English word for bribery: Backshish.
1 It is done in the back, so nobody sees it.
2 Shish means you should be quiet about it.
What bribery you may ask.
So what are those prepayed trips to Israel where the Congress people are treated as kings,
and they have chance to make love to the Jewish wall of the temple. They stick their wishes
written on paper into crevices of the wall. (Not too many records if the wall did take care
of their wishes.}
@AnonFromTN You
dont have to be a dual citizen be a traitor.
So what the US needs is an amendment to the Constitution expanding the definitions of
treason and subversion to better reflect the modern day realities of our political
system.
Perhaps suggest to the Magnificent Three that they put forth a bill calling for that.
What makes this piece meaningful is he is 100% correct. Representative Ilhar Omar should
be applauded for her bravery. She truly is courageous, as she not only risks her political
career but also her life. And by doing so she leaves open the door for others to follow.
We'll soon see how serious the Zionists take this matter.
JFK called for AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, however sense his murder not one
politician has ever mentioned it again. I think this says a lot about how much influence that
particular lobby has. Too much.
Dual loyalty is a fuzzy term. Why not go back to the tried-and-true fifth column? These
domestic Zionazis are Israel's fifth column. They constitute the vanguard of an
international, and their program is clearly shown here:
Israel leads a counterrevolutionary plan and conspiracy for bad-faith subversion of all
your human rights including your human right to peace. Israel's existence depends on domestic
Apartheid, totalitarian repression in client states such as the US, and continual threats to
peace worldwide. The government of Israel has forfeited its sovereignty by shirking its
responsibility to protect with the crime against peace of aggression and the crime against
humanity of extermination. In consequence, it must give way to a free Palestine.
The only way you're going to shake off Israel's fifth column is end Israel. You've got to
do to Israel what we did to South Africa.
"No politician can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or
he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve America and Israel."
@jo6pac There
are 40 Jews in the house and senate .that is not 89% of the total 500 congressmen and
senators.
Crap claims like this are actually harmful to the effort to get the Jewish Fifth Column
and Israel out of the US because the lie will be pointed out and much fun made of the
nutcases by the uber Jews.
Duel citizenship is only acceptable if one citizenship is from where you were born, over
which you had no choice, and the other is where you have chosen to live, made your home, and
become a citizen thereof. Two citizenship by choice is a sham: getting the benefactors of one
but maintaining your loyalty to another.
[Stephens] attributes to her "insidious cunning" and "anti-Jewish bigotry" observing how
"she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress
"Israeli-occupied" territory." And it's all " how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an
acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It's why anti-Semitism is just outside the
frame, bidding to get in.
Let's examine how and why the cunning and bigotry of Bret Stephens gets projected by him
onto Ilhan Omar.
1. Charge, sans evidence, your opponent with your own crimes and repeat the charge ad
nauseam.
2. In lieu of refutation of your opponent's argument, train your reader to identify his
argument as galling chutzpah and your galling chutzpah as an argument.
3. Double down on the accusatory inversion and invoke anti- Semitism: It is not the Jewish
demand that the USA shut-up and bow down before Israel which is threatening to provoke an
anti-Semitic reaction; no: anti-Semitism results from acknowledging as legitimate a scrutiny of
the claims and aims of the Zionist state.
Mr. Stephen's rhetoric is an admission that he and his kind hate Jews, insisting as it does
on the implicit acceptance of Jewish identity as irrational and homicidal. His rhetoric also
represents an ultimatum to the USA: honor Israel's irrational hatred and killing of its
neighbors or you are guilty of irrationally killing Jews.
This is known as desperation and is an infallible sign that yet another false Jewish messiah
– Neoconservatism-has failed.
"... I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors " ..."
I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations
have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters –
"one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "
Anti-Semitism theater – a carefully staged social movement organized by Government
owned media to divide the peons and make them hate each other. Real hate-group profit lies in
charging for vast quantities of militarism but making just enough to kill women and children
overseas.
Back home the flag waving patriots insist they need a giant military with weapons
for anyone who can pay to protect them and their families. Dual loyalty to the Jewish lobby
and the defense lobby.
"... I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors " ..."
I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations
have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters –
"one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "
Anti-Semitism theater – a carefully staged social movement organized by Government
owned media to divide the peons and make them hate each other. Real hate-group profit lies in
charging for vast quantities of militarism but making just enough to kill women and children
overseas.
Back home the flag waving patriots insist they need a giant military with weapons
for anyone who can pay to protect them and their families. Dual loyalty to the Jewish lobby
and the defense lobby.
"Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and
Google," read the ads which began to run on Friday, According to Politico
. "We all use them. But in their rise to power, they've bulldozed competition, used our private
information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor."
As these companies have grown larger and more powerful, they have used their resources and
control over the way we use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation , and
substitute their own financial interests for the broader interests of the American people. To
restore the balance of power in our democracy, to promote competition, and to ensure that the
next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last, it's time to break up our
biggest tech companies. -Elizabeth Warren
Facebook confirmed with Politico that the ads had been taken down and said said the
company is reviewing the matter. "The person said, according to an initial review, that the
removal could be linked to the company's policies about using Facebook's
brand in posts ."
Around a dozen other ads placed by Warren were not affected.
"... Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Page didn't get board approval when he awarded a $150 million stock grant to Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software who was under investigation by the company for sexual harassment at the time, according to a lawsuit. ..."
"... The new allegations shed light on Page's power to compensate top executives and could add fuel to criticism that the company's board isn't strong enough to keep management accountable to shareholders. ..."
"... Alphabet initially required shareholders' lawyers to conceal information in the complaint about the $150 million stock award to Rubin, on grounds it was confidential, according to Renne. Alphabet then rescinded its demand. Google declined to comment on that decision. ..."
Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer
Larry Page didn't get board approval when he awarded
a $150 million stock grant to Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software who was under investigation by the company for
sexual harassment at the time, according to a lawsuit.
Page later got "rubber stamp" approval for the equity compensation package from a board leadership committee eight days after
he granted it in August 2014, according to a revised investor complaint made public on Monday in California state court in San Jose.
Rubin used the grant as "leverage" to secure a $90 million severance agreement when he left the company almost three months later,
according to the complaint.
The new allegations shed light on Page's power to compensate top executives and could add fuel to criticism that the company's
board isn't strong enough to keep management accountable to shareholders. It could also pull Page deeper into the controversy around
how Google has handled sexual harassment complaints. The Alphabet co-founder has generally stayed behind the scenes, while Google
CEO Sundar Pichai has been left to deal with criticism of the company's culture.
Investors claim the board failed in its duties by allowing harassment to occur, approving big payouts and keeping the details
private. The complaint targets the company's top executives and committee members, including co-founder
Sergey Brin , venture capitalist John Doerr, investor
Ram Shriram and Alphabet Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, among others.
"It's confirmation of the fact that there were these large payouts" to Google executives and that the company's "own internal
investigation had shown there was misconduct and harassment," Louise Renne, a lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Monday by phone.
"Nonetheless, rather than being just being terminated, they were terminated with hefty reimbursement and gifts," Renne said.
A lawyer for Rubin said the complaint mischaracterizes his departure from Google.
"Andy acknowledges having had a consensual relationship with a Google employee," attorney Ellen Stross said in an email. "However,
Andy strongly denies any misconduct, and we look forward to telling his story in court."
The $90 million severance package was first detailed by the New York Times in October 2018, and sparked a
firestorm of criticism from both inside and outside the company. Soon after, thousands of Google employees walked out to protest
how the company handles sexual harassment complaints. Since then, Google has changed its policies, including ending the practice
of barring employees from suing the company and shunting them into private arbitration. People fired for sexual harassment haven't
gotten severance payments in the past two years, Google has said.
"There are serious consequences for anyone who behaves inappropriately at Google," a spokeswoman for Google said in an emailed
statement. "In recent years, we've made many changes to our workplace and taken an increasingly hard line on inappropriate conduct
by people in positions of authority."
Alphabet initially required shareholders' lawyers to conceal information in the complaint about the $150 million stock award to
Rubin, on grounds it was confidential, according to Renne. Alphabet then rescinded its demand. Google declined to comment on that
decision.
"My hope is this is a step toward transparency," Renne said, referring to Alphabet's decision to not fight the information being
unsealed. "The reason we brought this shareholder lawsuit was to have some transparency governing corporate affairs, as well as the
behavior being completely inappropriate conduct toward women," she said.
One allegation unsealed Monday is that Amit Singhal, a top Google executive who left the company in 2016, was allowed to resign
after accusations that he sexually harassed a female employee were found credible and he was given an exit package worth between
$35 million and $45 million. Singhal would go on to work for Uber Technologies Inc., but
resigned from the ride-hailing company after Recode
reported that he hadn't told Uber
about the reasons he left Google. Singhal, who has denied the harassment claims, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case is Martin v. Page, 19-cv-343672, California Superior Court, Santa Clara County (San Jose).
"... That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me. ..."
Anyone remember Mullah Omar, the deceased leader of the Taliban? The U.S. military and intelligence services claimed over and
over again that he was hiding in Pakistan. Bette Dam
finds (pdf) that he wasn't:
After 2001, Mullah Omar never stepped foot in Pakistan, instead opting to hide in his native land -- and for eight years,
lived just a few miles from a major U.S. Forward Operating Base that housed thousands of soldiers.
In late 2001, after the U.S. invasion, Mullah Omar resigned as leader of the Taliban and the movement officially surrendered
to Hamid Karzai who promised them reconciliation. The U.S. did not like that and launched a vengeful campaign against all former
Taliban member. Eighteen years later the U.S. is suing for peace.
Mullah Omar lived quietly, meditated and studied religious text. Allah remarked on his death:
On April 23, 2013, Mullah Omar passed away. That day, Jabbar Omari told me, the hot, dry lands of southern Afghanistan experienced
something he'd never seen before: a hail storm. I assumed it was hagiographic bluster, but later I found a U.S. army publication
referring to that day: "More than 80 Task Force Falcon helicopters were damaged when a sudden unprecedented hailstorm hit
Kandahar Airfield April 23, where nearly half of the brigade's helicopters were parked."
The fact that Mullah Omar's death was suppressed for two years even from high-level official sources, indicates to me that the
theory bin Laden died in 2001 is very plausible. We even have a similar progression of statements regarding their respective health,
doubts of whether they were alive at the respective time, etc.
Of course, both terror leaders were kept "alive" for geopolitical reasons. Once ISIS (and later Russia/China) took over as
a serious threat in the corporate media narrative, they no longer had to cling to those old phantoms.
The story on Omar is astonishing, but to me not surprising. If the US spends billions on finding one guy, and at the end of the
day, he is literally just down the road, it shows how incompetent and useless our intelligence gathering has become.
That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which
I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me.
Stupidity has a firm grip on our rulers, and they are getting, not only us but many others, killed for absolutely no reason.
And the dunces called the American voter, keep re-electing them. It leaves me breathless.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is launching a review of the main set of rules governing stock
trading, opening the door to the biggest potential changes in a decade-and-a-half, the head of the agency said on Friday.
The possible changes are aimed at making it easier to trade illiquid stocks, making more trading information available to investors,
and improving the speed and quality of public data feeds needed for trading.
The SEC in 2005 adopted a broad framework called Regulation National Market System that was largely aimed at ensuring retail investors
get the best price possible and preventing trades from being executed at prices that are inferior to bids and offers displayed on
other trading venues.
Since then, faster, more sophisticated technology has put a bigger focus on rapid-fire, high-speed trading. There has also been
an influx of new electronic stock exchanges, fragmenting liquidity and increasing costs for brokers around exchange connectivity
and market data needed to fuel algorithmic trading.
"It is clear that the market challenges we faced in the early 2000s are not the same as the issues that we confront over a decade
later," Jay Clayton, chairman of the SEC, said at an event in New York.
To get a better grasp of current market issues, the SEC held a series of roundtable discussions with industry experts last year
that led to potential rule-making recommendations around thinly-traded securities, combating retail fraud, and market data and market
access, Clayton said.
Some areas the SEC is looking at include:
- Increasing the speed of, and adding more stock price information to, public data feeds to help make them more competitive against
the more expensive, private data feeds sold by most stock exchanges.
- Allowing thinly-traded securities to trade only on their listing market, rather than on all 13 U.S. stock exchanges.
- Improving disclosure around reverse mergers.
- Adjusting the quote size of some high-priced stocks.
The 2019 review follows an active 2018 for the SEC.
The regulator adopted rules to increase transparency around broker-dealer stock order routing and private off-exchange trading
venues. It also ordered a pilot program to test banning lucrative rebate payments that exchanges make to brokers for liquidity-adding
stock orders.
judi 1 hour ago What about Naked Shorting? It is out of control and no one including the SEC is doing anything to stop it??
Tara 41 minutes ago The rules implemented in 2005 did nothing to help retail traders with accounts under 25K.
When are you going to address the real issue of stock price manipulation? Also, bring back the uptick rule. And while you are at
it, we need rules to punish dishonest analysts who publish opinions of price that are so far off the charts, they never reflect actual
earnings often announced days later.
Rob 38 minutes ago They are going to make it more in favor of big boys aka the banks
It's the second, but no less ludicrous, attempt in one week to sway the opinion of the public and
President Donald Trump against the concept of denuclearization and peaceful dialogue with North Korea.
A March 8, 2019 report from
National Public Radio
(NPR)
follows another by
NBC News
with sensational and misleading claims that satellite imagery released by private
corporations with contractual ties to government defense and intelligence agencies show imminent
preparations by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to engage in missile testing or the
launch of a satellite from their facilities in Sanumdong, North Korea. An examination of the photos
provided shows absolutely no indication of such activity.
I. Satellite Footage Of Sanumdong Facility Shows No Sign Of Imminent Launch
Images provided to NPR by private contractor DigitalGlobe consist of two low resolution images, one
of a building in the Sanumdong complex and the other of a train sitting along a rail line. In neither
photo is there any discernible amount of unusual activity.
The first image of a "production hall" bears a striking resemblance to a similar photo run by the
Washington Post
in
July 2018 where unnamed intelligence officials claimed that North Korea was building one or possibly
two liquid fueled ICBMs which appear to have never materialized or been used in any launch. The claims
came one month after President Trump met with Chairman Kim Jong Un in Singapore for a historic summit
between the United States and the DPRK.
NPR's claims that the imagery shows "vehicle activity" occurring around the facility. Yet close
inspection shows that the "activity" consists of a few inert vehicles, which appear to be a white
pickup and white dump truck or flatbed parked in a permanent position next to piles of metal. The
scene does not appear to be different from any number of sleepy yards of businesses that can be
examined by members of the public on Google Maps.
The second image, according to NPR, shows rail cars sitting "in a nearby rail yard, where two
cranes are also erected." The photo simply shows a train car sitting inert with empty flatbed cars and
hopper cars that are either filled with coal or empty. A second rail line similarly holds a number of
hoppers and flatbed cars. Hopper cars in particular are totally unsuitable for the transportation of
military technology such as missiles.
The tracks in the lower left corner are covered in snow, meaning that the train sat for many months
through the winter or was backed into its position. Considering that
US and international
sanctions
have caused an extreme scarcity of fuel in the DPRK it is likely that the trains have
not moved for quite some time, unless their diesel engines were converted to burn coal or wood.
In short, there is absolutely no indication that several low resolution photos of a facility in
North Korea have any activity in them outside of a few rusting vehicles that have sat without moving
for some time.
II. NPR's Sources Of Satellite Imagery Are Contractors For The CIA And Pentagon
The report by NPR lists two sources of satellite imagery - DigitalGlobe, Inc. and Planet Labs, Inc.
As
Disobedient Media
has previously reported, DigitalGlobe is an American vendor of satellite imagery
founded by a scientist who worked on the US military's
Star
Wars
ICBM defense program under President Ronald Reagan. DigitalGlobe began its existence in
Oakland, CA and was seeded with money from Silicon Valley sources and corporations in North America,
Europe and Japan.
Headquartered
in
Westminster CO, DigitalGlobe works extensively with
defense
and intelligence programs
. In 2016, it was
revealed
that DigitalGlobe was working with CIA chipmaker NVIDIA and
Amazon
Web Services
to create an AI-run satellite surveillance network known as
Spacenet
.
Planet Labs is a
private satellite imaging corporation
based in San Francisco, CA that allows customers with the
money to pay an opportunity to gain access to next generation surveillance capabilities. In February
2016, Federal technology news source
Nextgov
noted a
statement from former CIA Information Operations Center director and senior cyber adviser Sue
Gordon that Planet Labs, DigitalGlobe and Google subsidiary Skybox Imaging were all working with the
Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide location intelligence. Planet
Labs' own
website
also
lists press releases detailing past contracts for subscription access to high resolution imagery with
the NGA.
The pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies and defense contractors in attempts to
undermine negotiations with North Korea
does not create confidence in the already shaky claims
made by NPR regarding alleged preparations by the DPRK to participate in a missile launch. These
contentions are not supported in substance by any tangible facts. As claims and pressure continue to
build on President Donald Trump to
abandon the peace process
, there are multiple factions of the United States government who are
running a real risk of behaving in manners which could be interpreted as open sedition or refusal to
carry out the stated goals and policies of the President.
full disclosure: in 1990 i was in my sixteenth year as a
project manager for an oil field equipment manufacturer. we built
oilfield production equipment, and replacement equipment vessels for
major refineries around the US.
almost thirty years ago, at the end of gulf war I, there was a
video shown during a press briefing of a missile destroying a
loading platform in the gulf that was being used as warning base by
the iraqis. they explained during the briefing that it had been left
alone before the invasion as a diversion because the actual invasion
was land based from KSA.
the interesting part of this video was from a camera mounted in
the nose of the missile. it showed the "birds eye view" of the
flight of the missile. then as it closed on the target, the frame
changed. instantly. and the image that was shown on screen was
nothing like a loading facility or anything like an offshore
production platform that i had ever seen.
in my opinion, it was not even up to the quality of stanley
kubrick moon walk videos, and they were shot almost thirty years
before this video.
my point is, that was the first time i questioned the validity of
what the government was holding up and saying, "see what we did". in
the interim, i have done the same with numerous photographs presented
by the government saying "see what we see". in reality it was more
like "see what we tell you to see". now it has morphed to in your
face "we will tell you what to see and don't give a damn what you
think or do not see".
each time i see an article like this, i see the video of something
i was told was a loading platform, however, was anything butt.
I think that the draining of the swamp is ending up to be nothing
more than a lot of ******** from a professional con man. He'll move
onto developing TNN.
Hey, remember when Colin Powell showed pictures of Iraqi WMD
rail cars and truck trailers to the U.N. in the run-up to the big
war. This all looks equally legit.
Like every thing Chicken Hawk, it made for a headline, and crumbled
at the first investigation. America has fought many wars on the
basis of such flimsy evidence.
American foreign policy no longer makes sense, and that's deliberate.
Since The Donald went full Tricky **** on Syria, cruise missiles in
Damascus waving the poison gas narrative, it's been getting
deliberately more chaotic.
Trump and the other neocons can no
longer keep up a coherent narrative about the world wide organized
threat. So they've gone to chaotic contradictory statements,
gestures, and actions to keep the sense of crisis alive. The chaos is
the problem, and USA World Police is the solution.
So they've gone to chaotic contradictory statements ...
In the face of Chaos, MSM Conflicting or One Sided
Narratives... voters/people likely have to rely on the US Federal
Govt for "Truth, Problem Definition, Possible Solutions (which
increasingly are limited to just two), and for Powerful Federal
Funding of Response, Powerful MSM assertion of the Success, and
Powerful Narrative of How US Federal Govt was the Solution, The
Diplomat, The Disinterested Third Party, The Judge, The
Prosecutor, The Jailer,... and etc
I'll never forget how dementia man Bolton added in a demand for N
Korea to take away their chemical weapons too. Obviously meant to
sabotage the talks. Trump looking pretty foolish to have such bat
**** crazy by his side.
"... The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful way. ..."
Trump has driving desire to be seen as the first businessman president.
The appeal of Trump making 'allies pay their fair share' any reality check on how counterproductive the effort is to the
waning US empire
Trump's unique candidacy put him in the White House without any real foreign policy staff who would have long ago gotten
Trump to abandon the silly idea - at least after he was elected.
The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection
money' will change that trend in any meaningful way.
The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these silly shakedown attempts as the most
efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.
On Friday she called for legislation that would designate large technology companies as
"platform utilities," and for the appointment of regulators who'd unwind technology mergers
that undermine competition and harm innovation and small businesses.
"The idea behind this is for the people in this room," for tech entrepreneurs who want to
try out "that new idea," Warren told a packed and enthusiastic crowd. "We want to keep that
marketplace competitive and not let a giant who has an incredible competitive advantage snuff
that out."
Warren said venture capital "in this area" has dropped by about 20 percent because of a
perceived uneven playing field. She didn't provide more detail or say where she obtained her
figures.
Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up "Big Tech" companies is sure to stoke debate and add to the tension
between the Democratic Party and reliably Democratic Silicon Valley. While breaking up Big Tech isn't likely to
happen anytime soon, one nuance in her proposal is worth thinking about, and that's whether tech companies that
operate large marketplaces should also be able to participate in said marketplaces.
The most obvious impact this would have would be on Amazon. While in the universe of the American retail
industry Amazon's market share remains in the single digits, in e-commerce it's got around
50
percent market share
. When consumers shop on Amazon, they're presented with items sold by Amazon, and also
items that Amazon doesn't own or warehouse but merely hosts the listings. It's also increasingly getting into the
advertising business, so that when you're searching you'll be presented with a list of sponsored products in
addition to whatever results a search may generate.
A third-party seller on Amazon has a difficult relationship with Amazon, which can act both as partner and
competitor. Amazon can use its huge data sets to see how successful third-party sellers and products are, and if
they meet a certain profitability threshold Amazon can decide to compete with that third-party seller directly.
Someone might say, isn't that what grocery stores or Costco do with private label goods or Costco's Kirkland
brand? But the difference is that in physical retail, there are all sorts of stores where a producer can sell
their products -- Walmart, Target, Costco, major grocery chains, and so on. In e-commerce, with half the market
share, Amazon has a dominant position. While in the short run Amazon being able to compete with its third-party
sellers may be good for consumers, who can end up with lower prices, in the long run it may mean fewer producers
even bother to come up with new products, feeling that eventually Amazon will crowd them out of the marketplace.
Would restricting Amazon, which has grown so quickly and is popular with consumers, harm the economy?
Government's antitrust fight with Microsoft a generation ago ended up paying dividends for innovation. In the
2000s a common critique of Microsoft was that it "missed" the internet, and smartphones, and social media, but to
some extent that may have been because the company feared an expansion in emerging technologies would bring back
more scrutiny from the government. As a result, new tech platforms and companies bloomed. The same could happen in
the next decade if Amazon's ambitions were reined in a little.
"Break up Big Tech" is an easy emotional hook, but hopefully Warren's proposal will get all Americans to think
more about the power of tech companies and their platforms, and whether regulatory changes would best serve both
consumers and producers.
Thanks B. This is how empires end, or at least one way. Hubris gets them every time. I for
one will be glad to see US troops at the very least reduced in Italy, and for all of Europe
for that matter.
Especially now that the INF is dead. And I hear that Italy is now looking at
embracing China's B&R Initiative. I say have at it! There's the shiver waiting to run up
Washington's spine. You might find this amusing, too: >
https://thesaker.is/us-treats-luxembourg-like-a-vassal-state-or-us-imperial-hubris-gone-bonkers/
Little Luxembourg. It does bring a big smile. Keep going, Trump. You're on the right track.
More Art of the Deal, anyone?
This will be good for every one. Trump demands the Germans and Japanese pay for US
protection, which they reject and the US military goes home. Isn't that an excellent outcome
for all parties?
The only section that is slightly unclear is, "The only sound reason to keep the 30,000
U.S. troops in Germany is to prevent them from moving to Poland from where they could
threaten the country."
Surely the US occupation of Germany has been tacitly or latently threatening and
controlling and dominating and bullying and extorting Germany for around 74 years?
So what major difference would it make if they were moved a few hundred kilometers
away?
Kick 'em out! Germany has more than served her sentence!
The European people should support Trump in his desire to eliminate NATO. Of course the Deep
State in both Europe and the US will fight it tooth and nail. Maybe the #GiletsJaunes who
have been erased from western media will finally topple the Party of Davos candidate Macron.
And similar populist movements in other European countries can topple other Deep State
stooges from western Europe. Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the
Social Democrats implode in Germany.
Extortion because you're broke. We don't have the money to pay for it, so this
administration resorts to mob tactics to keep the scam going. "The government and us are cut
from the same cloth." Sam Giancana, former Chicago mob boss.
If that graphic is any indication of public opinion in Germany, things are even worse than
I'd heard.
There has been a small series of events where the German Government gave the US meddlers a
shove-off. First was the new gas pipeline Nord 2 - they refused to fold for perfectly good
economic reasons. Next was the German rejection of the horrible F-35. Recently I'm seeing
headlines about Germany and the Chinese 5G company.
Given all of this, I'm beginning to doubt if the Germans will allow the US to plant new
short-range nuclear missiles on their soil. Becoming a WW3 target for no good reason except
to please the US of A Imperia wouldn't seem to be a very clever move on their part.
I agree with Elliott A that it is better to have the US troops in Poland than in Germany -
and better that the inviters of the US troops then become the target for the defensive
nuclear missiles they force Russia to deploy rather than Germany.
Furthermore, if Poland is forced to pay the full cost of their invited US guests, maybe
their voters will eventually come to their senses and vote in more rational Polish
politicians.
The Poles are generally pseudo-Catholic and mercenary, pro-American in-name-only; as soon
as it could hit them in the pocket, they will pipe down very quickly and balk/bridle.
Hence Poland is a worthy (temporary) stopover for the US (including the NSA) when evicted
from Germany. The fact that Merkel is out soon is dangerous because she doesn't really G/A/F,
and will defer the decision to the next poor blighter.
There could be a treaty in place that says American troops can remain in Germany until the
year 2500 but Trump's just shot himself in the foot again by giving Germany a get-out
clause.
Zero hedge is reporting that Pence went a bit further than that and urged Germany To provoke
Russian Navy in the Kerch Strait by sending ships there in a freedom of navigation exercise.
Strangely enough Merkel said she was willing to provoke Russia, but thought doing it wouldn't
accomplish anything so she didn't want to provoke Russia for no reason. God, how insane are
these idiots. And now it looks like in response Pence/Trump will extort Germany for not being
mindlessly obedient enough.
Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the Social Democrats implode
in Germany.
Posted by: ab initio | Mar 8, 2019 11:49:49 AM | 6
The problem is though, that the Deep State have already reserved their places in Merkel's
successors, the AfD. All of these right-wing "populist" parties acros Europe seem to be no
more than a cynical vehicle for the Deep State to hijack popular discontent and channel it
into a new form of slavery to replace the old. Hence Steve Banner's dubious and highly
dangerous politicking for the so-called populist movement in Europe.
A real future lies in Jeremy Corbyn and maybe also a few other left-wing parties in Europe
(as long as they don't become compradors like Syriza) - but the Deep State is fighting Corbyn
tooth and nail. In Germany there is Die Linke who have some good people and some good
policies (from my limited knowledge!) - but their popularity is still in the doldrums,
unfortunately.
And of course, the extortion must be paid in US Dollars. Clearly, the threat is all about
keeping Dollar Hegemony alive by reducing the massive trade deficit. I see AfD making capital
thanks to this. As for Japan, Russia will not sign a Peace Treaty with it until all foreign
military forces are removed--a condition that's been reiterated several times over the last
few months to which I've linked. Okinawans are furious at being twice colonized and are at
the end of their rope. So far they've been peaceful, but I think it's clear to them by now
that the only way to remove the foreign vermin is to literally push them into the sea.
Korea's situation's been discussed on that thread.
For the domestic Outlaw US Empire, shutting down the Overseas Empire of Bases and the
related destabilization projects globally would save @ $1 Trillion/year--an utter wastage of
monies for projects that are decidedly NOT in the National Interest. And as most here
understand, the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an
Outlaw and an Empire. And it would become cleaner too as the US Military is the most
polluting entity on the planet.
Isn't Poland offering to pay the United States $2 billion to establish a base called Fort
Trump?
BTW, perhaps this is a ruse to remove all U.S. troops from Syria. I'd love to be there
when Elliott "debt collector" Abrams turns up demanding the money from Assad. There is an
opportunity for one of the greatest reality TV programs ever (I'm a neo-con, get me out of
here) which makes me wonder if that's Trump's reason for this scheme.
All Americans needs to protect Americans in the US is a coast guard and a border patrol.
Everything else is either protection for corporations doing business [which should be added
to the price of their products/services to reflect true costs] or empire.
Yes, it's another damp squib, another no-win, another over-promise, another posture, like all
the others.
This is all Trump knows and integrity never enters the equation.
Any sign of that border wall, that the Mexican government was going to pay for?
Not exactly "The Art of The Deal". more like one long and embarrassing suicide note.
I don't exactly dislike Trump particularly as he has "Mullered" a number of cretinous
insiders whom required a reality check but he is hindbound by his capinet; none of his plans
went through and he is in it well over his depth particularly since he appears to be
suffering from ADHD, dementia and schizophrenia - just what you need in the
Commander-in-Chief?
On the bright side, you can get a bigly discount for being a faithful toady and swearing
allegiance to the US of A. Wonder where the US 'leaders' got the idea of swearing allegiance
to a foreign power?
....the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an Outlaw
and an Empire....
Trump's just demonstrated that by staying out of the very recent Indo-Pakistan incident.
Maybe he didn't want Americans dying in the shithole that is the sub-continent. Maybe he
didn't see any opportunity to line his own pocket. Whatever his reason, he did the right
thing. Would Hillary have done the same? I don't know.....
Empire is getting the rest of its plates spinning so that must mean that the end is
getting closer. I don't think that the Philippine's plate is spinning fast enough so Trump
needs to give it some special love.
Pretty soon we will need a plate spinning scorecard just to keep track of all the
action.
Syria
Iran
Ukraine
Venezuela
Russia
China
Korea
EU w/ NATO
and now Germany and Japan
What plates am I missing?
Think about how much of the peoples resources are going to keeping these plates
spinning.
Who are going to come to the table with what arguments when the debt music stops?
* Trump has driving desire to be seen as the first businessman president.
* The appeal of Trump making 'allies pay their fair share' any reality check on how
counterproductive the effort is to the waning US empire
* Trump's unique candidacy put him in the White House without any real foreign policy staff
who would have long ago gotten Trump to abandon the silly idea - at least after he was
elected.
The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline.
Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful
way.
The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these
silly shakedown attempts as the most efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.
American troops pack up your shit and get the f*ck out, oh and here's an invoice for $100
billion to cover the cost of cleaning up your toxic waste.
Thanks for your business.
The only Germans that want them are restaurants and shops located near the bases and other
businesses that cater to them.
Yes, Trump's new policy is very welcome if it gets Germany to kick them out or, better
yet, get out of NATO. I wonder if Trump intends it - or is he just plain stupid?
Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, said the administration was sending a deliberate message by demanding "Cost
Plus 50" from South Korea first , even though that effort fell short.
Ouch, poor SK. What a timing, straight after 'successful' NK talks.
With allies like that, who needs enemies?
Perhaps this will finally get the EU to kick the US and its NATO out.
But I don't underestimate the ability of EU elites to crawl to the US. It's like second
nature. And they get their pockets stuffed full of dollars to be kept in line.
Let me guess the free loading douche bag country that gets the most support from the US will
magically be excluded from these demands yet again.
I sure hope they try this protection racquet in Iraq. The government is already under huge
pressure to kick the Americans out after Trumps visit there last month.
What's America's plan to maintain economic wealth at the end of the debt spiral and dollar
collapse????
I have an idea!! Tribute! Hey, it worked for the Aztecs. Soon many countries will
see it as a small price to pay to avoid having democracy brought to their countries. Previous
versions of this scheme, such as buying US treasury debt knowing full well it will never be
repaid wont cut it anymore. So we are moving towards the real thing.
When I used to play football in my young days (i.e. soccer for the american lads here), I had
to pass by a huge US military base in the south of Germany each time in order to reach the
training ground. But strangely, I never challenged the necessity of that base in the first
place - probably due to my lack of geopolitical, historical consciousness. Only after they
build a second, even bigger base directly on the opposite side of the road and after two
combat helicopters - for the first time - flew directly above my head, I finally became aware
and started to question things. I wonder how many people that drive the same road each day
actually do feel the same...
Anyway, thank you b and thanks to all the well-experienced forumites for providing the vital
informations and inputs that helped me to better understand what is going on after all.
This is quite a slap in the face as the US has been raising tensions with Russia and any
conflict with Russia would likely cause the destruction of Europe.
Wondering how this will play out in places such as the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain where
the U.S. actually pays the dictator to lease the Navy and Air Force bases? Where the U.K.
pays the dictator for a British naval facility, too, which is shared?
Remember when Bahrain and other Arab countries in the Persian Gulf didn't want bases to be
called bases? Instead they were each a Regional Operations Support Establishment, aka ROSE.
Surely there's a different term now, but we still pay to lease bases.
Give trump credit: he raises the issue. And by doing so he gives people the opportunity to be
thrust into the act of questioning.
I continue to believe that this is really the overriding attribute of his presidency. What
people like the Germans do with this opportunity is entirely incumbent on them. But it is an
opportunity nonetheless, and as b correctly asserts, this is a welcomed change from the
political grab ass of the preceding administrations.
We should wish good luck to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in hosting US
bases: not only will they have to foot the cost of hosting US forces but their entire
economies by now must be revolving around being open-air military barracks. All while their
own citizens are voting with their feet.
Psychohistorian @ 22: You're missing large parts of Africa (possibly Djibouti where there's a
US base; Rwanda which is a US satrapy under President Paul Kagame; western Africa where there
are offshore oil and gas deposits) and Georgia where the US operates a bioweapons laboratory.
Once again, on the surface this is obvious extortion. But I can't help but think this is
really a purposeful 'own goal.' I know this is likely giving Trump too much credit, but in a
parallel universe this is exactly what you would do if you had a hidden agenda to enfeeble
the US to cause our eventual pull back. There's no political way to slowly scale back our
involvement, but there is a way to overreach under everyone's noses and get the same end
result. Is this a 666d chess move or just what happens as empire descends into chaos,
grasping at straws? Either way I'm fine with the obvious result!
We are seeing the true colors. What we now have are Co-Presidents: Bolton, Trump; and Co-Vice
Presidents Pompous and Pence. The 4 morons do not realize they are isolating the U.S.A. and
hastening rejection of the USD.
Adhere my diktat and keep purchasing our T-bills.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has allegedly stood up to pressure from Washington as she
declined a proposal by Vice President Mike Pence to send German Navy ships towards Russia's
Crimea, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Pence
allegedly wanted German ships to sail through the Kerch Strait separating Crimea from
mainland Russia. France, [.]
next, trump asks venezuela to pay in advance for the invasion. in usd.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Mar 8, 2019 3:59:51 PM |
link
This is an utterly brilliant Empire-killing move by Trump. Speaking of the UK I wonder how
much we will be asked to pony up for the US air bases and troops still in the UK 75 years
after D-day. This should hit just after Brexit and we may have a different government in the
chair......
the germans would be owned by the russian,gadaffi saddam hussein serbia and hitler if it was
not for uk and usa.
we keep the world safe and stop irania and the hamas terroist pushing israel into the sea.
i say to the germans pay the man or be invaded by evil doers
Although I didn't read or watch, it appears most major BigLie Media have published/aired this
story, a point I was curious about since Friday's usually a slow news day, thus begging the
question: What's the public's reaction? Might there be a groundswell calling for returning
the troops home so that both the occupied nation and the occupier save monies? And what of
the opposite argument, that even more troops and bases are needed to defend against the Red
and Yellow Menace?
If I was a president who could not step too far out of line due to powerful forces all around
me, I would take the ideas of neocons et al and push them even further over the line past
reasonable.
No-one in power could argue against me because I'm implementing their ideas, even though I'm
taking them too far.
But pushing things too far creates real resistance, and makes the real policies obvious, and
brings about the end of the empire.
I might decide to:
1. Move the US embassy to Jerusalem, to make it clear who calls the shots
2. Demand that NATO countries pay more and publicly disrespect their leaders
3. Demand that Germany and Japan pay for their occupation
4. Obviously attack Venezuela (in contrast to previous less-obvious attacks)
5. and other increasingly outrageous demands until the vassals get fed up
Meanwhile I'd do other things that I have to do to keep the powerful forces happy.
I may be a terrible person with no 3-d chess master plan, but perhaps things would be
different after my term. And "different" might approximate "better".
"Obama
was a smiling murderer, says Ilhan Omar" And of course, she's 100% correct. As Ben Norton
noted in this tweet , Omar's
words were citied in a Politico article that he linked. You'll note, that by extension
she also called Trump a murderer, just not as "polished."
There's merit in your argument. For example, the so far small contingent of anti-war
Progressive Democrats either were elected or emboldened thanks to Trump, Rep. Omar being the
most prominent example. The same could be said of pushing the far-right's policy goals, as
that's also generated resistance. Too bad the initial call for resistance was based on the
Russiagate hoax. Time will tell!
Okay. If you don't get your weekly payola, then shut down the foreign bases. Only thing is,
what do we do with all these armed people trained to kill on command, looking for some action
in between saying the Pledge of Allegiance and painting Bible verses on bombs?
I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too
many cops on steroids as it is.
@ teri who wrote
"
I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too many
cops on steroids as it is.
"
Its called karma
I live here too....the energy needs to be refocused on planet rehab and going to the stars
along with my standard make global finance public
It sure will.
Especially the Neocons as they scramble around trying to collect all the rust flakes to glue
them back onto dilapidated USA's dilapidated Foreign Policy.
I'm sorry, but many people posting here are delusional about Trump's motives.
For a start, none of the issues discussed in this post would cause the American people
much in the way of dispute. Broadly, most Americans would think that other countries should
pay for US "support". Americans disagree quite a bit about "The Wall" and gender issues
around public restrooms; but not so much about the issues raised in this post. So there IS NO
RESISTANCE, and WILL NOT BE ANY RESISTANCE, within the US, on getting countries to pay.
Other countries might have problems but what other countries think has never been much of
an issue for Americans.
The issue of getting other countries to pay is about cost and the out-of-control US debt.
And, also, about Trump electioneering.
Should other countries refuse to pay (or request US troops to leave), then they can expect
to be sanctioned or economically damaged. Just consider how France (a US ally) had one of
their prize jewel (world-beating) nuclear technology intellectual assets, Alstom's
Arabelle steam turbine , taken from them by the US. This happened way before Trump so
demonstrates how the US operates (the art of the [coercive] deal is the way the US rolls).
France, and in particular Macron, who was French Finance/Economic Minster, at the time, had
no choice but to accept the takeover. Macron actually appeared quite gleeful about it (Macron
was effectively working for US, not French, interests).
Can Columbia or Kosovo afford to pay? Or will Washington increase the financial support they
give to those countries to cover the bill.
As for NATO, the core system was based on the countries that are members providing a
reliable easily-secured base for American expeditionary forces to attack and invade one of
the two countries that are at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. In exchange for that the
United States bankrolled NATO. If Trump breaks that bargain, what incentive is there for the
core members of NATO to allow wars to be fought on their territory particularly now that
Putin has said he is focused on improving the lives of ordinary Russians rather than going to
war with Europe but will make sure that the decision centres of any countries that attack or
are somehow involved in an attack on Russia will be destroyed. None as far as I can see, so
it looks like it'll be goodbye NATO.
@55ADKC - why would other countries pay to have the usa military on their soil? this explains
the whole agenda of fearmongering that has been in overdrive 24/7 since i was a kid...
nothing else explains it.. keep the fear up to justify this craziness.. i can't see anyone
paying for it.. i sure wouldn't want that if i was german, japanese or south korean for
example... now, maybe the leaders of these countries are going to be faced with a stark
choice... side with this b.s., or get removed from office... i praise trump for bringing this
forth and hope that he strikes a big fat zero from the countries that have usa bases on
them...
I think Trump believes the hype fed to Americans forever that the US soldiers are the good
guys and they really are protecting these countries. He also has a reputation for squeezing
contractors etc.
To MAGA he thinks it needs better deals and more people sending money in.
@59. I think that's right. He genuinely believes US forces are out there protecting 'our
allies' and keeping the world safe for democracy etc. But he also thinks 'our allies' are
taking advantage of American generosity. This is a common sentiment among Trump voters.
I think most Americans think they are protecting the world.
iv> i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and
norway for are freedoms.
we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big bat
folks must suffer.
the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world
does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be along
soon to take are democrasy
Posted by: chuck newsum , Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM |
link
i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and norway for are
freedoms.
we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big
bat folks must suffer.
the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world
does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be
along soon to take are democrasy
Posted by: chuck newsum | Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM |
link
Because they are (particularly, in Europe) occupied countries and many things can be done
to ensure compliance (economic, gladio operations, sanctions, theft of assets, prosecution
for any offence [no matter how small, incidental, or accidental] if a dollar is involved,
influx of refugees, war [directly or adjacent to target country], removal of post-colonial
areas of influence, instigating financial collapse [Deutche Bank is supposed to be very
vulnerable and would effect the entire EU/world], etc).
Why couldn't France protect Alstom? Would France be able to resist if the US targeted the
African CFA countries (which are France's neo-colonial milk-cows and essential to the
economic well-being of France and detrimental to the African people subject to the CFA
franc)?
You "praise Trump" for raising this issue but it's just the same old, same old.
The only place relatively secure is the Chinese/Russia milieu but that's the other side of
the real "wall" and restricts the expansion of OBOR. And the price (for Russia and China) is
having the entire western nuclear arsenal aimed at you.
Whether or not any payments are actually made will make no difference; US troops will
remain in occupied territory. (BTW: Europe will pay, the key is Germany. If Germany refuse to
pay the rest will follow. But Germany can't fudge this; it would amount to open resistance
and a re-negotiation of the outcome of the 2nd World War and, unless the US want to give up
the fruits of their 1945 victory, I don't see that happening. Germany will realise that, if
the US insist, they will have to comply; it's the direct consequence of losing the war and
being occupied.]
Moving American troops to Poland? Surely, the benefits are many. First, since the size of the
military is much smaller than in Warsaw block times, there are many military grounds.
Particularly in areas where forests are larger, climate harsher, and local men are fond of
beating up strangers when they get drunk. Local roads are crappy and American soldiers are
prone to hit side road trees. To summarize, martial skills and spirit are bound to improve.
For even better results, they should be moved to Estonia, Latvia and Finnmark, areas
bordering Russian Federation. OTOH, fleecing Balts would be like squeezing blood from stone.
E.g. Lithuania is an exemplary NATO member, spending 2% of GDP on the military, and yet they
cannot afford a tank.
He's already said he doesn't believe the hype. He said it 60 Minutes after his
inauguration...
"We've spent 6 Trillion dollars in the Middle East....6 Trillion! We could have rebuilt
America twice. It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop
to it."
The countries Trump wants to hit with fees are those he wanted the US military to pull out of
anyway. The cold war relics. Europe, Korea ect. Any bases to do with Israel Iran Venezuela
will not be hitting up the host country for extortion money. Bases he wants to use to
pressure China will also likely be exempt.
Those that do get hit with the fees, Trump doesn't give a shit if the US stays or leaves, so
long as the US is well paid if it stays.
I don't think Corbyn is the Messiah you take him for. He has sound ideas on not bombing
foreigners - unusual in a British politician - but apart from that he's a busted flush. Not
even close observers care to predict who will come out on top in the mud wrestling at
Westminster but if Corbyn makes it watch him accommodate.
.
With great respect, "b", and as happens rarely, I don't believe this article is on target.
America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence. Forget Aachen. It'll be a
long time before any purely European defence force is up to scratch.
The Europeans are hoping that America will hold the fort in the meantime. That's not an
alliance. It's a marriage of temporary convenience.
Of course the other problem with this is it makes the American forces official mercenaries
rather than national forces and all the legal consequences that flow from that.
History first as tragedy and later as a farce. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Beria reported only
to Stalin and Stalin reported only to Satan." Now Bolton reports only to Trump and Chump
reports only to Sreadsheets. So much winning and multi-dimensional chess... It's deplorable.
Lol
@59 and @60 This is why the shock will be all the more stunning to the Americans.
Its "allies" have no problem with Uncle Sam spending like a drunken sailor. As far as they
are concerned, well, who cares.
But if Trump insists THEY pay for American profligacy then they are going to say "no".
American pundits will then pontificate on how much MORE it would cost those allies, and
the response will be: don't be stupid, we won't spend money to protect ourselves against a
threat that doesn't exist.
Because - and let's be honest here - in a post-NATO world the only military threat to
Europe will be the USA, and the US Army will be on the other side of the Atlantic.
I see a number of comments where the question's begged: Just what nation intends to invade
Europe such that the continuing Outlaw US Empire's occupation's warranted? Putin and Xi want
Europe to join the EAEU/BRI confab--invasion via commerce?!
It appears the Anti-Communist Crusade is having a hard time dying in some quarters,
particularly where continually invoking it is required dogma by controlling interests.
I think Trump and his MAGA boils everything down to money. Money goes out and money comes in.
His job is to slow the money going out and get more money coming in. I think it is that
simple. You get bombed by our smart freedom and democracy bombs then you should be decent
enough to pay for it. Also our bases are protecting you from getting bombed by evildoers
bombs. You should definitely pay for that. Why are we?
I'd like to see a study of the amount of money spent into the local economy by the occupation
forces in Germany, Japan and South Korea. Not just by the military but by the servicemen,
families, civilian contractors for housing, travel, schools, food, entertainment, etc
Obviously paying to be occupied is not happening, but there is some logic to the idea that
the occupied receive some economic benefits from being occupied, including but not limited to
a reduction in spending on their own military.
Any spending into the local economy is dwarfed by the amount of ecological damage
done--just look at Subic Bay or Okinawa. And yes, studies have been done into both aspects;
I've read them, but have no links.
." It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop to
it."
Trump just does not believe in others hype, only his own hype. So show me evidence he is
stopping the spending which was his main point in what was infaur to Americans. Spending on
the military is even higher, 6 trillion is now 8 trillion even if the accountants still cant
tell who got paid
If Trump has shown us anything it is that he believes in the hype that whats good for Big
Business is good for America. Even his request for more money from NATO countries is a
request/demand to buy more from the MIC and not money to offset US military spending.
Sure, the reasons for the increased military spending are bogus, but he adds fuel to
supposed conflicts with Iran, Russia, China, North Korea that allows him to justify more
spending. Trumps just replaced Obama/Bush hype with his own personal hype. Call it Trump
hype.
Pft, that's what economist Michael Hudson has been saying:
The US military spending overseas during the Vietnam war resulted in a balance of payments
crisis, with the surprise solution being the recycling of USD from offshore economies back
into the US financial sector.
And it's been going on ever since.
I'll try to get a link ... Super
Imperialism also recently linked by the indefatigable karlof1.
The larger America's balance-of-payments deficit becomes, the more dollars end up in the
hands of European, Asian and Near Eastern central banks, and the more money they must
recycle back to the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bonds.
It's worthwhile to read any and all of Hudson's writings, including his autobiographical
essay. He has worked in the belly of the beast; Chase Manhattan bank and Standard Oil (Exxon)
just for starters, the Treasury and Finance departments of USA and Canada amongst others.
People, people!...Where will the military go? It's so obvious, it is staring us in the
face...
Space!
Ah, but not just space --
Mars!
The War Planet!
And best of all -- there's no people there! They can have their war games ad infinitum!!!
To boldly go...ok, I know, that dates me...
But oh my, blow it up! Blow it all up!! Keep on making horrible weapons, ship them off to
Mars! Raytheon on steroids; what's not to love????? Trump will go down in history - no - up,
up, and AWAY!!! [Just think - he'll have to visit the troops at Thanksgiving, take them a
turkey - oh and take any Bushes and Boltons and Obamas and Clintons with him as it is rather
far, a few Thanksgivings away but who's counting?]
People are really thinking too hard.
The Trump strategy is simple a la "The Apprentice":
Get a bunch of ambitious people to commit to deliver to outlandish goals. These goals are set
such that achieving or failing them, the blame goes to the failure but the success goes to
the leader.
If they fail: "You're Fired"
If they succeed: "I'm Brilliant"
This proposal broadens USA's demand that Germany terminate its plans to obtain energy imports
from Russia via Northstream. Trump has already asserted publicly (weeks ago) that the added
cost of LNG imports should be viewed as a defense-related cost. Via this new mechanism, the
cost will be not be borne 100% by Germany.
To understand why this new approach is likely to work, please read ADKC's comments.
Pundits may poke fun but the AZ Empire is deadly serious and most AZ elites will be
supportive. Especially when they are insulated from the cost (as they are).
@6ADKC... i agree with arbys view on this... trump and an undue number of americans probably
think they are doing some good protecting others.. it's laughable! now, as to your question
about france and alstrom... i don't know the specifics, but i know how easily euro
politicians, and politicians in general can be bought... i think it is excellent trump is
raising this issue, as i hope the leadership in these poodle countries recognize their goose
will be cooked soon enough, as ordinary people won't stand for it.. so, i am simplifying here
and i have to race out and will be back later to add more.. i see what you and jackrabbit are
getting at, but at some point this mafia-gangster strategy is going to collapse.. maybe i am
too naive, or idealistic.. i will give you that!
Your assessment is fine and not without merits but the other variable you seem to be
missing is the German people and others in Europe, themselves.
Will this cowtowing to the US bullying not in the end fully ensconse their leaders as the
globalist shills they truly are and thus lead to their demise? That is what b us alluding to.
We are unaware of Trump's motivations, here, but that is inconsequential when we are talking
about him waking up the people of Europe to finally give US the boot.
While cruising around the internet tubes I ran into a casual remark about Syria to the effect
that since the US is doing an occupation there, aren't "we" entitled to payment? If there is
any truth to a spate of recent headlines, the neocons have already solved that one.
How would ISIS have acquired any tonnage of gold? Perhaps it was part-payment for the oil
they sold until the Russians intervened. (the US sure didn't bother those sales!) More likely
they stole it from citizens and businesses. There have been LOTS of reports about the US
secretly rescuing ISIS fighters. Now here is yet another motive for those airlifts. I predict
any such gold will be quickly melted down so as to make it forever untraceable. Would Pompeo
or Bolton do such a thing?
It's bad enough that Omar tackled AIPAC, but to dump on Saint Obama is likely to get her
pegged as a "self-hating negro". Wonder what Speaker Nancy will do this time? Threaten to
waterboard her?
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This was sent to me yesterday by a concerned Indian, with the tag of..."Be careful with
your country"
He's right!
Re: "America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence."
Defence against whom exactly? People pushing the narrative that the Russian Federation is
a menace never mention the numbers involved. The European countries have roughly 3 times the
population, 5 times the military spending and a massive advantage in GDP, look it up. If you
add the US to the equation then more like 5 times the population and 15 times the military
spending. The Russians have nukes of course but with the odds stacked up so spectacularly
against them I don't blame them for thinking they need them as a deterrent. If you had
another adversary in mind don't be shy.
Thanks for the links. I have been following Hudson for the last 12 years and agree with
much of what he says. I do disagree that dollar holdings are a tax on other countries. These
dollars for the most part are paid to companies for goods and services. They exchange some of
this with their central bank to invest locally or pay expenses. The central bank then prints
their local currency out of thin air to exchange. The USD are then counted as reserves which
allows them to create more local currency by 10+ times, depending on their reserve
requirements. This money is spent or invested in the local economy.
The USD reserves can also be used to fund their own trade deficits with other countries,
or pay of USD denominated loans
A lot has changed since 1971. After the Vietnam War was winding down the US pulled out of
Bretton Woods as Hudson anticipated. They then established the Petrodollar which was not
anticipated. This put more USD into the hands of OPEC nations as they were told to accept
only USD and in return would be allowed higher oil prices, and much was recycled back to the
US, but they and the rest of the world had other options.
This option was the Eurodollar which began in the 60's in a limited fashion . A later
sub-option was Eurodollars in the many tax havens, which developed first on British
territories and then in the Carribean.
These options being exercised limited the amount of dollars coming back to the US and
caused higher interest rates in order to attract some more of the dollars back.
The 1985 Plaza accord put in place an agreement to weaken the dollar with the US to buy
more imported goods as they encouraged more US companies to move offshore to produce in low
wage countries to keep inflation down. In return the deficits would be funded by other
countries resending back the USD they received by buying treasuries. This was when the US
realized they could spend and run up fiscal/trade deficits without consequences, and so they
did. Oh my.
Then after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent looting bu oligarchs the
Eurodollar Market, especially in the tax havens , exploded even further as these oligarchs
and western investors transferred their stolen loot to these offshore tax havens which were
already loaded with dollars from the criminal drug trade (mafia-five eyes) and multinational
corporations evading taxes at home
In 1990 the Fed then made it easier for US banks to import and use these Eurodollars by
setting a zero reserve requirement (same as Fed Funds) on Eurodollar deposits which they
could then loan out at many order of magnitudes. This fueled the great credit and asset
bubbles using drug money and stolen Soviet asset money which came in to buy Trumps property
and stocks. It also allowed banks to increase credit to cash strapped consumers who felt the
pinch of neoliberalism and globalization, since the banks were flush with cheap cash. This
led to the Great Collapse in 2008
Added to this Eurodollar supply from 1993 was Chinas own oligarchs growing increasingly
rich from US investment/trade and from converting the peoples assets to individual party
members who wanted a safe place to hide their loot and evade taxes in China
Quantitative Easing following the crash of 2008 provided another source of a cash influx
for the US. Toxic waste from foreign and local banks were bought with USD printed from thin
air.
Recent Quantitative Tightening meant trouble though. So Trumps new tax measures made it
possible for US corporations to return Eurodollars hidden offshore which is fueling stock
buybacks and propping up the market. If not for this a 2008 collapse would be here.
When the next crash happens, I am sure the US will surprise us yet again. Pretty sure the
fix will be named Green something or another and a Carbon Dollar/Tax
@70 english outsider.. i agree with @13 BM... however, the msm in the uk is so warped, maybe
they will succeed in marginalizing corbyn.. i thought
this article today from jonathan cook was pretty good.. as for the usa being the backbone
of europe military and etc.. europe needs to grow a spine themselves and stop taking it in
the rear from the usa.. this suggestion from trump is a good place to start by saying no...
maybe the poodles are incapable.. that sounds like what you are saying..
@pft... i think i agree with you, although i don't study the financial dynamics enough..
the bailout from 2008 will be followed by more bailouts.. they will just be bigger... that is
the name of the game - bust and bailout.. bailing out the banks, until the world asks for
something different..
"Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment. " Oh rather you're brainwashed daily that Russia is an awful place
where Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment.
I'm pretty sure not a single Russian believes that the west is going to invade. For
reasons that are obvious, or should be obvious.
You must be joking ! 70 per cent of Americans do not know what the Constitution is, and
six per cent don't even know when Independence Day falls. In a recent survey just over a half
of Americans didn't know what the Taliban are , despite the fact they led the charge in
Afghanistan.
When looking at a map of the world, young Americans had a difficult time correctly
identifying Iraq (1 in 7) and Afghanistan (17%). This isn't that surprising, but only a slim
majority (51%) knew where New York was. According to Forbes and National Geographic, an
alarming 29% couldn't point to the Pacific Ocean.
Many didn't know where Europe is let alone Spain.
Americans cultural ? What a hoot !
runner911 -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 04:09
Be assured Russia is more than capable of defending itself against Western ( USA )
aggression, plus they hold the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet , so lets be clear
no-one is going to attack Russia and risk nuclear annihilation in return. As regards being
surrounded by NATO, how do you think the yanks would react if the same were to apply to the
USA and that sad corrupt country was surrounded by Russian Forces ? The last time it happened
in 1962, as I recall the yanks were whining like whipped dogs, but eventually agreed to
dismantle their missiles in Turkey provided the Russians did the same in Cuba.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 5 Sep 2015 11:59
You lost the argument, so you are trying to change the subject. Now we can see why Western
media doesn't allow an open discussion - you don't have much to say.
East-central Europe was invaded by Germans, Russians, Ottomans, French, even the Swedes.
Germans murdered about 15 million people here. Ottomans (Turks) about 10 million. Russians
liberated us from a murderous German occupation after WWII and stayed way too long...
Russian victims are in tens of thousands. Given that Russians lost about 1.5 million
soldiers liberating us from Germans and saved us from planned extermination by Nazis over
time, we keep some perspective about it. But I am not sure your ideological and slogan-driven
thinking would understand any of it...
EugeneGur -> zenithmaster 5 Sep 2015 11:43
This has zero to do with Russia's poor relations with the EU and everything to do the
Russians' smaller spending power.
This is not quite true. You underestimate the power of the sentiment. One example:
Russian tourism to Estonia dropped 60% after the scandal with the Bronze soldier in 2007,
long before any decrease in the buying power, and it never recovered.
You are right, of course, that the decreased value of the ruble affected mass tourism,
but the effect was multiplied by the anger towards Europe, believe me, it was. Going through
the visa process was always annoying and humiliating but under the present circumstances it
became unbearable. This one thing that affects all European countries whether its Bulgaria or
Italy.
MaoChengJi -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 09:56
Yeah, something like what thecorporateclass said above.
I'll add this: deep down even people like you don't believe in any Russian 'invasion'
in Ukraine. They know: if Russia did invade, it would've been over long time ago. The
question, rather, is about Kiev regime's control of the border, which would amount to a
blockade of Donetsk-Lugansk republics; blocking all the supplies, attacking from all
directions, and exterminating people who feel ethnically Russian.
This can not happen: it would've brought the Russian government down, and therefore no
Russian government could participate in it; be it led by Putin, Dugin, or Navalny, or anyone
at all. It's just a physical impossibility. IMO.
TheCorporateClass -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 06:37
The West agrees to drop this missile shield, Putin agrees to stop his military
interference in Ukraine.
This needs correcting IF it is to work as a solution.
The West agrees to drop this missile shield, agrees to stop it's interventions into
Ukrainian government and it's politics, agrees to stop FUNDING and GUIDING far right neo-nazi
militias and their political wings, agrees to stop making intentionally
false/unproven/fictional accusations against Russia & Putin's Government, stops providing
military intelligence to Ukraine (a non-Nato country), and admits to the direct connection
between the externally caused "political and social" instability in Ukraine begun by EU/NATA
and the externally caused "political and social" instability and then Civil War in Syria with
oil/gas supplies from Russia and Qatar ... then that would be a great first step towards the
truth of matters bullshit.
Then all of Russia and Putin at their ELECTED President would no doubt agree to stop his
humane military interference in Ukraine on behalf of those people having their human rights
and lives taken by ideologically driven psychopaths and their corrupt crazies from
Washington, Berlin, Riyadh, Doha, and Tel Aiv.
Simple really.
HollyOldDog -> raffine 5 Sep 2015 04:59
Whereas there are convoys of Russian trucks that are stopping the East Ukrainians of
starving to death. The only 'gifts' that West Ukraine gives to their East compatriates is
constant shelling, grad missile fire, mine fields and snipers that shoot any East Ukrainians
on sight whether they are men ,women or children.
MaoChengJi -> jezzam 4 Sep 2015 23:48
I believe the western anti-missile installations along the Russian borders give the
impression that the US is trying to break the MAD balance and create, at some point in the
future, a defense against retaliatory nuclear strike. That seems like the only rational
explanation for those installations. For do you think they are for?
MaoChengJi -> andy4248 4 Sep 2015 22:10
"Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment. "
Oh rather you're brainwashed daily that Russia is an awful pleace where Russians are
brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to invade them at any
moment.
I'm pretty sure not a signle Russian believes that the west is going to invade. For
reasons that are obvious, or should be obvious.
crackling -> MaoChengJi 4 Sep 2015 22:03
fingerprints is copying GWBush's data collection on citizens and visitors to the US - last
night I just had my photo and fingerprints taken on customs entry to Taiwan - I expect it's
becoming the norm these days.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 21:22
Address Obama's admission that "US assisted in the transition of power", why do you skip
over it? $15 billion was a loan and it was used for the Ukrainian budget. If someone stole
some of it, prove it and charge them.
I never said that Russians didn't try to influence Kiev, but so did US - listen to the
recording, it assigns roles for different protest leaders. Ashton was an EU official and she
was standing with the protestors - so were many others, incl. Nuland, ambassador, etc... -
that goes way beyond "trade agreement".
I am a Slovak and I comment on anything I feel like. If you have a problem with that,
maybe you don't understand democracy and freedom of speech. By the way, most people in my
part of Europe (from Budapest to Vienna to Prague) roughly share my view of the situation. We
know Russians, we know Ukrainians, and we can judge for ourselves.
Popeyes -> andy4248 4 Sep 2015 19:45
It's very sad but Russians are for more aware of what's going on politically than their
Western counterparts. The fact that they have a low opinion of Westerners is hardly
surprising and they certainly don't have to be " brainwashed ' by the Kremlin to know what's
going on. They only have to look at Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Ukraine the list is endless to
figure it out. You could blame GM food for the fact that Americans seem to be pretty dim and
clueless on Europeans affairs, but as for the rest of Europeans I guess they are the ones
that are really "brainwashed".
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 19:32
Thou protest too much.
The "baroness" was an EU foreign secretary, that's pretty high up. In addition: US
ambassador, assistant sec for Europe (Nuland), and a number of other officials were at the
Maidan protests - videos and all.
The recording was very specific about who (Yats) should be Prime Minister and how it
should be done. If US also does that in Spain, that's even a bigger problem.
$5bn is a lot of "civil organizations" - most of it in the last 5-10 years. Russia gave a
loan - that is very different.
Finally, Obama literally said "we assisted with the transition of power in Ukraine"
what other proof can one possible have than an admission by the chief?
By the way I used the term "assist in an overthrow". To "orchestrate" is more pro-active.
Given what has been made public there definitely was "assistance" (see Obama's statement
above), whether that amounts to "orchestrate" like in 1953 Iran, I would leave to the
historians.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 18:52
There are videos of dozens of Western leaders standing on the podium with the
demonstrators on Maidan (just imagine Lavrov joinig an Occupy protest in New York or
London).
There are recordings of Nuland deciding on who will run Ukraine ("f...k Europe").
US spent 5 billion in 20 years on "civil groups" in Ukraine.
If you prefer an infantile denial, I can't help you. Just don't be surprised if you become
irrelevant.
Beckow -> dmitryfrommoscow 4 Sep 2015 18:34
Yes it was always mostly about the visa-free access to EU. Ukrainians want to move to
Europe for jobs, benefits, school, etc... That was what drove Maidan energy (and US took
advantage of it).
But your numbers are off. There are about 1 million Ukrainians now in EU, mostly in UK,
Czech, Hungary and Poland. E.g. Poland has about 400,000 new Ukrainian migrants. The real
large numbers are yet to come. I think they will - they are watching the Syrians and getting
jealous, worried that all the empathy will be used up. Slovakia (my country) has camps ready
on the border. We also suddenly have a lot of Ukrainians who have discovered the Slovak (or
Czech) heritage. The same thing is going on in Poland, Romania and Hungary.
Millions are coming. And they won't be tourists or have money for Italian hotels. But I am
sure the Western media will find a way to blame it on Russia. Such are the pleasures of
dead-end ideologies, everything is very simple: "Putin did it!."
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 18:26
"US didn't orchestrate a coup in Ukraine and hasn't offered Kiev a military
alliance"
I suppose that would depend on your definition of "orchestrate" and a "coup". Most
rational observers would agree that US at a minimum assisted with the Maidan revolution (or a
coup). There are videos, recordings, financial transfers. Until the whole Maidan thing went
bad, the US State Department was very open about the assistance that they had provided on
Maidan, Obama said "we assisted with the transition of power in Ukraine" (actual quote).
US has said since 2008 that Ukraine will join Nato. They reiterated it last year and
Ukraine has an official policy of joining Nato. There are joint exercises and training with
Nato. It is rather conclusive that US and Ukraine are having a "military alliance".
Given those two facts how can you deny it? Or do you also deny the nose between your
eyes?
magicmirror1 4 Sep 2015 18:11
Fingerprints to get a visa.
Welcome to democratic EU. This is the future European leaders are building and I cannot
understand why.
dmitryfrommoscow -> Ola Smith 4 Sep 2015 16:46
Ola, the problem is there are no 45 million people in Ukraine these days. As many as 2.8
million people with Ukrainian passports work and live in Russia alone. And I think twice as
many live and work in the EU. And about five to seven million are in a crouch start position
to rush elsewhere at the first opportunity that avails itself. After all the Maidan
hullabaloo was about getting free access to European -- and probably North American -- job
markets and disappearing there for good. Let's throw aside all that talk about 'democracy and
values' and be honest about it.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Rand Paul
(R-KY) and Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the 2019 American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN)
Service Act to end America's longest war, honor the volunteers who bravely serve our nation by
providing bonuses to those who have deployed in support of the Global War on Terrorism, and
redirect the savings from ending nation-building in Afghanistan to America's needs at home.
Though American troops achieved what they were sent to carry out in October 2001, the
mission shift to nation-building has kept our forces in Afghanistan over 17 years later. Over
2,300 military members have sacrificed their lives in the war, with another 20,000 wounded in
action. In addition, the Afghanistan war has cost the United States $2 trillion, with the war
currently costing over $51 billion a year.
"Endless war weakens our national security, robs this and future generations through
skyrocketing debt, and creates more enemies to threaten us. For over 17 years, our soldiers
have gone above and beyond what has been asked of them in Afghanistan. It is time to declare
the victory we achieved long ago, bring them home, and put America's needs first," said Sen.
Paul .
"Soon, U.S. service members will begin deploying to Afghanistan to fight in a war that began
before they were born. As we face this watershed moment, it's past time to change our approach
to the longest war in our country's history," said Sen. Udall . "Our armed forces in
Afghanistan, including many from New Mexico, have served with exceptional valor and
effectiveness in the face of extraordinary challenges. After expelling the Taliban from power
and dismantling Al Qaeda's base of power in Afghanistan, they enabled a new Afghan government
to be formed while also eliminating Osama Bin Laden. But it is Congress that has failed to
conduct the proper oversight of this nearly 18-year war. Now, we must step up, and listen to
the American people -- who rightly question the wisdom of such endless wars. This bipartisan
resolution would bring our troops home at long last, while implementing a framework for
reconciliation."
The 2019 AFGHAN Service Act
• Declares victory in Afghanistan. The masterminds of the 9/11 attack are no longer
capable of carrying out such an attack from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011,
and Al Qaeda has been all but eliminated from Afghanistan.
• Pays, within one year, a $2,500 bonus to all members of the military who have served
in the Global War on Terrorism. Since 2001, more than 3,002,635 men and women have deployed
overseas in support of this effort. This would be a one-time cost of approximately $7 billion
and an immediate savings of over 83% when compared to the current yearly costs. The $51 billion
a year can be redirected to domestic priorities.
• Additionally, there is precedent for service bonuses going back to the Revolutionary
War.
• Sets guidelines for withdrawal. Within 45 days, a plan will be formulated for an orderly
withdrawal and turnover of facilities to the Afghan Government, while also setting a framework
for political reconciliation to be implemented by Afghans in accordance with the Afghan
Constitution. Within a year, all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
• At the completion of withdrawal, the 2001 AUMF will be repealed.
You can read the entire 2019 AFGHAN Service Act below:
His greatest accomplishment may well be that he has caused Washington's Swamp Dwellers to rise from the ooze and expose themselves
for all the world to see. That's weakened them immeasurably, perhaps fatally. To be sure, that's no small thing, and the next
Trump to come along is now on full alert as to who & what to bring with him.
You nailed it. Even if they do eventually succeed in foiling Trump, things will never be the same again. The whole world is watching
the circus in Washington, and so Washington's brand ('democracy') is now shot. 2016 was indeed an annus mirabilis! " things will
never be the same again. The whole world is watching the circus in Washington.."
It looks and sounds like dementia as if a sick person behaving inappropriately, showing unprovoked aggression (like some
Alzheimer patients), using silly or senseless phrasing, and having the unreasonable demands and uncontrolled fits of rage like
a spoiled child. The marasmic McCain, marasmic Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer
Brennan.
As I have written here and elsewhere, President Swamp Drainer needs to get control of the DoJ. He got rid of Comey, which was
good, but got Rosenstein and Mueller in response. Meanwhile Jeff Sessions is twiddling his thumbs re the Russia witch hunt. Perhaps
his recusal was appropriate, but he's not doing anything whatsoever regarding Swamp Draining. So it feels like he's a disingenuous
old guard GOPer, who wants to obstruct any real progress, while dragging his feet with do-nothingness obscured behind a facade
of law enforcement community boosterism. By this tactic the GOP attempts to stall until 2020, when it can then point at Trump's
failures (failures they have enabled by their stalling, wink wink) and then campaign to take "their" party back. In short, Sessions
may just be an anti-Trump "mole" planted in the single most important position with regard to swamp draining, in order to ***prevent***
any swamp draining.
Let me be clear: in the last 24 years the DC political class has gone almost entirely criminal, with the last 13 years dedicated
to serial war crimes. In this sort of situation the DoJ, AG, and FBI head, becomes corrupted, and turns away from the rule of
law to become a shield for the DC criminal despotism.
So watch closely what happens next. Just today rumors have come out -- though I've been speaking of this for several weeks
now -- that there is talk in the White House about ***recess appointments*** . We have reached the crucial moment, and I for one
am surprised that, as important as this is, it has not been prominent in public discussion until now. The "August" was scheduled
to begin at the end of business tomorrow, July 28th. Because of the health care business, McConnell has postponed it for two weeks,
so let's call it for close of business Friday, August 11th. That's fifteen days from now.
When Congress goes home fifteen days from now, this country and the world may very well change forever. Go to Wikipedia and
look up "recess appointment". Here's what you will find:
" a recess appointment is an appointment by the President of a federal official while the U.S. Senate is in recess.
Recess appointments are authorized by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting
Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session .
If Trump is the fighter I think he is, then this is what he has been waiting for, ever so patiently these last six months.
Notice that the Congress cannot countermand recess appointments. Recess appointments end by expiration, and then only at the end
of the following Congressional session. Other than impeachment, Congress cannot stop Trump from doing this .
So Trump dumps Sessions, purges the anti-Trump prosecutors from previous administrations, and appoints a new FBI head and dozens
of fire-breathing swamp-draining prosecutors who immediately start doling out orange jumpsuits. He could -- not saying that he
would execute this "nuclear option" -- but he could lock up virtually the entire Congress on war crimes charges; Neocons for conspiracy
to commit war crimes; Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and Bybee to the Hague for torture; Hillary and Obama for Libya.
Control of the DoJ is the key.
The next two weeks will show whether Trump is the real deal, or just another schlub.
Trump actually proved to be very convenient President to CIA., Probably as convenient as Obama... Both completely outsourced
foreign policy to neocons and CIA )in this sense the appointment of Pompeo is worst joke Trump could play with the remnants of
US democracy_ .
Notable quotes:
"... "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street." ..."
"... "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads." ..."
"... Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups. ..."
"... "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him." ..."
"... But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. ..."
"... He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable. ..."
And on the heels of
Dennis Kucinich's warnings , The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with
the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous.
As TheAntiMedia's Carey Wedler notes ,
Greenwald asserted in
an interview with Democracy Now, published on Thursday, that this boils down to a fight between the Deep State and the Trump administration.
Though Greenwald has argued the leaks were "wholly justified" in spite of the fact they violated criminal law, he also questioned
the motives behind them.
"It's very possible - I'd say likely - that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble," he wrote. "Whatever else is true,
this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries
in the Trump White House."
"The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies:
the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement
of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street."
As Greenwald explained during his interview:
"It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate
disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the
world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads."
Greenwald believes this division is a result of the Deep State's disapproval of Trump's foreign policy and the fact that the intelligence
community overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump because of her hawkish views. Greenwald
noted that Mike Morell,
acting CIA chief under Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush, openly spoke out against Trump
during the presidential campaign.
Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria.
In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead
advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups.
"So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was
exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout
the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him."
"[In] the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few
days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside
the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made."
Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of
undermining Trump is dangerous. "Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated
and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving," he said, likely alluding to a recent court ruling that nullified Trump's travel
ban.
He continued:
"But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to
urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity."
He argues that mentality is "a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it," highlighting that members
of both prevailing political parties are praising the Deep State's audacity in leaking details of Flynn's conversations.
As he wrote in his article, " it's hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people - from both parties,
across the ideological spectrum - who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era
leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn."
He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable.
In a recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD,
Matt Labash highlighted
the sad story of Trump University, one of the Donald's biggest failures. Here's an excerpt:
But most egregious was Trump University, a purported real estate school that attracted the attention of New York's attorney general,
who brought a $40 million suit on behalf of 5,000 people. The New York Times described Trump U as "a bait-and-switch scheme,"
with students lured "by free sessions, then offered packages ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 for sham courses that were supposed
to teach them how to become successful real estate investors." Though Trump himself was largely absentee, one advertisement featured
him proclaiming, "Just copy exactly what I've done and get rich." While some students were hoping to glean wisdom directly from
the success oracle, there was no such luck. At one seminar, attendees were told they'd get to have their picture taken with Trump.
Instead, they ended up getting snapped with his cardboard cutout. What must have been a crushing disappointment to aspiring real
estate barons is a boon to Republican-primary metaphor hunters.
Read the whole article
here , which documents
Trump at his Trumpiest, from his penchant for cheating at golf to his sensitivity to being called a "short-fingered vulgarian."
Michael Warrenis a senior writer at The
Weekly Standard.
"A pension is not a 'gratuity.' A pension is wages you could have taken in cash, but
prudently and conservatively set aside for your old age. It's your money. If your
employer, for every pay period, does not set aside and designate it to go into a
pension plan, your employer is stealing from you. The way to get this is to require pay
stubs to itemize the amount of money that has been contributed to your pension plan."
David Cay Johnston
"Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations,
or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we've lost sight
of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony. We are neglecting a torrent of
market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment. We are turning our
backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash
social benefits. We are destroying the Earth as if we are indeed the last generation."
Jeffrey Sachs
"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When
the 90 percent are getting worse off and they're trying to figure out what happened,
they're not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these
things and then writing about them -- they're people who have to make a living and get
through life. And they're going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about
the other, rather than bringing us together.
President Theodore Roosevelt said we shall all rise together or we shall all fall
together, and we need to have an appreciation of that.
I think it would be easy for someone to arrive in the near future and really create
forces that would lead to trouble in this country. And you see people who, they're not
the leaders to pull it off, but we have suggestions that the president should be
killed, that he's not an American, that Texas can secede, that states can ignore
federal law, and these are things that don't lack for antecedents in America history
but they're clearly on the rise.
In addition to that, we have this large, very well-funded news organization that is
premised on misconstruing facts and telling lies, Faux News that is creating, in a
large segment of the population -- somewhere around one-fifth and one-fourth of it --
belief in all sorts of things that are detrimental to our well-being.
So, no, I don't see this happening tomorrow, but I have said for many years that if we
don't get a handle on this then one of these days our descendants are going to sit down
in high-school history class and open a textbook that begins with the words:
The
United States of America was
and then it will dissect how our experiment in
self-governance came apart."
Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) is expected to introduce a new tax bill today. The senator
says his bill would tax the sale of stocks, bonds and derivatives at a 0.1 rate. It would apply
to any transaction in the United States. The senator says his proposal would clamp down on
speculation and some high frequency trading that artificially creates more market
volatility.
@Felix
Keverich You're full of shit what the heck do you know about industry you useless little
fart ? are you an industrial engineer do you have any technical qualifications whatsoever or
do you just pull buzzwords like 'marketable skills' out your wazoo, as needed ?
The Ukraine certainly had all kinds of 'entrepreneurs' they're called OLIGARCHS who
very capably enriched themselves unfortunately 'entrepreneurs' are what normal people would
call parasites, flim-flam men and hucksters
As for Ukrainian workers lacking 'marketable skills' I guess that would be 'skills' like
TROLLING, your specialty and making retarded statements on discussion fora
Ukraine had more very qualified engineers per capita than any country in Europe a huge
amount of intellectual capacity, and a very good industrial base especially in high tech
areas like aerospace and propulsion their problem was that they chose to play games with the
rotten west, instead of friendship with Russia, with which their industry was
integrated
You're a complete wanker in the A. Karlin mold. Get lost you have nothing to
contribute
@Big
Bill They fought that it was Russia, that was holding them back, and by separating they
could quickly achieve Western European standard of living. The first guy to become
president of independent Ukraine promised people that they were going to "live like France"
.in 5 years (!). lol
So their plan was something like this:
Lately, they began to think that the Ukraine's path to prosperity goes through EU
membership, hence popular support for Euromaidan, and you know the results
You're full of shit what the heck do you know about industry you useless little fart
? are you an industrial engineer do you have any technical qualifications whatsoever or do
you just pull buzzwords like 'marketable skills' out your wazoo, as needed ?
Your industries are worth ZERO, if you're unable to sell your products, and the Ukraine
struggled to sell its manufactured goods after 1991. Its traditional customer – Russia
began to import Western goods.
You sound like Martyanov. lol It doesn't take any "special qualification" to figure out
that Soviet-era factories were churning out worthless crap – there is a reason why that
system fell apart, you know.
I was expecting that if a Western invasion of Venezuela were to go ahead, that Brazil and
Colombia would decline to commit troops, the US would be overstretched, and Canada would take
the lead in organising an invasion force.
But I have just heard that Justin Bieber Turdeau is facing calls to resign after former
federal attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould testified that she'd been pressured to drop
bribery charges against SNC-Lavalin by government officials (of whom some were from the Prime
Minister's Office) wanting her to apply deferred prosecution (by which SNC-Lavalin would
merely pay a fine). The charges against SNC-Lavalin involve former company executives making
illegal donations to the Liberal Party from 2004 to 2011. SNC-Lavalin also paid huge bribes
to Libyan govt officials to secure contracts in Libya and has been shut out of contracts by
the World Bank for corrupt practices in Bangladesh.
If JWR's allegations that Turdeau pressured her, directly or indirectly, then he could be
charged with obstructing the course of justice. Deferred prosecution itself is recent
legislation introduced by the Turdeau government and SNC-Lavalin had lobbied for it.
Looks like Canada will be too busy dealing with the Turdeau govt's own corruption instead
of Maduro.
The silver lining is that Chrystia Freeland has said she supports JBT 100%, although with
her record of telling the truth one can never be too sure and she might not be willing to go
down with him if he has to resign.
That will teach me a lesson; I just lost a very lengthily-developed comment because I was
typing too fast, and accidentally hit the wrong combination of keys. Therefore, this one will
evolve in the form of saves and updates.
Yes, he's in serious trouble. Wilson-Raybould was one of his big success stories, the
first aboriginal woman to be appointed Justice Minister. She's also a lawyer, and kept
detailed records of who said what to her when. After the SNC-Lavalin affair broke and
following her obviously-unsatisfactory performance in refusing to keep things on the down-low
so they would be allowed to settle out of court and probably just pay a fine, she was removed
from her position in a cabinet shuffle, and given Veterans Affairs.
She pissed off Veterans with her obvious discontent with her new portfolio, as if it is
unworthy of her talents, and there is a substantial question why she did not immediately
resign as soon as she was pressured to do something she obviously knew was at least unethical
if not illegal. But otherwise she seems to have all her ducks in a row, and it is going to be
very difficult for the Trudeau government to attack her position.
They're not too busy to proceed with the extradition of Meng Wanzhou, though, I see.
This is not necessarily the end of the line, and is just a hearing, not a trial.
Nonetheless, it moves the decision into ministerial territory, and the higher you go in the
Canadian government, the more people you meet who like to lick the US government's shoes, and
would no more tell it "No" than they would come to work with no pants on. More ominously, the
Canadian Justice Department claims to have thoroughly reviewed the US charges, and consider
them satisfactorily supported to proceed.
Extremely curious timing, as there was just a story in today's National Post which mostly
scoffed at the American inveigling against Huawei, referring to it as 'exaggerated', and even
having the temerity to point out the USA has actually done what it accuses China of doing,
while China has not been caught – ever – inserting 'backdoors' in any of its
software. The USA built backdoors into equipment made by Cisco Systems, and then shipped it
around the world, which is why China banned it.
Predictably, after London declined to ban Huawei outright, saying the risk could be
'managed' – a terrific blow to the American argument – other countries with less
backbone, Canada among them, claim to have been of the same mind.
Curiously, as well, the original reference points out that the charges against Meng, which
the Minister deems substantial enough to proceed with the extradition hearing, relate to
matters which are not offenses in Canada. That struck a chord with me, because I remember
that when William Browder was detained in Spain on a Russian Interpol warrant, the official
reason Spain gave for letting him go was that the matters on which he was ordered held were
not crimes in Spain.
Unofficially, as revealed by Browder himself, the Interpol General Secretary in Lyon
advised the Spanish government not to honour the Russian warrant. Yet when the EU demands
that Russia release Khodorkovsky, or Navalny or whatever prominent 'Kremlin critic' is in
jail at the moment, they expect Russia to jump right the fuck to it.
...Her prescription also includes some great ideas. She would bar congressmen and Cabinet
secretaries from owning individual stocks (a measure we
proposed in 2011 ) and apply conflict of interest laws to the president and vice president.
Both would be good regulations of our politicians, mitigating temptations to corruption.
An extension of the current brief lobbying ban for senators and congressmen also seems
prudent and justified. Warren would make it a lifetime ban. She would also require former
government officials to disclose their private sector work for four years after they leave the
government. These rules can be thought of as conditions for holding positions that involve the
public trust. Truly serving the public can mean limiting your post-government employment
options.
Some of her other ideas are well-intentioned but nonsensical. Warren wants to expand the
definition of "lobbyist" to "include all individuals paid to influence the government."
"... As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has famously said with respect to cabinet and other political appointments, "Personnel Is Policy." You can see the outline of the Trump administration's real policies being shaped before our eyes via his proposed cabinet appointees, covered by Politico and other sites. ..."
"... Sanders, Warren and others should hold Trump's feet to the fire on the truly populist things he said and offer to work with him on that stuff. Like preserving Social Security and Medicare and getting out of wars. ..."
Not surprised at all. The election is over, the voters are now moot. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren
has famously said with respect to cabinet and other political appointments, "Personnel Is Policy."
You can see the outline of the Trump administration's real policies being shaped before our eyes
via his proposed cabinet appointees, covered by Politico and other sites.
Also no mention of NAFTA or renegotiating trade deals in the new transition agenda. Instead
there's just a bunch of vague Chamber of Commercesque language about making America attractive
to investors. I think our hopes for a disruptive Trump presidency are quickly being dashed.
Sanders, Warren and others should hold Trump's feet to the fire on the truly populist things
he said and offer to work with him on that stuff. Like preserving Social Security and Medicare
and getting out of wars.
As to the last point, appointing Bolton or Corker Secretary of State would be a clear indication
he was just talking. A clear violation of campaign promises that would make Obama look like a
choirboy. Trump may be W on steroids.
I can't imagine how he's neglected to update his transition plan regarding nafta. After all,
he's already been president-elect for, what, 36 hours now? And he only talked about it umpteen
times during the campaign. I'm sure he'll renege.
Hell, it took Clinton 8 hours to give her concession speech.
On the bright side, he managed to kill TPP just by getting elected. Was that quick enough for
you?
It is my belief as a student of history that corruption has been a
integral part of the United States government from the very start. I offer the careers of
founding fathers Robert Morris and James Wilson as evidence. We owe debts of gratitude to these
two men for their positive contributions, but their misdeeds are scandalous. Let us not forget
the dark compromises over slavery that continue to poison our society or the cynical corruption
that allowed the destruction of the civilized tribes of the Southeast and the illegal seizure
of their lands.
As a student of economics and a longtime corporate accountant, I propose even more radical
reforms than Senator Warren. I believe that we must reform the rights and legal protections of
corporations. We must end the fiction of corporation as a "legal person." We must hold
corporate officers accountable for criminal activity and truly enforce anti-bribery and other
laws. Too often corporations are de facto criminal conspiracies. It will take
international cooperation of governments to reign these enterprises in and force them to behave
in a socially responsible manner.
XXX 6 months ago
Thank you
for this insightful article. Most Americans know that the system is rigged towards the wealthy
and big business; however, they don't know exactly how. You have laid out the perfectly legal
way that government and business are intertwined to benefit big business and the individual in
government calling the shots.
A good example is Medicare Part D, where the legislation
precluded CMS negotiating directly with manufacturers for drug prices - a gigantic gift to the
pharmaceutical industry. At the time, I worked at a pharma company, and they through a party in
relief.
Billy Tauzin, the Congressman from Louisiana, shaped the Medicare Part D legislation,
retired from the House, and went to work for the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbying
organization for a reported $2 million a year.
Billy and big pharma reaped huge benefits but
the American people and our government did not. It is time something is done about our
government/business "pork fest", otherwise, as a nation, we will fall from within through sheer
unmitigated corruption.
XXX 6 months
ago
FEC fillings first reported by the Washington Free Beacon show that Warren cashed two
checks from Jonathan Lavine, the chief investment officer of Bain Capital, and his wife,
Jeannie Lavine, worth $5,400 each. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bain
Capital has spent more than $5.5 million on lobbying in the last decade.
Those same filings show Warren filling her war chest with $1,000 from Daniel O'Connell,
president and CEO of the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, an organization described by
the Boston Globe as "the state's most powerful business group." Warren also took two checks
worth $5,400 each from Lawrence Rasky, chair of Massachusetts-based lobbying firm Rasky
Baerlein, and Carolyn Rasky, his wife.
When asked whether or not Warren would still accept that money if she had a chance to
do it all over again, the senator's office did not return for comment. It seems the senator
wants to drain the swamp in Washington so long as she can still get that campaign money from
local lobbyists back home.
XXX 6 months ago
Philip Wegmann Elizabeth Warren doesn't mind taking money from lobbyists
| Washington Examiner | August 21, 2018
Wait a second: you condone lobbying or you are against it? It would seem that the legislative
proposal would address, at least, some of the issues plaguing our country. Do you really
believe, Ms. Warren cashes the checks? It's an organization...e
""The low-pressure economies of Volcker, late Greenspan, and Bernanke wreaked immense
damage."'
It's good to see Democrats make having a high-pressure economy a priority.
Oh wait no.
You and PGL are huge liars.
libezkova -> Sanjait...
There is no need to assume nefarious motives under neoliberalism. They are the essence of
the system, especially among the financial oligarchy. Wolf eats wolf and "Greed is good!" is
the most typical mentality.
In some way, it is close to the Italian mafia mentality. The mentality of organized mob.
They put themselves outside and above the society.
This just in .Saint Obama is no longer infallible among Dems. Winds of change are blowing. Six months ago, you couldn't get
away with saying this kind of thing.
"The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Obama will receive the sum - equal to his annual pay as president - for a speech
at Cantor Fitzgerald LP's healthcare conference, though there has been no public announcement yet."
=======================================
Sheer coincidence that what Obama campaigned on and what Obama governed on appear to be influenced by rich people. Physics prevents
single payer health care .dark energy, dark matter, dark, dark, money ..
Until a strong majority of dems are ready to say what is patently obvious to anyone even mildly willing to acknowledge reality,
i.e., that policy is decided not by a majority of voters, but by a majority of dollars, than there is simply no hope for reform.
... just as the day was ending, news broke that Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), an early Trump backer,
was indicted for misusing campaign funds for personal expenses big and small, including dental bills and a trip to Italy.
And this sort of behavior isn't even what Warren is targeting.
Warren's bill takes on what is usually termed the legalized corruption, the dirty dealings of Washington. Among other things,
the legislation would:
Increase salaries for congressional staffers, so they will be less tempted to "audition" for lobbying jobs while working for government.
Ban the "revolving door" for elected officials expand how lobbying is defined to include anyone who is paid to lobby the federal
government as well as halt permitting any American to take money from "foreign governments foreign individuals and foreign companies"
for lobbying purposes.
Prohibit elected officials from holding investments in individual stocks require that presidential candidates
make their tax returns public
The goal? To make government once again responsive to voters, not the corporations and the wealthy donors responsible for the
vast majority of the $3.37 billion spent lobbying Washington in
2017. That money buys results, but only for the people paying the bills. As Warren said:
Corruption has seeped into the fabric of our government, tilting thousands of decisions away from the public good and toward
the desires of those at the top. And, over time, bit by bit, like a cancer eating away at our democracy, corruption has eroded
Americans' faith in our government.
This is not hyperbole. A 2014
academic study found the U.S. government policy almost always reflected the desires of the donor class over the will of the majority
of voters, while a 2016 report by the progressive think tank
Demos determined
political donors have distinctly different views from most Americans on issues ranging from financial regulation to abortion rights.
A tax reform package that showers benefits on corporations and the wealthiest among us? Consider it done. But a crackdown on drug
pricing, buttressing of Social Security without cutting benefits, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, or progress combating global
warming, all of which majorities say they want? Not so fast.
Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) said on June 5 that she will introduce "sweeping anti-corruption legislation to clean up corporate money sloshing
around Washington." (Georgetown Law)
It's not just what laws get passed, but who is held accountable under those laws. No one in a high position went to jail for the
financial crisis. Foreclosure fraud on the part of the banks was punished with a slap on the wrist if that. All too many corporations
treat their customers with complete impunity, as scandals ranging from the
Equifax hack to
Wells Fargo's many misdeeds demonstrate. It feels as if there is no one minding the store -- if you are rich and connected enough,
that is.
This behavior leaves us enraged, feeling like outsiders peering in on our own elected government. A Gallup poll found 3 out of
4 voters surveyed described corruption as "
widespread throughout the government " -- in 2010. There's a reason Trump's claim he would "drain the swamp" resonated. No one,
after all, thought Trump was clean. His stated argument was, in fact, the opposite. He claimed his success a businessman navigating
the corrupt U.S. system gave him just the right set of insight and tools to clean up Washington.
We all know now that was just another audacious Trump con. The tax reform package almost certainly benefited his own bottom line,
though we don't know that for sure since he has not released his taxes.
Andrew Wheeler , the acting head
of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a former lobbyist for the coal industry.
Alex Azar , the secretary of Health and Human Services, is a former top executive of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. At the Education
Department, the revolving door is alive and well, with
former George W. Bush administration officials who went on to work at for-profit institutions of higher education
returning to government
service to advise Betsy De Vos who is -- surprise! -- cutting the sector multiple breaks.
And all this, under our current laws, is allowed.
To be clear, this is not a matter of Republicans Good, Democrats Bad. As Warren put it on Tuesday, "This problem is far bigger
than Trump." An Obama-era attempt to slow the revolving door
was riddled with loopholes
that allowed the appointment of Wall Street insiders to too many regulatory posts. Subsequently, more than a few Obama appointees
have gone on to work for big business as lobbyists.
Corruption, legal or illegal, rots the system from the inside out. In an environment where it seems anything goes, it's not hard
to think that, well, anything goes -- like Cohen and Manafort, who almost certainly would have gotten away with their behavior if
not for the Mueller investigation, and Hunter, who ignored multiple warnings from his campaign treasurer and instead continued to
do such things as pass off the purchase of a pair of shorts as sporting equipment intended for use by "wounded warriors."
There is, of course, no way Warren's bill would clean up this entire festering mess. But healthy democracies need government officials
-- elected and unelected -- to behave both ethically and honestly. Warren is putting our governing and business classes on notice.
Simply saying the law is on your side isn't good enough. The voters won't stand for that.
On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren
addressed the National Press Club , outlining with great specificity a host of proposals on
issues including eliminating financial conflicts, close the revolving door between business and
government and, perhaps most notably, reforming
corporate structures .
Warren gave a blistering attack on corporate power run amok, giving example after example,
like Congressman Billy Tauzin doing the pharmaceutical lobby's bidding by preventing a bill for
expanded Medicare coverage from allowing the program to negotiate lower drug prices. Noted
Warren: "In December of 2003, the very same month the bill was signed into law, PhRMA -- the
drug companies' biggest lobbying group -- dangled the possibility that Billy could be their
next CEO.
"In February of 2004, Congressman Tauzin announced that he wouldn't seek re-election. Ten
months later, he became CEO of PhRMA -- at an annual salary of $2 million. Big Pharma certainly
knows how to say 'thank you for your service.'"
But I found that Warren's tenacity when ripping things like corporate lobbyists'
"pre-bribes" suddenly evaporated when dealing with issues like the enormous military budget and
Israeli assaults on Palestinian children.
... ... ...
Said Warren of her own financial reform proposals: "Inside Washington, some of these
proposals will be very unpopular, even with some of my friends. Outside Washington, I expect
that most people will see these ideas as no-brainers and be shocked they're not already the
law.
Why doesn't the same principle apply to funding perpetual wars and massive human rights
abuses against children?
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist, senior analyst at the Institute for Public
Accuracy and founder of VotePact .org.
Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini
August 22, 2018,
10:46 am OpenSecrets shows that Senator Warren has received funds from the pro-Israel
PAC Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs for the 2018 election cycle. Among the
largest funders of this PAC are billionaire venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker and his wife. At
the start of Israel's 2014 massacre in Gaza, the PAC issued a statement in support of Israel.
August 22, 2018,
12:36 pm No surprise there, ckg. I cannot think of anyone in Congress nor in the US cabinet
that is not 99-100% in Israel supporters' pockets. Nor can I think of anyone that is
diplomatically focused. Nor can I think of anyone that is seriously objecting to the slaughter
in Yemen, the ongoing attempt to topple Assad, and the endless war in Afghanistan, etc.
Then there's this: the US and too many others pay/subsidize Israel for the privilege of
dictating foreign policy and for their own selfish, ridiculous claims of being 'surrounded by
enemies'. A nuclear- armed state (though never inspected nor properly declared) keeps this
trope/cliché alive???
How many billions should Americans and others pay to Israel for nothing in return?
August 23, 2018, 7:10 am
Standing up to the Israel lobby now is suicidal. Nobody will risk a career to support a
dissident until the dam breaks as it always does.
Power doesn't work linearly. It goes in cycles. Zionism is tied up with money which is a
function of the economic system. Warren is playing a long game. She knows the people at the Fed
are clueless. She knows there is going to be an awful crash. She knows there will be a new
economic system based on the people rather than the elites..
"... By Joshua Weitz, a research associate at the Academic-Industry Research Network and an incoming graduate student in the PhD program in political science at Brown University ..."
By Joshua Weitz, a research associate at the Academic-Industry Research Network and an incoming
graduate student in the PhD program in political science at Brown University
Since leaving office President Obama has drawn widespread criticism for accepting a
$400,000 speaking fee from the Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, including from
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Only a few months out of office, the move has been
viewed as emblematic of the cozy relationship between the financial sector and political elites.
But as the President's critics have voiced outrage over the decision many have been reluctant
to criticize the record-setting
$65 million book deal that Barack and Michelle Obama landed jointly this February with Penguin
Random House (PRH). Writing in the Washington Post, for example,
Ruth Marcus argues that while the Wall Street speech "feels like unfortunate icing on an already
distasteful cake," the book deal is little more than the outcome of market forces fueled by consumer
demand: "If the market bears $60 million to hear from the Obamas, great."
Obama centrists don't have to worry just about Sanders' popularity. Elizabeth Warren, who is increasingly appearing as a plausible
presidential candidate for 2020, has also risen as an economic populist critic of the former president.
She has been perfectly willing to challenge Obama by name, saying he was wrong to claim at a commencement address at Rutgers last
year that "the system isn't as rigged as you think." "No, President Obama, the system is as rigged as we think," she writes in her
new book This Fight Is Our Fight. "In fact, it's worse than most Americans realize." She even went so far as to say she was "troubled"
by Obama's willingness to take his six-figure speaking fee from Wall Street. There is indeed a fight brewing, but it's not Obama
v. Trump, but Obama v. Warren-Sanders.
And this is where the real difficulty lies for the Democrats. The trouble with the popular and eminently reasonable Sanders-Warren
platform-reasonable for all those, Obama and Clinton included, who express dismay over our country's rampaging levels of Gilded Age-style
inequality-is that it alienates the donor class that butters the DNC's bread. With Clinton's downfall, and with the popularity of
economic populism rising in left circles, Obama has to step in and reassert his more centrist brand of Democratic politics. And what
better way to do so than by conspicuously cashing a check from those who would fund said politics?
Oh please, stop quoting Andy Slavitt, the United Healthcare Ingenix algo man. That guy is
the biggest crook that made his money early on with RX discounts with his company that he and
Senator Warren's daughter, Amelia sold to United Healthcare.
He's out there trying to do his own reputation restore routine. Go back to 2009 and read
about the short paying of MDs by Ingenix, which is now Optum Insights, he was the CEO and
remember it was just around 3 years ago or so he sat there quarterly with United CEO Hemsley
at those quarterly meetings.
Look him up, wants 40k to speak and he puts the perception out there he does this for
free, not so.
I think you're missing the context. Lambert is quoting him by way of showing that the
sleazy establishment types are just fine with him. Thanks for the extra background on that
particular swamp-dweller, though.
Alex Azar is a Dartmouth grad (Gov't & Economics '88) just like Jeff Immelt (Applied
Math & Economics '78). So much damage to society from such a small department!
Since 2014, Ross has been the vice-chairman of the board of Bank of Cyprus PCL, the
largest bank in Cyprus.
He served under U.S. President Bill Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment
Fund. Later, under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ross served as the Mayor's
privatization advisor.
I have been meaning to write something on faux Libertarians of the corporatist ilk for a
while. However, since I
switched to forecasting mode instead of advocacy , I have tried to leave the political
element out of my posts as much as possible. I'll leave the politics to those who enjoy it; I
don't. But, I think this is an important topic so I am going to give it a go here.
If you do a search
for the word 'liberty' on the Internet, invariably you find the Wikipedia entry for that word.
I think the definition used there is a good one. Here's what Wikipedia says about Liberty :
Liberty is the concept of ideological and political philosophy that identifies the
condition to which an individual has the right to behave according to one's own personal
responsibility and free will. The conception of liberty is influenced by ideals concerning
the social contract as well as arguments that are concerned with the state of nature.
Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty relate to the freedom of the
individual from outside compulsion or coercion and this is defined as negative liberty.
What you will notice is there is nothing in this definition regarding corporations. It is
all about individual liberty and the freedoms of individuals . Individuals are born with
innate, natural and inalienable rights to liberty that are
self-evident. This philosophical view of humankind gained currency during the enlightenment and
is now universally accepted. It also underpins the very concept of democracy and is the origin
of the founding of the United States of America.
For example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins [highlighting added]:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them withpowers of the earth, the separate and equal
sta
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness . -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter
or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
Safety and Happiness.
As always, I have to note that the writer of the Declaration was a slaveholder in a country
in which government killed the indigenous population. So, there is certainly a gap between the
high-mindedness of this wonderful document and actual events on the ground. Don't let that
detract from the aspirational quality of the words.This is exactly what individual liberty is
all about.
On the other hand, a corporation is a societal construct codified
into legal existence to further the mutual interests of individuals. A corporation is "an
artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law,"
according to
Chief Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College Case of 1819. Trustees of Dartmouth College v.
Woodward , won by Daniel Webster when
the state of New Hampshire attempted to turn the college into The University of New Hampshire,
was an early American test of eminent domain-type property seizure.
A corporation has no inalienable or natural rights. Nevertheless, it is the fact that
corporations represent a group of individuals that allows the 'corporatist' to claim that these
fictional legal entities should enjoy the same natural and legal liberties and rights with
which individuals are born.
Let me be bold here: The 'Corporatist' is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in
liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of
furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at
the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary .
Remember my post on
kleptocracy from 2008? If not, here are the four methods Jared Diamond says ruling elites
use to maintain power:
Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular
ways.
Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing
violence. This is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies
over noncentralized ones.
The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or
religion justifying kleptocracy.
I broadened the argument on this in my year in review in 2009. Please read
The year in review at Credit Writedowns – Kleptocracy to get a fuller perspective.
Here's the statement from that post I want to concentrate on:
The last (and perhaps most important) issue [of the four ways elites maintain power], in
my view, has to do with the unabiding faith in free markets that many now have. It is with
religious zeal that these so-called Libertarians defend the primacy of markets over all else
when in reality common sense would tell you that those with the greatest influence and money
will always be at an advantage without some check on that influence and power.
This is the corporatism, the faux Libertarianism, to which I refer. The logic goes like
this:
Individuals have inalienable rights to freedom. This is a fundamental right that all
individuals have and efforts by government to undermine these rights must be resisted at all
costs.
Corporations are groups of individuals which have banded together for mutual benefit. In
so doing, they can express their individual natural rights more effectively than they could
as individuals.
As such, corporations must retain the same rights as individuals legally in order to
allow those individuals the corporation represents to express there natural rights.
Therefore, the same resistance to denying the rights of individuals must also be transferred
to the corporations which represent them .
This logic will take you much further in furthering the aims of corporations, the point
being that corporations, businesses, should enjoy the same rights that individuals have.
That is not to say that businesses should not have rights. They should; and we should grant
them as much liberty as is reasonable and warranted. But let's be clear, corporations are not
individuals; they are collections of individuals. Often, individuals hide behind this
collective using the corporate veil to shield themselves from sanction for behaviour that
abuses individual liberties. In a very real sense, the rights and liberties of businesses and
individuals often come into conflict. A real libertarian would always favour the individual in
that conflict . A corporatist would favour the corporation. That's the difference.
Let me give you an example. Say I was walking down the street in Louisville, Kentucky and
saw a cute little shop that sold Kettle Korn. For those of you who don't know kettle korn, it
is salted and sweetened popcorn that was brought to the U.S. by German immigrant farmers in
Pennsylvania, Maryland and into the Midwest over two hundred years ago. In Germany, popcorn is
sweet not salty like it is in the U.S. So, I see this store and I am thinking, "They have
Kettle Korn in Kentucky? Wow, who knew. I love this stuff. Let me go get some." Here's the
problem: the owner of the store has a business policy that no black people are allowed inside.
Mind you, this isn't a government policy because government discrimination based on race or
ethnicity is illegal in the United States. But, this business owner doesn't want Blacks in his
store. So when I enter, he tells me to leave because I am violating his store's liberty to
choose its own policies.
I would say the individual liberty trumps the business liberty in this case, especially
since the owner is violating his own government's business policy as well as societal norms. A
corporatist would say that the business owner wins since it is his business. Again, that's the
difference.
There are lots of other examples of corporatism at work in the U.S. legal system regarding
property rights in particular. My November 2009 post "
New York to use eminent domain to build a basketball stadium " showed the New York State
Court of Appeals ruling that the Atlantic Yards basketball project can go
forward as planned, dislocating the residents in the Brooklyn, NY area where the stadium is to
be built. The decision means that government can evict you from your own home, seize your
property, and give you what it believes is a fair price without your consent to build a
sports arena,
ostensibly for the public good but certainly for state and private profit.
This and other cases like it are occurring because of the decision in Kelo v. City of New
London, Conn . If a state or local government deems a private project – funded by
private monies and profiting private enterprises – to be in the public interest, it can
seize your property to allow this project to occur. In the New London case, residents were
evicted to make way for a luxury hotel and up-scale condos, from which private developers would
profit handsomely. Kelo was an outrageous example of cronyism completely at odds with
the ethos of the Dartmouth College Case of 1819. Because of Kelo , government can now
abuse its power to enrich specific private interests. That's corporatism at work.
Corporatism has nothing to do with liberty. It is all about power and coercion. It's about
favouring the big guy over the little guy, the more well-connected over the less
well-connected, the insider over the outsider. And in society that means favouring large,
incumbent businesses over smaller businesses, new entrants or individuals. How does
deregulation and free market ideology fit into this ?
"Obviously, if some always have more power and wealth than others, there is never a
situation in which the economic playing field is level. Moreover, it is axiomatic that those
with the means and access will always have greater influence over government than those
without. So, in a very real sense, the socioeconomic elite of any advanced, stratified society
will always have disproportionate control of the economic and political system.
"Now, I happen to be a Libertarian-minded individual, so I have nothing against the free
markets or the concept of limited government and deregulation. Freer markets and more limited
government are my preferred ideal. However, I am a realist. I understand that markets are never
truly free and
government fulfils a necessary function .
"So, when you hear someone talking about getting government out of the way and allowing the
free markets to work, you should be thinking about the influence and control this would
naturally engender.
"Think crony capitalism
"In fact, I would argue that the deregulation and free market capitalism that these
individuals refer to is really crony capitalism in disguise. I will explain.
"When I think of deregulation, I think of two related but distinct concepts. The one is the
actual de-regulation, which is the permission of economic actors to compete in markets
previously unavailable to them by order of legislation or de facto government intervention and
coercion. The other is regulatory oversight, which is the maintenance of specific rules of
engagement under threat of penalty on economic actors by government. De-regulation and
regulatory oversight are related concepts but they are not the same."
I think the books contains some useful information about the history of Propaganda Wars and the Deep state. But also a
lot of junk: Fidel Castro listed along with CIA connected neocons as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski: Key elements in this secret
war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central
Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles,
Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro.
He also denigrates Marx, which sound very simplistic. While Marx was wrong about many things and first of about
"the dictatorship of the proletariat". As well as the idea that proletariat is a new progressive class that will became the
next dominant class on the next stage of the development of the mankind, displacing capitalists. But Marx provided an
excellent framework for the analysis of capitalism. So to throw out all the Marxism is IMHO unwise.
Notable quotes:
"... The conspirators are a small group of Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations, most of them senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations. ..."
"... Key elements in this secret war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro. ..."
America is at war. But this not a conventional war waged with tanks, battleships and planes
in conventional battlefields -- at least not yet. It is a secret, insidious type of war whose
battleground is the people's minds. Its main weapons are propaganda and mass brainwashing by
disinformation, cunning, deception and lies in a large scale not used against the people of any
nation since Nazi Germany. Though important, however, those elements are just part of a series
of carefully planned and executed long and short-term psychological warfare operations. In
synthesis, it is a psychological war -- a PSYWAR.
If an unfriendly foreign power had carried
out against the American people the actions carried out by Wall Street bankers, Oil magnates
and CEOs of transnational corporations entrenched at the Council on Foreign Relations and its
parasite organizations, we might well have considered it an act of war.
Unfortunately, most
Americans ignore that they are under attack. The reason is because, like Ninja assassins, the
main weapon used by the conspirators who have managed to infiltrate and take control of the
U.S. Government and most of American life has been their invisibility. For almost a century,
these small group of conspirators have been waging a quiet, non-declared war of attrition
against the American people, and it seems that they are now ready for the final, decisive
battle.
Unfortunately, as the last two presidential elections showed, the brainwashed American
people reacted by changing the puppets, leaving the puppet masters untouched and in control. In
this book Servando Gonzalez studies in detail the origins of the conspiracy, who the
conspirators are, the main elements of this PSYWAR and, what's more important, how we can fight
back and win
This review is from: Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War
Against the American People (Paperback)
About the book
America is at war. But this is not a conventional war waged with tanks, battleships and
planes in conventional battlefields --at least, not yet. It is a secret, insidious type of
war whose battleground is the people's minds. Its main weapons are mind viruses disseminating
mass brain-washing through propaganda disinformation, cunning, deception and lies in a large
scale not used against any people since Nazi Germany. Though important, these elements are
just part of a series of carefully planned and executed long- and short-term psychological
warfare operations. In synthesis, it is a psychological war --a PSYWAR.
If an unfriendly foreign power had carried out against the American people the actions
carried out by Wall Street bankers, Oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations
entrenched at the Council on Foreign Relations and its parasite organizations, we might well
have considered it an act of war. Unfortunately, most Americans ignore that they are under
attack. The reason is because, like Ninja assassins, the main weapon used by the conspirators
who have managed to infiltrate and take control of the U.S. Government and most of American
life has been their invisibility.
For almost a century, this small group of conspirators have been waging a quiet,
non-declared war of attrition against the American people, and it seems that they are now
ready for the final, decisive battle. Unfortunately, as the last two presidential elections
showed, the brainwashed American people reacted by changing the puppets, leaving the puppet
masters in control.
This book studies in detail the origins of the conspiracy, who the conspirators are, the
main elements of this PSYWAR and, what's more important, how we can fight back and win.
About the Author
Cuban-born Servando Gonzalez got his training as a historian at the University of Havana.
He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage,
and semiotics.
Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, The
Secret Fidel Castro, The Nuclear Deception and La madre de todas las conspiraciones, all
available at Amazon.com.
He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and
Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San
Leandro, California.
What the critics are saying
Servando Gonzalez' exposé of the Alien Queen, also known as the CFR, could easily
alter the future of Western civilization and America for the good. These are times when a
single man may make great contributions to the cause of human dignity and freedom. --Kevin E. Abrams, co-author with Scott Lively of The Pink Swastika.
Thoreau wrote, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root." Servando Gonzalez didn't waste any time hacking at the branches, and
reveals the very crooked roots of evil. This is a most impressive book. A must read. --G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island.
Servando Gonzalez has studied in detail the men and organizations that rule the world.
This book reveals the true story of how Fidel Castro came to power, and discusses the
powerful group that has kept him in power for almost fifty years. It is one of the most
important books of this decade. Read it and learn about the invisible forces that direct the
course of world affairs. --Stanley Monteith, author of Brotherhood of Darkness.
Read this book. Read it carefully. It not only tells you what's happening today but, with
very well chosen historical perspective, it lets you look down the road of the recent past
for proof of what it says. That is the best way to learn to look at the future in order to
fathom what is coming your way. And what is coming our way in the U.S., Europe --the whole
world-- is riddled with grave dangers, pitfalls and perils. --Adrian Salbuchi, author of El cerebro del mundo: la cara oculta de la
globalización.
Edward Bernays wrote, "We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." However, Servando Gonzalez, an astute
researcher and author, masterly divulges the machinations behind many historical and
contemporary events and reveals who is really managing the presidential puppet strings. As
Servando maintains, the new American Revolution, using covert warfare, is a conflict without
guns. Rather, the ammunition is lies and psychological warfare and every American citizen is
a target. It is a fabulous book, a must-read! --Deanna Spingola, author of When the Power Elite Rules.
Book's Content
Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American
People
Contents
Preface
Conspiracies and Conspiracy "Theories" Espionage and Skepticism Historians and Intelligence Analysts The Art and Science of Historical Tradecraft
Introduction
A Fractured America The Covert American Revolution Who Are the New World Order Conspirators? The Secret War Against the American People Walking Back the Cat
Chapter 1. Is There an Invisible Government of the United States?
The CIA as Scapegoat The Council on What? The Science of Historical Forensics U.S. Presidents on Blinders CFR's Inside Critics The CFR Octopus The CIA's True Bosses
Chapter 2. Spying: The Rockefellers' True Passion
The Inquiry: First U.S. Civilian Intelligence Agency House-Wilson: A Typical Case of Agent Recruitment Wilson: The First Successful U.S. Puppet President The Family that Spies Together . . . Nelson and David Inherit Their Grandpa's Passion for Spying The Family Tradition Continues
Chapter 3. The Council on Foreign Relations: The Conspirators' Secret Intelligence
Agency
The Conspirators Create an Anti-American Monster The CFR: Second U.S. Civilian Intelligence Agency A Very Secretive Organization The CFR: an Association of Criminal Traitors The Invisible Government of the United States The CFR Conspirators Take Early Control of the Press The Conspirators Extend Their Control Over the Press, the Arts and the Academia The Conspirators Infiltrate the Two Parties The Conspirators Infiltrate the State Department
Chapter 4. The OSS: of the Bankers, by the Bankers, for the Bankers
American Intelligence Before and After WWI Was the OSS an Intelligence Agency? OSS: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight OSS: The Conspirators' Fifth Column Inside the U.S. Armed Forces The Assassination of General Patton
Chapter 5. The National Security Act, the CIA and the Creation of Artificial
Insecurity
The National Security Act of 1947 and the Origins of the National Security Council U.S. Presidents as CFR's Puppets The National Security Council: a Key Tool of the CFR Conspirators Why the CIA? The CIA: The Conspirators' Secret Military Arm The NSC Illegally Authorizes the CIA to Conduct Covert Operations Covert Operations: The CIA's True and Only Purpose
Chapter 6. The CIA's "Failures"
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight? The Gang That Shouldn't Shoot Straight CIA's Failed Assassination Attempts on Fidel Castro The CIA's True Role Team B VS Team A The Two CIAs CFR Conspirators Create CIA B American Patriots Working for CIA A HUMINT VS TECHINT Enemy Moles Inside the CIA Angleton's Deep Game
Chapter 7. The Cold War PSYOP
The CFR Conspirators Use the CIA to Recruit Fidel Castro The Bogotazo False Flag Operation and the Cold War PSYOP The Agent Provocateurs Planting False Clues Was Castro a Communist? The Bogotazo and the Assassination of Gaitán An Intelligence Analysis of the Bogotazo Gaitan's Assassin: A Manchurian Candidate? An Intelligence Analysis of Gaitán's Assassination New Pieces of the Puzzle The Bogotazo: Still a Mystery
Chapter 8. The CFR Mole Infiltrates the Soviets
The Destruction of Russia and the Creation of the Soviet Union Khrushchev's Peaceful Threat A Spy is Born ... or Made? Fidel Castro to the Rescue The Bay of Pigs PSYOP
Chapter 9. Agent Castro Warms Up the Cold War
The Soviets Swallow the Dangling Bait The CFR's Agent Provocateur Strikes Again Khrushchev Tries to Get Rid of Castro, But Fails Castro's Good Job on Behalf of His CFR Masters The Latin American Guerrillas and Other PSYOPs Fidel Castro and the 9/11 False Flag Operation The Castro-Chávez PSYOP
Chapter 10. PSYOPs Against the American People I
A War in the People's Minds PSYOPs Do Exist The War-for-Eugenics PSYOP The Anti-Christian PSYOP The Gay Movement PSYOP The Gay Marriage PSYOP
Chapter 11. PSYOPs Against the American People II
The Environmental PSYOP Anthropogenic Global Warming? The Two Party PSYOP The War on Terror PSYOP The Obama PSYOP
Chapter 12. Castro's Cuba: A Testing Ground for the New World Order?
The Cuban Economy Before Castro Cuba as a Testing Ground Castro's Cuba: a CFR Conspirator's Paradise
Chapter 13. The End of the CIA and the Beginning of the New World Order
The CFR Conspirators Take Control Over the U.S. Military The CFR's Fifth Column Inside the U.S. Armed Forces Faithful to Two Flags? The CFR Conspirators Destroy the CIA They Don't Need Anymore The "Support Our Army" Myth
Epilogue: What Can We Do to Win This War?
Is the U.S. Becoming a Totalitarian Dictatorship? Ballots or Bullets? Why They Hate Us? The Conspirators' Final Push for the New World Order PSYWAR and Mind Viruses
Appendixes
Appendix I. A Chronology of Treason
Appendix II. The Evaluation of Information: Intelligence, the 9/11/2001 Events, and the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962
Appendix III. Hegelian-type PSYOPS. False Flag Operations: Bogotazo and 9/11/2001
From the Preface
This is a book about a conspiracy. It is not, however, about the imaginary "vast
right-wing conspiracy" mentioned by Hillary Clinton. Neither it is about the alleged
"conspiracy of ideas" carried out by well-intentioned, honest people engaged in "an
ideological battle," mentioned by Congressman Ron Paul.
It is about a real vast right- left-wing conspiracy carried out by a group of criminal
psychopaths without any ideology at all except maximum power and control. To carry out their
plants, the conspirators usually resort to deception, coercion, extortion, usury,
racketeering, Ponzi schemes, theft, torture, assassination and large-scale mass murder.
The ultimate goal of these conspirators is the total destruction of the American republic
as we knew it and the creation of a global communo-fascist feudal totalitarian society under
their full control --a society they euphemistically call the New World Order.
The conspirators are a small group of Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of
transnational corporations, most of them senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Though their push for total control of the U.S. government began in 1913 during the Wilson
administration, since the end of WWII it has become a fully developed psychological war of
immense proportions secretly waged against the American people. Key elements in this secret
war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central
Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles,
Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro.
This conspiracy resembles a gigantic puzzle of which many pieces are missing or have been
intentionally placed in the wrong place in order to mislead. This explains why most analysts
who have studied the phenomenon using the analytical method have failed to find the true
source of the problem.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a roller coaster... , September 13,
2010
This book is a roller coaster. It questions most of your accepted ideas about
the Council on Foreign Relations, the OSS, the CIA, Castro, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban
missile crisis, 9/11 and many other events we take for granted. After reading this book I
agree with the author's assertion that most of what has been written about the CIA - pro and
con - is simply hogwash.
Gonzalez's theory about the two CIAs after the Team A -- Team B deception is very
convincing. This may explain why this is at the same time the most anti-CIA and the most
pro-CIA book ever written. (The book is dedicated to Arthur B. Darling, the first CIA
official historian.)
Moreover, this is the only book I have read that provides a logical explanation to the
CIA's seemingly illogical abandonment of HUMINT for its current widespread use of TECHINT,
and why good CIA officers have been abandoning the Agency.
Also, after reading many books about James Jesus Angleton, this books dissects his
behavior and shows what he really was: a traitor and a common criminal serving not the
American people but his true masters, the Wall Street bankers and oil magnates who created
the CIA.
A must read for CIA former and current officers, particularly the ones in the intelligence
area.
This book reads like a spy novel. In almost every single page I found shocking assertions
and theories -- supported by more than a thousand scholarly footnotes.
After enumerating the long list of CIA's failures, many books about the CIA rhetorically
ask the question: "Why the CIA has been so stupid?" After reading Gonzalez' book now I ask
myself, how I have been so stupid to believe the assertions that the CIA guys --or, much
better, the people who control the CIA-- are stupid?
In his book Gonzalez shows how, since its very conception, the CIA has never served us,
the American people, but the Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational
corporations who created it. The time is ripe to get rid of the CIA and the rest of alphabet
soup of intelligence organizations who use taxpayers money to protect the interest of
international bankers and transnational corporations.
Ah, and before we close the CIA building and throw away the key, I would like to see
destroyed the bust of William Donovan decorating its vestibule. While the traitor who ordered
that assassination of General Patton got a statue, the heroic, patriotic general's memory has
been covered with mud. What a shame!
I had a chance to read
and advance copy of this book and it was very interesting. I am a fan of conspiracy theory
books and historical books so this was right up my alley. What I realized though, after I
read more and more of the book is that this is not your typical book on this subject. It
backs ideas up with facts and has lots of good footnotes which I will use for future
reference. This type of subject matter may not be for everyone, but considering how things
are going in this country, it might be worth the read.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Had a chance to
purchase a copy of the book this past Saturday, started reading it then and finished it this
morning. Mr. Gonzalez has done such a remarkable job of analyzing historical events in detail
and providing so much key evidence that his claims must be taken seriously. I'm not going to
go into every detail about the book, but if you believe that everything in this country is
not as it seems and that we are being lied to by our government now and have been lied to in
the past, read this book.
Gonzalez in his engaging prose brings you quickly up-to-speed in the globalist plan and
the players. In spite of the abundance of typos and editing errors along with some stilted
English phrases, the book will be difficult to put down; and when it ends, you'll want to
know more. Hopefully,the second printing will be better-edited.
Warning, you will not be able to go back to where you were before, after reading this
book! , June 12, 2012
I am an honorably discharged Veteran with 20 years of military service and because I've
questioned the actions and motivations of the CFR, Homeland security, the bombing of the
Oklahoma Federal Building and the events of 9/11, I have been labeled by my government as a
potential terrorist. I am ashamed, hurt, confused and feel alarmed.
Why and how did it get to this point?
If you want to understand, put on your seat-belt and prepare yourself when you read
Servando Gonzalez's Psychological Warfare and the New World Order.
The wealth of historical, empirical proof within this work will rock your world. Just when
you think that you have reached the climax of evidence, the next wave of proof makes the hair
on the back of your neck stand up!
This book will affect you in a way that you will never be able to walk down American
streets again without recognizing that you could be seen as nothing more than cannon fodder
for a ruthless and cunning organization that has been working for a goal for over a hundred
years.
I am not religious but what has been going on in America and the rest of the world, is
truly evil. It's a force that is working to insure billions of people will suffer and who is
left will serve the masters of the New World Order.
This is not science fiction, not some crazy story of some sick delusional nut, this is
reality of elements within our government.
Servando Gonzalez will guide you through this strange and factual journey about what is
really going on in America and elements with in our government. If you don't care about your
love ones, if you don't care about your honor, if you don't care about knowing about what you
can do to protect yourself against this force, don't read this master piece of factual
work.
***Fair warning*** The knowledge in this capstone of work will affect you personally!
Literally. Servando Gonzalez's book on psychological warfare looks at the people and
organizations (and their motivations) of the conspiracy behind all other conspiracies.
For decades I've read of the main conspiracy-related events of my life time, the who's and
why's behind - JFK's and RFK's assassinations, the Contra/Arkansas cocaine/arms trade and
Whitewater money laundering scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks - and have
been fascinated, shocked, outraged, bewildered and disgusted. This book goes right to the
heart of the agenda behind these various events, and shows them to be mere layers in a much
larger onion. This book provides a clear overview but is also full of fascinating details,
especially on how Castro was a CIA agent and how his rule of Cuba has not been what it seems,
as well as providing a run down of some of the current PSYOPs being run on the American
public.
Gonzalez's own review here gives an outline of the details better than I ever could so I
will keep this short. I came across this book after reading a lengthy review by Gonzalez for
a different book on Amazon, greatly impressed by his intellect and perspective. At first I
was leery of purchasing his book because many of these reviews appear written by friends of
his (single review reviewers always make me skeptical). However this book delivers, and as
another reviewer commented here, it will change your understanding, views and perhaps life.
It has quickly risen into the top 10 list of influential books I've read. I'd even venture
say it is essential.
My main complaint is that while well informed, and intelligent Gonzalez's writing is often
dense and repetitive (as well as having a fair number of typos), and so apparently rushed to
press without thorough editing. Given the timely need of this book this is excusable, but
hopefully will be remedied in a second edition. More importantly I was sometimes left
wondering how Gonzalez knows all these (specific) people are CFR members/agents? And this
uncertainty of mine, and implied dependence on him, left me in doubt about the whole thesis
(are we both just paranoid delusional? lol!).... But perhaps such doubt (in the face of my
own mix of information and disinformation) is a healthy thing.
Many times when talking with friends about conspiracy ideas and theories they inevitably
ask two fundamental questions; 1) who is behind it all, and 2) why?
This book answers both clearly;
1) The Council of Foreign Relations (via the National Security Council, the CIA and
increasingly the US military command) and various sister organizations (The Trilateral
Commission and The Bilderberg Group). Many individuals are identified, most of these are
familiar public figures (as most high level government appointees and elected officials are
drawn from this elite group).
2) The New World Order - global domination for sustainable control and order by the
super-rich elite (the .0001%, not the mere, ordinary, scape-goated/smoke-screened "1%"). The
effect could well be a return to a new feudal age, with almost all of us in a "safe" but
unfree and impoverished serfdom (kind of like with the Cuba "experiment"). The kicker being
that to do this, "us" will probably be less than a quarter (and perhaps much less) of those
now alive.
And it also answers the question of how.
"But the conspirators who planned to bring a revolutionary change of government in the
United States to implement the communo-fascist regime they call the New World Order were a
bunch of physical cowards, who didn't have the courage to risk their lives in a revolution by
gun play. Consequently, despite the fact that the political system they wanted to implement
was a mixture of communism and fascism, they neither adopted the revolutionary tactics of
open insurrection favored by the Communists, nor the coup d'etat techniques of the Fascists,
but the evolutionary, infiltration techniques advocated by the British Fabians." (pg. 40)
The tools to achieve this Brave New World vision include any and all available. For some
it is direct warfare (the Middle East), for others, famine and eugenics (Africa), and for
American's it is mainly mind control (mass hypnosis and indoctrination) and psychological
warfare (destabilizing events leading to doubt, confusion, fear, depression and
helplessness). Of course this plan is not a given (even though already far along in it's
realization). There are other forces for change, sanity and awakening in the world today.
This is a well-documented expose of the puppet masters that pull the strings of the United
States Government.
As a retired police officer and intelligence analyst, I read this book with validation of
the ideas presented in the fore front of my mind. I used two bookmarks while reading. One
bookmark kept my current place and the other marked the corresponding footnotes. The
footnotes are detailed and accurate and led to even-more paths of discovering the truth.
This book is proof that the United States Government has been usurped by the Council of
Foreign Relations, transnational corporations and Wall Street bankers.
Every chapter is a light bulb going off in your mind. The author has brilliantly gathered
pieces of the puzzle and assembled them into a coherent picture.
This book is essential for understanding what has happened to our country and what is
still happening. It is a MUST read!
The USA in decline needs friends. Instead it got a powerful and well armed afversary, that
stupid neocon jerks (including academic jerks like Summers) tried to play to get some dollars in
theirs pockets... Add to this tentions with china and Harvard boys should probably be hanged on
lampposts.
As the incomparable Jimmy Dore says on his show, which should be required watching for
everyone, if the Russians can swing an election with such modest resources against maybe $1-2
billion spent by the Donald and the Hillary together, then every candidate for offices high and
low should run not walk with $54,700 in hand to secure a cheap and easy victory from the
Russobots.
When you beat a person who is down with boots and this person survive, you should not expect
any mercy in the next fight.
Russia just passed up the U.S. in grain exports. Their economy in real terms grows year
on year. Russia has more natural wealth available to exploit than USA that includes lands
rich in minerals, timber, water, etc.
With regards to traitorous fifth column atlantacists and oligarchy, Russia's shock
therapy (induced by the Harvard Boys) in the 90's helped Russian's figure out who the real
enemy is. Putin has marginalized most of these ((Oligarchs)), and they longer are allowed to
influence politics. Many have also been stripped of their ill gotten gains, for example the
Rothschild gambit to grab Yukos and to own Russia was thwarted. Dollar debts were paid off,
etc.
Russia could go further in their symphony of church and state, and copy Justinian
(Byzyantine empire) and prevent our (((friends))) from teaching in schools,bein control of
money, or in government.
With regards to China, they would be not be anywhere near where they are today if the West
had not actively transferred their patrimony in the form of transplanted industry and
knowledge.
China is only temporarily dependent on export of goods via their Eastern seaboard, but
as soon as belt and road opens up, she will pivot further toward Eurasia. If the U.S.
factories withdrew from China tomorrow, China already has our "knowledge" and will find
markets in Eurasia and raw materials in Africa, etc.
People need to stop whistling past the graveyard.
The Atlantics strategy has run its course, internal development of U.S. and linking up
with belt and road would be in America's best future interests. But, to do that requires
first acknowledging that money's true nature is law, and not private bank credit. Further,
the U.S. is being used as whore of Babylon, where her money is "Federal Reserve Notes" and
are international in character. The U.S is not sovereign. Deep state globalism does not
recognize national boundaries, or sovereignty.
That US elites that are split on who to go after first compromised by going after both
Russia and China at the same time is a definition of insanity. The US doesn't have a chance
in hell of subduing or defeating the Russia/China alliance. The US is already checkmated. The
more it goes after some big win the worse will be its defeat.
So the question (for me) is not which side will win, the question is the scenario of the
decline of the US Empire. Someone here mentioned the EU turning East. At some point the EU
will decide that staying a US vassal is suicide and it will turn East. When that happens then
the virus of US insanity will turn inwards into itself.
The US has recently focused on South America by installing several fascist regimes and
is now trying to get Venezuela. But the US backed regimes are laying the groundwork for the
next wave of revolution soon to come. Wherever I look the US is its own worst enemy. The big
question is how much suffering before it ends.
Huawei now sells more cell phones worldwide than Apple ( https://gearburn.com/2018/08/huawei-smartphone-sales-2018/
). And Huawei does this even though it is effectively excluded from the US market (You cannot
find it in stores) whereas Apple has unfettered access to the enormous Chinese market. You
find Huawei everywhere -- from Italy to Tanzania. How would Apple fare if China stopped
purchases of its products? Not so well I am afraid.
Usa is at war against everyone , from China to Latinamerica , from Europe to India , from the
islamic world to Africa . Usa is even at war against its own citizens , at least against its
best citizens .
When we speak of the culture war or the war on drugs or the war between the sexes or a trade
war we are misusing the word war.
War with China means exactly shooting and bombing and killing Chinese and American people.
Expanding the meaning of the word only makes it meaningless.
@joe
webbRussia and China are certainly not natural allies. However, deranged
international banditry of the US (called foreign policy in the DC bubble) literally forced
them to ally against a common threat: dying demented Empire.
As you call Chinese "Chinks", I suggest you stop using everything made in China, including
your clothes, footwear, tools, the light bulbs in your house, etc. Then, using your likely
made in China computer and certainly made in China mouse, come back and tell us how great
your life has become. Or you can stick to your principles of not using China-made stuff,
write a message on a piece of paper (warning: make sure that neither the paper nor the pen is
made in China), put it into a bottle, and throw it in the ocean. Be patient, and in a few
centuries you might get an answer.
In the halls of the Kremlin these days, it's all about China -- and whether or not
Moscow can convince Beijing to form an alliance against the West.
Russia's obsession with a potential alliance with China was already obvious at the
Valdai Discussion Club, an annual gathering of Russia's biggest foreign policy minds, in
2017.
At their next meeting, late last year, the idea seemed to move from the speculative to
something Russia wants to realize. And soon
Seen from Moscow, there is no resistance left to a new alliance led by China. And now
that Washington has imposed tariffs on Chinese exports, Russia hopes China will finally
understand that its problem is Washington, not Moscow.
In the past, the possibility of an alliance between the two countries had been hampered
by China's reluctance to jeopardize its relations with the U.S. But now that it has already
become a target, perhaps it will grow bolder. Every speaker at Valdai tried to push China
in that direction.
Where a war begins -- or ends -- can be hard to define. Michael Klare is right, 'War' and
'peace' are not 'polar opposites'. We often look at wars in chronological abstraction: the
First World War started on the 28th July 1914. Or did it only become a global war one week
later when Great Britain declared war on Germany? The causes can be of long duration. The
decline of the Ottoman Empire, for which the other Great Powers were positioning themselves
to benefit, might have begun as far back as 1683 when the Turks were defeated at the Battle
of Vienna. It ultimately led to the events of 1914.
Great power rivalry has always led to wars; in the last hundred years world wars. Graham
Allison wrote that the US can 'avoid catastrophic war with China while protecting and
advancing American national interests' if it follows the lessons of the Cold War. History
shows that wars are caused by the clash of interests, that's always at some else's expense.
When core interests collide there is no alternative to war -- however destructive.
My, Ukraine's American Minister of Health – Yuliana Suprun – is doing an
outstanding job. Ukraine was the locus of the world's biggest rise in measles cases in 2018,
from about 5,000 cases the year before to 35,120 the year just past. Moreover, 24,042 new
cases were reported in the first 2 months of this year.
But it was the Moskali who caused the epidemic by trolling social network sites with false
information as regards the efficacy of vaccination against measles.
Russian-backed attempts to sabotage Ukraine's economic, political, and health
developments have left the country fighting a measles outbreak and continuing a bloody,
undeclared war. The situation is emblematic of increasing tension between the ideologies of
President Vladimir Putin and countries of the pro-democratic, neoliberal west.
The measles outbreak -- affecting other countries including Serbia, Georgia, Greece,
and Italy -- has hit Ukraine hardest, with the country's 23 000 cases accounting for
more than half the European regional total. Kremlin-supported social media accounts spreading
discredited theories about the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, combined with shortages
and underfunding, have been blamed for the outbreak. Research published on Aug 23 concluded
Russian trolls promoted discord and, masquerading as legitimate users, created a false
impression that arguments for and against vaccination were equipoised. The result has been an
erosion of public consensus on the value of vaccine programmes. The precipitous fall in
vaccination level began after 2008, when 95% of eligible children in Ukraine received their
second (and final) recommended dose of the MMR vaccine. By 2016, the rate was 31%, among the
lowest in the world.
Although now rising again, the latest 85% measles vaccination rate recorded by WHO
remains below that needed for herd immunity. Records in 2016 show poor vaccination rates for
other diseases: only 19% of children received the third recommended dose of the
diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine and 56% received the third recommended dose of oral
polio vaccine.
Hepatitis B vaccination was low, with coverage with hepatitis B birth-dose and
third-dose vaccines at 37% and 26%, respectively. WHO estimates between 3% and 5% of the
Ukraine's 45 million population has been infected with hepatitis C.
Ukraine bears the second largest HIV epidemic in eastern Europe and central
Asia.
The above was printed in the much respected "The
Lancet" . Who wrote it, I know not -- but I can hazard a guess.
It begins with the outrageous statement that "Russia" is resposible for the epidemic,
specifically, the"ideology" of the Russian president is the cause of the epidemic.
No proof given: no data: sweet fuck all. Just an assertion that "Pyutin" is
responsible.
You know, it's a shame Ukrainians are so gullible, and believe Russia's lies without checking
any other sources of information – don't they know how to use The Microsoft and The
Google? Not to mention gullible Americans, who also fell for it.
Oh, and the Australians, who were so gobsmacked by Russia's campaign to discredit
vaccinations that being a 'vaccine skeptic' is now punishable by up to 10 years in
prison.
Mind you, the 'anti-vaxxers' in those instances are reportedly Australian nurses and
midwives – but I daresay they. too, were taken in by clever Russian trolls posing as
legitimate users on social media.
Some of you will probably be asking "At what point, for the love of Christ, are people
expected to take responsibility for their own decisions, instead of hiding behind the
feebleminded excuse that they were tricked by the Russians?" For my part, I am convinced that
Russia is going to take over the world, because Russian trolls are so much smarter than the
public in any country you care to name. With a few cat pictures and a sprinkling of Black
Lives Matter stories, many of them generated after the American election was actually over,
the Russians tricked the American electoral college into making Donald Trump president of the
United States instead of Mrs. Clinton, but in such a way that more of the public actually
voted for Clinton than for Trump. And the electoral college is supposed to be made up of
America's leaders. Brilliant, you must admit.
Watch out for the Kremlin campaign against photography – because having your picture
taken steals your soul – due to open in The Ukraine this summer. Then there will not
even be a photographic record of all the Ukrainians who died from measles, conniption fits,
brain fever and the fantods, as the Kremlin wipes them out with their own gullibility.
Survival of the fittest, baby.
"... Yesterday Israel's attorney general published his decision to indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection with three cases. ..."
"... Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed to charge Tony Blair with war crimes or the USA that similarly failed to indict George Bush for launching an illegal war*. ..."
"... Ariel Sharon's political career didn't come to an end after the massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The Kahan Commission that was formed to probe Israeli involvement in that colossal crime found that the IDF was indirectly responsible and that Sharon, who was then the Defense Minister, bore personal responsibility for the massacre. The commission recommended the removal of Sharon from his post as Defense Minister. ..."
"... Israel is led by criminals who love their country. For at least 70 years, Britain has been led by criminals who loathe their country. ..."
"... "The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks them behind bars". ..."
"... Which is hardly surprising, since most people who rise to high political office (in any country) tend to be criminals – or at the very least callous and cruel. What really is surprising, as Mr Atzmon observes, is how rarely other countries see fit to prosecute their political leaders, even when they commit glaringly obvious crimes. ..."
"... As Howard Scott accurately remarked, "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation". (Or, one might add, enough influence to launch a campaign for political power). ..."
"... Canadian Jew Henry Makow speaks often of the vicious rivalry in Jewry between the 'globalist' Jews typified by George Soros, and the 'nationalist-zionist' Jews typified by Netanyahu, who has recently making waves by his alliances with European right-wing parties, who are associated in many Jewish minds with 'anti-semitism' ..."
"... The prosecution of Netanyahu, can be seen as artillery fire by the Soros-type camp, which thinks Netanyahu has really gone too far linking himself with Viktor Orbán and so on ..."
"... One recalls the famous 'anti-semitic' tweet of Netanyahu's son Yair against Soros, using the infamous 'happy merchant' jewish caricature http://images.jpost.com/image/upload/q_60/391963 ..."
The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks
them behind bars. Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was found guilty of "rape, sexual
harassment, committing an indecent act while using force, harassing a witness and obstruction
of justice". He was sentenced to seven years in prison. Veteran Israeli PM Ehud Olmert was
convicted of two counts of bribery and was also sent to prison.
Yesterday Israel's attorney
general published his decision to indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach
of trust in connection with three cases.
Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed
to charge Tony Blair with war crimes or the USA that similarly failed to indict George Bush for
launching an illegal war*.
Yet Israel is far from an ethical realm. It is institutionally
racist towards the indigenous people of the land as well as African immigrants, and it is also
abusive to its poor. Israel is occasionally accused of gross
war crimes . One may wonder why a criminal state with such an appalling record is so harsh
with its leaders.
Zionism is one possible answer. Zionism, in its early days, was contemptuous of 'the Jews.'
It promised to civilise the chosen people by means of 'homecoming.' The following comments
weren't made by Adolf Hitler or a member of the Nazi party but by some of the most dedicated
early Zionists:
The wealthy Jews control the world, in their hands lies the fate of governments and
nations. They set governments one against the other. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations
and the rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich." (Theodor Herzl, Deutsche
Zeitung, as cited by an Israeli documentary )
'The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and
spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social
obligations, knows no order nor discipline.' ( Our Shomer 'Weltanschauung' ,
Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner)
'The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a
proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social
ladder.'(The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916)
The harsh treatment of Israeli politicians by the Israeli media and judicial system is
inspired by that Zionist promise. Israel wants to be 'a state like all other states.' It wants
its politicians to be ethical and behave with dignity. But the Israeli people aren't sure about
the importance of such trappings. Mostly, they could care less whether the judicial system or
the media approve of their leaders' ethical records.
Ariel Sharon's political career didn't come to an end after the massacre in Sabra and
Shatila. The Kahan
Commission that was formed to probe Israeli involvement in that colossal crime found that
the IDF was indirectly responsible and that Sharon, who was then the Defense Minister, bore
personal responsibility for the massacre. The commission recommended the removal of Sharon from
his post as Defense Minister. These findings did not stop Sharon political career, as we know,
he went on to become Israel's prime minister a few years later.
The asterisk says it all:"Needless to mention, Israel sends its politicians to jail for
bribery but also does not prosecute war crimes as much as it should." As long as you're
plundering & strafing shegetzes you're on safe ground in Israel (or wherever else you can
get away with it in heathen territory). Just like you can traffic in shiksas all you want
(one of Israel's leading industries until too much publicity recently).But if you dare screw
(either connotation) one of the tribe, your bacon (oink, oink) is fried!
"As much as early Zionism promised to change the people of Israel, the people themselves
haven't been keen of turning into something totally foreign to their true nature" instead,
they're more keen to turn their true nature into something very threatening to foreigners.
"Despite yesterday's polls that suggest that Netanyahu's support has dropped following the
decision to indict him, it is likely that within a few days we will find that Netanyahu's
support is rising" as he directs his ire to another foreign population again, in Iran or Gaza
or Europe or wherever. "This response to findings of criminal behaviour [of only one kind]
enlightens the dialectical clash between what the Israelis 'are' and the image they insist
upon attributing to"..the Other.
"Israelis love to see themselves as a dignified Western civilisation guided by law and
order" at home; while they avidly sell-out this image in the world. "Israel is at least
'democratic' enough to bring this contradiction to light." So give them a little credit,
anyway – but no reprieve.
The striking thing about the crimes Netanyahu is charged with is how trivial and Pollyannish
they are compared to what he should be charged with. If I think this living outside Israel, I
can only imagine what his diehard supporters think .
"The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks
them behind bars".
Which is hardly surprising, since most people who rise to high political office (in any
country) tend to be criminals – or at the very least callous and cruel. What really is surprising, as Mr Atzmon observes, is how rarely other countries see fit to
prosecute their political leaders, even when they commit glaringly obvious crimes.
As Howard Scott accurately remarked, "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who
has not sufficient capital to form a corporation". (Or, one might add, enough influence to
launch a campaign for political power).
Regarding why corrupt Israel surprises us by prosecuting its own leaders sometimes – Before he ended up suddenly dead in Florida USA, exiled Israeli journalist Barry Chamish
(1952-2016), always pointed out a corruption back-story behind such criminal charges
For example, Chamish attributed the bizarre Moshe Katsav indictment, to how Katsav had
been an impediment to the machinations of the even-more-connected Shimon Peres.
Canadian Jew Henry Makow speaks often of the vicious rivalry in Jewry between the
'globalist' Jews typified by George Soros, and the 'nationalist-zionist' Jews typified by
Netanyahu, who has recently making waves by his alliances with European right-wing parties,
who are associated in many Jewish minds with 'anti-semitism'
The prosecution of Netanyahu, can be seen as artillery fire by the Soros-type camp, which
thinks Netanyahu has really gone too far linking himself with Viktor Orbán and so
on
@NoseytheDuke "inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions."
"also known as the dialectical method, is at base a discourse between two or more people
holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through
reasoned arguments."
"the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions."
"a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of
contradictory process between opposing sides. " [the key phrase: Israelis contradict
themselves, or Israeli behavior contradicts its profession of virtue]
She raise important question about Trump university
Notable quotes:
"... That was brutally enlightening. I mean, I heard from the news that she didn't have a clue about education, but I didn't know it was this bad. America's education system desperately needs to be improved, but I don't see that coming with her... ..."
"... Senator Warren's zeal and interrogation skills are both admirable. ..."
I am an Australian observer, What I see of Elizabeth Warren, she should be the next
American President, 1, she has a brain, 2, she has dignity, 3, she knows what she is dong,
(she has a clue, unlike the current one ) no one scares this woman.
Betsy deVos got raked over the coals by both Franken and Warren... deVos isn't qualified
to be a teacher's aid for a kindergarten class much less run the D. of Ed. scary!
We need more Elizabeth Warrens in America. And we need new rules in our governance. Can
you imagine if this was a real life corporate board interview. Would DeVos be hired by that
board? Be honest....... DeVos was beyond stupid here.
That was brutally enlightening. I mean, I heard from the news that she didn't have a clue
about education, but I didn't know it was this bad. America's education system desperately
needs to be improved, but I don't see that coming with her...
I am not a fan either way of DeVos, but this was nothing but a platform for Warren to fast
talk over her, and a way to slam Trump, call him a crook and fraud, and be condescending
non-stop.
Elizabeth Warren has some good ideas at times, but this was bullying and
showboating on her part and she wasted her time lecturing instead of really giving her a real
opportunity to answer a few strong questions to see where she stood on certain topics. Pity.
Has Warren been held accountable for the billions of waste and fraud committed by the
congress in the past 8 years on failed policies, laws, etc.
And by the way, how many people
in Washington, D C have had experience running a Trillion dollar bank? What a rather dumb
question since the answer is NOBODY.
"Destroys?" She basically ask her a bunch of questions she already knew the answer to just
to point out she hasn't taken out a student loan or has experience overseeing a trillion
dollar program. Then Liz proceeds to derive her own answer prior to Besty answering herself.
A cop may not have saved someones life before so by that logic the cop is not qualified to
save lives? Sure, she may not have experience with student loans but that doesn't mean she
doesn't understand compound interest, inflation and economics. Maybe these hearings would be
a better use of tax payer's money if they weren't merely a forum to broadcast the fact that
you don't like someone's political affiliations.
So having focused on being a community organizer is fine for running for president, but
somehow NOT for running a federal agency under a president? Meanwhile, when it comes to
following the spirit of regulations as opposed to regulations themselves, which (if any) were
NOT violated when a certain senator used to be a professor at Harvard and proclaimed that she
was of American Indian heritage, while such a classification "coincidentally" benefited
whomever claimed it?
Having said that, Senator Warren's zeal and interrogation skills are
both admirable. So is the way in which Betsy Devos diplomatically handles such an onslaught
of pointed questions that some say are agenda-driven.
This is democracy at work and it's
refreshing to see. Thanks Youtube and all who helped bring this about.
Senator Warren. You are a US Senator. What is your plan for insuring the United States
won't run up 10's of trillions of debt which will bankrupt our country? Senator Warren, have
you ever balanced a budget? Do you know what a balanced budget is? Senator Warren, what is
your plan for protecting US citizens from criminal illegal aliens? Do you know, Senator
Warren, we already have laws in place to protect US citizens from criminal illegal aliens?
They're called immigration laws.
Tim Sloan has all the characteristics of a crook. He is remorseless, misleading, lacks
responsibility, tries to cause confusion of the facts, and a manipulator. This guy was the
CFO and claims he was removed from the scams. Yeah right!
I know Tim Sloan did not do a good job and Senator Warren grilled him to the point where I
feel bad for him. She is so good at finding out the truth and cornering the guilty like a
rat.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of Tim Sloan, probably some fair criticism, but he
doesn't strike me as a crook. For Pocahontas to say he should be "fired", the same charge
could be made at Pocahontas - that she should resign (fire herself from the Senate); the scam
of her claiming Native American heritage to further her career was TOTALLY bogus.
If she would shut up about being an Indian and attacking Trump and focus on attacking the
banks she would win I'm a Trump supporter and I would vote for her. She is great on the
fed
Trump is a dangerous and in his own way very capability media person, a propagandist who is
capable fully exploit this story. She really needs to call Trump Pinocchio to neutralize this
line of attack
Notable quotes:
"... She has too much excess baggage to run for president. She reminds me a little bit of Hillary mixed with Trump. She used to or still supports Susie Orman, the self proclaimed financial wizard. Orman is a lier and has cheated many people and has made a lot of money off people who fell for her get rich sceems. Orman is a lot like Trump. I don't mind having a woman president but just not this ine! ..."
"... Donald and Fred Trump both claimed that their family is from Switzerland when they are are actually 2nd and 3rd generation German immigrants and still have a whole town of living relatives in Germany. I'm sure we need to demand Donald Trump take a DNA test and also exhume and test Fred Trump's remains . I mean since these matters are clearly so important to everyone. Come on let's dig up the president's dead father to solve a petty political dispute! ..."
"... CNN literally can't do an interview without being obsessed with race. ..."
"... She mentions her native ancestry. It's a point of pride to her, she has no shame of it. Trumps bullying her lead her to get the DNA test. It made her look foolish, like she would do anything to shut the bully up. Whatever her action they have a reaction of insulting her. Because they are racist. ..."
"... OMG, What controversy with Warren?? No one outside of DC cares about the ancestry.. Trump is literally a Mob Boss... ..."
Most White ppl in the U.S. think they are Cherokee, even though they aren't. In fact, I
know White conservatives who claim Cherokee. Sure she went a step too far 30-40yrs ago, but
at least she actually cares about Natives. Conservatives, on the other hand, claim to be
Native Americans, support DAPL, could care less about them and mock Natives any chance they
get
--Principal Chief Richard Sneed "It's media fodder. It's sensationalism. That's what it
is,. All it takes is for one person to say they're offended, and then everybody does a dog
pile. But to me, it's 'Wait a second. Let's get to some of the facts here.' Sen. Warren has
always been a friend to tribes. And we need all the allies we can get."
I see the hate on the comments...it looks like the KKK types are here donning their MAGA
hats. Are they tight? Lowering your, already low, IQs further? Yeah
The whole DNA thing is such a silly, irrelevant distraction. It's so utterly unimportant.
But we're now going to find that those sideshows become the focus of the race rather than any
real discussion on policy. I'm becoming more and more convinced that people are increasingly
too stupid or simply lazy and cynical to bother thinking about things that actually
matter.
Why? The poor learned the loopholes just like the rich. That's why she checked the
native American box. And the hypocrisy of "President" Trump's past brought out from the time
he stated he was running, this women was right next to Hillary knocking him down.
I don't buy the soft casual talk about not going to the past. She messes with the wrong
man and then her skeletons came our of the closet. She deserved it
Nothing we First Nations people despise more than a white person so ashamed of themselves
try and pretend they are one of us . We have more respect for white people who are strong and
proud of their own people . She is not only very weak , she is a traitor to her people . We
do not respect people ashamed of themselves .
I also hope all you upright citizens are out there demanding a boycott of Chuck Norris.
I'm sure you're outraged by Walker Texas Ranger, correct? You know that tv show where one of
the whitest guys in America claimed both in the show and outside of the show for marketing
purposes that he is native American. I assume you all want Chuck Norris to take a DNA test
and prove it right? Guys? Right?
They should simply agree on what is the proper genetic mix that is acceptable
ideologically to determine which genetic mix is less or not acceptable so that the proper
mistreatment of the lesser sort can be determined and enforced by popular consensus. This
seems almost to be having the force and effect of law socially and politically. This is
becoming a strange mix of nostalgic notions of virtue while at the same time embracing the
basic premise of Nuremburg.
She has too much excess baggage to run for president. She reminds me a little bit of
Hillary mixed with Trump. She used to or still supports Susie Orman, the self proclaimed
financial wizard. Orman is a lier and has cheated many people and has made a lot of money off
people who fell for her get rich sceems. Orman is a lot like Trump. I don't mind having a
woman president but just not this ine!
Donald and Fred Trump both claimed that their family is from Switzerland when they are are
actually 2nd and 3rd generation German immigrants and still have a whole town of living
relatives in Germany. I'm sure we need to demand Donald Trump take a DNA test and also exhume
and test Fred Trump's remains . I mean since these matters are clearly so important to
everyone. Come on let's dig up the president's dead father to solve a petty political
dispute!
CNN literally can't do an interview without being obsessed with race. Warren would
probably had a chance if they gave her a support like they do Harris. ...now here comes the
twist I actually do not support her or anyone on the left but she didn't even get a solid
chance she might as well drop out now and endorse someone.
She mentions her native ancestry. It's a point of pride to her, she has no shame of it.
Trumps bullying her lead her to get the DNA test. It made her look foolish, like she would do
anything to shut the bully up. Whatever her action they have a reaction of insulting her.
Because they are racist.
It's so annoying how anytime a decent person fucks up nowadays they're forced to spend
like an entire year apologizing, and that's only if they don't automatically lose their
entire career right after said fuck up. She admits she shouldn't have done it, great, now
lets get back to policy.
I just don't understand how some people can't accept her apology for the Native American
fiasco, yet they give trump all the slack in the world. This is a man who bragged about
grabbing women by the pussy..... The double standard is just ridiculous.
Taxation itself does not solve the problem. You also need to cut MIC. Only in this case
orginary americans will benefit. Andf that Mmieans that Eligeth Warren will face tremendous
slander campaign neocons.
If Elizabeth Warren is nominated for president, and I hope she will be, I believe we will
see the most virulent, vile and vituperative campaign imaginable against her by the right,
the wealthy and the corporate interests. It will be a battle for the soul of this country.
But if anyone can make the case to the middle class for real economic and tax reform in the
face of the attacks that such a plan will face, Elizabeth Warren is the person to do it. She
has a first class intellect, she has remarkable communication skills and, as she says, this
is her life. She's not running in order to "be" president, she's running to enact policies
that have the potential of turning the tide in this country in favor of the people and away
from the plutocrats. And in this, she will face real opposition from many within her own
party. It's going to be an interesting two years.
Paul, it would be great if you could compare the revenue effects of this Warren proposal
with the actual tax policies that were in effect during the Eisenhower administration. It
seems that the progressive taxation rates of that era, topping out at about 90% marginal
rates, should and could be the "gold standard" for comparison with current plans.
The neolib/libertarian campaign, stretching back to those years and even earlier, has been
wildly successful in brainwashing Americans with regard to both public finance and the link
with tax structures. And the removal of controls on money in politics has us in a truly toxic
environment that in my view has already tipped us into an oligo-klepto-plutocracy. The
ravaging of all three branches of government has reached critical mass, and we're teetering
on the brink in a way that may not be reversible.
Any candidate who is promising health care for all and a substantial response to climate
change and crumbling infrastructure, has to be talking taxation of the wealthy either by
income tax or wealth tax or both. Otherwise, they are just blowing smoke. Elizabeth has that
combination in her platform.
It is a tragic commentary on the American political system that FDR felt he had to make a
compromise with the Devil in order to gain the passage of progressive legislation.
The situation continues today with the institutions of the electoral college and
especially the US Senate, where the population of several small easily manipulated states can
hold equal power to representatives of states with many times more people. In our times the
circumstances often result in gridlock when the Senators from progressive states refuse to
compromise with these who represent minority viewpoints.
Warren Buffett and other billionaires who are socially committed should endorse Senator
Warren's proposal and her candidacy. Let Trump call her names; she knows what she's doing and
is truly on our side.
The national debt as a % of GDP was higher after WWII than it is now. Then we had three
decades of prosperity along with a steady decline in the debt. How? High marginal tax rates.
Since Reagan's election the debt has steadily increased, so that now it's almost as high as
it was in 1945. We solved this problem before, we can solve it again. Warren and AOC are
right on.
There is a very simple logic to focus on; The corruption of Republicans from campaign
donations to legislation as directed by wealthy's lobbyists enriching their wealthy
benefactors, to gross wealth inequality as a result, is overwhelming justification to get
that wealth back to the nation through progressive taxation. Tax the wealthy before they
export America's wealth. It isn't trickling down as much as trickling Up and Out of the
country.
The idea that a couple of extra percentage points of taxes on fifty million dollars could
be considered to be outrageous shows how radical the right-wing has become in this
country.
Someone who has that much income- I was going to say "earned", but it's the lower-class
working people who earn it for them- would not even miss that money. And how much money can
you actually spend in a way that makes you happy, or happier, anyway?
In real life, Obama already increased taxes for the extreme rich, and Hillary's campaign
agenda included additional tax increases. So this is merely a logical continuation of what
Democrats have always stood for.
I've noticed two things that have happened in my lifetime. Many Billionaires and near
billionaires have proliferated while at the same time social security has become more
precarious and homelessness has exploded.
And of course our overall national debt has dramatically increased. Nobody needs a billion
dollars or even ten percent of it for that matter. Not sure if Warren's plan is the best but
it would generate a ton of money to improve the collective good and it still wouldn't dent
the billionaires much.
The downside to this proposal is that my newest Bugatti Veyron I was planning to
gold-plate may have to be silver-plated instead. Worse, my tenth beach house estate I was
planning on building on the island I purchased off Fiji may have to be scaled back to a
bungalow occasionally rented out to cover the utilities. Oh, the pain. And forget about me
trying a hostile takeover of a major media outlet I will not name.
Prof. Krugman, why do you give credit to Elizabeth Warren's party rather than to Elizabeth
Warren herself? Her party will deserve credit if they can get beyond the corporatists and
nominate her. Otherwise, no. Last night on Lawrence O'Donnell, Sen. Warren explained how the
wealthy have manipulated the system for years to accumulate more and more wealth.
Their lobbyists persistently ask Congress for small, subtle changes in the law that
benefit them. Because the individual changes seem minor, Congress often goes along, but, over
the years, they add up to major benefits allowing the wealthiest to accumulate more and more
assets.
Billionaire Howard Schultz's ability to self-fund a presidential campaign and the Koch
political network's efforts to make its own preferred policies exemplify another reason for
taxing the wealthiest. They can and do use their vast resources to cause significant harm to
the country.
Watched Sen. Warren on MSNBC last night and she did well to explain her plan to us
"regular folks," rare for a politician. Just ask Paul Ryan.
This plan can work if we don't let Republicans lie about its benefits. Nail the Fox crew
to the wall in siding with their uber rich boss Murdoch, who loathes the plan (I wonder why).
This plan can work if it still contains tax break goodies for the 90%---all levels. We all
have to join together and we all have different economic concerns. That's a fact.
This plan can work if the public realizes it prevents tapping into Social Security or
Medicare or cutting benefits. This plan can work if we can hear over and over again how the
money will be spent on climate change, healthcare, college tuition, infrastructure, cyber
security, and poverty, to name a few. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. This plan will work if they
point to the Republican tax debacle giveaway of 2018 did NOTHING to help any of those
problems but was a major giveaway to the rich who did not reinvest into the economy but
cashed in instead.
The ripple effects of more fair, adequate, progressive tax rates are huge throughout the
society. Low tax rates and tax havens for the rich and corporations lets mega donors keep
increasing their donations (investments) in our politicians and elections, thus their
dominance over lawmaking.
This effectively subverts our professed ideals of equality and citizen influence. It
subverts our constitution, bill of rights, and the safeguards of our 3 equal branches. Big
money values infect our executive, legislative and judicial branches. The S. Court legalized
unlimited donor money (investments) in our elections, pretending that any limits would
subvert the 1st Amendment's Free Speech. We see the effects on tax laws and weak regulations
giving huge advantage to the donor elites. In effect they are regulating our govt.
You are wrong in every argument you make. You don't live in isolation, you live in an
organized society that makes your wealth possible. There would be no wealth in the US if we
didn't have a functioning society, and there would be no functioning society without taxation
and government functions. And "the rich" didn't go anywhere in the fifties and sixties when
the taxation was much higher than today. Also these 0.1 to 0.01% that Warren is proposing to
tax don't pay vast majority of the taxes, it's the upper 10% that pays the majority.
I agree that the tax rates from the 1950's were economically, fiscally and socially sound.
Were it not a violation of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder, I would propose a
more rigorous tax be applied to the Kochs and the Adelsons. When it comes to spending more on
Medicare (which I interpret to mean more than the current 17-18% of GDP), however, we should
not. I recently had a health problem while traveling in Germany. I spent 4 days in a teaching
hospital (University Clinic of Bonn--UKB). Not only did I receive excellent care, which my
American doctor told me was as good as any care available here, but the bill came to around
$4300 (€3700). That included three diagnostic procedures. The Medicare-approved payments
for the same care would have been about $28,000. Throwing more money down the bottomless pit
of U.S. medical practice is futile. The proceeds of such a capital levy as that proposed by
Ms.Warren would be better spent on addressing hunger, on infrastructure and on retiring some
of the national debt
A tax on significant accumulated wealth is past due. The same for inherited wealth.
Apparently the hated "Death Tax" doesn't go far enough. Many self-made millionaires promote
the benefits of pulling one's self up by one's boot straps. Why are they so adamant about
denying the opportunity to their children?
When Warren Buffett turned over much of his wealth to charity through Bill Gates, he was
asked if he wasn't giving away his children's inheritance. Buffett responded, (paraphrase,)
"My children have enough to do whatever they want. They do not have enough to do nothing." In
my perfect world, it would be difficult to be very rich or very poor, and no one would ever
go without.
Nice headline---Eliz Warren does Teddy Roosevelt--- who broke up the trusts in the
progressive era. And Bernie Sanders aimed to do Franklin Roosevelt. Sanders had the quixotic
idea to restore the New Deal. But he was soundly bashed and trashed by Krugman and most NYT
columnists/reporters.
Even if he wasn't their ideal candidate, his proposals should have been given the respect
of serious discussion, like we now are getting for Ocasio and Warren. Do a compare and
contrast on policy---Warren and Sanders. Interesting to see what we can learn.
Speaking of billionaires, I just heard Howard Schultz on NPR trashing Warren's wealth tax
plan. So what does this say? Even a so-called progress wealthy person really doesn't want to
give up a scintilla of coin. I think the counter-argument, that increasing the income of the
0.1% with tax breaks, does not lead to significant increases in prosperity for everybody -
the "lifts all boats" ruse. A recent article in the NY Times shows that this is the case.
That is, yachts are being lifted, dinghies are getting shredded by their propellers.
Ignoring the irrelevance of the Teddy Roosevelt comparison (hardly has anything to do with
the rest of his article anyway), this is pretty good from a guy who did all he could to kill
Bernie against Hillary. Bernie would have said pretty much the same as Warren then and
probably would agree with the proposals now. So Dr K, good to have you back in the midst of
the progressives and assume you had a lapse of reason for the past 3 or 4 years. Saez,
Piketty and Zucman are fantastic. I am delighted the first two are helping Warren. Ps. All
three deserve the Nobel Prize. At least as much as you did.
I was disappointed that she didn't run in 16. She knows that large swaths of our
population are under-educated, superstitious, and under the impression that their little
arsenals will make a dent should their conspiracy theories that heroically place them behind
bushes at Lexington and Concord at odds with the US government somehow come to pass. As
someone who has taught school, she appears to understand that trying to engage the back row
not only fails to produce positive results but also annoys and appalls those who showed up in
good faith. Similarly, she appears to know that the best way to enlighten is to lay out the
facts as accessibly as possible and trust that those viewing the facts can come to logical
conclusions. Note that if her theory is fatally flawed, so is the Republic. Adlai Stevenson,
when told that every thinking American would vote for him, reportedly was chagrined and noted
that to win he needed a majority. That was in the 1950's, when sensible tax policies had not
been hijacked by dark messaging funded by those who had so much to gain if American safety
nets such as Social Security and, in the 1960's, Medicare, could be misconstrued as the
insidious tentacles of the Red Menace. The messengers of deceit, thanks to Citizens United,
no longer have to whisper doom from the shadows. Rest assured that if EW moves toward the
nomination we will be frightened by slick ads that equate gross wealth not with a cancerous
concentration but with American lifeblood.
@JW Not sure why anyone on the left sneers at Sanders. Did you know that Sanders has an
approval rating of something like 80% in Vermont, a state that used to be full of Republicans
and still has plenty of conservatives? People who pay serious attention to Sanders like and
respect him. We'll actually be very lucky if we get someone with Sanders' magnetism. If you
listen closely, his anger is at injustice, not at other people. He cares about everyone.
Why do we have college football coaches making $6million per year ? Because slightly
lesser coaches make $5million per year. They could all get by very nicely on a quarter
million per year. It's the same with the 1% : they need their fortune only in comparative
terms. In the meantime 80% of us live in an economy comprising about 20% of our country's
wealth, a very poor country in itself indeed.
Liz has always been ahead of the curve. She knows well that it's time for Democrats to
right the ship of state by reducing income and wealth inequality before it sinks our
democracy. Go Liz! Go Dems! Go big .. before it's too late!
"...public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich." Yet,
congress refuses to support such tax reform. I guess that tells us that most politicians are
serving and protecting their wealthy political donors rather than our country.
One summer in Sigourney, Iowa, when I was a small boy, my grandfather took me into the
library Carnegie built and talked about it with great pride. By the way, he served in both
world wars and was a prominent Republican. Oh, how times have changed.
This is going to be a tough choice for average voters. Work till the day you die, live in
squalor and penury in old age as the social safety net is cut, and condemn your family to
ever decreasing living standards -- or in the alternative, tax the accumulated wealth of
billionaires. Decisions, decisions, decisions...
RICH- THE ANSWER IS NOT CLASS WARFARE VS THE RICH...I'm not rejecting this proposal out of
hand but Warren/Picketty have been putting the cart before the horse-she needs to identify
and focus on a fiscal need, THEN assemble tax policy to pay for it in an earmarked way...and
it has to be gradual, ideally phased in over 10 plus years. Suggestions ? What do we need to
establish Medicare for all ? Or address infrastructure problems over next 10-20 years ? Or
make SS solvent ? Determine the revenue you need, not the "revenge" you might want vs the
"rentiers" - and I think a very good place to start would be top tax advantages accounts very
heavily at high rates.Its absurd Mitt Romney has like what $200 million in his IRA and hes
only taking the RMD ?? Tax any income to an IRA with a balance over say $10 million....nobody
needs a tax break at that level.
But billionaires are the job creators, the noble stewards of finance and cap... and I'm
laughing. Tax the rats. If they complain, tax them more. Let them move to Singapore and share
their crocodile tears with crocodiles (does Singapore have crocodiles?)
America's oligarchs have given the working class 40 years of wage slavery and we've given
them a life in the clouds. Time to renegotiate.
It's I thought was about taxing the rich more, not only on high incomes but on high net
worth also. Rajiv said about how the rich donate to causes that reduce their taxes, by say,
electing more tax-cutting Republicans. The Koch brothers are good examples. I didn't quite
get your criticism of Rajiv.
This column " Elizabeth Warren does Teddy Roosevelt " says a lot about Professor Warren
but very little about Teddy. I read a column yesterday by Charlie Pierce where he goes into
detail about TR`s New Nationalism speech.
There are parts of this speech that are real eye openers such as - The true friend of
property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not
the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the
servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must
effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.
Or- We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people
may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their
management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be
passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes;
it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate
expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service
corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political
affairs. This speech spends a lot of time praising the Saviors of our Country, The Civil War
Veterans. And it also says a lot about the proper place for Capital and Corporations,
servants not masters.
I might agree with you if this was a momentary phenomenon, but it's not. The imbalance
that is finally plain to all began with subtle changes in the balance between capital and
labor in the early 1970s. The truly rich understood what they were doing. They found a
fulcrum that allowed them to pry money and power from the increasingly vulnerable middle and
lower classes, so they did. To correct this by less drastic means will take at least that
long again. I doubt we can wait another 45 years, so yes. We need to use the taxation
authority as the fulcrum to pry back the people's fair share. There is no other option as far
as I can see.
Your characterization of the argument as suggesting that "we should just take all the
money from individuals because we can" is as complacent as your reference to Lenin and Mao.
Did you miss the part where Krugman points out that we have already used progressive taxation
in this country to advance the collective economic good? U.S. economic policy from the Great
Depression to Reagan unleashed a rising tide that truly floated all boats in the U.S.
economy.
It was the gratuitous tax giveaways to the wealthy advocated by Milton Friedman, among
others, that gave our wealth distribution its present hourglass configuration.
Let's add another thing: scrap the cap on the amount of wages subject to the 6.2%
Social Security tax, currently set at $128,400. Why should someone making $20 million a year
only pay the SS tax on the first $128,400? Scraping the cap would make SS solvent forever,
and could even reduce the percentage we're taxed.
@Robert Elizabeth Warren is a good explainer, and when she starts banging on a point she's
convincing. Importantly, she doesn't do it just once, she makes it a theme to be
hammered.
A great lesson of the Vietnam War was that it is *repetition* that drives change -- in
that case, TV news repeatedly showing flag-draped coffins coming home, covering marching
protesters, exposing atrocities, etc.
Whether through timidity or laziness or slavishness to big money donors, Democrats have
failed to create a momentum on the idea of wealth inequality that would persuade the public.
This will change with Elizabeth Warren and, if he chooses to run, Bernie Sanders. In this
regard, a prediction: At some point before November 2020, we will hear the phrase "I welcome
their hatred."
Far from radical, the ideas of Warren, Sanders, and AOC are sensible, logical, and fair.
Bring on any politician who means business such as these proposals and can articulate them,
isn't a billionaire already, and doesn't have a tawdry history of being entangled with Wall
Street, and watch him/her win.
Progressive taxation isn't all that progressive anymore. Capital gains and even earned
income of incredible amounts of money as well as stock options are taxed at low rates. In
case no one has noticed, the AMT is a bust. It doesn't work and when it does, it harms the
upper middle class rather than the super-rich.
The "high-end earners" pay a lot (but not enough) because they are the only ones who have
so much income that taxing them does not adversely affect the economy. We have rich folks who
can afford giant yachts and not so rich folks who can't survive an unexpected $400 bill. That
is not the way the economy should work. Eventually, income inequality will even weaken
corporate profits and destroy the economy. Even large corporations need customers who can buy
their products.
FDR 2.0 must address the social class the Great Recession created. Those are the now 50-60
year olds and millennials who lost jobs, pensions, and are still underemployed and in the gig
economy.
Starting in ten years, if nothing is done,very will have 95 million or so homeless.
Leaving it to states to construct affordable housing won't do. We need Universal Basic
Income. This is needed regardless of whether the GOP and Trump's scams cause a depression.
Bernie and Elizabeth would easily demand Congress act on these ideas. Bloomberg and Schultz?
Not on your life. A decent future is progressive. We need FDR 2.0. we need to be done with
triangulation.
The GOP is an untrustworthy partner. --- Things Trump Did While You Weren't Looking [2019]
https://wp.me/p2KJ3H-3h2
Let's hope Warren succeeds, whether she becomes President or not. I recall that under
Eisenhower-era rates of taxation, the middle class and the working class had a lot better
deal than we have today. Heck, we even had a better deal under Nixon-era rates of taxation.
It's weird to be nostalgic for Nixon, but look at what's in the White House now.
Thanks for a great column again, and yes, Ms. Warren in on the right track. Now if we
could only get the corporate media to stop trivializising her policies as "nerdy" we might
get somewhere.
While Warren's proposal and ACO's marginal tax ideas both have merit, let's be honest-
ideas such as these have no chance until campaign finance reform occurs. Given the current
composition of the SOCTUS that seems impossible for several decades, as the obscenely rich
simply buy the government they want.
I suggest that you rethink your position. I appreciate the frustration with the current
system but the public school system is habitually underfunded. The $40k is not a direct
benefit to each child. Look into that. And maybe look at Finland where schooling is
considered one of the most important benefits to a country. As a result you see the best
university graduates going into teaching because they make a very good salary and they are
supported by an administration that supports their efforts, efforts that come with passion
for helping kids.
A 2% tax on wealth is not much more than what many of us pay the financial industry to
'manage' our savings. The investment funds take their percentage, and the companies managing
the portfolio take theirs. Small investors tend to pay a higher percentage in fees than
larger investors. When all is taken into account, people living paycheck to paycheck pay the
highest percentage, of what ends up being zero wealth. This 'wealth tax' would help rectify
the imbalance.
I'm very impressed with Elizabeth Warren,not just for her tax proposals, but because she
is so intelligent - and genuine. Some say that she is too heady to win but she certainly has
more charisma than Adlai Stevenson, who lost in the 1950s because he was too intellectual.
And he didn't have a catchy slogan such as "I Like Ike." Unfortunately, it's all about how
politicians are perceived. I would like to see Warren more poised and not afraid to express
her sense of humor.
If talent and drive - particularly talent - were the deciding factor in wealth
accumulation, the descendants of Fred Trump would be living on the street.
We have a Carnegie library in our small town of 2400 in rural Indiana. It is still in use
as a community resource center and town history museum. It is a beautiful sturdy brick
building and I assume it will be around for 100 more years. We just outgrew it and had to
build a new one. Carnegie will be remembered for this, not his great wealth. Same with Gates
and Buffett.
I've generally been impressed with Warren's economic analyses, going back a couple of
years before she ran for Senate. A close version of this plan deserves support. If it seems
"radical," it's probably because the USA drifted so far to the right. I blame disco and
"Grand Theft Auto."
Her tax proposal would be a nightmare to implement. How do you value thinly traded assets
(real estate, art, antiques, etc.)? Hire a valuation expert? Have the IRS contesting it every
year? Litigate? Please, tax all dividends as ordinary income, eliminate/change the duration
for long term cap gains treatment, make inherited assets have a zero cost basis, etc. Simple
to implement, enforce, ideas.
In 1906, Representatives and Senators did not spend 4.5 days a week, every in a cubicle,
begging for money, calling rich people all day. We have elected telemarketers. (no insult
intended to telemarketers.)
It's not surprising that "the usual suspects" are already trying to disarm Elizabeth
Warren's well thought out tax plan. Many American billionaires are nouveau riche, and don't
have the sense of responsibility that the very wealthy used to feel towards the less
fortunate. And the Republican party is right there egging them on to resist fair
taxation--like Elizabeth Warren's proposal.
I'm all for her. Warren is by far the smartest presidential candidate in the Democratic
pack and I'm all for supertaxing the superrich -- as well as making mega-corporations pay the
proper taxes they've been evading for so long.
The confiscation of excessive wealth is exactly the point and that point is a practical
one -- to mitigate the tendency of unregulated large scale economies to form parasitic
aristocracies that lead to resource deprivation in vast portions of the society's population.
And this is not a scapegoating of the wealthy, it is refusing to worship them, it is to call
them back to Earth and ask of them what is asked of each of us.
"Malefactors of great wealth," Theodore Roosevelt called them. Prosperity that delivers
unbelievable amounts of wealth to a very few while the other 99% struggle is not
sustainable.
TR was no wild-eyed Socialist: he was a man of wealth and property and wished to remain
so. He and FDR were both blue-blooded aristocrats. Both were saving capitalism by restraining
its excesses.
Whether you realize it or not, the good old USA takes away the wealth of individuals and
hands it over to the government to allocate. The rest of your statement, about tyrants, is
just wrong. You are equating communism with taxation, a silly thing to do. Educate
yourself.
I agree with you 1000%. I'm tired of people arguing that certain persons would not be good
candidates because they sound too smart. That's the dumbest argument I've heard so far. If
someone sounds smart, then GOOD. I hope they ARE smart.
Right now we are a laughing stock of the world because our leaders are actually proud
to sound stupid and boorish. Out with charisma and in with intellect and expertise, please. I
wouldn't want Tom Hanks performing brain surgery on me, nor do I want him in the White House
(much as I enjoy seeing him on the big screen
This isn't about taxing wealth. It's about taxing power, privilege and greed. This
isn't about punishing oligarchy. This is about saving democracy. The concentration of wealth
parallels the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: it is economic climate change
with consequences equally as dire as global warming on all lifeforms.
The challenge will be no less difficult, replete with a powerful lobby of deniers and
greed-mongers ready for war against all threats to their power and position. Their battle cry
is apres moi, le deluge -- as if taxing wealth and privilege is barbarians at the gate and
the demise of civilization rather than curbing cannibals driven not by hunger but voracious
greed. Everywhere climate change deniers are being drowned out by a rational majority who now
see the signs of global warming in every weather report and understand what this means for
their children if we continue to emulate ostriches.
Likewise, the same majority now sees the rising tide of inequality and social
dysfunction and what that means for the future as a global caste system condemns nearly all
of us -- but mainly our progeny -- to slavery in servitude to our one percent
masters.
Elizabeth Warren is no nerd. She's our Joan of Arc. And it's up to us to make sure she
isn't burned alive by the dark lords as she rallies us to win back our country and our
future.
the two issues, inequality of wealth and global warming, are related. The vast wealth of
the Koch Brothers enables them to drown out rational debate with propaganda. Propaganda must
be abolished.
@FunkyIrishman I think Trump intentionally or inadvertently has destroyed anything
resembling the status quo. It's the political equivalent of Newton's Third Law of Motion:
that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Trump is the ugly face of unbridled power and privilege, leavened only by vainglory
ignorance.
He's the equivalent of melting icecaps and stranded polar bears when it comes to the
concentration of wealth and economic climate change. His utter failure will be the rational
majority's success in plowing a better and more equitable path forward. There's been nothing
more radical than Trump. He's made radical solutions compelling and necessary. And
inevitable.
@Yuri Asian: "This isn't about taxing wealth. It's about taxing power, privilege and
greed." Their is plenty of power, privilege and "greed" in our nation's capital, and it is
practiced daily by individuals who are elected and un-elected.
@Jim Thanks for your reply and appreciation. I'm lucky to be an Editor's Pick as there are
so many great comments by thoughtful and articulate NYT readers, particularly those who
follow Krugman's columns. I agree with your sense of wealth as a social disease that's highly
contagious. We need a vaccine and I hope Sen. Warren is it and she inoculates a strong
majority by 2020.
November 2018 has Come; 2020 is Coming Vallejo Jan. 28
@Anne-Marie
Hislop
I agree, Anne - Marie. There was a time when being rich carried a responsibility to
contribute more to the world than those with less; a responsibility to serve society overall,
and one's country and community in particular. Also the rich were expected to have better
manners and more discerning taste than those who worked because they had the free time to
study and model grace and refinement.
In addition, the wealthy were expected to be patrons of the arts, the sciences, and
religion by contributing money and time to support practioners, research, and experimentation
in these areas.
Finally, the wealthy were expected to raise children who were role models, leaders, and
volunteers who contributed emotionally and spiritually to their schools and communities.
Compare Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt to Paris Hilton or the tRump family.
Amen and hallelujah, and I'm an atheist. For those asleep or oblivious, we're in the new
gilded age. But faux gold, as evidenced by the occupant sitting in the Oval Office.
These " Job Creators " are creating Jobs only for shady attorneys and accountants
specializing in creative mathematics, sham Corporations, Trusts and TAX avoidance. See: the
Trump Family.
What's the average, law abiding citizen to do ??? Absent actually eating the Rich, WE must
overhaul the entire system.
Warren is very nerdy, and very necessary. Unfortunately, the great majority of Men will
not vote for any Woman, not yet. See: Trump. She would be a most excellent choice for VP, the
back-up with a genius IQ and unstoppable work ethic. President ??? A modern day, working
man's Teddy OR Franklin Roosevelt, and His name is Senator Sherrod Brown, Of the very great
state of Ohio. MY native state. Think about it, it's the perfect pair.
I particularly like Elizabeth Warren's ability to talk policy. But as a career academic
I also realize that she sounds to most like a law professor giving a lecture. Unfortunately,
I don't think this is a winning formula but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Yesterday a billionaire threatened the Democratic Party with certain defeat in the 2020
Presidential election if the Party chose a candidate not to his liking. Increasing
concentration of wealth in the hands of a few will ultimately spell the end of our
democracy.
If there were ever a politician for our time, the second and more egregious gilded age,
it should be Elizabeth Warren. She INVENTED the Consumer Financial Protection Burueau! She
has studied the big banks and Wall Street for decades! She knows how they operate better than
anyone on the planet. She is the Teddy Roosevelt of our time, but are we smart enough to
elect her?
My wife and I find Warren to be the most impressive candidate we've seen in a long time.
She has the mastery of detail that can actually move our country to where it should be. No
lazy demagoguery, either -- and she communicates well.
The primary purpose of taxes should be to raise necessary revenues, not the confiscation
of "excessive" wealth. Making the case for the moral and practical necessity to contribute
more would be more effective than the tiresome scapegoating of the wealthy.
@RR I happen to live in one of those Scandinavian paradises. I, nor my family, have ever
had a problem with ''care''. We also have higher education paid for through a moderately
higher tax structure. (perhaps 10% average higher than the U.S.) I sleep like a baby and all
is taken care of. (as well as 5 weeks vacation per year) You are welcome to visit
anytime.
@Shiv, the wealthiest 20% of Americans also have about 90% of the wealth (as of 2013,
probably higher now). According to the Wall Street Journal, the top 20% in income paid about
87% of individual federal income taxes in 2018. But income tax is just a portion of tax.
Personal income taxes were about 48% of federal revenues in 2017, payroll tax was 35%.
Since payroll taxes are regressive, the top 20% of income tax payers pay a considerably
lower percentage of total taxes than the percentage of the nation's wealth they control.
Saying those paying more in taxes than they receive in direct benefits and services are
'paying all the taxes' is simplistic and deceptive. It isn't even accurate to say that they
are completely funding the transfers and services to the bottom 50%, since the federal
government operates at a deficit.
The deficit is covered in large part by debt owed to the social security fund, which is
funded through payroll taxes. When you include state and local taxes, it looks like the
percentage of total taxes paid by each income quintile is not far off from the percentage of
total income that they bring in.
We probably all remember the scene where Chinatown's detective, J. J. Gittes, asks the bad
guy, Noah Cross, "How much are you worth?" And Cross says, "I've no idea."
There are two take-aways from this. One is the low marginal utility of wealth at Mr.
Cross's level. This is what makes the optimal progressivity of a wealth tax positive. But the
second is the literal take-away: he really doesn't know. Nobody knows.
So, as Prof. Piketty points out (pp. 518ff of his book), the value of even a nominal
wealth tax in terms of transparency -- forcing the system to determine what the distribution
of wealth actually is -- is substantial, aside from revenue generation. If we're going to
give wealth a vote, via Citizens United etc., then wealth should at least have to
register.
As this op-ed shows, even a majority of Republicans ALREADY supports this idea. So the
problem is not so much getting rid of the GOP's fake news, but having a voter turnout where
the demographics of those who vote reflect the demographics of the entire population. In
2016, a whopping 50% of citizens eligible to vote, didn't vote. And the lack of political
literacy among many progressives has certainly been a factor here. So what is needed is for
ordinary citizens to start engaging in real, respectful debates with their family, friends,
neighbors, colleagues etc. again, to make sure that everybody votes. Only then will we have
more impact on what happens in DC than Big Money.
This is a superb insight you are providing....the 'critique' of Late Capitalism from the
perspective of 'Systems Stability'. I work in the field of Distributed Systems Management
though Cloud for Living. The way with Distributed Decision Making is, in a number of
situations it is a lot more resilient and powerful. There are advantages of Command &
Control decision making (war for example). But in Late Capitalism that concentration of
Decision Making in hand of few has gone too far.
To understand all this, to figure out the relevance of Distributed Decision Making, to
articulate all this to masses and then to formulate sane policy proposals out of all that -
that is not a simple task. So Sen. Warren, please continue the 'nerding'. I am Kamala Harris
constituency, but the intellectual heft Warren is bringing to this campaign; I love that. She
needs to bring her such big guns for a couple of marquee social issues as well as about
America's Foreign Policy. Obviously, it cannot degenerate into 63 details policy papers like
HRC.
The trick is to make the campaign about few core issues and then there to 'have the house
cleaned' - completely worked out theory, understanding, explanation and policy proposals.
Hope E. Warren does that, she is capable no doubt. (Predictable election cycles - such a good
thing with American System....for a while just to think and discuss things apart from the
Orange Head in White House - it is so refreshing...)
J suspect that the notion that proposals to raise taxes sharply on the wealthy are too
left-wing for American voters is wishful thinking or propaganda by the wealthy, on whom many
pundits and analysts rely, one way or another, for their jobs. "It's difficult to get a man
to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I don't know
whether I agree with Warren on enough things to support her, but I hope this idea influences
the Democratic platform and becomes reality.
@Tom The current Republican Party is toxic – to democracy, truth, ethics, human
health, human survival, equality, education, nature, love... most anything a decent person
values. We can get rid of it and still have a two-party system of reasonable people who
disagree on the best way to solve problems.
I read somewhere that the Davos crowd was intent on speeding up the development of robots
to do those jobs so they wouldn't have to deal with pesky humans who want an occasional
break.
As a person who has done fairly well, there is no end to your "needs" once your start
getting wealthy. Let's take flying. First, you are happy to get a deal every now and then on
a flight to Hawaii. After a while, you earn status, so now you want to be first in line, have
baggage privileges and get into premium economy with an extra 5 inches of leg space. Then,
it's enough status to "earn" business class upgrades. Next you have to have business class on
every flight, so you pay up. There's first class, but now you can afford NetJets where you
get fractional ownership of a jet to fly almost anytime you like. If you get even wealthier,
you get your own jet with an on demand staff. It's "worth it" as your time is valuable. It
goes on and on. Every time you get more, you can't live without it. You feel like you deserve
it because you've worked so hard for that money. Knowing some of those super rich, they will
complain about those fascist attacking their success. They "donate" a lot to candidates whose
job it is to protect their wealth. While Warren's ideas via Piketty are really interesting,
maybe we need to work on our culture and values so people understand what they are doing when
they expect that jet with a staff that waits in them like royalty. Then let's invest in the
IRS to stop the cheating that deprives our citizens of at least $200 billion/year. After
that, let's look at closing loopholes and increasing taxes.
Until we get the money out of elections, the moneyed will control those elected. I'm not
sure what our elected officials are more afraid of - meeting with their electorate and facing
our anger, or voting against Grover Norquist et al.
During the primaries and the subsequent campaign, Democratic candidates should run
explicitly and continually as new Teddy Roosevelts, using his words and images of him --
presenting the Democratic Party as the Roosevelt Republican alternative when it comes to
taxation policy. It would reduce right-wing attempts to cast them as Maduros-in-waiting to
pure late-night comic fodder: which is what they properly are. In fact, they should identify
past Republican champions of as many of their policy proposals as possible and run as
"Democrats: the Real Republicans."
Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie have blown open up a discussion that had been locked
down since Reagan -- tax the rich. Krugman is too timid.
Time to radically redistribute wealth from the capitalist class to the people in the form
of jobs and social benefits.
Tax the banks and corporation to 40+% and end all tax incentives -- corporate welfare.
Apple used its tax break to buy back stock to enrich investors. Facebook bought up
competitors like Instagram and suppresses start-ups. A hedge fund bought Toys R Us, loaded it
with debt, then bankrupted it.
The right-wing turn of rural white Americans is largely due to economic anxiety resulting
from the industrialization of agriculture and global commodification of grain -- all the
profits leave farm communities for mega-corporations based in cities and Wall Street, as well
as global capitalist de-industrialization.
Americans on both the right and left believe the system is rigged, because it is. Warren's
tax on personal assets is the first baby step. To win 2020, Democrats have to secure the vote
of minorities, women, and Millennials, and peel off some white working-class voters. They
have to fight for working people against the capitalists.
And we have to keep educating people, in large part at taxpayers expense, so they can
continue to speak up as you have. The idea that everything, education, healthcare,
prescriptions, housing, food, etc has to be on a max-out-profit basis is not sustainable for
a decent society. If you look into the history of successful billionaire families who might
profess that government should not be used to create equal financial opportunity, you may
find that they have benefited from U.S. government policies themselves to get to where they
are. So why prevent others from having the opportunity to join them ?
@Bill A small transaction tax on sales of stocks would not raise that much money. What it
would do is much more useful -- put program trading and the arbitraging of tiny, tiny price
differences on huge, huge trades out of business. The sort of liquidity they provide is not
needed by the market and is not worth the price we pay for it.
Absolutely agree with R. Law--the carried interest loophole has got to go. That's probably
contributed more to the aggrandizement of oligarchical fortunes than just about anything
else. But I'd also add two more modest suggestions: --Eliminate the cap on individual Social
Security contributions. There's no reason it should fade to black at $132,900 gross annual
income. It should be applicable to ALL earned (and unearned) income. --Institute a small
stock trade/financial transactions tax; even a 0.1% rate here would raise significant
revenue, and it also might curb a lot of wild equities speculation. But, of course, none of
this is likely until we can get big money out of politics; it's impossible to get
representatives to represent their actual constituents, rather than their oligarchic campaign
funders, if the latter are the prime source of campaign money. So, as the risk of repeating
myself: --Publicly funded elections, with low three digit limits on individual campaign
contributions and NO corporate, organizational, church, or (yes, even) union contributions.
No PAC's, 501's, or any other letter/number combinations. --Reinstatement of the Fairness
Doctrine. --Legislative repeal of the Citizens United decision.
@Tom "Wealthy people reinvest their money in economic ventures that grow their wealth,
which generates greater productivity while creating jobs and wealth for the society." Like,
for example, the investments that caused the 2008 Republican Great Recession for example?
That plan hasn't worked since Reagan. And taxing 2%-3% of enormous wealth is hardly taking
away "all the wealth of individuals!" We also need to roll back estate tax to pre-Reagan
policies.
So businessmen and financiers need checks and balances, and these checks and balances
include high taxation and occasionally breaking a business into pieces because it is too big
and powerful. We broke up Rockefeller's company. We should be thinking about Amazon, Google,
Facebook, and even Microsoft. We are using Word and Excel because Microsoft owned the
operating system they run under, not because they were better products. Now we are stuck with
their strengths, weaknesses, and odd habits.
Boy do I wish I could share Dr, Krugman's hopefulness. But after the Supreme Court
decision equating money with speech and one of the two major political parties literally a
"wholly owned subsidiary" of those very 0.01%, as the ancestral Scot in laments, "I hae me
doots."
@Blair A Miller....Rewarded for hard work and talent? Well that is the myth. There is a
case to be made that capitalism rewards greedy and unethical people who have a talent for
working the system. There is also no question that it rewards monopolists and the
fortunate.
@Kurt Heck It doesn't. That's precisely why we have to stop the GOP strategy to pass tax
cut after tax cut for the wealthiest all while making life even more difficult for the other,
very hard-working 99%. And if you believe that in order to be a billionaire today you must
work hard, it's time to update your info. Most of them inherited a fortune already, together
with the knowledge needed to engage in financial speculation, which in the 21st century is
totally disconnected from the real economy - or rather, they PAY experts to engage in
financial speculation, and that's it.
It's time for the most industrious to at least be able to pay the bills, get the education
and healthcare they want, and become represented in Congress again. THAT is why we need a tax
increase for the extreme rich, all while increasing the minimum wage, and expanding Medicaid
and Medicare. THAT is how we'll finally become an entirely civilized country too. Not by
adding trillions and trillions to the debt just to make the extreme wealthy even wealthier,
as the GOP just did again.
The NYTimes reported in October, "Over the past decade, Jared Kushner's net worth has
quintupled to almost $324 million. And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner paid
almost no federal income taxes." Let's not get lost in the details of how we do it:
taxing wealth, making income taxes more progressive, restoring the estate tax, or something
else. Let's remember that Jared Kushner is the poster boy for our current (extremely unfair)
tax system.
I care about taxes and wealth inequality, so I like that Warren is talking about them. I'm
also a bit of a policy wonk, so I like the fact that Warren focuses on policy issues. As a
classically trained economist, though, I know how quickly others' eyes glaze over when I get
too excited about anything related to finance or economics. The vast majority of people lack
the patience for it. Too many think they understand far more than they really do because they
read a handful of articles and watched CNBC a couple times. And when people believe they
already know something, they're unlikely to greet new ideas with an open mind. A wealth tax
makes sense to me on a lot of levels. I just hope Senator Warren keeps the explanation as
simple as possible. For every wonk she wins over, she risks pushing two rubes away if she
makes it any more complicated. It's unfortunate that we live in the Twitter era of gadfly
attention spans, but we do. Dems need to do a better job of distilling their platform to
bumper stickers. If they do that, the polity might actually remember some of their talking
points.
Win or lose, Elizabeth Warren will bring the lion's share of ideas to this presidential
season. It's one to say that you support a trendy concept, but it's quite another to have
thought through the implications of your proposals - and be prepared to first defend, and
then implement them. Warren is, and will be - from Day 1. We shouldn't settle for "hope and
change" this time; we need a President in 2021 capable of thinking her way through a maze of
societal problems, and unafraid to passionately, untiringly champion her preferred
option.
Paul, as an aside, do you think that we would have lost the House of Representatives in
2010 if someone had opted for that much larger stimulus package that you, Joe Stiglitz and
Robert Reich were recommending (thus causing the economy to more quickly and fully rebound in
time for the midterms)?
@Tom A 2% tax on wealth from $50 million to $1000 million, will have minimal impact on the
mega rich, with hopefully maximum benefit going to those who need government assistance.
The primary purpose of Citizens United was to allow the wealthy a back door into
stealing our public institutions and public contracts along with reducing the taxes on
passive income for their own personal expansion of wealth. While I agree this is a form of
class warfare, the rich have won the war. Instead of thinking of this as confiscation,
consider it insurance for keeping your head up.
As Yascha Mounk has been saying for years, democracy isn't about a firm belief in the
power of the people, or a belief in personal liberty - above all, its support is determined
by one thing: whether it is delivering results for the majority of the population. If it
doesn't, it loses support; and unfortunately, for decades now, it hasn't been delivering
results. Even Obama, the great liberal hope, stacked his cabinet and advisors with the likes
of Geithner, Bernanke, and Sommers, appointing people to the FTC who were too soft to
trust-bust or aggressively tackle mergers. I am of the belief that Trump was a warning. We
got him because ordinary people have been losing faith that the government is working for
them. If we want to regain that faith, we need a government (meaning both an Executive and a
Legislature) that is prepared to go full FDR in 2021. Trust bust corporations that have
decreased power of workers by consolidating labor market, and the power of consumers by
monopolizing goods and services. Expand social security. Cut the red tape to build millions
of desperately-needed housing units. Take away the excess wealth of the plutocrats, and their
political power. Expand voting rights. Make unionization easier, and healthcare more
affordable by socializing it. Without this, we run the risk of losing our democracy. 2020 is
do or die. Warren has a record of fighting for this. She has my vote.
If the people who make their fortunes in America because of Americans don't want to
support the country that helped them perhaps they should consider this: our sweat, our hard
work, and our tears were a vital part of their success. It doesn't matter how brilliant the
idea is or smart the inventor is or how cleverly the product is marketed. If the public isn't
ready for it, it won't sell and money won't be made. There is a lot of luck involved in
making a fortune. Part of that luck depends upon us and our willingness to buy into what is
being sold. Yes, the inventor or the creator has to have the drive to succeed. S/he has to
accept failure, work very hard, and have faith that s/he will succeed.
It's nonsense to claim that Bill Gates would not have created Windows if he knew he'd be
taxed at very high rates. He didn't know if it would succeed as well as it did. The purpose
of taxes is to support the country. It's to have a government that can fund basic research to
help us, create nationwide rules to ensure that milk in New York is milk in North Dakota, and
to regulate those little things like roads, bridges, water safety, and keep the country safe.
Any exceedingly rich corporation or person who doesn't want to support that is not patriotic
in the least. They are greedy.
The American Revolution was a revolt of American born property holders, not of the
peasants or the slaves. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are both very strong on
property rights. The rights of an individual to own property free from seizure by the
government is at the heart of Liberalism. We live in a two party state. If we truly
eliminated the Republican party we'd be no different than China. America only gets better if
the Republican party gets better. The Democratic party could use some improvement too. I
support Warren's tax plan. It's a reasonable and sensible move, not just a bunch of poorly
thought out hot air.
This is but one in a long line of cogent reasonable suggestions to tax mega rich a little
more. Unfortunately while the economics makes sense, these schemes fail politically because
enough of the vast majority of much poorer people in the middle class can be convinced that
there is something unfair by singling out the successful.
The Steve Jobs story, whereby a poor boy with a great idea should be able to make tons of
money. The only way a change will come is if the middle class' eyes can be opened to the fact
that for every Steve Jobs there are thousands of Jay Gatsbys who inherited their wealth and
privilege and who now spend much of their time and money ensuring that the laws are written
so that they can keep their wealth.
The inequity of the present laws, via tax loopholes and corporate subsidies to favour the
very rich should be highlighted, showing the middle class how they are constantly being
ripped off in order to fund the rich.
There are polls and then there is reality. In Alabama in 2003, a newly-elected
conservative Republican governor proposed a constitutional amendment to raise taxes on the
wealthiest Alabamans. The measure was defeated 67.5%-32.5% with low-income voters opposing it
by a significant margin. In Washington in 2010, voters defeated a referendum to impose a
modest income tax on the state's wealthiest residents. (There is no income tax in
Washington.)
It seems unlikely that in the state with the country's most regressive tax system that 65%
of the voters are wealthy. Despite language in the referendum that guaranteed it could never
be applied to lower incomes without a vote of the people and a provision to lower property
taxes by 20%, paranoia, not reason, ruled the day. It lost 65%-35%.
Polling is easy. But when concrete proposals go to the voters, the wealthy interests
overwhelm voters with fear and lies, and the voters, complacent and ill-informed, can be
easily manipulated. Conservative Alabama and liberal Washington State both defeated measures
that would have helped their state finances significantly.
The money raised was to be spent on education, health care for the elderly and other
radical things some of which would have helped the poor, but lower income voters cast their
votes as though, despite their current conditions, they'd be subject to the taxes tomorrow or
next month or next year.
@Acajohn "Why isn't there one billionaire or multi billion dollar company that actually
takes pride in paying their fair share?" Like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the two richest
men in America, who have pledged to follow Carnegie's example, and taken actions to do
so?
The notion that Sanders has no deep understanding of the policies that he champions is a
stroke of common wisdom that is not very wise, as anyone who ever bothered going to he web
site would find. In 2016, at least, it was chalk full of issues and positions with a long
section on how it could be paid for.
Krugman seemed to shun him for reasons that were never clear to me, but Sanders' proposals
had the ear of quite a few economists.
Even Krugman's crush, Thomas Piketty was intrigued. I'm thrilled that both Warren and
Sanders are in this, and if the primary were today I could probably toss a coin. But I find
this constant picking at Bernie Sanders and his "flailing arms" to be grating and uninformed.
It's akin to asking him to just smile more.
Not just Roosevelt. "The consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery
to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing
property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all
from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in
geometrical progression as they rise." - Thomas Jefferson, October 28, 1785.
"An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the
rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state
hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property." - Benjamin Franklin,
July 29, 1776.
"All property ... seems to me to be the creature of public convention. Hence the public
has the right of regulating descents and all other conveyances of property, and even of
limiting the quantity and the uses of it." - Benjamin Franklin, December 25, 1783.
Senator Warren should consider a few adjustments to her plan. First, tax capital gains
income at the same rate as earned income. Eliminate the carried interest deduction and close
some other egregious loopholes (including the new "pass through" income loophole). Finally,
give the wealth tax a nine year period after which it would have to be renewed. Call it a
"Patriotism Tax". Pledge to use it for infrastructure improvements and debt reduction. I
think that could be very popular.
That is a radical plan, one tried many times before. It fails because humans are not
perfect, and not perfectible. They try to accumulate wealth and power, are jealous of each
other's possessions and mates, and try to create circumstances that favor their offspring
over others of the next generation.
The fields of human evolutionary biology and psychology tell us that your plan can not and
will not work. Not only that, countless Utopians have tried this in the past. Most fail
within months, even with a small group of people who all supposedly love one another. All
societies founded on the belief that humans are perfectible have failed. Societies founded on
the belief that humans will be venal, corrupt, and power-hungry tend to have the safeguards
that allow them to survive. That's why the constitution is full of "checks and balances".
Don't think you can replace them with a society of peace and love where we will all live in
quiet harmony. You can only replace them with better checks and balances if you hope to
succeed. John Lennon's "Imagine" is a lovely song. But it's just a wish list, not a
manifesto.
Yes, what kind of person, especially one with obscene wealth, prefers to keep every penny
rather than pay taxes that make our country function? Why isn't there one billionaire or
multi billion dollar company that actually takes pride in paying their fair share?
Sanders said little about taxation. In his debates with Clinton, he advocated scrapping
the ACA and starting de novo, whereas Clinton suggested legislation to improve it. Thanks in
part to Sanders' attacks on Clinton, both personally and on policy, Trump got elected and the
Republicans have tried in every possible way to destroy it. On this issue, will Pelosi and
Warren follow the so-called progressivism of Sanders?
I don't get your criticism of Rajiv either. Rajiv know what he is talking about. The rich
can never have enough; more is not enough. We see it all the time. We need to eliminate the
dynasties and equalize the democracy.
Existing wealth and annual income are two very different things. Both are now problems.
Existing wealth disparity is the accumulation of all the last 40 years of income disparity,
plus the "work the money did" to pile itself up higher. Our laws magnified the wealth
disparity. That was deliberate and calculated. Our laws allow it to pile up without the
former taxation at death to trim it back. We charge only half the tax rate on the "work" of
the money itself, the special "capital gains" rate. It is specially privileged from taxes,
which is entirely new over these last few Presidential Administrations. It was said that
would encourage job growth. It never did. Nobody who knew anything about the subject ever
really believed it would. What is now proposed by Warren is to fix what they so deliberately
broke. This would not come up if they had not done that first. And if we hadn't done this,
we'd have had the job growth this stifled, from the consumer purchasing power it took to pile
up as wealth, much of it speculative and overseas.
Conservative voters are against taxes because *if* they get rich they don't want to pay
them. As a liberal I, on the other hand, would be *delighted* to have to pay this tax!
By all means let's tax the rich. But what I find most alarming is Kamala Harris's call for
yet ANOTHER tax cut for the middle class. Every since the days of Saint Ronnie, Americans
have been misled into believing they deserve tax cut after tax cut. And the result for the
commons (those goods and services that we share) has been disastrous. Americans already pay
lower taxes than most of the developed world. Yet the candidates are also calling for more
benefits: Medicare for All and free college. The defense establishment continues to clamor
for more resources. What we need is to increase taxes on the rich along with a robust tax
enforcement system, so that Americans see that EVERYONE is pulling their weight, according to
their means.
Redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation is as American as apple pie. In
addition to taxing wealth, there should be a significant estate tax on the top 1%. Getting
rich is for many the American Dream, but that does not entitle the rich to endless wealth
forever. Others should have an opportunity to take their shot.
A couple of points: at the turn of the 20th Century (about the time that Teddy
Roosevelt was railing against the rich), John D Rockefeller had more lawyers on staff than
the United States Government. Rockefeller's net worth at that point (they had not yet broken
up Standard Oil at that point), was $1 billion, at a time when the total receipts of the US
Government were $700 billion.
Krugman also mentions Piketty and his book. A central theme in Piketty's book, not
mentioned here, was that there is no countervailing force that naturally takes us back to a
more equitable distribution of wealth.
That only occurred because the world suffered through two world wars, and a depression,
out of which came a determination by FDR to use government as a countervailing force. And so
it is not an accident that the Republican Party is trying to kill government because that is
the only large, countervailing force known to be effective. Do we really want a world where a
Jeff Bezos has more lawyers on staff than the US Government? Don't laugh; something similar
has happened in the past.
@dajoebabe For the last 40 years, we have had the GOP tell us that government is the
problem and lower tax rates will supercharge economic growth. Now we have a nation with a
superpower's army, third rate infrastructure, a porous social safety net and a mediocre
education system. Granted that government cannot solve all problems (nor should it try!), but
the evidence is clear that the effects of our disinvestment in ourselves is now coming to the
fore. If we are truly at the point where raising the marginal tax rate on a very small number
of households will cause economic collapse, then our capitalist system has failed and should
be replaced.
Interesting ideas, but to get Americans (read Republicans) to swallow this whole is
doubtful. Perhaps some marketing is in order. Let's not call this a tax. Let's call it a
gift. High value households would give to the government agency of their choice (Social
Security, Veteran's Affairs, EPA etc..), garner a modest tax credit as in charity donations,
and as a plus receive a full accounting of how their money was spent by an independent
auditor. Their gifts could be publicized on social media, thus generating the kind of
attention that could generate higher and higher donations. Just a thought.
We could also use Teddy Roosevelt's anti-corruption and environmental values as well. I
think he is one Republican completely disowned by the current Republican Party. While I
do not believe Elizabeth Warren has any chance to be President, her candidacy will certainly
force intelligent debate on the Democratic Platform for 2020. She will make a tremendous
Treasury Secretary and break the Goldman Sachs stranglehold on that position.
Let's not stop with progressive taxes on the income and wealth of corporations and
individuals. We need to ban monopolies outright, and limit the market share of oligopolies to
something like 20%. And we should even limit the fraction of a corporations' shares (e.g.
10%) that can be owned by any one entity (corporal or corporate), and make privately-held
corporations go public once they reach a certain size.
There's a lesson we can learn from Mother Nature: "Too big to fail" really means "Too
big to exist"!
Maybe Piketty instead of Teddy Roosevelt -- but the rates for the wealthy should be
higher, especially for passive income, to force the rich if for no other to avoid taxation to
invest their money in the economy.
@Linda: Your comment is just wonderful, and gets to the crux of what is right, fair,
decent, moral. Some super wealthy people will always be superficial and greedy, and others
will always be generous, and have profound character and depth.
People who are remembered with the greatest respect, fondness, reverence, and joy, are not
those who have amassed fortunes, but those who have done what they could with their fortunes,
for those who would never have fortunes. Or people who sacrificed for others, if not with
their fortunes, then by other means. It is not desirable to be remembered for being selfish,
greedy, and financially predatory like trump and his ilk.
Aside from the fact that a a massive concentration of wealth is inimical to a functioning
democracy because it inevitably leads to a concentration of power, if the tax code is meant
to give incentives to productive behavior, what is less of an incentive to being productive
than inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars?
I personally knew an heiress from one of the most famous wealthy families of the 20th
century; the name would be familiar. She was a good person, but a drug addict. So was her
brother. No one needs to start life with a hundred million dollars. It's not healthy.
tax and spend is what a government is for. Spending it on infrastructure as opposed to
increasing the already bloated pentagon budget and not on a wall, would be preferable.
And reallocation, so that for instance teaching becomes a viable career choice again, would
be a very useful government task. I don't know whether mr. Coctosin ever worked in the
private industry but if he did he must have seen a lot of waste. Though willful blindness is
of course "so expected from" the right.
"Conficatory taxes on excessive wealth" is a sin tax-a tax on greed. There is only so
much money on person can use in a lifetime if it is to be more than a competitive status and
power symbol and is not given back as an investment to build society and the future.
The numbers-$50 million are HUGE. Anyone, with that kind of money who could resent paying
1% toward the future and toward society is simply, selfishly and sinfully, GREEDY! It's about
time the excessively wealthy, who do not allow their wealth to trickle down as wages, or even
trickle through the economy as investments for the benefit of society, are taxed because it
has become apparent that only taxes will force them to let go of their wealth.
Trump making his tax returns public has nothing to do with IRS staffing. And yes, a better
staffed IRS does a better job of catching tax cheats. (No idea why they never nailed Trump's
father, though.)
We will only have a government for the people if it's a government BY the people. That
means politicians who REALLY are just like you and me, not always very charismatic, not
always your ideal best friend, or a "savior", or common sense spiritual leader such as
Michelle Obama, but instead people who flaws, all while being decent citizens, with a very
clear moral compass, AND the skills and intellectual capacity to know how to design new,
science-based law projects and how to obtain political agreements in DC without even THINKING
of starting to stop implementing already existing law (= shutting down the Executive branch
of government).
Warren would be an excellent Cabinet member. But people vote for President on an emotional
level, and I don't think Warren has that emotional charisma. It's excellent that she is
running and running early, because that way she can set some of the parameters of discussion,
which is what she's doing now.
Just how much money does somebody really need? The Bezos divorce is going to result in two
people having "only" 70 billion dollars each. 1 billion, 10 billion, 70 billion; at some
point, how can you tell? At some point, doesn't it just become a number?
@Yuri Asian Best comment I have read on this subject, Thank you. It should be understood
that the wealthy just don't care and are very un- American. Wealth in our society will equal
slavery for everyone else and it has already begun. See the republican tax plan if you have
any doubts.
Two points: If you add the compound interest forgone on the amount paid in SS taxes I
wonder if the calculation changes. The wealth of the over 65 group is very differentially
distributed, just like wealth in general. Think what the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the
Walmart heirs and Warren Buffet do to that distribution.
Just because Ellen is 70 does not mean she is participating in the relative wealth growth
of the over 65 cohort you note. I imagine with few exceptions most very wealthy people are
over 65, but that does not mean the reverse is true, that most over 65 are wealthy or even
comfortable. For a large number SS is their main source of support, and rampant ageism makes
it very difficult for even healthy over 65 years to find a job to supplement it.
Taxing SS is a form of double taxation. People with high incomes could still be taxed on
their income after excluding SS. Or, since you are so concerned about the people collecting
more in SS than they paid in, taxation could start on all benefits exceeding that figure.
(And you seem totally unconcerned with all the people who collect nothing or much less than
they paid in. If you are worried about one group not being in balance you should be equally
worried about the other group not being in balance.
I am ok with both because I consider SS to be an insurance program. I don't pay income
taxes on my insurance proceeds paid for by premiums on which I did pay taxes.
The shutdown taught a clear lesson: people squarely located in the middle class (in this
case, federal workers) cannot afford to miss a single paycheck.
Add that awareness to the cluelessness of the wealthy who, with the attention brought to
them by their position in the trump administration, put that cluelessness on full display --
and add the awareness that the trump tax break benefitted the wealthy only while saddling the
nation with debt -- put those together, and we will find positive support for what amounts to
a relative pinprick of sacrifice from the ultra wealthy, as proposed by Warren and likeminded
Congresswomen.
American public policy is designed to concentrate wealth at the top and impoverish the
bottom. Progressive taxation is but one measure to correct the economic structure that
results in death and destitution, even among fully employed workers. Health care for all and
living wages are additional measures.
Extreme poverty in America is a result of public policy which further enriches the
wealthy. Course correction is a moral imperative.
It's a giant leap to say that a 2% tax or a higher marginal rate is the confiscation of
wealth. It's also a giant leap imply that only the very wealthy reinvest their money. Where
do you think the dividends and gains in your 401K account go? They are reinvested! The key
point is that many of the very wealthy have used their wealth and influence to change the tax
code and other laws to their benefit. There is zero evidence that a lower marginal tax rate
on the wealthy has any correlation to job creation, but there is a very strong correlation
between lower tax rates and income disparity.
Taxes are the necessary fact of a thriving civilization. When confronted by the trained
mindset of anti-tax rhetoric issuing from a clone of selfish leadership, I simply say; if it
were not for taxes, we'd all be driving on rutted dirt roads and dying young. Tax the rich so
they survive the slings and arrows of discontent they created. They will thank us for it
later.
You already pay a wealth tax, if you own a home. It's called "property tax". Why should
the very wealthy not pay a property tax, too? But in the present condition, they do not, and
can easily hide their wealth from view, and pass it to their heirs without paying any tax.
Which just adds and adds to the concentration of wealth among the few.
Of course it makes perfect sense. Which is why those uber-rich people will not allow this
to happen. They'll do everything they can to shut down Ms. Warren. It's what they do
If I were doing tax policy from scratch, I'd include both the Warren wealth tax, a
progressive income tax culminating with the AOC 70% marginal rate, treat capital gains as
regular income, eliminate the carried interest loophole, and investigate the taxing of all
"non-profits" including religious and political organizations. I would replace the standard
deduction and personal exemption with a universal basic income. I would reduce the military
budget and provide at least a buy-in to medicare.
Anything less that than, I don't consider "radical."
If the Democratic party continues to do nothing to address the problem of the top .1
percemt owning 90 percent of American wealth, we are destined to sit idly by as the
heartbreaking inequities and divisions of this country deepen.... and this means, too, that
we will be doing very little to address the deeper causes of a certain kind of American
desperation and violence.
It's time to address the radically warped system with sensible countermeasures. This is,
in my view, a moderate position that moderate, sensible politicians will promote. Doing
nothing to address this enormous problem is the most radical position of all.
I work and pay taxes and have done so for 40 years. I'm happy to pay taxes, not because
I'm dependent on them, but because I realize a few things that make you uncomfortable:
1. No one does it by themselves; we all rely on others at work, at home and in life; we're
part of society; we are not solo warriors on some mystical heroic island
2. Not everyone is as fortunate as I; I'm glad the poor, the disabled, the unlucky, the
elderly, the uneducated and the unskilled can get a modicum of government assistance when
their chips are own
3. Canadians and Europeans and the Japanese do not suffer from 'dependency' syndrome;
they're hardworking people with healthy market economies who have decent government that
regulate healthcare extortion and corporate extortion to a minimum; it's a pretty humane
arrangement
4. Corporations and CEO's have been redistributing upward for about fifty years; 20:1
CEO:worker pay was the 1960's norm....now a 350:1 ration is common.
5. Tax rates for the rich and corporations have collapsed from the 1950's to 2019; the
right-wing pretends they're high, but they're not. 6. America has the greatest health-care
rip-off in the world at 17% of GDP; it's an international 'free-market' disgrace that no
foreign country would touch a 300-foot pole because it would bankrupt them, just as it
bankrupts Americans.
Keep living in a 1787 time tunnel and see where it gets you. Or buy a calendar...and
evolve.
[Drive toward] Equality is the basis of society; it has always been close to my heart.
Thank you, Paul Krugman, for standing clearly for economic equality.
The purpose of taxes is not only to fund public necessities, but also to encourage society
to behave in a manner which is good for all of society.
Thus, in World War 2 income tax was set quite high, to discourage consumption of scarce
resources.
It is not scapegoating the wealthy to have them pay a proportional share of their wealth
to fund the public good, and to, in a small way, discourage inherited wealth. It is through
our society that they are able to accumulate their wealth, it follows that they should have
incentive to preserve and further that society.
I agree completely with a progressive tax on net wealth. Piketty proposed this in "Capital
in the Twenty-first Century" back in 2014. I'm happy to hear that Elizabeth Warren has picked
up the idea.
The elegance of it is that it does not prevent the wealth-motivated from seeking high
incomes and accumulating a lot of wealth in their lifetime. But it reduces the incentive to
earn an ever-higher income, and it prevents the wealthy from creating wealth dynasties.
And consider this: even a 90% tax on inherited wealth would mean, for someone who
accumulated a $10 billion estate, that their heirs would receive a $1 billion inheritance as
a grubstake. Not a bad start in life, if I say so myself.
Almost any tax measure to re-distribute wealth is appropriate in a nation that values
economic justice. However, answering the question of just how people accumulate billions,
while so many others struggle so hard to remain in place. First, it is necessary to dispense
with the fiction that the wealthy earned it so let them keep it.
No one person or one family EARNS billions. The hard work necessary to create wealth
belongs to many hard working and creative people and to numerous public institutions that
make its creation possible.
Both are entitled to a fair share of the wealth they help to create. It is the laws and
even traditions that allow one individual to CAPTURE and keep so much wealth. And those laws
and traditions need to be changed.
Start with a Living Wage plus full benefits for all workers and salary scales that are
reasonable, not the 1:300 that some CEO's currently enjoy. End golden parachutes for retiring
or even fired executives and tax unearned income at the same rate as earned income. Equal
opportunity cannot stand without economic justice.
No, part of the purpose of taxes should be to counteract the normal power of capital
that causes the formation of massive personal fortunes which distort the economy relied on by
all. It's not scapegoating to try to put our economy back in balance, to curtail its division
into the Main St. economy, currently starved by that wealth division so heavily favoring the
fabulously wealthy, and the shadow economy of Wall St. gambling, commodity market
manipulation, and asset ownership.
I like the idea, although it may be very difficult to value certain kinds of assets and
how they may have appreciated. For example, if the Republican Congressman you bought as a
freshman goes on to win a Senate seat, how much would his value have increased?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Sunday said that President Donald Trump "may not even be
a free person" by 2020, suggesting the president might become ensnared by the special counsel's
investigation before she has a chance to face him in a general election.
"Every day there is a racist tweet, a hateful tweet -- something really dark and ugly,"
Warren said during a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "What are we as candidates, as
activists, as the press going to do about it? We're going to chase after those every day?"
She added: "Here's what bothers me. By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be
president. In fact, he may not even be a free person."
The jab marks Warren's first foray into campaign-trail skirmishing with Trump since entering
the Democratic presidential fray with a Saturday announcement event in Lawrence, Mass.
During her kickoff speech, Warren, a consumer protection advocate and former Harvard Law
School professor, attacked Trump as being part of a "rigged system that props up the rich and
the powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else."
Earlier Saturday, Trump mocked Warren's rollout and took aim at the controversies
surrounding her past claims of Native American heritage, which intensified Wednesday after The
Washington Post revealed that she had identified herself as American Indian on her Texas State
Bar registration card.
"Today Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to by me as Pocahontas, joined the race for
President," Trump tweeted. "Will she run as our first Native American presidential candidate,
or has she decided that after 32 years, this is not playing so well anymore?"
"See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!" the president added, in what many Democrats judged to
be a reference to the forced relocation of several Native American tribes in the Southeast U.S.
in the 1830s known as the Trail of Tears.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Monday her campaign will shun fundraising through
some of the old-fashioned means: dinners, donor calls and cocktail parties.
In an email to supporters Monday, Warren also said she won't sell access to big-name donors
as candidates often do to raise money for a presidential bid.
Warren has demonstrated as much in organizing events where she poses for photos with anyone
who stands in line and requests it. Typically, candidates put a premium on such access,
sometimes charging thousands of dollars for a personal photograph.
"My presidential primary campaign will be run on the principle of equal access for anybody
who joins it," Warren said in a message to supporters.
"That means no fancy receptions or big money fundraisers only with people who can write the
big checks. And when I thank the people giving to my campaign, it will not be based on the size
of their donation. It means that wealthy donors won't be able to purchase better seats or
one-on-one time with me at our events. And it means I won't be doing 'call time,' which is when
candidates take hours to call wealthy donors to ask for their support."
The self-imposed restrictions allow Warren to distinguish herself from the field at a time
when candidates are in a mad race for donations from small donors.
The Democrat, who launched a full-fledged campaign earlier this month, has already vowed not
to take money from lobbyists or super PACs.
She has rejected all PAC money and challenged others in the sprawling field of candidates to
reject PAC money. A group of competitors have said they wouldn't take corporate PAC money --
including Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Amy
Klobuchar (D-Minn.). Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, a prospective candidate, shattered
records in the 2018 midterms after rejecting PACs and relying on small-dollar donors.
Warren's move, though, takes that promise a step further, saying she won't spend time making
donor calls or that she will host private fundraising dinners or receptions.
While Warren did hold fundraisers in her years as a senator, she hasn't held any since she
first launched her exploratory bid Dec. 31, according to her campaign.
Warren has a proven network of small dollar donors, but she's also seemed to lag others in
the primary field in early fundraising, including Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose
one-day $6 million haul swamped all his competitors in the field.
First vices about the color revolution against Trump were heard on December 2016
Notable quotes:
"... Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you. ..."
"... Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to win concession after concession from the Trump White House. ..."
"... There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's immigration laws. ..."
"... On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump. But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging. ..."
"... Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms. Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers" from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power to do so. ..."
"... on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement. ..."
"... Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican Party. ..."
Several months ago I was asked what advice I would give to the Trump campaign.
I said, only half joking, that he had better pick a vice presidential candidate the establishment
hates more than it hates him. That would be his only insurance against impeachment. Those drums have
already begun to beat, be it ever so subtly.
Is anyone surprised how quickly the establishment that Donald Trump campaigned against has announced
opposition to much of his policy agenda? No. But few understand that the passionate opposition includes
a willingness to impeach and remove President Trump if he does not come to heel on his America First
goals.
Ferocious opposition to Trump from the left was expected and thus surprises nobody. From the comical
demands for vote recounts to street protests by roving bands of leftist hate-mongers and condescending
satire on late-night television, hysterical leftist opposition to Trump is now part of the cultural
landscape.
But those are amusing sideshows to the main event, the Republican establishment's intransigent
opposition to key pillars of the Republican president's agenda.
Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our
business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you.
If you think talk of impeachment is insane when the man has not even been sworn into office yet,
you have not been paying attention. Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after
Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to
win concession after concession from the Trump White House.
What are the key policy differences that motivate congressional opposition to the Trump agenda?
There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could
generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans
Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's
immigration laws.
On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump.
But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises
were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging.
Yet, while the President-elect 's transition teams at the EPA, State Department and Education
Department are busy mapping ambitious changes in direction, Congress's Republican leadership is busy
doubling down on dissonance and disloyalty.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms.
Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers"
from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan
Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting
to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite
five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power
to do so.
And then, on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to
campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and
most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement.
It is no exaggeration to say that Trump's success or failure in overcoming the opposition to immigration
enforcement will determine the success or failure of his presidency. If he cannot deliver on his
most prominent and most popular campaign promise, nothing else will matter very much.
So, the bad news for President Trump is this: If he keeps faith with his campaign promises on
immigration, for example to limit Muslim immigration from terrorism afflicted regions, which is within
his legitimate constitutional powers as President, he will risk impeachment. However, his congressional
critics will face one enormous hurdle in bringing impeachment charges related to immigration enforcement:
about 90 percent of what Trump plans to do is within current law and would require no new legislation
in Congress. Obama disregarded immigration laws he did not like, so all Trump has to do is enforce
those laws.
Now, if you think talk of impeachment is ridiculous because Republicans control Congress, you
are underestimating the depth of Establishment Republican support for open borders.
The first effort in the 21st century at a general amnesty for all 20 million illegal aliens came
in January 2005 from newly re-elected President George Bush. The "Gang of Eight" amnesty bill passed
by the US Senate in 2013 did not have the support of the majority of Republican senators, and now
they are faced with a Republican president pledged to the exact opposite agenda, immigration enforcement.
And yet, do not doubt the establishment will sacrifice a Republican president to protect the globalist,
open borders status quo.
The leader and spokesman for that establishment open borders agenda is not some obscure backbencher,
it is the Republican Speaker of the House. Because the Speaker controls the rules and the legislative
calendar, if he chooses to play hardball against Trump on immigration he can block any of Trump's
other policy initiatives until Trump abandons his immigration enforcement goals.
What all this points to is a bloody civil war within the Republican Party fought on the battlefield
of congressional committee votes.
Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning
with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation
of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican
Party.
Pretty interesting video... no we know that the Swamp consumed Flatfooted Donald rather quickly
Notable quotes:
"... Pete Hegseth and Jesse Watters discuss the bitter establishment's desperation to manufacture a Trump scandal ..."
"... Most people don't know that after the 134 men died on the Forrestal fire in 1967 McCain was the ONLY person helicoptered off the ship. It was done for his own safety as many on the ship blamed him for causing the fire by "wet" starting his jet causing a plume of fire to shoot out his plane's exhaust and into the plane behind McCain causing the ordnance to cook off on that jet. McCain then panicked and dropped his own bombs onto the deck making matters much worse. McCain should have ended his career in jail. Oh, wait, he kinda did, maybe karma justice? ..."
"... FakeStream Media ..."
"... The very Fake Media has met their match ..."
Pete Hegseth and Jesse Watters discuss the bitter establishment's desperation to manufacture
a Trump scandal
Louis John 2 hours ago
@hexencoff
McCain is a trouble maker. supporter of the terrorist and warmonger Iraq Libya
Syria he is behind all the trouble scumbag
Gary M 3 hours ago
McCain is a globalist
belaghoulashi 2 hours ago
(edited) McCain has always been full of horseshit. And he has always relied on people calling
him a hero to get away with it. That schtick is old, the man is a monumental failure for this
country, and he needs to have his sorry butt kicked.
ryvr madduck 1 hour ago
+belaghoulashi
Most people don't know that after the 134 men died on the Forrestal fire in 1967 McCain was the
ONLY person helicoptered off the ship. It was done for his own safety as many on the ship blamed
him for causing the fire by "wet" starting his jet causing a plume of fire to shoot out his plane's
exhaust and into the plane behind McCain causing the ordnance to cook off on that jet. McCain
then panicked and dropped his own bombs onto the deck making matters much worse. McCain should
have ended his career in jail. Oh, wait, he kinda did, maybe karma justice?
Michael Cambo 4 hours ago
When you start to drain the swamp, the swamp creatures start to show.
Alexus Highfield 3 hours ago
@Michael Cambo
don't they...they do say shit floats.
Geoffry Allan 41 minutes ago
@Michael Cambo
- Trump has not drained the swamp he has surrounded himself with billionaires in his cabinet who
don't give a damn about the working middle class who struggle e eryday to make a living -
explain to me how he is draining the swamp
tim sparks 3 hours ago
Trump is trying so fucking hard to do a good job for us.
Integrity Truth-seeker 2 hours ago
@tim sparks
He is not trying... HE IS DOING IT... Like A Boss. Thank God Mark Taylor Prophecies
2017 the best is yet to come
Jodi Boin 3 hours ago
McCain is a traitor and is bought and paid for by Soros.
Grant Davidson 4 hours ago
Love him or hate him. The guy is a frikkin Genius...
Patrick Reagan 4 hours ago
FakeStream Media
Michael Cambo 4 hours ago
@Patrick Reagan
Very FakeStream Media
aspengold5 4 hours ago
I am so disappointed in McCain.
orlando pablo 4 hours ago
my 401k is keep on going up....thank u mr trump....
Dumbass Libtard 3 hours ago
McCain is not a Republican. He is a loser. Yuge difference.1
Mitchel Colvin 3 hours ago
Shut up McCain! I can't stand this clown anymore! Unfortunately, Arizona re-elected him for six
more years!
robert barham 4 hours ago
The very Fake Media has met their match
H My ways of thinking! 3 hours ago
Why does everyone feel that if they don't kiss McCain's ass, they are being un American? Mccain
has sold out to George Soros. He is a piece of shit who is guilty of no less than treason! Look
up the definition for treason if you're in doubt!
Sam Nardo 3 hours ago
(edited) Mc Cain and Graham are two of the best democrats in the GOP. They are called RINOS
kazzicup 3 hours ago
We love and support our President Donald Trump. The media is so dishonest. CNN = Criminal News
Network.
Geoffry Allan 34 minutes ago
@kazzicup - yeah if you get rid of the media Trump becomes
a dictator - is that what you want he will censor everything and tell you what he wants - Trump
is still president and he is doing his job and fulfilling his promises even though the media is
there and reporting - so what's the problem - I don't want a got damn dictator running this country
- if you don't like the media then just listen to Trump - 2nd amendment free speech and the right
to bear arms we have to respect it even if we may disagree
Buffett Supports Trump on Cabinet Picks 'Overwhelmingly'
by Amanda L Gordon and Noah Buhayar
January 19, 2017, 8:19 PM EST January 20, 2017, 10:12 AM EST
Warren Buffett said he "overwhelmingly" supports President-elect Donald Trump's choices for cabinet
positions as the incoming commander-in-chief's selections face confirmation hearings in the U.S.
Senate.
"I feel that way no matter who is president," the billionaire Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman
and chief executive officer said Thursday in New York at the premiere of a documentary about his
life. "The CEO -- which I am -- should have the ability to pick people that help you run a place."
"If they fail, then it's your fault and you got to get somebody new," Buffett said. "Maybe you
change cabinet members or something."
Buffett, 86, backed Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, stumping for her in Omaha, Nebraska,
and headlining fundraisers. The billionaire frequently clashed with Trump and scolded him for not
releasing income-tax returns, as major party presidential candidates have done for roughly four decades.
Trump's cabinet picks include Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs
Group Inc. banker; former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state; and retired
Marine Corps General James Mattis as Defense secretary.
Since the election, Buffett has struck a more conciliatory tone toward Trump and called for unity.
In an interview with CNN in November, he said that people could disagree with the president-elect,
but ultimately he "deserves everybody's respect."
Trump's Popularity
That message hasn't resonated. Trump's popularity is the worst for an incoming president in at
least four decades, with just 40 percent of Americans saying they have a favorable impression of
him, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll published Tuesday. Buffett said on Thursday that the
low approval ratings won't matter much.
"It's what you go out with that counts -- 20, 50 years later what people feel you've achieved,"
Buffett said.
The president-elect has continued his pugnacious style during the transition, picking fights on
Twitter with news outlets, automakers, defense contractors, intelligence agencies, Hollywood actress
Meryl Streep and civil rights hero-turned-U.S. Congressman John Lewis.
* It solved the problem of Democrats beginning to get a spine and going after the Felonious
Five (or at least the three with major conflict of interest).
* It bumped Bush's approval rating from 40% to 80%.
* It greatly lowered opposition to Bush's anti-civil-liberties policies, such as creating
"1st Amendment Zones".
* It made passage of the Patriot Act possible.
* People were able to smear opposition to the Bush team policies as treasonous.
* It rendered torture, aggressive war, and barbaric imprisonment without due process of
law respectable.
Bush Administration sabotaged investigation:
Remember Coleen Rowley who claimed that an FBI superior back in DC rewrote her request for
a warrant, to make it less likely that it would be approved? There was also the FBI agent in
Arizona who wanted to investigate certain pilot students, but was prohibited.
Remember the DeLenda Plan? Once
we knew the USS Cole was Al Qaeda, it should have been executed. As in the spring of 2001.
Alas, it was deferred to after 9/11. Most incompetent crew ever and the Twin Towers fell down
taking 3000 people with because of their utter incompetence.
The US neoliberal/neocon elite emasculated Trump in just three months.
Notable quotes:
"... The elites are wetting their pants ..."
"... The really clever ones recognize that their is a populist upsurge worldwide against elite policymaking as Thoma discussed in his column on Davos man. ..."
So, which elites are you talking about? Just give me an
example or two. Y'know, it is possible to be successful and still spend a
lot of time doing the right things for people not as
successful as you.
Summers and Krugman. See their most recent columns. I think
more of the level-headed elites are thinking/hoping that
Trump will be 4 years and out and it will all blow over.
The really clever ones recognize that their is a populist
upsurge worldwide against elite policymaking as Thoma
discussed in his column on Davos man.
Tom aka Rusty -> EMichael...
, -1
Yes, there are a few of those. I;ve been impressed by some of
the things I have heard from the Steyer brothers. But then
there is Bill and Hill, Soros, the Trump cabinet, Rubin/Corzine/Rattner/Summers
and a whole unheavenly host. But not all that many impress me, particularly in
Manhattan and California.
Never believe the CIA. Ever! January 26, 2019 CIA Was Aiding Jihadists Before Soviets
Invaded Afghanistan
According to recently declassified documents of the White House, CIA and State Department
as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before
the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA
directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in December the same year.
Author Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are
mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union
which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan's security agencies which
nurtured the Afghan so-called "mujahideen" (freedom fighters) on the behest of
Washington.
what you say is true and correct. Fast forward to 2019. I never thought I would have to
believe those "authorities" or organizations to stop our own president. How far down the
rabbit hole we are. Keep it up . I should mention that consortium news was one of the sites
that was hit by a barrage of not true things. Do you remember KIllary Shillary, world war 3
on this website? That is when I stopped. No defence of Ms Clinton, but the attacks were
relentless. I do believe consortium news was hijacked by some really partisan people.
OlyaPola , February 22, 2019 at 3:12 am
"Before Soviets Invaded Afghanistan"
The Soviet forces were invited to Afghanistan by the Afghani Government – they never
invaded Afghanistan or Syria.
"... "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image." ..."
"That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely
nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and
in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire
administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until
they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image."
Now that's writing worth reading. If the Nobel committee did not serve the Global Empire,
it would give the Literature Prize to Hopkins.
The late 19th and 20th century Russians had the horror of dealing with Nihilists running
amuck in their country. Now the Nihilists rule the world as multi-billionaire Globalists.
Barr is CIA's shyster lawyer, Mueller is CIA's cleaner. Both FBI and DoJ are completely
controlled by CIA "focal points" (Dulles' term) or dotted-line reports (Bush-era
Newspeak.)
What's more, Hill and Bill work for CIA too: Hill got her start purloining documents for
CIA's "Watergate" purge of Nixon; Cord Meyer recruited Bill at Oxford.
CIA brainwashing makes Republicans blame Democrats for what CIA does to you, and makes
Democrats blame Republicans for what CIA does to them. CIA runs your country while party
loyalists tear each other's throats out. Divide et impera.
Nobody will be doing a fine job for the country because CIA doesn't give a rat's ass about
the country. They've got a business to run: drug-dealing, gun-running, child trafficking and
pedophile blackmail, money-laundering, foreign asset-stripping.
What's wrong with Tulsi's fundraisers? They are not PAC money and $125/plate is not that
expensive. Tulsi has a huge disadvantage, because she isn't getting any coverage. Tulsi's
dinners are not sponsored by Corporate money.
Warren said to Cenk Uygur(in a NEW interview!) that her refusal of corporate donations
only extends to the primaries. She said [we] need corporate donations- or as she calls them-
"everything in our arsenal to beat Trump". Still want to lump her in with Bernie?
Never Completely Trust anyone, so thoroughly research everyone before supporting anyone on
anything to be fully aware of who benefits and how, since you may or may not benefit at all
11:16
hours Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, 26 February 2019
"I've given up the illusion that we'll ever vote our way out of this madness, look at
Narco Rubio's tweet yesterday using snuff photos of Gaddafi after the gangsters in DC
murdered him and destroyed his country, turning it back centuries, using them as a threat
to Maduro. You don't vote that kind of Mob out, we have the mafia now in charge of our
country, the most powerful military in the world is run by satanic mobsters, and we're
foolish enough to think voting is going to make this go away? Criminals and gangsters don't
stop until they're either in prison or dead. They don't go away or give up power because
you ask them to, which is all voting is, asking them nicely. Good luck with that!
Mafia is the correct description. And you are right, they will never willingly give up
their power. It has to be taken from them. And anyone who expects voting to do that job
better find themselves a Elliot Ness to put in the WH.
Barr is CIA's shyster lawyer, Mueller is CIA's cleaner. Both FBI and DoJ are completely
controlled by CIA "focal points" (Dulles' term) or dotted-line reports (Bush-era
Newspeak.)
What's more, Hill and Bill work for CIA too: Hill got her start purloining documents for
CIA's "Watergate" purge of Nixon; Cord Meyer recruited Bill at Oxford.
CIA brainwashing makes Republicans blame Democrats for what CIA does to you, and makes
Democrats blame Republicans for what CIA does to them. CIA runs your country while party
loyalists tear each other's throats out. Divide et impera.
Nobody will be doing a fine job for the country because CIA doesn't give a rat's ass about
the country. They've got a business to run: drug-dealing, gun-running, child trafficking and
pedophile blackmail, money-laundering, foreign asset-stripping.
"... When we suggest turning to universally approved OSCE documents that reject as unacceptable any obstacles standing in the way of the public or journalists getting access to information, we are told that this was the case in 1990 and should remain there. ..."
"... It wasn't us that bombed Libya and turned it into a "black hole." It still remains such and through it bandits, terrorists and arms traffickers travel to the Sahara-Sahel zone whereas migrants are heading to the north. Therefore, we leave it up to them to deal with those who are responsible for this. ..."
"... Apparently, the international legal space is being fragmented the US is doing this all along the way while the EU is isolating itself when it comes to a number of issues. The processes that are taking place in Eurasia may also be interpreted as isolation at some point but in reality we want to launch something that will become all-embracing. ..."
"... Maybe, there is a rational idea in everything that is taking place. As Vladimir Lenin used to say, "before uniting it is necessary resolutely to draw lines of demarcation." Maybe, we should be fragmented to understand who the main global players are. ..."
We are now saying that the world is changing and the interdependence of states is growing. Do you think international regulation,
for instance, in communications, can be radically improved in perspective? Because of fake news navigation in the sea of information
leaves much to be desired. Is it possible to regulate a host of other things related to migration flows and capital management?
Is it possible to raise international regulation to a new level or is this altogether impossible? Will countries continue to strike
unstable alliances for shorter or longer periods of time or are there grounds to hope for an improvement of this situation?
Sergey Lavrov:
This question is fairly controversial. In brief, currently this regulation that should be ideally based on universal principles
of international law is being replaced with narrowly interpreted rules elaborated in a narrow circle of states.
As for fake news, France, for example, adopted a law that filters the media space the way it wants. The Russian media Russia Today
and Sputnik are political outcasts. They are not allowed to visit the Elysee Palace or attend any special events. When we address
French officials in this context, they tell us that everything is correct because in their view these are propaganda instruments
rather than news agencies. This is what regulation is all about.
When we suggest turning to universally approved OSCE documents that reject as unacceptable any obstacles standing in the way
of the public or journalists getting access to information, we are told that this was the case in 1990 and should remain there.
There are other examples as well. When France failed to use the OPCW exclusively for passing remotely a verdict on who is guilty
and who is not in violation of all conceivable norms of the Chemical Weapons Convention, it took the initiative to establish an International
Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons that was not linked with any international structures. A few months
later the EU made a decision to the effect that if the new structure reveals violators, Brussels will impose sanctions on them. This
is, of course, regulation but this regulation is based on the narrow interpretation of broad interests by an individual group of
countries.
As for the internet, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has been talking for years, if not decades, about the way
the internet should function so as to not offend anyone. No results have been produced and there will not be any in the foreseeable
future for obvious-to-all reasons. I have practically no doubts about this. Likewise, for the same reason virtually not a single
Western country supported our proposals that were endorsed by the UN General Assembly at the onset of work on the rules of responsible
conduct in cyberspace.
You mentioned migration. There is the Global Compact for Migration that was adopted last year. The West was fighting for it to
include a provision on the equal and divided responsibility for the migration crisis. Russia and other countries objected. It
wasn't us that bombed Libya and turned it into a "black hole." It still remains such and through it bandits, terrorists and arms
traffickers travel to the Sahara-Sahel zone whereas migrants are heading to the north. Therefore, we leave it up to them to deal
with those who are responsible for this.
We are now talking about the formation of the multipolar international order. Its development was preceded by a whole historical
era.
Apparently, the international legal space is being fragmented the US is doing this all along the way while the EU is isolating
itself when it comes to a number of issues. The processes that are taking place in Eurasia may also be interpreted as isolation at
some point but in reality we want to launch something that will become all-embracing.
Maybe, there is a rational idea in everything that is taking place. As Vladimir Lenin used to say, "before uniting it is necessary
resolutely to draw lines of demarcation." Maybe, we should be fragmented to understand who the main global players are.
Not those that established the UN in 1945 but those that are playing today, in the middle of the 21 st century. Only
after this we should think what to do next, for instance, with the UN. It is absolutely clear that the UN Security Council requires
a reform because the world's developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America are not properly represented in it. Today, up to
one third of the UN Security Council is represented by EU countries. I don't think that if more countries from the historical West
are added to this structure, it will gain the diversity we want to see in it.
Don't the people pulling the strings behind the media understand what they have done?
They have convinced a large part of the nation that everything that they were taught from
childhood is a fraud.
Civilizations are only held together by the "glue" of shared beliefs. The
deep-state-media-complex has just applied a solvent to the very glue that holds the entire
culture together.
And Hopkins says a disillusioned people might realize
in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire
administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until
they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image.
There has been a longstanding bipartisan attack against the nation, and I use that term as
defined as "a stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic
life, distinctive culture, and language in common."
But I don't think the "deep-state-media-complex" is concerned by this. Again, feature not
bug.
The world slipped closer to nuclear war. Big false flags -- actual, suspected, and
anticipated -- were a key factor. But hardly anybody noticed. Everyone was riveted by the story
of actor Jussie Smollet, who supposedly paid a couple of Nigerian-American bodybuilders for a
staged racist-homophobic near-lynching. The ostensible motive: Add a zero to Smollet's pathetic
little million-a-year salary.
For all of you ZH'rs who hate civil trial lawyers, there were several prominent ones who
literally devoted a decade to this (many at the risk of their practices, taking on TPTB). And
without any real chance of ever seeing a penny for their efforts. Kudos and cheers for the
victory in the battle.
If they do see vindication, The Miami Herald should get some credit. The reporters
there have been doing the investigative work to reveal that there were many children
involved. Funny how the MSM couldn't get to the bottom of this story. ///
It wasn't just Bill Clinton and actor Kevin Spacey who got ferried, (sorry, but when it
comes to Spacey, there's an inside joke there I'm sure). Sen. Bob Menendez was also a
passenger, and who knows who else. I personally would like for AG Barr to have a chance at
squeezing Epstein's nutz for evidence on the [DS].
NATO's Aggression Against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999
The NATO launched a military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia
and Montenegro) on March 24th, 1999 in the name of protection of human rights of Kosovo
Albanians. In other words, the 78 days of barbaric air-strikes were formally justified by
"humanitarian intervention" which was mainly based on the false flags and fake news (like the
Rachak case) by Western corporate mass media or brutal lies from the ground (like by William
Walker – a Head of the Kosovo Verification Mission).
In essence, regional organizations like the NATO, according to the UN Charter, do not have
the right to interfere in internal affairs of any country, not even in internal affairs of
their own member states. This superior international document and instrument of global security
explicitly demand the approval of the UNSC for the undertaking of any armed action by any
regional organization. The NATO never asked and never became authorized to carry out military
intervention against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 and, therefore, according to modern Public
International Law, this "humanitarian" intervention under arms was a pure act of brutal
aggression against a sovereign country and as such a crime against peace. Subsequently, human
rights served in this case just as a justification for the realization of certain geopolitical
aims in the Balkans. It became of crystal visibility in February 2008 when Kosovo Albanians
proclaimed an independent Republic of Kosovo which became recognized by all US' satellites
around the world. In 1999 NATO did not bomb Serbia and Montenegro for the sake of Kosovo
independence but only to protect "human rights" (of Albanians). However, the same NATO nothing
did to continue the protection of human rights (of Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians) after
the war when the province became put under complete protectorate and control by the NATO who
nothing did to prevent comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the province committed by Albanian
extremists (former members of the KLA).
Although, as it is presented above, every armed intervention is strictly prohibited by both
Public International Law and the UN Charter, the NATO, established in 1949 on the foundation of
Article 51 of the UN Charter which is dealing with the right to collective and individual
self-defense, attacked the FYR on March 24th, 1999 with continual barbaric air-strikes for the
next 77 days. The term "air-strikes", the NATO was regularly used at its own press conferences
during the aggression on Serbia and Montenegro like the term "collateral damage" for the mass
destruction and civilian casualties resulted by the NATO bombing. In their official statements,
NATO's officials declaratively claimed that the focal reason for those (illegal) air-strikes
was a set of humanitarian issues among them the most important have been three:
1) protection of individual human rights,
2) violation of Albanian rights in Kosovo as a national minority, and
3) prevention of the potential policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against ethnic
Albanians by Yugoslavia's security forces.
Nevertheless, the aggression was accompanied by dirty and powerful media propaganda which
was, of course, directly supported by a number of politically "correct" legal and human rights
experts for the purpose to wash the brains of the Western audience. Most of them justified the
aggression with the right of Kosovo Albanians to self-determination, although such right is not
supported by any valid international instrument if the right to self-determination means the
destruction of territorial integrity of the country. However, the same experts did not
recognize the same right to self-determination to Croatia's and Bosnia's Serbs during the break
up of ex-Yugoslavia.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, center, with court security guards at left and
right, appears before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Tuesday July 3, 2001.
Milosevic walked into the U.N. tribunal courtroom, Tuesday, without lawyers to represent him
against charges of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Milosevic died in his
prison cell in the Hague on March 11, 2006 allegedely of a heat attack jist a few months begore
the verdict to be annouced.
To keep in our mind, according to Public International Law and the UN Charter, the
aggression also includes bombing by the armed forces of one country against the territory of
another country or use of any arms and armed forces of one country against the territory of
another as, for instance, NATO used Kosovo Albanian KLA as ground forces during the Kosovo War.
But the crucial fact in relation to the 1998−1999 Kosovo War was that since there was no
real humanitarian catastrophe before the NATO aggression starred on March 24th, 1999 against
the FRY, it had to be created what exactly NATO did during the air-strike campaign of 78 days
in order to justify its occupation of the province after the war followed by Kosovo's secession
from Serbia in 2008.
Violation Of Human Rights In Kosovo
No one claims that human rights of all citizens including and ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo-Metochia have not been violated to a certain extent before NATO's military campaign in
1999. This fact was approved in several resolutions by the UNSC before the NATO aggression but
what is systematically hidden as a fact is that original flagrant violation of human rights in
the province came from the side of Albanian KLA as this terrorist organization launched a
widespread policy of attacking, kidnapping and killing of the Serbs in order to provoke
Serbia's security forces who reacted as they did it by violation of human rights of those
Albanians who participated in the actions of and/or supported the KLA's activities. Here we
have to keep in mind that a majority of Kosovo's Albanians did not support the methods of
combat by the KLA including and Dr. Ibrahim Rugova – a political leader of Kosovo's
Albanians. In order to calm down a political situation in the province, the Yugoslav Government
concluded with different international organizations, like the OSCE or the NATO, several
agreements allowing the OSCE monitoring mission in Kosovo-Metochia. The Yugoslav Government as
well as agreed to restrain the activities by its security forces if the opposite side (the KLA)
would do the same. That the Albanian side before NATO's aggression was committing war crimes is
clear from the invitation to both the Yugoslav and Kosovo's Albanian sides by the international
community to cooperate with the UN special Tribunal (est. 1993) for the crimes committed on the
territory of ex-Yugoslavia (including Kosovo-Metochia too). The fact was that regarding this
invitation to cooperate with the Tribunal's prosecutor in the Hague, the leaders of the
"Albanian national community" were also invited but not only the Yugoslav side to participate
in the investigation for all offenses within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. The Albanian
side was, in other words, invited to participate in the investigation of personal involvement
of the KLA members in the crimes committed against other ethnic groups in Kosovo-Metochia, with
the final political aim to secede the province from the FRY.
Nevertheless, in no one resolution on Kosovo before March 24th, 1999, it was not mentioned
any "threat to peace" in the province nor did they order the UNSC to form international armed
forces with the right to re-establish the peace and order in Kosovo, that was to undertake
certain armed actions against Serbia and Montenegro. In 1998, the FRY as a sovereign state was
combating separatist Albanian movement in Kosovo-Metochia, in some cases with inordinate use of
force, but, nevertheless, there was no real humanitarian catastrophe at that time. The recent
historical experience of violation of human rights according to contemporary definition, in the
province suggests that the critical situation was escalating with the creation of the KLA in
1995 which took comprehensive terrorist actions for the sake to bring about the secession of
Kosovo from Serbia. The Yugoslav security forces came into serious conflict with different
groups of the KLA, and the judiciary of the FRY accompanied by relevant experts and scholars
justifiably qualified the armed actions of Kosovo's separatists as classic terrorism and
criminal acts against a sovereign state.
[iv]
Former leader of KLA Ramush Haradinaj arrested on 5 January 2017 on a Serbian arrest warrant
by French border police upon his arrival at EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg on a flight
from Pristina. Serbian authorities urged France to extradite Haradinaj, citing that he
personally took part in the torture, murder, and rape of civilians. On 27 April 2017, a French
court turned down a Serbian request to extradite Ramush Haradinaj and released him. Since
September 9, 2017 Haradinaj is the Prime Minister of self-proclamed Kosovo.
In essence, there were prior to NATO's aggression on the FRY the problems of protection of
human rights in Kosovo-Metochia, but certainly no to such extent as it was exaggerated by the
Western mass media and policymakers at least no bigger than in many other corners of the world
like in Colombia or Turkey's eastern part populated by ethnic Kurds. Surely, the situation in
regard to human rights in Turkey since 1994 onward is much more serious than it was in
Kosovo-Metochia in 1998 as the Kurdish human and minority rights are drastically violated like
in 1994 when a large number of the Kurdish villages were destroyed by the Turkish police and
regular army's forces and when almost one million of ethnic Kurds fled Turkey to neighboring
states but the US administration simply did nothing to protect the Kurdish human rights. Even
no initiative was launched for the UN to undertake a legitimate international action in order
to prevent Turkey's authorities to stop with the production of a humanitarian
catastrophe.
Producing Humanitarian Catastrophe But Characterized As No Aggression
The focal result of NATO's bombing of Serbia and Montenegro was a huge number of refugees of
all nationalities from Kosovo-Metochia that became, in fact, a real humanitarian catastrophe.
However, during such exodus of people, NATO's military aggression under the umbrella of the
"armed humanitarian intervention" became even strengthened in spite of all prohibitions which
have been existing in Public International Law. However, during and after the bombardment of
the FRY, the UN resolutions, like the UNSC Resolution of June 10th, 1999, simply did not
mention the bombardment at all for a very reason: if mentioned it would have to be officially
qualified as "aggression" what means a violation of Public International Law and the UN
Charter. In this case, however, due to the established voting system in the UNSC (threat of
using Russian and Chinese veto rights), no resolution could be adopted. The Resolution of June
10th, 1999, in fact, is speaking only about deployment of international security forces
including and those of the NATO in the province after the war for the sake to " establish safe
environment for all people in Kosovo, as well as to facilitate safe return of all displaced
people and refugees to their homes". In other words, nowhere in the whole text of the
resolution is mentioned the bombardment of the FRY and, therefore, a pure act of aggression
against a sovereign state. That was the same with another previous resolution adopted during
the aggression (Resolution 1239 on May 14th, 1999) which does not say any single word about
NATO's bombardment but instead it only says that international community expresses serious
concern in respect to the humanitarian catastrophe in and around Kosovo as a result of
continuing crisis but who produced this crisis is absolutely unclear from the text of the
resolution. The same text confirms the rights of all refugees and displaced persons to return
to their homes in a safe and dignified manner but what was a real background of the crisis is
not clear. According to the UN resolutions on Kosovo, the NATO barbaric bombardment and a
classic act of aggression on a sovereign state, in fact, believe or not, never happened!
We have to mention that there were several attempts by Russia and China in the UNSC to adopt
an appropriate resolution in which would be recognized that NATO's air-strikes in 1999 really
happened on the ground and subsequently they had to be characterized as "aggression". However,
such resolution's proposals failed as not being adopted for the only reason – used veto
rights by the USA, the UK, and France (the Western obstruction).
Arguments Against
Humanitarian Intervention
There are several focal objections by the scholars, policy-makers, and lawyers to
humanitarian intervention advocated at various times. Here, we will address the most important
arguments against humanitarian intervention taking primarily the case of NATO's bombing of the
FRY in 1999:
No real basis for humanitarian intervention in Public International Law . The common good
is best preserved by maintaining a ban on any use of force not authorized by the UNSC.
Interveners have typically either claimed to be acting in self-defense according to the
"implied authorization" of the UNSC resolutions and the UN Charter or have refrained from
making any reasonable legal argument based on Public International Law at all.
States do not intervene for primarily humanitarian reasons . States always have mixed
real reasons for humanitarian and other interventions and are very rarely prepared to
sacrifice their own soldiers overseas. It means that humanitarian intervention is guided by
calculations of national interest but not by what is best for the victims in whose name the
intervention is formally carried out.
States are not allowed to risk the lives of their own soldiers in order to save strangers
. Political leaders do not possess any moral right to shed the blood of their own citizens on
behalf of suffering foreigners. Citizens are having the exclusive responsibility of their own
state, and their state is entirely their own business and, therefore, if a civil authority
has broken down this is the responsibility only of the citizens and political leaders of that
state but not of the foreign powers.
T he issue of abuse . In the absence of a not politically colored mechanism for deciding
when a real humanitarian intervention is permissible, states have a possibility to espouse
humanitarian motives just as a formal pretext to morally cover the pursuit of national
self-interest as, for instance, A. Hitler did with the Sudetenland.
Selectivity of response . States all the time apply principles of humanitarian
intervention selectively following their own national interest but not real protection of
human rights. In other words, a state's behavior is always governed by what the Government
decides to be in their interest and, therefore, states are selective about when they choose
to intervene. As an example, the selectivity of response is the argument that NATO's
"humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo in 1999 could not be driven by real humanitarian
concerns as it has done nothing to address, for instance, the very much larger humanitarian
catastrophe in Darfur, a province in West Sudan (Darfur genocide).
A problem of moral principles . There is no generally reached consensus on a set of moral
principles about humanitarian intervention which should not be permitted in the face of
disagreement about what constitutes extreme cases of the violation of human rights.
Practically, humanitarian intervention does not work . Humanitarian intervention is not
workable as the outsiders cannot impose human rights especially by those who have the same
problem in their homes. Democracy can be established only by a domestic struggle for liberty
but not from the outside. It means that human rights cannot take root if they are imposed by
outsiders. The argument is that the oppressed people should by themselves overthrow
non-democratic authority.
Conclusion
The norms of Public International Law and doctrine of collective security after 1945
presented above, unfortunately, did not stop different forms of armed interventions around the
globe but especially by the US – a country which became a global champion of aggression.
Armed "humanitarian" interventions are still going to be a reality of the present and future
international relations under the umbrella of the R2P.
After the Cold War, the most brutal, illegal and shameful "humanitarian intervention" was in
the southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metochia in 1999 that was, in fact, NATO's aggression
against the FRY in a form of an air campaign. However, beside this example of "humanitarian
intervention" as a violation of Public International Law, there were many similar interventions
before like when in 1983 the USA invaded a sovereign state of Granada with some 8.000 soldiers
under justification to protect the lives of about 1.000 American citizens living there under
the belief that they were threatened due to the unrest in this country. However, the real
reason of such "humanitarian intervention" has been of purely political and geostrategic nature
rather than humanitarian one as US' troops occupied the whole island (state) of Granada
including and those parts in which US' citizens did not live. The focal proof of abuse of
Public International Law was a fact that the American troops de facto occupied Granada as they
stayed on the island even after all the American citizens had left and changed the Government
of it.
From the presentation above, it is quite clear that NATO's military action against Serbia
and Montenegro in 1999 cannot be characterized as a just war of "humanitarian intervention"
even according to the criteria by the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius not to speak
about the modern set of criteria incorporated into the UN Charter and Public International Law.
Therefore, the action was rather a classic example of brutal military aggression against a
sovereign state covered by politicized Western mass media. It is true that "media are not only
spectator in modern conflicts, but must be considered active participants forming public
opinion and also creating and directing threat perception" that was exactly the case of the
1998−1999 Kosovo War when the Western corporate mass media succeeded to convince public
opinion that NATO's "humanitarian intervention" was a just war.
Western Oligarchs raped Russia in the 90's. OK, most of them were Jews – but still
Western. The (((harvard))) boys foisted dollar debts on Russia, and then converted Russia to
an extraction economy. Putin cleverly taxed the Oligarchs and prevented them from further
predations.
No country can survive if it has an internal hostile elite. Nobody here can claim that
Russia's government is hostile to its people. A fair claim can be made that the
"international" elite that infest America IS HOSTILE. Why would you immigrate a replacement
population if not hostile? Why would you export your industry if not hostile?
You don't dig out and convert your economy to first world standards overnight.
So, the trend lines are clear. The West and U.S. is a finance oligarchy in decline, while
Russia is on a ascendant path. These lines will cross over at some point in near future. One
could even squint and say that Russia is no longer an Oligarchy of special interests, and is
moving into Byzantium mode e.g. symphony of Church and State. Many Russian thinkers are
projecting another 40 years or so to consolidate the gains.
"... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
"... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
"... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic
cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:
" We must stand up
against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up
new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and
hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our
middle class."
It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing
so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.
As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what
happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military
industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American
taxpayers at least six trillion dollars.
[1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans may have suffered brain injuries."
[2]
Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and
destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the
Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle
East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.
The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both
parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about
you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that
matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of
the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you
should all agree with Gabbard here.
[1] Ernesto Londono, "Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion," Washington
Post , March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars," The Nation , March 29,
2013; "Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson
Institute Study," Huffington Post , May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, "The $5 Trillion War
on Terror," Time , June 29, 2011; "Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have
been done?," LA Times , March 18, 2013.
[2] "360,000 veterans may have brain injuries," USA Today , March 5, 2009.
"We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new
places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy,
our security, and destroying our middle class."
Liz Warren is talking about what Bernie talked about in '16. I'm concerned that she has
progressive rhetoric but centrist instincts. Her voting record isn't as progressive as I
believe is necessary. She needs to be able to withstand scrutiny if she hopes to attract
progressive voters. Rhetoric and platitudes aren't enough... #LeadersNeedToLeadByExample
I don't think I'm alone in finding a big difference that was not mentioned in the video.
While I greatly appreciate Elizabeth Warren, and those clips you showed from earlier today
were very encouraging, there is just a quality Bernie and Tulsi share that is very rare among
politicians. Something about the way they speak, their past actions, and ways they don't
speak, just hit home really hard a believability that they are extremely genuine and from the
heart. I see some of this from EW, but, Bernie and Tulsi are just incredibly impressive in
regard to this quality... it doesn't feel like supporting a politician, it feels like
supporting a kind of way of being and appreciation for what we all are so many of us try to
make our way of life. fwiw, I think it's also a big part of AOC's appeal.
Elizabeth Warren is a cautious, cowardish (her behaviour during 2016 was disgusting), but pretty energetic careerist. Her views will
quickly change under pressure, so good talking points will never translated into real policies.
The fact the wealthy control the USA is not news. This is the fact of life and always be. the
question is how to reach optimal middle point when interest of the bottom 80% standard of living
do not deteriorate.
Probably close to Barack Obama who also utters all right things during election complain and then blatantly betrayed his
voters.
She clearly is the top anti-corruption candidate and will expose the level of corruption in
Washington. So she is preferable to Kamala Harris and other establishment candidates.
The fight between organized and rich few and unorganized and poor many became hotter right
now. But what is the power base of anti-neoliberal movement. That can be only trade unions, which
were decimated. So the first step might be to restore the power of unions.
Notable quotes:
"... Elizabeth Warren is a progressive with no backbone who supports the military industrial complex ..."
"... Warren missed her moment when she failed us in 2016. She'd be VP today, and thinking about running in 2024. She shied away and instead, we have Trump ..."
Elizabeth Warren is weak. She did not have the courage to stand up to the Clinton machine
in 2016 when she could have made a difference by standing up against corruption. Now she is
waffling on what it means when she says she supports Medicare for All, as now she is open to
tweaking the Republican "Affordable" Care Act. She won't fight for us. We need real fighters.
We need Bernie and Tulsi.
I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Elizabeth Warren but in the last few years
she's shown that she's not as reliable as i thought she was. She's way to soft when it comes
to calling out the corruption in the dem party. She's also shown she's more willing to bend
to the will of the Dem establishment and that is not the kind of President we need right now.
I'll be posting a video on her campaign soon & unfortunately I'll have to tear into her a
lot more than you did in this video
Elizabeth Warren is a progressive with no backbone who supports the military industrial
complex. She will lose to Trump if she gets the nominee. Tulsi is a real progressive with
balls. #Tulsi2020
Warren missed her moment when she failed us in 2016. She'd be VP today, and thinking about
running in 2024. She shied away and instead, we have Trump.
I don't think she has the ability
to motivate she could have had back then. I don't think she has the savvy to beat Trump. We
need Tulsi or Bernie, the rest would lose in the general.
tomjulio2002, 1 week ago
Sorry but there is no comparison between Warren and Sanders.
Warren is either at best a coward (see primary 2016) or at worst a con (at lot of words but no action when it matters). So
not much will change with her, except that Trump would be gone. Then we will get a worse than Trump next time around when
people get even more disappointed and desperate.
For Sanders, you know for sure that he means what he says and that he intends to try.
The question is whether he will have the courage to go for it when the going gets tough. Or will he buckle like he did at
the 2016 convention thinking best to get half a loaf than risking to get nothing.
With Sanders, there is at least a chance (albeit a slim one in my opinion) of big changes happening on the issues like
Medicare for all, Green New Deal, Free public college...
For me, Warren is a no go.
Also Gabbard is clearly a fighter but I am still hazy on some of her positions. But I will take her before I even take
another look at Warren (if somehow Warren becomes the nominee).
"... Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes vote. ..."
"... how being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure, for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic? ..."
Foreign policy is more than just war and peace, it is a nuanced and complex issue that
directly affects us here at home. In this interview, Dr. Jane Sanders sits down with
Representative Tulsi Gabbard to talk about U.S. foreign policy and how it affects us here at
home.
Tulsi this is the first I've explored who you are. This conversation felt like a life
giving refreshment. The constant war and regime change policy of every administration since I
was a young child has been utterly confounding. We are bankrupting our society and
civilization with military expenditure exactly like a life destroying heroin addict except
it's on a global scale. These people in the powers that be together with the masses that back
them are literal sociopaths and they're entirely in control at both the highest and base
levels. The only other time I've felt as nourished by a public figure that somehow pierced
through the mainstream media was Bernie Sanders actually expressing the fact that we are an
oligarchy not a democracy. Like oligarchy, anti-war and imperialism is just not talked about.
US Americans won't acknowledge the scale of our imperialism.
Tulsi should run and both Sanders should follow her lead. As much as I love him, Bernie's
too old to be president - when it gets to the stage against Trump, we need a young, vibrant
face. Add onto that the fact that she's a veteran who actually asked to be deployed in
comparison to him, a draft dodger - he looks like an old fat pathetic septogenarian next to
an early 40s real populist. Ultimately it is up to Sanders whether this whole thing is about
a man or a movement. If he runs, he'll probably win the primary but it is not a guarantee
that he'd win - Tulsi would win and she'd be around for decades to come as a standard barer
too.
"Sensible politics" seems to be an oxymoron these days and pretty much throughout the
history of our country. It's so refreshing to see a politician who has a vision for the
future that the majority of us can get behind. It scares me though. I've read quite a bit
about JFK the past few years, and he amassed a number of very powerful and dangerous enemies.
They won't just stand by and allow someone in a position of influence to get the truth out
about our immoral and illegal wars. Tulsi, I support your efforts to bring peace to the
Middle East and elsewhere, but please do be careful. You're a fighter and I admire that, but
we all want you to be safe and healthy for many years to come.
Tulsi Gabbard, I am thrilled to have someone like you running for president. I am a fellow
Veteran dealing with disability and I am glad to have a candidate who understands the issues
Veterans are dealing with. I also realize that the voting public will support the person who
resonates with their personal lives and issues that don't exist in their life they will
disregard.Thank you for you're support.
The DNC will lie cheat and steal the election from Tulsi Gabbard just like they did Bernie
Sanders, and the 15 million Americans who Left the un-Democratic party will double and
triple....DEMEXIT
Tulsi Gabbard needs to be the president of the United States of America period. If she not
the president of our country will not survive. That is a fact, how stupid can our government
be. I guess very stupid, what else can I say. We don't hear that in main news media, the
reason we do hear it the media . The news media is totally brought, the main news media love
money and the devil, simple as that. How are you going to hear about wars from main news
media. They do care about the citizens or the country. We really don't have a real news
media, it all propaganda. All fake news, that why one doesn't hear anything from the new
medias.
Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one
responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime
change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes
vote.
WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Bernie is a sell-out - a sheeple-herder that never intended to win. He
was a gatekeeper for Hillary because she is AIPAC-beloved and he is an Israel-firster. He
threw his supporters under the bus as they told him in real time that the nomination was
being stolen. He's part of the con, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we'll be.
BERNIE WORKS FOR DEMOCRATS. Vote Third Party (REAL third parties, not the Bernie Sanders'
kind).
Kinky, 2 months ago
Tulsi - re your comment about our veterans who have "served and sacrificed for their country," could you clarify how
being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure,
for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our
country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic?
That's a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI
director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump's firing of former
Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly
elected president out of office.
According to New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Matthew Haag, McCabe made the
statement in an NBC 60 Minutes interview to be aired on Sunday. He also reportedly said
that McCabe wanted the so-called Russia collusion investigation to go after Trump for
obstructing justice in firing Comey and for any instances they could turn up of his working in
behalf of Russia.
The idea of invoking the 25th Amendment was discussed, it seems, at two meetings on May
16, 2017. According to McCabe, top law enforcement officials pondered how they might recruit
Vice President Pence and a majority of cabinet members to declare in writing, to the Senate's
president pro tempore and the House speaker, that the president was "unable to discharge the
powers and duties of his office." That would be enough, under the 25th Amendment, to install
the vice president as acting president, pushing aside Trump.
But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it
would set, it's necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text
prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional
figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president
after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration
within those four days that the guy can't govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue.
It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have
to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the
vice president would govern. If Congress can't muster the two-thirds majority within the
prescribed time period, the president "shall resume the powers and duties of his office."
It's almost impossible to contemplate the political conflagration that would ensue under
this plan. Citizens would watch those in Washington struggle with the monumental question of
the fate of their elected leader under an initiative that had never before been invoked, or
even considered, in such circumstances. Debates would flare up over whether this comported with
the original intent of the amendment; whether it was crafted to deal with physical or mental
"incapacitation," as opposed to controversial actions or unsubstantiated allegations or even
erratic decision making; whether such an action, if established as precedent, would destabilize
the American republic for all time; and whether unelected bureaucrats should arrogate to
themselves the power to set in motion the downfall of a president, circumventing the
impeachment language of the Constitution.
For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing
narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.
One narrative -- let's call it Narrative A -- has it that honorable and dedicated federal
law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian
agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve
U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite
understandably, that Trump had "colluded" with Russian officials to cadge a victory that
otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by
Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the "Russia as Threat" preoccupation, and
by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post
, and The New York Times .
The other view -- Narrative B -- posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the
national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart
Trump's candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and
particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive
investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law
enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters,
conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably
columnist Kimberley Strassel.
The McCabe revelation won't affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and
outrageous as this "deep state" behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be
seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there
heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.
And those Narrative A folks won't have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was
fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to
the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators
on four occasions, including three times while under oath.
Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed
by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn't matter. Peter Strzok, head
of the FBI's counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails
to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele's dossier of dirt on Trump,
including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled
by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was "desperate that
Donald Trump not get elected and passionate about him not being president"? Not important. The
dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial.
Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?
Now we have a report from a participant of those meetings that top officials of the
country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting
president they didn't like. The Times even says that McCabe "confirmed" an earlier
report that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire in meetings with
Trump to incriminate him and make him more vulnerable to the plot.
There is no suggestion in McCabe's interview pronouncements or in the words of Scott Pelley,
who conducted the interview and spoke to CBS This Morning about it, that these federal
officials ever took action to further the aim of unseating the president. There doesn't seem to
be any evidence that they approached cabinet members or the vice president about it. "They were
speculating, 'This person would be with us, this person would not be,' and they were counting
noses in that effort," said Pelley. He added, apparently in response to Rosenstein's
insistence that his comments about wearing a wire were meant as a joke, "This was not perceived
to be a joke."
What are we to make of this? Around the time of the meetings to discuss the 25th Amendment
plot, senior FBI officials also discussed initiating a national security investigation of the
president as a stooge of the Russians or perhaps even a Russian agent. These talks were
revealed by The New YorkTimes and CNN in January, based on closed-door
congressional testimony by former FBI general counsel James Baker. You don't have to read very
carefully to see that the reporters on these stories brought to them a Narrative A sensibility.
The Times headline: "F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on
Behalf of Russia." CNN's: "Transcripts detail how FBI debated whether Trump was 'following
directions' of Russia." And of course, whoever leaked those hearing transcripts almost surely
did so to bolster the Narrative A version of events.
The independent journalist Gareth Porter, writing at Consortium News, offers a penetrating
exposition of the inconsistencies, fallacies, and fatuities of the Narrative A matrix, as
reflected in how the Times and CNN handled the stories that resulted from what were
clearly self-interested leaks.
Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director
John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever
since, particularly in the Times . Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence
indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was "colluding with Moscow," Brennan dodged the
question. He said his experience had taught him that "the Russians try to suborn individuals,
and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly."
Of course you can't collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan's fancy expression has the
effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious
and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or
injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, "The real purpose is to confer on national
security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the
basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration
with the Russian government."
That seems to be what's going on here. There's no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and
Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations
with Russia. They viewed him as a president "who needed to be reined in," as a CNN report
described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.
So they expanded the definition of collusion to include "unwitting" collaboration in order
to justify their machinations. It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would
take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body
politic.
Now we learn that they actually sat around and plotted how to distort the Constitution, just
as they distorted the rules of official behavior designed to hold them in check, in order to
destroy a presidential administration placed in power by the American people. It's getting more
and more difficult to dismiss Narrative B.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the
author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. MORE FROM THIS
AUTHOR
You're right, it didn't change a thing in the full-throated support to depose an elected
President they disagree with. The bureaucratic cabal has long had a more informal absolute
veto over who can even run for President. This guy challenged that hegemony of insider power
brokers, and caused the revelation that we have morphed into a Potemkin-style, managed
democracy, in which we don't choose who gets to run, just which of their choices we are allowed
to approve.
Such is the decadent trajectory, of republics that transition into empires, where
democratic accountabilty to the governed, domestic and foreign, decays in favor of empire
administrators and their elite beneficiaries and their sinecures at the expense of the
majority.
People rail against Trump as some sort of would-be Caesar, but he is elected, while those
permanent unaccountable "national security" czars acting in secrecy they are willing to
transfer all power to, are not.
No form of popular government can survive when secret police recording everything and spying
on the population become the real power.
"It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude
toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic."
What we don't want to recognize is that people in such positions are, in fact, just that
dumb. It is unfortunately true. While not a Trump supporter, I would be out on the streets with
them if these jacka$$es had tried to pull this off. They should ALL be immediately terminated
and any benefits revoked.
Last night (Feb 14, 2019) Tucker Carlson interviewed retired Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz (1:04-3:36):
Carlson: "Professor, thanks very much for coming on. So now the suspicions of many are
confirmed by one of the players in it. The Department of Justice discussed trying to remove the
President using the 25 Amendment. What's your reaction to that?
Dershowitz: "Well, if that's true, it is clearly an attempt at a coup d'état.
Relating to what your former guest said, let's take the worst case scenario: Let's assume the
President of the United States was in bed with the Russians, committed treason, committed
obstruction of justice -- the 25 Amendment simply is irrelevant to that. That's why you have an
impeachment provision. The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It's about a
president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It's not about the most
fundamental disagreements. It's not about impeachable offenses. And any Justice Department
official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed
a grievous offense against the Constitution. The framers of the 25th amendment had in mind
something very specific. And trying to use the 25th amendment to circumvent the impeachment
provisions, or to circumvent an election is a despicable act of unconstitutional
power-grabbing. And you were right when you said it reminded me of what happens in third world
countries. Look, these people may have been well-intentioned. They may believe that they were
serving the interests of the United States. But you have to obey the law and the law is the
Constitution and the 25th Amendment is as clear as could be: incapacity, unable to perform
office. That's what you need. That's why you need 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate
agreeing. And it has to be on the basis of a medical or psychological incapacity. Not on the
basis of even the most extreme crimes -- which there is no evidence were committed -- but even
if they were, that would not be basis for invoking the 25th Amendment. And I challenge any
left-wing person to get on television and to defend the use of the 25th Amendment. I challenge
any of my colleagues who are in the "Get Trump At Any Cost" camp to come on television and
justify the use of the 25 Amendment other than for physical or psychiatric incapacity.
Carlson: I bet they're doing that right now. This is an attack on our system, I would say,
not just the President. Alan Dershowitz, thank you very much.
Dershowitz: It is an attack on our system. It's an attack on the constitution. Thank
you.
How many millions of dollars did Bill and Hill receive from Russians? How much of America's
uranium deposits did Hillary sell to Russians during her time in the Obama administration? The
New York Times informs us:
" . . . the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity
in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for
national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from
a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off
was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions
from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton
Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling
$2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an
agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.
Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
"And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in
Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank
with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
"At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease
concerns about ceding control of the company's assets to the Russians. Those promises have been
repeatedly broken, records show."
I wonder how much howling and how many allegations of "collusion" with Russia we'd be
hearing if the name Clinton were removed from the NY Times article and the name Trump were
inserted?
The article states: " top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around
and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like."
-- -- -- --
Which makes one wonder if "The rule of law" is becoming the rule of outlaws? When the
non-elected in the justice profession appear to have their own agenda.
Trump is an idiot, but his enemies in the lib-Dem-media Establishment are far worse: corrupt,
deceitful, arrogant, and lawless. Exhibit A is Andrew McCabe.
That's why I'll vote for the Idiot-in-Chief (again) in 2020. Because the alternative makes
me vomit.
"The pages of this publication drift further and further into utter insanity and
despicable defense of Trump. Stand up for the values of the Constitution, or something, but
not for this man who is no more than a self-enriching demagogue with no understanding of the
reactionary politics he uses to delude the rubes and attract asinine threadbare pieces like
this one."
Actually no. Consider me the inverse of Peter. I didn't vote for Trump due to the character
weaknesses Peter describes. However, what I see is a seriously flawed man who has served the
useful purpose of revealing an echo chamber of flawed and self-serving biases shared by the
media and political establishment of this country. I see CNN, the NY Times, the Washington
Post, and even some key leaders of our security services in a completely different light than I
did two years ago. I am thankful for the clarity. I consider Merry's article to be a
contribution in that direction.
"Peter" sez: "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they
knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency."
Weird but no one has shown any actual criminal behavior by said President. Two years later
still no charges. But Peter and these "career law enforcement officials" KNEW he was a
criminal. Then Peter appeals to the Constitution, apparently oblivious to the fact that the
Constitution doesn't make any provisions for plotting to remove the lawfully elected President
because you don't like just because you "know" he is a "criminal", in spite of any actual
evidence.
"After his election, they (the deep state) determined to undermine his political standing, and
particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive
investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law
enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters,
conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably
columnist Kimberley Strassel."
The trouble with that is it completely ignores the ton of evidence pointing to really
nefarious stuff.
Lots of times, when there's smoke, there's fire. And when the smoke is overwhelming there
probably is a fire. A big one.
Trump has been going after the Russians since his inauguration. Therefore, those trying to
remove him from office are likely the actual Russian agents. Of course they would need smoke
and mirrors to hide that fact and deflect attention from themselves. It just so happens that
Russian spies are trained by the FSB to accuse others of being a spy, for just this purpose.
I'm looking at you, John O. (Oleg?) Brennan
No matter who the President is, there is some group of people in Washington is ALWAYS trying to
bring him down. Who those people are, and how large and powerful the group is, depends on a
variety of factors. But a competent president manages to enact his agenda while staying one
step ahead of his intriguers. Obama and GWB accomplished both, more or less because they were
intelligent men of good character (though Obama was much smarter and better man than W)
While Bill Clinton's character was too low to avoid impeachment he was a smart and able
administrator. Trump has both low character and low intellect so it is not surprising A. that
many people want to bring him down and B. that they have been pretty effective.
Politics may be a blood sport in Washington but that's not the same as a "deep state". And
Trump can't compete and win with anyone in Washington who doesn't grovel before him like the
supine Senate Republicans. And that is no one's fault but his.
You wanting Trump to be a Russian agent does not make him one. It never
will. Get over it. , ,
February 16, 2019 at 12:08 am
"If it turns out that Trump IS a Russian asset, will you apologize, Robert Merry? Because he
certainly acts like one. And, as REAL Republicans used to say, if it looks like a duck, walks
like a duck, and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a duck."
@One Guy Yeah, because sending deadly aid to Ukraine is so pro-Russian. What an idiot you
are!
"Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a
criminal taking over the office of the presidency. Shame on them!"
They also "knew" Martin Luther King Jr. was a Soviet agent.
The issue with the 25th amendment, is that the President's character flaws or mental deficiency
were known and very visible before the election. Is it constitutionally proper for Congress to
suspend a President for a preexisting condition that was known to and unhidden from voters? If
Congress did that, it means Congress has a veto over who the public is allowed to vote in as
President.
Forget the Covington students, Andrew McCabe and his lady co-workers have some pretty punchable
faces. (Ok, I'm enough of a sexist to not punch a lady. I'd use eye-rolling and mocking
gestures instead.)
The problem is not the existence of the deep state. It's inevitable that there will be
unelected officials who will continue to shape policy regardless of who is elected President.
The problem is that the deep state is blatantly working to undermine its elected
leadership. If you can't in good conscience work with your President, the honorable thing
to do is resign as some undoubtedly have. It's not an excuse for insubordination.
"... The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed. ..."
<
>if we say fly mentally back to early nineteen sixties, the admiration>
> for America was still very strong, even in the USSR.
> Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Feb 16, 2019 1:34:44 PM | 38
My uncle was in the US Navy in the early sixties. He made many ports of call in the
Mediterranean basin, where he and his mates were warmly greeted. Not so much now, I'm
sure.
Some here might recall that Ike was extremely pissed off at the British, French, and
Israelis for attacking Egypt and creating the 1956 Suez crisis. He threatened to dump UK
bonds and crash their financial system. That's pretty serious stuff!
So how did the Israelis manage to shift US policy 180 degrees, like a parasite taking over
the host's brain? Perhaps the answer to that could yield clues as to how to remove said
parasite without killing the host. Although the host is already brain-dead, so maybe it
wouldn't matter...
The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.
After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which
Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed.
The US began to escalate its war in Vietnam and the cost of pursuing that war eventually led
to the US government in 1971 taking the US dollar off the gold standard and allowing it to
create fiat money.
Something must have happened well before 1967 when the USS Liberty was strafed by Israeli
fighter jets in the intent to destroy it and all its crew and the incident blamed on the
Egyptians in an effort to draw the US into the Six Day War.
Being pro-Zionism is New York way of being militarist
Notable quotes:
"... Trump just appointed John Bolton ! Trump has betrayed us ! How did they turned him ? Blah blah blah .. Forchrissake ! ..."
"... It boggles the mind that even at this stage, so many peoples are still bamboozled by this duopoly dog and pony show , aka the mukkan election ! ..."
The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
In neoliberal MSM there is positive feedback loop for "Trump is a Russian agent" stories. So the meme feeds on itself.
Notable quotes:
"... And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies. ..."
"... the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience. ..."
"... Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years ..."
"... Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water ..."
"... Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community . ..."
"... The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. ..."
"... The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man. ..."
The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just
published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the
interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia's natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning
Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.
<picture deleted>
And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working
to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand
for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence
agencies.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less "Putin's puppet" talk and a lot more "Hey,
maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth" talk among news media consumers. But there isn't,
because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives
are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.
Like His Predecessors
Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors,
and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's
not that much different
from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump
hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they
were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration's actual behavior, he's just as reliable an upholder of
the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.
Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating
government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't
even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water.
They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their
ninth consecutive week , a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions
and the official narratives which uphold them.
The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France
closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting
U.S. government institutions. Right now they've got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S.
intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that
Americans think about their rulers.
Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and
rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those
institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power
to the people in France, and media corporations
acting increasingly weird and insecure , that looks more and more likely by the day.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam,
Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending
wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
Notable quotes:
"... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into
an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously
pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our
republic.
Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and
Elliott Abrams.
I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters:
if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked
Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A
republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread
Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans
themselves?
Hmm (strokes beard)
Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)
1. Bolton is evil, 2. Pompeo is a liar, 3. Pence is a moralizing buffoon.
I detest them all but who do I hate the least? I'm going to go with Bolton.
Since I believe that Pence is an honest man, it twists my mind how someone can stand on a
stage and seriously believe that other countries have a moral obligation to obey the U.S. in
who they do and don't do business with. How dare you undermine U.S. sanctions he thunders,
and the look on his face, priceless.
At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply
exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence.
Feb. 14, 2019 (EIRNS) -- Responding to the U.S. Senators' efforts to impose new sanctions on
Russia by proposing a bill on Feb. 13 called the "Defending American Security from Kremlin
Aggression Act (DASKA)" of 2019, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said behind such proposals
"there is an absolutely concrete, pragmatic and aggressive trading approach, having
nothing to do with international trade rules.... This policy sometimes borders on
racketeering. I mean various provisions of the draft law aimed at disrupting various energy
projects of Russian companies, undermining the activities of Russian banks with state
participation,"
Peskov said, reported TASS.
The proposed legislation, an updated version of an earlier bill that did not muster enough
support, seeks to increase economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Russia "in response
to Russia's interference in democratic processes abroad, malign influence in Syria, and
aggression against Ukraine, including in the Kerch Strait," said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who
proposed the bill with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among other members of the Foreign Relations
Committee.
That why war is called racket, And that's why dominance of military-industrial complex turns
any country in neo-fascist state. Still people can fight this cancer, even if changes are not
that great.
Notable quotes:
"... It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them. ..."
It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple
reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is
that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.
And I say this as a Veteran that also thought Iraq was a good idea back in 2001. The
difference is that I then went there to serve. As a result I have learned hard fought
lessons. Tucker is spot on. Maybe the follow up article can be a piece that discusses why we
need more "combat" Veterans up in the beltway. And it is good that more veterans are now
serving in Congress but not all are combat veterans.
That's probably why Max Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed
conflict,"y et never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces
Bottomfeeders like Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Max Boot are just peddlers of MIC interests.
Perhaps the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to
do with their worthless opinions.
They are not paid to be experts. They're paid to use thier meaningless credentials to enhance
their credibility of MIC policies of perpetual war for perpetual peace. They're PROPAGANDISTS,
not experts.
The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and colludes
to run the Federal government for themselves and MIC
So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of
the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around.
There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is
no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are
always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."
The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be
responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since
the Iraq and Afghan debacle.
There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even
Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.
You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other
than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!
The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot
declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat
to the American homeland."
-- -- -
There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And the perpetrators are Free. See
info below:
"They Speak "
"The destruction of Libya by NATO at the behest of the UK, the US and France was a crime,
one dripping in the cant and hypocrisy of Western ideologues " John Wight, November 27,
2017.
They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves
They are the dangerous hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell
Thousands upon thousands are dead in this unfortunate country
Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and dirty
Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free
Some of them are seen posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V.
Others have written books and others are retired from public office
And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was their accomplice
They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes
And this went unreported in the "media": was this by design?
There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society today
When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say
Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war
Now Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure
And the NATO gang that caused all this horror and devastation
Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations
The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law?
Can they get away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw?
Whatever happened to law and order in the so- called "democracies"?
When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not hypocrisy?
There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived
Now many of its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive
The future of this war torn country now looks very sad and bleak
If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead hypocrisy: They Speak
"The cause of the catastrophe in Libya in Libya was the seven month US-NATO blitzkrieg
from March to October 2011 in which thousands of bombs and rockets rained down on that
unfortunate land which was governed by President Muammar Ghaddafi whom the West was
determined to overthrow by assisting a rebel movement." Brian Cloughley, 12.02.2019
The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any
rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to
apologize for is the lack of sales.
These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling
the product.
Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.
"... It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them. ..."
It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple
reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is
that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.
And I say this as a Veteran that also thought Iraq was a good idea back in 2001. The
difference is that I then went there to serve. As a result I have learned hard fought
lessons. Tucker is spot on. Maybe the follow up article can be a piece that discusses why we
need more "combat" Veterans up in the beltway. And it is good that more veterans are now
serving in Congress but not all are combat veterans.
"... Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant low level set of global conflicts is perfect. ..."
"... The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to apologize for is the lack of sales. ..."
Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? Pundits like Max Boot and Bill
Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts."
1. The goal of the neocons was to exploit 9/11 to destroy countries in the Middle East
that posed a threat to Israel. As Wesley Clarke told us a long time ago, they were going to
"do" Iraq first, and after that, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and finally Iran. Most
of this has been accomplished. We are now in the end game and Iran is in their
cross-hairs.
From the perspective of the neocons, everything has gone their way.
2. The only people who got everything thing wrong were useful idiots like Rod Dreher,
Tucker Carlson and Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones who were too dense to see what the neocons
were really up to. You did not a PhD from Harvard to see that Bush and Blair had no evidence
to back up their claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or to figure out the true
intentions of the neocons.
So why are Boot and Kristol still around? Because Iran is not yet reduced to an ash-heap,
courtesy of USA!USA!USA! so they still have work to do.
Why have they paid no price? Let's all pretend like we don't know the answer to this. And
don't forget to condemn Ilhan Omar for her tweets just to be on the safe side.
It's difficult to live in a post-America America where American interests are subordinate to
Israel and AIPAC and lunatics like Bolton and Pompeo, now have replaced the president in
matters of foreign policy.
Trump has done a 180 and given in completely.
I like Tulsi Gabbard
and hope that she might have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in spite of the
fact that she now is being attacked by members of her own party, along with the
representative from Minnesota who has the courage to talk of the power of the Israel lobby
that functions solely in the interest of Israel. It seems the Democrats are not so tolerant
of strong women after all. And its time for everyone to stop being intimidated by the charge
of anti-Semitism. When Israeli interests are not those of America and Americans.
Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the
bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant
low level set of global conflicts is perfect.
The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any
rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to
apologize for is the lack of sales.
These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling
the product.
Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into
an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously
pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our
republic.
Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and
Elliott Abrams.
I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters:
if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked
Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A
republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread
Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans
themselves?
Hmm (strokes beard)
Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kristol and Boot work for the CIA and MI6. They tend to lead
with placed stories, either before or after events, helping to persuade those who have yet to
make up their minds or those looking to have someone else do their thinking for them.
With the ongoing internet reformation we are experiencing, its a lot easier for the masses
to see the bigger picture, the parties involved and the corrupt characters playing the puppet
strings for the media.
Glad to see these shysters exposed for what they are propagandists.
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot
declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat
to the American homeland." -- -- - There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And
the perpetrators are Free. See info below:
They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves They are the dangerous
hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell Thousands upon thousands are dead in this
unfortunate country Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and
dirty
Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free Some of them are seen
posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V. Others have written books and others are
retired from public office And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was
their accomplice
They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes And this went unreported
in the "media": was this by design? There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society
today When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say
Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war Now
Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure And the NATO gang that caused all this
horror and devastation Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations
The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law? Can they get
away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw? Whatever happened to law and order in
the so- called "democracies"? When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not
hypocrisy?
There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived Now many of
its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive The future of this war torn
country now looks very sad and bleak If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead
hypocrisy: They Speak
"... There was a desperately weakened and impoverished Russia (still with its nuclear arsenal more or less intact) that, as far as they were concerned, had been mollycoddled by President Bill Clinton's administration. There was a Communist-gone-capitalist China focused on its own growth and little else. And there were a set of other potential enemies, "rogue powers" as they were dubbed, so pathetic that not one of them could, under any circumstances, be called "great." ..."
"... It was as clear as glass that the world -- the whole shebang -- was there for the taking ..."
"... Charles Krauthammer who, in February 2001, six months before the ... attacks of September 11th, wrote a piece swooning over the new Bush administration's "unilateralism" to come and the "Bush Doctrine" which would go with it. In the process, he gave that administration a green light to put the pathetic Russians in their nuclear place and summed the situation up this way: ..."
"... "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will." ..."
"... "How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?" said a typical protest sign ..."
"... And yet, wrong as they may have been on such subjects, don't sell Krauthammer and the rest of that neocon crew short. They were, in their own way, also prophets, at least domestically speaking. After all, Rome, like the United States, had been an imperial republic. That republic was replaced, as its empire grew, by autocratic rule, first by the self-anointed emperor Augustus and then by his successors. Arguably, 18 years after Krauthammer wrote that column, the American republic might be heading down the same path. After all, so many years later, the neocons, triumphantly risen yet again in Washington ( both in the administration and as its critics), finally have their Caesar. ..."
"... All of this not only gave Americans a visibly unhinged president -- think of him, in axis-of-evil terms, as a rogue state of one -- but an increasingly unhinged country. ..."
"... Think of it not as an obituary for a single loopy president, a man who, with his "great, great wall," has indeed been an opiate of the masses (for his famed base, at least) in the midst of an opioid crisis hitting them hard. Yes, Donald J. Trump, reality TV star and bankruptee , he of the golden letters, was elevated to a strange version of power by a troubled republic showing signs of wear and tear. It was a republic feeling the pressure of all that money flowing into only half-noticed distant wars and into the pockets of billionaires and corporate entities in a way that turned the very idea of democracy into a bad joke. ..."
"... Someday, if people ask the obvious question -- not who lost Afghanistan, but who lost America? -- keep all those failed imperial wars and the national security state that went with them in mind when you try to answer. Cumulatively, they had a far more disruptive role than is now imagined in toppling the dominos that sent us all careening on a path to nowhere here at home. And keep in mind that, whatever Donald Trump does, the Caesarian die was cast early in this century as the neocons crossed their own Rubicon. ..."
What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade.
They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything
ever seen before -- one that would build (as its
National Security Strategy put it in 2002)
a military "beyond challenge." Let's be clear on that: no future power, or even bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge
it again.
And, in retrospect, can you completely blame them? I mean, it seemed so obvious then that we -- the United States of America --
were the best and the last. We had, after all, outclassed and outlasted every imperial power since the beginning of time. Even that
other menacing superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, the "
Evil Empire
" that refused to stand down for almost half a century, had gone up in a puff of smoke.
Imagine that moment so many years later and consider the crew of neoconservatives who, under the aegis of George W. Bush, the
son of the man who had "won" the Cold War, came to power in January 2001. Not surprisingly, on viewing the planet, they could see
nothing -- not a single damn thing -- in their way. There was a desperately weakened and impoverished Russia (still with its nuclear
arsenal more or less intact) that, as far as they were concerned, had been mollycoddled by President Bill Clinton's administration.
There was a Communist-gone-capitalist China focused on its own growth and little else. And there were a set of other potential enemies,
"rogue powers" as they were dubbed, so pathetic that not one of them could, under any circumstances, be called "great."
In 2002, in fact, three of them -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- had to be cobbled together into an "
axis of evil
" to create a faintly adequate enemy, a minimalist excuse for the Bush administration to act preemptively. It couldn't have been
more obvious then that all three of them would go down before the unprecedented military and economic power of us (even if, as it
happened, two of them didn't).
It was as clear as glass that the world -- the whole shebang -- was there for the taking.
... ... ...
As President
Bush would put it in an address
at West Point in
2002,
"America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other
eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."
In other words, jihadists aside, it was all over. From
now on, there would be an arms race of one and it was obvious who that one would be. The National Security Strategy of that year
put the same thought this way:
"Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up
in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
Again, anywhere on the planet ever .
Look at more or less any document from the period and you'll sense that they weren't shy about touting the unprecedented greatness
of a future global Pax Americana . Take, for instance, columnist Charles Krauthammer who, in February 2001, six months before the
... attacks of September 11th, wrote
a piece swooning over the new Bush administration's "unilateralism" to come and the "Bush Doctrine" which would go with it. In
the process, he gave that administration a green light to put the pathetic Russians in their nuclear place and summed the situation
up this way:
"America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly,
America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations
of will."
"How Did USA's Oil Get Under Iraq's Sand?"
And soon enough after September 11th, those unapologetic, implacable demonstrations of will did, in fact, begin -- first in Afghanistan
and then, a year and a half later, in Iraq.
Goaded by Osama bin
Laden, the new Rome went into action.
Of course, in 2019 we have the benefit of hindsight, which Charles Krauthammer, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of that crew didn't have as they applied their Roman-style
vision of an imperial America to the actual world. It should be added, however, that the
millions of people who hit the streets globally to protest the coming invasion of Iraq in the winter of 2003 -- "How did USA's
oil get under Iraq's sand?" said a typical protest
sign (which Donald Trump would have
understood
in his own way) -- had a far better sense of the world than did their American rulers-to-be. Like the Soviets
before them ,
in fact, they would grievously confuse military power with power on this planet.
More than 17 years later, the U.S. military remains stuck in Afghanistan, bedeviled in Iraq, and floundering across much of the
Greater Middle East and Africa on a planet with a resurgent Russia, and an impressively rising China. One-third of the former axis
of evil, Iran, is, remarkably enough, still in Washington's
gunsights , while another third (North
Korea) sits uncomfortably in a presidential bear hug. It's no exaggeration to say that none of the dreams of a new Rome were ever
faintly fulfilled. In fact, if you want to think about what's been truly exceptional in these years, it might be this: never in history
has such a great power, at its height, seemed quite so incapable of effectively applying force, military or otherwise, to achieve
its imperial ends or bring its targets to heel.
And yet, wrong as they may have been on such subjects, don't sell Krauthammer and the rest of that neocon crew short. They
were, in their own way, also prophets, at least domestically speaking. After all, Rome, like the United States, had been an imperial
republic. That republic was replaced, as its empire grew, by autocratic rule, first by the self-anointed emperor Augustus and then
by his successors. Arguably, 18 years after Krauthammer wrote that column, the American republic might be heading down the same path.
After all, so many years later, the neocons, triumphantly risen yet again in Washington (
both in the administration and as its
critics), finally have their Caesar.
Hail, Donald J. Trump, we who are about to read your latest tweet
salute you!
A Rogue State of One
Let's note some other passing parallels between the new Rome and the old one. As a start, it's certainly accurate to say that
our new American Caesar has much gall (divided into
at least three parts). Admittedly, he's no Augustus, the first of a line of emperors, but more likely a Nero, fiddling while, in
his case, the world quite
literally burns . Still,
he could certainly say of campaign 2016 and what followed: Veni, Vidi, Tweeti (I came, I saw, I tweeted). And don't forget the classic
line that might someday be applied to his presidency, " Et tu , Mueller?" -- or depending on who turns on him, you can fill in your
name of choice.
One day, it might also be said that, in a country in which executive power has become ever more imperial (as has the
power
of the Senate's majority leader), blowback from
imperial acts abroad
has had a significant, if largely hidden, hand in crippling the American republic, as was once true of Rome. In fact, it seems
clear enough that the first republican institution to go was the citizen's army. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the draft was thrown
out and replaced by an "all-volunteer" force, one which would, as it came to fight on ever more distant battlefields, morph into
a home-grown version of an imperial police force or
foreign legion . With
it went the
staggering sums that, in this century, would be invested -- if that's even the word for it -- in what's still called "defense,"
as well as in a vast
empire of
bases abroad and the national security state, a rising locus of power at home. And then, of course, there were the never-ending
wars across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa that went with all of that. Meanwhile, so much else, domestically
speaking, was put on the equivalent of austerity rations. And all of that, in turn, helped provoke the crisis that brought Donald
Trump to power and might, in the end, even sink the American system as we've known it.
The Donald's victory in the 2016 election was always a sign of a deep disturbance at the heart of an increasingly
unequal and
unfair system of wealth and power. But it was those trillions of dollars -- The Donald
claims seven trillion of them -- that the neocons began
sinking into America's "
infinite
" wars, which cost Americans big time in ways they hardly tracked or
noticed
. Those
trillions didn't go into shoring up American infrastructure or health care or education or job-training programs or anything
else that might have mattered to most people here, even as untold tax dollars -- one estimate:
$15,000 per middle-class family
per year -- went into the pockets of the rich. And some of those dollars, in turn,
poured back into the American political system (with a helping hand from the Supreme Court's 2010
Citizens United decision) and, in the end, helped
put the first billionaire in the Oval Office. By the 2020 election campaign, we may achieve another all-American first: two or
even three of the candidates could be billionaires.
All of this not only gave Americans a visibly unhinged president -- think of him, in axis-of-evil terms, as a rogue state
of one -- but an increasingly unhinged country. You can feel so much of this in President Trump's confused and confusing attempts
to both end American wars and
ratchet them
up , 17-and-a-half -- he always claims
" almost 19 " -- years
after the invasion of Afghanistan. You can feel it in his gut-level urge to
attack the "deep state"
and yet fund it beyond its wildest dreams. You can feel it in his attempts to
create a corps of "my generals" and then fire
them all. You can feel the unhinged nature of events in a world in which, after so many years of war, America's enemies still seem
to have the formula for staying afloat, no matter what Washington does. The Taliban in Afghanistan is
on the rise ; al-Shabaab
in Somalia, is still going
strong ; the Houthis in Yemen
remain functional
in a sea of horror and starvation; ISIS, now without its caliphate, has from Syria to the
Philippines ,
Africa to
Afghanistan , become a distinctly
global brand ; al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula thrives ,
while terror groups more generally continue to
spread .
You can feel it in the president's confused and confusing explanations for his urges to withdraw American troops in
days or
four months
or
whenever from Syria and do the same or
maybe not exactly in Afghanistan. (As he
said in
his State of the Union address, American troops would both withdraw and "focus" on "counterterrorism" in that country.) You can feel
it in the way, after so many years of visible failure, the neocons are once again
riding high in Washington,
ascendant both in his administration and as critics of its global and military policies.
These days, who even remembers that classic early Cold War question -- who lost China? -- that rattled American domestic politics
for years, or later, the similar one about Vietnam? Still, if Donald Trump ever truly does withdraw American forces from Afghanistan
(undoubtedly leaving this country's allies in a Vietnam-style ditch), count on foreign policy establishmentarians in Washington and
pundits around the country to ask an updated version of the same question: Did Donald Trump lose Afghanistan?
But no matter what happens, don't make the mistake of blaming him. It's true that he tweeted endlessly while the world burned,
but he won't be the one who "lost" Afghanistan. It was "lost" in the grisly dreams of the neocons as the century began and it's never
truly been found again.
Of course, we no more know what's going to happen in the years ahead than the neocons did in 2001. If history has taught us anything,
it's that prediction is the diciest of human predilections. Still, think of this piece as an obituary of sorts. You know, the kind
major newspapers write about those still living and then continually update until death finally occurs.
Think of it not as an obituary for a single loopy president, a man who, with his "great, great wall," has indeed been an opiate
of the masses (for his famed base, at least) in the midst of an
opioid crisis
hitting them hard. Yes, Donald J. Trump, reality TV star and
bankruptee , he of the
golden letters, was elevated to a strange version of power by a troubled republic showing signs of wear and tear. It was a republic
feeling the pressure of all that money flowing into only half-noticed distant wars and into the pockets of billionaires and corporate
entities in a way that turned the very idea of democracy into a bad joke.
Someday, if people ask the obvious question -- not who lost Afghanistan, but who lost America? -- keep all those failed imperial
wars and the national security state that went with them in mind when you try to answer. Cumulatively, they had a far more disruptive
role than is now imagined in toppling the dominos that sent us all careening on a path to nowhere here at home. And keep in mind
that, whatever Donald Trump does, the Caesarian die was cast
early in this century as the neocons crossed their own Rubicon.
"... As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. ..."
"... Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on armed conflict." ..."
"... Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character. ..."
"... Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled "Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf." ..."
"... Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump. ..."
"... Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump. ..."
"... By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at all. ..."
"... Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK, and requires big pay. ..."
"... Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following: Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than Kristol/Boot? ..."
One thing that
every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards
decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They're happy in their sinecures
and getting richer. In a culture like this, there's no penalty for being wrong. The talentless
prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the
way. It happened to the Ottomans.
Max Boot is living proof that it's happening in America.
Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn't exist outside of a
select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns
on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an
influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the "world's leading authorities on
armed conflict."
None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one
ofthe world's Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with
armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don't need a track record of wise
assessments or accurate predictions. All that's required are the circular recommendations of
fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their
ranks, you're in. That's good news for Max Boot.
Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush
administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were
debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was
thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled "The
Case for American Empire."
"The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,"
Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation." In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a
series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to
Iraq.
"Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in
Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote. "To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope
for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an
ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also
without a doubt."
In retrospect, Boot's words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that
ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to
20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself
emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and
exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United
States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
Things haven't gone as planned. What's remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste
and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot
has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a
prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.
In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries
to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was
"less than two years" from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot's list as well. Then
Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.
"If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein,
imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family," Boot wrote.
Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal , Boot advocated for the
military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was
unreasonable public opposition to new wars.
"Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering
international peacekeeping forces," he wrote. "Think of American and French troops blown up in
Beirut in 1983, or the 'Black Hawk Down' incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside
states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of
engagement that preclude meaningful action."
In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn't that Americans die, but that too few
Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign
mercenaries. "The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants
but also to illegal ones," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times . When foreigners get
killed fighting for America, he noted, there's less political backlash at home.
♦♦♦
American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another
war in mind. "Qaddafi Must Go," Boot declared in The Weekly Standard . In Boot's
telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. "The only way this
crisis will end -- the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya -- is to
remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won't suffice."
In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot
was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and
Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times , Boot laid out
"Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now."
Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would "diminish Iran's influence" in the
region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot's advice
and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran's most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about
a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted "with little
risk."
Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American
bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed
Conflict. Boot conceded that "it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake
of such strikes." He didn't seem worried.
Listed in one place, Boot's many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a
parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while
drunk. ("I'll invade you!!!") Republicans in Washington didn't find any of it amusing. They
were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign
in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.
Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority
on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in
invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.
As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more
aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He
called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be
construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with
signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was "hard to imagine" the Russian government would
react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as "cheerleaders" for Putin
and the mullahs in Iran.
Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by
The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on
armed conflict."
It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican
establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in
Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of
nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. "We should
never have been in Iraq," Trump announced, his voice rising. "We have destabilized the Middle
East."
Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: "They lied. They said there were weapons of
mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."
Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts
declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they
said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and
carried out.
Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change
their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a
mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave. Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned
the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him
for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.
♦♦♦
Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era.
Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of
neoconservatism.
The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal
establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic,
tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done
with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.
Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled
"Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead
editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and
chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the
Gulf."
After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In
November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that
Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to
hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively
collaborating with Saddam's intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused
Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.
Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still
goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things
he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on
TV to attack Donald Trump.
Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly
Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining
readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.
Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise
Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more
impressive than native-born Americans. "Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist
society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent,
lazy, spoiled, whatever." Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so
forth."
In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would "take in a heartbeat a group of newly
naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings" who supported
Trump.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still
making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria,
and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at
all.
Trump isn't the only one hated by useless establishment Republicans – with essays like
this so will Tucker. Thanks for this takedown of these two warmongering know-nothings. I wish
Trump all the time was like he was at that debate in S Carolina where he said what every
American knows: the Iraq invasion was stupid and we should not have done it!
So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of
the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around.
There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
Well, the headline pretty much answers its own question if you know the purpose of Experts.
In any subject matter from science to economics to politics, Experts are paid to be
wrong. Nobody has to be paid to observe reality accurately with his own senses and rational mind.
Every living creature does that all the time. It's the basic requirement of survival.
Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK,
and requires big pay.
""The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,"
Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation.""
In other words, if we had only squandered even more blood and treasure, why, everything
would have been fine.
Why do so many true believers end up with some variation on the true believer's wheeze:
"Communism didn't fail ! It was never tried!" Then again one can't be sure that Boot
is a true believer. He might be a treacherous snake trying to use American power to advance a
foreign agenda.
Max Boot has indeed been an advocate of overseas intervention, but you fail to point out
that he has recanted his support of the Iraq War. In his 2018 book "The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I left the American Right," he states:
". . . I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it (The Iraq War) was all a big mistake.
Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos
that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost. It
was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power."
I'm glad to see that Boot, along with yourself and other Republicans, realize that
American use of force must have a clear objective with reasonable chance of success. I
suggest you send this article to John Bolton. I'm not sure he agrees with you.
Excellent article. It's a shame that the Bush era GOP took Boot and Kristol seriously. That
poor judgment led Bush to make the kinds of mistakes that gave Democrats the opening they
needed to gain power, which in turn led them to make even more harmful mistakes.
Being against the Iraq 2 I find this populist arguing very 'eye-rolling' as you were pimping
this war to death back in the day. (In fact I remember Jon Stewart being one of the few
'pundits' that questioned the war in 2003 & 2004.) And has dovish as Trump as been, his
administration is still filled with Hawks and if you are concerned about wars then maybe use
your TV show for instead of whining for past mistakes:
1) The administration action in Iran is aggressive and counter-productive to long term
peace. The nuclear deal was an effective way of ensuring Iran controlling behavior for 15
years as the other parties, Europe and China, wanted to trade with Iran. (Additionally it
makes our nation depend more on the Saudia relationship in which Washington should be slowly
moving away from.)
2) Like it or not, Venezuela is starting down the steps of mission creep for the Trump
Administration. Recommend the administration stay away from peace keeping troops and suggest
this is China's problem. (Venezuela in debt to their eyeballs with China.)
3) Applaud the administration with peace talks with NK but warn them not to overstate
their accomplishments. It is ridiculous that the administration signed big nuclear deals with
NK that don't exist.
I find it amazing that Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed
conflict,"yet never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces, nor even heard
a shot fired in anger. He is proof that academic credentials do not automatically confer
"expertise."
Any war, anytime, any place, and cause just so long as American boys and girls can be in the
middle of it.
Welcome to the American NeoCon movement, recently joined by Republican Never Trumpers,
elected Democrats, and a host of far too many underemployed Beltway Generals &
Admirals.
From a reformed Leftist, thank you Tucker for calling out the stank from the Republicans. The
detailed compilation of lowlights from Max Boot and Bill Kristol (don't forget Robert Kagan!)
should be etched in the minds of the now pro-war Democratic Party establishment.
I laughed out loud while reading this, and continued laughing through to the end, until I
saw who had the audacity to tell the truth about these utter incompetent failures (who have
failed upwards for more than a decade now) who call themselves "foreign policy experts."
Yeah -- "experts" at being so moronically wrong that you really start wondering if perhaps
the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to do
with their worthless opinions, which always seem to do made for the benifit of the nameless
nation.
So hurrah for you!!!
Let the truth set us all free!
Praise the Lord & Sing Songs of Praise to his Name!!!!
Literally that's how great it is to hear the pure & unvarnished TRUTH spoken out loud in
this publication!
I hope you get such awesome feedback that you are asked to continue to bless us with more
truths!
Thank you! You totally made my day!
And thank you for your service to this country, where it used to be considered patriotic
to speak the truth honestly & plainly!
"Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in
Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote.
To which the reader might reasonably reply, "What do you mean we , Paleface?"
When I see Max Boot or Bill Kristol in uniform, carrying a rifle, and trudging with their
platoon along the dusty roads of the Middle East, I'll begin to pay attention to their bleats
and jeremiads.
Until that day, I'll continue to view them as a pair of droning, dull-as-ditchwater
members of the 45th Word-processing Brigade. (Company motto: "Let's you and him fight!")
It is my understanding that HRC led the charge to overthrow and hang Gaddafi in spite of a
reluctant Obama administration. Did Boot, in fact, influence her?
"Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so forth."" Unintentional irony, one must presume. Still it is astonishing that it took someone as addled as DJT to point out the
obvious–Invading Iraq was a massive mistake.
Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is
no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are
always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."
The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be
responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since
the Iraq and Afghan debacle.
There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even
Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.
You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other
than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!
These Chairborne Rangers in Washington know nothing about war. They are the flip side of the radical Dems. "Hey, we lost in 2016. Let's do MORE of what
made us lose in the first place!"
The GOP is as much an enemy to the Trump revolution
as the left. The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and
colludes to run the Federal government for themselves and their pet constituents.
Trump should have stuck it out on the shutdown until those federal workers left. I think
it was called RIF wherein after 30 days, he could dump the lot of em.
THE GOP IS NOT THE PARTY OF LESS GOVERNMENT. That's there motto for busy conservatives who
don't have the time or inclination to monitor both sides of the swamp.
Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following:
Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than
Kristol/Boot?
Funny how when liberals said it was wrong to be in Iraq they were vilified. Yes some
conservatives changed their minds. Trump however is all over the map when it comes to wars.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176527/
US Representative Ilhan Omar's (D-Minnesota) tweet is a critique of US-Israel collusion in
the Middle East, Institute for Public Accuracy's Sam Husseini tells RT America's Manila Chan.
#RTAmerica#InQuestionRT#QuestionMore
Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is facing
criticism today after commenting on a tweet by Glenn Greenwald. On Sunday, Greenwald tweeted,
"GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their
criticisms of Israel.
It's stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it
means attacking free speech rights of Americans." Rep. Omar retweeted his post and added the
line: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."
She later named AIPAC as the organization paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.
"... So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under. ..."
"... Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly). ..."
"... Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela. ..."
"... And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. ..."
Maybe Donald Trump isn't as stupid as I thought. I'd hate to have to admit that publicly,
but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time.
Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn't help but notice a significant decline in the
number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and "
the brink of fascism " that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton
lost the election.
I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn't find a single
editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S. Constitution, dissolve
Congress, and
proclaim himself Führer . Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz , or any other Nazi
stuff which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria
has been a standard feature of the official narrative we've been subjected to for the last two
years.
So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He
did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the
bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist
empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live
under.
I'm referring, of course, to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries
that are not playing ball with global capitalism and which haven't been "regime changed" yet.
Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the Venezuelan "opposition," but
which is obviously a U.S. operation, or, rather, a global capitalist operation. As soon as he
did, the corporate media immediately suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to
Adolf Hitler, and so on, and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to
overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country.
Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying their economies, stealing
their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold of the global capitalist "international
community" is not exactly what most folks thought Trump meant by "Make America Great Again."
Many Americans have never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist
empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the Cold War. They have
not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan democracy, or Syrian democracy, or
Ukrainian democracy.
This is not because Americans are a heartless people, or an ignorant or a selfish people. It
is because, well, it is because they are Americans (or, rather, because they believe they are
Americans), and thus are more interested in the problems of Americans than in the problems of
people in faraway lands that have nothing whatsoever to do with America. Notwithstanding what
the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous,
self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were
brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he
sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was
supposed to mean, exactly).
Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a
fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less
buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever.
What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a
decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national
governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces,
media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in
Venezuela.
The entire global capitalist empire is working in concert to force the elected president of
the country out of office. The US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark,
Poland, the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have officially recognized
Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, in spite of the fact that no one elected
him. Only the empire's official evil enemies (i.e., Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and other
uncooperative countries) are objecting to this "democratic" coup. The global financial system
(i.e., banks) has frozen (i.e., stolen) Venezuela's assets, and is attempting to transfer them
to Guaido so he can buy the Venezuelan military. The corporate media are hammering out the
official narrative like a Goebbelsian piano in an effort to convince the general public that
all this has something to do with democracy. You would have to be a total moron or hopelessly
brainwashed not to recognize what is happening.
What is happening has nothing to do with America the "America" that Americans believe they
live in and that many of them want to "make great again." What is happening is exactly what has
been happening around the world since the end of the Cold War, albeit most dramatically in the
Middle East. The de facto global capitalist empire is restructuring the planet with virtual
impunity. It is methodically eliminating any and all impediments to the hegemony of global
capitalism, and the privatization and commodification of everything.
Venezuela is one of these impediments. Overthrowing its government has nothing to do with
America, or the lives of actual Americans. "America" is not to going conquer Venezuela and
plant an American flag on its soil. "America" is not going to steal its oil, ship it "home,"
and parcel it out to "Americans" in their pickups in the parking lot of Walmart.
What what about those American oil corporations? They want that Venezuelan oil, don't they?
Well, sure they do, but here's the thing there are no "American" oil corporations.
Corporations, especially multi-billion dollar transnational corporations (e.g., Chevron,
ExxonMobil, et al.) have no nationalities, nor any real allegiances, other than to their major
shareholders. Chevron, for example, whose major shareholders are asset management and mutual
fund companies like Black Rock, The Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, Geode Capital
Management, Wellington Management, and other transnational, multi-trillion dollar outfits. Do
you really believe that being nominally headquartered in Boston or New York makes these
companies "American," or that Deutsche Bank is a "German" bank, or that BP is a "British"
company?
And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. Ask yourself,
honestly, what have the "American" regime change ops throughout the Greater Middle East done
for any actual Americans, other than get a lot of them killed? Oh, and how about those bailouts
for all those transnational "American" investment banks? Or the billions "America" provides to
Israel? Someone please explain how enriching the shareholders of transnational corporations
like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin by selling billions in weapons to Saudi Arabian
Islamists is benefiting "the American people." How much of that Saudi money are you seeing?
And, wait, I've got another one for you. Call up your friendly 401K manager, ask how your
Pfizer shares are doing, then compare that to what you're paying some "American" insurance
corporation to not really cover you.
For the last two-hundred years or so, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as the
citizens of a collection of sovereign nation states, as "Americans," "Germans," "Greeks," and
so on. There are no more sovereign nation states. Global capitalism has done away with them.
Which is why we are experiencing a "neo-nationalist" backlash. Trump, Brexit, the so-called
"new populism" these are the death throes of national sovereignty, like the thrashing of a
suffocating fish before you whack it and drop it in the cooler. The battle is over, but the
fish doesn't know that. It didn't even realize there was a battle until it suddenly got jerked
up out of the water.
In any event, here we are, at the advent of the global capitalist empire. We are not going
back to the 19th Century, nor even to the early 20th Century. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone
else is going to "Make America Great Again." Global capitalism will continue to remake the
world into one gigantic marketplace where we work ourselves to death at bullshit
jobs in order to buy things we don't need, accumulating debts we can never pay back, the
interest on which will further enrich the global capitalist ruling classes, who, as you may
have noticed, are preparing for the future by purchasing luxury
underground bunkers and post-apocalyptic compounds in New Zealand. That, and militarizing
the police, who they will need to maintain "public order" you know, like they are doing in
France at the moment, by
beating, blinding, and hideously maiming those Gilets Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Vest) protesters
that the corporate media are doing their best to demonize and/or render invisible.
Or, who knows, Americans (and other Western consumers) might take a page from those Yellow
Vests, set aside their political differences (or at least ignore their hatred of each other
long enough to actually try to achieve something), and focus their anger at the politicians and
corporations that actually run the empire, as opposed to, you know, illegal immigrants and
imaginary legions of Nazis and Russians. In the immortal words of General Buck Turgidson, "I'm
not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed," but, heck, it might be worth a try, especially
since, the way things are going, we are probably going end up out there anyway.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
"... By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an "anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert". He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics . He is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Tax Research UK ..."
"... Like much of political economy, this is a story of power. In the first instance this was professional power. The big firms did, as professional institutes developed, have the means to dominate them. They were in the capital cities where those institutes were usually based. They had the means to release partner time to manage those institutes' affairs. They had the motive to do so. That was ring-fencing their profit. The big firms, then, used their power to set the rules for their professions. ..."
"... Have been reading The Billion-Dollar Whale about the 1MDB mega-heist, facilitated by auditors and bank compliance officers at every step as the Malaysian people were fleeced of billions to pay for sickening rounds of parties, yachts, champagne baths, jewelry, gambling, and garish mansions. "Odious debt" if ever there were. ..."
"... Good topic to cover. The accounting firms are right up there with the ratings agencies as 'high priests' of capital whose blessing is required if your are to be welcome into the halls of power. ..."
A
Study in Professional Power: Why Do the Big 4 Accountants Survive? Posted on
February
13, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. While many
people go into "my eyes glaze over" mode when the topic of accountants comes up, you ignore them at your peril. In the US, boards
and executives escape liability if they can say they were acting on the advice of professionals. Lawyers are the main liability shields
for corporate bigwigs, but pliant accountants are also very helpful.
And why don't shareholders who've been hurt due to professionals signing off on crooked corporate conduct sue? They can't. As
we wrote in ECONNED:
Legislators also need to restore secondary liability. Attentive readers may recall that a Supreme Court decision in 1994 disallowed
suits against advisors like accountants and lawyers for aiding and abetting frauds. In other words, a plaintiff could only file
a claim against the party that had fleeced him; he could not seek recourse against those who had made the fraud possible, say,
accounting firms that prepared misleading financial statements. That 1994 decision flew in the face of sixty years of court decisions,
practices in criminal law (the guy who drives the car for a bank robber is an accessory), and common sense. Reinstituting secondary
liability would make it more difficult to engage in shoddy practices.
In other words, the only party that can sue an accounting firm for engaging in fraudulent conduct is his immediate client .who
almost certainly is in on the con. Lovely.
By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been
described by the Guardian newspaper
as an "anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert". He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University,
London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of
Cambridge Econometrics . He is a member of the
Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at
Tax Research UK
I was asked very recently why it was that the big 4 firms of accountants survive. This is an issue I have been considering with
Len Seabrooke and Saila Stausholm at Copenhagen Business School. The academic paper on the subject is in progress. Let me offer a
plain English perspective for now.
Like much of political economy, this is a story of power. In the first instance this was professional power. The big firms
did, as professional institutes developed, have the means to dominate them. They were in the capital cities where those institutes
were usually based. They had the means to release partner time to manage those institutes' affairs. They had the motive to do so.
That was ring-fencing their profit. The big firms, then, used their power to set the rules for their professions.
Leading the way at a technical level as well, in a profession lead from these firms and not by either government or academia,
these firms also innovated in ways that ring fenced their market. I suspect that this may have provided the strongest incentive for
the creation of consolidated accounts which were not a universal requirement for group companies until the 1940s. When consolidated
accounts required that multinational groups be treated as single entities their auditors, who I strongly suspect sold its benefit
to governments who then made it a legal requirement, could in turn demand that they were the sole group auditor. The global spread
of a select few firms was guaranteed. The rise of the global firm was the consequence.
These firms succeeded. The firms then sold consultancy advising other companies to copy the success of their global company clients
by also becoming global using a structure that guaranteed market growth in auditing for the big accountants. The market for the big
audit firms was reinforced.
As this was happening in the 50s and 60s another phenomena was growing, which was the tax haven. Slowly at first, but steadily
as the British empire (in particular) receded, the opportunity to hide nefarious activity, as well as profits and so tax bills in
such places, grew. Did the big firms go there before their clients? Or did they have to go because some clients had already gone?
It's a question to be answered. But if the firms were to maintain their demand that they must be sole auditor, worldwide, at least
in name, then if the global entities they were helping spawn moved to tax havens then they too had to go there.
And they did not miss the opportunity. Already used to lobbying and forming opinion on legislation in the countries from which
they originated, and well aware of the coercive power this gave them over their clients, the governments of new tax havens must have
seemed easy pickings to the big accountants of the day. And so they were. Whole rafts of legislation were influenced by such firms
as they peddled in tax havens the secrecy that opposed the transparency they sold elsewhere. The opportunities must have seemed unlimited.
But the timeline has now reached the 70s, and life was not so good for accountants. Airlines failed back then, with people noticing
that their accounts gave no hint that they owned or used planes. In contrast, aeroplane engine makers were claiming that they had
value when the products they were developing at enormous cost for the time were unlikely to push anything into the sky. Accounts
were not providing a true and fair view.
In the face of significant threats to the profession from an outraged public (well, at least those parts losing money as a result
of these failings) the big firms reclaimed the initiative. Accounting standards supposedly written in the public interest and for
the benefit of all stakeholders were created and governments that were too trusting by half gave them the force of law. The power
of the big accountants was reinforced, rather than diminished, by the accounting debacles of that era. Now they could write the rules;
say they had the power of law; force them onto their clients and the rest of the profession; and in the process pull themselves ahead
of the competing pack. They could do that by advising on the very rules they had created; by claiming to be the only people who could
audit them; and by making sure that because some only applied to larger enterprises the knowledge of their use did not trickle down
into the profession as a whole.
And they exploited this to the full. The era of capital market liberalisation and globalisation simply provided greater opportunity
to do this, whilst the new and more relaxed ethics of this period promoted the use of tax havens in ways previously unforeseen, and
the firms jumped with both feet into this market as well, producing tax avoidance schemes by the bucket load.
And things only got better. Although the accountants failed miserably to deliver what they promised when accounting standards
were first developed, because they entirely ignored the needs of almost all users of accounts, their capture of the process was so
complete that when the European Union was looking for a set of single accounting standards they adopted the Big 4 created International
Financial Reporting Standards as quasi law, which has now led to their adoption in more than a hundred countries worldwide, with
a parallel process taking place in the USA, Japan and other influential markets. The ability of these firms to control the world's
view of capitalism appeared complete, and they reaped the rewards.
And then some cracks appeared. There was a global financial crisis, which accounts had not anticipated. And there was a global
loss of tax revenue, which accountants appear to have facilitated through tax havens. And rather annoying people pointed out both
failings. You would have thought that the fundamental failure of their product, in the form of accounting standards, and the fundamental
failure of their ethics, evidenced by their use of tax havens and sale of tax avoidance products, would have done for these firms.
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, hence the question I was asked. How are they surviving?
Let me reiterate how we got here, because the clue is in the process.
They captured the profession, long ago.
Then they captured government, and used it to create laws that suited their purposes in influential countries like the USA
and UK.
They used this law to reinforce their own audit market.
And as a result they also created the image of the modern firm, which they then sold to aspiring rivals, who were required
to replicate it, and so provide yet more fee income to these firms.
In the process they captured the tax havens and their legislatures, and used them for their own purposes.
So complete was the capture that their accounting standards became de facto law. And when the EU wanted to extend that right
to create de facto law with regard to accounting standards, the big accountants were again given the chance to write the rules.
The result is that the big four are now integral to company law, auditing law, accounting law, the law of many tax havens, the
structure of the accounting profession and the structure of many of its clients. Their desire to protect their ability to make supernormal
profit has created a situation where the entire process of law surrounding companies has been captured for their benefit, and the
behaviour of whole markets has been distorted in their favour as a result.
But what they did to achieve this result was display an ability to innovate. Whenever under criticism, they delivered an alternative.
When their ethics were questioned, they produced a supposed new standard. When the market demand that they change, for example post
Enron, that's what they appeared to do, enough to keep people at bay. And all the time, chameleon like, they emerged from each threat
with their power reinforced because they are so integral to the process of corporate regulation that government has effectively abandoned
to them.
That is how they have survived. But that also suggests how the process is changed. Government has to reclaim this process.
It has to audit.
It has to create company law.
It has to say for whose benefit company law is created, and that is not the accountants any more.
And it has to determine who will write the alternatives. None of that will be easy. But with adequate investment it is entirely
possible. These firms have captured significant parts of the processes of capitalism for their own ends. If we are to still have
mixed economies, and I think we should, then this process of capture has to be disrupted, in the public interest. It is only by doing
so that the power of the Big 4 will be challenged. Nothing else will change it.
That's the issue we face. And since there is no challenge right now the Big 4 will go on. And on. Which is right now just as they
want it.
Have been reading The Billion-Dollar Whale about the 1MDB mega-heist, facilitated by auditors and bank compliance officers
at every step as the Malaysian people were fleeced of billions to pay for sickening rounds of parties, yachts, champagne baths,
jewelry, gambling, and garish mansions. "Odious debt" if ever there were.
"In the process they captured the tax havens and their legislatures, and used them for their own purposes." That is certainly
the case in Mauritius where the former deputy PM and finance minister, Xavier-Luc Duval, worked for KPMG in London and Port-Louis.
In the UK, Patricia Hewitt left the cabinet and Commons to head public policy and affairs for one of the Big Four.
It's not just the legislatures, the former CFO to the royal family, Sir Michael Peat,was senior partner at KPMG. So was his
great grandfather, a scion of the Barclay banking family and founder of Peat Marwick. Former KPMG employees hold and have held
senior regulatory positions in the UK. KPMG seems to be the go to firm.
2. Cape Town HQD and dual listed in Frankfurt and Joburg, retailer Steinhoff International has shed over 90% of its market
value due to an "accounting scandal" (with ordinary pensioners losing billions in the process).
3. The Guptas, through their companies and aided by their man Jacob Zuma as state president, brazenly looted state coffers
on a massive scale.
As the enablers-in-chief, KPMG is woven into the common thread running across all these scandals. Not to worry though, they've
thrown a few executives under the bus and are currently on a charm offensive reminding the public just how ethical a bunch they
all are in spite of providing cover for these nefarious activities and will surely emerge from this with their "power reinforced".
PS: Steinhoff has set up an "ethics hotline" run by who? KPMG, wonders truly never cease
I know Steinhoff well from my time at HSBC in Johannesburg and London, 2003 6. It had yet to become the plaything of Wiese.
KPMG is similar woven into UK scandals.
You are right to use the term "enabler in chief". It's the entire professional services industry. Law firms, too. The UK Big
Four are now setting up legal, advertising and corporate finance practices.
I was at the Blue Eagle, soon to be ABSA red in the rest of Africa, from 2014 6. A friend was fired from the nest after querying
why one of the Big Four was hired to manage its client on boarding remediation at a higher cost and on a longer timescale than
her team could do. The management wanted the Big Four as a firewall. Ironically, she joined one of the Big Four a few months later.
Her settlement, which included a gagging order, precluded her from working for six months.
This is a topic that gets raised now and them (more often recently) in the UK that auditors/accountants should bear responsibility
for fraud etc., and should not be just mindless box tickers.
A question for those of us not in the know. With Neoliberalism you can say that it has an intellectual back-office with places
like the Chicago school of economics. Is there an intellectual back-office of sorts for accountancy that enable these Big Four
to justify their accountancy rules as well? Or do they get to make it up as they go along?
Having the government do audits will make things worse. In the US, the PCAOB is the Big Four's cartel enforcer. The PCAOB should
be dissolved and the law changed to facilitate suits against CPAs. Let the plaintiff's bar discipline the CPA profession.
Uncle Sam had the FED create stress tests. Why? To convince the public the FED had things under control and the banking system
is sound. Why would government audits be better than the stress tests?
Uncle Sam could break up the Big Four into the not so sweet 16. Will it? Or does the Big Four do exactly what Uncle Sam wants?
Are the "problems" we see, feature or bug?
Yes, the plaintiffs bar worked very well in my early days as a CPA. Particularly because CPAs, like other professionals, had
PERSONAL liability and could not hide behind the corporate wall. This is one of those things that worked very well in real life
but someone (if it wasn't economists it was persons of the same ilk) proved it was theoretically impossible. Hence, all professionals
are now corporations where before they weren't even allowed to be called a business. From the perspective of a professional accountant
with years of watching how the system works we are, ironically, failing because of accountability. We have a smoothly functioning
form of capitalism that manifests in "Heads I win, tails you lose". That fundamental principal has been ignored from the late
'70s to today at our extreme peril culminating in the GFC where it was taken to the extreme of "Heads I win, tails I win more
and you lose more.
Good topic to cover. The accounting firms are right up there with the ratings agencies as 'high priests' of capital whose
blessing is required if your are to be welcome into the halls of power.
For anyone interested, NN Taleb writes eloquently about two subjects which are germane: experts and skin in the game, for the
same reasons as the author of this piece. The Big Four are so-called experts and they have no skin in the game. This as Taleb,
makes us all fools who have been hoodwinked because failure to understand that abuses of these two issues is what has ruined capitalism
in our lifetimes. Like the frog put in a pot of water which is slowly heated, I watched this happen over my career. It is our
formerly functioning capitalist system that is the frog in the water.
Thanks for this. There have always been some accounting practices that were supposedly "Generally Accepted" that made me scratch
my head as they didn't seem to lead to any greater transparency, and in fact often quite the opposite.
A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep. Ilhan
Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting
both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan.
Omar quoted rap lyrics -- " It's all about the Benjamins baby
" -- to suggest McCarthy's move was driven by the lobby's prolific spending. Asked specifically
who she was referring to, Omar responded, " AIPAC !"
The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by
Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based
group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a
six-month period in 2016. That investigation, however, was never aired by the network --
suppressed
by pressure from the pro-Israel lobby .
In November, Electronic Intifada obtained and published the four-part
series, but it did so during the week of the midterm elections, and the documentary did not get
a lot of attention then.
In it, leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence
the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they'd be
charged with anti-Semitism.
"Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them."
David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public
Affairs Committee's annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors
organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money
doesn't show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that
organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. "This is the biggest ad hoc political
group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.," Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but
is clearly tied to AIPAC. "It's the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does.
It's the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal." (Ochs and AIPAC did not
immediately return The Intercept's requests for comment.)
Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn't able to enact its agenda.
"Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down
the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money," he
explains.
He describes a fundraiser for Anthony Brown, a Democrat running for Congress in Maryland, as
typical. "So we want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment, 50, 30,
40 people, and say, 'This is what's important to us. We want to make sure that if we give you
money, that you're going to enforce the Iran deal.' That way, when they need something from him
or her, like the Iran deal, they can quickly mobilize and say look, we'll give you 30 grand.
They actually impact," Ochs tells the reporter.
Such a claim is not so different from what Omar was describing, and for which she was
roundly condemned. In the wake of Omar's tweets, the Washington Post,
for instance, reported , "The American Jewish Committee demanded an apology, calling her
suggestion that AIPAC is paying American politicians for their support 'demonstrably false and
stunningly anti-Semitic.'" (On Monday, Omar apologized for her tweets, but
insisted that AIPAC and other lobbyist groups are harmful to U.S. politics.)
In the censored documentary, Ochs went on to describe a fundraiser hosted by
Jeff Talpins , a hedge fund giant, as similar as well. "In New York, with Jeff Talpins, we
don't ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? 'Cause it's a tiny
issue. It's a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on
Iran," Ochs says. "What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them
exactly what his goals are -- and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million -- basically
they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, 'You can swipe each of these credit
cards for a thousand dollars each.'"
Ochs explains that the club in New York required a minimum pledge of $10,000 to join and
participate in such events. "It's a minimum commitment. Some people give a lot more than
that."
AIPAC, on its own
website , recruits members to join its "Congressional Club," and commit to give at least
$5,000 per election cycle.
Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells the Al Jazeera reporter
that AIPAC gets results. "Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what
AIPAC just did," he notes at one secretly recorded lunch. "Everything AIPAC does is focused on
influencing Congress."
The film, called "The Lobby," was produced by Al Jazeera's investigative unit, and features
hidden-camera footage obtained by the reporter, who posed as a Jewish, pro-Israel activist from
Britain who wanted to volunteer with the Israel Project. Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in Outfitted with a
luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, the reporter hosted multiple gatherings and otherwise
socialized broadly within the pro-Israel community, winning the confidence of senior officials,
who divulged insider details, many of which have been leaked and created international
news.
A companion version of the film, which looked at the Israel lobby's influence in the United
Kingdom, did make it to air and was the subject of intense controversy. It exposed a plot by an
Israeli embassy official in the United Kingdom to "take down" pro-Palestinian members of
Parliament, leading to his resignation.
That film, however, included a snippet of footage from the United States. Officials here
quickly realized that they, too, had been infiltrated. In the U.K., the Israel lobby lodged an
official complaint claiming the series was anti-Semitic, but the U.K.'s communications agency
rejected the claim, finding that "the allegations in the programme were not made on the grounds
that any of the particular individuals concerned were Jewish and noted that no claims were made
relating to their faith."
Pro-Israel officials in the United States, rather than file an official complaint, exerted
political pressure. A bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers
wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into "the full range of
activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States," and suggesting that the organization
be made to register as a foreign agent. Ultimately, Qatar bent to the pressure and killed the
documentary.
"... But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job.. ..."
During the VN War Canada stripped Canadians of their citizenship if they fought for the US
although they had had no problem having US citizens in their ranks in both world wars with no
penalty from the US. One of my uncles did that in WW1. I did not know I was a Canadian
citizen until after I had left active US government service and no longer had a US government
information security clearance.
It is possible to be a dual national in the US government but
this requires individual judgments to be made by heads of agencies and it would probably bar
someone from high level jobs.
It used to be against US law to hold a second citizenship but
the law changed to accommodate US/Israeli citizenship and of necessity now applies to all. If
you act to the detriment of the US for the benefit of your second country I would say that is
prima facie proof of dual loyalty.
But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm
Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job..
You must be new here. We have been through the issue of US information security clearances
several times. This security clearance system foe access to classified information is
entirely an artifact of Executive Orders, not of laws. therefore the president as the
ultimate executive can give anyone he wants access at any level.
Members of congress and
federal judges do not have access under this system.
They have access by virtue of their
constitutional office outside the Executive Branch.
"... To that end, the senator from Florida on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to limit corporate buybacks. Unlike a plan pitched by Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer earlier this month, Rubio's plan would seek to end preferential tax treatment of share buybacks, by decreeing that any money spent on buybacks would be considered - for tax purposes - a dividend paid to shareholders, even if individual investors didn't actually part with any stock. ..."
"... Any tax revenue generated by these changes could then be used to encourage more capital investment, Rubio said. As part of the proposal, Rubio would make a provision in the tax law that allows companies to deduct capital investment permanent (that provision is currently set to expire in 2022). ..."
"... But before lawmakers take their next steps toward regulating how and when companies should return excess capital to shareholders, they might want to take a look at a column recently published by WSJ's "Intelligent Investor" that expounds a concept called "the bladder theory." ..."
"... But the law most likely to govern here is the Law of Unintended Consequences. ..."
"... That companies bought back a record $1 trillion worth of stock last year while employers like GM slashed jobs and closed factories has stoked criticisms of the Trump tax cuts, but as the gulf between the rich and the poor grows ever more wide (a phenomenon for which we can thank the Federal Reserve and other large global central banks) it's worth wondering: facing a simmering backlash to one of the most persistent marginal bids in the market place, have investors already become too complacent about proposals like Rubio's? ..."
"... Worse, since they're largely funded by increased corporate debt (!) they amount to corporate strip-mining by senior management. This is disgraceful and dangerous. The debt will bust some corporations when the inevitable next downturn comes. ..."
"... This buyback cancer, which has grown rapidly because of corrupt SEC thinking and perverse tax incentives, requires urgent treatment. ..."
For better or worse, Republican Senator and one-time presidential candidate Marco Rubio
isn't about to let
the Democrats own the fight to curtail one of the most flagrant examples of post-crisis
corporate excess. And if he can carve out a niche for himself that might one day help him
credibly pitch himself as a populist firebrand, much like the man who went on to claim the
presidency after defeating him in the Republican primary, well, that sounds to us like a
win-win.
To that end, the senator from Florida on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to limit corporate
buybacks. Unlike a plan pitched by Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer earlier this month, Rubio's
plan would seek to end preferential tax treatment of share buybacks, by decreeing that any
money spent on buybacks would be considered - for tax purposes - a dividend paid to
shareholders, even if individual investors didn't actually part with any stock.
According to CNBC
, the plan calls for every shareholder to receive an imputed portion of the funds equivalent to
the percentage of company stock they own, which, of course, isn't the same thing as directly
handing capital to shareholders (it simply changes the tax rate that the company buying back
the shares would pay).
Ultimately, Rubio hopes that these changes would discourage companies from buying back
stock. Those companies that continued to buy back shares would help contribute to higher
revenues by increasing the funds that can be taxed, while also raising the rate at which this
money can be taxed. Any tax revenue generated by these changes could then be used to encourage
more capital investment, Rubio said. As part of the proposal, Rubio would make a provision in
the tax law that allows companies to deduct capital investment permanent (that provision is
currently set to expire in 2022).
But before lawmakers take their next steps toward regulating how and when companies should
return excess capital to shareholders, they might want to take a look at a column recently
published by WSJ's
"Intelligent Investor" that expounds a concept called "the bladder theory."
Overall, however, buybacks (and dividends) return excess capital to investors who are free
to spend or reinvest it wherever it is most needed. By requiring companies to hang onto their capital instead of paying it out, Congress might
- perhaps - encourage them to invest more in workers and communities.
But the law most likely to govern here is the Law of Unintended Consequences. The history of investment by corporate managers with oodles of cash on their hands isn't
encouraging. Hugh Liedtke, the late chief executive of Pennzoil, reportedly liked to quip
that he believed in "the bladder theory:" Companies should pay out as much cash as possible,
so managers couldn't piss all the money away.
That companies bought back a record $1 trillion worth of stock last year while employers
like GM slashed jobs and closed factories has stoked criticisms of the Trump tax cuts, but as
the gulf between the rich and the poor grows ever more wide (a phenomenon for which we can
thank the Federal Reserve and other large global central banks) it's worth wondering: facing a
simmering backlash to one of the most persistent marginal bids in the market place, have
investors already become too complacent about proposals like Rubio's?
We ask only because
the Dow soared more than 350 points on Tuesday, suggesting that, even as Rubio added a
bipartisan flavor to the nascent movement to curb buybacks, investors aren't taking these
proposals too seriously - at least not yet.
Celotex
This still doesn't address the insider trading aspect of stock buybacks, with insiders front-running the buyback.
vladiki
No one's arguing that if a company's groaning with cash then buybacks make sense. But it's the other 95% of of them that
are the problem. Compare the 20 year graphs of buybacks with corporate profits, corporate debt, corporate tax paid, corporate
dividends paid.
They tell you what everyone in higher management knows - that they're a tax-free dividend mechanism pretending to be
"capital rationalisation".
Worse, since they're largely funded by increased corporate debt (!) they amount to corporate strip-mining by senior
management. This is disgraceful and dangerous. The debt will bust some corporations when the inevitable next downturn comes.
This buyback cancer, which has grown rapidly because of corrupt SEC thinking and perverse tax incentives, requires
urgent treatment.
james diamond squid
Everyone is in on this ponzi. I'm expecting tax deductions for buying stocks/homes.
- Ilhan Omar tweeted that AIPAC plays a role in encouraging a lot of Jewish Americans to
contribute campaign funds to congressional candidates? Is that a serious question? AIPAC is not
a PAC in American law and thus cannot make political contributions, but it illegally controls a
lot of real PACs and has a lot of political influence in the Jewish community.
- Ralph Northam said on TeeVee that the very first blacks brought to Virginia were initially
considered to be "indentured servants" in English law? He is correct although within a few
decades the colonists realized that it would be more profitable to keep them permanently as
slaves. One must remember that Northam is only now learning some actual Virginia history
- Lindsey Graham is IMO correct in suggesting that Trump should "pocket" the barrier money
in the negotiated bill, keep the government fully open, and then proceed to used additional
funds available to him as CinC to continue to build the barrier system.
- The National Guard of several states is probably serving on the border with federal
funding support although still under state control. There is a law which provides for that. If
the governors order a withdrawal from the border, Trump should IMO call these National Guard
forces into federal service. The governors would then have no control over this matter at all.
pl
To me, repeat, to me, the issue is less,, much less, what AIPAC does, or Israelis, or
American Jews do, than what the pols making policy do. I fully expect the three groups above
will try their damndest to do what they believe is in Israel's interest . I get that. I might
not like it that they are so damn successful...but that's another issue. But American pols
that betray their own Nation's interest is what bugs me. They are the ones selling their
people out. The Lobbyists are just doing their job. Dirty and counter productive job as I
think it will prove to be in the long run...
With friends like Marco Rubio, the United States doesn't need enemies. I still remember very
well, when then-candidate Donald Trump ridiculed Rubio as "little Marco" during the 2016
debates. He was perfectly right. Like Phil Giraldi demonstrated Rubio's "intellectual"
capability, It seems he has a birdbrain. Joke aside, Rubio's political busyness Israel is
concerned raises the question who owns his true loyalty. Instead of working for his
constituency, he is on the road primarily for Israel. As it seems he loves Israel more than
his birthplace the United States, and he despises Cuba that political system is more
social-oriented that the American one.
The problem with the Florida senator is his absolute blind obedience towards the Zionist
state, his engagement against the BDS movement and his loyalty to Israel's stalwarts in the
US. He is not the only US politician in Congress who is in the pocket of the Zionist lobby.
At least the American Middle Eastern policy is run by the Zionist Israel Lobby in the US. But
from all walks of life, their influence is also not to be underestimated.
The so-called unbreakable bond between the US and Israel is mere rhetoric, but most
members of Congress believe in this nonsense just out of mere political survival. Israel is
not an ally but a massive liability to US national interest in the region. The Zionist
political class uses the American political system to its advantage and pays nothing in
return. The opposite is true. The State of Israel is massively spying on the US and cause the
American people a lot of damage.
There are not only the assassinations of JFK and RFK, but also the killing of JFK, Jr.
who's private plane crashed into the sea right of the coast of Martha's Vineyard. It was the
same cover-up as in the case of his father and his uncle. There are persistent rumors in the
wind that the Israeli Mossad was behind it, such as Laurent Guyénot laid out in his
two excellent articles on UNZ Review. Among large parts of the truther movement, some
segments make a strong argument that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks, although with the
collaboration of sections of the Bush/Cheney administration.
To refer to Israel as a friend or ally such as Rubio does is just a joke. Israel is
nothing more than an albatross like an ally. The whole American-Israeli relationship must be
put to the test. There is no room for romance because such romanticism is for the sole
detriment of the United States and the American People.
How such a lightweight came to be a Senator of the United States of America eludes
me.
I know this question is meant to be a bit rhetorical but let me try and answer it.
This senator, and the vast majority of his ilk in the Congress, are venal lying whores in
thrall to a foreign party and to money interests. He is not unique in this regard but only
one of many lying whores in power.
And the American people–by and large–are so dumbed down by a dumbed down
culture and a dumbed down media that they cannot recognize these treacherous weasels for the
traitors that they are.
The Senator is using contentions meant to protect us citizens from unfair business
practices by state and enterprise to launch protections against free speech for a foreign
entity.
That is painfully funny. I hope it is only a feeling, a sensation, but our political
leadership seems to have abandoned their collective minds. But this is convenient for the
Sen. because nullifying the constitution is one way of nullifying borders.
Zionists control our money via the unconstitutional FED and that gives the Zionist banking
cabal total control over the U.S. government and we the goyim/proles!
Nathan Rothschild infamously said, I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of
England for the man who controls the money supply controls the British Empire and I am that
man!
It is the same here in America and every country in the world that has a Zionist central
bank and that is almost all of them!
Rubio is just another puppet of the Zionist banking kabal and is just like the rest of
congress and in fact congress would be better named as the lower house of the Knesset.
Marco Rubio Is A Complete And Total Politician Whore For Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and
Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson.
Marco Rubio does the bidding of Jew Billionaires by putting the interests of Israel ahead
of the interests of the United States.
Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson all push nation-wrecking
mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
Marco Rubio pushes nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien
invaders.
Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman have bought the mass
legal immigration policies and the amnesty for illegal alien invaders immigration policy of
the Republican Party ruling class and Marco Rubio and Shyster Boy Trump.
Marco Rubio and New York City Shyster Boy Trump have been bought and paid for like common
whores by Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman.
Israel is powerful only to extent its goals are well correlated with the goal of the US MIC.
So like neocons Israel serves as a collective lobbyist of MIC. If this would not be the case, all
power of AIPAC and similar organizations would disappear, and the organization itself would be
put under FARA where it belongs.
The same is true for Zionists billionaires. The minute they turn against MIC would the minute
some dirty dealing and connections with organized crime would be exposed and some pedophile
scandals put on the front pages of MSM.
Notable quotes:
"... There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran. ..."
All these anti-Semitic articles fail a basic logical test :
i) If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the
combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism
fails.
ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone like
China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate Russia or
the EU?
iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say about
whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the WN claim
is even weaker.
There is a reason that the conspiracy theories regarding Zionists don't get any purchase
outside of a small fringe.
@Thomm i) It's not so
surprising given the wholesale lies pedaled by the predominantly Zionists media and
entertainment sectors of Western civilization, compounded by the outright censorship of
opposing views by those same groups with the assistance of the ADL, SPLC, et al. Add to that
the altruistic nature and generally independent spirit of Whites as opposed to the *dare I
say tribal* nature of Zionists.
ii) China's recent ascent to global dominance was not built on usury and manipulation of
foreign nation states through a diaspora of what has been described as "nations within
nations." I'd say Zionists in Russia (ever hear of the Holodomor?) manipulated that part of
the world for over a century quite completely, and in Eastern Europe for slightly less time,
to the tune of 100 million dead White Christians.
iii) Interesting you bring up Blacks but leave out the part about Zionists manipulating
Whites with "Birth of a Nation" being the first movie many arriving White immigrants viewed.
Shock status: imagined. Clearly, that's but one of a laundry list of things any reasonably
educated White person could hold up as an example of manipulation of public opinion.
Calling truisms tropes doesn't absolve ... crimes committed against humanity.
Every single day Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Han Chinese, are criticized and critiqued for
all sorts of reasons and all manner of circumstances. Only one category of people is immune
from criticism: Zionists. It's a double standard, and it must end.
> If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the
combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism
fails.
WN's largely agree that Zionists are more intelligent, so they are not surprised that
Zionists have been able to achieve outsized influence (to "control everything," in the
language of this lame troll).
ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone
like China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate
Russia or the EU?
If the Chinese attempted the same thing, Americans would be permitted to notice .
Noticing Zionists political activity is "anti-semitic", so many Americans don't notice it (or
pretend not to).
There are far fewer Zionists in the EU and Russia, but they enjoy outsized influence in
those lands too – just not to the same extent as in the U.S.
iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say
about whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the
WN claim is even weaker.
Incorrect. WN's admit that Zionists are more intelligent than white gentiles; blacks who
accuse whites of racism seldom admit that whites are more intelligent than blacks.
Ultimately, WN's want separation from Zionists. Blacks who accuse whites of racism virtually
never desire separation from whites. I'm not even a WN, but it really shouldn't be
controversial to admit these obvious facts.
Why does Phil have such a hard time banning moronic trolls like this clown? (Who everybody
suspects is just a sad little hindoo, but it's possible is a deranged little zionut.)
There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a
country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran.
I was disappointed to see that one of my two senators voted for the bill. And I would have
to say the biggest surprise was Sen. Gillibrand who probably wanted to say 'aye' but
didn't.
The next step is likely to be that any public disagreement with the state of Israel is
akin to antisemitism. Which I'm certain that the Republicans will be happy to throw at the
Dem. congress.
"... However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute. ..."
Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. died at the age of 76 on Sunday after an extended illness for which was a granted a leave of absence from
Congress last year.
The Republican representative for North Carolina's 3rd congressional district since 1995 had initially been a strong supporter
of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and even became well-known for getting french fries renamed as "freedom fries" in the House cafeteria
as a protest against French condemnation of the US invasion.
... ... ...
However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret
over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism
abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute.
Remembering Jones as a tireless advocate of peace, Ron Paul
notes that he " turned
from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war . His passing yesterday is deeply mourned
by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception." The Ron Paul Institute has also called him "a Hero of Peace" for both
his voting record and efforts at shutting down the "endless wars".
And Antiwar.com also describes Jones as having been among the "most consistently antiwar members of Congress" and
a huge supporter
of their work:
By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming
Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, "If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn't have voted for
that resolution."
Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Also the BBC describes Rep. Jones' "dramatic change of heart" concerning the Iraq war starting in 2005, after which he began reaching
out to thousands of people who had lost loves ones in combat.
Rep. Walter Jones led an effort in the House to call French Fries "Freedom Fries" instead, but came to profoundly regret his role
in supporting Bush's war.
Noting that "no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq" and that the war was justified by the Bush administration based
entirely on lies and false intelligence, the BBC describes:
At the same time, Mr Jones met grieving families whose loved ones were killed in the war. This caused him to have a dramatic
change of heart, and in 2005 he called for the troops to be brought home.
He spoke candidly on several occasions about how deeply he regretted supporting the war, which led to the deaths of more than
140,000 Iraqi and American people.
"I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who've lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,"
he told NPR in 2017. "That was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake."
In total he represented his district for 34 years, first in the North Carolina state legislature, then in Congress. He took a
leave of absence last year after a number of missed House votes due to declining health.
"... By Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor-emeritus of South-North Development Monitor SUNS, is based in Geneva and has been monitoring and reporting on the WTO and its predecessor GATT since 1978; he is author of several books on trade issues; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, is Senior Adviser with the Khazanah Research Institute, and was . an economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Inter Press Service ..."
"... Data governance infrastructure ..."
"... Enterprise competition ..."
"... Consumer protection ..."
"... Trade facilitation ..."
"... Describing what these TNCs are trying to push through as "digital colonialism" seems apt. In contrast to traditional colonialism, characterized as it was by massive investments in manpower and other resources required to conquer far-flung overseas territories, the marginal cost of adding one more overseas territory to a digital colonizers empire is miniscule compared to what old-school colonizers had to pony up to expand their list of colonies. ..."
"... Add to this weak regulatory firewalls in developing countries and market saturation in developed nations, it's obvious why these TNCs are determined to push through an international policy framework that advances their drive to uncover new pockets of growth in the developing world. It's also telling that they're aggressively pursuing this end before developing countries can mount a cohesive defense of their digital sovereignty. "Beware Proposed E-commerce Rules" indeed ..."
Beware Proposed
E-Commerce Rules Posted on February 10,
2019 by Jerri-Lynn ScofieldBy
Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor-emeritus of South-North Development Monitor SUNS, is based in
Geneva and has been monitoring and reporting on the WTO and its predecessor GATT since 1978; he
is author of several books on trade issues; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, is Senior Adviser with the
Khazanah Research Institute, and was . an economics professor and United Nations Assistant
Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Inter Press
Service
In Davos in late January, several powerful governments and their allies announced their
intention to launch new negotiations on e-commerce. Unusually, the intention is to launch the
plurilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), an ostensibly multilateral
organization, setting problematic precedents for the future of multilateral negotiations.
Any resulting WTO agreement, especially one to make e-commerce tax- and tariff-free, will
require amendments to its existing goods agreements, the General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS) and the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreements. If it is not an
unconditional agreement in the WTO, it will violate WTO 'most favoured nation' (MFN)
principles.
This will be worse than the old, and ostensibly extinct 'Green Room' processes -- of a few
major powers negotiating among themselves, and then imposing their deal on the rest of the
membership. Thus, the proposed e-commerce rules may be 'WTO illegal' -- unless legitimized by
the amendment processes and procedures in Article X of the WTO treaty.
Any effort to 'smuggle' it into the WTO, e.g., by including it in Annex IV to the WTO treaty
(Plurilateral Trade Agreements), will need, after requisite notice, a consensus decision at
Ministerial Conference (Art X:9 of treaty) . It may still be illegal since the subjects are
already covered by agreements in Annexes 1A, 1B and 1C of the WTO treaty.
Consolidating Power of the Giants
Powerful technology transnational corporations (TNCs) are trying to rewrite international
rules to advance their business interests by: gaining access to new foreign markets, securing
free access to others' data, accelerating deregulation, casualizing labour markets, and
minimizing tax liabilities.
While digital technology and trade, including electronic or e-commerce, can accelerate
development and create jobs, if appropriate policies and arrangements are in place, e-commerce
rhetoric exaggerates opportunities for developing country, especially small and medium
enterprises. Instead, the negotiations are intended to diminish the right of national
authorities to require 'local presence', a prerequisite for the consumer and public to sue a
supplier.
The e-commerce proposals are expected to strengthen the dominant TNCs, enabling them to
further dominate digital trade as the reform proposals are likely to strengthen their
discretionary powers while limiting public oversight over corporate behaviour in the digital
economy.
Developing Countries Must Be Vigilant
If digital commerce grows without developing countries first increasing value captured from
production -- by improving productive capacities in developing countries, closing the digital
divide by improving infrastructure and interconnectivity, and protecting privacy and data --
they will have to open their economies even more to foreign imports.
Further digital liberalization without needed investments to improve productive capacities,
will destroy some jobs, casualize others, squeeze existing enterprises and limit future
development. Such threats, due to accelerated digital liberalization, will increase if the
fast-changing digital economic space is shaped by new regulations influenced by TNCs.
Diverting business through e-commerce platforms will not only reduce domestic market shares,
as existing digital trade is currently dominated by a few TNCs from the United States and
China, but also reduce sales tax revenue which governments increasingly rely upon with the
earlier shift from direct to indirect taxation.
Developing countries must quickly organize themselves to advance their own agenda for
developmental digitization. Meanwhile, concerned civil society organizations and others are
proposing new approaches to issues such as data governance, anti-trust regulation, smaller
enterprises, jobs, taxation, consumer protection, and trade facilitation.
New Approach Needed
A development-focused and jobs-enhancing digitization strategy is needed instead. Effective
national policies require sufficient policy space, stakeholder participation and regional
consultation, but the initiative seeks to limit that space. Developing countries should have
the policy space to drive their developmental digitization agendas. Development partners,
especially donors, should support, not drive this agenda.
Developmental digitization will require investment in countries' technical, legal and
economic infrastructure, and policies to: bridge the digital divide; develop domestic digital
platforms, businesses and capacities to use data in the public interest; strategically promote
national enterprises, e.g., through national data use frameworks; ensure digitization conducive
to full employment policies; advance the public interest, consumer protection, healthy
competition and sustainable development.
Pro-active Measures Needed
Following decades of economic liberalization and growing inequality, and the increasing
clout of digital platforms, international institutions should support developmental
digitization for national progress, rather than digital liberalization. Developing country
governments must be vigilant about such e-commerce negotiations, and instead undertake
pro-active measures such as:
Data governance infrastructure : Developing countries must be vigilant of the
dangers of digital colonialism and the digital divide. Most people do not properly value data,
while governments too easily allow data transfers to big data corporations without adequate
protection for their citizens. TNC rights to free data flows should be challenged.
Enterprise competition : Developing countries still need to promote national
enterprises, including through pro-active policies. International rules have enabled wealth
transfers from the global South to TNCs holding well protected patents. National systems of
innovation can only succeed if intellectual property monopolies are weakened. Strengthening
property rights enhances TNC powers at the expense of developing country enterprises.
Employment : Developmental digitization must create decent jobs and livelihoods.
Labour's share of value created has declining in favour of capital, which has influenced
rule-making to its advantage.
Taxation: The new e-commerce proposals seek to ban not only appropriate taxation,
but also national presence requirements where they operate to avoid taxes at the expense of
competitors paying taxes in compliance with the law. Tax rules allowing digital TNCs to reduce
taxable income or shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions should be addressed.
Consumer protection : Strong policies for consumer protection are needed as the
proposals would put privacy and data protection at risk. Besides citizens' rights to privacy,
consumers must have rights to data protection and against TNC and other abuse of human
rights.
Competition : Digital platforms must be better regulated at both national and
international level. Policies are needed to weaken digital economic monopolies and to support
citizens, consumers and workers in relating to major digital TNCs.
Trade facilitation : Recent trade facilitation in developing countries, largely
funded by donors, has focused on facilitating imports, rather than supply side constraints.
Recent support for digital liberalization similarly encourages developing countries to import
more instead of developing needed new infrastructure to close digital divides.
Urgent Measures Needed
'E-commerce' has become the new front for further economic liberalization and extension of
property rights by removing tariffs (on IT products), liberalizing imports of various services,
stronger IP protection, ending technology transfer requirements, and liberalizing government
procurement.
Developing countries must instead develop their own developmental digitization agendas, let
alone simply copy, or worse, promote e-commerce rules developed by TNCs to open markets, secure
data, as well as constrain regulatory and developmental governments.
Describing what these TNCs are trying to push through as "digital colonialism" seems apt.
In contrast to traditional colonialism, characterized as it was by massive investments in
manpower and other resources required to conquer far-flung overseas territories, the marginal
cost of adding one more overseas territory to a digital colonizers empire is miniscule
compared to what old-school colonizers had to pony up to expand their list of colonies.
Add to this weak regulatory firewalls in developing countries and market saturation in
developed nations, it's obvious why these TNCs are determined to push through an
international policy framework that advances their drive to uncover new pockets of growth in
the developing world. It's also telling that they're aggressively pursuing this end before
developing countries can mount a cohesive defense of their digital sovereignty. "Beware
Proposed E-commerce Rules" indeed
It is still cold in davos, all the more reason to feel carefully, and be very sure
that the P-crats are not slipping you "a mickey" in the butt, because they
always repeat always do it!
The comment, and questions posed aren't clear.
The announcement (widely reported in media) was made to media at Davos after a breakfast
meeting, and almost immediately it appeared on WTO website as a "communication" from the
members at the breakfast meeting.
Beyond "intention" to negotiate, everything else was vague – whether it be issues to be
negotiated, where and how etc.
Why does this make me think of MERS and how the finance industry diverted at least
hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction recording fees away from local government
real estate offices? If popular government is to remain meaningful it had better have in
place effective means of enforcing its tax entitlements and the will to do it.
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Published on Feb 8, 2019
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) clash over donations
connected to Whitaker and decisions made at the Department of Justice.
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
"... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
"... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
"... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
'We have a system that is fundamentally broken.' -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is
explaining just how f*cked campaign finance laws really are.
" Subscribe to NowThis:
http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe
In the latest liberal news and political news, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made
headlines at a recent congressional hearing on money in politics by explaining and inquiring
about political corruption. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, aka AOC, went into the issues of
lobbyists and Super PACs and how the political establishment, including Donald Trump, uses big
money to their advantage, to hide and obfuscate, and push crooked agendas. Alexandria Ocasio
Cortez is a rising star in the Democratic Party and House of Representatives.
NowThis is your premier news outlet providing you with all the videos you need to stay up to
date on all the latest in trending news. From entertainment to politics, to viral videos and
breaking news stories, we're delivering all you need to know straight to your social feeds. We
live where you live.
Love this feisty congresswoman. I can see why AOC is dislike by the right and even many
democrats. She's in DC to work for the American ppl and not enrich herself or special
interest. Love the 2018 class and hope they make changes and clean up DC.
AOC is amazing, pointing out all the fundamental wrongs in our political system. I hope
she stays in Congress as long as possible to spread her influence.
AOC is speaking out when no one else will about the corruption in Washington. She is
disliked because she is actually fighting for people. This makes me want to move to New York
just so I can vote for her. Keep it up the pressure.
She is going to be needing extra security. She's poised to take them down and we know how
these things have been handled in the past. I'm loving her fearlessness but worry for her
safety. May she be protected and blessed. SMIB
@Asagirian
Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
She famously
told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was
"worth it."
Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we
get two lunatics for the price of one.
"... The job paid minimum wage and exposed Warren firsthand to the topics that would later define her career: the power of corporations and the effects of bankruptcy on the American consumer. ..."
"... Warren, who had been sharply critical of Clinton in part over her ties to Wall Street, ultimately chose not to challenge her for the Democratic party's nomination and endorsed the former secretary of state's campaign. It was also during this time that Warren proved among the few capable of getting under then candidate Donald Trump's skin. ..."
"... At the same time, Warren became a top target of conservatives and Trump himself. The president has repeatedly mocked Warren with the derisive nickname "Pocahontas" including at an event intended to honor Native Americans. ..."
"... Republicans first tried to push the notion that Warren used her Native American ancestry to further her career in the 2012 Senate race, homing in on a single questionnaire in which she claimed mixed ancestry. ..."
"... But the matter did not end there. The Washington Post published a story revealing Warren listed her race as "American Indian" while seeking a Texas bar registration card in 1986. ..."
"... Warren's platform includes the single-payer healthcare system Medicare for All, debt-free college tuition and anti-corruption legislation designed to restore accountability in government. She is also poised to unveil a proposal that would impose a wealth tax on Americans worth over $50m. ..."
Warren's official entry into the race has differed sharply from when she captured widespread liberal enthusiasm in
her unlikely bid for the Senate seven years ago.
The two-term senator will join a crowded Democratic primary
field with no clear frontrunner and several contenders jockeying to claim the progressive mantle that she
aspires to grasp. She has also found herself contending with a lingering controversy for previously identifying as
Native American over the course of nearly two decades.
The question now is whether Warren, who moved early to build an expansive field operation in anticipation of
her presidential run, can overcome early setbacks and reclaim her role as the Democratic party's top foil to
Donald Trump.
Born to middle-class parents in Norman, Oklahoma
, Warren has spoken
candidly about how her family's livelihood was upended when her father's heart attack forced him out of work.
Addressing crowds across the country, Warren often recalls how her late mother determined not to lose the
family's home "pulled on her best dress" and got her first paying job at the department store Sears.
The job paid minimum wage and exposed Warren firsthand to the topics that would later define her career:
the power of corporations and the effects of bankruptcy on the American consumer.
Her research in bankruptcy law and the impact on the average person's medical bills, mortgage payments and
other installments led Warren to become a leading expert on the subject and rise in the academia world.
"These are the issues she still cares about," said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped
recruit Warren to its faculty.
"I think she is extraordinary for this reason, that she got into politics because she cared about some issues.
She didn't get into politics because she wanted to be in office and then tried to figure out what issues she cared
about."
Warren cultivated a profile as a populist firebrand against the backdrop of the Great Recession, earning the
ire of Wall Street by spearheading the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau an agency
established under the Obama administration as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010.
Upon being passed over to head the agency she helped create, Warren decided to continue the fight from within
the government, embarking on a campaign to win back the late senator and liberal icon Ted Kennedy's seat from the
Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, in the high-profile 2012 Massachusetts Senate race.
Roughly $70m was spent on the bitterly waged contest, which catapulted Warren to the national stage.
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Elizabeth Warren speaks during day two of the Democratic national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina,
on 5 September 2012. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The race also saw Warren cement herself as a leader of the burgeoning progressive movement within the
Democratic party; branding the choice before voters as "Wall Street versus you", Warren viewed the election as an
opportunity to hand a major defeat to what she once
dubbed
as "the largest lobbying force ever assembled on the face of the earth".
Following her victory, Warren's profile grew so rapidly that speculation swiftly emerged over a potential White
House run in 2016, despite the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's candidacy. A group of progressives even mounted
a #DraftWarren campaign.
Warren, who had been sharply critical of Clinton in part over her ties to Wall Street, ultimately chose not to
challenge her for the Democratic party's nomination and endorsed the former secretary of state's campaign. It was
also during this time that Warren proved among the few capable of getting under then candidate Donald Trump's
skin.
After Trump derided Clinton as a "nasty woman", Warren famously riffed: "Get this, Donald. Nasty women are
tough, nasty women are smart and nasty women vote, and on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty
feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever."
The 2016 presidential election did not, however, produce the groundswell of unified opposition to Trump that
Democrats
had hoped for. Instead, it left the party in search of a clear leader to fill the void left by
Obama's departure from the White House.
For Warren, it looked as though her moment had arrived.
In the early days of the Trump administration, Warren quickly emerged as the face of the Democratic opposition,
matching the president's tweets with sharp ripostes of her own and holding his cabinet nominees to account when
they appeared for consideration before congressional committees.
During the confirmation process for the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, Warren famously read a letter
written 30 years prior by Coretta Scott King, in which the widow of Dr Martin Luther King Jr warned of Sessions'
civil rights record from the time of his nomination for a federal judgeship.
Silenced by Republicans mid-speech
on the Senate floor, Warren read the letter on Facebook Live. The hashtag
#LetLizSpeak trended on Twitter and the phrase "Nevertheless, she persisted" was coined.
At the same time, Warren became a top target of conservatives and Trump himself. The president has repeatedly
mocked Warren with the derisive nickname "Pocahontas" including at an event intended to honor Native Americans.
Although Warren long ignored the president's taunts, she took the unusual step of addressing the issue head on
in October by making public the results of a DNA test revealing that she did, in fact, have some Native American
ancestry.
Rather than putting the topic to rest, Warren's move was rebuked by some tribal leaders, who felt it
politicized their identity, and reignited the story.
Republicans first tried to push the notion
that Warren used her
Native American ancestry to further her career in the 2012 Senate race, homing in on a single questionnaire in
which she claimed mixed ancestry.
An exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe found no evidence that Warren benefited from doing so, and
nearly every living Harvard law professor involved in her hiring
has said
it was not a factor in their votes to offer her a tenured position.
"When we brought her to Harvard, no one had a clue that she thought of herself as Native American," said
Laurence Tribe, the school's professor of constitutional law.
"I think she's had an unfair rap," he added. "I don't think it's the case that she ever exploited her family's
background or ancestry in a way that some people seem to think she did."
The Cherokee nation, one of the groups that was critical of Warren, said she privately apologized to to tribal
leaders.
But the matter did not end there. The Washington Post published a story revealing Warren
listed her race
as "American Indian" while seeking a Texas bar registration card in 1986. Warren apologized once more, telling reporters: "I'm not a tribal citizen.
"My apology is an apology for not having been more sensitive about tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty. I
really want to underline the point, tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship."
Warren remains a popular figure in the Democratic party
and was
easily re-elected to a second Senate term in the 2018 midterm elections.
Even so, she received fewer votes in her home state than Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of
Massachusetts, prompting Warren's hometown paper to urge the senator to reconsider a presidential bid.
"While Warren won re-election, her margin of victory in November suggests there's a ceiling on her popularity,"
the
Boston Globe editorial board
wrote. "Baker garnered more votes than she did in a state that is supposed to be
a Democratic haven."
She's hard-edged, not personally, but ideologically. She takes very sharp and
controversial positions
Barney Frank
"While Warren is an effective and impactful senator with an important voice nationally, she has become a
divisive figure," the board added. "A unifying voice is what the country needs now after the polarizing politics
of Donald Trump." Those close to Warren dismissed the editorial as having more to do with the personal biographies and
inclinations of those who sit on the board. "She's hard-edged, not personally, but ideologically," said Frank. "She takes very sharp and controversial
positions."
"So, yeah, they're going to be people who are unhappy with her."
More challenging for Warren, friends and former colleagues said, would be the task of distinguishing herself
within a diverse field of Democratic candidates that includes at least three of her Senate colleagues and a record
number of women seeking the party's nomination.
Warren's platform includes the single-payer healthcare system Medicare for All, debt-free college tuition and
anti-corruption legislation designed to restore accountability in government. She is also poised to unveil a
proposal that would impose a wealth tax on Americans worth over $50m.
Fried, who served as solicitor general under Ronald Reagan, said he disagreed with some of the more expansive
economic policies touted by Warren. But her greatest asset as a candidate, he acknowledged, would be to approach the campaign with the same steely
resolve to elevate the middle class that endeared her to voters seven years ago.
Although he is only occasionally in touch with Warren as she embarks on what will undoubtedly be a grueling
campaign for America's highest office, Fried recalled recently sending Warren a lengthy article about capitalism
and income inequality.
To his surprise, he received a response from Warren 10 days later. She had not only taken the time to read the
article, but highlighted a portion that stood out to her. "How many presidential candidates would do that?" Fried asked.
In her email, Warren also recounted to her old colleague how not very long ago they sat together on a flight
discussing the prospects of a Clinton presidency.
That day never came to fruition, Warren noted.
"I don't know what lies ahead," she added. "But I know what I'm fighting for."
While controversy around her heritage lingers, voters call the Democrat's fight against economic
injustice 'inspiring'
On a cold, blustery January day in 1912, immigrant women walked out of the Everett Mill in the
->
Massachusetts
factory town of Lawrence demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Mill owners and
city government responded in a swift and heavy-handed manner; local militias and police forces were called to the
streets. Protesters died. Many more were arrested.
On a cold, blustery February day 117 years later, the
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren stood in front of Everett Mill
->
to announce her candidacy for president of the United States
, channeling the spirit of those women as she told
her supporters that they were in a fight for their lives against a rigged system that favors the rich and
powerful.
ss="rich-link">
Why women 2020 candidates face 'likability' question even as they make
history
Read more
"These workers led by women didn't have much. Not even a common language. Nevertheless, they persisted,"
she said. "The story of Lawrence is about how real change happens in America. It's a story about power our power
when we fight together."
For Warren, who grew up in an economically struggling Oklahoma household and who first rose to mainstream
prominence by handing out practical financial advice to American families, the word "fight" is central to her
platform and political ethos it was a word peppered throughout her speech.
But on Saturday, she made clear that hers was not just a fight against president Donald Trump, but against a
system she described as one where the rich, privileged and powerful oppress the rest of the country.
"The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest and most extreme
symptom of what's gone wrong in America, a product of a rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and
kicks dirt on everyone else," she said. "So once he's gone, we can't pretend that all of this never happened."
The backdrop of the mill, where the so-called Bread and Roses strikes originated, was symbolic. But so too was
the choice of the modern day city of Lawrence, which is one of those places in America that has felt left behind
in recent times. To many in New England, Lawrence is synonymous with crime, drugs and poverty. The Republican
governors of Maine and New Hampshire have invoked the city's name when laying blame for the opioid crises in their
states. As was the case at the time of the strikes, Lawrence is a working class city of immigrants, with a
population that is about 80% Latino. It is a city where wealth is nearby, but out of reach for many.
Sebastian Brown, 31, moved to Lawrence five years ago. While he had yet to choose a candidate to support, he
was excited by Warren's message and was happy Warren chose the town as the site of her announcement.
ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">
I think we need a woman president and I think it will be the fight of our lives
Vicki Ward, rally attendee
"This is a working class city. And I think her and Bernie [Sanders] are running on platforms that speak to
the working class and how they're being screwed over by the rich and powerful," he said. "And I think she's a
great messenger for it."
While there was optimism about Warren's candidacy at her rally, she enters an already crowded Democratic field
amid
->
r
enewed controversy over her past identification as Native American.
For years now since even before he was president
->
Trump has needled Warren on the issue
, calling her "Pocahontas". He and others accuse Warren of falsely
presenting herself as Native American to gain unfair advantages in life.
The controversy was re-ignited last week when the Washington Post
->
published Warren's 1986 registration card
for the Texas State Bar. In it, she listed "American Indian" as her
race.
Warren has now apologised repeatedly for identifying as Native American, saying in recent days that she "should
have been more mindful of the distinction with tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty". She still maintains
that Native American ancestry was part of her family's story passed down to her.
->
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Elizabeth Warren called Donald Trump the 'most extreme' symptom of a broken system. Photograph: Cj Gunther/EPA
How damaging the controversy will be remains to be see. Warren enters a diverse Democratic field where other
candidates belong to minority groups: New Jersey senator
->
Cory Booker is African American
;
->
California senator Kamala Harris
was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
->
Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
is both the first Hindu and first Samoan-American member of Congress, and
the former San Antonio mayor
->
Juliαn Castro is Latino
. When the Democratic race gets heated, Warren's portrayal of race could prove to be a
point of attack.
Peter Devlin, a 56-year-old dentist from the nearby town of North Andover, said he was at the rally to hear
what Warren had to say but said that the Native American controversy "is going to be a problem" for her campaign.
"I voted for her as senator, but I'm concerned about her electability," he said. "It's going to be a tough run.
She's got a bit of baggage and she's so sort of cliche progressive liberal that I think there's a lot of America
that's not up for that. But I want to hear what she's up to."
ss="rich-link">
Stacey Abrams on the ticket? Democrat's star turn fuels talk for 2020
Read more
However, other attendees, like 64-year-old Vicki Ward, who drove two hours to the event from Vermont, were
ready to throw their support behind Warren on the first day of the senator's presidential campaign.
"I think she's got the qualities that we need," she said. "I think we need a woman president and I think it
will be the fight of our lives."
Maryann Johnson, who came to Warren's announcement from New Hampshire, also said she was already sold on
Warren.
"I basically agreed with everything she said. We need to have more equality, there needs to be less corruption
in government," she said. "She's inspiring."
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
This 20 year old satire looks like it was written yesterday...
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives ..."
"... Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products. ..."
"... condemned TV-exercise-show personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced to exercise for centuries on end ..."
"... In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of verbal abuse ..."
"... "In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a goddamn woman ever since." ..."
After nearly four years of construction at an estimated cost of 750 million souls,
Corpadverticus, the new 10th circle of Hell, finally opened its doors Monday.
Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell
The Blockbuster Video-sponsored circle, located in Nether Hell between the former eighth and
ninth levels of Malebolge and Cocytus, is expected to greatly alleviate the overcrowding
problems that have plagued the infernal underworld in recent years. The circle is the first
added to Hell in its countless-millennia history.
"A nightmarishly large glut of condemned spirits in recent years necessitated the expansion
of Hell," inferno spokesperson Antedeus said. "The traditional nine-tiered system had grown
insufficient to accommodate the exponentially rising numbers of Hellbound."
Adding to the need for expansion, Antedeus said, was the fact that a majority of the new
arrivals possessed souls far more evil than the original nine circles were equipped to handle.
"Demographers, advertising executives, tobacco lobbyists, monopoly-law experts retained by
major corporations, and creators of office-based sitcoms–these new arrivals represent a
wave of spiritual decay and horror the likes of which Hell has never before seen," Antedeus
said.
Despite the need for expansion, the plan faced considerable resistance, largely due to the
considerable costs of insuring construction projects within the Kingdom Of Lies. Opposition
also came from Hell purists concerned about the detrimental effect a tenth level would have on
the intricate numerology of Hell's meticulously arranged allegorical structure. In 1994,
however, funding was finally secured in a deal brokered between Blockbuster CEO Wayne Huizenga
and Satan himself.
Prior to the construction of the tenth circle, many among the new wave of sinners had been
placed in such circles as Hoarders and Squanderers, Sowers of Discord, Flatterers and Seducers,
Violent Against Art, and Hypocrites. Hell authorities, however, say that the new level, the
Circle of Total Bastards, located at the site of the former Well of Giants just above the
Frozen Lake at Hell's center, better suits their insidious brand of evil.
Frigax The Vile, a leading demonic presence, is one of the most vocal supporters of the new
circle.
" In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners
flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales
representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives
rollerblading and talking on miniaturized cell-phones at the same time. But now, we've finally
got the sort of top-notch Pits of Doom necessary to give such repellent abominations the
quality boilings they deserve."
Pausing to tear off the limbs of an Access Hollywood host, Frigax added, "We're all
tremendously excited about the many brand-new forms of torture and eternal pain this new
level's state-of-the-art facilities will make possible."
Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending
Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of
Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products.
The Circle also features a Hall of Aerobics, where condemned TV-exercise-show
personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced
to exercise for centuries on end , covered in vomit and prodded with the distended ribs of
skeletal, anorexic demons, accompanied by an unending, ear-splittingly loud dance-remix version
of the 1988 Rick Astley hit "Together Forever."
In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated
Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of
verbal abuse from their former subservients as crows descend from trees to peck at their
eyes. In one of the deepest and most profane portions of the circle, unspeakable acts are said
to be committed with a mail-order Roly-Kit.
"In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told
reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those
condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the
crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right
people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the
Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and
transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a
goddamn woman ever since."
His face contorted in the Misery of the Damned, a Disney lawyer said: "It's hell
here–there are no executive lounges, I can't get any decent risotto, and the suit I have
to wear is a cheap Brooks Brothers knock-off. I'm beeped every 30 seconds, and there's no way
to return the calls. Plus, I'm being boiled upside down in lard while jackals gnaw at the soles
of my feet. If I could just reach the fax machine on that nearby rock, I could contact some
well-placed associates and work something out, but it's just out of my grasp, and it's out of
ink and constantly blinking the message, 'Replace Toner Cartridge, Replace Toner Cartridge,
Replace Toner Cartridge.'"
He then resumed screaming in agony.
Grogar The Malefic, a Captain in Hell's elite Demon Corps and supervisor in charge of
admissions for the new circle, said Hell's future looks bright, thanks to the new circle.
"Things are definitely looking up," Grogar said. "We're now far better equipped, and we're
ready to take on the most Unholy Atrocities humanity has to offer."
"We're really on the grow down here," Grogar added. "This is an exciting time to be in
Hell."
"... Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans' care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700 people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs." ..."
"... Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria. ..."
"... A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women ..."
"... Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population, under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate, and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. ..."
"... The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act. ..."
"... Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more. ..."
"... It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists do not care for the facts. ..."
"... That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused. Brzezinski said, "None". ..."
An editorial published by the New York Times on February 4 titled "End the War in Afghanistan" has provoked a backlash from prominent
supporters of the decades-long US "war on terrorism" and the fraud of "humanitarian intervention."
The Times editorial was a damning
self-indictment by the US political establishment's newspaper of record, which has supported every US act of military aggression,
from the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the US wars for regime change in Libya
and Syria beginning in 2011.
The editorial presents the "war on terror" as an unmitigated fiasco, dating it from September 14, 2001, when "Congress wrote what
would prove to be one of the largest blank checks in the country's history," i.e., the Authorization for Use of Military Force against
Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which is still invoked to legitimize US interventions from Syria to Somalia, Yemen and, of course, Afghanistan.
On the day that this "blank check" was written, the Times published a column titled "No Middle Ground," which stated "the Bush
administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism, deny safe havens to terrorists
or face the certain prospect of death and destruction. The marble halls of Washington resounded with talk of war."
It continued, "The nation is rallying around its young, largely untried leader-as his rising approval ratings and the proliferation
of flags across the country vividly demonstrate "
This war propaganda was sustained by the Times, which sold the invasion of Afghanistan as retribution for 9/11 and then promoted
the illegal and unprovoked war against Iraq by legitimizing and embellishing the lies about "weapons of mass destruction."
With the first deployment of US ground troops in Afghanistan, the Times editorialized on October 20, 2001: "Now the nation's soldiers
are going into battle in a distant and treacherous land, facing a determined and resourceful enemy. As they go, they should know
that the nation supports their cause and yearns for their success."
Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans'
care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly
all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have
fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700
people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who
served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs."
The massive loss of life, destruction of social infrastructure and vast human suffering inflicted by these wars on civilian populations
are at best an afterthought for the Times. Conservative estimates place the number killed by the US war in Afghanistan at 175,000.
With the number of indirect fatalities caused by the war, the toll likely rises to a million. In Iraq, the death toll was even higher.
What does the Times conclude from this bloody record? "The failure of American leaders-civilians and generals through three administrations,
from the Pentagon to the State Department to Congress and the White House-to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to
be studied for generations. Likewise, all Americans-the news media included-need to be prepared to examine the national credulity
or passivity that's led to the longest conflict in modern American history."
What a cowardly and cynical evasion! Three administrations, those of Bush, Obama and Trump, have committed war crimes over the
course of more than 17 years, including launching wars of aggression-the principal charge leveled against the Nazis at Nuremberg-the
slaughter of civilians and torture. These crimes should not be "studied for generations," but punished.
As for the attempt to lump the news media together with "all Americans" as being guilty of "credulity" and "passivity," this is
a slander against the American people and a deliberate cover-up of the crimes carried out by the corporate media, with the Times
at their head, in disseminating outright lies and war propaganda. The Times editors should be "prepared to examine" the fact that
journalistic agents of the Nazi regime who carried out a similar function in Germany were tried and punished at Nuremberg.
The Times editorial supporting a US withdrawal reflects the conclusions being drawn by increasing sections of the ruling establishment,
including the Trump administration, which has opened up negotiations with the Taliban. It is bound up with the shift in strategy
by US imperialism and the Pentagon toward the preparation for "great power" confrontations with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
The Times ' call for an Afghanistan withdrawal has provoked a heated rebuke by defenders of the "war on terrorism" and "humanitarian
intervention," who have denounced the newspaper for defeatism. Such a withdrawal, a letter published by the Times on February 8 argued,
would "accelerate and expand the war," "allow another extremist-terrorist phenomenon to emerge," and "result in the deaths and abuse
of thousands of women."
The signatories of the letter include Frederick Kagan, David Sedney and Eleanor Smeal.
Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals
who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every
US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
Likewise Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense responsible for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, now working
at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Married to a top lobbyist for Chevron who worked extensively
in Central Asia, he has his own interests in the continuation of US military operations in the region.
Smeal is the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMD) and a former president of the National Organization for Women
(NOW), who is widely described as one of "the major leaders of the modern-day American feminist movement."
A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women. In 2001, Smeal and her FMD circulated a petition thanking the Bush
administration for its commitment to promoting the rights of women in Afghanistan. After the bombing began on October 7, she declared,
"We have real momentum now in the drive to restore the rights of women." A few days later, she and representatives of other feminist
organizations showed up at the White House to solidarize themselves with the US war.
Urging on the conquest of Afghanistan, she wrote, "I should hope our government doesn't retreat. We'll help rip those burqas off,
I hope. This is a unique time in history. If you're going to end terrorism, you've got to end the ideology of gender apartheid."
Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population,
under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate,
and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16.
Recent reports suggest that the maternal death rate may be higher than it was before the war began, surpassed only by South Sudan.
While USAID has poured some $280 million into its Promote program, supposedly to advance the conditions of Afghan women, it has done
nothing but line the pockets of corrupt officials of the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul.
The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a
crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act.
On October 9, two days after Washington launched its now 17-year-long war on Afghanistan and amid a furor of jingoistic and militarist
propaganda from the US government and the corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site editorial board posted a column titled "Why
we oppose the war in Afghanistan." It rejected the claim that this was a "war for justice and the security of the American people
against terrorism" and insisted that "the present action by the United States is an imperialist war" in which Washington aimed to
"establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control" over not only Afghanistan, but over the broader
region of Central Asia, "home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world."
The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. At most, it is a passive acceptance that war is the only means to fight terrorism,
a mood that owes a great deal to the efforts of a thoroughly dishonest media which serves as an arm of the state. Beneath the reluctant
endorsement of military action is a profound sense of unease and skepticism. Tens of millions sense that nothing good can come of
this latest eruption of American militarism.
"The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration.
What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.
"The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind
at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than
ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for
socialism."
These warnings and this perspective have been borne out entirely by the criminal and tragic events of the last 17 years, even
as the likes of the New York Times find themselves compelled to admit the bankruptcy of their entire record on Afghanistan, and their
erstwhile "liberal" allies struggle to salvage some shred of the filthy banner of "human rights imperialism."
"The failure of American leaders -- civilians and generals through three administrations, from the Pentagon to the State Department
to Congress and the White House -- to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to be studied for generations. Likewise,
all Americans -- the news media included -- need to be prepared to examine the national credulity or passivity that's led to the
longest conflict in modern American history."
What the New York Times should propose is a Nuremberg-style trial for the war criminals responsible for the genocide of millions,
the devastation of of the Middle East and Africa, and the looting of the US Treasury by war profiteers and the political duopoly.
If these criminals are NOT held accountable for their actions NOTHING will be learned and the violence, death and destruction
will continue.
"The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law, acted as Head of State or responsible
government official, does not relieve him from responsibility under international law."
Gore Vidal rightly named America as the United States of Amnesia. They NEVER learn from their own history and they are never told
about what their terrorist government does in their name.
Eleanor Smeal's comment about "ripping off those burqas" in Afghanistan reminds me of Louisiana congressman John Cooksey's post-9/11
suggestion that police should pull over and question anyone with ''a diaper on his head''. Both use religious intolerance to increase
the power of the state.
"A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women."
wouldn't it be more correctly "Janey comes lately" ..as in "Johnny come lately"..?
The completely insane fraud of waging imperialist war for "women rights" has been , unfortunately, extensively documented..the
US occupation has strengthened not weakened the Taliban
"The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. "
Not really in agreement with this statement although, everything has changed in almost 20 years.....
There are always elements that are gung ho for war. And I'll agree that the number was abnormally high for Afghanistan. But I
do think the majority still reluctantly agreed to the war as a necessary measure to fight "terrorism" as the more-than-likely-to-be-a-false-flag
9/11 event was very fresh in everyone's mind.
Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still
hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the
crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more.
What's more interesting is that the liberal elites will probably do their best to continue on with the war. But either way,
the USA will likely lose. In fact, it's already lost the war. The Taliban have won this one. That the elitists can't see that
shows just how far gone they are.
It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists
do not care for the facts.
That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years
ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused.
Brzezinski said, "None".
"I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more than
a little merit." As many have said, Trump is the symptom, not the disease.
Notable quotes:
"... Still, I find myself wondering: If a proposed troop drawdown in Afghanistan qualifies as a "mistake," as O'Hanlon contends, then what term best describes a war that has cost something like a trillion dollars, killed and maimed tens of thousands, and produced a protracted stalemate? ..."
"... And, if recent press reports prove true, with U.S. government officials accepting Taliban promises of good behavior as a basis for calling it quits, then this longest war in our history will not have provided much of a return on investment. Given the disparity between the U.S. aims announced back in 2001 and the results actually achieved, defeat might be an apt characterization. ..."
I don't wish to imply that political leaders and media outlets ignore our wars altogether.
That would be unfair. Yet in TrumpWorld, while the president's performance in office receives
intensive and persistent coverage day in, day out, the attention given to America's wars has
been sparse and perfunctory, when not positively bizarre.
As a case in point, consider the op-ed
that recently appeared in the New York Times (just as actual peace talks between the
U.S. and the Taliban seemed to be progressing
), making the case for prolonging the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while chiding President Trump
for considering a reduction in the number of U.S. troops currently stationed there. Any such
move, warned Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, would be a "mistake" of the first
order.
The ongoing Afghan War dates from a time when some of today's recruits were still in
diapers. Yet O'Hanlon counsels patience: a bit more time and things just might work out. This
is more or less comparable to those who suggested back in the 1950s that African Americans
might show a bit more patience in their struggle for equality: Hey, what's the rush?
I don't pretend to know what persuaded the editors of the Times that O'Hanlon's
call to make America's longest war even longer qualifies as something readers of the nation's
most influential newspaper just now need to ponder. Yet I do know this: the dearth of critical
attention to the costs and
consequences of our various post-9/11 wars is nothing short of shameful, a charge to which
politicians and journalists alike should plead equally guilty.
I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more
than a little merit. Even more striking than Trump's critique is the fact that so few members
of the national security establishment are willing to examine it seriously. As a consequence,
the wars persist, devoid of purpose.
Still, I find myself wondering: If a proposed troop drawdown in Afghanistan qualifies as
a "mistake," as O'Hanlon contends, then what term best describes a war that has cost something
like a trillion dollars, killed and maimed tens of thousands, and produced a protracted
stalemate?
Disaster? Debacle? Catastrophe? Humiliation?
And, if recent press reports prove true, with U.S. government officials accepting
Taliban promises of good behavior as a basis for calling it quits, then this longest war in our
history will not have provided much of a return on investment. Given the disparity between the
U.S. aims announced back in 2001 and the results actually achieved, defeat might be an apt
characterization.
Yet the fault is not Trump's. The fault belongs to those who have allowed their immersion in
the dank precincts of TrumpWorld to preclude serious reexamination of misguided and reckless
policies that predate the president by at least 15 years.
You have to compare Trump with the alternative. The D's /progs make war on free speech,
attack the presumption of innocence, want essentially uncontrolled mass immigration and
relentlessly push in the direction of war with Russia. Add their cynical Russiagate
hoax-witch hunt for further illustration
of the danger they present. As many have said, Trump is the symptom, not the disease.
"I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more
than a little merit."
I'm with Bacevich on the insanity of Endless War, but I question why he has to denigrate
Trump in his lead in. The cynical side of me believes that Bacevich thinks he has to be a
Trump-hater if he is to be listened to.
Hey Andrew sir Democracy is messy. But DJT is on your team and the MSM/Liberal
progs/Neocons aren't. Worth reflecting on
@fnn "As many have said,
Trump is the symptom, not the disease"
Actually, Trump is the microbe not the virus. He's the opportunistic microbe that attaches
itself to a sick and diseased body-politic. As to symptoms, they are borne by society
at-large and now manifest themselves in the majority of Americans who one way or the other
are "Lost in TrumpWorld"
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the
Rich Richer
By Dean Baker
The Old Technology and Inequality Scam: The Story of Patents and Copyrights
One of the amazing lines often repeated by people in policy debates is that, as a result
of technology, we are seeing income redistributed from people who work for a living to the
people who own the technology. While the redistribution part of the story may be mostly true,
the problem is that the technology does not determine who "owns" the technology. The people
who write the laws determine who owns the technology.
Specifically, patents and copyrights give their holders monopolies on technology or
creative work for their duration. If we are concerned that money is going from ordinary
workers to people who hold patents and copyrights, then one policy we may want to consider is
shortening and weakening these monopolies. But policy has gone sharply in the opposite
direction over the last four decades, as a wide variety of measures have been put into law
that make these protections longer and stronger. Thus, the redistribution from people who
work to people who own the technology should not be surprising -- that was the purpose of the
policy.
If stronger rules on patents and copyrights produced economic dividends in the form of
more innovation and more creative output, then this upward redistribution might be justified.
But the evidence doesn't indicate there has been any noticeable growth dividend associated
with this upward redistribution. In fact, stronger patent protection seems to be associated
with slower growth.
Before directly considering the case, it is worth thinking for a minute about what the
world might look like if we had alternative mechanisms to patents and copyrights, so that the
items now subject to these monopolies could be sold in a free market just like paper cups and
shovels.
The biggest impact would be in prescription drugs. The breakthrough drugs for cancer,
hepatitis C, and other diseases, which now sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars
annually, would instead sell for a few hundred dollars. No one would have to struggle to get
their insurer to pay for drugs or scrape together the money from friends and family. Almost
every drug would be well within an affordable price range for a middle-class family, and
covering the cost for poorer families could be easily managed by governments and aid
agencies.
The same would be the case with various medical tests and treatments. Doctors would not
have to struggle with a decision about whether to prescribe an expensive scan, which might be
the best way to detect a cancerous growth or other health issue, or to rely on cheaper but
less reliable technology. In the absence of patent protection even the most cutting edge
scans would be reasonably priced.
Health care is not the only area that would be transformed by a free market in technology
and creative work. Imagine that all the textbooks needed by college students could be
downloaded at no cost over the web and printed out for the price of the paper. Suppose that a
vast amount of new books, recorded music, and movies was freely available on the web.
People or companies who create and innovate deserve to be compensated, but there is little
reason to believe that the current system of patent and copyright monopolies is the best way
to support their work. It's not surprising that the people who benefit from the current
system are reluctant to have the efficiency of patents and copyrights become a topic for
public debate, but those who are serious about inequality have no choice. These forms of
property claims have been important drivers of inequality in the last four decades.
The explicit assumption behind the steps over the last four decades to increase the
strength and duration of patent and copyright protection is that the higher prices resulting
from increased protection will be more than offset by an increased incentive for innovation
and creative work. Patent and copyright protection should be understood as being like very
large tariffs. These protections can often the raise the price of protected items by several
multiples of the free market price, making them comparable to tariffs of several hundred or
even several thousand percent. The resulting economic distortions are comparable to what they
would be if we imposed tariffs of this magnitude.
The justification for granting these monopoly protections is that the increased innovation
and creative work that is produced as a result of these incentives exceeds the economic costs
from patent and copyright monopolies. However, there is remarkably little evidence to support
this assumption. While the cost of patent and copyright protection in higher prices is
apparent, even if not well-measured, there is little evidence of a substantial payoff in the
form of a more rapid pace of innovation or more and better creative work....
Progressive Taxes Only Go So Far. Pre-Tax Income Is the Problem
By Dean Baker
In recent weeks, there have been several bold calls for large increases in progressive
taxation. First we had Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), often referred to as
AOC, proposing a top marginal tax rate on income over $10 million. This sent right-wing
talking heads into a frenzy, leading many to show they don't know the difference between a
marginal tax rate and an average tax rate. (AOC's 70 percent rate would only apply to an
individual's income above $10 million.)
More recently, we had Senator Elizabeth Warren propose a wealth tax that would apply to
people with assets of more than $50 million. This tax could have Jeff Bezos sending more than
$3 billion a year to the Treasury.
Given the enormous increase in inequality over the last four decades, and the reduction in
the progressivity of the tax code, it is reasonable to put forward plans to make the system
more progressive. But, the bigger source of the rise in inequality has been a growth in the
inequality of before-tax income, not the reduction in high–end tax rates. This suggests
that it may be best to look at the factors that have led to the rise in inequality in market
incomes, rather than just using progressive taxes to take back some of the gains of the very
rich.
There have been many changes in rules and institutional structures that have allowed the
rich to get so much richer. (This is the topic of my free book Rigged.) Just to take the most
obvious -- government-granted patent and copyright monopolies have been made longer and
stronger over the last four decades. Many items that were not even patentable 40 years ago,
such as life forms and business methods, now bring in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars
to their owners.
If the importance of these monopolies for inequality is not clear, ask yourself how rich
Bill Gates would be if there were no patents or copyrights on Microsoft software. (Anyone
could copy Windows into a computer and not pay him a penny.) Many other billionaires get
their fortune from copyrights in software and entertainment or patents in pharmaceuticals,
medical equipment and other areas.
The government also has rules for corporate governance that allow CEOs to rip off the
companies for which they work. CEO pay typically runs close to $20 million a year, even as
returns to shareholders lag. It would be hard to argue that today's CEOs, who get 200 to 300
times the pay of ordinary workers, are doing a better job for their companies than CEOs in
the 1960s and 1970s who only got 20 to 30 times the pay of ordinary workers.
Another source of inequality is the financial sector. The government has aided these
fortunes in many ways, most obviously with the bailout of the big banks a decade ago. It also
has deliberately structured the industry in ways that facilitate massive fortunes in
financial engineering.
There is no reason to design an economy in such a way as to ensure that most of the gains
from growth flow upward. Unfortunately, that has largely been the direction of policy over
the last four decades.
We can ignore the inequities built into the way we have structured the economy and just
try to tax the big winners, as is being proposed. However, there are two major problems with
this route, one practical and one political.
The practical problem is that the rich are not stupid. They will look to find ways to
avoid or evade the various progressive taxes being proposed. Both AOC and Warren have relied
on advice from some top economists in describing their tax proposals, but even the
best–designed tax can be gamed. (Is it worth $3 billion a year for Jeff Bezos to remain
a US citizen? As a non-citizen he wouldn't pay the wealth tax.)
Gaming the tax system will mean that we will collect considerably less revenue than a
static projection would imply. It also will lead to the growth of the tax gaming industry.
From an economic standpoint, this is a complete waste. We will have people designing clever
ways to try to hide income and wealth, and in some cases getting very rich themselves in the
process.
The political problem with going the tax route is that people attach a certain legitimacy
to the idea that income gained through the market is somehow rightfully gained, as opposed to
say, income from a government transfer program, like food stamps. The rich will be able to
win support from many non-rich by claiming that the government has taken away what they have
fairly earned.
By contrast, it is much harder for a drug company billionaire to cry foul because a drug
developed with public funds, and selling at generic prices, has destroyed the market for his
$100,000–a–year cancer drug. In the same vein, CEOs might have a hard time
getting sympathy for the complaint that new rules of corporate governance make it easier to
shareholders to bring their pay down to earth.
It is great that the rise in inequality seems likely to be a major topic in the 2020
presidential campaign. However, it is important that we think carefully about how best to
reverse it.
Matthew Daly - Associated Press - February 7, 2019
WASHINGTON -- Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are calling
for a Green New Deal intended to transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change and
create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.
The freshman lawmaker and veteran Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts are teaming up on the
plan, which aims to eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2030.
A joint resolution drafted by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey sets a goal to meet ''100 percent
of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy
sources,'' including dramatic increases in wind and solar power.
A news conference at the Capitol is set for Thursday, the day they introduce the
resolution.
While setting lofty goals, the plan does not explicitly call for eliminating the use of
fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, a nod to pragmatism that may disappoint some of
Ocasio-Cortez's strongest supporters.
Even so, their Green New Deal goes far beyond the Clean Power Plan proposed by President
Barack Obama. President Donald Trump has scrapped Obama's plan, which imposed emissions
limits on coal-fired power plants, as a job-killer.
The Democrats are likely to meet resistance to their proposal in Congress, especially in
the Republican-controlled Senate. Trump, who has expressed doubts about climate change, also
is likely to oppose it.
The resolution marks the first time Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers have attached
legislative language onto the Green New Deal, a concept that until now has been largely
undefined other than as a call for urgent action to head off catastrophic climate change and
create jobs.
Several Democratic presidential hopefuls have embraced the idea of a Green New Deal
without saying exactly what it means.
Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement that the plan will create ''unprecedented levels of
prosperity and wealth for all while ensuring economic and environmental justice and
security.'' She calls for a ''World War II-scale mobilization'' that includes high-quality
education and health care, clean air and water and safe, affordable housing.
Answering critics who call the plan unrealistic, Ocasio-Cortez says that when President
John F. Kennedy wanted to go to the moon by the end of the 1960s, ''people said it was
impossible.'' She also cites Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great
Society and the interstate highway system begun under Dwight D. Eisenhower as examples of
American know-how and capability.
While focusing on renewable energy, Ocasio-Cortez said the plan would include existing
nuclear power plants but block new nuclear plants. Nuclear power does not emit greenhouse
gases, which contribute to global warming.
The resolution does not include a price tag, but some Republicans predict it would cost in
the trillions of dollars. They denounced the plan at House hearings on climate change on
Wednesday.
The Green New Deal would be paid for ''the same way we paid for the original New Deal,
World War II, the bank bailouts, tax cuts for the rich and decades of war -- with public
money appropriated by Congress,'' Ocasio-Cortez said.
Government can take an equity stake in Green New Deal projects ''so the public gets a
return on its investment,'' she said.
New Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker got a warning of sorts from Moody's ahead of the
governor's first budget address. The rating agency's most recent report* highlighted the
usual crises Pritzker must tackle: ballooning pension debts and chronic budget deficits.
Moody's rates Illinois just one notch above junk largely due to the state's finances and
malgovernance.
Moody's says new revenue likely will be required to achieve stability, as you'd expect,
because rating agencies love higher taxes. But for the first time, the agency has included
outmigration among its top-three credit concerns. That matters because Pritzker's number one
prescription to "fix" Illinois is tax hikes, something that's sure to accelerate Illinois'
out-migration trend and further erode the state's tax base.
---------------
Moody's is politely explaining that they are 180 deg out of cycle, the negotiation has
been finished, in the past.
Is the new gov confused or is he consciously doing the crawl back step? Whatever, the gov
will be confused no longer, he is clearly in crawl back stage, the next chapter in
bankruptcy.
It is now all about deciding which industry stays and which goes; a re-agglomeration, the
second step of the Hicksonian jump, shift expectations operator; you have to move stuff
around according to the agreement.
"If America Turns to Fascism, Populism Will Be at Its Heart."
Several months ago, I wrote a book review (see Internet Review of Books and my review of
"Fascism: Why Not Here?" by Brian E. Fogarty) about a political history that has made me think
ever since. (Title quote is taken from Fogarty's excellent book http://internetreviewofbooks.com/mar10/fascism.html
.)
Lately, I keep seeing similar ideas popping up--mostly in response to the anti-intellectual,
folksy, populist appeal of people such as Sarah Palin and up-and-coming Tea Party types.
Aw, heck, who couldn't appreciate drinkin' a beer with a politician? That's what we want
from those guys n' gals. We don't want them to be smarter than us or anythin', right? You
betcha.
Call me a snob (and I've been called a "snotty liberal elitist," lately, which I thought was
very funny, actually, and it made me laugh an elitist snort of triumph); I really don't
care.
I demand more; I demand wisdom, good ideas, and a wide understanding of international
politics as well as history; I demand people who can speak without dropping their g's (because
that slangy, folksy gibberish just sounds, frankly, slow).
Working with profoundly gifted kids (as I like to do) is like attending the smartest
cocktail party you were ever invited to--sans cocktails. It's a tennis match of fascinating
ideas about absolutely everything; it makes me hopeful for the future, and it challenges and
amuses me at the same time.
I don't feel that way when I watch any of these populist politicians on the news. Rather, I
feel a sinking, ill feeling...could people really be that stupid? Apparently, yes, in some
cases, they are.
But I actually think there's a way out: it boils down to education and spreading the
truth.
Jon Meacham's editorial this week in NEWSWEEK (7/12/2010, "The Right Kind of American
Populism") speaks to exactly the same issues.
He explains how "...in the age of [Andrew] Jackson, American populism was about money;
later, in the age of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, it became more about culture...Given the
clinical economic and political facts of the hour, we should be living through a Jacksonian era
of hostility to the rich and the well connected. Those whom Jackson called "the humble members
of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers" ought to be generating substantial political
pressure to exact reparations from, and impose severe new regulations on, the plutocratic
few...And yet the pitchforks are being brandished not to encourage government to curb the
excesses of the elite but to warn the citizenry that the government has turned into a
socialistic threat to free enterprise."
Meacham (with whom I do not always agree) nailed it, I think; the bottom line is that the
"humble members" of society have been inundated with propaganda and fear-mongering lies by the
very people who profit by keeping them down.
Will they wake up and realize it and fight back (I mean "fight" in a good way--by
voting)?
Will government prove its viability by doing good for the people--finally?
Maybe if that happens--if people let it happen--they will finally wake up and realize who's
really been keeping them poor and oppressed and away from the American Dream.
Maybe it's the "plutocratic few," but maybe it's also themselves.
This 20 year old satire looks like it was written yesterday...
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives ..."
"... Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products. ..."
"... condemned TV-exercise-show personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced to exercise for centuries on end ..."
"... In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of verbal abuse ..."
"... "In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a goddamn woman ever since." ..."
After nearly four years of construction at an estimated cost of 750 million souls,
Corpadverticus, the new 10th circle of Hell, finally opened its doors Monday.
Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell
The Blockbuster Video-sponsored circle, located in Nether Hell between the former eighth and
ninth levels of Malebolge and Cocytus, is expected to greatly alleviate the overcrowding
problems that have plagued the infernal underworld in recent years. The circle is the first
added to Hell in its countless-millennia history.
"A nightmarishly large glut of condemned spirits in recent years necessitated the expansion
of Hell," inferno spokesperson Antedeus said. "The traditional nine-tiered system had grown
insufficient to accommodate the exponentially rising numbers of Hellbound."
Adding to the need for expansion, Antedeus said, was the fact that a majority of the new
arrivals possessed souls far more evil than the original nine circles were equipped to handle.
"Demographers, advertising executives, tobacco lobbyists, monopoly-law experts retained by
major corporations, and creators of office-based sitcoms–these new arrivals represent a
wave of spiritual decay and horror the likes of which Hell has never before seen," Antedeus
said.
Despite the need for expansion, the plan faced considerable resistance, largely due to the
considerable costs of insuring construction projects within the Kingdom Of Lies. Opposition
also came from Hell purists concerned about the detrimental effect a tenth level would have on
the intricate numerology of Hell's meticulously arranged allegorical structure. In 1994,
however, funding was finally secured in a deal brokered between Blockbuster CEO Wayne Huizenga
and Satan himself.
Prior to the construction of the tenth circle, many among the new wave of sinners had been
placed in such circles as Hoarders and Squanderers, Sowers of Discord, Flatterers and Seducers,
Violent Against Art, and Hypocrites. Hell authorities, however, say that the new level, the
Circle of Total Bastards, located at the site of the former Well of Giants just above the
Frozen Lake at Hell's center, better suits their insidious brand of evil.
Frigax The Vile, a leading demonic presence, is one of the most vocal supporters of the new
circle.
" In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners
flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales
representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives
rollerblading and talking on miniaturized cell-phones at the same time. But now, we've finally
got the sort of top-notch Pits of Doom necessary to give such repellent abominations the
quality boilings they deserve."
Pausing to tear off the limbs of an Access Hollywood host, Frigax added, "We're all
tremendously excited about the many brand-new forms of torture and eternal pain this new
level's state-of-the-art facilities will make possible."
Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending
Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of
Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products.
The Circle also features a Hall of Aerobics, where condemned TV-exercise-show
personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced
to exercise for centuries on end , covered in vomit and prodded with the distended ribs of
skeletal, anorexic demons, accompanied by an unending, ear-splittingly loud dance-remix version
of the 1988 Rick Astley hit "Together Forever."
In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated
Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of
verbal abuse from their former subservients as crows descend from trees to peck at their
eyes. In one of the deepest and most profane portions of the circle, unspeakable acts are said
to be committed with a mail-order Roly-Kit.
"In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told
reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those
condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the
crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right
people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the
Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and
transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a
goddamn woman ever since."
His face contorted in the Misery of the Damned, a Disney lawyer said: "It's hell
here–there are no executive lounges, I can't get any decent risotto, and the suit I have
to wear is a cheap Brooks Brothers knock-off. I'm beeped every 30 seconds, and there's no way
to return the calls. Plus, I'm being boiled upside down in lard while jackals gnaw at the soles
of my feet. If I could just reach the fax machine on that nearby rock, I could contact some
well-placed associates and work something out, but it's just out of my grasp, and it's out of
ink and constantly blinking the message, 'Replace Toner Cartridge, Replace Toner Cartridge,
Replace Toner Cartridge.'"
He then resumed screaming in agony.
Grogar The Malefic, a Captain in Hell's elite Demon Corps and supervisor in charge of
admissions for the new circle, said Hell's future looks bright, thanks to the new circle.
"Things are definitely looking up," Grogar said. "We're now far better equipped, and we're
ready to take on the most Unholy Atrocities humanity has to offer."
"We're really on the grow down here," Grogar added. "This is an exciting time to be in
Hell."
What we are experiencing today is the worst and most extreme form of predatory and parasitic
financialised monopoly crony capitalism (crapitalism), allied with blatant aggressive
jingoistic militarism and the crudest form of imperialist exploitation.
I'm not sure even Marx envisaged anything this corrupt and degraded. This must be the
terminal stage of crapitalism's death throes. It can only end in war and complete
collapse.
It comes as no surprise to see the Faux Left Blairite Backstabbers and the
Oh-So-Right-On-Politically-Correct Trudeau Regime leading the charge for a bog standard
Pinochet style US coup behind the likes of Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and recycled neocon war
criminal and death squad queen Abrams.
They have taken off the mask and showed their true colours. The final outcome is uncertain
but the fall out will extend way beyond Venezuela. It may well sound the death knell of our
current system.
Isn't it amazing how the scum of the Earth arrange to get into high places? I am totally
outraged that Canada had anything to do with fostering a coup in Venezuela! It disturbs my
sense of national sovereignty and I rue the day that Trudeau made this apostosy a member of
his cabinet. What a poor choice for a Minister of Foreign Affairs! Just consider Canada's
recent problems with Saudi Arabia, the Meng problem with /China, the chastising of Russia
because it protected its sole military base on the Black Sea and now this foolish
interference in Venezuela's internal affairs brought on by US sanctions. Canada's stupidity
in all these matters makes me bilious.
Trudeau made Soros' protege Chrystia Freeland part of his cabinet because it was on that
condition that Soros generously funded and otherwise caused Trudeau's election bid to be well
supported. Billionaires make "democratic" politics so very easy. Canadians, naive,
unquestioning, insouciant, swayed by very well rewarded PR & media and with the
transacted aquiesence of the other two warmongering neoliberal parties (Conservative &
NDP) voted their hopes and Justin Trudeau to PM. But positioning Chrystia Freeland on the
global stage and creating a neoliberal path to imperious fascist globalization is the
assigned purpose of the swish disposable Canadian Dauphin. Harper played his Soros assigned
role, Trudeau will play his and Chrystia hers and they, as quislings all, will exit rewarded
as pet functionaries of Soros and his overly entitled ilk. We authorize Soros by wishing
& believing this coup is at worst simply a flawed democracy. Ukraine was a Soros coup,
Canada is a Soros coup and Venezuela is a Soros coup. All very, very profitable. Don't look,
this is how omelettes are made. Our political parties are always for rent by billionaires
–that is the main function of political parties. Being corrupt is a design
characteristic not a flaw. Buying political parties in supposed democracies is easier, less
risky and much more profitable than stealing candy from babies. Canada is undefended against
billionaires, invest here, concentrated public assets and resources are available and the
quaint people are professionally deactivated. m\\
Nations should explore better system to break US hegemony
"The US dollar is used for the international oil and gas trade and a wide part of global
trade. This gives the US an exorbitant privilege to sanction countries it opposes.
..
The latest sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company aim to cut off source of foreign
currency of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro's government and eventually force him to step
down.
..
A new mechanism should be devised to thwart such a vicious circle"
My question is really about those at the top of the power pyramid (those few hundred
families who own the controling share of the wealth of the world) -- those who position
idiots like Bolton to do their work, do they comprehend 'exergy' decline ?
If we can, then can they not? I agree with Parenti that they are not
'somnambulists'. They are strategists looking out for their own interests, and that means
scrutinising trends in political movements, culture, technology and, well, just about
everything. I find it hard, the idea that all these people -- people who have seen their
businesses shaped by resource discovery, exploitation and then depletion, have no firm grasp
on the realities of dwindling returns on energy.
The models were drawn up 47 years ago. I think that some of them at least, do
understand that economic growth is coming to a halt, and have understood for decades. If true
then they are planning that transition in their favour.
These hard to swallow facts about oil are still on the far fringes of any political
conversation. The neoliberal cultists are deaf to them for obvious reasons; the socialist
idealists believe that a 'New Deal' can lead us off the death train, but mostly ignore the
intractable relationship between energy decline and financial problems; even the anarchists
want their work free utopia run by robots and AI but stop short of asking whether solar
panels and wind turbines can actually provide the power for all that tech. It's the news that
nobody wants to think about, but which they will be forced to thinking about in the very near
future.
The Twitter feed 'Limits to Growth' has less than 800 followers (excellent though it
is).
I do not want to get into the mind of the Walrus of Death Bolton! I do not want to know
what he does, as he does. But at lower levels of government, and corporatism, there is an
awareness of surplus energy economics. And as Nafeez has also pointed out, the military (the
Pentagon) are taking an interest. And though it could rapidly change, who really appreciates
the nuances of EROEI? I'm guessing at less than a single percent of all populations? And how
many include its effects in a integrated political sense?
Its appreciation is sporadic: ranging from tech-utopia hopium to a defeated fatalism of
the inevitability of collapse. Unless and until people want to face the harshness of the
reality that capitalism has created: we are going to be involved in a marginal analysis.
There are very few people who have realised that capitalism is long dead.
Dr Tim Morgan estimates that world capitalism has conservatively had $140tn in stimulus
since 2008 -- without stimulating anything or reviving it at all. In fact, that amounts to
the greatest robbery in history -- the theft of the future. Inasmuch as they can, those
unrepayable debts -- transferred to inflate the parasitic assets of capitalists -- will be
socialised. Except they cannot be. Not without surplus energy.
Brexit, gilets jaunes, Venezuela, unending crises in MENA, China's economic slowdown, etc
-- all linked by EROEI.
It is a common socio-politico-economic energy nexus -- but linked together by whom? And
the emergent surplus energy-mind-environmental ecology nexus? All the information is
available. The formation of a new political manifesto started in the 1960s with the New Left
but it seems to have been in stasis since. Perhaps this might stimulate the conversation.
According to Nate Hagens: there is 4.5 years of human muscle power leveraged by each
barrel of oil. We are all going to be working for a very long time to pay back the debts
the possessing classes have built up for us -- with absolutely no marginal utility for
ourselves.
We are subsidising our own voluntary slavery unless we develop an emergent ecosocialist
and ecosophical alternative to carbon capitalism. We cannot expect paleoconservative carbon
relics like Bolton -- or anyone else -- to do it for us. The current political landscape is
dominated by a hierarchical, vested interest, carbon aristocracy. We can't expect that to
change for our benefit any time ever. Expect the opposite.
Graeber has a point, though. We could already have a post-scarcity, post-production society
but for the egregious maldistribution of resources and employment. Andre Gorz said as much 50
years ago (Critique of Economic Reason). Why do we organise around production: it makes no
sense but for the relations of production are, and remain, the relations of hierarchical
rule. So long as we assign value to a human life on the basis of meritocratic productivity --
we will have dehumanisation, marginalisation, and subjugation (haves and have nots). So why
not organisation around care, freedom and play?
Such a solution would require the transversalistion of society and not-full-employment: so
that no part of the system is subordinate, and no part is privileged. All systems and
sub-ordinate (care) systems would be co-equal, of corresponding value and worth. So, without
invoking EROEI, that would go a long way to solve our exergy, waste, pollution, and
inequality problems. It is the profligate, unproductive superstructure: supporting rentier,
surplus energy accumulating, profit-seeking suprasocieties -- that squanders our excess
energy and puts expansive spatio-temporal pressures on already stretched biophysical
ecological systems that engenders potential collapse. It is their -- the possessing classes
-- assets that are being inflated, at our environmental expense. When it comes to
survivability, we cannot afford a parasitic globalised superstructure draining the host --
the ecologically productive base. Without the over-accumulation, overconsumption, and wastage
(the accursed share) associated with the superstructure of the advanced economies -- and
their cultural, credit, military imperialisms I expect we could live quite well. Without the
pressures of globalised transportation networks, and unnecessary military budgets -- the
pressure on oil is minimised. It could be used for the 1001 other uses it has, rather than
fuelling Saudi Eurofighters bombing Yemeni schoolchildren, for instance. The surplus energy
could be used to educate, clothe and feed them instead. That would be a better use of
resources, for sure.
If we took stock of what we really have, and what we really are -- a form of spiritual
neo-self-sufficiency, augmented and extended into co-mutual care and freedom valorising
ecologies we wouldn't need to chase the perceived loss all over the globe, killing everything
that moves. The solutions are not hard, they are normative, once we are shocked out of this
awful near-life trance state of separationism. Thanks for the link.
It seems to me that there are two parallel arguments going on.
One is about social organisation, attitudes towards and policies determining work, money,
paid employment, technological development and the distribution of weath.
The other is fundamentally based on the laws of thermodynamics and concerns resource limits,
energy surpluses, the role of 'stored sunlight' in producing things and doing work for each
other, pollution and projections about these into the future.
I am surprised that Graeber (just as an example) seems to basically ignore the second of
these even though he clearly is an incisive thinker and makes good points about the first. It
is taken as a given that, theoretically at least, human civilisation could re-organise around
a new ethic, transform the economy into a 'caring economy', re-structure money, government
and do away with militarism. In terms of what to do now, as an individual, what choices to
make, it is disconcerting to me when talk of these ideals seems to ignore those latter
questions about overshoot.
I wonder if the egalitarian nature of much of indiginous North American society was
inescapably bound with the realities of a low population density, low technology,
intimate relationship with the natural world and a culture completely steeped in reverence
for Mother Earth.
The talk I hear from Bastani or Graeber along the lines of 'we could be flying around in jet
packs on the moon, if only society was organised sensibly' rings hollow to me.
Welcome to my world! Apart from as a managerial tool, systems thinking has yet to catch on
in the wider population. According to reductive materialism: there are two unlinked
arguments. According to Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) there is only one integrated argument --
with two inter-connected correlative aspects. We can only organise around what we can
energetically afford. Consequently, we cannot organise around what we cannot afford -- that
is, global industrialised production with a supervenient elitist superstructure.
Let's face it : ethical arguments carry little weight against organisation around
hierarchical rule. The current talk of an ethical capitalism -- in mixed economies with
'commons' elements -- is an appeasement. and distractional to the gathering and ineluctable
reality.
The current (2012) EROI for the UK is 6.2:1 -- barely above the 'energy cliff' of 5:1. The
GDP 'growth' and bullshit jobs are funded by monetised debt (we borrow around £5 to
make every £1 -- from Tim Morgan's SEEDS). From the Earth Overshoot Day website: the UK
is in economic overshoot from May 8th onward.
These are indicators that we will not be "flying jetpacks on the moon": even if we
reorganise. Everyone, and I mean everyone, will have to make do with less. A lot less.
Everything would have to be localised and sustainable. Production would be minimised, and not
at all full. Two major systems of production -- food (agroecology) and energy -- would have
to be sustainable and self-sovereign. And financialisation and the rentier, service economy?
Now you can see why no one, not even Dave the crypto-anarchist, is talking about reality.
Elitism, establishment and entitlement do not figure in an equitable future. We can't afford
it, energetically or ethically.
So when will the debate move on? Not any time the populace is bought into ideational
deferred prosperity. All the time that EROEI is ignored as the fundamental concept governing
dwindling prosperity -- no one, and I mean no one, will be talking about a minimal surplus
energy future. The magic realism is that the economic affordances of cheap oil (unsustainably
mimicked by debt-funding) will return sometime, somehow (the technocratic superfix). The
aporia is that the longer the delay, the less surplus energy we will have available to
utilise. Something like the Green New Deal -- that has been proposed for around two decades
now -- may give us some quality of life to sustain. Pseudo-talk of a Customs Union, 'clean'
coal, and nuclear power, will not.
An integrated reality -- along the model of Guattari's 'Three Ecologies' -- of mind,
economy, and environment is well, we are not alone, but we are ahead of the curve. The other
cultural aporia is that we need to implement such vision now. Actually, about thirty years
ago but let's not get depressive!
We are going to need that cooperative organisation around care and freedom just to get
through the coming century.
As mentioned elsewhere here, Venezualan oil deposits are not all that the hype cracks them up
to be. They are mostly oil sands that produce little in the way of net energy gain after the
lengthy process of extraction.The Venezuala drama is about the empire crushing democracy
(i.e. socialism), not oil. [not that this detracts from Kit's essential point in the
article].
The Left (as well as the Right), by and large have not come to terms with the realities of
the decline in net surplus energy that is unfolding around the world and driving the
political changes that we see. So they still view geopolitics in terms of the oil economy of
pre-2008.
The productive economies of Europe are falling apart (check Steve Keen's latest on Max and
Stacy -- although even i he doesn't delve into the energy decline aspect).
The carbon density of the global economy has not changed in the 27 years since the founding
of the UNFCCC.
The Peak Oil phenomenon was oversimplified, misrepresented and misunderstood as a simple
turning point in overall oil production. In truth it was a turning point in energy
surplus.
I predict that by the end of this or next year, everyone will be talking about ERoEI.
Everyone will realise that there is no way out of this predicament. Maybe there are ways to
lessen the catastrophe, but no way to avert it. This will change the conversation, and even
change what 'politics' means (i.e. you cannot campaign on a 'new start' or a 'better,
brighter future' if everyone knows that that physically cannot happen).
Everyone will understand that their civilisation is collapsing.
Does Bolton understand this?
If you were referring to my earlier comments about Venezuelan extra heavy crude: it's
still massively about the oil. The current carbon capitalist world system does not understand
surplus energy or EROEI, as it is so fixated on maximal short term returns for shareholders.
It can't comprehend that their entire business model is unsustainable and self cannibalising.
Which is bad for us: because carbon net-energy (exergy) economics it is foundational to all
civilisation. The ignorance of it and subsequent environmental and social convergence crises
threatens the systemic failure of our entire civilisation. The Venezuelan crisis affects us
all: and is symptomatic of a decline in cheap oil due to rapidly falling EROEI.
I can't find the EROEI specifically for Venezuelan heavy oil: but it is only slightly more
viscous than bitumen -- which has an EROEI of 3:1. Let's call it 4:1: the same as other tight
oils and shale. Anything less than 5:1 is more or less an energy sink: with virtually no net
energy left for society. The minimum EROEI for societal needs is 11:1. Does Bolton understand
this? Francis hit the nail on the head there.
Do any of our leaders? No. If they did, a transition to decentralisation would be well
under way. Globalised supply chains are systemically threatened and fragile. A globalised
economy is spectacularly vulnerable. Especially a debt-ridden one. Which way are our leaders
trying to take us? At what point will humanity realise we are following clueless Pied Pipers
off the Seneca Cliff -- into globalised energy oblivion?
The rapid investment -- not in a post-carbon transition -- but in increased
militarisation, and resource and market driven aggressive foreign intervention policies
reveal the mindset of insanity. As people come to understand the energy basis of the world
crisis: the fact of permanent austerity and increased pauperisation looms large. What will
the outcome be when an armed nuclear madhouse becomes increasingly protectionsist of their
dwindling share? Too alarmist, perhaps? Let's play pretend that we can plant a few trees and
captive breed a few rhinos and it will all be fine. BAU?
The world runs on cheap oil: our socio-politico-economic expectations of progress depend
on it. Which means that the modern human mind is, in effect, a thought-process predicated on
cheap oil. Oleum ergo sum? Apart from the Middle East: we are already past the point where
oil is a liability, not a viability. Debt funding its extraction, selling below the cost of
production -- both assume the continual expansion of global GDP. Oil is a highly subsidised
-- with our surplus socialisation capital -- negative asset. We foot the bill. A bill that
EROEI predicts will keep on rising. At what point do we realise this? Or do we live in hopium
of a return to historical prosperity? Or hang on the every word of the populist magic realism
demagogue who promises a future social utopia?
EROEI = Energy Returned on Energy Invested (also known as EROI = Energy Return on Investment)
EROEI refers to the amount of usable energy that can be extracted from a resource compared
to the amount of energy (usually considered to come from the same resource) used to extract
it. It's calculated by dividing the amount of energy obtained from a source by the amount of
energy needed to get it out.
An EROEI of 1:1 means that the amount of usable energy that a resource generates is the
same as the amount of energy that went into getting it out. A resource with an EROEI of 1:1
or anything less isn't considered a viable resource if it delivers the same or less energy
than what was invested in it. A viable resource is one with an EROEI of at least 3:1.
The concept of EROEI assumes that the energy needed to get more energy out of a resource
is the same as the extracted energy ie you need oil to extract oil or you need electricity to
extract electricity. In real life, you often need another source of energy to extract energy
eg in some countries, to extract electricity, you need to burn coal, and in other countries,
to extract electricity you need to build dams on rivers. So comparing the EROEI of
electricity extraction across different countries will be difficult because you have to
consider how and where they're generating electricity and factor in the opportunity costs
involved (that is, what the coal or the water or other energy source -- like solar or wind
energy -- could have been used for instead of electricity generation).
That is probably why EROEI is used mainly in the context of oil or natural gas
extraction.
There was one leading US politician whose name escapes me for the moment. When Chavez was
president, he complained bitterly that Venezuela's oil wealth was being squandered on things
like healthcare, education, literacy and welfare. It could have been given instead to hard
pressed Wall Street fund managers in bigger bonuses. He wasn't being ironic.
"Everything (to the contrary) is propaganda"
Yes, they will never stop. Just think of this brand-new propaganda lie of Maduro allegedly
preventing aid shipment to come into Venezuela. See BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47143492
: " Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing ahead of a delivery arranged by
opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself interim president ".
Notice the word " ahead " in this sentence. This word appears because there was
never a " delivery " (truck) with aid shipment at the bridge!
The Venezuelan government ("Maduro") blocked the bridge only because of war-threatening
Columbia and USA.
If you want to send aid shipment to Venezuela you can send as much as you want anytime. Of
course you have to respect the regulations of the custom (like in every other country!). But
that's all!
Whets foul with this story?
Well, this aid " delivery " cannot have been collected in Colombia – and thus
being taken away from the people of Colombia, who are much poorer than the people of
Venezuela. So it would have to come from other country (USA, Europe, China, Japan). And then
you would not land this aid shipment in Columbia (a harbour, an airport), drive it, in
hot-humid air, through half of Colombia to the border crossing bridge of Cúcuta. Then
cross the bridge and then drive it through half of Venezuela!
Instead aid shipments for Venezuela would be landed directly in Venezuela – in an
Venezuelan harbour or airport.
Intelligence agencies like CIA is a threat to "normal" societies as they tend to acquire
power with time and tail start wagging the dog. Mechanism of control are usually subverted and
considerable part of their activities is dome without informing "supervisory" structures.
In the USA sometimes CIA monitor Congress communications and tries to coerce them like was the case when the torture program was revealed. In other words intelligence agencies are the core
neofascist structures in modern society and as such represent a distinct danger.
Notable quotes:
"... Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. ..."
"... The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad. ..."
"... Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and esteem themselves. But they are pimps. ..."
"... Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the devil is and that he must be fought. ..."
"... The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. ..."
"... Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth? ..."
...The Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations:
weltanschauungskrieg -- "world view warfare." As good students, they had learned many
tricks of the trade from their American teachers, including Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward
Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for the United States during World War I and
had subsequently started the public relations industry in New York City, an industry whose
raison d'etre from the start was to serve the interests of the elites in manipulating the
public mind.
In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological
warfare," a phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration
of U.S. propaganda, then and now. Of course, the American propaganda apparatus was just then
getting started on an enterprise that has become the epitome of successful world view warfare
programs, a colossal beast whose tentacles have spread to every corner of the globe and whose
fabrications have nestled deep within the psyches of many hundreds of millions of Americans and
people around the world. And true to form in this circle game of friends helping friends, this
propaganda program was ably assisted after WW II by all the Nazis secreted into the U.S.
("Operation Paperclip") by Allen Dulles and his henchmen in the OSS and then the CIA to make
sure the U.S. had operatives to carry on the Nazi legacy (see David Talbot's The Devil's
Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and The Rise of America's Secret Government , an
extraordinary book that will make your skin crawl with disgust).
This went along quite smoothly until some people started to question the Warren Commission's
JFK assassination story. The CIA then went on the offensive in 1967 and put out the word to all
its people in the agency and throughout the media and academia to use the phrase "conspiracy
theory" to ridicule these skeptics, which they have done up until the present day. This secret
document -- CIA Dispatch
1035-960 -- was a propaganda success for many decades, marginalizing those researchers and
writers who were uncovering the truth about not just President Kennedy's murder by the national
security state, but those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Today, the tide
is turning on this score, as recently more and more Americans are fed up with the lies and are
demanding that the truth be told. Even the
Washington Post is noting this, and it is a wave of opposition that will only grow.
The CIA Exposed -- Partially
But back in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, some covert propaganda programs run by the CIA
were "exposed." First, the Agency's sponsorship of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, through
which it used magazines, prominent writers, academics, et al. to spread propaganda during the
Cold War, was uncovered. This was an era when Americans read serious literary books, writers
and intellectuals had a certain cachet, and popular culture had not yet stupefied Americans.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary
and intellectual elites. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book,
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters , and Joel Whitney
followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, with
particular emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris
Review.
Then in 1975 the Church Committee hearings resulted in the exposure of abuses by the CIA,
NSA, FBI, etc. In 1977 Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire -- "The CIA and the
Media" -- naming names of journalists and publications ( TheNew York Times, CBS
, etc.) that worked with and for the CIA in propagandizing the American people and the rest of
the world. (Conveniently, this article can be read on the CIA's website since presumably the
agency has come clean, or, if you are the suspicious type, or maybe a conspiracy theorist, it
is covering its deeper tracks with a "limited hangout," defined by former CIA agent Victor
Marchetti, who went rogue, as "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the
clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely
on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting -- sometimes even
volunteering -- some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts
in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never
thinks to pursue the matter further.")
Confess and Move On
By the late 1970s, it seemed as if the CIA had been caught in flagrante delicto and
disgraced, had confessed its sins, done penance, and resolved to go and sin no more. Seeming,
however, is the nature of the CIA's game. Organized criminals learn to adapt to the changing
times, and that is exactly what the intelligence operatives did. Since the major revelations of
the late sixties and seventies -- MKUltra, engineered coups all around the world,
assassinations of foreign leaders, spying on Americans, etc. -- no major program of propaganda
has been exposed in the mainstream media. Revealing books about certain CIA programs have been
written -- e.g. Douglas Valentine's important The Phoenix Program being one -- and
dissenting writers, journalists, researchers, and whistleblowers (Robert Parry, Gary Webb,
Julian Assange, James W. Douglass, David Ray Griffin, Edward Snowden, et al.) have connected
the U.S. intelligence services to dirty deeds and specific actions, such as the American
engineered coup d'état in Ukraine in 2013-14, electronic spying, and the attacks of
September 11, 2001.
But the propaganda has for the most part continued unabated at a powerful and esoteric
cultural level, while illegal and criminal actions are carried out throughout the world in the
most blatant manner imaginable, as if to say fuck you openly while insidiously infecting the
general population through the mass electronic screen culture that has relegated intellectual
and literary culture to a tiny minority.
Planning Ahead
Let me explain what I think has been happening.
Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed
to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing,
and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm
of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized
criminals. They have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are
deeply involved in the drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own
propaganda network in conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations.
The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes
are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the
CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence
to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is
propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.
Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who
pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and
independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps
analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different
fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies,
linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent
but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But
they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often
belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and
esteem themselves. But they are pimps.
... ... ...
Methods of Propaganda
Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as
well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that
you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer
resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the
propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event
bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been
so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the
devil is and that he must be fought.
The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and
weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the
victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight
suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. The gun
goes off, and the entranced one can't remember why (see: Sirhan Sirhan). This is the goal of
mass hypnotization through long-term propaganda: confusion, memory loss, and automatic reaction
to suggestion.
Intelligence Pimps and Liquid Screen Culture
When the CIA's dirty tricks were made public in the 1970s, it is not hard to imagine that
the intellectual pimps who do their long-range thinking were asked to go back to the drawing
board and paint a picture of the coming decades and how business as usual could be conducted
without further embarrassment. By that time it had become clear that intellectual or high
culture was being swallowed by mass culture and the future belonged to electronic screen
culture and images, not words. What has come to be called "postmodernity" ensued, or what the
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls "liquid modernity" and Guy Debord "the society of the
spectacle." Such developments, rooted in what Frederic Jameson has termed "the cultural logic
of late capitalism," have resulted in the fragmentation of social and personal life into
pointillistic moving pictures whose dots form incoherent images that sow mass confusion and do
not cohere.
... ... ...
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/
But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of
their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these
financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. They
have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are deeply involved in the
drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own propaganda network in
conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations. The corporate mass
media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these
media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the
media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the
nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is
propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.
Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I
mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working
for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult
in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth?
Under "The CIA Exposed" could have mentioned Philip Agee's "Inside the Company" as he was the
Edward Snowden of his day.
Interestingly, CIA agent Miles Copeland, Jr., the father of the drummer of the British
band "The Police", said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be
published anywhere" and that it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or
British 'case officer' operates
" Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for
the United States during World War I and had subsequently started the public relations
industry in New York City, an industry whose raison d'etre from the start was to serve the
interests of the elites in manipulating the public mind.
In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological warfare," a
phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration of U.S.
propaganda, then and now."
The Yank propaganda machine always was an alliance between WASP Elites and Jews. Always.
The Yank WASPs knew that Brit and British Commonwealth WASPs had done the same thing: make
alliance to rule the world, which featured – not a bug but a feature – new ways
to use psy ops to pervert the vast majority of white Christians they ruled.
Until that is understood, which means accepting that WASP culture itself is a problem as
big as Jews and Jewish culture, all that is done in opposition to all that is horrendously
wrong today is wasted time and energy.
@DESERT
FOX The CIA is a British creation, just like Israel's Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General
Intelligence Presidency.
The CIA is a pure WASP Elite creation. It always has served the interests of the WASP
Elite, in the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere as well the US. And the CIA always has
served the interests of Jews and Israel, because that makes perfect sense for WASP culture,
which was formed fully, completed, by the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.
Judaizing heresy guarantees pro-Jewish politics and culture.
Sean, Who else, is here first with the CIA line, "CIA works for the president!" CIA
shoehorned that into the Pike Committee report right after Don Gregg visited the committees
and gave them an ultimatum: back off or it's martial law.
Then Sean mouths a bit of bureaucratic bafflegab about feasibility.
The feasibility of CIA crime is a product of CIA impunity. So next Sean feeds you more CIA
boilerplate by trying to pathologize anyone who's aware of CIA impunity through formal legal
pretexts in municipal law. John Bolton, Trump's CIA ventriloquist, had one prime directive as
unauthorized UN ambassador: remove any reference to impunity from the Summit Outcome
Document. To that end he submitted 600+ NeoSoviet amendments to paralyze the drafting
process.
That's how touchy CIA is about its impunity. CIA is the state, with illegal absolute
sovereignty because they can kill you or torture you and get away with it.
If you're John Kennedy, if you're Robert Kennedy, if you're Dag Hammarskjöld, if
you're Judge Robert Vance. No matter who you are.
"... The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel ..."
"... Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy ..."
"... Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war ..."
"... So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of the West rushed to follow the decision. ..."
"... Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance. ..."
Even before the 2016 US presidential election, this blog supported that Donald Trump is
apure sample of neoliberal barbarism . Many almost laughed at this perception because Trump was being already promoted,
more or less, as the 'terminator' of the neoliberal establishment. And many people, especially in the US, tired from the economic
disasters, the growing inequality and the endless wars, were anxious to believe that this was indeed his special mission.
Right after the elections, we supported that the
US establishment
gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in power, against the only candidate that the same
establishment identified as a real threat: Bernie Sanders.
In 2017 , Trump bombed Syria for the first time, resembling the lies that led us to the Iraq war disaster. Despite the fact that
the US Tomahawk missile attack had zero value in operational level (the United States allegedly warned Russia and Syria, while the
targeted airport was operating normally just hours after the attack), Trump sent a clear message to the US deep state that he is
prepared to meet all its demands - and especially the escalation of the confrontation with Russia.
Indeed, a year later, Trump built a pro-war team that includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish neocons. And then, he ordered a
second airstrike against Syria, together with his neocolonial friends.
In the middle of all this 'orgy' of pro-establishment moves, Trump offered a controversial withdrawal of US forces from Syria
and Afghanistan to save whatever was possible from his 'anti-interventionist' profile. And it was indeed a highly controversial action
with very little value, considering all these US military bases that are still fully operational in the broader Middle East and beyond.
Not to mention the various ways through which the US intervenes in the area (training proxies, equip them with heavy weapons, supporting
the Saudis and contribute to war crimes in Yemen, etc.)
And then , after this very short break, Trump returned to 'business as usual' to satisfy the neoliberal establishment with a 'glorious'
record. He achieved a 35-day government shutdown, which is the
"longest shutdown in US history"
.
Trump conducted the longest experiment on neoliberals' ultimate goal: abolishing the annoying presence of the state. And this
was just a taste of what Trump is willing to do in order to satisfy all neoliberals' wet dreams.
And now, we have the Venezuela issue. Since Hugo Chavez nationalized PDVSA, the central oil and natural gas company, the US empire
launched a fierce economic war against the country. Yet, while all previous US administrations were trying to replace legitimate
governments with their puppets as much silently as possible through slow-motion coup operations, Trump has no problem to do it in
plain sight.
And perhaps the best proof for that is a statement by one of the most warmongering figures of the neocon/neoliberal cabal, hired
by Trump . As John Bolton cynically and openly
admitted recently,
" It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and
produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. "
Therefore, one should be very naive of course to believe that the Western imperialist gang seriously cares about the Venezuelan
people and especially the poor. Here are three basic reasons behind the open US intervention in Venezuela:
The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel, as well as the
great untapped
natural resources , particularly gold (mostly for the Canadian companies).
Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy, which is mainly funded by
the oil production. The imperialists know that they must interrupt the path of Venezuela to real Socialism by force if necessary.
Neoliberalism must prevail by all means for the benefit of the big banks and corporations.
Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability
to minimize the effects of the economic war. The country may find an alternative to escape the Western sanctions in order to fund
its social programs for the benefit of the people. And, of course, the West will never accept the exploitation of the Venezuelan
resources by the Sino-Russian bloc.
So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of
the West rushed to follow the decision.
This is something we have never seen before. The 'liberal democracies' of the West - only by name - immediately, uncritically
and without hesitation jumped on the same boat with Trump towards this outrageously undemocratic action. They recognized Washington's
puppet as the legitimate president of a third country. A man that was never elected by the Venezuelan people and has very low popularity
in the country. Even worse, the EU parliament
approved this action
, killing any last remnants of democracy in the Union.
Yet, it seems that the US is finding increasingly difficult to force many countries to align with its agenda. Even some European
countries took some distance from the attempted constitutional coup, with Italy even
trying to
veto EU's decision to recognize Guaido.
Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes
the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism
with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and
ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance.
This unprecedented action by the Western neoliberal powers to recognize Guaido is a serious sign that neoliberalism returns to
its roots and slips towards fascism. It appears now that this is the only way to maintain some level of power.
As neocolonial empire of it s own (albeit the one that is vassal of the USA) yes it does,
especially in xUSSR state where EU wants to capture the makets. Ukraine is a nice example
here.
Does the European Union generate external instability?
The historic achievement of peace within a Europe of universal norms is belied by the external
instability engendered by violent and incoherent interventions.
By Branko Milanovic
The European Union is justly admired for making war among its members impossible. This is no
small achievement in a continent which was in a state of semi-permanent warfare for the past
two millennia.
It is not only that we cannot even imagine the usual 19th and 20th century antagonists, such
as France and Germany, going to war ever again. The same is true of other, lesser-known
animosities which have led periodically to bloodlettings: between Poles and Germans, Hungarians
and Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians. Unthinkable is also the idea that the United Kingdom and
Spain could end up, regarding Gibraltar, in a reprise of the Falklands/Malvinas war.
Destabilised
But creating geopolitical stability internally has not, during the last two decades, been
followed by external geopolitical stability along the fringes of the union. Most of the big EU
member states (UK, Poland, Italy, Spain) participated, often eagerly, in Operation Iraqi
Freedom, which led to the deaths of some half a million people, destabilised the middle east
even further and produced Islamic State.
Then, seemingly not having learned from this fiasco, France and Italy spearheaded another
regime change, this time in Libya. It ended in anarchy, another civil war, two competing
governments and a UN Security Council deadlocked for years to come -- since it is clear that
China and Russia will not in the foreseeable future vote to allow another western military
intervention.
The wars along the long arc from Libya to Afghanistan, in which EU powers participated, were
the proximate cause of large refugee flows a few years ago, which continue even now. (As I have
written elsewhere, the underlying cause of migration is the large gap in incomes between
Europe, on the one hand, and Africa and the 'greater middle east', on the other, but the sudden
outbursts were caused by wars.)
The next example of generating instability was Ukraine, where the then government of Viktor
Yanukovych, having only postponed the signing of an EU agreement, was driven out of power in
2014 in a coup-like movement supported by the union. It is sure that a reasonable
counterfactual, with the same EU-Ukraine agreements being signed and without a war in eastern
Ukraine and with Crimea still part of Ukraine, would have been much preferable to the current
situation, which threatens to precipitate a war of even much greater dimensions.
Finally, consider Turkey, in an association agreement with the European Economic Community
since 1963, and thus in a membership-awaiting antechamber for more than half a century. The
initial period in power of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was marked by pro-European policies, a
desire to create an 'Islamic democracy', in the mould of the Christian democracies of Italy and
Germany, and civilian control over the army. But realisation that, because of its size and
probably because of its dominant religion, Turkey would never be recognised as part of Europe
led Erdoğan, gradually, to move in an altogether different direction -- with an almost
zero chance that he would come back to his original pro-European stance.
The endless waiting period, with similarly protracted negotiations over what are now 35
chapters which need to be agreed between candidate countries and all 28 (or soon 27) members,
is what lies behind the frustration with the EU in the Balkans. Long gone are the days when
Greece could become a member after a couple of months (if that) of negotiations and an
agreement between the French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and the German
chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. The European bluff -- it neither has the stick nor the carrot --
albeit long hidden behind the veil of negotiations, was recently called by the Kosovo
leadership, when it engaged in a trade war with Serbia. The EU could express its 'regrets' but
it was squarely ignored. In the past, nether Kosovo nor any other Balkan state would have dared
to defy Europe so openly.
Slow and hesitant
It all means that Europe needs a much better thought-out external policy with respect to its
neighbours. There are already some signs that it is moving in that direction but it is doing so
too slowly and hesitantly. A multilateral compact with Africa is needed to regulate migration
from a continent with the fastest rising population and lowest incomes. Much more European
investment -- in hard stuff, not conferences -- is needed. Rather than complaining about
China's Belt and Road initiative, Europe should imitate it -- and, if it desires to counteract
Chinese political influence, invest its own money to make more African friends. A similar set
of much more proactive policies is required within the framework of the Mediterranean
initiative, while military options in the region should be forsworn no less clearly than they
are within the union.
When it comes to the potential members, as in the Balkans or the western republics of the
former Soviet Union, interminable talks should be replaced by either special association with
no expectation of EU membership or clearer, time-limited negotiations leading to membership.
Both would manage expectations better and avoid the build-up of resentment and frustration.
The most important challenge is the relationship with Turkey. The EU does not have a
blueprint for a Turkey after Erdoğan; nor can it offer anything to the Turkish secular
opposition, as it is not clear within itself whether it wants Turkey in or out. It should be
rather obvious that a European Turkey, with its vast economic potential and influence in the
middle east, would be a huge economic and strategic asset. Such a Turkey would also behave
differently in Syria and in Anatolia, because it would have an incentive to follow European
rules.
This rethinking of the EU's neighbourhood policy thus calls, in short, for three things:
greater economic aid to Africa, no support for wars or regime change, and much clearer rules
and time-limits for membership talks.
Perhaps, you ascribe to the EU successes that it did not create.
The formation of the EU is not the vehicle that created, nor sustained, the uneasy peace.
I suggest it was the resolution of WW2 that has determined the current state of
tolerance.
I fear that the formation of the EU, in the end, will be the cause of a re-instigation of
the age old skirmishes that have plagued the world, as you say, for two millennia.
The destruction of the Middle East by the West, not just the EU but the US, is a
foolishness of biblical proportions.
The EU's disposition of Greece and Brexit are red flags that the EU is an unsustainable
contrivance that will eventually, come undone. The mercantilist wars between France, England,
Spain, Germany, Italy, etc, may rise again. Hopefully, I'm wrong.
We just got done conquering Iraq. We haven't stayed to loot the oil.
The US has NOT successfully conquered Iraq (has not pacified the country). Oil is not like
a bag of diamonds, which you can grab and run. In order to steal a worthwhile amount of the
greasy stuff, you have to make a substantial investment up front, in wells and shipping
terminals. Not even the greediest thief will risk his money if there is even the slightest
chance that his wells and terminals will be blown up by righteous nationalists. This is why
the US hasn't stolen much from Iraq.
So now you believe we're going to Venezuela to take their crappy heavy oil?
That the US hasn't been able to steal much from Iraq tells us little about whether the
Americans have larcenous motives with regard to Venezuela. Especially as Trump has been
talking loudly about the oil.
It would be easier for us just to build a pipeline to Alberta and import all their
cheap, shut-in heavy crude.
" Second, Venezuela's central bankers were persuaded to pledge their oil reserves and all
assets of the state oil sector (including Citgo) as collateral for its foreign debt. This
meant that if Venezuela defaulted (or was forced into default by U.S. banks refusing to make
timely payment on its foreign debt), bondholders and U.S. oil majors would be in a legal
position to take possession of Venezuelan oil assets."
Solid proof that it was the empire who invented the practice of "debt trap" and is still
flourishing with it.
hunor, February 7, 2019 at 6:24 am GMT
Thank you ! Made it very clear. Perfect reflection of the " Values of Western Civilization ".
Reaching to grab the whole universe, with no holds barred . And never show of any interest for the " truth". They are not
even pretending anymore , awakening will be very painful for some.
Reuben Kaspate, February 7, 2019 at 2:38 pm GMT 100 Words
Why would the U. S. based White-Protestant aristocracy care a hoot about the Brown-Catholic elites in the far off land?
They don't! The comprador aristocracy in question isn't what it seems It's the same group that plagues the Americans.
The rootless louts, whose only raison d'κ·tre is to milk everything in sight and then retire to coastal cities, i.e. San
Francisco, if you are a homosexual or New York City and State, if you are somewhat religious.
Poor Venezuelans don't stand a chance against the shysters!
"... Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely event that it poses a serious threat. ..."
"... It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start. ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
"... Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel, too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran. ..."
America's policymakers should ignore this advice, no matter how fervently it's offered. And
if any president is willing to tell this self-interested chorus to shut up, it is Donald
Trump.
Among the notable nations lobbying for America's attention are Israel and Taiwan, otherwise
isolated and vulnerable governments that seek Washington's military backing. Greece and Turkey
have carried their battle in the eastern Mediterranean back to D.C., as they fight over
America's role there. Kosovar insurgents worked with ethnic Albanians in the U.S. to push
Washington into the Yugoslav civil war in 1999. Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates, spread cash lavishly around the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to pressure
American policymakers into such atrocities as the Yemen war.
The consequences can be long-lasting. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
governments of the newly freed Eastern European states lobbied to join NATO. Their diasporas in
the United States -- derisively called "hyphenated Americans" during World War I -- helped win
Washington's support. The result was a rapid expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, compounding
humiliation with hostility, which continues to bedevil the West's relations with Moscow
today.
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Sometimes foreigners talk as if they should be consulted and heeded whenever U.S.
policymakers act. In many cases, Washington has created this problem. Alliances in which other
states theoretically have authority over American military deployments encourage foreign
meddling. For instance, the Obama administration intervened in Libya at least partially in
response to pressure from Rome and Paris, which wanted to use the transatlantic alliance to
oust Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. Europeans were essentially returning the favor by which
Washington had dragged them into the seemingly endless Afghan war, which never made sense for
them.
NATO is particularly problematic, since it's made ever less sense as foreign threats have
diminished, Europeans' capabilities increased, and gaps between allies' interests expanded.
Although America remains the big kahuna, recently empowered "friends" assert authority over
U.S. decisions and behavior. Today, the transatlantic alliance is made up of one transcendent
military power, America, and eight moderately important nations with serious, or at least
potentially serious, militaries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the
United Kingdom.
The remaining score of NATO members are, well, largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean they
don't contribute to and suffer losses in Western military operations -- as The Netherlands has,
for example. But what they do doesn't and never will make much of a difference. Yet they sit at
the NATO table as nominal equals. Of these 20, three have populations of less than one million,
while another 11 come in at under 10 million. Incoming member (Northern) Macedonia barely
breaks the two million barrier.
Why the pretense that the opinions of micro-states Iceland, Luxembourg, and Montenegro
matter to Washington? Why should governments with more than their shares of controversies --
Albania, Romania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and even Poland -- theoretically have a say on
the use of the alliance's one military that really matters? Imagine if Georgia, which helped
provoke war with Russia in 2008, and Ukraine, which ended up in conflict with Moscow after a
street putsch backed by the West ousted their elected president, joined NATO. Tbilisi and Kiev
would push to borrow the U.S. military to fight their wars. Who would blame them? But it
certainly would not be in America's interest to let them.
This presumptuousness reaches beyond European security. French President Emmanuel Macron
apparently called President Donald Trump to complain about the latter's decision to withdraw
from Syria, which he said he "deeply" regretted. Added Macron, "An ally must be dependable,"
which apparently means that America must forever maintain a deployment illegal under both U.S.
and international law. Macron said that French troops would remain, proclaiming: "To be allies
is to fight shoulder to shoulder." But that fight should stop when the justification for
fighting has ended.
Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the
president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the
Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided
that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very
powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting
itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely
event that it poses a serious threat.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked complained that the withdrawal would hurt the Kurds,
whom she characterized as "allies" and "great heroes." Moreover, the pull-out "strengthens
[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, an antisemitic war criminal who carries out massacres
of the Kurdish people, and does so with a wink from the international community." Well, why
doesn't her country -- the one with nuclear weapons and a strong conventional military force --
rescue the Kurds? Israel is there and has far greater interests at stake than does America.
It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war
that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start.
For instance, TheEconomist , a British magazine, recently headlined an
article: "A deal to end the insurgency in Afghanistan would be wonderful: As long as it is not
a figleaf to cover an American retreat." Really? After 17 years of unsuccessfully trying to
plant a liberal democracy in Afghanistan, the only logical U.S. policy is to exit -- with
figleaf if possible, but without if necessary.
After the president announced his intent to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, the
Financial Times , a United Kingdom newspaper, declared that the decision made America
appear "erratic and inconsistent." Indeed, the United States needed a new defense secretary "to
stand up to the president's wilder impulses," like making sure America stayed involved in the
Syrian war as long as the FT thought necessary. The paper was horrified that the
withdrawal "constitutes, too, an abandonment of key allies" and "signals, more broadly, a US
retreat from the Middle East." Perhaps the anonymous FT writers should form a
volunteer unit to patrol the Mideast in America's stead. After all, it was British and French
line-drawing post-World War I that created the current national boundaries that are failing so
badly.
Roger Boyes, diplomatic editor of The Times of London, headlined his article: "Only
the US can rein in ambitions of Iran." And not just "can." Boyes explained, "As the Syrian war
nears its end, Trump must find ways to loosen Tehran's grip on the region." Frankly, I don't
remember Americans asking him for his advice. Why the U.S.? Is there no one else available?
Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey? That unnamed country that already
possesses nukes? Toss in a little assistance from the Brits and French, too.
Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it
lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening
neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel,
too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more
than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran.
Perhaps Americans should be honored that so many overseas "friends" have so much free advice
to offer. However, much of it is bad. Policy should be based on the interests of the U.S. --
protecting its people, territory, prosperity, and system of constitutional liberties. That
means advancing peace first and making war a last resort. Desiring to do good abroad cannot
justify sacrificing American lives, wealth, and security in never ending war.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
WASHINGTON -- In an impassioned call for preemptive action against the Middle Eastern
nation, United States national security advisor John Bolton insisted Thursday that Iran was
likely harboring the dangerous terrorist Osama bin Laden. "For the good of our nation, we must
act immediately," said Bolton, citing several intelligence reports providing significant
evidence that Iran is currently providing sanctuary to the Al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of
the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We must never rest until this fugitive is brought to justice, and the only way to achieve
that is through repeated and prolonged military strikes on Iran.
We have reason to believe that he's living in a compound there where he's training a legion
of bloodthirsty Iranian civilians to take up arms as the next generation of terrorists. It is
our solemn duty as the international safeguard of freedom to prevent this at all costs."
At press time, Bolton had left the podium to follow up on an important tip that Iranian
leaders had hired American nuclear physicist Otto Gunther Octavius.
"... The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' ..."
"... Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers. ..."
"... Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. ..."
Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public
confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the
conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the
story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit.
(Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with
youthful lust.)
Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot
misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley
summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the
course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not
any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in
an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been
a fraud, philosophically.' Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.
Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break
compared with our home grown rightwingers.
abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many
useful insights:
A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional
experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of
the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong.
Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that
"fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one
forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he
imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the
slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at
all.
Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
"Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read."
When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out
that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never
actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
Jerry Vinokurov 01.28.19 at 2:22 pm (no link)
Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely,
that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre
community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more
reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It's "funny" because many of them are plainly
anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because
they're virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting
to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but
this was a revelation to me.
Jerry Vinokurov@ 23 : A
small potatoes objection/question. Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community,
including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of
individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of
emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more
reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
It's hard for me to say because I don't really have much exposure this culture's Cuban
counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they're
substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that
the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war
stuff isn't a huge motivator. I can't think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever
stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of
vote or other political activity.
They may not care much for it and I'm sure being e.g. LGBT
in this community is no picnic, but it's not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is.
I can't possibly count how many conversations I've had with relatives complaining about this
or that "onerous" regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same
"why are they wasting our money" and "I don't want to pay for this" tirade.
Needless to say
the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of
how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn't stop them
from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it's doing, it's doing it
wrong.
Glen
has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an
incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin' principle is what makes him, in
foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP
cannot stomach that, though they're happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.
January 25, 2019 I've been thinking about political converts
for a long time . At The New
Yorker , I take up the problem of Max Boot, who probably needs no introduction, and Derek
Black, who was a leading white supremacist and then renounced it all.
Here's a taste:
Max Boot, a longtime conservative who recently broke with the right over the nomination and
election of Donald
Trump , registered as a Republican in 1988. At the time, Boot writes in " The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ," he wanted to join the "party of ideas." A movement
of highbrows, conservatism was the work of the "learned, worldly, elitist, and eccentric lot"
of writers at National Review , "far removed from the simple-minded, cracker-barrel
populists who have taken control of the conservative movement today." It was a movement, Boot
explains at the outset, "inspired by Barry Goldwater's canonical text from 1960, The
Conscience of a Conservative . I believed in that movement, and served it my whole
life."
A hundred and seventy-five pages later, Boot inadvertently lets slip that reading
Goldwater's "actual words" was something he hadn't done until after Trump's election.
Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read.
But it turns out that the problem of Boot and Black goes much deeper than what
books were or weren't read. If you compare the conversions from left to right -- think Arthur
Koestler, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and so on -- with those from right to left, you
find something interesting.
Curiously, the movement from right to left has never played an equivalent role in modern
politics. Not only are there fewer converts in that direction, but those conversions haven't
plowed as fertile a field as their counterparts have.
As your piece alludes to but does not say outright, Boot was a right-wing intellectual
because he said he was a right-wing intellectual. He celebrated, but hadn't actually
read , Goldwater and Buckley; his grasp of his other icons was equally weak. I
remember reading his stuff in UC Berkeley's The Daily Californian back in the middle
1980s and getting the impression that Boot was another dope-with-a-thesaurus like George F.
Will, with added militarist bloodthirst.
The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low, and in the present
day we see examples like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle putting out high school
current-events assignments and being lauded as original thinkers. It's probably a reflection
of the preferences of the people who own the presses.
BruceJ 01.25.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Personally, I rather doubt Boot is truly repenting, but is rather merely taking advantage of
the zeitgeist.
"Anti-Trump Repentant Right" sells books, gets him on teevee, etc. The proof of the
pudding will be what he does when the neocons are ascendant again.
The likes of Michael Gerson and David Frum sliding from the Bush II White House to
"George Boosh?? Never heard of him!" critics of the right always seemed awfully
convenient for their post-WH careers.
As DocAmazing says, it's a reflection of the people who own the presses, of which there
has always been an orders of magnitude greater number, prominence and paychecks on the right
rather than the left.
The vast ( hugely interconnected, almost incestuously so) network of RW "Think Tanks" and
publishing houses funded by wealthy oligarchs pretty much guarantees a safe haven for
Left->Right apostates.
There really isn't such a network for the reverse. The L->R crownd don't have to spend
the long years in the wilderness atoning for their sins, like the R->L side does. (And
given the damage the Right has done over recent decades, there is much atonement needed )
b9n10nt 01.25.19 at 11:25 pm (no link)
Here's the lesson I'd expect from Corey: reactionaries need to continually contrive new
rationalizations for reaction, and might thus be inspired by Leftist rhetoric for the task.
The Left does not need to similarly borrow from the Right because there's no need to hide its
pursuit of liberty, equality, and solidarity before a popular audience. Hence, left
–> right converts are useful to the right in ways that right–>left converts
are not. & then you've got your empirical evidence to support the theory.
The emphasis, however, was on experience: the right needs to experience the vitality of
revolution to understand it and inform counter-revolution. This seems like a weaker
explanation, but perhaps the stronger argument would have seemed too shrill for the New
Yorker?
Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot
misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley
summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the
course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not
any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in
an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been
a fraud, philosophically.'
Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.
Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break
compared with our home grown rightwingers.
abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many
useful insights:
A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional
experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of
the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong.
Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that
"fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one
forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he
imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the
slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at
all.
Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
"Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read."
When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out
that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never
actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
abd 01.26.19 at 8:34 pm (no link)
@3 re neocons, this quote of Boot from Corey Robin's article:
"That my parents and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews were finally able to
leave was due largely to neoconservative foreign policy," Boot writes. "In later life I
would support giving moral concerns a prominent place in US foreign policy, a stance that
has been associated with neoconservatism."
reminded me of an answer that E.L. Doctorow gave to following question from Bill Moyers in
1988:
How do you explain that so many intellectuals today are in service to orthodoxy?
The third element is very interesting, and I think it's been under-reported–and
that is the immense influence of the émigré, Eastern European intellectuals
who've come over here in the past fifteen or twenty years. Many of them are quite brilliant
writers and professors of different disciplines. They have tended to see American life in
terms of their own background and suffering, which has been considerable, as people in
exile from regimes that have done terrible things to them and their families. They come of
the terrible European legacy of monarchism and the reaction to it. So every attempt we make
to legislate some advance in our American society, some social enlightenment, they see as a
dangerous left-wing weakness leading toward totalitarianism. They've had enormous influence
in the American intellectual community. They tend to see things as either/or and feel that
you must be rigidly against any idea of improvement because the idea of perfection is what
kills society and creates totalitarianism. The Utopian ideal leads to revolution. They seem
to forget we had our revolution two hundred years ago. Our history is not theirs.
We've always gone out into the barn of the Constitution and tinkered. That's our very
pragmatic history. I don't think these people understand that. So any time we tune
something up and fix something and make it more just, make it work a little better, they
become alarmed.
I think the most reasonable account of Boot's conversion is that he hasn't converted. He's
profoundly angry at Trump because Trump, to the everlasting shame of our side, is the first
political figure in generations to dare to question US imperialism, and US imperialism is
what Boot is really about. He's mostly a military enthusiast. Were Trump to gin up a war with
Venezuela and/or Iran, Boot would be back on his side in a heartbeat. Blood and Iron!
abd 01.26.19 at 8:49 am (no link)
@13, You may have a point there, given the gullibility of folks in these parts. Finkelstein,
almost admiringly, noted the case of "the Polish émigré hoaxer, Jerzy Kosinski,
who, shrewdly siz[ed] up intellectual culture in America" and plied his rusty wares on the
university lecture with brio until his past caught up with him (many other European
émigrés, e.g. Man Ray, Bruno Bettelheim, etc. also come to mind; google for the
sordid details).
Heck, the moral beacon whom Corey Robin never tires of citing, Hannah Arendt, was also a
habitual "lifter" of material from others
laboring in the archives, not to mention the free ride , intellectually speaking, she got
because of "the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical
profundity."
The direction in which the intellectual impostures listed by Pankaj
Mishra below are "adjusting" to the prevailing winds is something to be expected from
their ilk:
Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump's apotheosis, to
account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and
gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and
authoritarian 'populism'. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental
'axis of evil', now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared
'neo-imperialist' and exponent of 'savage wars', recently claimed to have become aware of
his 'white privilege'. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently
embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as
stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates's diligent promoter.
DocAmazing #1: "The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low "
Excepting for the brilliance of Corey Robin and a few others, it is no lower than the bar
on the left, but I think you correctly point to the asymmetry in the general acceptance of
the two piles of bosh that are usually produced. But going beyond BruceJ's fingering (at #3)
of the presses and thinktanks for embracing the right bosh, there is a cause in the basic
asymmetry of their political preferences, because the right justifies and praises the system,
while the left does not. This makes it easier for the productions of the right to slide by,
without critical inspection by the large mass of people who just want to get on with their
lives.
More complicated still: in our era the left (or most of it) doesn't want to tear down the
system; it would prefer a mixed economy with more redistribution than we have at present, but
not the destruction of private capitalism. This more nuanced preference can only explain
itself by wading into the deeper ends of economic explanation, while it's still much easier
for the moneyed right to demonize the left using the psychological critique of mere laziness
or lack of initiative. This leaves the left with a more complex rhetorical problem in dealing
with voter preferences than the right has, which, again, is another asymmetry.
I think the winds are not merely shifting, but we are approaching a different and less
stable era. The industrial economy is so successful that its winner-take-all mechanics is
increasing inequality. In the US, the intellectual disaster of the right fabricated its bad
policy of tax cuts and "smaller" government under Reagan, and the contradictions Reagan
engineered took 30 years to crack up the Republican Party until a grifter named Trump could
drive a plough through it. And he of course has come a cropper. At the same juncture, the
presses and thinktanks have fallen in influence due to the internet where everyone is drowned
out regardless of the viability of their ideas. In such a new, unstable, untested environment
perhaps the best approach is the one taken by Warren, AOC, etc. -- hammer on a few big ideas
with broad appeal.
CIA Was Aiding Afghan Jihadists Before the Soviet Invasion
by Nauman
Sadiq Posted on
February 05, 2019 February 1, 2019 Originally, there were four parties involved in the
Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly,
the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan's
security agencies which nurtured the Afghan jihadists on the behest of Washington.
Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the
jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western
capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile
"freedom fighters" to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a
threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.
Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then
American envoy to Kabul, Adolph "Spike" Dubs, was assassinated on Feb. 14, 1979, the same day
that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.
According to recently
declassified documents of the White House, CIA and State Department, as reported by Tim
Weiner for The Washington Post , the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the
Soviets invaded in 1979.
President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979,
whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year. That the CIA
was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been
proven by the State Department's declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that
the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan's security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm
the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years before the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Historically, Pakistan's military first used the Islamists of Jamaat-e-Islami during the
Bangladesh war of liberation in the late 1960s against the Bangladeshi nationalist Mukti
Bahini liberation movement of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman – the father of current prime
minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and the founder of Bangladesh, which was then a
province of Pakistan and known as East Pakistan before the independence of Bangladesh in
1971.
Jamaat-e-Islami is a far-right Islamist movement in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh –
analogous to the Muslim Brotherhood political party in Egypt and Turkey – several of
whose leaders have recently been hanged by the Bangladeshi nationalist government of Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed for committing massacres of Bangladeshi civilians on behalf of
Pakistan's military during the late 1960s.
Then, during the 1970s, Pakistan's then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding
the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud's government, who had toppled his first cousin King
Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of
Afghanistan.
Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan's northwestern
Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan's security establishment was wary of his irredentist
claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated
in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.
Pakistan's support to the Islamists with the Saudi petrodollars and Washington's
blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.
The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to
radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central
Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December
1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies
spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.
Even the American President Donald Trump
recently admitted : "The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were
going into Russia; they were right to be there." Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason
why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was
making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the capitalist and communist blocs,
Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf's petro-monarchies took the side of the capitalist bloc
because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume
less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist
bloc was a net importer.
It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries
to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc.
Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East's energy, but it's a recent
development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited
the economic interests of the Gulf countries.
Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge
for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close
economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid,
hence it didn't have a choice but to toe Washington's policy in Afghanistan.
In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a "bear trap" and the former Soviet Union
was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse
because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution
of the Soviet Union.
Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department
documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998
interview to the alternative news outlet The CounterPunch Magazine , former
National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the
president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979,
whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.
Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question: "And
neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to
future terrorists?" Brzezinski replies: "What is most important to the history of the world?
The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation
of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least
he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It's worth noting, however, that the
aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western
policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused
on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and
petro-imperialism.
"... Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side ..."
I don't agree with Jimmy Dore on much, but he and Tucker are 100% right about Syria. There is a segment of the left and right
that aren't that far apart, but we keep getting manipulated to hate each other.
Jimmy, Just admit that you like and agree with Tucker. Every Tucker video has the premise of, "I disagree with 99% of what
Tucker says" or "If Tucker sees this then everyone should see it." Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party
line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side
.
Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project.
Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran
Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project.
Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran
Jimmy Dore: the only leftist journalist with any integrity. I legitimately believe that while he's wrong all the time (to my
far-right view), he's not lying.
Most important part in my opinion is comment about christians celebrating Christmass in Damascus. They wouldn't celebrate under
Al Nusra or Isis or other wahabi supported fractions, but they are celebrating under Assad. By the way US government is in some
way protecting HTS in Idlib wich is rebranded Al Nusra, Syrian ofshoot of Al Kaida so Assad army is not attacking them.
Pro war people don't just want to be there for the sake of it. They want to have US forces on the ground there for a whole
host of reason all related to maintaining US hegemony wherever they can. We have forces deployed throughout the middle east because
we want to be the primary hegemon in the middle east. Our primacy is threatened by no one nation but by a coalition of anti US
nations particularly Iran, Syria and Syria's longstanding alliance with Russia.
I find it a shame that the western nations are vilifying Russia as Putin hates the globalists and is fighting against the terrorists.
It appears that Russia should be our allies rather than Isra Hell and the Saudi regime. Putin was invited by Assad to help him
rid his country of the terrorists but the US weren't asked and just illegally invaded. Out of interest why does the US support
Isra hell when it has over 300 nukes but it thinks Iran is a problem? Isn't it more that Iran doesn't have a central (Rothschild)
bank? Just like North Korea, Cuba and now, Russia due to paying them off and ridding his country of the Rotschilds! They don't
own Russia like they do the US. Edited as I forgot to say I love Tucker and his common sense.
The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased
but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must
have been a freudian slip.
The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased
but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must
have been a freudian slip.
This guy can't admit that the Obama Administration started the Syrian civil war and created ISIS. What he really wants is to
PROTECT ISIS because after Syria they were trained to attack Russia in the Caucasus. Russia is sensibly wiping out ISIS in Syria
so they don't have to fight them in Chechnya. The Democrats and the neocons created Russiagate to prevent Trump from pulling out
two years ago, now Trump doesn't care, because they will invent shit about him regardless.
You're missing a major point -- I S R A E L These neocon and establishment democrats have tightened ass cheeks because Trump's
decision bypasses these Zionists' fervent wishes of keeping the US there in a proxy war as Israel's protectors.
Tucker is slowly but surely becoming increasingly sympathetic towards the third position.He's the only figure on the MSM who
thinks critically and asks uncomfortable questions. I wonder when the Zionists over at Fox News will pull the plug on him? You
should have Tucker on if it's at all possible. He is actually aligned with the left somewhat on economic issues.
The freezing of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England is a signal to all countries out of
step with US interests to withdraw their money, according to economist and co-founder of
Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff. He told RT America that Britain and its central
bank have shown themselves to be "under the thumb of the United States."
"That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that
they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it's not the safe
place as it once was," he said.
"... Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was mixed. ..."
"... PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem. ..."
"... There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go. ..."
"... I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq. ..."
Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign
interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was
mixed.
We launched an ineffective volley of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to a trumped up gas attack, but we never
sought to establish a no fly zone and risk war with Russia. For a while we were well on our way to establish an enduring client state
in east Syria. We assumed this was all the doing of the cabal of manipulating neocons that Trump surrounded himself with. His call
for immediate withdrawal of troops from Syria surely proved this true. Finally Trump was allowed to be Trump. He was even seeking
a way out of Afghanistan, after a literal lifetime of war in that godforsaken land.
The neocons are fighting back bigly. The pace of withdrawal from Syria was slowed and there is no indication we would ever
give up our outpost on the Baghdad-Damascus highway at Tanf. Why? I think Trump laid out HIS thoughts on the matter during the traditional
pre-super bowl presidential interview.
-- -- -- --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to protect Israel. We have to protect other things that we have...
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you want to keep troops there [Iraq] now?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the
reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Whoa, that's news. You're keeping troops in Iraq because you want to be able to strike in Iran?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, because I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable
and expensive military base built in Iraq. It's perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle
East rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. We're going to keep watching and we're going to
keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we're going to know it before
they do.
-- -- -- --
So, We are staying in Iraq to keep an eye on Iran and we are doing this to protect Israel. It was not any of the neocons who said
this. It was Trump himself. So much for America first. There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force
after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue
providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go.
However, Baghdad has thrown a monkey wrench into this developing Trump doctrine. Iraqi President Barham Salih has told Trump to
slow his roll.
-- -- -- --
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Barham Salih said on Monday that President Donald Trump did not ask Iraq's permission for
U.S. troops stationed there to "watch Iran."
Speaking at a forum in Baghdad, Salih was responding to a question about Trump's comments to CBS about how he would ask troops
stationed in Iraq to "watch" Iran. U.S. troops in Iraq are there as part of an agreement between the two countries with a specific
mission of combating terrorism, Salih said, and that they should stick to that. (Reuters)
-- -- -- --
I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq.
This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all
key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena:
might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump
does not even bother.
In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs
of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016,
Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who
"oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
Notable quotes:
"... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
"... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
"... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
"... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
"... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
"... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
"... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
"... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
"... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
"... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
"... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
"... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
"... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
"... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
"... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right
wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro
was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.
Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international
actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the
same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives
and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using
Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor
overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).
Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichιs
and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.
Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist,
and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide
-- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal
globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries,
senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.
However, when he delivered his inaugural address
on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the
government's back on a long-standing policy of
cultural imperialism
, stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill
with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations
to put their own interests first".
Russia
Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office
-- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy
conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.
Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism
toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency,
Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear,
Trump has done precisely nothing
to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".
His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia,
have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of
trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary,
it has degraded " and his spokesman called
the relations " deplorable ".)
Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin
a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has
developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated
the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American
officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The
only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of
total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international
affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.
WikiLeaks
Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from
wars for regime change, Trump sold out again.
"I love WikiLeaks --
" -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.
After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches,
and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks
to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years
under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work,
call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange,
and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may
file arrest charges against Assange
. Mike Pompeo ,
chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself
cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared
WikiLeaks to be a "
non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.
Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one
that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit.
The backtracking is so obvious in this
interview
Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:
AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on
Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with
the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?
TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying
is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC,
but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack
both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said,
"Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."
AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?
TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .
AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to
arrest Julian Assange?
TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision,
but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.
First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to
hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others
decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.
Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt
for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship)
or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are
those of expedience and greed (he admits that much).
This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6
NAFTA
On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising
to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be
awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peρa
Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.
While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US,
witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support
for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to
them.
This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when
Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity
is part of the NAFTA agreement.
Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction.
Wisconsin alone has more
dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada.
Overall,
the US has a net surplus in the trade in
goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he
weakens his own criticisms of immigration.
Since NAFTA was implemented,
migration from Mexico to
the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately
drove them away from agriculture.
As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact,
per capita GDP is nearly a flat
line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures
that have been implemented, the
US leads the world .
To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims
he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only
when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.
His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at
the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core
of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing
about TISA and TTIP.
Mexico
Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any
evidence of production
in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should
also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC,
ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.
China
Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions
of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according
to Wilbur Ross, the "
after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not
because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on
selling out citizens' interests , and
particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating
North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade
issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical
neoliberals.
North Korea
Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a "
crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing
to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than
any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near
North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the
US Air Force publicly boasted of having
"nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly
60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and
sign a peace treaty
. Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in
addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly
provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: "
I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a
major, major conflict with North
Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you
can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure,
the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being
asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools
of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.
Syria
Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions
of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign,
he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the
US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared
to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute --
Trump made the point himself :
"I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go
the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that
attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching
it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will
tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last
few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".
Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories,
Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and
media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his
pursuit
of
public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist
culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical
merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above.
According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He
would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language
typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an "
animal ," who would
have
to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would
Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed
with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded
organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her
approval of even more drastic
action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap
on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest
opposition
, however, came from Trump's
own base , with a number of articles
featuring criticism from Trump's
supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a "
weakling
and a political ingrate ".
Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials
saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials
promising more if there
were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in
existence on Afghanistan); some said that
regime change was not the goal,
and then others made it clear that was the ultimate
goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed.
We're not going into Syria " -- even
though
Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least
protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation
that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a
renewal of neocon policy .
We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First,
Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius ,
a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the
neoconservative agenda and its hit list of
states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the
attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and
the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term
of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely
dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting
the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies.
His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters
of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless
in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil
liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.
Venezuela
It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead
up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest
regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of
Exxon
and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut
member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the
State
Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating
on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless
continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time
and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued
a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself
is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days
before the election, to a couple of weeks
after his inauguration, he has sent explicit
messages of support for anti-government
forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump
imposed sanctions on Venezuela's
Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.
NATO
Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding
reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: "
I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as
Ivanka Trump was about to represent
his government at a meeting of globalist women, the
W20 . NATO has served as
the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political
members of the TCC. 7
Saving Neoliberalism?
Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are
we still in the dying days of liberalism
? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents,
to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight
back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist
in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take
the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided
to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have
no way of knowing if it could be true.
Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist
media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that
their vision had been vindicated.
However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking.
If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US
and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.
Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?
Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a
left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it
did not originate with the
left , and that it has a long and distinguished history
in the US itself , then we can move
toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users,
is that one of the
significantreasons
why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for
example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and
no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America
anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial
thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against
globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity,
and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended
to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and
especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures
such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It
could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades,
essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders,
neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.
As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son --
then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8
On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism,
which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now
contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced.
In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption
of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining
economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily
caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking
about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power"
is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also
render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated,
and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward
various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart
of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.
As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism
. Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.
As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power
of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation
of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.
PoliticsTaxes/regulation (Dan here lifted from
Robert's Stochastic Thoughts ) Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession Max Boot is a
candidate member of the Rubin Gerson can't be a conservative anymore, because I always agree
with them club of Washington Post columnists. But he is a bit confused about US macroeconmic
history and macroeconomics. He wrote"The deficit spending of the Reagan years was at least
justified because it boosted the economy out of a deep recession " As a matter of timing, this
can't be right. The Kemp Roth tax cut was enacted in 1981. Real GDP peaked in 1981q3 -- the tax
cut corresponds to the beginning of the recession not the end.
The part that Boot misses (because it has been unimportant for the past 10 years) is
monetary policy. It is possible to cause a severe recession in spite of fiscal stimulus by
driving the Federal Funds rate up over 19 %. The combination of loose fiscal and very tight
monetary policy caused huge real interest rates and a collapse of investment. It also caused an
over-valued dollar, a huge surge in imports and deindustrialization.
pgl, January 30, 2019 5:05 pm
Towards the end of 1980 Volcker was backing off his initial tight monetary policy and
the economy inched towards a recovery from that initial recession. But when Volcker saw
Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max
Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does
get this – he is just another supply side liar.
Likbez
@pgl January 30, 2019, 5:05 pm
> ...when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the
1982. If Max Boot does not understand this he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this he is just
another supply-side liar. "
That's probably the most concise explanation which is enough for the given case. Thank you!
Max Boots is a "wardog" --a rabid lobbyist of MIC, and, as such, is as far from economics (even voodoo
supply side economics) as one can get.
Also like all neocons, he is statist par excellence. If not MIC money, he would probably be forced to
paint houses for a living, instead of writing nonsense in Bezos blog.
"... An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran ..."
"... Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue? For another 100 years? ..."
"... The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness. ..."
Trump wants to
keep U.S. forces in Iraq so they can "watch" Iran:
President Trump plans to keep United States troops in Iraq to monitor and maintain pressure on neighboring Iran, committing
to an American military presence in the region's war zones even as he moves to withdraw forces from Syria and Afghanistan.
"I want to be able to watch Iran," Mr. Trump said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "We're going to
keep watching and we're going to keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things,
we're going to know it before they do."
An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops
in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that
their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran.
Many Iraqis already want U.S. forces out of the country now that ISIS has been dealt with, and there will probably be even more
demanding our withdrawal if Trump tries to keep U.S. forces there for this purpose.
Trump's suggestion that Iran might "do nuclear weapons" is more of the same propaganda that he and his officials have been pushing
for months. Iran is unable to develop and build nuclear weapons because it is complying with the nuclear deal that Trump reneged
on. Thanks to the nuclear deal, the IAEA is able to conduct very intrusive inspections as part of the most rigorous verification
regime, and they would be the first to know if Iran were violating the restrictions set down in the JCPOA.
It is unlikely that the Iraqi government is going to agree to a U.S. presence that is being justified by hostility to its neighbor.
Iraq's president has already said that the U.S. military presence is permitted in the country only for the purposes of counter-terrorism:
Iraq's government wants to maintain good relations with Iran, and it isn't going to go along with an anti-Iranian agenda that
can only harm Iraq's economic and security interests. Many of Iran's neighbors are not as obsessed with and hostile to Iran as the
Trump administration, and Iraq definitely doesn't want to be a front-line state in some anti-Iranian coalition. Trump's proposal
would needlessly put U.S. troops at greater risk in Iraq, and it would gain the U.S. nothing except more resentment from Iraqis.
Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this
occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue?
For another 100 years?
The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness.
LOL Deep State is a term used by the simple minded. There is no 'deep state' there is
however a shadow government and it is made up of various groups all jockeying for
their own interest.
We have the 'Establishment..i.e. the two parties who want to maintain
their political power. We have the Corporate Elites and Globalist ' who want to control the
world's commerce and economies. We have Wall Street who doesnt want any restrictions on their
financial crimes. We have Domestic Business Interest who want laws and policies favorable to
them. We have Foreign Interest who want to use the US for their country.
Sometimes they join forces when their interest coincide, sometimes they don't.
Outside of this shadow government we have Ideological Activist of various kinds that can
be useful or not to the Establishment, the Globalist, Wall Street, Domestic Business Interest
and Foreign Interest.
All of the above are why we cant and don't have coherent policies on anything foreign or
domestic.
People like you who want to ascribe everything to some giant conspiracy in the CIA help to
dumb people down , its easier for the lazy to have one or two big scary entities to blame.
You cant even explain what the CIA conspiracy is can you? Tell us how the CIA maintains their
conspiracy against the US and what their goal is. How does the CIA maintain their secret
agenda when the CIA is subject to new CIA directors with every change of presidents and
parties?
US Sanctions as a Tool To Perpetuate Neocolonialism
by Nauman
Sadiq Posted on
February 02, 2019 January 31, 2019 It's an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled
by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far
more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational
corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the
Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called "special
interest" groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.
Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on
international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity
which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting
their demands or gets sidelined.
In 2013, the Manmohan Singh's government of India had certain objections to further
opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal
congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a
meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into
accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.
The developing economies, such as India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct
investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth, and this investment mostly comes from the
Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber
of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in "collective bargaining" activities, the
nascent and fragile developing economies don't have a choice but to toe their line.
State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent
policies, particularly economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of
the developing countries which maintain a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics;
similarly, the neocolonial powers and multinational corporations control international
politics and the global economic order.
Any state in the international arena which dares to transgress the trade and economic
policies laid down by neocolonial powers and multinational corporations becomes an
international pariah like Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe; or more recently, Maduro's
Venezuela.
Venezuela has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Even though the
mainstream media's pundits hold the socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro
responsible for economic mismanagement in Venezuela, fact of the matter is that
hyperinflation in its economy is the effect of US sanctions against Venezuela which have been
put in place since the time of late President Hugo Chavez.
Another case in point is Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006
to 2015, and then again after May last year when President Donald Trump annulled the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because of Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for
Iran that it also has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been
insolvent by now.
Such is the power of Washington-led global financial system, especially the banking
sector, and the significance of petrodollar, because the global oil transactions are pegged
in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the
Western financial districts.
The crippling "third party" economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to
the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petrodollar as a
global reserve currency wields over the global financial system.
It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran's
nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally
dangerous conventional threat to Israel and the Gulf's petro-monarchies, just across the
Persian Gulf.
Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in
negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and such was the
crippling effect of those "third party" sanctions on Iran's economy that had it not been for
its massive oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly
buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to the sanctions.
Notwithstanding, after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate
in Istanbul on October 2, and the clear hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the
murder, certain naïve political commentators of the mainstream media came up with a
ludicrous suggestion that Washington should impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia.
As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning Saudi Arabia also seems
plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160
billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per
day (mbpd) of crude oil.
On the other hand, the Persian Gulf's petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states.
Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude
oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves, each, and 3
mbpd of daily crude oil production, each. Together, the share of the Gulf Cooperation
Countries (GCC) amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world's 1477 billion
barrels of total proven oil reserves.
Therefore, although imposing economic sanctions on the Gulf states might sound like a good
idea on paper, the relationship between the Gulf's petro-monarchies and the industrialized
world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of
energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction
their energy suppliers and largest investors.
If anything, the Gulf's petro-monarchies had "sanctioned" the Western powers in the past
by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel War. The 1973 Arab oil embargo
against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil
quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on
the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve
fuel for strategic and military needs.
Recently, some very upbeat rumors about the shale revolution have been circulating in the
media. However, the shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution. It has increased
the probable recoverable resources of natural gas by 30%. The shale oil, on the other hand,
refers to two starkly different kinds of energy resources: firstly, the solid kerogen –
though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US Green River formations, the
cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically
unviable for at least a hundred years; secondly, the tight oil which is blocked by shale
– it is a viable energy resource but the reserves are so limited, roughly 4 billion
barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.
More than the size of oil reserves, it is about per barrel extraction cost, which
determines the profits for the multinational oil companies. And in this regard, the Persian
Gulf's crude oil is the most profitable. Further, regarding the supposed US energy
independence after the purported shale revolution, the US produced 11 million barrels per day
(bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014, which was more than the output of Saudi
Arabia and Russia, each of which produces around 10 million bpd. But the US still imported
7.5 million bpd during the same period, which was more than the oil imports of France and
Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an
oil-producing country exports determines its place in the hierarchy of petroleum and the
Gulf's petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused
on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and
petro-imperialism.
While the US Midwest suffers with Arctic temperatures, winter tightens its icy stranglehold
on Europe, where a considerable number of people are struggling to keep their homes warm.
Statista's Niall McCarthy reports that, according to new data released by Eurostat ,
eight percent of the EU population couldn't afford to adequately heat
their homes in 2017. That still represents an improvement on recent years, particularly 2012
when it peaked at 11 percent.
Among member
states , the largest share of people who could not afford to properly heat their home was
recorded in Bulgaria at 36.5 percent. It was followed by Lithuania (28.9 percent) and Greece
(25.7 percent). The lowest figures were recorded in Luxembourg (1.9 percent), Finland (2.0
percent) and Sweden (2.1 percent).
Dominance in technology still represent pretty powerful lever used to damage and possibly subdue Russia. King of
technological imperialism.
Notable quotes:
"... As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods. ..."
"... In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions. ..."
"... - Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces. ..."
"... In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. ..."
"... -- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures. ..."
"... And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial. ..."
"... It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. ..."
Article from the newspaper: weekly "Arguments and Facts" № 1-2 09/01/2019
Is the scenario of suffocation of the USSR, carried out by the US 30 years ago, similar to
the events that are happening now, and what Russia needs to fear most? "AiF" asked these
questions to the Director of the Institute of new society, economist Vasily Koltashov.
How the world has changed
Alexey Makurin," AIF": Looking at the events taking place in recent years, you catch
yourself thinking that all this has already happened. The current strategy of suffocation of
Russia by America one in one copies the same strategy of times of Reagan. In the eighties, the
United States also hampered the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. The fall
in oil prices also drained our budget, and defense spending grew. And the army was involved in
the conflict in the southern country: Afghanistan. The West deliberately repeats the plan that
brought him victory in the cold war?
Vasily Koltashov: it's more of a coincidence. But even if there is some scenario, the game
this time is some stupid. In the days of Reagan and Bush senior Americans were more rational,
thinner. And now, in everything they do, there is an element of hysteria caused by the need to
respond to the complex state of their own Affairs. Compared with the eighties in the us huge
public debt and huge bubbles in the stock market, threatening investors ruin. The imbalances
that have accumulated in the economy are blocking the development of industrial production.
Much other than agriculture and raw material extraction is often expensive and uncompetitive.
These problems provoke a conflict not only with Russia, but also with China, with other
Eurasian centers of capitalism, which took shape in recent decades.
30 years ago, Western countries revived and developed after the crisis of the seventies. The
orbit of influence of the USA included Pakistan, Turkey, China. Now Trump has stopped financing
Pakistan. In Turkey, there was an attempt of a coup d'état in which Ankara accused
Washington. The Americans are waging a trade war against the Chinese. These and other countries
that do not find a common language with the United States, are increasingly trading among
themselves. The American press writes about the" Eastern Entente", implying the Eurasian
powers.
Increasingly, there are disputes and conflicts between Americans and their European allies,
which was unthinkable before. In such a situation, a plan to weaken Russia, similar to the
scenario of Reagan advisors, can no longer work.
-- What did the West want, putting pressure on the USSR in the eighties?
- I think the West did not seek to destroy the Soviet Union, but just tried to solved a more utilitarian
problem: acquiring new markets for their products. At that time, neoliberal globalization became the
main mechanism of economic growth, it was important for the West to draw countries into its
orbit, which were previously somehow isolated from the world market. They bought the Russian nomenklatura like they buy local
elites in Latin America and tried to concert Russia into Latin American country. They almost succeeded.
How did Ronald Reagan scare the USSR by joking on August 11, 1984?
-- What about Reagan's "evil Empire"statement?
-- It was preparation for the beginning of negotiations from a position of strength. Behind
this ideological rhetoric was another meaning: if you continue to maintain its planned economy,
closed to free trade, we will begin to destroy it, and if you agree to our terms, we will offer
you a deal.
As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington:
they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries.
Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs,
enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national
corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over
time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods.
In
response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions.
- What is their purpose in the current situation?
- Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its
representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian
domestic market and get the fattest pieces.
How Russia has changed
- This time Russia does not give up and attacks itself, as is happening in the same Syria.
What changed?
- The country and enterprises are now run by people with a market view of the world who know
the value of the wealth they dispose of. It was for Gorbachev that Soviet factories were an
abstraction, he did not understand their true value. His concessions to the US and Europe were
completely irrational from a commercial point of view. It's impossible now.
In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has
accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with
ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more
attractive. The war in Afghanistan was declared meaningless. And now the Syrian conflict,
Russia does not solve a particular ideological goals. The military plays the role of guards of
its economic interests. Without any doubt, it would be more difficult for our government to
agree with OPEC on limiting oil production, if not for the successes in Syria. This agreement
in 2017-2018 allowed to raise oil prices and helped to resume economic growth in Russia.
-- Was it possible for the Soviet leadership to influence world oil prices?
- The USSR, too, nothing prevented to sit down at the negotiating table with OPEC. But that
wouldn't change the situation. Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were then loyal allies of
the United States. The West then concentrated all the world's capital, he put the OPEC
countries conditions: create comfortable prices for us, and we will invest in your economy.
And today, Saudi capital seeks to play an independent role, Riyadh's relations with
Washington have become cooler, and with Moscow, on the contrary, warmer. And the US itself is
increasingly supplying hydrocarbons for export: it is predicted that in 2019 they will come out
on top in the world for oil production. But this leadership is provided to Americans by
expensive shale oil, the extraction of which becomes unprofitable at prices below $ 40 per
barrel. So, for the US, very low oil prices are now also unprofitable.
On the other hand, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas today is also higher
than 30-35 years ago, when the country had a more powerful industry. This is an additional
risk.
-- What new qualities acquired by the Russian economy allow it to successfully withstand
Western pressure?
-- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working
printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The
planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business
is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but
also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged
very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues
exceed expenditures.
Where the main threats
-- But aren't the military expenditures, which have to be made in the conditions of
confrontation with the United States, too high? Will it not be possible that the new arms race
will be too much for the country?
- Financing of the defense industry to the detriment of consumer and other civil industries
usually occurs in the planned mobilization system, where all the resources of the country are
concentrated by the state. And in a market economy, such imbalances appear only during the war,
when budget distortions arise and private companies begin to focus more on military orders than
on grass-roots demand. There is no such thing in Russia now, although the government's
attention to defense capability is growing along with the pressure of the US and its
allies.
- Where does the main danger come from in such a situation?
-- Not exactly from the USA. The main threat to Russia is low effective demand within the
country. The weakness of the ruble, the low rate of economic growth -- all this is a
consequence of the poverty of the mass buyer.
And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a
new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end
of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in
price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to
act and strongly non-trivial.
With whom will trade? Expert on how Russia can live under sanctions
It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At
the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a
new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within
the country. This is a traditional trade on the "method of cat Matroskin", which existed for
thousands of years: "To buy something you need, you must first sell something unnecessary." All
need to produce themselves.
And it is important to support the Russian buyer. This may be a preferential mortgage loan
at 3-5% per annum, which will stimulate demand for housing and the sectors of the economy that
are associated with construction. This may be an increase in the number of school teachers,
doctors and kindergarten workers. We need an hourly wage to let people know what their time is
worth. It is extremely important to have a tax-free minimum income (at least 50 thousand rubles
per month). It is necessary to interest migrant workers to live in Russia and leave money in
our country, which will help to create new jobs. We need to directly give people money and
encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship, release the economic energy of society.
Technological superiority is a weapon and the USA know how to use it.
Notable quotes:
"... Made in China 2025 is the Chinese government's 10-year plan to update the country's 10 high-tech manufacturing industries, which include information technology, robotics, aerospace, rail transport, and new-energy vehicles, among others. ..."
"... Without U.S. semis, China will not be able to process the technology necessary to push forward the Made in China 2025 program. "American chips in many ways form the backbone of China's tech economy," Shah said. ..."
"... The Trump Administration's tariffs on Chinese goods were intended to severely disrupt the Chinese tech-advancement initiative. But Shah says that making U.S. chips more expensive for China could have consequences for the U.S. as well. ..."
"... "Over 50% of Chinese semiconductor consumption is supplied by U.S. firms In 2017, China consumed $138bn in integrated circuits (ICs), of which it only produced $18.5bn domestically, implying China imported $120bn of semis in 2017, up from $98bn in 2016 and $73bn in 2012." ..."
"... If the two leaders are unable to come to some sort of trade resolution at the meeting, U.S. tariffs on over $200 billion worth of Chinese goods will increase from 10% to 25% on January 1, 2019. ..."
"... While US has the upper hand on semis, a trade embargo on semis will (1) slows down China's move towards achieving Made in China 2025, (2) at the same time give China the impetus to rush ahead will all resources available to achieve the originally omitted goal of being self-sufficient in tech skills and technology, and (3) seriously hurt companies like Intel, AMD, Micron, and Qualcom as a huge percentage of their businesses are with China, and with that portion of their business gone, all these companies will end up in a loss and without the needed financial resources to invest into new technology in the near future. ..."
As trade tensions run hot between the U.S. and China, President Trump might have one key advantage in the trade war, according
to Nomura.
Analyst Romit Shah explained that China's dependence on U.S.-made advanced microchips could give Trump the upper hand.
"We believe that as China-U.S. tensions escalate, U.S. semiconductors give Washington a strong hand because the core components
of Made in China 2025 (AI, smart factories, 5G, bigdata and full self-driving electric vehicles) can't happen without advanced microchips
from the U.S.," Shah said in a note to clients.
BEIJING, CHINA NOVEMBER 9, 2017: US President Donald Trump (L) and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands at a press conference
following their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Artyom Ivanov/TASS (Photo by Artyom Ivanov\TASS via Getty Images)
Made in China 2025 is the Chinese government's 10-year plan to update the country's 10 high-tech manufacturing industries, which
include information technology, robotics, aerospace, rail transport, and new-energy vehicles, among others.
One of Made in China 2025's main goals is to become semiconductor self sufficient. China hopes that at least 40% of the semiconductors
used in China will be made locally by 2020, and at least 70% by 2025. "Made in China 2025 made abundantly clear China's commitment
to semiconductor self-sufficiency. Made in China 2025 will upgrade multiple facets of the Chinese economy," Shah said.
According to Nomura's estimates, China is currently about 3 to 5 years behind the U.S. in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM)
chip production. However, Shah explained that if the trade war persists, the consequences could set Chinese chip production behind
by 5 to 15 years.
Without U.S. semis, China will not be able to process the technology necessary to push forward the Made in China 2025 program.
"American chips in many ways form the backbone of China's tech economy," Shah said.
Consequences for U.S.
The Trump Administration's tariffs on Chinese goods were intended to severely disrupt the Chinese tech-advancement initiative.
But Shah says that making U.S. chips more expensive for China could have consequences for the U.S. as well.
One concern centers around intellectual property theft. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been working hard to punish China
for allegedly attempting to commit espionage. For example, the DOJ believes China was attempting to spy on the U.S. through Huawei
and asked U.S. allies to drop
the Chinese tech equipment maker.
However, while many U.S. chipmakers, such as Advanced Micro Devices (
AMD ), Qualcomm (
QCOM ) and Micron (
MU ), expressed gratitude that the DOJ was intervening
to prevent intellectual property theft, the companies are also concerned that it could spark retaliation from their Chinese business
partners and result in loss of access to the Chinese market. "Joint ventures, IP sharing agreements and manufacturing partnerships
are the price of admission into China, and thus far, companies are playing ball," Shah explained.
Shah essentially calls the Chinese tariffs a double-edged sword. While tariffs will hurt the Chinese if they can't have access
to freely source U.S. chips, it could also hurt U.S. chipmakers if they lose their business in China. According to Shah's research,
"Over 50% of Chinese semiconductor consumption is supplied by U.S. firms In 2017, China consumed $138bn in integrated
circuits (ICs), of which it only produced $18.5bn domestically, implying China imported $120bn of semis in 2017, up from $98bn in 2016 and $73bn
in 2012."
Trump
and China's President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Thursday for a two-day
meeting. If the two leaders are unable to come to some sort of trade resolution at the meeting, U.S. tariffs on over $200 billion
worth of Chinese goods will increase from 10% to 25% on January 1, 2019.
"China could source equipment from Europe and Japan; however, we believe there are certain mission-critical tools that can only
be purchased from the U.S. We believe that U.S.-China trade is the biggest theme for U.S. semis and equipment stocks in 2019. Made
in China 2025 can't happen without U.S. semis, and U.S. semis can't grow without China. We hope this backdrop drives resolution,"
Shah said.
Heidi Chung is a reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter:
@heidi_chung .
R
While US has the upper hand on semis, a trade
embargo on semis will (1) slows down China's move towards achieving Made in China 2025, (2) at the same time give China the impetus
to rush ahead will all resources available to achieve the originally omitted goal of being self-sufficient in tech skills and
technology, and (3) seriously hurt companies like Intel, AMD, Micron, and Qualcom as a huge percentage of their businesses are
with China, and with that portion of their business gone, all these companies will end up in a loss and without the needed financial
resources to invest into new technology in the near future.
Apart from semis, China holds the throat of the US in the supply of
rare earth (used in semis, military weaponry, ans astronomical), as well as antibiotics..
Huge external debt plus high unemployment represents two vital preconditions of rise far right nationalism and fascism in all
its multiple incarnations. In this sence Ulrain, Argentina and Brasil are different links of the common chain of
events.
In a way fascism is a way of reaction of nation deeply in crisis. In essence this is introduction of war time
restrictions on political speech and freedoms of the population. The Catch 22 is that often this is done not so much to
fight external threat, but top preserve the power of existing financial oligarchy. Which fascist after coming to power quickly
include in government and and desire of which are disproportionally obeyed by fascist state.
What in new in XXI century is the huge growth of power on intelligence agencies which is way represent crippling fascism or
neofascism. In a way, then intelligence agencies became political kingmakers (as was the case with the assassination of JFK,
impeachment of Nixon, elections of Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, as well as establishing Mueller commission after Trump
victory), we can speak about sliding the county of the county toward fascism.
Notable quotes:
"... In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that followed. ..."
"... The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015 ..."
"... Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it forward. ..."
"... The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise. Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power. ..."
"... Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a program called Operation Paperclip . Many were dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist. ..."
"... A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason. Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism. ..."
"... The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism ..."
Missing from explanations of the rise of Mr. Bolsonaro is that for the last decade Brazil
has experienced the worst economic
recession in the country's history (graph below). Fourteen million formerly employed,
working age Brazilians are now unemployed. As was true in the U.S. and peripheral Europe from
2008 forward, the liberal response has been austerity as the Brazilian ruling class was made
richer and more politically powerful.
Since 2014, Brazil's public debt/GDP ratio has climbed from 20% to 75%
proclaims a worried IMF. That some fair portion of that climb came from falling GDP due to
economic austerity mandated by the IMF and Wall Street is left unmentioned. A decade of
austerity got liberal President Dilma Rousseff removed from office in 2016 in what can only be
called a Wall Street putsch. Perhaps Bolsonaro will tell Wall Street where to stick its loans
(not).
Back in the U.S., everyone knows that the liberalization of finance and trade in the 1990s
was the result of political calculations. That this liberalization was/is bipartisan suggests
that maybe the political calculations served certain economic interests. Never mind that these
interests were given what they asked for and crashed the economy with it. If economic problems
result from political calculations, the solution is political -- elect better leaders. If they
are driven by economic interests, the solution is to change the way that economic relationships
are organized.
Between 1928 and 1932 German industrial production fell by 58%. By 1933, six million
formerly employed German workers were begging in the streets and digging through garbage
looking for items to sell. The liberal (Socialist Party) response was half-measures and
austerity. Within the liberal frame, the Depression was a political problem to be addressed in
the realm of the political. Centrist accommodation defined the existing realm. Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression.
In Brazil in the early-mid 2000s, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula,
implemented a Left program that pulled twenty million Brazilians out of poverty. The Brazilian
economy briefly recovered after Wall Street crashed it in 2008 before Brazilian public debt was
used to force the implementation of austerity. Dilma Rousseff capitulated and Brazil re-entered
recession. Rousseff was removed from power in 2016. Hemmed in by Wall Street and
IMF mandated austerity , any liberal government that might be elected would meet the same
fate as Rousseff.
In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that
preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations
and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to
the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial
economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that
followed.
Since 2008, the fiscal structure of the EU (European Union) combined with wildly unbalanced
trade relationships led to a decade of austerity, recession and depression for the European
periphery. In the U.S., by 2009 Wall Street was pushing austerity and cuts to Social Security
and Medicare as necessary to fiscal stability. The consequences of four decades of
financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external
class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely
distributed busts.
With the presumed shared goal of ending the threat of fascism:
The ideological premises behind the logic that claims fascists as the explanation of fascism
emerge from liberalism. The term here is meant as description. Liberalism proceeds from
specific ontological assumptions. Within this temporal frame, a bit of social logic: If
fascists already existed, why didn't fascism? The question of whether to fight fascists or
fascism depends on the answer. The essentialist view is that characteristics intrinsic to
fascists make them fascists. This is the basis of scientific racism. And it underlies fascist
race theory.
The theory of a strongman who exploits people who have a predisposition towards fascism is
essentialist as well if receptivity is intrinsic, e.g. due to psychology, genetics, etc.
Liberal-Left commentary in recent years has tended toward the essentialist view -- that
fascists are born or otherwise predisposed toward fascism. Unconsidered is that non-fascists
are equally determined in this frame. If 'deplorables' were born that way, four decades of
neoliberalism is absolved.
The problem of analogy, the question of what fascism is and how European fascism of the
twentieth century bears relation to the present, can't be answered in the liberal frame. The
rise and fall of a global radical right have been episodic. It has tied in history to the
development of global capitalism in a center-and-periphery model of asymmetrical economic
power. Finance from the center facilitates economic expansion until financial crisis interrupts
the process. Peripheral governments are left to manage debt repayment with collapsed
economies.
Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing
ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would suggest
the opposite. In 2015, self-identified Marxists in Greece's SYRIZA party capitulated to the
austerity and privatization demands from EU creditors led by Germany. Even Lenin negotiated
with Wall Street creditors (on behalf of Russia) in the months after the October Revolution. In
a political frame, the solution from below is to elect leaders and parties who will act on
their rhetoric.
The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate
their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in
payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist
expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't
serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to
repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable
loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015.
Fascist racialization has analog in existing capitalist class relations. Immigration status,
race and gender define a social taxonomy of economic exploitation. Race was invented decades into the
Anglo-American manifestation of slavery to naturalize exploitation of Blacks. Gender difference
represents the evolution of unpaid to paid labor for women in the capitalist West. Claiming
these as causing exploitation gets the temporal sequence wrong. These were / are exploitable
classes before explanations of their special status were created.
This isn't to suggest that capitalist class relations form a complete explanation of fascist
racialization. But the ontological premise that 'freezes,' and thereby reifies racialization,
is fundamental to capitalism. This relates to the point argued below that the educated German
bourgeois, in the form of the Nazi scientists and engineers brought to the U.S. following WWII,
found Nazi racialization plausible through what has long been put forward as an antithetical
mode of understanding. Put differently, it wasn't just the rabble that found grotesque racial
caricatures plausible. The question is why?
Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson
administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and
in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and
images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it
forward.
The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had
no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise.
Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by
the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power.
Since WWI, commercial propaganda has become ubiquitous in the U.S. Advertising firms hire
psychologists to craft advertising campaigns with no regard for the concern that psychological
coercion removes free choice from capitalism. The distinction between political and commercial
propaganda is based on intent, not method. Its use by Woodrow Wilson (above) is instructive: a
large and vocal anti-war movement had legitimate reasons for opposing the U.S. entry into WWI.
The goal of Bernays and Wilson was to stifle political opposition.
Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their
families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a
program called Operation Paperclip . Many were
dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In
contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi
scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent
contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist.
The problem isn't just that many committed Nazis were scientists. Science and technology
created the Nazi war machine. Science and technology were fully integrated into the creation
and running of the Nazi concentration camps. American race 'science,' eugenics, formed the
basis of Nazi race theory. Science and technology formed the functional core of Nazism. And the
Nazi scientists and engineers of Operation Paperclip were major contributors to American
post-war military dominance.
A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious
past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of
liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason.
Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois
basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project
within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism.
This is no doubt disconcerting to theorists of great difference. If Bolsonaro can impose
austerity while maintaining an unjust peace, Wall Street and the IMF will smile and ask for
more. American business interests are already
circling Brazil, knowing that captive consumers combined with enforceable property rights
and a pliable workforce means profits. Where were liberals when the Wall Street that Barack
Obama saved was squeezing the people of Brazil, Spain, Greece and Portugal to repay debts
incurred by the oligarchs? Liberalism is the link between capitalism and fascism, not its
antithesis.
Having long ago abandoned Marx, the American Left is lost in the temporal logic of
liberalism. The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on
Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is
published by CounterPunch Books.
"... Big tech companies have bullied competitors and outrun ethical standards in an effort to "own the world," Jean Case, the CEO of the Case Foundation and a former senior executive at AOL, told Yahoo Finance this week. "Many of those big companies are crowding out new innovations of young upstarts. That's not healthy," she said, in response to a question about Google and Facebook. ..."
Big tech companies have bullied competitors and outrun ethical standards in an
effort to "own the world," Jean Case, the CEO of the Case Foundation and a former
senior executive at AOL, told Yahoo Finance this week.
"Many of those big companies are crowding out new innovations of young upstarts.
That's not healthy," she said, in response to a question about Google and
Facebook.
"On the technology side, look, things have changed so fast," Case said. "I think
we just haven't kept pace with some of the ethics policies and frameworks that we
need to put around this stuff...used by millions of millions before thought is
given to implications."
Case made the comments in a conversation that aired on Yahoo Finance on Thursday
at 5 p.m. EST in an episode of "
Influencers
with Andy Serwer
," a weekly interview series with leaders in business,
politics, and entertainment. In addition to her comments on big tech, Case
explained why a woman can be elected president, what National Geographic has done
to thrive amid media industry tumult, and how it felt at AOL in the heady early
days of the internet.
It's not hard to see the parallels of how the US is treating China today compared with
Japan in 1939. The US sanctioned Japan and stopped them from importing Iron and Oil and today
China is being technologically sanctioned throughout the West with Huawei.
The US is bludgeoning every Govt throughout the world to get its own way both allied and
contested. This attitude can only lead to War eventually. Venezuela today, Iran tomorrow
which will continue to box in China and Russia.
The US is needing a war to rally its people around the flag and to attempt to keep its
hand on the Rudder of the world.
China will be forced to sink an American ship or shoot down an American Jet to save face
re Taiwan and their Islands in the China Sea.
The West is begging for war and the parallels now and before WW11 is scary.
"... We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one. ..."
I don't know if I have already posted this here in this blog in the past, but it's as
actual as ever: an interview with Adolf Hitler, by journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in
1923 (the NSDAP was founded in 1920). Viereck was himself a Nazi:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party
programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of
dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The
Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from
the Socialists.
"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain
lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to
disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private
property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is
patriotic.
"We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the
National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race
solidarity. To us state and race are one."
Taming of financial oligarchy and restoration of the job market at the expense of outsourcing and offshoring is required in the
USA and gradually getting support. At least a return to key elements of the New Deal should be in the cards. But Clinton wing of Dems
is beong redemption. They are Wall Street puddles. all of the them.
Issues like Medicare for All, Free College, Restoring Glass Steagall, Ending Citizen's United/Campaign finance reform, federal jobs
guarantee, criminal justice reform, all poll extremely well among the american populace
If even such a neoliberal pro globalization, corporations controlled media source as Guardian views centrist neoliberal Democrats
like Booker unelectable, the situation in the next elections might be interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin ..."
"... 2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy. ..."
In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic
party. Booker ,
Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)
and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college
tuition for most Americans.
But outward appearances aren't everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late -- on
Wall Street. According to
CNBC , all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone's Jonathan
Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.
Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which
just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and
Gillibrand weren't far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and
other powerful executives.
When CNBC's story about
Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support
for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take "no corporate Pac money". But what's most telling isn't
that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street's money, it's that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn't take
their contributions, she's signaling that she's just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus
their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional
coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.
Gillibrand and others are behaving perfectly rationally. The last presidential election cost $6.6bn -- advertising, staff and
conventions are expensive. But even more important than that, they know that while leftwing stances might help win Democratic primaries,
the path of least resistance in the general election is capitulation to the big forces of capital that run this country. Those elites
might allow some progressive tinkering on the margins, but nothing that challenges the inequities that keep them wealthy and their
victims weak.
Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances,
the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.
The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don't have a labor-backed social democratic party that could
create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It's telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper's
recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: "We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values
across sectors."
Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think
there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments
like that, it doesn't take fake news to convince working-class Americans that
Democrats don't really have their interests at heart.
Of course, the Democratic party isn't a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic
socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn't going to
scare capital away from the Democratic party, it's going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.
Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of
Bernie Sanders . It seems likely that he will run
for president, but he's been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising
ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team's experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal
will morph into all-out war.
Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It's afraid of the Democrats who will take them on -- and those,
unfortunately, are few and far between.
Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin
Just like universal health care, let's give up, it's too hard, we're not winners, we're not number one or problem solvers
and besides, someone at some time for some reason might get something that someone else might not get regardless if that someone
else needs it. Let's go with the Berners who seem to believe there will never be none so pure enough to become president.
The corporate state does not cast the votes. The public does.
Leaning farther to the left on issues like universal healthcare and foreign wars would be agreeing with the public. Not only
the progressive public, but the GENERAL public. The big money donors are the ONLY force against the Democrats resisting these
things.
2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform
that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and
well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy.
Bernie's challenge will "morph into all-out war". "Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats", blah, blah, blah. But we're
going to continue to play along? Why? Oh yeah, Bhaskar Sunkara will have us believe "There is no alternative". Remember TINA?
Give it up, man, just give it up.
One dollar, one vote.
If you want Change, keep it in your pocket.
We can't turn this sinking ship around unless we know what direction it's going. So far, that direction is just delivering money
to private islands.
Democrats have a lot of talk, but they still want to drive the nice cars and sell the same crapft that the Republicans are.
Taxing the rich only works when you worship the rich in the first place.
Election financing is the single root cause for our democracy's failure. Period.
I really don't care too much about the mouthing of progressive platitudes from any 2020 Dem Prez candidate. The only ones that
will be worth voting for are the ones that sign onto Sanders' (or similar) legislation that calls for a Constitutional amendment
that allows federal and state governments to limit campaign contributions.
And past committee votes to prevent amendment legislation from getting to a floor vote - as well as missed co-sponsorship opportunities
- should be interesting history for all the candidates to explain.
Campaign financing is what keeps scum entrenched (because primary challengers can't overcome the streams of bribes from those
wonderful people exercising their 'free speech' "rights" to keep their puppet in govt) and prevents any challenges to the corporate
establishment who serve the same rich masters.
Lol, Social Security, Medicare, unemployement protections, so many of the things you mentioned, and so much more, were from the
PROGRESSIVE New Deal, which managed to implement this slew of changes in 5 years! 5 years! You can't criticize "progressives"
in one sentence and then use their accomplishments to support your argument. Today, the New Deal would be considered too far left
by most so called "pragmatic liberals." I assume you are getting fully behind the proposed "Green New Deal" then, right?
Vintage59 pointed out lots of things people have changed. Here's an exhaustive list of the legislation passed by people
who didn't get elected but were more progressive than the people who did:
There is also a steadily growing list of Democrats who did worse in elections than a hypothetical Democratic candidate had
been projected to do.
The party can either continue being GOP-Lite or it can start winning elections. It can't do both.
Nobody is going to get elected on a far left platform. Not in the USA and not anywhere. That's just a fact. And everybody
is going to need $$$ in the campaign. Of course candidates are going to suck up to Wall street and business in general.
And we would have been a thousand percent better off with HRC in the white house than we are now with the Trumpostor.
We don't need a candidate with far-left platform, we need one that is left-leaning at all. HRC and her next generation of clones
are mild Republicans.
Those who want to push the Democrats to the left in order to win perhaps need to stop talking to each other and talk to
people who live outside of LA and NY. If you stay within your bubble it seems the whole world thinks like you.
How old will Sanders be in 2020?
The people (outside the coasts) lean to the left some big issues. Medicare for all. Foreign wars. etc.
A sane person might ask why in the hell the left-side party is leaning farther to the right than the general public.
Sanders is a dinosaur. If there is a reason for Wall Street to be wary of him then it is that the mentally challenged orange
guy may win another term if the Democrats run with Sanders.
Hopefully, Sanders will understand what many of his supporters do not want to see: At some time age becomes a problem. If
the Democrats decide to move to the left rather than pursuing a pragmatic centrist approach, Ocasio-Cortez might be an option.
If they opt for the centrist alternative, it might be Harris or Gillibrand. Or, in both cases, a surprise candidate. But Sanders'
time is over, just as Biden's Bloomberg's.
It's true, but Trump is such a clusterfuck that an 80yo president is still be a better situation. Many countries have had rulers
in their 80s at one time or another.
Trump is clearly showing early-stage dementia now. Compare footage of him 10+ years ago to anything within the last 6-12 months
and it's obvious. The stress levels of being the POTUS + blackmailed by Putin + investigations bearing down on him . . . it's
wearing him down fast.
Anti-trust would be a very good place to start with.
Universal healthcare is a lot harder than you seem to think. I'd love it, but getting there means putting so many people out
of work, it'll be a massive political challenge, even if corporations have no influence. Progressives might be better off focusing
on how to ensure the existing system works better and Medicaid can slowly expand to fill the universal roll in the future.
Where has offering candidates who actually have a chance to win gotten us? Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the ADA, Title
9, Social Security, and more. None of these exist without constant changes. All took years to pass against heavy opposition. None
went far enough. All were improvements.
The list of wrongheaded things that were also passed is longer but thinking nothing changes because it takes time is faulty
logic.
Our capitalist predators are still alive and well. The finance, insurance, and real estate
organizations are the worst predators in the USA.
They will eat your babies if you let them.
"... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
"... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkφtte's books and media appearances. ..."
"... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
"... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
"... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
"... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
"... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
"... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this
for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for
starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise
Russia and Putin.
The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and
roll round like dying flies yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they
come across a particularly adorable baby.
Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while
producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.
Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.
I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkφtte's
books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back.
He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of
the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping
on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining.
Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.
But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and
zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks
together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41
Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?
The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac Parry's notes of the bloodstained
legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger
on JFK, MLK herself (some think).
Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression,
Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot
and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.
George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual
beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems
these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war
is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and
once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.
During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the
church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain
apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.
At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about
Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that
at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya all places where the US has
instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.
I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some
redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on
Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.
But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc
will pay a heavy price whether in this life or the next.
The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round
good egg he was.
The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the
BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA
trained and orchestrated death squads.
Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising
of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s early 90s here in
Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists
fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the
gullible to believe in. Sigh
I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It
was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains
when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were
wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people
have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population
that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election,
just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and
Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max
failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to
export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks
to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence,
and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios
Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding
fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need
to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the
like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own
dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell
are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and
public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media
hacks like Tisdall.
Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for
Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The
eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for
alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when
you need him?
What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend
meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book
"Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking,
oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was
a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when
during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was
handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and
Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.
Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There
still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late
seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy,
determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination
that the truth never becomes public.
I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst
ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.
The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the
Truth which it used to proclaim.
It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person
maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists)
came and went a long time ago.
What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House
cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect
in the family.
Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
"The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more
and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from
over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5
times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger
area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected
by radiation poisoning
"DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time.
The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal
(which it is).
Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't
recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that
solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link,
which began my research into the JFK Assassination.
"... The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." ..."
"... What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100% certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals. ..."
"... That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so ..."
Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss,
David Petraeus, who's just been handed a $100,000
(£64,000) fine and two years' probation for leaking classified information.
Petraeus now works for the vulturous private equity firm KKR, run by Henry Kravis, who does arguably Bilderberg's best impression
of Gordon Gecko out of Wall Street. Which he cleverly combines with a pretty good impression of an actual gecko.
... ... ...
"Can I go now?" Another no. So I continued my list of criminals. I moved on to someone closer to home:
Renι Benko, the Austrian real estate baron, who had a conviction
for bribery upheld recently by the supreme court. Which didn't stop him making the cut for this year's conference. "You know Benko?"
The cop nodded. It wasn't easy to see in the glare of the searchlight, but he looked a little ashamed.
... ... ...
I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular
attendee at Bilderberg, and he's heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank's board of directors, Rona Fairhead.
Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank's busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.
A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC "a bank beyond shame" after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while
at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay £28m in fines to Swiss regulators
investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer,
George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy he'll
go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.
High up on this year's conference agenda is "current economic issues", and without a doubt, one of the biggest economic issues
for Osborne at the moment is the future and finances of Europe's largest bank. Luckily, the chancellor will have plenty of time at
Bilderberg to chat all this through through with Flint, Levey and Fairhead. And the senior Swiss financial affairs official, Pierre
Maudet, a member of the Geneva state council in charge of the department of security and the economy. It's all so incredibly convenient.
Let's see, maybe because we have read over their leaked documents from the 1950s in which they discussed currency manipulation
and GATT. Everything they have discussed in their meetings over the past decades has almost come to fruition. There are elected
officials meeting with criminals such as HSBC. Did you even read the article? If you did, and you are not het up or whatever you
call it, then you are of a peasant mentality, and there is no use talking to you.
The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." I won't
be looking for your response because you have confirmed that you do not matter.
Carpasia -> MickGJ 12 Jun 2015 10:52
Thank you for your comment, my good man. Hatred is human, and helps us all to avoid pain, for pain, especially unnecessary
pain, is allowed to be hated by the agreement of all, if nothing else is. I would hate to be beaten by Nazis. Thus, I would avoid
going to a place where that could occur. That is how hatred works for me. It is the only way it can work, and not be pernicious
to the self and others.
I distrust the international order as it is the means, harnessed by money, whether corporate or state or individual or monarchical,
by which this world is being destroyed. Could things have been better? Jesus is on one end of the spectrum, and Lord Acton on
the other, of the spectrums of viewpoints from which that could be properly assessed.
If the corruption at the heart of the international
order is not regulated properly, this world will come to an end, not the end of the world itself, but the end of the world as
we know it. This is happening now. The world is finite.
I am not a xenophobe. In my experience, the people that are most likely to hurt me, and thus deserve fear, are those closest.
Perhaps that is a cynical way of describing it, but anyone who thinks honestly about it would accede to the notion that it is
the people who "love" us that hurt us the most, for we agree too be vulnerable to them. It is the matrix of love.
As for Austria and Bavaria, I have visited both places and they were, both, the cleanest locales I have ever seen, with Switzerland
having to be mentioned in the same breath, of course.
I take a certain liberty in writing. I am not damning the human race, or strangers to me. If I did not entertain, but caused
offence, I apologize to you. I do not possess omniscience, and my words will have to speak for themselves.
Thank you, again.
DemonicWarlordSlayer 12 Jun 2015 08:02
"How Geo Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power" in the UK Guardian >
"Did Geo H W Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team" at Veterans Today >
"9/11 Conspiracy Solved, Names, Connections, Details" on youtube....dot-to-dot of the
Demonic Warlord's Crimes Against Humanity....end feudalism.
Carpasia 12 Jun 2015 07:09
Excellent article.
I visited Austria once, and I know of what he speaks. It was the one place I have ever visited that I thought I would be jailed
if I littered. I was wandering at the time, but I tentatively had a meal of chicken and departed henceforth.
Austrians are an interesting lot, to be sure. That they are perfect goes without saying. Their main virtue is that they do
not travel, and that strangers, which we call tourists these days, are not welcomed. If only we were all like that, the world
would be a far better place.
Austrians do everything well, including crime. Some of the greatest crimes in the world have been committed by Austrians, but
their crimes did not include not having their papers.
During World War 2, and I pass over Hitler, the German machine of death had an unusually high proportion of Austrians in commanding
roles assisting it. It can not be explained away by saying they were some kind of faux Germans, and so it matters not. Indeed,
if anything, Germans are faux Austrians, looked at in the broad brush of history. Men of many nations joined the Germans and adorned
themselves with the Death's Head, but many Austrians might as well have tattooed it onto their foreheads. I know of what I speak,
for I read on it, and will justify if questioned.
Reinhard Heydrich is an epitome of this, in the true sense of the word. Kurt Waldheim was another, too young too rise too far
before the Ragnarok of May of 1945, but government of the world was not out of his reach, a man who had materially assisted the
transportation of the Jews of Thessaloniki to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and, when challenged, was unrepentant, not as a racist,
but as something worse even, as a man whose great virtue was that he followed orders. It is order that the Austrians value over
everything. Even crime is ordered.
In the common-law west we think criminals are disordered beasts to be locked up. We do not give them papers. They are registered
only to warn us of their existence, and we do not like to let them travel, as much as we could benefit by their absence, because
we think they flee to license, and we think it wrong to inflict them upon innocents abroad. In Austria, the criminal is the man
with no papers. If he has papers, all is well, and he is no criminal, whatever he has done.
colingorton 12 Jun 2015 03:19
What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that
there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100%
certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals.
That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the
whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so.
How far can all this mutual back scratching go? It seems that the only alternative left is far too drastic, but there really
seems to be no place for a legal alternative, does there?
The EU didn't impose austerity on the UK, its own government did. We don't have the euro, in
case you haven't noticed. The US is our top overseas buyer. If we want more of that, we'll
have to take something like TTIP or worse.
The EU was a voice for African, Caribbean and Pacific producers against US transnationals,
and offered favorable terms. We've weakened that voice.
Brexit makes us more dependent on the IMF, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup
and Morgan Stanley. They're not EU bodies.
Britain opposed EU democratisation for forty years by upholding national governments' veto
powers over proposals supported by elected MEPs.
You voted against everything you claim to uphold. Because it was a vote against
everything.
None of that's even the issue. Do you have an insight to offer beyond antipathy to the
EU?
Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on
that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets
broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In
other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
Notable quotes:
"... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
"... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
"... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
"But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce
grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the
guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their
folly and change course?"
What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all
the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up
diversity.
And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices
would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might
change course?
Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.
mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm
GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social,
economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no
serious comparison with third world countries and regions.
As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as
compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of
recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.
If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any
real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based
on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information
ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and
irresponsibility.
That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the
rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune
to challenge.
Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am
The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere
citizens having influencing decisions like that.
Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm
What ineffable flummadiddle!
Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed
ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a
baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller
of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).
So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!
But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public
then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a
Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.
It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through
with it.
Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm
"Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually
existed is beside the point."
It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of
the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in
Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national
independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.
Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm
It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.
We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats,
frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And
they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.
A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that
Americans will be Americans again.
Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of
the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those
institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and
their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and
evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to
rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
New emails published by the U.S. Department of State reveal the real motives behind the
international invasion of Libya.
The new emails of Hillary Clinton reveal that the real reason behind the invasion were
primarily the countries large gold and oil reserves, and the extension of French influence in
North Africa.
Fort Russ reports:
The U.S. State Department has published a series of emails that reveal the volume of gold
reserves of Gaddafi. According to the documents, the reserves are so great that they could
become the basis for creating a pan-African currency, which, in turn, could compete with the
dollar in the region.
Also, the reasons for intervention were identified as the major oil reserves of Libya and
the strengthening of French influence in North Africa. However, in 2011, Western leaders
welcomed the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime as a democratic step. "Long live Benghazi, long
live Libya, long live the friendship between France and Libya!", – said French President
Nicolas Sarkozy.
"You showed the world that you can overthrow the dictator and have chosen freedom!" –
said the Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron, speaking to the Libyan people."The
people of Libya got rid of a dictator. Now it has a chance," claimed the Vice-President of USA
Joe Biden.
In the past five years, the violence and chaos in Libya has not stopped. In the background
of this, "Islamic State" is gaining momentum in the country and has captured new territory. In
January 2016, dozens of people were killed as a result of terrorist.
Previously, "Islamic State" had claimed responsibility for the attack on a training camp in
Zliten. According to the correspondent of the newspaper The Jerusalem Post Ariel Ben Solomon,
from the outset it was obvious that intervention in Libya would lead to negative consequences
for the country.
"The email to Clinton is confirmed by the results of studies that began to appear after the
invasion of Libya, organized by France with U.S. support. Major oil reserves of the country
were the main reason for intervention. Dictators lead many African countries, but the West is
in no hurry to intervene in each of them. The Obama administration from the beginning was
guided by rather naive misconceptions on the actions that needed to be taken to resolve the
situation in Libya after the war," said RT political analyst Ariel Ben Solomon.
Source:
http://yournewswire.com/clinton-email...Ozzie Crosby2 years ago
America needs war to survive. The United States IS the infidel. It's not just propaganda.
pav_k20072 years ago
modern day robbers! K Lyall2 years ago
Imagine a NWO puppet like her in the White House for 4 more years!
10 11
View reply Hide replies 1979USHI2 years ago The
Western nations governments are totally out of order and need to be taken to a real world
court. Notta
Dr2 years ago
incredibly disgusting what we are learning about warmongering corporate globalist elites. there
is a strong move starting in the other direction....more conservative nationalist leaders are
rising up everywhere. these monsters ask need to be arrested, tried and severely
punished....held to the highest level of accountability.
January 25, 2019For Thierry
Meyssan, one of the consequences of the successive ends of the bipolar and unipolar world is the re-establishment of colonial projects.
One after the other, the French, Turkish and English have publicly declared the return of their colonial ambitions. We still need
to know what form they will adopt in the 21st century. by Thierry Meyssan Part 3 - The British Empire
As for the United Kingdom, it has been hesitating for two years about its future after the Brexit.
A little after the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, Prime Minister Theresa May went to the United States. Speaking to
the representatives of the Republican Party, she proposed re-establishing the Anglo-Saxon leadership of the rest of the world. But
President Trump has been elected to liquidate these imperial dreams, not to share them.
Disappointed, Theresa May then travelled to China in order to propose that President Xi Jinping share control of international exchanges.
The City, she said, was ready to ensure the convertibility of Western currencies into Yuan. But President Xi had not been elected
to do business with an heiress of the power which had dismantled his country and imposed on the Chinese their opium war.
Theresa May tried a third version with the Commonwealth. Some of the ex-colonies of the Crown, like India, are today enjoying powerful
growth and could become precious commercial partners. Symbolically, the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Charles, was raised to the
Presidency of this association. Mrs. May announced that we are on our way to a Global Britain.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on 30 December 2018, the British Minister for Defence, Gavin Williamson, published
his analysis of the situation. Since the fiasco of the Suez Canal in 1956, the United Kingdom has implemented a policy of decolonisation,
and has withdrawn its troops from the rest of the world. Today, it conserves permanent military bases only in Gibraltar, Cyprus,
Diego Garcia and the "Falklands", to give these islands their imperial title.
For the last 63 years, London has been oriented towards the European Union, invented by Winston Churchill, but to which, initially,
he never imagined that England would belong. The Brexit "tears this policy to shreds". From now on, "the United Kingdom is back as
a global power".
London is planning to open two permanent military bases. The first will probably be in Asia (Singapore or Brunei), and the second
in Latin America - most likely in Guyana, in order to participate in the new stage of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy of the destruction
of those regions of the world which are not connected to globalisation. After the "African Great Lakes", the "Greater Middle East",
it's time for the "Caribbean Basin". The war will probably start with an invasion of Venezuela by Colombia (pro-US), Brazil (pro-Israλli)
and Guyana (pro-British).
Neocons are "enemies of the people" independent of their party affiliation. Nuremberg principles were written not for nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks. ..."
"... The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence. ..."
There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene's classic "The Quiet American" in which the
title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated
than he'd imagined. "I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be
from principles or conviction," Pyle says. Surveying the wreckage of the American war effort,
he adds, "Looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than
fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake."
Greene's admirers will recognize that these lines do not actually come from his 1955 novel.
They are from Max Boot's new book, " The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ." Boot, a leading intellectual in the conservative
movement for the past two decades, is now apologizing for nearly everything he has done and
abided. He is denouncing not just Donald Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole. "Upon
closer examination," he writes in his 260-page atonement, "it's obvious that the whole history
of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance,
isolationism, and know-nothingism."
The temptation is to say, Bravo, here at last is a Republican willing to admit the emperor
has no clothes. That's the reaction of lots of journalists and
pundits who have flipped
through Boot's book. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the
Washington Monthly that Boot's "readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable."
Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic, tweeted , "You don't want to
punish people for getting the right answer." Boot is no longer a Republican (he quit the party
after Trump's election) but he is hardly an outcast in the political world -- he is a
Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a CNN
analyst. Such is the sweet life of a born-again intellectual.
It's easy to understand why a penitent like Boot appeals to liberals and other members of
the Trump resistance. He ratifies their sense of having been correct from the start, and his
confession is enunciated in perfect sound bites, with just the right dose of abasement. Boot is
an irresistible spectacle -- the sinner with tears running down his cheeks dropping to his
knees at the altar of all that is good, proclaiming that he has seen the light and wants to
join the army of righteousness. But here's the thing: Boot is only half-apologizing. And
because he's been wrong so many times and with so many ill consequences, he should be provided
with nothing more than a polite handshake as he's led out of the sanctuary of politics,
forever.
When I say wrong, I mean Guinness World Records wrong. In his first book, " Out of
Order ," Boot argued that the Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Brown v. Board of
Education that school segregation violated the Constitution ("I am not proud of 'Out of
Order,'" he now says); he was a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq ("Once we have deposed
Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the
one in Kabul," he proclaimed in 2001);
he thought John Bolton was treated unfairly when Democrats
opposed his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations ("He seems like a good choice
to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants");
he thought
Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly
maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone
except the staff of Commentary
magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the
GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks.
That's a lot of wrong. It's so much wrong that I can't imagine how or why anyone could look
at Boot and think, "Ah, here's a man we should listen to." I can pre-empt Boot's response to
this -- in his book, he complains that "doctrinaire leftists" will be satisfied with nothing
less than his "ritual suicide" for the war crimes he's committed. I've exchanged a few cordial
emails with Boot (we both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a few years
apart, and worked at its student newspaper, the Daily Californian ), and I can honestly say he seems a nice and
bright enough fellow to whom I wish no physical harm. But like Alden Pyle, he has helped create
so much havoc, he has been wrong so completely, that it would be the definition of insanity to
treat his ideas as fodder for anything other than a shredder. Here's a real line from "The
Quiet American," spoken about Pyle by the novel's weary narrator, that suits Boot perfectly: "I
never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Pyle's innocence, the
book explains, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no
harm."
The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and
intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic
consequence.
Boot is a perfect example, because he has been wrong so many times in such major
ways and is actually willing to admit it. But there are vast numbers of pundits , masters of
spin , and
allegedintellectuals who have been wrong
enough on enough big things (not just war, but climate change and more) to merit laughter
rather than praise. Yet there they are,
stroking their chins on our finest
op-ed pages and cable news channels. Mutual forgiveness is a necessity among pundits who are
stuffed with nonsense much of the time; without mercy on demand, they might all be out of jobs.
It's no surprise that Boot's book arrives with admiring blurbs from D.C. heavyweights James
Fallows, Jon Meacham, and David Corn, among others.
Whatever the truth, and I become daily more distrustful of the media that regularly attack
Putin in this way, I doubt very much if his crimes in this regard come anywhere near those of
Bush, Cheney, Blair, Cameron, Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This is just routinely parroted by the MSM and equally routinely expanded upon by them.
Organs like the Guardian/ BBC casually announce that Putin has stolen £40 billion
(sometimes this is casually raised to £200 billion, which would make him the richest
man on the planet and people like Gates/ Buffett poor as church mice by
comparison.)Occasionally someone does ask for details, like bank transfers, property holdings
or whatever.
Nothing is ever forthcoming. All they come up with is that he has some nice Italian suits
and a nice gold watch that cost him $1,200.
Apart from that, these allegations must be true because some financial fraudster mate of
Khordokovsky who sought refuge in the US said so. Sounds pretty convincing to us here in the
MSM – what more evidence do you need? Of course Putin is just a kleptocratic thug and
James Bond cartoon villain who has people murdered purely for the fun of it.
Very late in the game I finally saw the documentary Icarus recently. I had passed it up
because I thought I could predict that it would be rampantly dishonest, and an exercise in
propaganda. It having received an Academy award seemed to be an independent confirmation of
my prejudice.
Well, I was right for once. It was disgraceful, and the most common image in it was of
Putin, accompanied by feeble ad hominem claims, without any counterpoints of any kind. So the
core issue, cheating at the Olympics, turned out to be presented with no context at all, for
the anti-Russian smear job. No mention of Balco, Carl Lewis, Marion Jones, and just a few
seconds of an unidentified Lance Armstrong.
So now we see awards for propaganda. The Americans don't do fairness or integrity, but now
they don't even pretend.
Tolkien also comes to mind here.
Us 'hobbits' are treated as inferior beings by the 'Saurons', 'Nazguls' and 'Gollums' of this
world.
Gandalf ?
We're waiting
Comments were true and apposite enough, but it's all been said really. But given that this is
largely an information war the truth needs continuously asserting.
Our opponents – the Guardian (minitru on thames) the New York Post (Pravda on the
Hudson) the Washington Post (Izvestia on the Potomac) – sole tactic is constant
repetition, this should be our tactic also but with evidence to back it up.
We need to constantly expand our readership and challenge the lunatic narrative of the
PTB. We are now in a pivotal historical moment. If we fail it will be Hunger Games.
I agree about the repetition but do you want to know what I think? I think you need to
play MSM and others a little bit at their own game. They don't back anything up with
evidence. They write short pieces of fiction as statements of fact. Yet they are
believed.
The thing is all 'our' evidence is already out there just by taking a look. (e.g White
Helmets will take you 15 minutes to doubt that narrative) You have an army of
researchers/journalists (e.g Kit Klarenberg, Vanessa Beeley etc) posting detailed evidence
out there. A lot of the independent/academic articles I read are well backed up with evidence
but the problem is to someone not up to speed, is less inclined to read a long article backed
up by detailed reasoning and evidence within it.
I think this article is clear and credible and prompts those new to independent thought to
look at different sources of information.
So perhaps more independent writing, which is creative setting out the facts in an
intelligent way as above and invite (through links) the reader to look at the evidence which
is plentiful, at their leisure.
Humour is another good way of spreading the message. The CJ Hopkins piece a few days ago
very effective.
Skripals case reminds us that the Red Brigades in Italy and Baader-Meinhof in Germany were
entirely bogus and controlled intelligence operations. It's the same story with the "Symbionese
Liberation Army" in the US. Then there's Gladio and Northwoods.
Realpolitik has become surrealpolitik. In Skripals case Russia was immediately blamed,
despite the fact an investigation had barely begun That instantly suggests british intelligence
services participation in Skripals poisoning.
Were are currently the father and daughter who were allegedly poisoned is unknown. Why they
are in hiding is also unknown. But such quetions are never raised by MSM.
In the Middle Ages, everybody knew that witches, fairies, pixies and elves existed and were
responsible for everything that went wrong in life, like the cows or the pigs falling sick or the
hens stopping laying. But round about the early 1600s, judges and juries started demanding
evidence and acquitting defendants in witch trials. They accepted their existence, but still
wanted to see some evidence. The folk in the 1600s were probably more sceptical and less
credulous than our friends like Harding at the Guardian today.
The public can be persuaded to accept almost anything providing the story chimes with deep
seated fears or prejudices, such as Russians threatening 'our way of life' (fears and prejudices
continually stoked by the media of course)
Skripal. The final illustration is the alleged of poisoning with "Novichok" of Sergei
Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018. This was immediately blamed on
Russia, again before an investigation had been concluded, followed by sanctions, the expulsion
of Russian diplomats (including by Australia) and a general tirade of abuse against Russia in
general and President Putin in particular.
The Skripal case is a classic illustration of Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief,
Roh's magical realism and Orwell's doublethink (the act of simultaneously accepting two
mutually contradictory beliefs as correct) all rolled into one.
Rob Slane ( www.theblogmire.com 9
January 2019) has brilliantly deconstructed the many logical, scientific and political
absurdities in the official story. One will wait in vain for the merest hint of this demolition
in the mainstream media.
One possible reason for this non-coverage of the actual evidence and instead a non-stop
barrage of disinformation, suppression of evidence and manipulation of the public can be found
in the activities of a shadowy organisation known as the Institute for Statecraft, and one of
its projects known as the Integrity Initiative (sic).
Fresh revelations are emerging about this project on a daily basis and a proper analysis
must await developments. Suffice to note at this point that the Integrity Initiative is
known to be funded by the United Kingdom government, ostensibly to counter 'Russian
disinformation.' It is rather a major project to spread falsehoods about Russia through
"clusters" of journalists working in mainstream media outlets.
The latter have gone beyond the willing suspension of disbelief and instead actively promote
disinformation they know to be untrue. It is not only potential embarrassment that prevents
this story getting the attention it deserves. It is a strong suspicion, no more than that at
the time of writing, that a D Notice has been issued in the United Kingdom and
Australia.
The effect has been to prevent discussion of what is an extraordinary campaign to mislead
the public, attack opposition politicians and the alternative media, and generally undermine
what used to be regarded as a free press.
That some of the same personnel involved in the Integrity Initiative are also involved in
the Skripal matter (itself subject to a D Notice) reinforces the belief that this project has
wider tentacles than originally thought .
March 20, 2018, marks the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. While the American footprint in Iraq has drastically
changed over 15 years, a significant number of the original cheerleaders for the invasion still hold prominent roles in the media
today:
John Bolton, Fox News contributor
Bolton was President George W. Bush's
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control when the Iraq War began.
Bolton backed an Iraq invasion as early as 1998, when he signed a letter from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
a neoconservative group led by William Kristol, urging then-President Bill Clinton to attack Saddam Hussein. As the State Department's
top arms-control official during President Bush's first term, Bolton played a role in pushing the allegation that Saddam Hussein
sought uranium in Africa.
"We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq." [BBC,
11/20/02
]
"I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct." [Talking Points Memo,
5/14/15 ]
Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior contributor
Kudlow was economics editor of
National Review and a co-host of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer when the Iraq War began.
"Could it be that a lack of decisive follow-through in the global war on terrorism is the single biggest problem facing the stock
market and the nation today? I believe it is. The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand
points." [ National Review ,
6/26/02 ]
"Every day we wait for the impending invasion of Iraq is a day Saddam Hussein grows stronger, a day our national security is threatened,
and a day our economic security is jeopardized." [ National Review ,
2/6/03 ]
Boot's bloodthirstiness is united with a peculiar naοvetι about America; it must be said that in this respect he is not unlike
Lansdale. Could it really have been, as Boot wrote in 2017, that only Trump opened his eyes to the fact that it's a bit easier
to be a white guy in America, that "I benefitted from my skin color and my gender -- and those of a different gender or sexuality
or skin color have suffered because of it"? Good for Max if he's had a change of heart and seen the world through more empathetic
eyes; one only wishes he could've had those moments of reflection, which seem so modest and so reasonable, circa 2001. But that
might not have changed anything. He wrote as recently as 2013 that he feels "No Need to Repent for Support of the Iraq War." He
declares, "I feel no shame being part of the 75 percent of Americans who believed at the beginning that this was a war worth waging."
This move is not quite honest: Boot wants to submerge himself into the center of a crowd, one of the democratic mass, when in
fact he was at its vanguard, pushing for the Iraq War early and often.
"Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq." [ The Weekly Standard ,
10/15/01 ]
"In places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and very shortly Iraq, ordinary people clamor for American intervention, and welcome
U.S. troops as liberators." [Nimitz Memorial Lecture at University of California, Berkeley,
3/12/03 ]
"No need to repent for support of [the] Iraq war." [ Commentary ,
3/18/13 ]
"But how exactly does the Iraq War differ from previous wars? From World War I, when the Great Powers were said to have 'sleepwalked'
into a conflict that no one really wanted?" [ Commentary ,
7/6/16 ]
Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist
Cohen
was a Washington Post columnist when the Iraq War began.
"Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or
possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." [ The Washington Post ,
2/6/03 ]
"Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong -- not about the cause, but about its practicality."
[ The Washington Post ,
4/1/08 ]
Ari Fleischer, Fox News contributor
Flesicher served as President Bush's
press secretary as the Iraq War began.
"My point is, the likelihood is much more like Afghanistan, where the people who live right now under a brutal dictator will view
America as liberators, not conquerors." [ The New York Times ,
10/12/02 ]
"There's no question that if force is used, it will achieve the objective of preserving the peace far faster than the current
path that we're on." [White House press briefing, 2/14/03
]
"Given the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice." [White House press briefing,
3/21/03 ]
"I think that if you look at the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly pleased with the fact the United States has
helped them to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime. That was clear from their dancing in the streets, from the way they tore down
the statues. And I think that is the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people." [White House press briefing,
7/1/03 ]
Sean Hannity, Fox News host
Hannity was also a syndicated talk radio host
and a Fox News host when the Iraq War began.
"We're going to find all the weapons of mass destruction." [Fox News, Hannity & Colmes , 2/19/03, via Nexis]
"I was a real believer in the Iraq War. I still am to this day. I still feel that there were probably weapons of mass destruction.
I do believe they were likely moved to Syria in the long lead-up to the war." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show
,
9/7/16 ]
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard editor-in-chief
Hayes was a senior writer at The
Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began.
"Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives
and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi
financial support for al Qaeda." [ The Weekly Standard ,
11/24/03 ]
Hayes' 2004 book was titled The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America .
[ Media Matters ,
6/30/04 ]
Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial director
Hiatt has been
editorial page director of The Washington Post since 1999.
As Media Matters has
documented , the Washington Post editorial page -- headed by Hiatt since 1999 -- repeatedly echoed the Bush administration's
claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. A February 6, 2003,
editorial began, "After Secretary Of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it
is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."
The Post 's editorial page also
linked the need to invade Iraq to the 9/11 attacks:
During the past decade the United States vowed many times to disarm Saddam Hussein, who made no secret of his hatred and enmity
toward the United States; but when the Iraqi dictator resisted, the United States chose to abandon its vows rather than use the
force that would have been needed to enforce them. In every case, the calculation, stated or unstated, was the same: Pay tribute,
don't make trouble, and maybe nothing worse will happen.
In the ruins of Lower Manhattan in September 2001, most Americans saw evidence that this calculation was incorrect as well
as craven. The nation's enemies would not be deterred or mollified by a gentle response; they would be emboldened. President Bush
rightly concluded that the nation had to defend itself more vigilantly but also that no defense could succeed unless accompanied
by an offensive against the terrorists and the states that sheltered them.
Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor-at-large
Kristol was a co-founder of
Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank Kristol used to crusade for the Iraq War.
Saddam Hussein "will not disarm peacefully. And he must be disarmed. So war will come. The war itself will clarify who was right
and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about
Saddam's regime." [ The Weekly Standard ,
3/17/03 ]
Kristol bragged that the war would last just two months:
In 2015, Kristol
defended
the decision to invade Iraq:
Even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction, and the mistakes we made in failing to send enough troops at
first and to provide security from the beginning for the Iraqi people, we were right to persevere through several difficult years.
We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008.
Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor
Gigot has been the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal since 2001.
Under Gigot, the editorial page
frequently hyped the likelihood that Saddam Hussein was close to producing or obtaining a nuclear weapon. The Journal
forwarded alarmist claims about Iraq's nuclear capabilities on numerous occasions:
August 2, 2002: "Above all, a debate would let Mr. Bush demonstrate that he has by far the stronger case. Even the critics
concede that Saddam is a threat, after all, a tyrant who has gassed his own people, tried to kill a U.S. President and whose military
routinely fires at American pilots patrolling no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said Monday that before the Gulf War Saddam was 'within a year or two' of having nuclear weapons. And at Wednesday's Senate hearings,
former Iraqi nuclear engineer Khidir Hamza said Saddam will have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005."
August 29, 2002: "There is always the chance that Congress could refuse the President. But this must be measured against the
strong case the Administration has, a case Vice President Dick Cheney pressed earlier this week in Nashville. Mr. Cheney flatly
declared that when it comes to a nuclear-armed Saddam, 'the risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action.'"
September 25, 2002: "And then there is the redoubtable Mr. Blair, an ally who continues to risk dissent in his party and country
for a cause in which he believes. Yesterday Mr. Blair released a dossier of intelligence on Iraq. The 50-page report describes
how Saddam has tried to buy uranium from Africa for use in nuclear weapons, has 20 missiles that could reach British military
bases in Cyprus as well as Israel and NATO members Greece and Turkey, and stating that Iraq's chemical weapons are on standby
for use within 45 minutes. 'The policy of containment is not working. The WMD program is not shut down. It is up and running,'
Mr. Blair told Parliament."
September 9, 2002: "Democrats hardly need two more months now to deliberate over this evidence, most of which they already
know. They merely want to push any decision past Election Day so their votes won't put their Senate majority at risk. They can
then posture as statesmen for two months but only declare themselves after the day when voters would be able to hold them immediately
responsible. Let's hope Saddam's nuclear weapons program is operating on the same wait-until-the-election timetable."
A January 27, 2003, editorial was titled "If Saddam Survives."
Judith Miller, Fox News contributor
Miller was a New York Times reporter
when the Iraq War began.
Miller produced a series of now-debunked reports that the Bush administration used to buttress its claim that Saddam Hussein possessed
weapons of mass destruction. As Franklin Foer wrote for New York magazine:
During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein's ambition
and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by [Ahmad] Chalabi and his allies --
almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.
For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi's
credibility into question. [ New York magazine, 6
/7/04 ]
In a 2004 interview, she told The New
York Review of Books: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My
job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."
Former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller
discussed
Miller's Iraq War reporting with Media Matters in 2011:
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says one of his biggest mistakes as editor was not addressing the paper's
misleading pre-Iraq War coverage sooner, including the reporting of former Times writer Judy Miller.
Keller tells Media Matters that he is "not at all" surprised that Miller ended up at the "conservative" Fox News Channel
after she left the Times under a cloud of controversy related to her Iraq reporting.
Keller, who announced Thursday that in September he will leave the post he has held since July 2003, said: "Judy was the author
of a lot of those stories, and I should have dealt with the stories and with her I think as the sort of first order of business
when I took the job rather than waiting until the following year."
Keller was referring to the unusual
editor's note the
Times published on May 26, 2004, in which it admitted many of its pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq -- a number of which were reported by Miller -- misrepresented the situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"The whole Judy Miller WMD experience was ... one of the low points of the last eight years," Keller said.
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host
Scarborough
was hired by MSNBC as the Iraq War began.
Joe Scarborough repeatedly cheered on the Iraq War and attacked people who criticized it.
"Congressman [Jack] Kingston [R-GA], give me a quick response. How could there be anyone left on the planet today that doesn't
believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction?" [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/5/03, via Nexis]
Toppling Saddam Hussein "will mean the end of his weapons of mass destruction." [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/11/03, via
Nexis]
"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types
. I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe
the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war
.
"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief UN weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein?
Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between
its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.
"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step
forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions
were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their
mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing." [MSNBC 4/10/03 via
FAIR ]
Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor
Stephens
was editor of The Jerusalem Post when the Iraq War began.
As The New Yorker
noted , in 2003 Stephens' Jerusalem Post "named one of the Iraq War's chief architects, Paul Wolfowitz, its 'man of
the year.'"
"Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world's first nuclear bomb." [ The Jerusalem Post ,
11/15/02 ]
Stephens criticized the Obama administration's case for military intervention in Syria by contrasting it with Bush's decision
to invade Iraq, which he claimed was made based on "highly detailed" intelligence revealing weapons of mass destruction. Stephens
claimed that the "testimony of U.N. inspectors like Hans Blix" supported the Bush administration's case for war, and accusations
that the Bush administration lied were "libel" and "cheap slander." In fact, Blix told CNN in 2004 that the Bush administration "chose
to ignore" his team's concerns about the lack of solid evidence in favor of war, and that prior to the invasion the evidence of WMDs
in Iraq was revealed to be "shaky." [ Media Matters ,
4/13/17 ]
David Frum, Atlantic senior editor
Frum was a speechwriter for President
Bush when the Iraq War began.
Frum is renowned for writing George W. Bush's
"Axis of Evil" speech. Alex Nichols
described
Frum's Iraq boosterism in 2017:
Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, a fellow fanatical interventionist and veteran of the neoconservative underworld, tapped
Frum for the speechwriting team in 2000. His greatest accomplishment was the authorship of Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech,
now known for its most famous phrase, "axis of evil." The axis was a grouping of three countries -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea
-- that were implicit allies in a plot to destroy America. The supposed ties between the three mostly came down to their mutual
love for imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and non-existent collaboration with al-Qaeda. As Trump threatens war crimes against
civilians in Iraq and Syria, sanctions Iran despite its compliance with our nuclear agreement and threatens "fire and fury" for
North Korea, Frum must be held accountable for cementing them as boogeymen in the public imagination.
Frum resigned his post in February 2002 in order to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank then
working in close association with the Bush administration. With them, he emerged as one of the most enthusiastic supporters of
the War on Terror. In 2004, Frum and former adviser to the Bush Department of Defense Richard Perle published a book titled An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Its text was as audacious as its title. "An End to Evil will define the conservative
point of view on foreign policy for a new generation -- and shape the agenda for the 2004 presidential-election year and beyond,"
a description of it reads. By this time, the Iraq War was in full swing, and Frum and Perle offered full-throated apologia. Under
the assumptions that the war would bring stable democracy to Iraq and that the imaginary WMDs would be located soon enough, they
called for similar action against North Korea and Iran.
Eli Lake, Bloomberg View columnist
Lake was a State Department
correspondent for United Press International (UPI) when the Iraq War began.
As
noted
by Adam Weinstein for Gawker, Lake
argued
for the legality of the Iraq War in a 2003
column for UPI:
"On the facts of the case, it is hard to argue that Iraq has given up its weapons of mass destruction. ... With this kind of
evidence, far from being an international outlaw, the United States would be a the (sic) defender of the entire institution of
international (sic) should it lead a war to disarm Iraq."
Eliot Cohen, Atlantic contributing editor
Cohen was a co-founder
of Project for the New American Century.
MSNBC's Zachary Roth described
Cohen's role in boosting the Iraq War in 2013:
[Cohen] was a key agitator for an Iraq invasion and for a maximalist response to the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 op-ed
in which he called the War on Terror "World War IV," Cohen argued that the US. should "target" Iraq because it had "helped al
Qaeda" and "developed weapons of destruction." Not long after, he touted a spurious connection between Muhammed Atta, the chief
9/11 hijacker, and Saddam's regime. In Congressional testimony in 2002, Cohen framed a stark choice for policymakers: Allow Saddam
"to acquire weapons of mass destruction or to take action to overthrow him." In 2007, Cohen became a top adviser to Condoleezza
Rice at the State Department.
Ann Coulter
Coulter was a prominent conservative author and
commentator when the Iraq War began.
Coulter, alongside Sean Hannity,
pushed lies about Army Ranger Pat Tillman's opposition to the Iraq War. Asawin Suebsaeng
wrote in 2017 for The Daily Beast about Coulter's Iraq War boosterism and how she has pivoted away from it under Trump:
"I think Iraq was a crucial part of the war on terrorism -- if you had to choose between Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd take Iraq
over Afghanistan," Coulter said on a Fox Business panel, debating anti-war libertarians, in late 2011. "PATRIOT Act, fantastic,
Gitmo, fantastic, waterboarding, not bad, though [even harsher] torture would've been better."
Coulter went on to tell a bewildered John Stossel and Matt Welch that "[Iraq] is a fantastic country for regime change," that
"torture works beautifully," and that position regarding potential blowback or unintended negative consequences to the war were
merely a "crazy ACLU argument."
Rush Limbaugh
Limbaugh was also host of his own radio show when the Iraq War began.
On April 7, 2003, Rush Limbaugh said
, "We're discovering WMDs all over Iraq." On September 26, 2007, Limbaugh
called soldiers who advocated withdrawal from Iraq "phony soldiers." Limbaugh has
subsequently tried to justify the Iraq War, even declaring that President Bush should be
added
to Mount Rushmore . In January 2018, Limbaugh
accused the "deep state" of faking weapons of mass destruction evidence in Iraq to damage Bush.
Nicole Wallace, MSNBC host
Wallace
was George W. Bush's communications director as the Iraq War began.
"[Obama's] legacy on foreign policy is going to be that he didn't start a war in Iraq. He wasn't the president, thank God, in
the years after 9/11." [MSNBC, 5/30/14 ]
"... As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal Doomsday machine. ..."
"... That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State. ..."
"... In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914. ..."
"... Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington not Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991. ..."
"... So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s. ..."
"... Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business. ..."
We've got NATO on our mind today because we learned this morning that the mere suggestion this obsolete relic of the Cold War
should be abandoned tends to trigger an absolutely virulent outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the mainstream media.
So long as we were talking about the folly of Trump-O-Nomics and the Donald's rookie mistake in embracing an egregious stock market
bubble that is destined to crash and a failing, geriatric business cycle that at age 115 months has "recession ahead" written all
over its forehead, our host, Mika Brzezinski, was happy to nod approvingly.
But when we veered off into approval of the Donald's efforts to rein in the Empire and make peace with the Russkies, it was an
altogether different matter. We no more than launched the thought of it than Mika was sputtering in disbelief as if we had committed
a grotesque sacrilege in public:
STOCKMAN: Beyond that beyond that, trump tried to do the right thick with America first. He's been stymied at every turn
of the road. He was right. They wouldn't let him do it. He was right. NATO is obsolete. We should get rid of it. Everybody went
after him for he's trying to do the right thing in Korea and yet they keep coming after him on the basis of the status quo, which
has been wrong for last 60 years. So on the one hand, his economic policy is a failure. On the other hand, his effort to rein
in the empires I call it and get to something we can afford is being stymied. And then he's filled the swamp with $100 billion
more for the Pentagon that is doesn't need. That's the deep end of the swamp."
BRZEZINSKI: "David, David, hold on a second, hold on, hold on. You did a lot."
STOCKMAN: "Yes."
BRZEZINSKI: "I just want to like hone in on one are you saying we should pull out of NATO?" [crosstalk]
STOCKMAN: "Sure. NATO is obsolete."
BRZEZINSKI: "What?"
STOCKMAN: "NATO is obsolete. It was only set up to stop the Soviet Union and 50,000 tanks on the Warsaw front. That ended 25
years ago. We don't need NATO. Europe can take care of itself. Russia's a pint-sized economy, 7 percent of size of U.S. economy.
NATO, US GDP combined is $36 trillion, Russia's $1.5 trillion. You think the Europeans can't handle it? Germany spends 1 percent
only of GDP on defense. If they really thought that the Russians were heading through the Brandenburg Gate, they would be providing
for their own defense. They're not pacifists.
So if you wonder why we insist that a fiscal calamity is barreling down the pike just consider the implications of this exchange.
MSNBC is ground zero for the so-called progressive Left. Yet it has become so deranged by the Donald and convinced that he was elected
not because the electorate rejected its threadbare agenda, but because Putin and the Russkies threw the election to him, that it
has become a full-fledged champion of the War Party.
As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security
assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements
that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal
Doomsday machine.
That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the
nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State.
Yet with respect to the latter, the last time we checked the old Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history 28 years ago.
Shortly thereafter the 50,000 Red Army tanks, which had been arrayed menacingly (and unbeknownst to the CIA, largely without spare
fuel) behind the Iron Curtain, were mostly melted down for scrap by the destitute statelets of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, Rumania,
Bulgaria, Albania etc.) and 14 ex-Soviet Republics (like Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, etc.)
What was left of the Soviet Empire was the rump state of Russia shorn of much of its industrial base and with an aging population
of just 140 million compared to the 425 million souls who had been incarcerated in Stalin's dystopia.
So, yes, there was every reason to declare "mission accomplished" and disband NATO because the much exaggerated conventional military
threat of the Soviet Union had literally vanished from the face of the earth. At that point, NATO was, in fact, pointless.
So when President George Bush the Elder, who was no wimpy Yale pacifist, promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence
to the reunification of Germany that NATO would no move " a single inch to the east", he wasn't exactly selling the "free world"
(as they called it) down the drain.
In fact, as the above map unfolded, the 77-Years War that had incepted in August 1914 was finally over. If you want to count bodies,
150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and
the march of history into the second world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.
To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench
warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and
Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and
Vietnam.
So finally the time had come for Washington to lead the world into a golden age of peace, disarmament and prosperous commerce
among the nations.
Yet there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77 Years War ended. The great general and president,
Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address.
But that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word "congressional" in a gesture of comity
to the legislative branch. So restore Ike's deleted reference to the legislative pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol
Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID,
NED etc.) and the circle would have been complete.
It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized
world.
In a word, the real threat to world peace circa 1991 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly into the good
night.
In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold
war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.
Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington not Moscow, Beijing,
Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.
What needed to happen back in 1991 was for Bush the Elder to declare "mission accomplished" and slash the Pentagon budget from
$600 billion to $250 billion.
So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development,
procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed
forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican
predecessors during the 1920s.
Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of
the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous
dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business.
By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dumbkopf politician, he well understood
that the Great War had been for naught, and that to insure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves
of their huge navies and standing armies.
To that end, he achieved the largest global disarmament agreement ever made during the Washington Naval conference of 1921, which
halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade.
And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. He thereby gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist
candidate for president and vehement antiwar protester, who Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his first amendment right
to speak against US entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.
In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over, and the folly of Wilson's 1917 plunge into Europe's bloodbath should not be
repeated at all hazards.
The Unforgiveable Sins 0f George H.W. Bush
Not George H.W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and
their neocon pack of jackals to come to power even if he did denounce them in his bumbling old age.
Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary
confrontation with Islam. In turn, that nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces
unleashed by George H.W. Bush's petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.
We will address more fully on another occasion the 45-year-old error that holds the Persian Gulf is an American Lake and that
energy security requires it be patrolled by the Fifth Fleet. As history proves, the real answer to high oil prices everywhere and
always is high oil prices and the wonders they work to rebalance the global energy market.
But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens
of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the cold war ended.
But rather than dismantling the NATO machinery, virtually the opposite happened. NATO has been expanded to 29 countries including
such powers as Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and now the statelet of Montenegro that has a military half the size of the
police force of Philadelphia.
In the context of this relentless and pointless NATO expansion to the very borders of the shrunken Russian state, Washington not
only sponsored and funded the overthrow of Ukraine's constitutionally elected government in February 2014. But once it had unleashed
a devastating civil war, it relentlessly blocked the obvious alternative to the bloodshed that has claimed 10,000 civilian and military
casualties.
That is, it's partition of its population among the Russian speaking provinces in the Donbas and Crimea and Ukrainians in the
west. After all, partition was accomplished peacefully in the artificial state of Czechoslovakia and at the insistence of NATO bombers
in the short-lived nation of Yugoslavia.
Had not the Donald been stopped cold by the hail of hysteria which emanated from the War Party and their dutiful stenographers
in the main stream media, the next step after his historic meeting with Putin in Helsinki would have been to take up where George
H.W. Bush faltered in 1991.
That is, on the dismantlement and interment of NATO and the reopening of Europe to peaceful commerce among all the nation's that
had been artificially separated by the now long departed Iron Curtain.
The fact is, Washington doesn't need its budget-busting $720 billion defense budget to defend Europe from Russia, nor should it
be endlessly haranguing those nations to waste more of their own money on defense than they already are.
That's because there is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia wants to attack Germany or any other country in Europe. Indeed,
the very idea is just plain madness.
As shown by the table below, the NATO-28 (excluding the US) are now actually spending $250 billion per year on defense
(2017). That's 4X Russia's entire military budget of $61 billion .
Likewise, the GDP of Russia is but $1.5 trillion compared to $18 trillion for the NATO-28. So is Cool
Hand Vlad so completely foolish and reckless as to think that he could invade and occupy territories that have an economy 13X bigger
than that of Russia?
Actually, it's far more ludicrous than that. The rump of Russia today is a giant hydrocarbon province attached to some wheat fields,
timber lands and mineral deposits all dependent upon an aging work force afflicted with an undue fondness for Vodka etc.
What that means is that Russia must export its commodities big time or die. In fact, during 2017 Russian exports totaled $357
billion or 26% of its GDP. And 55% of that went to Europe!
Moreover, when you breakdown Russian exports it is plain to see that the industrial maw of Europe is the port of first call for
its vast tonnages of exported commodities. These included $173 billion of oil and gas and $60 billion of iron, steel, aluminum, precious
metals, forest products, fertilizers, grains and copper, among others.
Finally, the table on defense spending by country below speaks for itself as to the purported Russian threat. If the German government
really feared that Russian tanks would be soon rolling through the Brandenburg Gates, it would have more than 20 operational tanks,
and it would spend far more than $40.6 billion or 1.2% of GDP to defend itself.
And the same is even more true of the former Warsaw pact countries that are located cheek-by-jowl on Russia's border. Yet Romania
spends the tiny sum of $2.8 billion or 1.2% of GDP on its military.
Likewise, the figure for Hungary, which learned all about Soviet-style invasions in 1956, spends only $1.2 billion or barely 1.0%
of GDP. And besides that, its intrepid leader, Viktor Orban, doesn't even support NATO's ridiculous sanctions on Putin's cronies
and allies.
And as for the allegedly threatened Baltic states, their combined defense budgets are less than $1.5 billion, representing a minuscule
1.7% of combined GDP; and Bulgaria, fast upon the Russian Lake called the Black Sea, spends only $660 million or 1.4% of its GDP.
In short, European policy action on the defense spending front trumps all the hot air that wafts from NATO's spanking new Brussels
headquarters. Their governments and parliaments positively do not think they are threatened by the Russian Bear because they aren't.
What would help a lot, therefore, is for the Great Disrupter to forget about his unfortunate infatuation with the idea that bigger
is always better, and do what no other American politician in thrall to the Warfare State has been unable to do since 1991 when the
Soviet Union vanished.
That is, declare "mission accomplished" with respect to NATO and disband it forthwith.
You could call it a Mercy Killing. Indeed, a couple more NATO summits at which they are browbeat to waste ever more money on defense,
and the Europeans themselves may well start begging for exactly that.
Then again, could you imagine how loudly the progressive left would be screaming if the Donald even entertained the thought deep
beneath his bedraggled Orange Comb-Over?
and especially in the US, where any criticism of Israel is regularly treated as
'anti-semitism', just as it is here in the UK. I have never recognised the state of Israel,
even though my mother's family was exterminated almost in its entirety during WWII. And I
don't even know where or when my aunts, uncles, cousins et al vanished, even 70 yrs later.
Oft times I'm ashamed to be considered Jewish and see very little difference between Hitler's
Nazis and the so-called Jewish state that treats Palestinians as untermensch.
This write-up is an uncanny coincidence for me as I just watched the four part movie The
Lobby (UK) yesterday. As I watched the maneuvers of the israeli's lobby groups and their
wilful political accomplices, I kept smiling seeing how much they are putting into an
unwinnable war. They seem not to learn from history. Michelle Alexander would be vilified and
demonized but I think she will live in peace with herself. The Apartheid-Israel is indeed a
horrendous shame.
I falsely said earlier that every Congress-person is on the payroll but only 269 (62%) of
the 435 voting House delegates received pro-Israel money, an average of $23,220 each. . .
here
Essentially they are trying to control the US foreign policy. That's a sign of the slide to neofascism as under
neofascism intelligence agencies have a political role and are instrumental in crashing the dissent.
Notable quotes:
"... The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy establishment. ..."
"... By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist NKVD. ..."
"... The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder, Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." ..."
"... Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television news. ..."
"... But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials." ..."
The Times claims that Trump "had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when
he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack the emails of his
opponent, Hillary Clinton." Given that this was a sarcastic campaign remark directed against
Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and delivered at a
public news conference, Trump's sally can hardly be construed as evidence of a conspiracy.
The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at
the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the
Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to
benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions
adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy
establishment.
By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or
the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and
conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist
NKVD.
The agency also investigated four of Trump's campaign aides over possible ties to Russia,
and even made use of the notorious Steele dossier, consisting of anti-Trump gossip collated
from Russian sources by a former British intelligence agent on the payroll of the Democratic
Party.
After Trump fired Comey, according to the Times , "law enforcement officials became so
concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working
on behalf of Russia against American interests Counterintelligence investigators had to
consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national
security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or
had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence."
The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid
rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder,
Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II
commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist
conspiracy."
Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American
politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of
the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television
news.
But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at
age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a
billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the
Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence
has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian
government officials."
While there is no evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and Moscow, the Times report itself
is evidence of a conspiracy involving the intelligence agencies and the corporate media to
overturn the 2016 presidential election - which Trump won, albeit within the undemocratic
framework of the Electoral College - and install a government that would differ from Trump's
chiefly in being more committed to military confrontation with Russia in Syria, Ukraine and
elsewhere.
A secret security investigation by a powerful police agency directed against an elected
president or prime minister can be described as nothing other than the antechamber to a coup by
the military or intelligence services.
Historically, the FBI has been at the center of such dangers in the United States. Its
founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, was notorious for his unchecked power, particularly during
the period of the McCarthy anticommunist witch hunt, when he accumulated dossiers on virtually
every Democratic and Republican politician and authorized widespread spying on civil rights and
antiwar groups.
President John F. Kennedy was so concerned that he installed his brother Robert as attorney
general - and nominal superior to Hoover - to keep watch over the bureau. That did not save
Kennedy from assassination in 1963 , an event linked in still undisclosed ways to ultra-right
circles, including Cuban exiles embittered by the Bay of Pigs disaster, Southern
segregationists, and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus up in arms over Kennedy's
signing of a nuclear test ban treaty with Moscow.
The New York Times report - and a companion piece published Sunday in the Washington Post
claiming that Trump has kept secret key details of his private conversations with Putin - serve
to legitimize antidemocratic and unconstitutional conduct by the military-intelligence
apparatus .
These reports shed light on the striking complacency in the "mainstream" media over Trump's
threats to declare a national emergency, using the pretext of his conflict with congressional
Democrats over funding of a border wall, which has led to a three-week-long partial shutdown of
the federal government.
If one takes for good coin the main contention of the reports by the two newspapers, their
acquiescence in a potential Trump declaration of emergency rule is inexplicable. After all, if
Trump is Putin's agent, then a Trump declaration of a state of emergency, giving him sweeping,
near-absolute authority, would put the United States under the control of Moscow.
The explanation is that the Times and the Post welcome the discussion of emergency rule, to
prepare the forces of the state for coming conflicts with the working class. Their only
disagreement with Trump is over which faction of the ruling elite, Trump or his opponents in
the Democratic Party, should direct the repression.
One thing is certain: if Trump declares a national emergency, or if, as the Post suggested
in an editorial, his opponents in the ruling elite declare a national emergency over alleged
Russian "meddling" as part an effort to remove him, it will represent an irrevocable break with
democracy.
It is impossible to determine which side in this sordid conflict is more reactionary. The
working class is confronted with two alternatives :
either the present political crisis will be resolved by one faction of the ruling elite
moving against the other, using the methods of palace coup and dictatorship, whose essential
target is the working class,
or workers will move en masse against the political establishment as a whole and the
capitalist system that it defends.
No, please no Max Boot anymore. This neocon clown should switch to painting houses as Tucker
Carlson suggested, not write "national security" commentary in Bezos blog (is this CIA blog or
Besos? ;-)
I am with tucker Carlson: painting Houses is probably the most quality job Max book can
perform with acceptable quality. The only danger is that he might steal some paint :-)
Why so many "national security" commentators are in reality national security parasites? Why
national security attracts bottomfeeders? This is an interesting question to
ponder.As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nothing changes since that time
January 15,
2019PaulR113
Comments The Washington Post has been banging the 'Trump is a Russian agent' drum
incessantly, and was at it again this week, with an
article by that well-known bastion of common sense and accurate analysis, Max Boot,
entitled 'Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian agent'. Boot's article doesn't actually
provide any evidence concretely linking Trump with the Russian intelligence agencies, but
that's pretty much par for the course. Boot ends with the words:
Now that we've listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian assets, let's look at the
exculpatory evidence:
[This page intentionally left blank]
I can't think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grapsing
what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could
actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. If Trump isn't actually a Russian
agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.
So what does a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent look like in real life? To answer
that we have to find examples of the Trump adminstration's policies towards Russia, and
fortunately the international press has just provided us with a good example. The German paper
Bild am Sonntag
reported on Sunday that the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, sent letters
to companies participating in the North Stream 2 gas pipeline project in which he told them
that, 'We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in
something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.' A spokesman for Grenell
subsequently clarified the Ambassador's letter by saying that it was not a threat, just a
'clear message of US policy', though I have to say that the distinction is lost on me.
Grenell's letter didn't come out of the blue. The United States has long been doing all it can
to sabotage North Stream 2. And Trump himself is fully signed up to the policy. At a meeting
with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia last year, the US president declared his
opposition to North Stream 2, declaring
:
Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of
dollars for energy into Russia. And I'm saying, 'What's going on with that? How come Germany
is paying vast amounts of money to Russia when they hook up a pipeline?' That's not
right.
This is indeed a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent. There's no doubt about it
– Trump is working for the Russians. Why else would he doing his damnedest to destroy one
of the Russian Federation's most valuable international trade projects? Does that make sense to
you? It doesn't to me. If Donald Trump is indeed a Russian agent, I have to conclude that he's
got to be the worst secret agent ever.
"... In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora ..."
"... The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness." ..."
"... When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran. ..."
"... One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election . ..."
"... Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone. ..."
"... Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it . ..."
"... That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America. ..."
The Roman poet Ovid's masterful epic The Metamorphoses includes the memorable opening line
regarding the poem's central theme of transformation. He wrote In nova fert animus mutatas
dicere formas corpora , which has been translated as "Of shapes transformed to bodies
strange, I purpose to entreat "
Ovid framed his narrative around gods, heroes and quasi-historical events but if he were
around today, he would no doubt be fascinated by the many transformations of the group that has
defined itself as neoconservative.The movement began in a cafeteria in City College of New York
in the 1930s, where a group of radical Jewish students would meet to discuss politics and
developments in Europe. Many of the founders were from the far left, communists of the
Trotskyite persuasion, which meant that they believed in permanent global revolution led by a
vanguard party. The transformation into conservatives of a neo-persuasion took place when they
were reportedly "mugged by reality" into accepting that the standard leftist formulae were not
working to transform the world rapidly enough. As liberal hawks, they then hitched their wagon
to the power of the United States to bring about transformation by force if necessary and began
to infiltrate institutions like the Pentagon to give themselves the tools to achieve their
objectives, which included promotion of regime change wars, full spectrum global dominance and
unconditional support for Israel.
The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they
moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill
Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the
Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White
House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was
buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his
administration's "weakness."
The neoconservatives lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, appalled by Donald Trump's
condemnation of their centerpiece war in Iraq and even more so by his pledge to end the wars in
Asia and nation-building projects while also improving relations with the Russians. They worked
actively against the Republican candidate both before he was nominated and elected and did
everything they could to stop him, including libeling him as a Russian agent.
When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but
chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well
as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all
odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as
National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is
Fred
Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump
added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for
countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with
Iran.
Meanwhile, the neocon metamorphosis is nearly complete as many of the neocons, who started
out as Democrats, have returned home, where they are being welcomed for their hardline foreign
policy viewpoint. Glenn Greenwald
reports that , based on polling of party supporters, the Democrats have gone full-Hillary
and are now by far more hawkish than the Republicans, unwilling to leave either Syria or
Afghanistan.
The neocon survival and rejuvenation is particularly astonishing in that they have been
wrong about virtually everything, most notably the catastrophic Iraq War. They have never been
held accountable for anything, though one should note that accountability is not a prominent
American trait, at least since Vietnam. What is important is that neocon views have been
perceived by the media and punditry as being part of the Establishment consensus, which
provides them with access to programming all across the political spectrum. That is why neocon
standard-bearers like Bill Kristol and Max Boot have been able to move effortlessly from Fox
News to MSNBC where they are fêted by the likes of Rachel Maddow. They applauded the Iraq
War when the Establishment was firmly behind it and are now trying to destroy Donald Trump's
presidency because America's elite is behind that effort.
Indeed, the largely successful swing by the neocons from right to left has in some ways
become more surreal, as an increasing number of progressive spokesmen and institutions have
lined up behind their perpetual warfare banner. The ease with which the transformation took
place reveals, interestingly, that the neocons have no real political constituency apart from
voters who feel threatened and respond by supporting perpetual war, but they do share many
common interests with the so-called liberal interventionists. Neocons see a global crisis for
the United States defined in terms of power while the liberals see the struggle as a moral
imperative, but the end result is the same: intervention by the United States. This fusion is
clearly visible in Washington, where the Clintons' Center for American Progress (CAP) is now
working on position
papers with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of
Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4
lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against
Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up
to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the
2016 election .
DDT is a prime example of how the neoconservatives and traditional liberal interventionists
have come together as it is in part funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire co-founder of
eBay who has provided
DDT with $600,000 in two grants through his Democracy Fund Voice ,
also a 501(c)4.
Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive
organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder
of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg
and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone.
Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding
the launch of
the launch of a new webzine The
Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the
recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting
itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least
some of the Omidyar money is behind it
.
Iranian-born Omidyar's relationship with Kristol is clearly based on the hatred that the two
share regarding Donald Trump.
Omidyar has
stated that Trump is a "dangerous authoritarian demagogue endorsing Donald Trump
immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust."
He has tweeted that Trump suffers from "failing mental capacity" and is both "corrupt and
incapacitated."
Omidyar is what he is – a hardcore social justice warrior who supports traditional big
government and globalist liberal causes, most of which are antithetical to genuine
conservatives.
But what is interesting about the relationship with Kristol is that it also
reveals what the neoconservatives are all about. Kristol and company have never been actual
conservatives on social issues, a topic that they studiously avoid, and their foreign policy is
based on two principles: creating a state of perpetual war based on fearmongering about foreign
enemies while also providing unlimited support for Israel. Kristol hates Trump because he
threatens the war agenda while Omidyar despises the president for traditional progressive
reasons.
That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no
character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is
quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of
America.
There was one man who completely delegitimized state of Israel and who, under political
pressure from Polish Government conducting political purge of Jews, Polish workers party
members, was fired from his job as director of hospital and pushed to leave country for
Israel and to denounce Polish Citizenship.
He, a Jew, in 1969 refused to immigrate to Israel because as he described it, Israel was
apartheid country run by Jewish Nazi collaborators and American Zionists.
This man was Marek Edelman, one of leaders of Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943.
No need for further delegitimization of state of Israel.
iv> Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also
represent a sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just
appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to
the powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist
Manchurian Candidate.
Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed
Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department as
a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.
Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of Zionism,
Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!
Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS
(anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist
movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.
Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I bring
up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this world.
The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and now
they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying to
destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A pox
on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link
Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also represent a
sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just appointed to
the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to the
powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist
Manchurian Candidate.
Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed
Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department
as a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.
Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of
Zionism, Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!
Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS
(anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist
movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.
Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I
bring up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this
world.
The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and
now they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying
to destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A
pox on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George
Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American
People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history.
But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired
by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond
specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead,
I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies
my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic
heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
This is a compelling book that documents and examines the senseless and dangerous demonizing of Russia and Putin. Unfortunately,
the elites in Washington and mass media are not likely to read this book. Their minds are closed. I read this book because I was
hoping for an explanation about the cause of the new cold war with Russia. Although the root cause of the new cold war is beyond
the scope of this book, the book documents baseless accusations that grew in frequency and intensity until all opposition was
silenced. The book documents the dangerous triumph of group think.
"On my planet, the evidence linking Putin to the assassination of Litvinecko, Nemtsov, and Politkovskaya and the attempt
on the Skripals is strong and consistent with spending his formative years in the KGB. The naive view from Cohen's planet is
presented on p 6 and 170."
Ukrainian history. That's evident to any attentive reader. I just want to state that Ukrainian EuroMaydan was a color revolution
which exploited the anger of population against the corrupt neoliberal government of Yanukovich (with Biden as the best friend,
and Paul Manafort as the election advisor) to install even more neoliberal and more corrupt government of Poroshenko and cut Ukraine
from Russia. The process that was probably inevitable in the long run (so called Baltic path), but that was forcefully accelerated.
Everything was taken from the Gene Sharp textbook. And Ukrainians suffered greatly as a result, with the standard of living dropping
to around $2 a day level -- essentially Central Africa level.
The fact is that the EU acted as a predator trying to get into Ukraine markets and displace Russia. While the USA neocons (Nuland
and Co) staged the coup using Ukrainian nationalists as a ram, ignoring the fact that Yanukovich would be voted out in six months
anyway (his popularity was in single digits, like popularity of Poroshenko those days ;-). The fact that Obama administration
desperately wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainians eludes you. I would blame Nuland for the loss of Crimea and the
civil war in Donbass.
Poor Ukrainians again became the victim of geopolitical games by big powers. No that they are completely blameless, but still...
It looks like you inhabit a very cold populated exclusively with neocons planet called "Russiagate." So Professor Cohen really
lives on another planet. And probably you should drink less American exceptionalism Kool-Aid.
So neoconservatives return to the Democratic Party in which they were hatched. When the party
became the second War Partty in Washington. nice...
Notable quotes:
"... Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire." ..."
"... his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy. ..."
"... Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy. ..."
"... The Corrosion of Conservatism ..."
"... A Choice Not an Echo ..."
"... In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal ..."
The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he
has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the
neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move
back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon
journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it's creating a vertiginous sensation.
James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair , "One of the chewier
ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I'm following former foes on Twitter and
elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency,
especially after the invasion of Iraq."
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right by Max Boot
Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more
crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front.
Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a
hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the
Atlantic . Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street
Journal to the New York Times . William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on
MSNBC.
And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot's breach with the Republican
Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn't sure that
he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a
lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on
Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, "Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President
Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation
today?," with this accompanying text: "Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no." His sallies have earned
him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a
"soulless, craven opportunist."
Boot's defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once
the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism
in a Weekly Standard cover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he
announced, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." His name became a synonym for neocon
warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential
aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.
In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances
that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race,
gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post , Boot has
relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. "If there has been an outcry against Trump's
virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it," he wrote in August. "The only
conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump's bigotry are those of us who are
#NeverTrumpers -- and, as I constantly hear online, we aren't 'real' conservatives because we
do not worship at the orange altar."
Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism , Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He
deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace
of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the
2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination,
Boot's Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He
became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with
Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump's
authoritarianism. When they didn't, he felt betrayed.
For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to
America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to
Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has
sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right , Boot was
never a Republican operative. He isn't trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order.
Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic
temperament hasn't changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.
The value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he
explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In
describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the
right.
Now it's the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he
missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted
with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy
mongering. And he is haunted by a question: "Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark
force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?"
Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills's Confessions of
a Conservative , the value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis.
Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative
madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide
of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor
for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler's remark in The God
That Failed : "When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know
what it's all about."
B oot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was
deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both
later immigrated to America. Boot's father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed
samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then
taught Russian in California.
Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father -- a self-described monarchist who
now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state -- is
quite constrained. But Alexander's gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he
was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers,
ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F.
Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers's
Witness , F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom , and Russell Kirk's The
Conservative Mind . Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the "evil empire" that Max and his
parents had fled, was Boot's contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with
the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.
Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony,
he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to
Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion
would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire."
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of
adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the
Christian Science Monitor . But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the
Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented
polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side
economics and a hawkish foreign policy.
Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned
that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that
he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an
assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased
Bartley. "I later learned," Boot writes, "that he liked to take writers who did not know much
about the subject and train them in his way of thinking."
In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the
cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went
to the monthly "Monday Meeting," where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold
standard to Central Park's horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a "made man" in 2007 when
he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a "love of
country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of
totalitarianism."
B ut Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal . He once invited
a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics,
which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. "This was an early
indication," Boot writes, "that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the
left." Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy
theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving
Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. "I thought he was a
deeply flawed man," Boot says of Clinton, "but I appreciated the achievements of his
presidency." But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote
the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.
One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's
acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has
always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to
ignore," he writes. For all the political right's hosannas for Buckley, he established the
revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to
treason. It's important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous
Joseph McCarthy -- a sentiment he never repudiated -- and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a
dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed
to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and
for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet
Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless
apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.
After McCarthy's demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully
reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo
suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from
winning. "It wasn't any accident," she claimed. "It was planned that way" by New York
financiers who supported "a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter
White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting
Red Russia and her satellites." The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet
agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn't any accident, either. The message was that egghead
liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.
One
of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that
Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark
underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes.
The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections.
But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point
began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now
Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has
become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the
rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he
maintained that the GOP should not " 'Rush' to embrace talk show democracy." He now
denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy
theories on Trump's behalf.
Perhaps the most notable part of Boot's book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco
that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and
was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. "It is not nearly as easy to remake a
foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003," he writes. And he recognizes that the
catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In
listening to Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes "my
callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale
University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be."
Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that
belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching
indictment of the GOP: "I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and
devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and
know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be
any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes." Indeed, he
concludes, "having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will
swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may
lead me."
There's a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered
the breaking-ranks genre in Witness , Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But
his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to
sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.
"... Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult. ..."
"... Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in. ..."
I wanted to like this book and Max Boot but couldn't. I'm an 'old white
guy' who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican family but switched allegiance to the Democrats
during the civil rights battles in the 60s. I was hoping to read about someone who went through
a similar transformation but Max's journey falls short.
The book is part autobiographical: Max was born in Russia into a Jewish family in 1969. His
family was allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the US in 1976 after pressure was placed
on the Communist government by the United States. Max states that the Boots survived here in
part on payments from Social Security for which Max says "Thank you, America" but ignores that
this support was from a program that was developed by liberals and that has been regularly
attacked by conservative Republicans. His mother was employed by the University of California, a state university, and Max received
his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. While he notes that it "cost next to nothing" at
the time, he doesn't point out that his tuition was low thanks to subsidies that were paid by
the taxes of the citizens of the State of California. The UC system is also a product of
progressive thinking and is partly responsible for the economic growth in California. It's paid
for itself many times over by developing a highly educated work force that supports the many
high paying, high skilled jobs in the state.
Max began his conversion to right wing politics at age 13 when he received a subscription to
the New Republic magazine. I suppose you can't expect much critical thinking from an
adolescent, but you would think that it would have taken less than 36 years to realize that
conservative Republican values and policies weren't conducive to helping people who have needs
similar to those of his family. Especially since Max seems certain that he is among the most
intelligent people to walk among us.
He states that he now sees that the messages of conservative Republicans were often "coded
racial appeals – those dog whistles" and that liberals have recognized this for decades.
He just didn't believe the liberals or bother to honestly evaluate their warnings. Max can't refrain from making the ad hominem attacks so prevalent among right wing pundits.
Most of these are directed at Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "liar, an ignoramus, and a
moral abomination". He also includes a chapter about the "Trump Toadies".
Max "loved the attention and notoriety" his conservative views generated in his youth. He
now recognizes that he has been a part of a movement that has been "morally and intellectually
bankrupt".
He also states that he no longer receives any pay from any conservative organization. Is
this the reason that he is looking for another group to hook up with? Or is he worried that
since he was not born in the United States his citizenship might be revoked and he might be
sent back to Russia if the anti-Semitic members of the right wing get their way?
So Max comes across as quite shallow even while showing off his extravagant vocabulary. While
he was quite willing to accept the offerings of a liberal society, he's been unwilling to
consider any responsibility to provide similar benefits to those who came after him.
The book is well written and is a quick read. Ultimately it's one man's awakening to the
awful realities of what conservative Republicanism has become. It doesn't really break any new
ground for those who have been following politics for any length of time.
In the epilogue Max lists his current beliefs and many of them are liberal. He states he is
pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration including offering a path
to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he is also in favor of free speech. He and I
might disagree on the details about how to reach some of these goals but in these areas we
would be pointing at similar directions.
But then Max attacks other progressive programs. For example, he states that single payer
medical insurance – Medicare for all – would cost too much and cause insurance
companies to go bankrupt or "find a new business model". Frankly if a company that makes its
money by increasing the cost of our health care has to "find a new business model", I believe
that would be a good thing for the health of our economy and of our people. As to the insurance
company employees, since claims would still have to be processed I suspect that the people
processing claims for the insurance companies would be able to make the switch to work for a
government agency processing claims easily, so they should be ok.
I hope that Max's rejection of conservative Republicanism is actually a genuine realization
that ALL people are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" including getting
affordable medical care. If that's the case, I would be happy to welcome him to join those of
us who vote for politicians who truly represent these values.
But I am not convinced by this book that he has truly escaped the "corrosion of
conservatism". Let's see if time will prove me wrong.
skeptic
Thank you for your review. Much appreciated...
I would add that it is important to understand that Max Boot is not an intellectual, he is essentially a well-paid MIC
lobbyist who pretends to be an intellectual. He does not have convictions per se, only the burning desire to belong to the
winning and/or better paid party.
The fact that he realized from which side the bread is buttered at early age just confirms what he always valued money
more then ideas.
The politics of the cold war created many political anomalies in the United States. One of
the biggest was the migration of the cold war hawks after 1968 from the Democratic Party to
the Republican Party. For many of them, it was less about a broad vision of politics than
narrow concerns over Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The alliance functioned up until the end
of the cold war and the establishment of republican control in the Senate and House. Then it
broke down completely during the Presidential Term of George W. Bush.
After a decade out of power and as a hanger-on in three failed presidential campaigns, Max
Boot has written this book which is sort of a combination of angry farewell letter and maoist
self-criticism covering his entire political career to 2016 or so.
The problems start at the beginning of the book. He defines "conservative" to mean to him
"incremental policy making based on empirical study". His conservative beliefs, in contrast
to what he considers "European" beliefs, rejects the nation-state and the idea of an American
identity. The only limit to the "social safety net" in his mind is when that safety net
begins to impact "individual initiative". He makes a special point of saying that what has
united the country since the beginning is not belief in a nation, but rather belief in ideas
or "self evident truths".
The problem with all that is that his ideas of conservatism are in fact liberalism.
Incremental government policy to incrementally perfect society is not a remotely conservative
concept. Further, when you conclude as he does that American Soil has no meaning and American
Blood shed has no value, you have to really wonder about how exactly he justifies his belief
in foreign wars. Are Americans who have served in the military just suckers? or slaves in
Pharaoh's army? Where is patriotism in his vision of what "conservative" means? Did people in
wars die for "self evident truths" rather than the flag?
He drifts further into liberal thought with his idea that there is more to the
constitution than what is in the constitution. Rather than just the text and intent, Boot
finds unwritten "norms" hidden within the constitution which he holds American Citizens
should respect equally with the constitution. This is not a new idea. Its the old idea of the
"living" constitution which only elite oracles can present to us its true hidden meaning.
Then, like many people, he claims that his ideas are those of Barry Goldwater in 1960. But
they are absolutely not. The ideas that Max Boot stands for are the ideas of Lyndon Johnson.
The ideas of using the power of government for social engineering. The idea of fighting
crusades for ideas overseas in places like Vietnam. A general rejection of any sort of
morality or patriotism in politics. Worst of all, the tendency to see the United States of
America as an intellectual crusade for justice in the world rather than as a country.
A large portion of the book is given over to complaints about Trump. But the problem is
that Max Boot's ideas and his idea of what a conservative is go far beyond just being for or
against Trump. In a very real sense, he represents the discredited politics of George W. Bush
who have no support among any party and only tend to have followers in places like the pages
of "The Atlantic". The question isn't really what happened to the republican party, but more
how someone with the outright liberal political worldview of someone like Max Boot ever
thought that those ideas are what conservative meant. He tries to attach himself to men of
the past like Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. But he fails to realize that he would not fit
in with the politics of any of those man. Perhaps he would have best fit with the old
Rockefeller Republicans but to me even that is far from certain.
Max Boot has in the past been critical of Ronald Reagan's decision not to fight a war in
Lebanon in the 1980s associating it with American "weakness" that led to 9/11. He blamed
Eisenhower's decision not to support the British/French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as starting
a "pattern of weakness" in America's dealing with the middle east which was not corrected
until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its equally doubtful that Max Boot would have supported the
ideas of Barry Goldwater over those of Lyndon Johnson.
The bulk of the book him talking about his favorite topic: himself. He proves once again
that he isn't any sort of intellectual or man of ideas. He complains about trump. He
complains about various republicans who he clearly expected to follow him out of the
republican party but did not.
There are some incredible claims in the book such as claiming that the welfare state is
what ensures the success of free market. He just loves Black Lives Matter and suddenly after
a long career, race is suddenly something he cars about while the police are now the bad
guys. He also discovered after the election of Trump that sexism is a problem in America. He
can't really explain why he didn't care about these issues for decades before Trump and now
cares about deeply after Trump. I don't think he really cares about much of anything other
than boots on the ground in the middle east or preparing for war with China.
He ends the book with a conclusion titled "the vital center". The title is of course a
shout-out to old school liberal (and kennedy henchmen) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In it, he
tells us that he is "socially liberal", He believes in fiscal responsibility but not if it
involves cutting the welfare state & along those lines supports "Simpson Bowles" which
called for fixing the deficit with higher taxes and a "public option" for health insurance.
He supports the welfare state because to him its the basis for the free market. He supports
gun control. He wants more immigration to deal with our "labor shortage". He sees China and
Russia as defense threats along with a list of other countries.
He concludes with a "moderate" (ironic of course) call for everyone to vote every single
republican out of office until Trump is out of office or removed as president. And while he
makes it (finally) clear at the end that he just loved Hillary Clinton and her brand of
politics, he could never become a democrat because of the threat of bernie sanders. His
vision is a party of what he calls "centerists" which would seemingly favor a policy of
expanding the welfare state while fighting wars overseas to save the world. But Max Boot's
politics don't represent the center of anything. Whatever the bad of Trump, Max Boot
represents something just as bad or worse.
Corrosion is a slow process but early in the 1960's the GOP sucked almost all of the racists
out of the Democratic Party right into the Republican Party just to elect Richard Nixon with
the GOP "Southern Strategy." Men like the followers of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the
rural south rushed to vote for the "Sanitary Republican Party."
Sanitary was old Jim Crow
code for "whites only." If any business identified itself with "sanitary" in its name, that
was a warning for "whites only."
Strom Thurmond had earlier literally executed the longest
filibuster in Congressional history to oppose a vote on a civil rights legislation promoted
by Democrats.
Then Ronald Reagan and the George Bush used Lee Atwater and Richard Quinn (a
South Carolina leader of the neo-Confederacy movement) to craft overt racist strategies,
narratives, and TV advertisements. The Southern Partisan was a publication aimed at
legitimating racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks. This block of GOP consultants
used the Southern Partisan publication to create a core database of neo-Confederacy racists
which was so reliably Republican that both John McCain and George W. Bush used Richard
Quinn's backing in their election efforts.
Around 1981 Clemson University founded the "Strom
Thurmond Institute" to co-opt this public university to historically immortalize the papers
and sentiments of Strom Thurmond in a revisionist manner.
Another product of Richard Quinn
was young Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who grew up working in his parent's business in
Central South Carolina, the "Sanitary Cafe," a bar, grill, and pool hall establishment.
Lindsey Graham was mentored into South Carolina politics by Richard Quinn who supplied Graham
with a heroic hard knocks narrative which never mentioned the neo-Confederacy roots of both
men. Now if you review the Congressional Record you see Lindsey Graham's voting record
follows a Republican Southern Strategy which Nixon, Reagan, George Bush, Strom Thurmond, and
Jesse Helms would have been proud of. These racist political narratives can be mapped to
every Republican strategist and their GOP candidate product. Max Boot ignores this historical
behavior infused into the Republican Party since before 1963.
Donald Trump is only different
in that he has Tweeted these sentiments ad nauseam and publicly voiced them expressly in his
political appearances and news conferences. If you are honest, the "N" word has been
"whispered" (Jim DeMint) as an "IN" word in secret congregations of Republicans for decades.
Lindsey Graham has created a consistent attempt at humor where he frequently quips "white
man" jokes while supporting voter suppression and gerrymandering by his party.
Max Boot is
correct that this racism has moved from the backrooms under the cover of Donald Trump, but,
to deny that this these sentiments have not been part of the Republican infrastructure for
decades is rude hypocrisy. As you read this book, to load this burden on Donald Trump alone
is to deny history and the public record. Donald Trump merely harnessed this latent DNA of
the Republican party while masterfully marketing himself as a new Republican unbound by swamp
politics (a political breed which does not exist in the Republican Party.) Look at Ben Sasse,
he writes as a centrist yet votes as a Trump man. Look at Lindsey Graham's descriptions of
Trump in 2016 and now listen to his praise of Trump today. Yet, Max Boot sees this as a
recent development in the Republican Party when it has been part of the GOP DNA which has
produced a racist voting record as each generation of Republicans is sworn in.
Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after
9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled
cult.
A month after 9/11, he called for the invasion of Iraq. Did he not think that almost
two decades of continuous war fighting would not radicalize the American populace? He's
making amends by writing a book, for which he probably received a hefty advance and will make
money off of from royalties. Should donate the proceeds to charity.
Max Boot is another smug, arrogant, self righteous, Gramscian, ruling class communist, that's
trying convince the "Base" that he knows what's best for them; all while devowing the little
bit of wealth they might have left to live on. Why?
Because the "Base" are the slaves of the
"Superstructure" ruling class. Remember, as Stalin put it, "the middle class is the enemy" to
the socialist. America is on slow-drip to Totalitarianism. And Max Boot is just one more in
the camp on the transition.
"Hi, I'm a bonafide conservative and here are
the ways Trump has embarrassed The Cause as defined by Ronald Reagan. Since I refuse to kiss
Trump's ring, I still gotta eat so I'm going to grandly announce that I have left the
Republican Party in the form of this book and hope you will give me a check to cash. Thank
you."
I know that's a harsh assessment of a book that I agree with 98% of what's written, Mr.
Boot offers no insight. Not once did I think, "Ah, good point. I didn't think of that."
It's
simply a rehashing of Mr. Trump's ridiculous gaffs (hell, I could have done that, there are sooo many to choose from) and at the very end a very lame path out of this quagmire (spoiler
alert: we just need someone else as charismatic as Trump that's not [insert negative
adjectives here] because the Republicans have proven they will follow ANYBODY over a
cliff).
I finished this book (though skipped many chapters because it was simply rehashing Trump's
train wrecks) and said, "That's all you got? [sigh of resignation]"
I never searched this book on Amazon, however, I did write a tweet about Max Boot, so I guess
Twitter shares with Amazon. To the review, however -- this is written by a person who writes
that Trump has failed us by leaving troops in war, and just 6 months later, writes an article
that totally contradicts the earlier statement, stating that Trump can never do anything
right because he is pulling troops out of war. Which is it? I would not line a birdcage with
this garbage.
Trump is just a symptom; an easy scapegoat because he's a twit. Boot helped create and
perpetuate the monster that the GOP became. Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few
more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in.
Unfortunately the author is venting his personal dislike of the current administration
without addressing the previous administrations attempt to divide the country by any means
possibly and subsequently putting the American people into a politically charged environment
that the author is trying to capitalize on.
"... As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them. ..."
"... "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics." ..."
"... Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting. ..."
"... "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history." ..."
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass
destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq...
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored
weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard
released its final
issue
. Two years removed from Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding
the publication's demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism -- an ideology that has been soundly
defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of
Bill Kristol
on cable news notwithstanding.
If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in
The New York
Review of Books
, the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP
and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives"
or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them.
"Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent
organs of opinion," Wertheim writes. "The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing
influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The
Washington Post."
In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to
9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat
in the form of "Islamofascism." Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss,
who wrote in the
"The City and
Man"
that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." For the
Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the
enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.
Trump's presidency has proved a clarifying moment. "[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first
time, whether they are more against 'totalitarianism' or 'globalism,'" continues Wertheim. "If anti-totalitarians
take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit
and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political
wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide."
Within Trump's cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who
has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism
is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken
aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has
made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration,
Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that "leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American
sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies."
"For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism'
from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics."
Which brings us to neoconservatives' suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican
apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the "next
best thing" to a foreign dictator: "an enemy within." His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have
allowed them to "reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America."
"More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these
neocons into their fold," Wertheim observes. "Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and
Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the 'axis
of evil' as George W. Bush's speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by
warning
of 'this hour of liberal peril' in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens
from The Wall Street Journal in an
effort
to 'broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,' a curious rationale given that
Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change
the op-ed page's lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist."
Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering
foreign policy advice
to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for
American Progress are
partnering
with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from
Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home
within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.
"What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy
but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent
decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy
and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons
indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands
for onto the ash heap of history."
"... Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason. ..."
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad.
Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
We've known since WW2, that fighting fascism is difficult. Benito Mussolini defined fascism
as "Barely able to slip a cigarette paper between business and government." And when business
runs government, we have even exceeded fascism. The new battle against fascism is not going
to be easy.
ISLAMABAD -- U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said on Saturday that Washington was ready
to "address legitimate concerns" of all Afghan sides in order to restore peace in
Afghanistan. Since being appointed in September, Khalilzad has met with all sides, including
the Taliban, Afghan officials and Pakistan's political and military leadership in efforts
aimed at finding a negotiated end to America's longest war in neighboring Afghanistan.//
The US managed the overthrow of the Afghanistan government seventeen years ago, then
creating a puppet government with a feckless army to fight the Afghan resistance while
assassinating many of the Afghan leaders who fought to regain their country, and now the US
is ready to "address legitimate concerns" of all Afghan sides?
Well the Afghan officials are US puppets, so rule them out of legitimate concerns (as the
Taliban has done). Pakistan? They fully support the Taliban's return to government, so that's
a "legitimate concern" as is the Taliban's return to power.
Anything less ain't gonna work, that's obvious. Khalilzad was appointed in September to
achieve results in six months, which is soon. So get with it, Zalmay. Get the US troops out
of there as the Taliban demands in your "peace" talks.
[T]he units have also operated unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect
civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity, in a covert
campaign that some Afghan and American officials say is undermining the wider American
effort to strengthen Afghan institutions.
The "special forces" and the people trained by them don't follow rules. This has been
going on for a long time.
The Clinton administration has enforced a near-total ban on the supply and sale of U.S.
military equipment and training for the Colombian military because of its deep involvement
in drug-related corruption and its record of killing politicians, human rights activists
and civilians living in areas controlled by guerrilla groups.
The piece goes on to say that Special Forces were immune from this ban on training a
foreign military to kill politicians, human rights activists and civilians" . It names
dozens of nations where this was happening.
Of course not all US Special Forces are wild and lawless. Unfortunately the ones who do
behave are at risk of being killed themselves.
Whenever you have a combination of lousy leadership and "Special Forces", there is going
to be a problem. Australia has recently made the news in that regard.
Individually, each claim is staggering: apparent execution of detainees; reported use of
so-called drop weapons, planted to cover up unlawful killings; confirmed reports of
commandos flying a Nazi flag on a combat patrol; alleged "blooding" of rookies, initiation
rites in which newcomers were pressured to execute unarmed men. In one particularly
sadistic case, a prosthetic limb was allegedly pilfered from the corpse of a dead Afghan,
only to be repatriated and repurposed as a novelty binge-drinking implement.
At some point a Special Forces person is going to shrug and say "so what?" He or she knows
they can double or triple their pay with Blackwater-type mercenary forces. So except for
taking minimal precautions against going on trial, they can do as they please.
The base attack took place in Maidan Wardak Province, where US Special Forces troops were
evicted five years ago for atrocities.
In 2013 President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations
Forces (SOF) from Wardak province after charges that U.S. special forces stationed in Wardak
province engaged in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.
A Memorandum of Understanding signed May 12, 2012 between the U.S. military and the Afghan
Defence Ministry was trumpeted by the Obama administration as giving the Afghan government
control over such operations.
But a little-noticed provision of the agreement defined the "special operations" covered
by the agreement as those operations that are "approved by the Afghan Operational
Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in
accordance with Afghan laws."
That meant that the SOF was still free to carry out other raids without consultation with
the Afghan government, until Karzai threw them out. But not the CIA.
The idea that the US isn't REALLY trying to win wars strikes me as more of a
rationalization of failure than a real explanation. The US is an economically declining power
that is trying to use its military dominance to maintain, and ideally increase its power. So
wouldn't it be in the US's best interests if Afghanistan or Iraq (for example) were
completely controlled by US controlled puppet governments, and US controlled corporations
were making huge profits by exploiting those countries mineral and human resources? Wouldn't
that be far more profitable than the mere creation of chaos?
Part of the reason I tend to find your ideas less than plausible, Pft, is that you always
seem to vastly exaggerate the competence and power of the US or transnational elites you
suspect are controlling everything. So I don't think the US's wars are either "fake" or
"forever". Instead they are failures. And they can't last forever, because the corrupt system
that generates them needs some successes, and soon, in order to continue to survive.
I have previously written that all wars have been started by the Democrats with the single exception of the
Iraq
War under Dick Cheney
and the
Neocons
. Now after Trump has pulled out of Syria, the
Neocons
are
meeting with the Democrats to retake the White House and restore the effort to bring World War III to the Middle East.
This is by no means something I care to have to write about. But there is a very dark cloud rising and all the people
who hate Trump so much are clueless that he is actually trying to prevent these people from creating war. The hatred
they are spreading about Russia is a deliberate attempt to paint them as evil to gain support for a war.
One of the
leading
Neocons
is Bill Kristol. I have previously written that back in 1976, Bill Kristol worked for
Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan's United States Senate campaign. Later, in 1988, Kristol was the campaign manager for
black Republican Alan Keyes's unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes. So Kristol was on both
sides of the aisle.
It was the
Neocon
Kristol wrote the
War Over Iraq
:
Saddam's Tyranny And
America's Mission
with his co-author Lawrence F. Kaplan, which was published on
February
1st, 2003,
one month and change
BEFORE
the invasion to support Cheney. Today, Kristol is
very much anti-Trump. He is a true
Neocon
and wants to see conservatives challenge Trump for the 2020
nomination. He argues that the conservatives/
Neocons
need to seize control to reestablish the economic,
national security and his brand of moral principles to take over the Republican Party. Kristol argues that Trump's
support among the rank and file will diminish over time and they are really too stupid to know what is best for the
country.
The
British Magazine, the
Economist
,
call Kristol and crew the
Never Trumpers. These
Never Trumpers, claim to be
Republicans but are really
Neocons
who have no problem watching your children die for their political
experiments. They are Trump's critics from within the Republican Party and are vocal to advocate war after Trump pulled
out of Syria. This group of critics is led by conservative pundits such as Max Boot, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and George Will. That may appear to be few in number, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.
If
you pick up the rug to look at the dirt hidden below, you will find also Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton. Both
are the most reliable warmongers. Thank God John McCain is dead, he would have invaded Canada if you could argue there
was one terrorist lurking somewhere enjoying the skying. Hillary, you might recall, repeatedly criticized Obama being
too soft on military options. Both have come out and condemned Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria using the
Terrorist Card as always.
Americans, in general, have been historically isolationists. The Europeans who fled to
America
were adamantly against both World War I and World War II. Roosevelt had to go to Boston and lied to the people there to
get support for sending arms to Britain. He swore no troops would
EVER
be sent to Europe. Most were
Irish there who were insulted by the idea that their boys would go back and defend the British after what they did to
Ireland. It has always been the politicians who have lied about each and every war to get involved from Johnson
admitting the Vietnamese never fired on Americans at Tokin Gulf to weapons of mass destruction.
The
Neocons
actually delude themselves thinking they can create democracies in the Middle East by
force and this will end all wars. It is kind of like Napoleon who also claimed he could end all wars by conquering
everything. This is the same nonsense behind the EU eliminate the sovereignty of all member nations in Europe and then
one government in Brussels will end all wars.
Nevertheless, their policy to justify war is always the same this will be the war to end all wars.
There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President.
Nobody defended him when he was
accused , brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he
called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with
NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his
Twitter account at his disposal.
The media
accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel's needs. Israel needs US troops in
Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs
the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide,
says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US
statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do
what is needed for them, not for Israel
López Obrador comes to the presidency as a man of the left, but the space for
maneuvering that he has for a left agenda is minimal. Mexico's economy, through geography and
trade agreements, is fused with that of the United States. More than 80 percent of Mexico's
exports go to its neighbor to the north, while Mexico's financial sector is almost entirely at
the mercy of Northern banks.
Already, López Obrador has had to deal with the leash from Northern banks that
sits tightly around Mexico's throat. On October 28, after the election, López
Obrador canceled the project to build a new airport for Mexico City. This new airport -- at a
cost of US$13.4 billion -- is seen as far too expensive (Istanbul has just inaugurated a new
airport, far bigger, for almost US$2 billion less). The peso fell, the Mexican stock market
fell, Fitch downgraded Mexico to "negative," and international investors frowned.
Then, in early November, legislators from López Obrador's party -- Morena --
proposed laws to limit bank fees. Mexico's stock market collapsed. It was the worst single-day
loss of the BMV stock index in seven years. The bankers sent López Obrador a
message: don't rock the boat.
Hastily, López Obrador's choice for the finance ministry -- Carlos
Urzúa -- scolded the legislators and winked to the banks. Urzúa, an
economist, has spent years consulting for the World Bank and other such agencies. It is hard to
find an economist these days who has not put his fingers into a consultancy for either the
World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The economics profession has slid almost
wholesale into the pocket of international agencies that are committed to a very asphyxiating
version of public policy -- one that goes by the name of neoliberalism. It is a policy
framework that favors multinational corporations over workers, one that seeks to control
inflation rather than find ways to improve the livelihood of people. Finance is the religion,
while Money is God.
López Obrador and Urzúa do not have the political power to
challenge the order of things.
IMF Comes to Mexico City
Just a month before López Obrador takes office, the IMF sent a team to Mexico.
This team came to do a study based on the IMF charter's Article IV. Its
report set limits on what López Obrador's government can do. There is the
usual verbal concern expressed for inequality and poverty, but this is just window-dressing.
Nothing in the IMF staff statement indicated a policy that would tackle Mexico's grave problems
of poverty and inequality.
What the report details instead is a caution that López Obrador must not try to
invest funds in infrastructure that benefits the Mexican people -- investment, for instance, in
the sclerotic oil industry (Pemex). Mexico, an oil exporting state, imports oil because it has
limited refining capacity. López Obrador has said he wants Mexico to properly
develop the state-run oil firm Pemex. But the IMF staff statement says that "further
improvements of Pemex's financial situation are a prerequisite before new investments in
refining can be contemplated." López Obrador will be forced to make drastic cuts
in Pemex and to continue to drain the exchequer to import oil. No structural change is going to
be possible here without a negative IMF report, which would further encourage an investment
strike into Mexico.
Someone should encourage the IMF to stop sending staff teams into countries like Mexico.
Each report is identical to the previous one. Nothing seems to be learned by these teams. Years
ago, a senior IMF economist told me that when he arrived in a Central Asian country he knew
nothing of that country, he got to see nothing of it when he was there and he knew virtually
nothing when he drafted the Article IV review. All he did in the country was sit in one
air-conditioned room after another, listen to canned reports from nervous finance ministry
officials and then develop the report based on the IMF's same old recipe -- make cuts, target
welfare, privatize and make sure that the banks are happy.
Latitude for creative policy making is simply not available. The IMF comes to town to tell
new governments to behave. López Obrador and his cabinet will have to listen. Any
deviation from the IMF recipe will make investors flee and foreign investment dry up. It is so
easy these days to suffocate a country.
IMF Comes to Buenos Aires
For the past two decades, the IMF had found it difficult to dictate terms in Latin America.
From 2002 to 2007, left-leaning governments governed most of the region, where economic
activity was helped along by high commodity prices (including oil prices) and high remittance
payments.
Even Mexico's conservative President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) had to lean
into the prevailing winds of Bolivarianism. In 2011, at the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States, Calderón championed integration of Latin America -- something
that is least to be expected from a Mexican head of government, because Mexico is firmly
integrated into the United States.
The world financial crisis from 2007 hit Latin America hard. Calderón went to
Davos the next year and said that Latin America would be insulated from the crisis. Far from
it, Mexico had already begun to suffer job loss as the economy of its main trade partner -- the
United States -- contracted. An IMF
study found that Latin America lost 40 percent of its wealth in 2008. Public finances
contracted, and public investments declined. Inflation led to higher poverty rates and to
social instability.
A quick summary: Why did Latin America's economies suffer a crisis after 2007? It was not
because of the left-leaning governments and their policies. It was because of the
over-leveraged financial system, only one of whose asset bubbles -- U.S. housing prices --
collapsed. Deep integration into and reliance upon the U.S.-dominated financial system, and
poor diversification of their economies from the U.S. market, meant that as the U.S. banks
contracted, Latin America felt the pain. Over 80 percent of Argentina's private debt was in
dollars in 2002, while only a quarter of Argentina's economy was geared toward exports. This
was the fuel that was fated to burst into flame. It is this dollar reliance that could not be
corrected.
The exported economic problem had a political impact. It weakened the left-leaning
governments, even as these governments tried to ameliorate the crisis. Many of these
governments -- from Argentina to Brazil -- lost elections, while social turmoil struck others
-- from Venezuela to Nicaragua. It is in this context that the International Monetary Fund
returned to Latin America with a vengeance.
After two decades of relative absence, the IMF has now returned to Argentina (on which
please see this dossier from
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research). Its Article IV staff
statement from December last year pointed to the problems of high borrowing in foreign
currency, a problem that was recognized in 2001-2002. But the power of international finance --
centered at Wall Street and the City of London -- prevented any easy pivot out of this problem.
It was easier to demand cuts from the already meager incomes of ordinary people.
In 1994, Mexico suffered from what became known as the "tequila crisis," as the peso
collapsed when international capital fled the country. The government would not place capital
controls to protect the peso against currency speculators. The "tequila effect" then spread to
South America. No one was prepared to stand up to the dollar and the speculators. From the
forests of Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas spoke out in favor of the pockets of
the forgotten, the people who did not cause the crisis but who would bear the cost of these
financial shenanigans. Once more, with help from the IMF, the pockets of the forgotten from
Argentina to Mexico will suffer so that finance is left intact.
This article was produced by Globetrotter , a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
The MSM and its allies in the controlled alternative media, and the global private-interest
financial, investment and banking system, are a tag-team, indispensable to each other.
Control of money and control of information. The first narrowly concentrates wealth and thus
power and influence. The second through agenda-driven selection, lies, censorship, spin,
misdirection and so on – disinformation – controls people's sense of what is real
and possible, thus dis-empowering them.
The American military and CIA have provided most of the overt and covert 'muscle' for that
control system.
The combined effort of narrowly controlled and narrowly advantaging globe straddling
finance, media, and muscle has facilitated the development of a near global Empire. In common
with traditional Empires this new Empire had totalitarian ambitions: but since its reach was
global, this is really a first attempt at global totalitarian control.
Russia under Putin – leaving aside China – has developed enough strength to
attempt alternative modes of communication and finance and development, not as adjuncts or
subordinates to the Empire's efforts in those regards. And their military is antidote and
opposition to the totalitarian project.
The forgoing is pretty obvious stuff, but I think that the Saker's concluding paragraph
provides a limiting summary of how the issue can play out.
"But fundamentally the Russian people need to decide. Do they really want to live in a
western-style capitalist society (with all the russophobic politics and the adoption
of the terminally degenerate "culture" such a choice implies), or do they want a
"social society" (to use Putin's own words) – meaning a society in which social and
economic
justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits.
You could say that this is a battle of greed vs ethics."
This is a simplistic way of looking at the choices available. We are all caught up in
transitional culture processes, no matter where we live. The conjunction of the cornucopia of
new technology and unprecedented environmental and social challenges is everywhere at play,
leading who knows where?
What the Russian people have been given, and this is near singular on Earth, is a
protected and enhanced opportunity of developing a culture in which honest national discourse
is a predominant feature. This is in complete contrast to the predominant 'fake news' system
of discourse control that is in place in so many countries. And full and honest discourse
will create its own original cultural developments.
The Russian adoption of more honest discourse is already having global influence. An
example is Russia Today, which far from perfect and all that, still provides an enormous
advance over the extremely controlled western mass media, and a powerful foe to 'fake
news'.
Perhaps the most visible exemplar of rationale discourse has been Putin himself, with for
example his marathon annual Q and A with the Russian people, or his articulate well
considered sallies on many issues
And with that – if Russia can use unfettered reason writ large as a prime ingredient
of cultural and political development, as a basic developmental 'steering tool' – then
the simple dichotomy of "western-style capitalist society" vs "a society in which social and
economic justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits"
, as much as I'm sympathetic to the latter, seems to me to be a limiting way of expressing
the range of potential beneficent possibilities.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted nine years. But it was largely successful in building
a stable government and the Soviets left a mostly competent Afghan military behind. Three
years later Russia ended its financial support for the Afghan government. Only that gave the
guerrilla the chance to destroy the state.
After 18 years in Afghanistan the U.S. military seems still unable to create and train
competent local forces.
The $8 billion spent on the
Afghan airforce have resulted in a mostly incapable force that depends on U.S. contractors to
keep its birds flying. This was the result of unreasonable decisions:
Aviation experts have criticized a decision to phase out the old workhorses of the Afghan
forces -- Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters -- for American-made UH-60 Black Hawks.
Mr. Michel, the retired general, said the Mi-17 was "the perfect helicopter" for
Afghanistan because it can carry more troops and supplies than the Black Hawk and is less
complicated to fly.
"Let's be candid," he said of the switch. "That was largely done for political
reasons."
The U.S. military built an Afghan force in its own image:
American trainers have built an Afghan Army that relies heavily on air power that the air
force might not be able to provide for years, said John F. Sopko, the special inspector
general for Afghan reconstruction.
Why the U.S. military, which since Vietnam proved inept at fighting local guerrilla,
believed that its ways of fighting suits an Afghan force is inexplicable. If the Taliban
manage to win without an airforce why should the Afghan military need one?
As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up in flames. Within
were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot
three times in the head. Villagers who rushed to the home found the burned body of her
3-year-old daughter, Marina, in a corner of a torched bedroom.
The men who raided the family's home that March night, in the district of Nader Shah
Kot, were members of an Afghan strike force trained and overseen by the Central
Intelligence Agency in a parallel mission to the United States military's, but with looser
rules of engagement.
... ... ...
that the two most effective and ruthless forces, in Khost and Nangarhar Provinces, are
still sponsored mainly by the C.I.A.
This conflict between militarized CIA proxy forces and forces trained by the U.S. military
played out in every recent war the U.S. waged. In Iraq CIA sponsored Shia units clashed with
Pentagon sponsored Sunni militia. In Syria this CIA trained 'rebels' ended up shooting at
U.S. military trained 'rebels' and vice versa. In Afghanistan the rogue force under CIA
control is some 3.000 to 10,000 strong. It large alienates the same population the Afghan
military tries to protect.
Unity of command is an important condition for successful military campaigns. As the
military works in one direction while the CIA pulls in another one, the campaign in
Afghanistan continues to fail.
A similar split can be seen in Afghanistan's political field. The CIA is notorious for
bribing Afghan politicians, while the military launches anti-corruption campaigns. The
political system installed by such competing forces is unsustainable.
The last Afghan election with the top candidates being the Pashto Ashraf Ghani and the
Tajik Abdullah Abdullah, was marred in irregularities. The uncertain outcome led the U.S. to
fudge the results by making Ghani president and Abudullah his 'chief executive'. Both are now
again
competing against each other in the elections that are to be held later this year. They
will be as irregular as all elections in Afghanistan are. The disputed outcome might well
lead to new clashes between ethnic groups.
This upcoming conflict will further weaken the Afghan state. Why hasn't anything be done
to prevent it?
@1 @3
While appearing weak, incompetent and clueless the US implements chaos exactly as
intended. It works in Congo, it works in Libya, it works in South America and it works in
Afghanistan. Chaos is very profitable for extracting resources and supplying and controlling
the world narcotic business.
The USA goal is an incompetent state, a permanent war and the destruction of any stable
Afghan government that could make relations with neighboring states. Permanent conflict
prevents unity and transnational trade through the region. Same goes for the Baluchistan
rebels in the south.
Isolate Iran is all and no strategic care or thinking about anything else.
The USA will fight until the last Afghani civilian is killed.
"... The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial. ..."
"... The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people", "Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence, fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified. ..."
"... The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important to them, and so dangerous us. ..."
Trump has been a disappointment to his base and is yet to implement half the policies he discussed on the campaign trail, but
he's not fully and totally being controlled by the warhawking Deep State yet, either. His policy of peace with North Korea and decisions
to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan show that there is a tug-of-war ongoing inside the administration. It's probably no coincidence
that this latest of many "bombshells" comes so quickly
on the heels of Trump's announcement of the Syria withdrawal. Careful "leaks", planted stories and social media witch-hunts remind
Trump how precarious his position is, whilst simultaneously distracting the public both pro-Trump and anti-Trump from real issues.
The case-specific "why?" doesn't matter so much as the general aim of this type of manipulation. The important question
is: Why does the media tell lies if they know they will be revealed as such? Clearly, the lies serve a purpose, regardless of their
retraction or qualification. Telling a lie loudly and then taking it back quietly is an old propaganda trick it allows the paper
to maintain a facade of "accountability".
The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract
and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial.
The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump
ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people",
"Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence,
fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified.
That is the purpose of "fake news", to forge the Empire's
"created
reality" , and force us all to live in it. These are world-shaping, policy-informing, news-dominating narratives and are nothing
but feathers in the wind .
A perfect exemplar of this occurred just two days ago on the BBC's flagship Political debate show Question Time :
me title= The (notionally impartial) host not only sided with right-wing author Isabel Oakeshott in criticising
Labour's polling, but then joined in mocking the Labour MP Diane Abbott for attempting to correct the record. Both Oakeshott and
Fiona Bruce, the host, were
factually incorrect as shown a hundred times over since. But that doesn't matter.
The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise
is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important
to them, and so dangerous us.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now
he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
The breakup of the USSR was due to confluence of factors such as rise of neoliberalism,
stagnation of oversentlised USSR economy, emergence of internat communications and personal
computers which weakened official propaganda power, creation of fifth column within the USSR due
to bad timing and execution of Gorbachev's reforms (Presetoyka was essentially the idea of
repeating NEP on a new level), and extremely weak abilities of Gorbachov as a politician, growth
of nationalism (well financed from theWest), degeneration of Bolshevik's elute and emergence of
multiple neoliberal turncoats (Yeltsin, Gaidar, Yakovlev, etc). but dissolution of the USSR
probably case as a surporse.
But after the dissolution CIA-Mossad-MI6 jumped into the dame with the explicit goal to
destruction of Russian economy, asset stripping (Browder probably is connected to MI6), Harvard
mafia probably also was somehow connected to CIA, and disintegration of the country (Chechnya
insurrection was supported by the USA, Britain and their vassals in Persian gulf).
This is an interesting lesson for future reformers: the presence of CIA-Mossad-MI6 on the
world scene changes the result of almost any forceful overthrow of the government, especially if
it was done with the goal of neoliberalization, imposing a huge cost on the population. Ukraine
is one recent example (the standard of living dropped probably 300 or so). Libya is another.
This particular neocon writing in his official capacity of a MIC lobbyist (that is what all
neocons are), so his views are interesting only as an example of a dangerous trend.
Like
many contemporary cold warriors, Bugajski toggles back and forth between overhyping Russia's
might and its weaknesses, notably a lack of economic dynamism and a rise in ethnic and regional
fragmentation. But his primary argument is unambiguous: That the West should actively stoke
longstanding regional and ethnic tensions with the ultimate aim of a dissolution of the Russian
Federation, which Bugajski dismisses as an "imperial construct."
Even more alarming is Bugajski's argument that the goal should not be
self-determination for breakaway Russian territories, but the annexing of these lands to other
countries . "Some regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from
whom Moscow has forcefully appropriated territories in the past."
It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without sparking a
series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version the US would
directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800 Serbian nuclear
warheads.
So who is Janusz Bugajski, and who is he speaking for?
The author bio on the Hill's piece identifies him as a senior fellow at the Center for
European Policy Analysis, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. But CEPA is no ordinary talk shop:
Instead of the usual foundations and well-heeled individuals, its financial backers seem to be mostly arms of the US
government, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Mission to NATO,
the US-government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, as well as as veritable who's who
of defense contractors, including Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and
Textron. Meanwhile, Bugajski chairs the South-Central Europe area studies program at the Foreign
Service Institute of the US Department of State.
To put it in perspective, it is akin to a Russian with deep ties to the Kremlin and
arms-makers arguing that the Kremlin needed to find ways to break up the United States and, if
possible, have these breakaway regions absorbed by Mexico and Canada. (A scenario which alas is
not as far-fetched as it might have been a few years ago; many thousands in California now openly
talk of a "Calexit," and many more in Mexico of a reconquista .)
The breakup of the USSR was planned also. It was followed by the formation of oligarchs, IMF
loans, and asset stripping. The economic advice and help Russia received from the west almost
accomplished the goal of breaking up Russia.
Russia is well aware that war with NATO cannot be avoided in the long run. One only has to
talk to Russians to see that they understand they are in a Cold war that they have to survive.
From their view they did not seek this confrontation. They truly thought they would be embraced
by the West after the fall and a new relationship benefiting both sides could have emerged. So
now Russia has to turn to China and prepare for a future war within a decade with NATO!
Disgusting projection of US imperialism. The elite never forgave Putin for throwing US
Rothschild elites out of Russia so they could no longer plunder Russias extensive wealth under
Yeltsin..
Let's see what happens when neocunts start that hot war, how Americans then feel about
Russia
We truly have dumbfucks in this country who love the thought of other as enemy other than
THEMSELVES. They never ONCE consider that in demonizing another countries leader, they are
demonizing a whole nation of peoples too. I wonder how Americans would feel if constant
demonizing and threats coming their way, with also say regime change in Mexico to provoke
them?
US neocons are psychopaths that care nothing for Americans. What they do to others in regime
change they will do to us. Oh, wait. They already have #9/11
Published in the Hill under the dispassionate title "Managing
Russia's dissolution," author Janusz Bugajski makes the case that the West should not
only seek to contain "Moscow's imperial ambitions" but to actively seek the dismemberment of
Russia as a whole.
If that is the intended goal then wouldn't it be accurate to state that America, or at least
its government, has imperial ambitions?
The rationale for dissolution should be logically framed: In order to survive, Russia
needs a federal democracy and a robust economy; with no democratization on the horizon and
economic conditions deteriorating, the federal structure will become increasingly
ungovernable...
Russia already tried "democracy" and the end result spelled disaster for their country.
Minorities were put on a pedestal while their economy was in shambles, all the while the
oligarchs, who were mostly Jewish, made a fortune plundering their natural resources. Sound
familiar?
Some regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from whom
Moscow has forcefully appropriated territories in the past."
The hypocrisy in this statement is breathless. Is America going to return Alaska to Russia?
Allow Hawaii to once again be an autonomous entity? Cease the illegal occupation of countries
throughout the Middle East? Remove their Neo-Nazi stooges from Ukraine?
It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without
sparking a series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version
the US would directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800
Serbian nuclear warheads.
The idea seems to be to stoke regional tensions in order to provoke Russia and start a
conflict where the surrounding countries are put on the front lines while being provided with
logistics from the outside, meaning the US. Washington could then play up the plausible
deniability angle, even while technology from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other Western
contractors is primarily being used against the Russians.
Russia is not a direct threat to Western nations, only to their (((governments))), because
during any attempted implementation of a JWO (as in the EU for example), Russia will serve as a
reminder to all Western peoples - especially white people - as to what their nations once were:
independent, sovereign and self-determined. Russia prevented ISISrael from taking over Syria,
thwarted their Oded Yinon plan and threw out their oligarchs, so World Judaism is using America
as their bludgeon against the Russian Federation while preventing us from forming an
alliance.
74 years after Nazi Germany miscalculated Russian resolve some idiot dreams of carving
Russia up like it's a Thanksgiving turkey and some people actually take him seriously. Yeah,
good luck with that.
6 hours ago Bug-aj-ski - neocon shrill writing for and paid by the MIC it looks like
from the sponsors of this think tank
"Cultivating new sources of competitive advantage for U.S. strategy."
no list of sponsors tho I can see from the website - real MIC platform it sounds like from the
article
6 hours ago Yep, it's a Zbigniew Brzezinski memorial. The money seems to come mostly from the
MIC and the usual Cold War think tanks, like the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation. 5 hours ago
These necons need to remember that chess is the national passtime of Russians, while making
mudpies is the what they do in the West. These "think-tanks" are very childish. 3 hours ago 9
hours ago here's where some of it started/got turbocharged:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/seymour-m-hersh/the-vice-presidents-men
LA_Goldbug 10 hours ago The only way I can understand this twat is to think that he is just
earning his shekels. He knows what the Party Line is in DC requires and is writing accordingly. I
just checked a bit of his BS and this one is definitely written for the uninformed or deeply
indoctrinated Western sheep.
"Taking Stock of Ukraine's Achievements Amidst Russia's Aggression
Five years ago, the Ukrainian people staged a peaceful "revolution of dignity" against a
corrupt regime sponsored by the Kremlin. They stood firm even under gunfire and it was the
discredited President Viktor Yanukovych who eventually retreated and took refuge in Russia. With
Moscow engaging in renewed attacks against Ukraine in the Sea of Azov it is important to take
stock of Ukraine's achievements since those fateful days in Kyiv's Independence Square."
You need to be brain dead to think it was peaceful !!!!
Journalist David
Montero
(Sven Stork)
Here's a pop quiz: How long has corporate corruption existed? Answer: As long as corporations as we know
them have been in business. Thanks to journalist David Montero's meticulously sourced survey, "
Kickback:
Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network
," the consumer public now has access to a wealth of
details about the astonishingly shady antics in which multinationals have been engaging since the
retro-imperialist heyday of the British East India Company.
And this malignant strain of corporatism is
only getting worse. As Robert Scheer remarks to Montero in this week's episode of "Scheer Intelligence,"
it amounts to nothing short of a "virulent, corrosive, murderous arrangement that has only accelerated in
recent years." Some potential reasons why this global scourge hasn't been more aggressively treated
include: greed; willful ignorance; the widely supported myth that the phenomenon is "just" about
white-collar crime; a false sense that corporate malfeasance ranges outside of various states'
jurisdictions; and powerful companies engaging in a race to the bottom because, well, everyone else is
doing it.
But Montero is ready to serve notice to a host of Fortune 500 companies -- helpfully name-checked
throughout the episode -- that at least two hard-nosed investigators are onto them. Not only has the extent
of the damage done been vastly underestimated and underreported, but so long as it grows in the dark,
it's able to feed into the worst kinds of crises around the world. After taking in Montero's argument,
Scheer sums up the stakes powerfully as he remarks that "white-collar crimes are human rights crimes."
Listen to Montero's interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence,
where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, from David Montero, who's a highly regarded
journalist of considerable experience. And he's written what I think is kind of a classic book:
"Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network."
And what the book asserts, in great
detail with wonderful case studies, is that this is a historic problem of modern capitalism. And it goes
back in this book to the British East India Company, the very company that the American Revolution was
fought to challenge, with the Boston Tea Party and other things. And traces this virulent, corrosive,
murderous arrangement that has only accelerated in recent years. And it begins with the claims about the
Russian interference in our election, Russian oligarchs, and so forth, but it really takes in the most
prestigious of American companies. And so let me get you to talk about why this book now. Because after
having read it, it sort of makes a compelling case that despite our efforts, beginning most prominently
with Frank Church, Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s, to do something about this problem, it's a festering
problem that is actually more important now, maybe, than ever.
David Montero:
Yeah, and I think the reason it's more important than ever now is
because, one, we've laxly enforced a law that we had on the books since 1977 -- we've only laxly enforced
it -- that law was supposed to prohibit corporations from paying bribes abroad. We now have a president in
the White House who's vocally opposed to this law. His administration has done things to roll back that
law. But more importantly, in the person of the president himself, we have someone whose business
interests seem to be tainted by this crime itself, and himself. And that, I would say that more than just
the efforts that the administration under Trump has made to roll back provisions of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act, Trump being in the White House and being tainted by this crime itself sends a far more
disturbing message, that we need to do something about this crime.
RS:
Is it more disturbing, or is it just more obvious that, ah -- ? It's sort of the
ugly face of a kind of international capitalism, that the people who practice this would rather it not be
noticed. And you have Fortune 500 companies like Alcoa, Chevron, Shell, Simmons, Novartis, Bristol-Myers
Squibb; you can go down the list, it's just about every multinational corporation has engaged in this
practice of going along with bribes, kickbacks, and everything. And their defense is, it's the only way
you could do business. And they're accepting the normalcy of corrupting, basically, the international
business community. That's the inescapable conclusion, I think, from your book.
DM:
Yeah, and why that's disturbing is, again, you know, these are cutting-edge
companies; these are world-class companies, as you mentioned the names; these are household names. It's
really kind of shocking and disturbing that the only way that a lot of them seem to think they can
compete abroad is to pay bribes to government officials. And the reason they think that is why? Because
that's what their competitors are doing. But when you do something that your competitors are doing which
is also illegal and inefficient and destructive to the business itself, it's not very innovative. And
that was what was kind of surprising to me: that these companies that make these incredibly innovative
products, and they have a history of innovation when it comes to selling them, they're not innovative at
all. They just pay bribes. And they're not just tainting the international business community; these are
bribes that they pay to government officials in some of the poorest, already unstable places on earth.
And that money goes on to have a terrible impact, a lasting impact for decades, and is funneled into all
kinds of nefarious things. Like conflict, like terrorism. And overall, it deepens poverty in those
countries. It's a crime that right now, the public and the Justice Department tend to think of, and
certainly prosecute, as a white-collar business crime. But it's much broader than that, much more
complicated and much more devastating.
RS:
I'm talking to David Montero. He's the author of "Kickback: Exposing the Global
Corporate Bribery Network
."
It's incredibly well documented, and it presents an issue that, you
know, is incredibly important but overlooked. And I want to get into the overlooked part of it. You were
a correspondent for a publication that I used to read a lot, the Christian Science Monitor; I thought
they did a great job. And then of course you were well-known as a producer for PBS's Frontline series;
you're a highly regarded journalist. Why has this been overlooked? You've written for a lot of important
publications, the New York Times, The Nation, Le Monde diplomatique
,
all these others. Why is it
under the rug? And then let me ask you, by the way, doesn't this involve these corporations being more
than passive? First of all, they get an advantage if they know how to bribe better than others; if
they've got their channel, their system set up, they don't want to ask too many questions. And they also
are able to corrupt their home government, in this case the U.S. government, to not aggressively follow
the law. Isn't that really the subtext here?
DM:
You were saying just about why it's been so underreported -- just to address that
first, I think part of the reason it's underreported is, again, the public and the Justice Department and
the Securities and Exchange Commission tend to think of this as a white-collar crime; it's a business
issue. And so a lot of people think, well, if a corporation pays bribes abroad, why should I care? That's
a business thing, that doesn't affect me. I started looking at this from the lens of Bangladesh, which is
a country where I lived for a year, and I lived there during a time when it was experiencing not only
terrible corruption but terrible terrorism, the first suicide bombings, et cetera. I started digging into
a particular case that involved Siemens, the German industrial company, and bribes they had paid in
Bangladesh. And when I started following the money, actually looking at -- well, Siemens paid these bribes,
which have been publicly announced by the Justice Department, and not much else. When I started looking
into those payments and where they went, I uncovered that they had been given to a minister in the
Bangladeshi government who was in turn a patron of a terrorist group. That sort of was eye-opening to me
and made me think, well, it's not only that these bribes are a business issue; if we follow the money,
which has not been done enough, and we uncover where the money goes, we find devastating things. And I
think part of the reason it's not been looked at much is because it's expensive, and it takes a lot of
time to go and follow the money in places like Bangladesh. The corporations certainly don't want to do
that. The Justice Department doesn't make an effort to really understand; it's not in their purview, it's
not in their mandate to understand the fallout of these bribes, so they don't do that. And journalists,
again, it's not something that's necessarily on their radar, and it's not something they have the
resources to do. So I think that's why it kind of got swept under the rug.
RS:
Well, but you're kind of giving them a pass. I mean, first of all, the very idea
that white-collar crimeyou know, I just had some young people who work with, have come out of gangs here
in Los Angeles, in my class; they served hard time for their crimes. And their crimes didn't affect as
many people as the corporations you're talking about, the executives. What is it about this double
standard? That you can bribe a whole nationI mean, after all, for instance, Bangladesh, that's a
factory-floor country now, right? They make a lot of the clothes that we're wearing, and everything else.
People, you know, their working conditions, their living conditions, are a basic human rights concern for
the world. And then some companies can go in there and totally corrupt the local governmentwell, they
probably also can keep unions out; they can probably make sure we don't, the country doesn't do much for
working conditions or the life of the people. So white-collar crimes are human rights crimes, very often.
DM:
Oh, absolutely. And this one in particular, yeah.
RS:
Well, talk about that a little bit, because I mean, there is a theme running
through your book that could let these people off the hooklike, it's always been thus. You know, going
back to the British East India Company. But the fact is, it's always been exploitive, vicious, and ever
more so now.
DM:
It's always been thus, and again, I think the crime has been looked at the wrong
way, and as a result, the prosecution has been pretty weak. And that's what I was trying to argue in the
book, that this is a crime that has existed for 400 years, since there were corporations. And the impact,
as we saw with the British East India Company in India, has been devastating. But the companies have
never been held to account for the devastation; they've just been held to account because our laws say
that they violated the mandate to keep accurate books and records. In other words, we prosecuted as if it
were just a white-collar crime. So that's what I'm saying, is that it's not just a white-collar crime; I
agree with you, it's a human rights issue, it's something that affects poverty and political civility. I
think the corporations get away with it because, to go back to something you said before, they often
argue that they're extorted, and they sometimes argue that they've been passive participants in these
schemes. Which is not true; if you look at the hundreds of cases that the Justice Department has filed in
the last 10 years alone, this is active bribery. I mean, some companies have an entire department in
their operation that handles these payments. It's very elaborate, and it's very active. So this whole
idea that they're sort of being passively extorted, and we couldn't do business otherwise, and those
sorts of arguments, is definitely not valid.
RS:
But what is their influence over the U.S. government? I mean, clearly, you know,
you have good contact in these government agencies as a reporter; they've turned over files to you,
people talk to you. The book has a lot of this great detail. But what I took away from it is, yes, Donald
Trump may be the most offensive president we've had in this regard, because he himself has perfected the
art, has been able to function in these countries; so you know, he probably has been at the scene of
these crimes more often than most presidents. But clearly, there's a lack of political will, and
bipartisan. I mean, some of these companies -- for instance, GE is mentioned in your book. You know, it's a
company where two out of three jobs have gone abroad, and they have all kinds of problems with GE
Capital, and their financial, and blah blah blah. But Jeffrey Immelt, the head of GE, was the head of
Barack Obama's jobs council. He was held up as an exemplary businessman. And this is true of a number of
the companies. And American foreign policy has actually been the handmaiden of these companies, their
ability to function.
DM:
Maybe it goes back to this fact: while a corporation cannot pay a bribe
abroad -- that is illegal under our laws; if you try, even attempt to pay a bribe to a government official
abroad, that is illegal -- but here in this country, lobbying is not. And so, yeah, the corporations have a
huge amount of money to legally lobby; that wouldn't be called bribing here in the United States. But
yeah, they wield an incredible amount of power. And I mean, we have just seen an example of this; after
Trump became president, the Republican-led House rolled back a very important -- bipartisan, I should
mention -- effort to inject more transparency into business deals involving oil companies and mining
companies under the Cardin-Lugar provision of the Dodd-Frank Act. That was a really important piece of
legislation, but that was one of the first things that, thanks to the oil companies which lobbied very
hard, the House repealed, and Trump signed into law.
RS:
You know, there's a notion of free market capitalism, and you know, Adam Smith,
Ricardo, the great prophets of that. And those notions of the free market, everybody thinks that that
somehow was an unequivocal endorsement of capitalism -- no. It was a warning that there's another kind of
capitalism -- of the cartels, monopoly capitalism, restrictive trade -- that would threaten the virtues of a
free market. That's why Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
talked about, you know, the
invisible hand; that no one should be able to control the action. But the multinational corporations, and
they are dominant now -- they want a hand. They want it controlled.
DM:
They have an invisible hand through bribes. There isn't a free market that we
think, there isn't free and fair competition. In fact, it's all -- I don't want to say it's all rigged, but
it's greatly rigged through bribes.
RS:
In your book, you describe a normalcy of corruption. And then I kept thinking,
OK, so what does Apple do in China? What does Lockheed do in their airplane sales? Trump just bragged
about the biggest arms deal we have with Saudi Arabia that we've ever had. Does this go on in all of
these places, and with these very respectable companies?
DM:
That's what history would tell us. Again, we discovered that companies were doing
this back in 1977, right after Watergate, because very prestigious companies like Lockheed, and the
titans of industry, so to speak, were doing this. So in one sense, we just don't know; the estimates we
have are that about 30 percent of companies globally pay bribes. But that's based on what they tell us
through surveys, and it's based on the number of cases that are detected; we just don't know, we're
looking at the tip of the iceberg. But yes, Rolls Royce, a company that is known for making the best
engines in the world, the most cutting-edge engines in the world, and was considered, you know, a paragon
of success and corporate leadership for 10 years, between 2006 and 2016 -- it turns out the way they made
their money was not through brilliant corporate leadership, it was through bribes. They hired people
around the world, these shady middlemen, which is a common practice, who paid off government officials in
Nigeria and Indonesia. And the thing that's striking about that is, Rolls Royce didn't need to do that,
in one sense; they have good products. It's not as if their engines are terrible; they have some of the
best engines in the world. But they, again, thought, well, we won't compete with Pratt & Whitney, or
other competitors, if we don't pay these bribes. They either thought that or they decided, we're not even
going to take a chance; we're just going to pay these bribes and beat the competition. And they know that
they can do that because the laws are not really going to hold them to account for it.
RS:
And I just want to be clear, in your book, you deny the basic argument, which is
that they have to do it, they have no choice. And in your book you indicate there's another motive: that
if they can have a preponderant position in a market, if they have the support of that local government,
they can have what they call a desirable business environment. That government will also suppress labor
discontent; you see it in even, say, Vietnam, where strikes are broken in order to -- here's a government
that, a communist government, and they had a revolution and fought off the United States and everything.
Yet you know, you have companies like Nike and everything operating in Vietnam, and the government is a
partner in giving them an acquiescent, suppressed workforce. And the key to modern capitalism seems to be
to have a cartel or monopoly hold on a market share. And you want to exclude the competition. And that's
what the bribing facilitates, right? It's just a cost of doing business that ends up being very
lucrative.
DM:
Absolutely, and in countries like Bangladesh -- and I mention Bangladesh because
it's an example I know very well -- but in a period between 2001 and 2006 there was a particular government
in control, and that government was notoriously corrupt and run by two brothers who were the sons of the
prime minister. And I think a lot of corporations really liked having that system, where they knew as
long as they keep paying off these guys, they'll get the contracts they want. That these guys will force
contracts through Parliament that the country doesn't even need -- a telecom project, for example, or a
power station project. And this is wasting public money, but it's a turnkey solution. If you have a
corrupt politician in power, and you're a company willing the pay the bribes, then yeah -- I mean, this is
what would be called state capture, right? You have a system that is just perfectly benefiting your aims
and their aims, and it's the people who are losing out.
RS:
I want to return to that point, but let me take a break for a few minutes here.
[omission for station break] We're back with David Montero, the author of "Kickback: Exposing the Global
Corporate Bribery Network." And we're just now talking about, what did you say the phrase is? State
capture. And I want to get into that a little bit. We've just had the renegotiation of the NAFTA
agreement, NAFTA 2.0, by Donald Trump. But a couple of the positive features is there's actually a
built-in protection for goods that come in; that workers on 45 percent or something of the product have
to make 16 bucks an hour; in some of these places they're making less than 2 bucks an hour, in Mexico.
And also, the idea that maybe local courts -- Canadian, Mexican, U.S. courts -- might have some jurisdiction,
instead of private corporate courts. But in looking into that, in Mexico for example, one of the things
that companies get when they go down to Mexico, is there are these fake unions that people join. They
aren't real unions that could really put pressure on a company to pay more than a couple of bucks an
hour. And I'm just wondering whether the bribing has created an overwhelming norm, and that's why we have
Apple computers in front of every student in a college classroom, that's why all the clothes we wear are
made in Bangladesh or Vietnam or China. Because those governments are being bribed, one way or another,
to deliver an acquiescent workforce. And that is the business model, it's not the exception.
DM:
I can't speak to that directly; I didn't look at a case that involved how bribes
affected labor specifically. But I can see your point with, again, a government in a place like
Bangladesh being very much open to the idea of, if you bribe us we'll give you the contracts you want. In
the case of these two brothers I mentioned, they certainly, some of their concerns that they owned were
factories; no one's been able to trace back whether or not factories they owned were mistreating their
workers or anything like that. But the point is that, yeah, I see what you're saying; that there's a
sense that these governments would be willing to flout other laws. If they're willing to take bribes and
pass contracts that their country doesn't even need, yeah, it's possible.
RS:
Yeah, I mean, the reason I'm pushing this -- and it is a big issue in your book,
because you're really arguing this is not a victimless crime. It's often presented as a victimless crime;
that's how you do business, you grease the palm, goods get made, everybody's happy. But in your book, you
keep reminding us that there are victims, and one victim is the American worker. This lowers wages, it
has an effect on our quality of life. And that's why I'm bringing it up. I mean, these are concessions
obtained in considerable measure through bribery of powerful people in the governments that are the
factory floor, or what have you, for these goods. And the consequence is negative, considerably negative,
for the average person in the home country, the United States in this case.
DM:
Well, yeah. And it's incredibly negative, I think even more importantly, for the
average citizen in the country where the bribes are paid. Because that's where the fallout really takes
place. But certainly, yeah, this is a system through which the corporations benefit; the handful of
officials who receive the bribes benefit; but on either side of the equation, in the United States and in
the country where the bribes are paid, ordinary people lose out. That may include that, right, a company
pays a bribe for a contract, and as a result, an American company loses that contract; and that has
happened many, many times, and as a result Americans lose jobs, or as you said, wages go down. And in the
countries where these bribes are paid, again, if you follow the money, you find that the impact of these
bribes is very devastating, so devastating, and devastating for a very, very long time. These are crimes
with an impact that takes sometimes a decade to unfold. And again, it increases poverty, it increases
conflict. And that's part of the problem that I really didn't see being told. And I think that's why the
laws against the crime are not really that enforced.
RS:
Yeah. The book is called "Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery
Network." And that is not, from reading this book, to me, an overstatement. And if it's a network, then,
you know, the consequences are pervasive not just in the country -- and here maybe I'm taking issue with
your emphasis -- where the bribes are being extended, but in the home country. For example, we have a big
argument -- I'm doing this broadcast from Los Angeles; the county and the city of L.A. just did pass
resolutions guaranteeing a somewhat higher minimum wage that will rise in the next few years. That
doesn't mean a whole lot if most of the goods that we're using are producing countries that have an
incredibly low minimum wage. And if that low minimum wage is maintained elsewhere because of the bribery
and corruption of those governments, whether it's Mexico or China or anywhere else, that means you're not
going to do a whole lot through your own political activity, your own voting, your own activity within
the home country to improve conditions, because these terms are set elsewhere, and they're set in a sea
of corruption in this global corporate bribery network. So I think the book has an ominous message,
really, beyond what we've discussed so far.
DM:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's disturbing that this is, for a lot of companies, it is
and has been for a long time, standard operating procedure. This is such an elaborate system, the way it
works; it's not that a company goes to a foreign minister and hands him $10,000 under the table. The way
bribery works in the modern era is far more complicated than that, and requires a network of people, both
within the organization and then who are hired outside of the organization, to pass on these bribes. It
takes an incredible amount of effort to launder the money once the officials receive it. So it really is
a network, and it's an operation that's much more sophisticated and ominous than we think when we think
of someone just passing money under the table.
RS:
The power of this book is you offer case studies that cannot be ignored. And it
means that within a large company, there are whole divisions devoted to this kind of bribery. And people
are in on itaccountants, executives, and so forth. This is a major part of doing business. And so I want
to go from there, and we only have a few minutes left. I'd like to get into the role of our own
government. Because you are really quite flattering in this book about individual civil servants within
our own government who are supposed to be monitoring this. And they're well-intentioned, they get the
data, they try to bring the cases. But most often, it doesn't go very far. And the fines are not very
large given the profits involved; it's more of a slap on the wrist. And I want you to just take the
trajectory in this book from the mid-1970s, when thanks to Senator Frank Church and others, and good
media reporting for once, whistleblowing, we actually were conscious of this corruption. And how much
progress have we really made since the mid-1970s in controlling this global corporate bribery network? Is
it worse now, is it better?
DM:
Yeah, as you mentioned, after Watergate in the 1970s it was the most poignant
reckoning as a country we had with how this -- this system exists, and how it exists. Congress held hearings
for three or four years in which they really delved into the issue, and that resulted in the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act, this law. So there was a time in the late '70s, early '80s, when there was a great
amount of momentum behind stopping this crime; we understood why it was so bad, it involved our best
companies, it was wreaking havoc abroad. But then a number of things happened, and we kind of lost sight
of the law. The first was that the FCC and the Justice Department could not really decide, well, who's in
charge of enforcing this law? And by the way, it's a law that doesn't just deal with market violations;
it's a very complex law touching on national policy, foreign policy, et cetera. They didn't have the
expertise to do it. Nonetheless, it was decided they would jointly enforce this law, neither of them
having really the adequate expertise to do so. Communism collapsed, and that was one of the main
motivations for why we had this law; we were worried that the bribery abroad, that our corporations were
involved in, was helping communists; it was giving them ammunition to say, look at these corrupt
corporations funding these capitalist parties, and et cetera. Communist collapsed, and then by the 1990s,
really this law became about protecting American competitiveness. The whole argument of "we need to
protect citizens abroad" sort of died out; it became, the CIA of all things uncovered that foreign
corporations were costing American companies billions of dollars in contracts because they were stealing
them through bribery. And the CIA became very active in cracking down on this by handing over intercepts
and other things. So by the early 2000s, we had literally one guy at the Justice Department enforcing the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and not surprisingly, he was an incredible -- I mentioned in the book, Peter
Clark, he was an incredible force in that sense. But there's only so much one man can do. By the
mid-2000s, enforcement of the FCPA was entirely lacking. And so there has been an upsurge in the last 10
years, as the result of a couple of different factors including more international cooperation and more
political will. But the fines that the companies are forced to pay, for one thing, they're so low.
According to one study, they are equivalent to about one percent of a company's market cap. That's not
much to be punitive. The Justice Department has many prosecutors working on this crime, but they're
incredibly complex, and they often don't have the resources to really delve into them. What they would
rather see is, bring enough evidence to get a corporation to settle, and pay a moderate fine, and that
sends the message of deterrence. But clearly, it doesn't.
RS:
Well, I mean, people should ponder what you just said. We have lots of people in
our prison system; we have the largest incarcerated population in absolute terms in the world. And our
society is vigilant in going after someone who's committed a petty crime, even, the third time, and try
to put them away forever. And yet we get this slap on the wrist. And the idea that you have one
person -- one person! -- in this huge bureaucracy devoted to controlling this, it tells the story. And it tells
it, I think -- I'm all for Trump-bashing and everything, but the fact of the matter is, he didn't invent
this problem. He may personify the problem, but we're talking about, you know, the Clinton
administration, the Obama administration, the two Bush administrations, going back to the Nixon
administration. And so there's a general intent, or lack of will, to hold these large corporations
accountable. I don't know, I don't want to misstate the book, and people should read the book, draw their
own conclusions. But the conclusion that I came away [with] from reading "Kickback: Exposing the Global
Corporate Bribery Network," I felt I needed to take a shower.
DM:
[Laughs]
RS:
I felt I had just been dipped in a cesspool. And these are people who have been
to the Harvard Business School, and you know, they're top lawyers, they're businesspeople, they talk a
good game, they wear the finest suits, talk about integrity. And they live in a cesspool of corruption. I
mean, you mentioned Siemens; it's a German company of great, high regard, right? And these companies,
they're the blue-chip companies, and the norm of their operation throughout the world is to set an
example of deep, deep corruption. Am I putting too fine a point on this? I don't want to distort the
book.
DM:
No, not at all. I just want to point out, though, at the moment the Justice
Department certainly has more than one person enforcing this. They have, I think, 24 prosecutors. But,
right, for a long time it was only one person. But no, I think you're absolutely not overstating this. I
think that it's standard operating procedure at many corporations; it's very active, it's very organized,
this bribery. And it has a devastating impact. And it's done by corporations that have already paid fines
to the Justice Department, and in return for not being prosecuted through a settlement, they have said to
the Justice Department, we are really sorry, we promise we're going to reform, here's the money for our
fine. And they move on, and then a couple years later, guess what we find out -- oh, they did it again. And
they again reach a settlement where the Justice Department says, we won't prosecute you, you guys promise
to reform, we'll take the fine. And it seems like on the one hand, their reforms are window dressing, and
the Justice Department's fines are kind of a slap on the wrist, and it's not really making an impact for
the corporations or for the people abroad who suffer for this.
RS:
Your book describes these incredibly prosperous business executives, corporate
lawyers, and so forth, who are quite comfortable in a system where they know when they violate the laws
and bring misery to large numbers of people around the world, and corrupt the other political
systems -- they're the worst role models for American democracy in the world; it's a role model of
corruption -- that they're not going to be hurt by this. Their company is not going to be hurt. They're
going to get the slap on the wrist. I just wonder, what will the people who read the New York Times, or
the L.A. Times, Washington Post
,
who are in these corporate boardrooms -- and presumably you'll get
some good reviews, hopefully -- but what will they think when they read this book? Will they feel a sense of
shame? Will they want to reform the system? Will they think it's only Trump? If it's only Trump, then how
do you explain going back 400 years? You know, what do you think the reaction will be?
DM:
Yeah, I think the reaction should be a wake-up call. I think some executives that
I spoke to, including some who'd gone to jail for bribery in the past, they claimedI think I believe
themthey weren't aware that bribes had such a devastating impact. And I think that's part of the
problem. People pay these bribes and they think it goes into a vacuum, and that allows them to get away
with it legally, but also on their conscience. So I'm hoping that people who read this book, if they work
in a corporation, it will be a needed wake-up call for them to say, wow, this is really devastating
stuff; this money doesn't just go into a black hole. It funds some really, really terrible things. And
that, yes, I think hopefully the book will set a precedent that they can't just get away with this by
saying, well, we didn't know the bribes were going to do that; we didn't know they had that effect. And I
hope that it may result in maybe more meaningful fines, if people understand the impact that this bribery
has; it's not just a white-collar crime.
RS:
Great. That's it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. I've been talking to
David Montero. The book is called "Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network." And if
you're one of those folks who thinks you don't want to read about economics, then you don't really want
to read about people, you don't want to read about the world condition. This book -- and it's vivid, and
it's telling of case stories, it's a page-turner, and I highly recommend it. And that's it for this
week's edition of Scheer Intelligence. Kat Yore and Mario Diaz are our brilliant engineers here at KCRW.
Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon are our producers. And we were ably assisted this week by the public
radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, WESA. That's it for this week's Scheer Intelligence. We'll see you next
week.
Imagine if, during President George W. Bush's occupation of Iraq, someone had predicted that
in about a decade, Republican voters would oppose war more than Democrats. Few would have
believed it.
Yet according to new polling, it's happening. It might even be President Donald Trump's
greatest accomplishment to date.
The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald broke down this new data in a recent piece in which he
claims Democrats are "
becoming far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans ." Greenwald says that while
the overwhelming majority of Washington elites opposed -- or, more accurately, had a
total meltdown over -- Trump's December announcement that he would
withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, polling data from
Morning Consult/ Politico shows that 49 percent of Americans support the decision
while 33 percent oppose it.
Pluralities or
majorities of Americans
being tired of war is not new
. This is: "[W]hat is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of
support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and
independents overwhelming favor their removal," Greenwald writes.
"The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support
withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it," he notes.
And then the kicker: "Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14
percent."
Seventy-six percent? Think about that number. More than three quarters of GOP voters
today want to support the troops by bringing them home. A position that was once denounced as "
unpatriotic
" is now apparently part of making America great again.
Greenwald also notes that the poll shows similar results among those who voted Democrat in
the midterm election, with 28 percent supporting withdrawal and 54 percent opposing it.
It takes two to tango. The defense contractors can jaw jaw and spread around loads of
cash but without someone in power having the same views war doesn't happen. You don't buy
politicians they willingly sell you their services at top dollar if the cause is right.
Too
many people with big ego's and tiny dicks proving their manhood by sending in the military to
kill and maiming or piling on sanctions to slowly starve any country that stands in the way of
the one indispensable nation on the planet.
Politicians and their sanctions are like the fabled
neutron bomb. Very little physical damage but huge death and suffering.
Iraq is a perfect
example. Sanctions killed far more than than bombs and bullets.
DEDA CVETKO 13 hours ago
Is The Violent Dismemberment Of Russia Official US Policy?
Taking Stock of Ukraine's Achievements Amidst Russia's Aggression
Five years ago, the Ukrainian people staged a peaceful "revolution of dignity" against a
corrupt regime sponsored by the Kremlin. They stood firm even under gunfire and it was the
discredited President Viktor Yanukovych who eventually retreated and took refuge in Russia.
With Moscow engaging in renewed attacks against Ukraine in the Sea of Azov it is important to
take stock of Ukraine's achievements since those fateful days in Kyiv's Independence
Square."
Talk about Orwellian double speak. Only Russiagaters would eat that **** up in their stupidity
.
pparalegal 10 hours ago (Edited)
Oligarchs, corporations and want to be psychopathic rulers
East and West run the political/ think tank know-it-all class. All profit by it. Governments
start wars, not people.
I am still waiting for an explanation of how the mythical beast New Russia will own the USA
and what they will do with it after that. If we don't bomb the s**t out of some third country
because we can. I am much more concerned about the in house mad cows we have elected to boss the
American public and take the gold out of my teeth for the greater good..
Helg Saracen 10 hours
ago (Edited)
I'm just curious. How many real estate over the past 15 years has been bought by the
Chinese in New York, Chicago and California? How many brands, businesses were bought by the
Chinese from the Americans? How many were "borrowed" technology? And how many Russians bought
(rich Jews from Russia cannot be taken into account, they came to their relatives, well, they
bought a little of everything)? :( 30 years ago, the USSR was communist, and the US was
capitalist, now Russia has become capitalist, and the USA (I don't even know how to say) has
become an elite club for financial bandits manipulating sheep under the name "American Nation".
Mantis964 6 hours ago
and the USA (I don't even know how to say) has become an elite club for
financial bandits manipulating sheep under the name "American Nation".
Even as an old timer, I am drawn to the arguments made by our "Dissident Right"(DR), who seek
to find a Third Way between destructive international capitalism and destructive
international socialism. That movement is Nationalism. Some might call it Fascism, though
that loaded term has become far too pejorative. It is not surprising that one of the heroes
of the US DR is Mr. Putin.
The people making the best oral arguments for this third way that I've listened to thus
far are Mike Enoch and Eric Striker. Do not dismiss them lightly. They are obviously highly
intelligent and their movement is growing. As young white males are increasingly marginalized
and oppressed by the dominant culture, they have nowhere else to go. Old-time GOP civic
nationalism is dead, killed by the Diversity Cult that they foolishly embraced. On their own,
after Trump, and given the snowballing demographic catastrophe, the GOP could never again win
another national election. At some point there will be an uprising, unless young
indoctrinated males have been become like frogs in slowly boiling water, who don't realize
they are being scalded alive until it is too late.
"... In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class, most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep State. They now run the show. ..."
Great article and right on target. In fact, we don't have a real democracy anymore. We have a
Potemkin Village democracy. Our national legislature is paralyzed and impotent. And honestly,
that's the way its membership likes it. Pretend to govern. Hold tight to the seats of
privilege and status.
In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a
single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever
the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class,
most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep
State. They now run the show.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media plays the role of Orwell's Squealer the Pig from Animal
Farm. Propagandists. Purveyors of fake news and fake truth. This is not going to end well.
The only question is how and when the ending comes.
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to have real effect. ..."
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr
Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at
least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have
indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the
primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their
fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to
have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I
see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
Russia's PL-19 Nudol, a system U.S. military
intelligence assesses will be focused primarily on anti-satellite missions, was successfully
tested twice in 2018. The weapon, which was fired from a mobile launcher, was last tested on
Dec. 23 and marked the seventh overall test of the system, according to one of the people who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Russian anti-satellite weapon is expected to target communication and imagery satellites
in low Earth orbit, according to the other person, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
For reference, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope travel in low
Earth orbit.
While anti-satellite missiles are by no means new, the latest revelation comes less than a
year after Putin touted his nation's growing military arsenal.
"I want to tell all those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to
win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed to contain our
country's development: You have failed to contain Russia," Putin said during a national address
in March.
A recently unclassified report from the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, or
NASIC, explained how the U.S. advantage above the Earth's atmosphere is eroding to "an emergent
China and a resurgent Russia."
The NASIC report said there number of foreign intelligence and imaging satellites "has
tripled" to 300 in orbit in the last two decades. The U.S. itself has 353 of its own space
assets in orbit for those purposes. In response, military superpowers have poured funding into
researching and developing anti-satellite weapons.
Missiles are the most high-profile, physical manifestation of anti-satellite weapons. Frank
Slazer, the vice president of space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, told CNBC
about how those missiles may be physically effective, but are likely not the "first line of
approach on this."
"You'd much rather jam the satellite, blind it [with a laser], or take over its control
systems with a cyberattack," Slazer said. "Kinetic impacts could cause problems for other
nations, besides the one you are attacking, and possibly for your own system's for many years
afterwards."
Both Slazer and the NASIC report pointed to the example of China's anti-satellite test in
2007. China fired an anti-satellite missile at one of its own, discarded weather satellites.
The test was successful, but the satellite shattered into thousands of pieces, which continue
to zip around in an orbital cloud of deadly debris.
"A huge percentage of the debris in low earth orbit is still attributable to that one test,"
Slazer said.
As far as the U.S. military's ability to defend against anti-satellite weapons, the assets
and capabilities in orbit "are the same as they have been for awhile," Tommy Sanford, director
of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told CNBC.
Sanford contends that there has not been much in the way of progress when it comes to
defending U.S. space-based assets. Sanford gave the example of using networks of smaller and
cheaper satellites, like cubesats and nanosats, to offer "effective platforms to augment and
support missions carried out by the DoD's larger exquisite satellites."
"The idea behind a distributed architecture for space support is – instead of having
one exquisite target – you'd have a system which could presumably survive some loss of
its elements and still be able to provide function," Slazer said.
You know there's a lot of rampant insanity sloshing around when every time there's a
debate about potential threats to the US, whether it starts with Russia, China, NK, or (?),
the Neocons rarely fail to include Iran.
I've been wondering what's fueling their obsession, given that Iran has never threatened
"Israel." The dominant factor which comes to mind is the Holocaust Conference held in Tehran
in 2006 to examine the numerous inconsistencies in the Official Narrative.
The conference was organised as a series lectures based on detailed research undertaken by
the speaker, or a spokesman for an organisation which had undertaken research into the
subject.
Much of the info consisted of statistical analysis of pre & post Holocaust population
factors which cast 'doubt' on the magnitude of various and varying claims made in the
Official Story.
At the end of the conference all of the 'papers' delivered during the conference were
published online and some of them were very well researched and very persuasive. In the
aftermath there were many objections from the 'usual suspects' which, instead of attempting
to refute the published findings, confined themselves to smearing the convenors and
participants. I found this response to be disappointing, lazy and stupid; and tantamount to
an endorsement, by default, of the findings.
It was NEVER the subject of public debate of any note or duration and was quickly 'forgotten'
by the MSM. However, despite the forgetfulness, Iran appears not to have been forgiven.
If a country ruled by a Muslim theocracy tolerates large numbers of Jews living in its
territory, that in itself contradicts Israel's claim to be the only country in the Middle
East that offers Jews the freedom, stability and security to worship as they wish. Israel
offered money to Iranian Jews to move but the Iranian Jewish community rebuffed the offer,
saying it considers itself Iranian first and Jewish second and its identity is not for
sale. https://www.haaretz.com/1.4952371
The fact that a Muslim theocratic state hosts a large Jewish community represents an
existential threat to Israel. Why does Israel need to exist for then, if other countries can
host Jewish communities so well that they don't feel they need to move?
I remember reading several years ago that Israel offered cash incentives to the French
Jewish community and that community also knocked back the offers. Since then France has had a
number of terrorist attacks - guess what those have done to the French Jewish community? https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/22/middleeast/france-israel-jews-immigration/index.html
Iran has the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
...
Posted by: Jen | Jan 18, 2019 11:36:14 PM | 48
Thanks for the timely reminder.
I forgot all about Iran's Jewish citizens but, now that you've jogged my memory, I do recall
looking it up in 2006 and discovering the fact you've reiterated.
It begs a lot of questions about Jewish Unity, doesn't it?
It also reminds me of a rant by Gilad Atzmon called Judea Declares War On Obama. I haven't
posted a link because it's easy to find on the www. Suffice to say that it's about the
prelude to the Holocaust and is ... unflattering...
I dont call 12-15K Jews in a large country an existential threat to Israel.
Zionism was unpopular among most Jews, orthodox and assimilated Jews alike, up until the
holocaust. Without Hitler there never would be an Israel today
"... The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States
has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist
its domination. ..."
"... The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization", with
continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism.
The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, therefore making
it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic. ..."
"... By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized
of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that
they have learned to control". ..."
"... Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state because
of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate subsidies.
..."
According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks,
as summarized at Wikipedia,the United
States has two main totalizing dynamics:
The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United
States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any
state to resist its domination.
The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization",
with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component
of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people
feel helpless, therefore making it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Wolin's Inverted Totalitarianism provides the ground work for my suspicions regarding faux populists Obama and Trump:
By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized
of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections
that they have learned to control".
Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state
because of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate
subsidies.
Looks like when it will all shake out, the net result will not be in the favor of the US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new
"normalcy of some sort."
"Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra
that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story."
In doing research for a dinosaur novel I'm planning to write, I was pleased to learn that the feature of the hydra sprouting
multiple heads to replace each one severed wasn't part of the original myth, but was added later during the decadent stage of
Greek culture. That ancient perception tallies well with the cultural-economic decadence of this collapsing civilization.
BTW I got my copy of Spirit in the Gene and look forward to reading it.
@65 pyschohistorian.. that is a good personal story of yours from today.. it is an easy analogy and many people will understand
it.. one person at a time maybe...
More than one person at a time came out to hear Bernie Sanders deliver that message. There is no doubt they heard it vaguely
via the US media but that was enough, they came in their tens of thousands. Such was the response that the Sanders campaign had
to sometimes book bigger venues and truck in extra PA and video gear to broadcast to crowds outside.
The yankee establishment is just desperate to smash any chance of this growing a second time. Come on Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard
and all those newly elected put on the yellow vest. I dare you. Millions of Americans are willing. Ditto throughout the world
millions of people are waiting to mock the BS colour revolutions and have a real one.
Socialism and thoughts of socialist economic management spread like pheromones on the wind.
Its all like living on the film set of Alice In Wonderland while reading 1984 and Brave New World at the same time while overdosing
on chocolate. Just batshit surreal, and the presstitutes keep pushing the World to the edge of the abyss in their continuous Russia
and Putin bashing. And the vast majority in the West are completely oblivious to what is going on in the World, and completely
oblivious to what is coming. And it will not be pleasant.
@57 James
Did anyone notice an article copied from the Guardian by Information Clearing House entitled "Brought to Jesus - the evangelic
grip on the Trump administration"? "Pense and Pompeo both call evangelical theology a powerful motivating force". "Evangelics
now see the US locked into a holy war against the forces of evil who they see embodied by Iran". It is a never-ending struggle
until.... the rapture." It is a chilling read, especially when it comes to their belief in the role of Zion. Extremely dangerous
because entirely irrational.
I also want to see it [yellow vest] on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps, in china
near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........
apparently you missed the fact that an anti-establishment, anti-euro(thus threatening global bond markets) government was elected
here in Italy last summer, precluding the necessity for protests in the streets. for the moment you might say we're riding the
avant-garde.
@61 NemesisCalling "Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in
Syria."
They would fit the definition of a Mercenary in Article 47 of the Geneva Conventions.
As such they would not be afforded the protections of Geneva Convention III.
"Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them."
I believe that Prince is advocating his own private mercenary airforce to provide support for his own mercenary army. Might
work as far as ground support goes, but not against SU-35 fighter jets.
So, yes, if Trump agrees to this proposal then it is inevitable that he will end up either providing a no-fly-zone for them
or be accused of leaving these brave, brave boys to be slaughtered.
I would assume that the Pentagon has told him that, but I make no assumption that he is paying that advice any attention.
"Open season on all guns for hire. In Afghanistan, too."
Well, yes, that's what International Humanitarian Law says.
So today we have US service men killed in Manbij and ISIS claim responsibility. It is reasonable to suspect that this is a false
flag (with actual deaths) in order to create political justification for US to stay in Syria. Many commentators here view ISIS
as being effectively a US proxy force.
In my view the only real evidence that the US would be leaving Syria would involve direct negotiations with the Syrian government.
In this case the US could leave saving face and securing some concessions that reflect their interests. The alternative is that
the US would leave with their tails between their legs being bombed out, very ignoble and looking like the withdrawal from Vietnam;
it is just not plausible that the US would leave in this way.
Yes. What better way to demonstrate that ISIS is not defeated and the US "job" in Syria is not done.
I suspect that Trump's rhetoric will not change. He will continue to insist that he is/will 'pull out' of Syria .... it's just
gonna take longer. Just how long will remain a mystery.
I see you have been accused of having a one sized fits all condom!😁
Your theory, unfairly, gets short shrift whereas ideas like "Trump is doing all the right things, but is frustrated at every
turn by the deep state" is just accepted unquestioningly.
However, the Syrian withdrawal could happen and this would not necessarily be incompatible with your theory; there may be tactical
reasons. Whatever, the idea that the US is just going to retreat and leave the Middle East alone is so far fetched that I am staggered
that people see this as a real possibility.
Personally, I think the US have a strategy for the world based on the model they created in Congo, South America, Libya and
Afganistan. All of these areas are hugely profitable for the Empire because "controlled" chaos allows cheap extraction of resources
and control of the world drug trade. This is what I believe the Empire has in mind for the Middle East, everywhere along OBOR
and, also, Europe (and, perhaps, the US itself?).
from Asia Times, quote:
On a mission from God: Pompeo messages evangelicals from the Middle East
The US secretary of state was communicating to an audience back home on his Middle East tour, the key Trump constituency of evangelical
Christians.
In Cairo: "This trip is especially meaningful for me as an evangelical Christian, coming so soon after the Coptic Church's Christmas
celebrations. This is an important time. We're all children of Abraham: Christians, Muslims, Jews. In my office, I keep a Bible
open on my desk to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth." . .
here
Trump is being prosecuted by Robert Swan Mueller III, who entire career has been him covering up and fixing cases which involved
CIA criminality. Now William Barr is Trump's own choice for Attorney General. Barr spent the mid-1970s in the CIA. While there
he got his degree in law, suggesting his career path was being drawn by his employer. Unsurprisingly, GHW Bush moved him along
until he became Bush's AG.
Trump is either more demented than many have thought, he's in on the whole charade of his Presidency or he's in deep trouble
with the Deep State. The strings all lead back to Langley.
> Starting with Reagan, every President and/or VP has had, or rumored to have had, links to CIA: Bush Sr. had led the CIA;
Clinton allowed CIA flights into Arkansas; Obama's grandfather/mother. Questions have also been raised about Trump - the first
casino he purchase was rumored to have been involved in CIA money laundering (prior to Trump's purchase).
> Wolin, a respected Princeton University academic, described how the ruling establishment engages in "managed democracy"
to retain control. A key part of that management is the money-based electoral system which ensures that no real populist is
elected President.
If you enjoy the Kool-Aid then just pass over my comments.
Yes! Why nominate Barr for AG? Why nominate Gina Haspel for CIA? Why bring on Bolton? These choices make no sense for a President
that is supposedly at war with the Deep State.
Great list, b. Another. From the top of google (enter co name or part of post in goog for details.)
Afaik (please correct if), Trump tried to do biz in Russia but more or less failed or gave up or didn't get anywhere much,
nothing major transpired.
"There are 517 McDonald's restaurants in Russia, 73 of which were opened in 2014. The company's total revenue for 2014 in Russia
was 65.8 billion rubles.. the chain has been operating in Russia independently for 22 years."
"PepsiCo reported that in 2017, its Russian operations generated net revenue of $3.23 billion, which made up 5.1 percent of
the company's total net revenue."
Philip Morris has good sales in Russia. Cisco Systems (idk about this, look it up.) Abbot Labs (US) sells generic drugs in
Russia. Ford is still selling cars there.
The leading Chocolate co. in Russia is Mondelez (should be another topic .. )
Starbucks celebrated its 100 stores in Russia in 2015.
The CEOs of these cos. + their shareholders, employees, are in bed w. Russia and undermining US Democracy, interfering in people's
choices, the true shining light on the hill, or what? It is collusion! They meet and deal with Russians, all the time.
Note: Flynn revelation was likely just a tip of the iceberg. It was from his agency (DIA) that Judicial Watch got the memo (via
FOIA) that talked of how US allies wanted to establish a Caliphate.
These were important to understanding ISIS as a proxy force, not the grass-roots group of Jihadi hoodlums that the Obama Administration
wanted us to believe. Obama infamously called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" to explain why he was essentially ignoring it's rise.
Later, the story changed to "ISIS was created by Assad." LOL.
@68 uncle tungsten.. i wish you all the best trying to take back control of the gov't, or following thru on the yellow jacket
demonstrations... i am with you in spirit..
@70 montreal.. something is driving these folks... some whacky evangelical fantasy sounds about right... i can't believe how
easily duped people are with fundamental religion of all stripes...
@74 john.. you probably would have voted for frank zappa if he was running in the italian elections!
i've never embraced the argument that Trump is a president who is at war with the deep state. i've only said that this sort
of yammering is all conjecture and as such will never be sufficient grounds for proof...that it doesn't really matter anyway.
for all i know every incoming president is given a private screening of the zapruder film and the rest is left to his imagination.
i don't drink Kool-Aid, and if i passed over your comments i wouldn't know that they pretty much all say the same thing.
Fair enough! But what should be done about the many people that HAVE drunk the Kool-Aid and believe the Trump vs. Deep State
narrative?
I think some amount of repetition is unavoidable. Especially since the Trump vs. Deep State narrative is repeated ad nauseum
by MSM and even independent bloggers (that haven't thought it through).
@90 James.
As someone said, history doesn't always repeat itself but sometimes rhymes....... in India, in the early nineteenth century, the
British presence consisted largely of lowland Scots - evangelical Presbyterians. People like Dalhousie and Grant. They managed
to combine an iron conviction in their own Godly righteousness - and duty to improve the benighted heathen - with a sincere belief
that there was nothing wrong in robbing the natives blind whilst improving them. Their arrogance and greed led directly to the
disaster of the First Afghan War and subsequently the First Indian War of Independence (or Indian Mutiny depending on your point
of view). Maybe Presbyterian Evangelical certainty will be the American downfall as well. I do often hope so.
do you know the story
of when once president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, appointed Frank as Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture
and Tourism , much to the chagrin of then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker?
apparently Baker declared, 'You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa.'
@93 montreal.. i was unaware of the specifics on the history in india as you note.. thanks for sharing that.. i just assumed it
was the british empire mindset, without looking more closely at the details of it..
@94 john.. lol! cool pic - man from utopia... i do recall frank getting that appointment from vaclav havel, but this is the first
time i heard of james bakers response! james baker is long forgotten, but frank zappa is a cultural icon that will be remembered
for a long time!
Superbowl democracy : pick the red team or pick the blue, really doesn't matter which you do, none of the wrestling is really
true, just a snare of a circus we're forced to view, where puppets pose and pretend to duel, and the House will always win...
Indeed the Levant is returning to the centre of Middle East and world attention in a stronger position than in 2011. Syria
has advanced precision missiles that can hit any building in Israel. Assad also has an air defence system he would have never
dreamed of before 2011 -- thanks to Israel's continuous violation of its airspace, and its defiance of Russian authority. Hezbollah
has constructed bases for its long and medium range precision missiles in the mountains and has created a bond with Syria that
it could never have established -- if not for the war. Iran has established a strategic brotherhood with Syria, thanks to its
role in defeating the regime change plan. . .
here
Alastair Crooke
NATO's support for the growth of ISIS has created a bond between Syria and Iraq that no Muslim or Baathist link could ever
have created: Iraq has a "carte blanche" to bomb ISIS locations in Syria without the consent of the Syrian leadership, and
the Iraqi security forces can walk into Syria anytime they see fit to fight ISIS. The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger
than it is today. That is the result of 2011-2018 war imposed on Syria". . .
here
And then add to that the current hectic itinerary of pompous Pompeo to explain the defeat to eight Middle East countries
in eight days, highlighted by his feeble pleas to Qatar to join with Saudi Arabia against Iran. Solidity is crucial! Pompeo
says, to which Qatar which shares a huge gas field with Iran gave pompous the middle finger. Another factor is the Turkey-Qatar
alliance promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, anathema to the Saudi despots. This will all shake out, not to the favor of the
US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new "normalcy of some sort."
First of all, if Trump is so bad with and Russia, why are you and others here always loving on him, singing his praises and
defending him like he's still a naive schoolboy in short pants that the big boys are picking on?
@21 Jackrabbit
Bolton's not steering Trump into war with Iran, Trump hired Bolton so he'd have someone to blame and take the heat when
he greenlights war with Iran and things go bad; which they will.
Trump was an Iran hawk from start. He's been railing against Iran since he got off the Trump Tower escalator and stepped
behind the AIPAC podium.
@43 uncle tungsten
Wow, I mean wow. That's a bull's eye zinger. DB was really off the mark.
Yeah, and Israel still has one of the most powerful arsenals in the world funded to the tune of $38 billion, the largest
aid package to Israel in U.S. history delivered by Trump. and Israel has hundreds of nukes, still occupies Palestine and the
Golan Heights, and still has the Empire's bases where it wants them, and now has the GCC in its corner all in, and Trump has
delivered on so many promises already: tearing up the Iran deal, defunding aid to Palestinians, closing the Palestinians D.C.
mission office, moving the U.S. Embassy and declaring Jerusalem capital of Israel, and sabotaging a Resolution at the U.N condemning
settlements when he wasn't even President yet. Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.
You ask the question: "How will we ever gain control of our country."
As psychohistorian intones, private financial casinos and their ilk need to become public utilities to fund public activities
and protect the resources on which they're based, while the political/philosophical change to create that paradigm metes our
justice and cleans The Swamp. To discover the veracity of our prescription, one need only read
Michael Hudson's works , although there're others we might also cite.
Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra
that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story.
Of course, the end is far easier than the road to get there. But as the polling link I provided upthread and others show,
the public is roused and of greater solidarity for the first time this century. Why do ya think the Deep State's trying so
hard to limit and falsify information I an overt manner!
@ Circe | Jan 16, 2019 12:10:26 AM | 51 Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.
I never said Israel was abandoned by Trump, so I was never "really off the mark," was I. If Trump is doing any abandoning anywhere,
it's in Syria, Israel's enemy, now stronger due to Obama's mistake, one of many. Trump is a late arrival.
Aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself. US troops are still there. NY Times says the 'pull out' is expected to take
4-6 months.
How many times has US been rumored to be leaving Afghanistan?
US still has troops in Iraq! Years after Obama was forced (yes, forced) to remove the bulk of the forces in that country.
And what good is the 'pull out' if US keeps mercenaries/special forces in the country to fight with SDF? The plan seems
to be retain control of Syrian territory via proxies. There is NO TALK of a hand over to SAA.
Thanks karlof1 I will explore that Michael Hudson link it looks good from first scan.
Generally: I don't do graphics but I think a statue of liberty with a yellow vest would be a good theme for a behind the
scenes 'competition' submitted via email to b (if willing) then published here for a discussion and 'vote' would be a great
aid to mirth. I won't be in your revolution if I can't dance - sort of thing. Maybe its been done by now ?
I rarely harangue at US Exceptionalism like I did when I first began commenting here as it gets in the way of highlighting
other points, and with me it's a priori along with its kin Manifest Destiny. It should also be observed that all Imperialist
Nations share both to differing degrees and becomes part of Elite "Magic Mirror" persona--Mirror, mirror on the wall; who's
the fairest of them all..."--generating the deadliest of snobbishness. When I taught, I took pains to properly explain the
Outlaw US Empire's Mythos and show where it's present in everyday life--The Few; The Proud; The Marines. He's shooting the
ball. (You throw the damn thing; do baseball pitchers shoot their pitch!?)
The Canadian domestic situation differs from the USA's in numerous ways, but it faces the same forces trying to keep citizens
from gaining control over their destiny and that of their nation. And Canadians share much of the same negative American baggage.
Both nation's citizens would benefit by knowing the true nature of their past which would aid them greatly in their current
struggle.
@43 uncle tungsten is bang on... for some reason - maybe you need to read a tao te ching verse before i say this to you!
- you can't seriously believe trump has changed his fealty to israel? that is just not the reality as i see it.. the whole
of the usa establishment are completely subservient to israel.. take a look at trumps daughter and son in law.. what the fuck
is that?
trump is also totally down with war on iran.. why is that? was a little zionist birdie talking in his ear, or not? sure
looks like 24/7 fealty to israel is spite of whatever bullshit trump is tweeting about..
@56 karlof1... thanks.. i agree with you and see what you are saying... it seems though on one small level canucks are not
always thinking we are the fucking greatest.. that is the one difference i would point to.. so if that isn't exceptionalism
rearing it's ugly head, i don't know what to call it.. other then that - i agree with you and i suppose your point is that
the concept of exceptionalism is just another distraction..
@ karlof1 with the hat tip about gaining control of "our" country....thanks.
I am with uncle tungsten with wanting to put a yellow vest on the statue of liberty and especially the dance part because
I already do that twice a week. I also want to see it on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps,
in china near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........you get the picture.
We are entering that cleft of time where psychohistorian is suppose to wave its magic wand and greatly reduce the time before
"real change". Ok, so I did that. But that still means that others will need to play their roles as well for the change to
occur. We all need to continue the zombie awakening so that when the time comes for "we the people" to make a collective "sound",
it comes out as beautiful music that we can all dance to.
This is a good place to begin at Hudson's site as it explains a great many things about the recent past and present. I
would suggest this page next .
His opus, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ought to be in every respectable library, for
which the videos here provide
a bit of context. If I add another link, this might be construed as spam, so I'll also highly suggest Life & Thought: An
Autobiography from last August. Enjoy!
Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in Syria.
Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them.
Remember the episode where 100+ Russian contractors were strafed fighting alongside SAA by USAF? Open season on all guns
for hire. In Afghanistan, too.
YES!and some really good (short)5second? video to stream via whatever those social media platforms are. One on each of the
religious icons of whatever would be inviting.
"The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue -- the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish
grand inquisitor named Mueller -- has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such
as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump,
like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US
seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes movement (just as an example)
are definitely not."
By now everybody knows that Netanyahu asks and Trump delivers. The servility of US politicians and media to Israel is so obvious
that they world laughs at the "superpower USA, that is being rough shod" by a toy shit entity called Israel. THE GREATEST TREASON
OF ALL "Israel first"
@ james who quoted Orlov:
"
That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes
movement (just as an example) are definitely not."
"
This is part of the elite massaging of nationalism narratives. There is still too much "frontier" in America that blind
many to not feeling part of a government controlled community. I talked to a young guy today with 3 kids and living in a mobile
home on property in the sticks so he doesn't have problems with neighbors and government. I think I got my message across when
I pointed out that the roads he drives on to his house, the power and water he gets are forms of socialism and I just want
the tools of finance to be public-minded like that.
Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great message
to her traitors and gangsters. Apart from the Skripal case, the UK seems up to confiscate the
wealth Russian expats in the UK looted back home. On the one hand, it's ~ $10bn worth that
will be definitely lost for Russia, on the other if the UK's treatment of Skripal and runaway
oligarchs won't heal Russian traitors and gangsters from their blissful enamourment with
England's climate, I don't know what will.
@Mike
P I can't find the comment because the comment archive is down -- I think it was
annamaria who reported that the British were holding assets of Russian oligarchs and that
Russia wanted the funds back. The speculation was that Teresa May would take possession of
the assets.
As these two articles state, most of the Russian billionaire oligarchs are Jewish
So at least (conspiracy theory) part of the Skripal scheme is for Teresa May to be an
angel and return their assets to the Jewish billionaires who stole Russian wealth fair and
square.
"... The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment. ..."
annamaria says: April 10,
2018 at 2:44 pm GMT 100 Words On the British Establishment:
The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when the
influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up to the
criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir" Savile. The
Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them to do.
Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.
The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices
against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by
any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the
vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.
A new piece by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books gives some insight into
secret U.S. operations during the Reagan administration.
The Vice President's Men includes a quite sensational claim of who revealed the
Iran-Contra affair.
According to the conventional wisdom, as reflected
in Wikipedia, an Iranian operator revealed to a Lebanese paper that the U.S. was selling
weapons to Iran in the hope to get hostages in Lebanon released:
After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986. This
was the first public report of the weapons-for-hostages deal.
People is the National Security Council used profits from these weapon sales to
illegally arm and finance CIA run anti-government gangs in Nicaragua. Both, the weapon
sales to Iran and the weapon delivery to guerilla in Nicaragua, were illegal under U.S.
law. The leak to Lebanese paper blew up both operations.
That Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian operative, leaked the affair is only supported
by second hand hearsay from a dubious source. Seymour Hersh reports of a very different
culprit.
According to his sources former CIA director George H.W. Bush, who was then Reagan's
vice president, ran his own secret operations through a special office in the Pentagon. It
was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau. The office and its operations were kept outside of
congressional oversight. Neither the CIA nor the Joint Chief's of Staff were aware of its
doing. During some 30 different operations the Bush team used small groups of U.S. marines
to effect Soviet operations in foreign countries and to get rid of unwanted foreign
politicians. Bush essentially ran the prequel of the 'war on/of terror' which today is run
by the CIA and the Joint Special Forces Command.
Bush disliked William Casey, who Reagan had named as new CIA director. Casey was a
business man who got the job after he managed Ronald Reagan's election campaign. Bush
thought that he was too incompetent to run the clandestine service.
One of the operations run under Bush also involved Nicaragua, but had nothing to do with
the later Iran-Contra scandal. At the same time the CIA director William Casey was drumming
up support for the Contras in Nicaragua. The two operations collided when Lieutenant
Colonel Oliver (Ollie) North at the National Security Council used the proceeds from the
weapon sales to Iran to illegally finance the CIA's Contras in Nicaragua. While North was
also a confident of the Bush/Moreau's operations, he allegedly freelanced and eventually
deserted to the CIA side.
According to a former officer involved in Bush's operations office, Bush and Moreau
feared that the CIA's widely expanding Iran-Contra operation run by Oliver North would
become a threat to their own operations. They decided to blow it up:
'Ollie brings in Dick Secord and Iranian dissidents and money people in Texas to the
scheme, and it's gotten totally out of control,' the officer said. 'We're going nuts. If
we don't manage this carefully, our whole structure will unravel. And so we' –
former members of Moreau's team who were still working for Bush – 'leaked the story
to the magazine in Lebanon.' He was referring to an article, published on 3 November 1986
by Ash-Shiraa magazine in Beirut, that described the arms for hostages agreement. He
would not say how word was passed to the magazine, ...
According to Hersh's source the effect of the leak to the Lebanese paper was foreseen
and intended:
The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in
public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ' Our goals were to protect the
Moreau operation, to limit the vice president's possible exposure, and to convince the
Reagan administration to limit Bill Casey's management of covert operations. It only took
a match to light the fire. It was: "Oh my god. We were paying ransom for the hostages
– to Iran."'
If Hersh's anonymous source is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, the Iranian
Mehdi Hashemi did not leak the issue. It was bureaucratic infighting between a former CIA
director, who continued to run secret operations, and a sitting one, who was deemed
incompetent by the former, that led to the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair.
Seymour Hersh is known to have lots of contacts with former officials and officers.
According to his on telling he is actively seeking them out as soon as they retire. Old men
like to tell war stories, but dislike to damage their still living friends. George H.W.
Bush died last November. Hersh likely knew the story long ago but is only now allowed to
tell it.
The new Hersh/LRB
piece is quite long and the details seems to have little relevance for current affairs.
But his sources tell an interesting story about the backstage fights that went on between
the various branches of the national security bureaucracy during the Reagan presidency.
There is no doubt that similar fights, including intentional leaks to damage competing
officials, continue today.
Posted by b at
02:11 PM |
Comments (36) Interesting too that Hersh cannot finds a publisher in the United States.
The fact that this is in the LRB-where I just read it- tells you all you need to know
about, for example, the New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harpers. As to the newspapers, they
are a lost cause.
Now let us see if there is any follow up in the MSM..anywhere. My guess is that RT will
cover it.
Congratulations, again to b, for spotting the stories that matter and making sure that the
imperialist media cannot suppress them.
"That Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian operative, leaked the affair is only supported by second
hand hearsay from a dubious source."
That dubious source is George Cave aka Ibrahim Razin aka Oswald LeWinter, poet,
Shakespeare expert, and involved since the Sixties in disinformation of the highest order.
He had a role -- mainly as disinformant, I believe -- in at least the following cases:
Charlie Manson, Propaganda Due, Iran-Contra, Olof Palme, Princess Diana, Lockerbie.
LeWinter turns up in Francovich's Gladio as well as his Lockerbie movie.
I think the take home is how agency structure at different levels is used to circumvent
relevant laws and public awareness. An auditor applying normal audit technique under
contract to one agency would be hard pressed to find this kind of activity because it exist
in another agency at a different level. My question is how could this have been
discovered at the time it happened? What formula, question or technique could produce a
discovery that would lead to the existence of this kind of activity? Even more important
did the auditors discover the activity and fail to report it or did they have the data to
discover it and just missed it. The audit firm involved might owe the government some
money.
Reconciling the actually delivery of assets deployed to the funds that were used to
acquire and transport them might have produced a discovery result.?
If you search the most nefarious and deadly covert operations, you will usually find Naval
Intelligence deeply involved.
Bush-CIA was always a cover for Bush-Naval Intel.
The Kennedy Assassination plot overlord was Naval Intelligence.
The most pervasive war-mongering by the Hegemon is led by US Naval Intelligence.
See Bob Woodward's background, even Steve Bannon's CV.
The US Navy projects US hegemonic power and is decisive for Logistical transport of war
efforts.
The most elite of SOF is Navy SEALS. SEALS are always sent on the most sensitive
missions.
The Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine followed this century to destroy the sovereignty of
third world states is the masterplan of Cebrowski, an Admiral. Thierry Meyssan always
refers to it as the strategic basis for the chaos in MENA and coming to Africa and Latin
America.
From the USS Maine in Havana harbor, to Pearl Harbor, to Iran-Contra, to Iraq,Libya,
Syria, the handprint is there.
"... Even voters too ignorant to see Trump for what he really was - voters that are misinformed to the point that they unwittingly and continually vote against their own best interests - realized how much the Dems have sold out to Wall Street. ..."
"... That's why they anointed Obama who then proceeded to squander eight years of opportunity to remove big money from politics and enact progressive reforms to health care, the environment, etc. ..."
"... Bernie is a bit long in the tooth, so I am all in for Liz Warren. She's the only one with both the courage and the intelligence to take on the big money that controls our politics. ..."
"... Sanders or Warren would mean a change from neoliberal war mongering of the Clinton/W model. If the Democrats offer up another Clintonite they will lose. They need to offer something positive to the 90% who have lost the last 40 years of class war. ..."
The neoliberalism of the Democratic Party elite (and most of the rank and file) is one big
factor in our 2016 loss. Even voters too ignorant to see Trump for what he really was -
voters that are misinformed to the point that they unwittingly and continually vote against
their own best interests - realized how much the Dems have sold out to Wall Street.
HRC would have been nominated in '08 if she had kissed more Wall Street you-know-what.
That's why they anointed Obama who then proceeded to squander eight years of opportunity
to remove big money from politics and enact progressive reforms to health care, the
environment, etc.
Bernie is a bit long in the tooth, so I am all in for Liz Warren. She's the only one
with both the courage and the intelligence to take on the big money that controls our
politics.
Therefore, you can expect the Russian trolls to be coming for her in force. If you read
anything negative about Warren in the coming months, check the source and don't trust the
accuracy.
Sanders or Warren would mean a change from neoliberal war mongering of the Clinton/W
model. If the Democrats offer up another Clintonite they will lose. They need to offer
something positive to the 90% who have lost the last 40 years of class war.
Broadly, authoritarianism is the desire to impose one's own worldview on others in one's
society by institutionalized coercion. Authoritarians, therefore, see punishment as an
appropriate response when members of the group with which they identify [...] diverge too
far from values that the authoritarian believes are best for society – even if the
punished person has neither caused direct harm to another nor infringed another's
rights.
Yep,
The party has circled its wagons.
They insist that the Evil Vlad stole the last election.
Therefore, no need to examine Obama's centrist/neoliberal policies and the socio-economic
conditions that fueled the rejection of Hillary.
We're doomed to repeat our errors.
The farcical DNC leadership echoes the days of Brezhnev's intransigent politburo.
This is the realistic perspective we have to adopt in the US: the Democratic establishment
is part of the neoliberal machinery that has generated Bush's wars, Obama's bank bailouts,
deportations, and drone executions, and now Trump's anti-democratic populism.
"... Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly stayed on-message. ..."
In regards to the Hillary v Bernie question, it also didn't help that the primary vote was
wildly skewed by so-called 'superdelegates,' who don't actually commit their votes until the
DNC convention, but were being counted by the media as having already voted for Hillary,
which made it appear to many of the uninformed that Bernie didn't have any chance of winning,
which may have been intended to keep Bernie supporters home on primary day under the
assumption that Hillary was unbeatable.
As sensible as your suggestions may be, what you're calling for would require at least three
constitutional amendments to be practical - including scrapping the first amendment.
Maybe we should strive towards attainable goals instead?
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad. Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
Progressive believe in inclusion and if that is "moralistic rhetoric" then so be it.
The litany goes "round and round.
Hillary Clinton:
" you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you
name it!
"Barack Obama:
"Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the
presidential hopeful said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion "
Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him
in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly
stayed on-message.
The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, also known as the Yinon Plan, is an Israeli
strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel
must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding
Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
The reach of a "Greater Israel", as described in the Yinon plan.
When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war
on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt,
must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists
in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli
expansionist project.
"Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.
Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge. This is why Iraq was
outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In
Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the
division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one Shiite and the other
Sunni.
The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military's Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both
published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside
from a divided Iraq, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The Yinon
Plan also calls for color revolutions (Arab Spring) North Africa and forecasts it as starting
from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.
"Greater Israel" requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.
The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must
become an imperial regional power, and
must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all
existing Arab states.
Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently,
the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically,
its source of moral legitimation This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first
time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units
has been a recurrent theme.
Viewed in this context, the war on Syria is part of the process of Israeli territorial
expansion. Israeli intelligence working hand in glove with the US, Turkey and NATO is
directly supportive of the Al Qaeda terrorist mercenaries inside Syria.
The Zionist Project also requires the destabilization of Egypt, the creation of factional
divisions within Egypt as instrumented by the "Arab Spring" leading to the formation of a
sectarian based State dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Half of Americans don't bother voting for president. Why is the American media full only of people who insist that the country
is divided in half between Democrat and Republican supporters? Where are the people of influence who think it's a problem and
reflects poorly on the country that half of eligible voters don't see a reason to participate, and that it's worth changing things
in order to get more people to change their minds about that?
Both parties are content with being unpopular, but with political mechanisms ensuring they stay in power anyway. The Democrats
aren't concerned with being popular. They're content with being a token opposition party that every once in a while gets a few
token years with power they don't put to any good anyway. It pays more, I guess.
It still looks like if Americans want to live in a progressive country, they'll have to move to one. But as it is clear that the
neoliberalism of establishment Democrats has little or nothing to offer the poor and working class, or to non-wealthy millennials,
the times they are a-changing.
The Deep State is not monolithic. I would not be surprised that at the same time as Iran
Contra there were other large scale covert operations going on.
There certainly are ongoing operations that are directed at keeping actual nationalists
(like I believe Putin to be) from gaining power in important resource countries in Africa and
other continents
Llike the operation that brought down Gough Whitlam without the need for Perkin's
(Economic hitman) jackals which were probably used to kill Olof Palme.
It does appear that a portion of the Deep State was really disappointed and didn't
give up when other billionaires got Trump elected.
What makes folks think that the Bush secret cabal has gone away?
I see a splintering or bankruptcy of many elite coming as part of the new order.....cull
the herd...... If only the elite would take each other down in this event I would be
pleased.....grin
Leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces and move on with life after our global
private finance/God of Mammon world collapses.
I agree with comment #2 Richard Steven Hack that Hersh is playing his role of keeping
focus off more recent crimes against humanity by exposing the deeds of the dead but staying
tight lipped about deeds of the living.
If Hersh is now revealing secrets he couldn't while Bush was still alive, I wish he would
tell us what connection there was between Bush and the JFK assassination. Unfortunately,
Hersh's disgraceful book "The Dark Side of Camelot," suggests he will not. That book
reflects thinking by Hersh's CIA and Secret Service sources that Kennedy was such a bad
person and president that it's a good thing he was killed. The book never explicitly says
this, but it's the underlying thought.
Hersh seems to be engaged in a bit of revisionism to whitewash Bush's role on
Iran-Contra. Probably he has been strong armed, like so many others today
President Bush decapitated the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning 6 figures including
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whose trial was about to begin, with Bush himself
likely called to testify. ." Bush first consulted his attorney general at the time, William
Barr. Barr has just been named by Trump as attorney general.
Interesting article on Barr here (i broke the link with space). The swamp just keeps
getting nastier
Bush was basically the acting President during the Reagan years like Cheney was during his
sons regime. Cheney and Bush go way back. Bush like Cheney knew everything going on.
"On May 14, 1982, Vice President Bush's position as chief of all U.S. covert action was
formalized in a secret memorandum (signed "for the President" by Ronald Reagan's National
Security Adviser William P. Clark and declassified during the congressional Iran-Contra
hearings)."
Gee, what a surprise, GHW Bush committing ongoing acts of treason, first as DCI then,
Veep, then POTUS. Yet another bit of evidence backing my hypothesis that the CIA quickly
gained control of the Executive branch of the Federal government soon after its
inception.
It would be tempting to call it the Mafiosi States of America except that so few Italians
or Sicilians are involved.
Saker's Anglo-Zionist Empire is quite close to reality, although I prefer my own Outlaw US
Empire.
What I was trained to portray the USA as to students is a massive lie, some of which I
knew at the time, but not to the extent I now know. Frankly, I'm rather glad my elders have
all passed--to be told you've been living a lie your entire life is an affront to one's
dignity that's hard to top.
"... By Thomas Neuberger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny! ..."
"... I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. -- William Arkin, former NBC war reporter ..."
"... Former CIA Director John Brennan the latest superspook," they said, "to be reborn as a TV newsie . He just cashed in at NBC News as a 'senior national security and intelligence analyst' and served his first expert views on Meet the Press . The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN , which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. ..."
"... Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert Mueller; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC ; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush. ..."
"... At this point Arkin is selling the idea, with which I agree, that the security state has become so powerful that it's able to use the news networks, who compete for "spook parity," as their sales platforms. ..."
"... And there's no real evidence that the FBI is either -- is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it's pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers , that they're the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there's just no evidence that that's the case. ..."
"... And we tend, again, to say "Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department." Donald Trump couldn't find the Department of Homeland Security if somebody set him on the streets of New York -- of Washington, D.C. So it's not Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department. It's our Homeland Security Department. And I think it's important for us to recognize that this is a department that is really operating on its own behalf and out of control . ..."
"... if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend? ..."
"... The Guard had the power to "make or break emperors." Are we growing our own Praetorian Guard, or giving them leave to grow, under cover of their anti-Trump "resistance"? If I were one of the national security superspooks, I'd want nothing better than to be welcomed -- and washed clean -- by acceptance into that well-praised effort. Doors would open publicly that before were open only in secret. ..."
"... the form of government he leaves behind may be worse, especially if he cements in the public mind the rightness of superspooks acting as new-minted kingmakers. Sanders supporters, take note. ..."
The Praetorian Guard declares a cowering Claudius emperor after murdering Caligula (from
a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema)
I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed
a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and
practically impervious to criticism.
-- William Arkin, former NBC war reporter
File this under "Praetorian Guard Watch."
William Arkin is a longtime NBC reporter, primarily covering war and national security news.
He recently quit NBC, offering his reasons in an online " departure
letter ." There he castigated the media's coverage of the president, calling them at one
point "prisoners of Donald Trump."
"Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor," Arkin wrote. "And yet I'm alarmed at
how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell
more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn't get out Syria? We shouldn't go for the bold
move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned
about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really
earn for the Cold War? And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this
historically destructive institution?"
Please notice the last sentences above, about the growth in reputation -- and
irreproachability -- of the national security state: "And don't even get me started with the
FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"
Then he gave an interview
to Democracy Now 's Amy Goodman. Part of that interview went this way (emphasis mine
throughout):
AMY GOODMAN: So, you talked about the people who populate the networks as pundits,
and you've been a fierce critic of the national security state, or at least understanding who
it is who is explaining things to us.
Reading from Politico , " Former CIA Director John Brennan the latest
superspook," they said, "to be reborn as a TV newsie . He just cashed in at NBC News as a
'senior national security and intelligence analyst' and served his first expert views on
Meet the Press . The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN
, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA
Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity.
Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too
numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of
staff for FBI Director James Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert Mueller;
Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national
security adviser under Bush, at NBC ; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under
Bush."
And it goes on and on and on. These are now the pundits. And so, when you have a situation
like President Trump announcing he will immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and halve
the troops that are in Afghanistan, you have this massive attack on him that's actually
led by the permanent national security state under the guise of pundits on television
.
At this point Arkin is selling the idea, with which I agree, that the security state has
become so powerful that it's able to use the news networks, who compete for "spook parity," as
their sales platforms.
But in doing so, he's making another point as well, if not mindfully -- that the national
security state is approaching (or has approached) the status of a latter-day Praetorian Guard,
a military organization without whose approval no one can become or remain president.
He gets there in stages. First, this:
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I think that you've -- I mean, what you said stands for
itself, Amy. But I would add to it that I think the real crisis is that when we have a panel
discussion on television, in the mainstream press, and even in the mainstream newspapers, we
don't populate that panel with people who are in opposition. We have a single war party in
the United States, and it's the only one that is given voice.
And I think that probably because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump -- let's just be
honest about it -- really what we see on TV now is former Obama administration officials
masquerading as analysts who are nonpartisan, when in fact they are partisan .
Brennan, Clapper (he who lied to Congress but, as an approved insider, was forgiven), and a
number of other "former Obama administration officials" are not just partisan, pro-endless war
advocates "masquerading as analysts"; they are "analysts" working to delegitimize Donald Trump.
Whether not Trump is a legitimate president, that "partisan superspooks" are uncritically
accepted as part of the takedown operation should be concerning.
Arkin seems to recognize this. Later in
the interview he's asked to explain his comment about the FBI, which I noted above.
AMY GOODMAN: And, William Arkin, you also write, "don't [even] get me started with
the FBI : What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"
WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, there's a crazy collateral damage of Donald Trump. And that is
that there are a lot of liberals in America who believe that the CIA and the FBI is going
to somehow save the country from Donald Trump .
Well, I'm sorry, I'm not a particular fan of either the CIA or the FBI . And the FBI , in
particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the
peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been
persecuted by the FBI .
And there's no real evidence that the FBI is either -- is that competent of an
institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it's pursuing.
But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth
tellers , that they're the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there's
just no evidence that that's the case.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you mean by the "creeping fascism of homeland security"?
WILLIAM ARKIN: You know, I was against the creation of the Homeland Security
Department in 2003, to begin with. First of all, don't like the word. "Homeland security"
sounds a little bit brown-shirty to me. But, second of all, it was created to be a
counterterrorist organization, a domestic counterterrorist organization. And all during the
Obama administration, we heard Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, saying,
"You know, we are counterterrorism." But since then, we've seen they're creeping into
cybersecurity. We've seen them creeping into election security. We've seen ICE and TSA become
the second and third largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. And so, now
homeland security sort of has become a domestic intelligence agency with really an unclear
remit, really with broad powers that we don't fully understand .
And we tend, again, to say "Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department." Donald Trump
couldn't find the Department of Homeland Security if somebody set him on the streets of New
York -- of Washington, D.C. So it's not Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department. It's our
Homeland Security Department. And I think it's important for us to recognize that this is
a department that is really operating on its own behalf and out of control .
I'd like you to ask yourself this. If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations
with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring
manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and
corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the
national security apparatus , on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided
services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful,
well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) and for good measure, started
jailing bankers again
if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national
security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners
of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary
FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?
As a reminder :
The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members
served as personal bodyguards to the Roman emperors. [T]he Guard became notable for its
intrigue and interference in Roman politics, to the point of overthrowing emperors and
proclaiming their successors. In 312, the Guard was disbanded by Constantine the Great [after
defeating them and their latest declared emperor at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge ].
The Guard murdered Caligula -- insane, incompetent and dangerous -- and declared Claudius
emperor, the first of its many "interferences." After Claudius was poisoned, they transferred
allegiance to Nero. It went like this for centuries (of which we have none, by the way).
The Guard had the power to "make or break emperors." Are we growing our own Praetorian
Guard, or giving them leave to grow, under cover of their anti-Trump "resistance"? If I were
one of the national security superspooks, I'd want nothing better than to be welcomed -- and
washed clean -- by acceptance into that well-praised effort. Doors would open publicly that
before were open only in secret.
In that sense, Trump may be even more dangerous than he's now considered to be. What he may
do while still with us may be frightful to consider. But the form of government he leaves
behind may be worse, especially if he cements in the public mind the rightness of superspooks
acting as new-minted kingmakers. Sanders supporters, take note.
''Tis booming because the left/liberal/metropolitan muesli crunching elites (and I include
the Tories in that) who have reigned disdainfully over us since the Second World War have
ignored our fears over mass immigration and the changing of our established traditions and
cultures. They have also connived in the insanity of insisting every hair brained liberal
idea is worthy of being protected by the human rights legislative farce. Rapists being
offered a say in the upbringing of their issue, school uniforms being dragged into law and a
thousand and other one 'special issues' to a tiny minority being rammed down the throats of
the fed up majority at every opportunity by activists.
But that's the point, isn't it? That populist has been so vaguely defined that it encompasses
anything the authors don't like. It's a straw man, a pejorative.
Populism is a belief in the goodness of people, a belief that masses make better decisions
than elites and that the the rule of the elite come at the expense of the demos.
It's a term synonymous with grassroots, popular democracy. Proponents of elite rule with
reductionistic views democracy (rule with the consent of the governed and all that trash)
call their grassroots opponents 'populists' in attempt to tie them to strong men.
Noam Chomsky has a view on this issue and I am inclined to think he has a better
understanding of it than the author of this piece.
Chomsky rejects the term "populism" in this matter and offers, instead, the proposal that
;
"Working people are turning against elites and dominant institutions that have been
punishing them for a generation"
The theory of 'cause and effect' seems eminently more sensible to me than the shrill cries
of "It was the internet wot dun it"
The elites and dominant institutions that Chomsky refers to ( including mainstream media )
precipitated the current shift and would do better to acknowledge the part they played in it,
rather than insult and demean the consequential reaction of people on the receiving end of
it.
The enemy is not populism, it's the right's capture of the populist narrative. Trump is a
faux populist that has nothing but disdain for the people he employs and the people
rules.
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through
our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my
ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
"A Cult of Ignorance". Newsweek, January 21, 1980.
the very old school Christian conservative libertarians and old skool nutty right have
seized on the success populist narrative has had in recent elections and referendum.
I would argue that is is because establishment figures in the Democratic party -- the New
Democrats -- decided that the days of class struggle were over, that 'we are all capitalists
now' and ceded the populist narrative to the right. Yes, this a populist moment and the
question is not if we can reestablish faith in the elite but whether we can ensure that the
new populism goes is a left rather than right direction.
I don't agree that populism lacks depth -- probably because when I think of populism I
think of left populist intellectuals like Friere, Martin-Baro and the like who thought that
democracy should be built on the virtues of the people.
The occupy movement was a populist movement. It said we, the people on the ground, know
better than the elites in the towers. It made decisions democratically, this in stark
contrast to the hierarchical structures of decision making exercised by the financial elite.
I think populism, or grassroots, popular democracy has intellectual depth and
sophistication. Take a look a the writing of Sheldin Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, David
Graeber . . .
I don't agree with most of the definitions of populism we've been offered -- I think they
are little more that pejoratives dressed in academic language and have as much depth as the
right's favored "snowflake" pejorative.
I remember watching 'Tomorrows World' ' in the 1970s and they showed us an unpuncturable
cycle tyre that would last 25,000 miles.
The patent was bought by Europe's largest cycle tyre manufacturer, and AFAIK that was the
last ever heard of it.
If that happened why is the water fuel idea so fanciful?
If you inject water into the inlet port or combustion chamber of a petrol engine, compression
ratios, power output and efficiency can be raised dramatically, this has been known since WW1
and was employed in high altitude aero engines during WW2, yet has never been taken up by any
major car manufacturer as far as I know, why?
So the notion that inventions could be suppressed for commercial reasons is really not
fanciful at all, it would make less sense for such technology, if it existed, to be made
altruistically available on a single purchase basis than to shitcan it.
As far as I can see, our country has been ruled by a right-wing, monied elite for many
years- not a 'liberal' one. Liberals at least tend to think in terms of economic equality and
social freedoms, whatever their other faults might be.
But many working class and middle class people still carry on voting Tory even though it's
against their own interests.
We don't have a 'liberal elite' in the UK. We still have the old-fashioned right wing Tory
elite in power based on class and wealth. Why 'liberals' get all the abuse these days is
beyond me.
I'm researching populism on youtube - and it is seedy- and I have yet to turn on the FB news
feed, but the algorithms do support populism- watch a PragerU video and the feed is full of
other rightwing nonsense.
And all of it has the same empty lines.
I watched the Oxford Union Steve Bannon address- and it could have come from a left
winger- the globalised corporate world has abandoned the little guy, and Trump is fixing
it.
The on message is the MSM is lying
PC and activists are totalitarian = commies
either capitalism or socialism [commies] = freedom vs enslavement
and an over whelming anti intellectualism - where have we heard that before.
True but there is still a case for having decent housing etc and training our own
professionals as well and not hollow out professionals from less advantaged countries. When
we took hundreds of nurses from the Philippines in 2000 and whole clinics there had to shut
to terrible detriment of ill locals
"But populism has two chief characteristics. First, it offers immediate and supposedly
obvious answers to complicated problems, which usually blame some other group along the
way."
I think this point (simple solutions to complex problems) is often overstated. If you take
the issue of immigration (an issue that has fuelled populism) , it actually shouldn't
necessarily be that difficult to bring the number of new immigrants down, except that the
political and media establishment pretend that it is.
Take Trump's plan to build a wall on the Mexican border. I see absolutely nothing wrong
with this as it is ultimately every country's prerogative to defend its borders.
Ditto for intra-EU immigration (perhaps the main reason for Brexit): the EU acts as if
this principle of free movement is sacred, but why should that be the case? Or Germany, where
I live, where the constitution guarantees a right to asylum for those seeking refuge in the
country. Again, this is spoken of as though it were cast in stone, when it really shouldn't
be that difficult to amend. So I don't necessarily believe that solutions to problems always
have to be difficult and complicated.
I agree that advances in people's abilities to interact with greater numbers of other people
tend to usher in periods of social upheaval. A lot of the current nationalistic,
anti-foreigner sentiments are the result of our initial reactions against unfamiliar
influences coming from groups with whom we previously had relatively little contact.
Brexit, "Make America Great Again", and similar movements are the collective screams of
resistance against dealing with unfamiliarity, learning new things, and growing. Over time,
we will adapt, but this will probably require a generation or so, at minimum.
Of course, given the high pace of technological change, we are likely to be collectively
bonded together even more tightly before we are able to adapt to the current state of the
world. It won't be long before people will all be interconnected via implants, which means
that each and every thing we do and every emotion we have will be sent out over the
net.
In a way Populism is somewhat similar to Marxism: implicit message is that the class struggle
in the societies is the key problem, which is completely true. American middle class was robbed
from 1970th of a considerable chunk of its standard of living. So it is not surprising that the
neoliberal elite ( the News Class of as they are called the US nomenklatura) now feels threatened
and resorts to censorship, usage of intelligence agencies and mass surveillance, and other
oppressive tactics to squash the dissent.
But in such cases the dissent grows stronger despise such an efforts and might turn, at some
point, into insurrection against financial oligarchy as Marxists predicted.
The only problem is with Marxism is that they considered working class to the the next
dominant class and this proved to be a false idea. That will never never happens.
Populism is a range of political approaches that deliberately appeal to "the people,"
often juxtaposing this group against a so-called "elite." There is no single definition of
the term, which developed in the 19th century and has been used to mean various things
since that time. Few politicians or political groups describe themselves as "populists",
and in political discourse the term is often applied to others pejoratively. Within
political science and other social sciences, various different definitions of populism have
been used, although some scholars propose rejecting the term altogether.
the wiki
page is a bit more expansive you should try reading it.
The left is also guilty of populist ideas- blaming the rich, or banking [when in the UK we
get a lot of tax from international banking as a service].
The right has just seized on populism and mainly through social media- brexit and trump
are proof its works- but the people behind the populist message are the same old tired neo
con christian right of the Reagan era and the sad old far right conspiracy nut jobs. Their
message failed in the past- but people like Rees-mogg can now seize on this technique.
Your misunderstanding of what socialism means indicates you swallow the new right wing
propaganda. Poorly funded education will result in people without proper opportunity- S.Korea
is not a socialist country but they spend a huge amount on education and reap the rewards.
But they have a culture where children doing well academically is praised but can also have
negative pressure consequences.
It is complicated and worth discussion but populism wants the easy message.
One of the better reports on populism I've see recently is ''European Disunion'' by Yascha
Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard
https://newrepublic.com/article/143604/european-disunion-rise-populist-movements-means-democracy
.
A analysis by Harvard ''Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and
Cultural Backlash'' found that the primary factor driving populism is a cultural backlash
i.e. against [neo]liberal policies and immigration.
Populism is growing because wealth is being concentrated into the hands of the wealthy, at
the expense of everyone else.
Generations, instead of doing better, through working are doing worse because governments
are allowing individuals and corporations to reduce terms and conditions of the
workforce.
Twenty years ago, many UK workers had company pension schemes and jobs that paid the rent
& bills. Now, the pensions have largely dried up and as housing has got more expensive,
and incomes have shrunk.
Those at the top are pushing those beneath them closer to a bowl of rice a day, and shrug
at the social consequences as inevitable - and a necessary step to protect shareholder values
and profits.
In essence, it is the same situation that gave rise to populism in the thirties.
Who do you blame for the fact that house prices have gone up?
Who do you blame for the fact that your pension is going to be smaller than your
parents'?
Thing is the populist politicians are the very same people who cut your pension and made
money out of it. They just want you to blame someone else.
Some highlights from this thread (no names, no pack drill):
Populism is a kickback and correction to the forty years of political correctness where
the white masses of Europe and America were forbidden by the liberal establishment to be
their real selves
People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites.
Perhaps the reason that "populism" is thriving is that the liberal elites who ruled us
in the entire post war period became complacent out of touch with those they were meant to
represent.
there are millions of others whose voices have been ignored or silenced by the
mainstream news
We are disenfranchised by what the elites are saying because the elites control the
narrative in a way that makes sure the power will always reside with them.
The MSM has always been biased-
Why is democracy booming the article asks.
Well because the lies and bullshit of the liberal elite are there for all to see.
Take a look at what the MSM refuses to report, or what it deliberately distorts,
You can see the problem. It's like they are all reading from the same limited script which
has been handed to them. Given the freedom to express our opinions, we are regurgitating what
someone else has told us to say.
Maybe we should not be too pessimistic. The levels of opportunity for expression that the
internet and social media have given us might currently have exceeded our ability to think
critically about whatever bullshit we are being fed, but future generations may be better.
After all, it's only a small step from doubting whatever mainstream thought tells you, to
starting to wonder who is telling you to doubt those things and why and then to actually go
back and think for yourself about the issues.
So Corbyn and Trump are the same because they both have shirts. Well, color me
convinced!
Like so many of these articles -- including the long but uninformative 'long read' on the
same topic -- there is no mention of the failures of the elites.
Clinton sold us a false bill of goods. The Washington Consensus on economics would make
the country richer and, after some 'pain', would benefit the working class. Sure you wouldn't
be making cars but after some retraining you would work in tech.
This was a broken promise -- de industrialization has devastated the upper midwest. The
goods are made in China and the money goes to Bezos. People are rightly upset.
The Washington Consensus on war sold us a false bill of goods. Instead of peace through
strength we have seen a century of endless conflict. We have been caught in state of constant
killing since 2001 and we are no safer for it. Indeed the conflicts have created new enemies
and the only solution on offer is a hair of the dog solution.
People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites. Nowhere
are the repeated failures of the elites, the decades of broken promises mentioned in the
articles. Instead, those of us who prefer Sanders to Clinton, Corbyn to Blair are mesmerized
by emotional appeals and seduced by simplistic appeals to complex problems. And they wonder
why we don't accept their analyses . . .
TL;DR -- clickbait didn't get us here. The broken promises of the Washington consensus
did.
Why is populism booming asks the writer - simple, because people feel that no-one's
listening. Can it really be a surprise to The Guardian Opinion writers that people who have a
zero hours contract, pay a high rent and have little job security won't vote for more of the
same?
It's not a question as the writer suggests of 'if this wave of populism drifts into
authoritarianism or worse' it's more a question of when - and when it does the liberal left
will still be asking themselves - why?
I've grown very sceptical over the years about the whole issue of asylum. To me, the idea
that an individual can cross a border illegally without a visa, or without even a passport,
and then suddenly become quasi legal be declaring that they wish to seek asylum is a bit of a
farce. The situation becomes even more farcical when failed asylum seekers still aren't
deported. As for humanitarian and ethical obligations, I don't really buy into that either
because the demographics of the world are such that the West is at risk of losing its very
identity if it feels "obliged" to accept everyone seeking asylum and/or work from the world's
more troubled regions. I see the admission of refugees as a generous gesture, not as an
obligation.
If he can only succeed in a positive environment then there's not much hope for him, he needs to be able to fight and prove
he's got what it takes. As it is I'm not sure he's got it.
That's not what I said at all and you know it.
Last time, the only stories that the NYTimes and (mostly) the Guardian could manage to run were Bernie-negative
stories. The NYTimes has already begun the exact same campaign for the 2020 cycle. By comparison, the Guardian
has been providing balanced Bernie coverage.
Do not count on the mainstream media to support him. They're already hard at work smearing him and he hasn't even announced yet.
Half the time they dont even mention him as being a likely contender. It's Biden all day, all night. Might as well be Hillary
again.
Expect 2020 to be quite contentious, possibly even more than 2016. That just means as a supporter of Bernie you'll have to
work twice, maybe three times as hard. The corporate media is going to suppress and challenge him as much as possible. They don't
even mask it anymore.
[Jan 16, 2019] Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions
That is why we need a Constitutional amendment to get the money OUT of politics. Make bribery illegal. THEN, we will not need
Wall Street, which doesn't serve MOST of the population of this country, and is mostly responsible for the wealth gap and lack
of opportunities for most of the population.
I'm not fooled. These are not progressives, they are corporatists, beholden to their donors. They have no courage, no interest
in serving their constituencies, but are only interested in the power and money. What our country , and the world, needs is radical
change from the profit-first point of view. I won't support either one of them.
These corporate-Dem candidates are not being forced to sell out to win elections. Quite the
opposite in fact. They are risking losing their elections for the sake of selling out.
Surely, many will comment that Democrats have no choice but to take the money in order to be
competitive. I have one truism for such folks to ponder: Why would you trust your allegiance
to those who don't care if you win?
Basic logic: rich people win the general election either way, so long as the
primary-winning Democrat is in their pocket (the GOP is always on their side). So this
monetary affection is certainly more about fixing an no-lose general than it is about ousting
Trump, or any Republican.
More correctly is probably say that FBI and CIA can act as a single agency when their interests are threatened. And based on
the fact that investigation was run by FBI counterintelligence division, which is a branch of CIA (with dotted line reporting)
it was CIA (Brennan and Obama) which was at the helm. The problem with powerful intelligence agencies that very soon
the tail starts wag the dog. Which happened in the USA around 1963.
Clearly this was a soft coup, organized along color revolution schema, so well known by both State Department and CIA,
and adapted to the USA government structure. Mueller investigation was a classic move designed to paralyze and undermine the
President.
1. The president of the US was made head of the Executive Branch (EC) of the federal
government by Article 2 of the present constitution of the US. He is also Commander in Chief of
the armed forces of the federal government. As head of the EC, he is head of all the parts of
the government excepting the Congress and the Federal courts which are co-equal branches of the
federal government. The Department of Justice is just another Executive Branch Department
subordinate in all things to the president. The FBI is a federal police force and
counter-intelligence agency subordinate to the Department of Justice and DNI and therefore to
the president in all things. The FBI actually IMO has no legal right whatever to investigate
the president. He is the constitutionally elected commander of the FBI. Does one investigate
one's commander? No. The procedures for legally and constitutionally removing a president from
office for malfeasance are clear. He must be impeached by the House of Representatives for
"High Crimes and Misdemeanors" and then tried by the US Senate on the charges. Conviction
results in removal from office.
2. According to these transcripts of congressional testimony by some of the participants,
the FBI decided all by itself after Comey was fired to consider acting against Trump by
pursuing him for suspicion of conspiracy with Russia to give the Russians the president of the
US that they supposedly wanted. Part of the discussions among senior FBI people had to do with
whether or not the president had the legal authority to remove from office an FBI Director. Say
what? Where have these dummies been all their careers? Do they not teach anything about this at
the FBI Academy? The US Army lectures its officers at every level of schooling on the subject
of the constitutional and legal basis and limits of their authority.
3. Following these seditious and IMO illegal discussions the FBI and Sessions/Rosenstein's
Justice Department sought FISA Court warrants for surveillance against associates of Trump and
members of his campaign for president. Their application for warrants were largely based on
unsubstantiated "opposition research" funded by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.
The judge who approved the warrants was not informed of the nature of the evidence. These
warrants provided an authority for surveillance of the Trump campaign.
4. IMO this collection of actions when added to whatever Clapper, Brennan and "the lads" of
the Deep State were doing with the British intelligence services amount to an attempted "soft
coup" against the constitution and from the continued stonewalling of the FBI and DoJ the coup
is ongoing. pl
"... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
"... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn,
might illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent
pissing in."
Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to
guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that
like a feudal fiefdom?
Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there"
gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant
threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson
factor.
Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but
Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite
capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.
"... Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have been ignored, mocked or both. ..."
"... When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie? ..."
"... The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. ..."
Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the
better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in
Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have
been ignored, mocked or both.
Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how
they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no
response from President Trump. Or anyone else for that matter.
When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused
a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie?
I can't think of one. Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton
knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds. And he did this from Jerusalem.
The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the
situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump
Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.
No. In November 2018, the US rejected a symbolic UN resolution calling on Israel to end its
occupation of the Golan Heights. The resolution passed with 151 votes in favor, 14 abstentions and only two votes against
– the US and Israel itself They call it, "Occupied" for no reason. Gaza also an example but joos kept slicing it out ever since
installed there.
Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it
resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to
suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN
should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.
"The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing.
And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies
as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "
This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty
potentate, and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act of political suicide. He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions. Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.
Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the
better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in
Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have
been ignored, mocked or both.
Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how
they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no
response from President Trump.
Or anyone else for that matter.
When was the last time you heard of a major U.S. political figure go overseas and be refused
a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant
flunkie?
I can't think of one.
Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton
knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds.
And he did this from Jerusalem.
The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the
situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump
Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.
Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it
resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to
suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN
should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.
" The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing.
And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies
as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "
This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid
hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty
potentate,
and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously
thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act
of political suicide.
He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions.
Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate
backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.
"... With Warren wanting to be at the table with the elites, perhaps she took the advice of Larry Summers. In her memoir, "A Fighting Chance", she mentions a dinner conversation where she was told by him 'I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. ..."
"... Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. ..."
"... Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People -- powerful people -- listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.' ..."
With Warren wanting to be at the table with the elites, perhaps she took the advice of
Larry Summers. In her memoir, "A Fighting Chance", she mentions a dinner conversation where
she was told by him 'I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an
outsider.
Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to
them.
Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People --
powerful people -- listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one
unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.'
who has spent time in Ukraine knows how deep hatred of Russia goes
I don't know where is Ukraine you spent your time and in what company, but this is
complete BS. The South-Eastern Ukraine hates the Western Ukrainian "banderovtsi" as much as
the Russians do if not more -- after all, the followers of Bandera operated mostly on the
Ukrainian soil. There are deranged individuals in every country, of course, and Ukraine has
been subjected lately to intense hate propaganda as well as repressions, but there is no
hatred of Russia. This is contradicted by both sociology and everyday behavior of Ukrainian,
which move to Russia in droves, spend time in Russia, support Russian sport teams, etc.
we are supposed to dismiss the actual wishes of Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, Georgians
and other peoples who hate Russia (and love the US)
Nobody is asking about what the real Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians or even Poles
actually think, least of all the US. There are almost as many Georgians living in Russia as
there are in Georgia, and they show no desire to move back. In 2008 during the conflict,
their biggest fear was that they'd be deported.
The Ukraine's Maidan was a violent coup, where a few thousand militants armed and trained
abroad overthrew a government elected by the entire country. Protests that immediately
started all over the country were suppressed with force -- the one in Donbass still is.
How could anyone with an access to Internet remain unaware of these facts is beyond
me.
@Peter
Akuleyev Why should anyone freaking care and put his ass in the line of fire because you
bunch of primitives hate Russia? Between having a nuclear cataclysm because you pathetic
dwarfs of nations are frustrated to have a neighbour you can't bully and Russia obliterating
you, I say let Russia obliterate you, thus we won't have to suffer the ear-hurting
dissonnance of your incessant whining any more. Though I doubt Russia would stomp on you.
When you see shit, you don't stomp on it, you don't want you don't want your shoes to stink,
you just walk around it.
@EugeneGur
That's an interesting point. Even if true, doesn't matter. One could wonder ..who are the
people populating Ukrainian Armed Forces?
Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces, presently engaged against Donbass? All of
them. Including those is logistics/maintenance depots far away from the (current) line of
separation?
The will to fight against "Russia" ranges from a deep hate to simply not wishing to go
against the (current) Ukrainian government. The former are in those "shock" battalions. The
later are manning the logistics train. And everything in between.
Now .if/when a real shooting starts, as soon as Russia, as expected (and desired) by the
most of readers here, starts delivering ordnance into operational depth of Donbass enemy, the
ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I suspect.
"... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
"... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
"... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
"... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
"... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
"... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
"... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
"... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
"... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
"... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
"... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative
nirvana:
" for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United
States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared
to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose
authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"
"For a moment,"
swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard
editorial meeting."
Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an
expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.
As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated
their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the
classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the
coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.
So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia
religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing
Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between
1975-2015; Saudi Arabians
murdered 2369 !
Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate
sheiks?
Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected.
Curiously, they're currently rioting.
If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in
Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the
left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its
spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First"
plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."
Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."
In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost
overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and
the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man
rule .
When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration
-- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic
families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).
It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs.
In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign
Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly,
beheaded with a sword .
Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley,
was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At
least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world
affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)
Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently
barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are
dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like
this
one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.
No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of
Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of
"sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered
technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!)
"vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."
These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.
"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote
historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a
dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and
Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any
debate in Congress or the media."
Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American
people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the
president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000
additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not
undertaking nation building.
This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.
Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add
to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did
in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad
guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.
Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting
force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .
The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about
troops in Niger and
Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."
With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our
dangerously united political factions.
This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now
comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan,
Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.
How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate
Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.
Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right
cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit
that we of the callused
Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always
right.
Not going to happen.
To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of
genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight
of hand.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but
you cannot fool all the people all the time.
But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton,
Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.
So Trump did morph into Hillary.
Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but
expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State
calling the shots.
I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the
real political atmosphere in Washington.
Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do
whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of
the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."
I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is
"interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.
The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:
1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.
2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.
And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting
sovereignty – that of others and our own.
I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless
immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that
our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make
the same case at home.
If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and
relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick
Van Dyke show, i would reread,
"Adios , America."
In Col. Bacevich's book,
Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so
tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was
that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's
time.
@J.RossThe Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018
equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a
spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time
it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how
he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.
I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break
your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are
mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by
the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to
lose your support?
Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always
have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the
WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American
foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all
costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle
subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.
No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For
decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually
Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson,
Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish
billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.
But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews
with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into
politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of
pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies
(a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.
I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a
business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g.,
Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid
conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are
virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot
down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).
Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to
placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.
People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the
red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be
legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by
that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama
would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.
That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk
(Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its
legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018
congressional contests, ad nauseum.
Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes
to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it,
so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to
hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are
self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who
are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written
by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like
this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents
and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.
The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov
knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an
Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does
jack shit about it.
The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.
Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more
duplicitous.
Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will
eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they
have used to destroy so many others.
@anonymous
Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to
the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what
America needs in foreign policy.
And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy
necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it
is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.
And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of
white Christians while being pro-Jewish.
Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.
@neutral
Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly
situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,
I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of
hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior,
marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration
positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.
It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced
that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a
strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in
to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier
than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to
exhibit in office.
@Jake
The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the
fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.
The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free
trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.
On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than
the Christian ones
It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity,
but that was 500 years ago.
What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby
funnels into those fundamentalist churches.
If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful
of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore
election.
Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern
fundamentalists
@Twodees
Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put
in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like
Saban was Hillary's.
Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political
funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.
Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political
organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals
in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to
her group,
which raised a total of $915,000.
This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's https://www.haaretz.com › U.S.
News
Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in
September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent
speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is
a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.
The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard
dogs.
Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he
is.
The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.
The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the
neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist
side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free
speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.
@renfro
I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've
seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in
Israel.
But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start
those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set
up those big churches that just appear from nowhere
@Grandpa
Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.
As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap,
but not always.
From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became
dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).
@Twodees
Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG
naked without usual pretension.
Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American
history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried
fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter
besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,
He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to
revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend
Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of
course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab
Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .
Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to
drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply
corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As
Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"
@Twodees
Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing
stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not
judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo
But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and
blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign
promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but
drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.
US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they
might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole
world.
Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American
interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the
eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in
turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing
about its destruction.
I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.
Meh, hyperbole.
Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She
got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of
the opportunity.
People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic
of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to
detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.
But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts
of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the
politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor
as any.
In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does
when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and
tell him he'll never make it."
Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.
If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other
than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can
out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.
Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr.
Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist
Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)
In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with
his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies
to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that
engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large
overlap, but not always.
Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th
century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to
a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.
There is a large group of US politician non Jews
who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called
Neocons.
There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.
That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless
American jingoism and imperialism.
@dfordoom
Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on
another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to
correlate directly to wisdom.
If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp
You are exactly right.
Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his
Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.
" It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great
again"
So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"
How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that
doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries,
doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine
the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree
with it." Would that be too much to ask?
I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that
greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's
aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.
I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth
about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or
partially disagree with
And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking,
Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is
disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an
"elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money,
disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum
bunch
So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now
willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality
Naomi Klein was mostly right about 'shock doctrine' that was a nasty trick to wrest the wealth from the society back to financial
oligarchy and strip assets in the post-Soviet republics.
Notable quotes:
"... Taking advantage of the anarchy, a conspiratorial elite consisting of a cabal of billionaires raped the Soviet Union of its wealth while there was still something left to steal and absconded to safe havens in London, New York, and Israel. This made the end of the Soviet system inevitable. ..."
Let me be optimistic that the path to the eventual economic, national, and cultural collapse of the United States will follow
the path of the Soviet Union: quick collapse followed by a slow process of national, cultural, and religious regeneration.
In this model, Trump is playing out the script written for "Yeltsin" a reckless buffoon exposing the hypocrisy and inherent
weakness of Soviet ideology, economics, and culture.
Trump has done us a favor. Without Yeltsin, the Soviet Union might have lumbered for a few more decades as a decadent, geriatric
patient in a hospice awaiting inevitable death. With Yeltsin's help, the end came quickly. Taking advantage of the anarchy,
a conspiratorial elite consisting of a cabal of billionaires raped the Soviet Union of its wealth while there was still something
left to steal and absconded to safe havens in London, New York, and Israel. This made the end of the Soviet system inevitable.
Are we already in the phase of oligarchical plunder? Yes, it's obvious.
Russia achieved its "MRGA" with Putin, backed by a core of Russian nationalists and patriots who rejected the multicultural
diversity and globalism inherent in Marxist dogma. Russia is returning to its pre-1917 culture and traditions. Let's hope we can
also achieve our "MAGA" by rediscovering the confident Anglosphere that created the post-WWII world.
Bye-bye feminism, multicultural diversity, and the decadent "globohomo" ideology that came to define the "Empire".
@TheJester I'll remain agnostic as to whether the US is facing financial collapse, but point out that USSR's collapse doesn't
imply US has to have one (not that you intended the reference that way).
USSR had a command economy, US doesn't. That said, I do think our military-industrial complex is long overdue for a collapse,
having long since lost its only real justification, the Soviet threat.
Trimming the huge amount of Defense and entitlement fat we're carrying would help a lot.
Clinton Democrats (DemoRats) are so close to neocons that the current re-alliance is only natural and only partially caused by
Trump. Under Obama some of leading figures of his administration were undistinguishable from neocons (Samantha Power is a good
example here -- she was as crazy as Niki Haley, if not more). There is only one "war party in the USA which
continently consists of two wings: Repugs and DemoRats.
Notable quotes:
"... Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham , one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton , who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon. ..."
"... That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's way" ..."
"... But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent. ..."
"... This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan ..."
"... While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining ..."
"... At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives , even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump ). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. ..."
"... By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a "national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism"). ..."
"... All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation -- which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way. ..."
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S.
troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the
anti-war wings of bothparties , but largely provoked
bipartisan outrage among in Washington's reflexively pro-war establishment.
Both
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary
Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient
hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror
jargon.
But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from
Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump's Syria
withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.
That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the
proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's
way" far more than they agree with the pro-war view that "the U.S. needs to keep troops in
places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and
maintain our foreign policy interests in the region."
But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support
for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents
overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in
2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump
voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28
percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support
for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump's announced intention to withdraw half
of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping
troops there than Republicans and independents.
This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in
Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data
consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all
troops from Afghanistan:
With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this
has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans
and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed . Among 2016 Trump voters,
there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however,
oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent
opposed.
This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy
documented early this week , separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on
questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.
While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should
continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to
withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. "Those who voted for
Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do
something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS," Edwards-Levy wrote, "while Trump voters
said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility." (Similar trends can be
seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump
has moved away from his posture of the last two years --
escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians , as he
repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign -- to his return to his other campaign pledge to
remove troops from the region.)
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their
"beliefs" based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party's
base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations,
drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those
policies once they
became hallmarks of the Obama presidency .
But what's happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance
has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats
using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is
insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he's willing to allow the Bad Countries to take
over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with
adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.
By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet,
MSNBC, is
stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while
even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the
pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a
"national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism").
All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first
time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and
imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max
Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of
conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly
pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation --
which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way.
Naomi Klein's book "Shock Doctrine", encapsulated by this post as "global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force
damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly
as a result."
Notable quotes:
"... Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position). ..."
"... Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations. One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products. ..."
"... I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book? or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support. ..."
"... Somehow neoclassical economists always distort history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models. ..."
"... If you looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998. ..."
"... The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long as various macroaggregates eventually rose. ..."
"... Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward. ..."
"... Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different. The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected. ..."
"... Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian state when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that. ..."
"... Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles. ..."
The argument largely seems to hold for the original poster boy example in Chile with the Pinochet coup against the socialist Allende
regime. A military coup replaced a democratically government. Whiole Chlle was experiencing a serious inflation, it was not in a
full-blown economic collapse. The coup was supported by US leaders Nixon and Kissinger, who saw themselves preventing the emergence
of pro-Soviet regime resembling Castro's Cuba. Thousands were killed, and a sweeping set of laisssez faire policies were imposed
with the active participation of "Chicago Boys" associated with Milton Friedman. In fact, aside from bringing down inflation these
rreforms did not initially improve economic performance, even as foreign capital flowed in, especially into the copper industry,
although the core of that industry remained nationalized. After several years the Chicago Boys were sent away and more moderate policies,
including a reimposition of controls on foreign capital flows, the economy did grow quite rapidly. But this left a deeply unequal
income distribution in place, which would largely remain the case even after Pinochet was removed from power and parliamentary democracy
returned.
This scenario was argued to happen in many other narions, especially those in the former Sovit bloc as the soviet Union disintegrated
and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market
capitalism imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus. Although he has since expressed
regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American nations and what went down after 1989
in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs. Klein's discussion especially of what went down in Russia also looks pretty sound
by and large, wtthout dragging through the details, although in these cases the political shift was from dictatorships run by Communist
parties dominated out of Moscow to at least somewhat more democratic governments, although not in all of the former Soviet republics
such as in Central Asia and with many of these later backsliding towards more authoritarian governments later. In Russia and in many
oothers large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered. Klein has also extended this argument
to other nations, including South Africa after the end of apartheid.
likbez
The level of the naivety of Barkley Rosser is astounding.
Poland was a political project, the showcase for the neoliberal project in Eastern Europe and the USSR. EU was pressed to provide
large subsidies, and that marionette complied. The commenter ilpalazzo (above) is right that there has been " a tremendous development
in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been a serious engine of growth." Like in Baltics and Ukraine,
German, French, Swedish and other Western buyers were most interested in opening market for their products and getting rid of
local and xUSSR competitors (and this supported and promoted Russophobia). With very few exceptions. University education system
also was partially destroyed, but still fared better than most manufacturing industries.
I remember talking to one of the Polish professors of economics when I was in Poland around 1992. He said that no matter how
things will develop, the Polish economy will never be allowed to fail as the USA is interested in propelling it at all costs.
That means that there was no CIA activity to undermine the financial system, deindustrialize the country, and possibly to partition
the county like it was in Russia with Harvard mafia (Summers, Shleifer, etc.)
Still, they lost quite a bit of manufacturing: for example all shipbuilding, which is ironic as Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity
emerged in this industry.
Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian
stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later
by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position).
But they have a large gas pipeline on their territory, so I suspect that like Ukraine they make a lot of money via transit
fees simply due to geographic. So they parochially live off rent -- that why they bark so much at North Stream 2.
Polish elite is a real horror show, almost beyond redemption, and not only in economics. I do not remember, but I think it
was Churchill who said " Poland is a greedy hyena of Europe." This is as true now as it was before WWII.
Now they are propelled by cheap labor from Ukraine, which they helped to destroy (along with Sweden and Germany)
My post seem to have vanished into oblivion so I'm pasting from the clipboard.
I am a Pole and have been a daily reader here since 2008. I hope a better versed compatriot will come out of the closet and
give a better picture (I know there are a few).
Let's just say the shock was pretty bad. In terms of amount of human suffering the worst was dissolving state owned farms.
Hundreds of thousands of people were just let go without any help, although many farms were profitable and others could be restructured
or converted into collectives etc. I live in a small town where there was a huge state farm and I can see former employees started
to recover and get by just recently judging by the looks of their dwellings.
Most of the manufacturing and heavy industry was sold off and extinguished. We used to have pretty decent capital producing
capabilities like tooling etc. Not a trace of that now. There is a lot being manufactured now here but mostly simple components
for german industry to assemble.
Pension system was thoroughly looted by you know who and is a ticking time bomb. Most of it was quasi privatized that is
managed by western companies but still part of the state system. There were supposed to be individual saving accounts managed
by sophisticated investment specialists but the money ended up invested in state bonds, issued to subsidize it. Managing fee 7
10 percent charge on every payment into the system, regardless of performance, anyone? It was a heist of the century.
The ticking time bomb is because a large part of young people working now are working on non permanent contracts that don't
pay benefits. These people won't have any pension at all and there are a lot of them.
Healthcare is single payer fund but heavily underfunded. Private practice and hospitals are allowed and skim most profitable
procedures leaving the rest to public fund. There are unrealistic limits on number of procedures so if you need to see a specialist
in July or later prepare to pay cash or wait till January.
Municipal service companies, at least the most lucrative ones have ben sold off to foreign investment funds. A few of our cities'
municipal companies, like central heating or energy have been sold off to german municipal companies (!). State telecom has been
sold off to french state telecom (and one of the biggest and most famous fortunes made).
Local printed press is 90% german corps owned.
This is a map of state rail company railways in 1988 and 2009 . It
has been a meme here for some time. It is true. Cancelled lines are the subsidized ones workers relied on to get to job. I closely
know a thousand years old town that had rail built in 1860 by germans and liquidated right in 1990. The populace is now halved,
all young emigrated, businesses dead. There have been a huge investment in freeways and other kind of roads so every one has to
own a car to get to her job. Most cars are used 10+ year old german imports. Polish car mechanic and body shops are the best in
the world specialists of german automotive produce.
I live in a small contry town that was a home to a wealthy aristocrat. There is a beautiful baroque palace and huge park, the
complex is literally a third part of town. After the war it was nationalized, there were sporting facilities built in the park
for locals and school pupils to use. The palace was re-purposed as medical facility and office complex for state farm management.
In the nineties the whole thing was given back to aristocrat descendants a shady bunch hiding in Argentina AFAIR. They couldn't
afford to keep it so they sold it to a nouveau riche real estate developer. He fenced the whole thing off and refurbished into
a sort of conference complex it is underway and still not clear what's gonna happen with it. The effect is that a third of my
town that used to be public space is fenced off and off limits now.
To conclude, there has been a tremendous development in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been
a serious engine of growth. Lot of people got mortgage and financed homes or flats and there has been a whole industry created
around it. A few crown jewel companies (copper mining, petroleum and other chemistry) are state owned. But most of the sophisticated
furnishings used in real estate are german made (there is german made nat gas furnace in 95% of newly built homes) etc. Two million
young people emigrated to work mostly to UK and Ireland. I'd lived in Dublin for a year in 2003 and there were Chinese people
as salespersons in groceries and seven elevens everywhere, now there are Poles instead.
Recommended reading about the transformation years dealing is this book:
Thanks for this. Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations.
One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing
plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really
interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products.
And in agriculture, they both insisted on the elimination of subsidies within the eastern nations, and proceeded to use the
area as a dumping ground for their own (often subsidized) agricultural surpluses.
All this gets back, in my minuscule view, to failure to have a decent answer to one little question:
What kind of political economy do "we, the mopes" want to live within?
And related to that, what steps can and must "we, the mopes" take to get to that hopefully wiser, more decent, more homeostatic
and sustainable, political economy?
And it likely doesn't matter for us old folks (obligatory blast at Boomers as cause of all problems and distresses, dismissing
the roots and branches of "civilization," current patterns of consumption, and millennia of Progress), given what is "baked in"
and the current distribution of weatlhandpower. But maybe "we, the mopes" can at least go down fighting. Gilets Jaunes, 150 million
Indians, all that
But without an answer to the first question, though, not much chance of "better," is there? Except maybe locally, for the tiny
set of us mopes who know how to do community and commensalism and some other "C" words
"We, the mopes" could make some important and effective changes. Enough of us, and soon enough, to avoid or mitigate the Jackpot?
Thanks very much for this. Very graphic. So, if you would, could you explain who the Law and Justice Party is, and why they
won the election, and what exactly are they doing to make themselves popular? Are they in fact enacting certain social programs
that we can read about or are they primarily relying on something else, like mainly Catholic traditionalism, for their political
power?
I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book?
or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched
Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient
state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support.
It is unsurprising to read that Poland followed a more nuanced approach. Somehow neoclassical economists always distort
history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models.
That was in the early 2000s. The university was then brand new and was still filling the shelves of the library. If you
looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the
same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998.
Klein at least provided footnotes, and sources for her claims. Which are conspicuously absent from this piece.
The World Bank, (World Development Indicators, 2006), one of Klein's sources, has a nationwide poverty rate only for 1993,
and has it at 23% at that point, or between 2.3 times and more than 4 time the most common estimate he cites under the ancient
regime.
The same source has unemployment averaging 19.9% in 1990-92, and 19% in 2000-2004.
As to the later poverty rate, Klein's source is Przemyslaw Wielgosz, then editor of the Polish edition of le Monde Diplomatique,
who gives this: " Poles living below the 'social minimum' (defined as a living standard of £130 (192,4 EUR) per person and £297
(440,4 EUR) for a three person family per month) affecting 15% of the population in 1989 to 47% in 1996, and 59% in 2003." but
whence he obtains these figures he does not say. Given that it falls in a period when unemployment was pushing 20% for a prolonged
period, and that both the EU's subsidies and outmigration to the EU as an escape valve only start to kick in in 2003, the figure
seems not wildly implausible.
The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as
leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided
by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long
as various macroaggregates eventually rose.
The contrast between what was done, and what Solidarnosc had claimed to be all about when in opposition is incredibly striking,
basically the difference between libertarian Communism and uber Dirigisme style capitalism.
Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued
rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for
example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward.
Yes, your unemployment and poverty rates are lower if a significant fraction of the population works elsewhere in the EU, and
reatriates the money. Though the pattern may cause a few other problems. (while many nations like to export their unemployment,
not everybody wants to import it.)
Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different.
The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected.
The migration from Poland does not have only economic reasons. A lot of Poles migrate because they find the polish society
(especially small towns and rural) very stiffling.
A friend of mine left Poland the moment she got her MSc literally, the same day she was on a bus to Germany. She's now a
sucessfull woman, director level at a large consultancy. Yet her father calls her "old spinster" (this is the polite version),
as she wasn't maried by 30, and she basically avoids going to Poland.
She says she could never be as sucessfull in Poland, being a woman, and not being keen on marrying. I've heard similar stories
from young Poles, not just women.
Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian
state when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that.
Kasia, January 10, 2019 at 5:17 pm
Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they
are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles.
So Poland is proof that nationalist, populist policies can indeed work. Poland has had to taken rough measures with our judicial
system and media to ensure globalist forces do not undermine our successes. No one, I mean no one, in Poland mouths the words,
"diversity is our strength". Internationalist, liberal minded people who are so susceptible to globalist propaganda, are generally
the ones leaving the nation. Indigenous Western Europeans who are suffering the joys of cultural enrichment and vibrant diversity
are starting to buy property in Eastern Europe - more Hungary than Poland - but as the globalists push even more multiculturalism
and continue to impoverish indigenous Europeans, Eastern Europe will become a shining beacon on the hill free of many of the evils
of globalisation.
" In Russia and in many others large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered." --
this was by design. In a hundred years or so we will know the details of this operating and major players. It is clear that CIA was
heavily involved and tried to enforce the deindustrialization of the the USSR and complete destruction of its military industrial complex
and any existing high technology industries.
Notable quotes:
"... This was "shock therapy" that was more like destructive electroshock than any sort of therapy ..."
"... This scenario was argued to happen in many other nations, especially those in the former Soviet bloc as the Soviet Union disintegrated
and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market capitalism
imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus. ..."
"... Although he has since expressed regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American
nations and what went down after 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs ..."
"... In Russia and in many others large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered. ..."
In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her book, Shock Doctrine. It promulgated
that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School
and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result. This was "shock therapy" that was more like
destructive electroshock than any sort of therapy . There is a lot of truth to this argument, and it highlighted underlying
ideological arguments and outcomes.
The argument largely seems to hold for the original poster boy example in Chile with the Pinochet coup against the socialist Allende
regime. A military coup replaced a democratically government. While Chile was experiencing a serious inflation, it was not in a full-blown
economic collapse. The coup was supported by US leaders Nixon and Kissinger, who saw themselves preventing the emergence of pro-Soviet
regime resembling Castro's Cuba. Thousands were killed, and a sweeping set of laisssez faire policies were imposed with the active
participation of "Chicago Boys" associated with Milton Friedman. In fact, aside from bringing down inflation these reforms did not
initially improve economic performance, even as foreign capital flowed in, especially into the copper industry, although the core
of that industry remained nationalized. After several years the Chicago Boys were sent away and more moderate policies, including
a reimposition of controls on foreign capital flows, the economy did grow quite rapidly. But this left a deeply unequal income distribution
in place, which would largely remain the case even after Pinochet was removed from power and parliamentary democracy returned.
This scenario was argued to happen in many other nations, especially those in the former Soviet bloc as the Soviet Union disintegrated
and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market
capitalism imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus.
Although he has since expressed regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American
nations and what went down after 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs .
Klein's discussion especially of what went down in Russia also looks pretty sound by and large, without dragging through the details,
although in these cases the political shift was from dictatorships run by Communist parties dominated out of Moscow to at least somewhat
more democratic governments, although not in all of the former Soviet republics such as in Central Asia and with many of these later
backsliding towards more authoritarian governments later.
In Russia and in many others large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered. Klein
has also extended this argument to other nations, including South Africa after the end of apartheid.
What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21
with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.
Absolutely remarkable, again, but it is reflective of the brain dead sheeple currently doing any reading at all of books by
the rabid neo cons. I hesitate to guess what some extreme alarm sounding diatribe by Wolfowitz or the current "main man,"
max boot would register. Maybe Romney can lead us out of the wilderness (sarc)>
I know that this is Amazon and when it comes to the standards of what passes as accurate reporting and journalistic
standards,"wapo and bezos leads the pack into the sewer.
REPLY
AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC.
THIS COMMENTER
@El Dato
an American puppet inasmuch as he had Americans masterminding his political PR campaigns) start
giving ground that the situation becomes fluid.
Albright (and Nuland) had no idea what Russia as a normal nation state could be expected to put up with, because all they
had to go on was Yelstyn who was drunk most days. So the US was slowly but surely drawn into the power vacuum in the
territories the USSR withdrew from and Albright thought that was the way things were going to continue to be. The domestic
situation in America was also one where the elite had things their own way to an unsustainable extent. What Albright does
not like is the facts of life.
The whole discussion is so asinine.
Facism is not a form of government that can just be inserted or deleted.
It is a very specific reaction to the communist takeover of a nation.
At that point, other forms of government are no longer viable: totalitarianism of one kind of another becomes an absolute
necessity to rule.
We see western governments coming to this point-the moral law is lost, corruption reigns, and only pure force has currency.
So at this point you only have one of two choices, there simply are no alternatives:
communism or facism.
And it is quite clear that facism is a more reasonable and less murderous choice.
for as long as neo con history is a subject for study (she has plenty of competition for that recognition).
Most "history" taught in the US (and combined West) is one or another iteration (sometimes extreme, sometimes less so) of
US exceptionalism. Even American so called "realism" is built around exceptionalism. American military doctrines are
written primarily on exceptionalism basis. Results are easily observable.
Big brass and government executives play both sides of the military revolving door,
including "the only adult in the room."
Before he became lionized as the "only adult in the room" capable of standing up to
President Trump, General James Mattis was quite like any other brass scoping out a lucrative
second career in the defense industry. And as with other military giants parlaying their four
stars into a cushy boardroom chair or executive suite, he pushed and defended a sub-par product
while on both sides of the revolving door. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that contract
turned out to be an expensive fraud and a potential health hazard to the troops.
According to a
recent report by the Project on Government Oversight, 25 generals, nine admirals, 43
lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals retired to become lobbyists, board members,
executives, or consultants for the defense industry between 2008 and 2018. They are part of a
much larger group of 380 high-ranking government officials and congressional staff who shifted
into the industry in that time.
To get a sense of the demand, according to POGO, which had to compile all of this
information through Freedom of Information requests, there were 625 instances in 2018 alone in
which the top 20 defense contractors (think Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin) hired
senior DoD officials for high-paying jobs -- 90 percent of which could be described as
"influence peddling."
Back to Mattis. In 2012, while he was head of Central Command, the Marine General
pressed the Army to procure and deploy blood testing equipment from a Silicon Valley
company called Theranos. He communicated that he was having success with this effort directly
to Theranos's chief executive officer. Even though an Army health unit tried to terminate the
contract due to it's not meeting requirements, according to POGO, Mattis kept the pressure up.
Luckily, it was never used on the
battlefield.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise but upon retirement in 2013, Mattis asked a DoD counsel
about the ethics guiding future employment with Theranos. They advised against it. So Mattis
went to serve on its board instead for a $100,000 salary. Two years after Mattis quit to serve
as Trump's Pentagon chief in 2016, the two Theranos executives he worked with were indicted for
"massive"
fraud , perpetuating a "multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and
patients," and misrepresenting their product entirely. It was a fake.
But assuming this was Mattis's only foray into the private sector would be naive. When he
was tapped for defense secretary -- just three years after he left the military -- he was worth
upwards of $10 million . In addition to his retirement pay, which was close to $15,000 a
month at the time, he received $242,000 as a board member, plus as much as $1.2 million in
stock options in General Dynamics, the Pentagon's fourth largest contractor. He also disclosed
payments from other corporate boards, speech honorariums -- including $20,000 from defense
heavyweight Northrop Grumman -- and a whopping $410,000 from Stanford University's public
policy think tank the Hoover Institution for serving as a "distinguished visiting fellow."
Never for a moment think that Mattis won't land softly after he leaves Washington -- if he
leaves at all. Given his past record, he will likely follow a very long line, as illustrated by
POGO's explosive report, of DoD officials who have used their positions while inside the
government to represent the biggest recipients of federal funding on the outside. They then
join ex-congressional staffers and lawmakers on powerful committees who grease the skids on
Capitol Hill. And then they go to work for the very companies they've helped, fleshing out a
small army of executives, lobbyists, and board members with direct access to the power brokers
with the purse strings back on the inside.
Welcome to the Swamp
"[Mattis's' career course] is emblematic of how systemic the problem is," said Mandy
Smithberger, POGO's lead on the report and the director of its Center for Defense
Information.
"Private companies know how to protect their interests. We just wish there were more
protections for taxpayers."
When everything is engineered to get more business for the same select few, "when you have
a Department of Defense who sees it as their job to promote arms sales does this really serve
the interest of national security?"
That is something to chew on. If a system is so motivated by personal gain (civil servants
always mindful of campaign contributions and private sector job prospects) on one hand, and big
business profits on the other, is there room for merit or innovation? One need only look at
Lockheed's F-35 joint strike fighter, the most expensive
weapon system in history, which was relentlessly promoted over other programs by members of
Congress and within the Pentagon despite years of test failures and cost overruns , to see what
this gets you: planes that don't fly, weapons that don't work, and shortfalls in other parts of
the budget that don't matter to contractors like pilot training and maintenance of existing
systems.
"It comes down to two questions," Smithberger noted in an interview with TAC.
" Are we approving weapons systems that are safe or not? And are we putting
[servicemembers'] lives on the line" to benefit the interests of industry?
All of this is legal, she points out. Sure, there are rules -- "cooling off" periods before
government officials and members of Congress can lobby, consult, or work on contracts after
they leave their federal positions, or when industry people come in through the other side to
take positions in government. But Smithberger said they are "riddled with loopholes" and lack
of enforcement.
Case in point: current acting DoD Secretary Patrick Shanahan spent
31 years working for Boeing , which gets about $24 billion a year as the Pentagon's second
largest contractor. He was Boeing's senior vice president in 2016 just before he was confirmed
as Trump's deputy secretary of defense in 2017. Last week he recused himself from all matters
Boeing, but he
wasn't always so hands off. At one point, he "prodded" for the purchase of 12 $1.2 billion
Boeing F-15X fighter planes, according to Bloomberg.
But the revolving door is so much more pervasive and insidious than POGO could possibly
catalogue. So says Franklin "Chuck" Spinney , who worked
as a civilian and military officer in the Pentagon for 31 years, beginning in 1968. He calls
the military industrial complex a "quasi-isolated political economy" that is in many ways
independent from the larger domestic economy. It has its own rules, norms, and culture, and
unlike the real world, it is self-sustaining -- not by healthy competition and efficiency, but
by keeping the system on a permanent war footing, with money always pumping from Capitol Hill
to the Pentagon to the private sector and then back again. Left out are basic laws of supply
and demand, geopolitical realities, and the greater interest of society.
"That's why we call it a self-licking ice cream cone," Spinney explained to TAC.
" [This report] is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more subtle stuff going on.
When you are in weapons development like I was at the beginning of my career, you learn about
this on day one, that having cozy relationships with contractors is openly encouraged. And
then you get desensitized. I was fortunate because I worked for people who did not like it
and I caught on quickly."
While the culture has evolved, basic realities have persisted since the massive build-up of the military
and weapons systems during the Cold War. The odds of young officers in the Pentagon making
colonel or higher are slim. They typically retire out in their 40s. They know implicitly that
their best chance for having a well-paid second career is in the only industry they know --
defense. Most take this calculation seriously, moderating their decisions on program work and
procurement and communicating with members of Congress as a matter of course.
" Let's just say there's a problem [with a program]. Are you going to come down hard on a
contractor and try to hold his feet to the fire? Are you going to risk getting blackballed
when you are out there looking for a job ? Sometimes there is no word communicated, you just
don't want to be unacceptable to anyone," said Spinney. It's ingrained, from the rank of
lieutenant colonel all the way up to general.
So the
top five and their subsidiaries continue to get the vast majority of work, usually in
no-bid contracts
($100 billion worth in 2016 alone) , and with cost-plus structures that
critics say encourage waste and never-ending timetables, like the $1.5 trillion F-35. "The
whole system is wired to get money out the door," said Spinney. "That is where the revolving
door is most pernicious. It's everywhere."
The real danger is that under this pressure, parties work to keep bad contracts alive even
if they have to cook the books. "Essentially from the standpoint of Pentagon contracting you
are not going to have people writing reports saying this product is a piece of shit," said
Spinney. Worse, evaluations are designed to deflect criticism if not oversell success in order
to keep the spigot open. The most infamous example of this was the
rigged tests that kept the ill-fated "Star Wars" missile defense program going in the
1980s.
* * *
Everyone talks about generals like Mattis as though they're warrior-gods. But for decades,
many of them have turned out to be different creatures altogether - creatures of a
semi-independent ecosystem that operates outside of the normal rules and benefits only a
powerful minority subset: the military elite, defense contractors, and Congress. More recently,
the defense-funded think tank world has become part of this ecology, providing the ideological
grist for more spending and serving as a way-station for operators moving in and out of
government and industry.
Call it the Swamp, the Borg, or even the Blob, but attempting to measure or quantify the
revolving door in the military-industrial complex can feel like a fool's errand. Groups like
POGO have attempted to shine light on this dark planet for years. Unfortunately, there is
little incentive in Capitol Hill or at the Pentagon to do the very least: pull the purse
strings, close loopholes, encourage real competition, and end cost-plus practices.
"We generally need to see more (political) championing on this issue," Smithberger said.
Until then, all outside efforts "can't result in any meaningful change."
So tell me again how "Mad Pedo" evaded Obama's axing of all the non-compliant General(s)
and Admiral(s) in charge of the U.S. strategic command?!!!
Answered my own question. He's like the rest of them since the Balkans that just does
counter insurgencies!...
"SUCCESS" in every direction on the weather vane you look!!!
Or... Another way of saying it.
How to build your successful U.S. military career turning $8 trillion in unfunded
liability debt into $200 trillion in unfunded liability debt in less than 20 years!
Who wants to line up for that 'self help book"?!!!
Mattis is just another self serving cockroach in a U.S uniform.
__name___3O4jF">Realname Wild tree , 31 minutes ago
link
It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the
blood of our nation.
It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations
security. Follow the money.
As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry.
Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he
knew.......
It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the
blood of our nation.
It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations
security. Follow the money.
As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry.
Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he
knew.......
"... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
"... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
"... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet on reflection cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
"... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
"... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
"... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
"... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements not exactly leftist thinktanks have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
"... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
"... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
"... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
"... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
"... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
"... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
"... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
"... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're
sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman
'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.
This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet on reflection
cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job
creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance
the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded the philosophy of the left is that the strongest
shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise but across the spectrum virtually
all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they
really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like "
welfare
state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and
the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders
are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we
hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts
are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about
it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means
tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout
app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money.
That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase
your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his
power to claim economic benefit.
'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'
For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large
class of useless rentiers, well-described by the
French economist
Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend
the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big
pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard.
Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the
big innovations of our age businesses like Facebook
and Uber are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are
coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled
to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll
start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the
International Monetary Fund and the
Bank for International Settlements not exactly leftist
thinktanks have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they
gobble it up whole.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating
anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however,
is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares,
then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you),
and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies
that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means
of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw
is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields
a similar revenue model.
Take
tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of
other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers.
One of the richest people in the world,
Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The
same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the
Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the
face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely
that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like
GlaxoSmithKline and
Pfizer regularly
unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture
medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers,
and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the
result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google
, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries
and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid
paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing
growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult
to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article,
Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner,
creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider,
owns no real estate."
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because
they're cool and they're fun and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy
to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because
their friends are on Facebook.
Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for
free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg
has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with
free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an
astounding
64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only
make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more
and more ads.
Uber has
usurped the whole taxi sector just as
Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful
they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order
to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody
who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology
funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their
earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts.
So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who
was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it.
But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a
credit default swap
, or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue
model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too?
Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models
both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist
Matt Taibbi about
Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything
that smells like money."
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker.
He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity".
Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is
twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even
themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO
Lloyd Blankfein
was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is "
doing God's
work ". The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people
complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market
and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if
house
prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades
we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest
exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts.
En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich
rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding
them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a
kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he
had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely
in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised
within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon
a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks,
law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions
in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire.
Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier
drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may
explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers
and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.
Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies
tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest
freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through
a system of, say, employee shares, or a
universal basic
income .
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the
old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders
of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.
"... A conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of the Soviet Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi and the former head of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest person to Yeltsin's body), Alexander Korzhakov. ..."
A conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of the Soviet
Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi and the former head
of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest person to Yeltsin's body),
Alexander Korzhakov.
Twenty-two years ago, Moscow shuddered from the tank volleys, and people all over the
country clung to TV screens, on which Western TV stations broadcasted how Yeltsin's loyal
troops fire at the rebel troops of the Supreme Soviet (Parlament) of Russia. The opposition of
the Armed Forces and the President Yeltsin with his team, on the one hand, and Rutskoi and
Khasbulatov with the deputies, on the other, ended in great blood. Incongruous with the one
that spilled two years earlier, when the Emergency Committee tried to keep the USSR. This was
the beginning of our conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of
the Soviet Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Vladimirovich
Rutskoi and the former head of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest
person to Yeltsin's body), Alexander Vasilyevich Korzhakov.
Harvard mafia was a part of larger scheme of stripping Russia assets. It looks like according
to CIA and State Department plans Yletsin should play role of Russia Pinochet forcefully
implementing neoliberalization and killing/putting in prisons and concentration camps
opponents.
Notable quotes:
"... 15th of December, the Ides of December 2006) ..."
"... 19th of February 2007) ..."
"... On the possibility of a negotiated settlement, Pickering comments, "[T]here were talks back and forth, not very fruitful ones because the Russian government then was in a position of deciding whether it was going to treat with these people and deal with compromises or take back the White House. They decided that they were going to take back the White House. They had the troops and the capability of doing that." ..."
"... "no real rivals to me are visible." (Vice President Rutskoy and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov were in prison, the prosecutor general was forced to resign and the Constitutional Court was suspended after its Chairman declared Yeltsin's decree 1400 unconstitutional.) ..."
"... Gaidar's Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation of Russia ..."
"... The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy ..."
Declassified Clinton-Yeltsin Telcons Show U.S. Support No Matter What Embassy Cables and
Oral Histories Detail Complex Conflict and U.S. Motivations Today's Russian Opposition Sees
Crucial Turning Point Towards Today's Autocracy ... ... ...
Cable from White House Washington DC to American Embassy Moscow. Memorandum of
Conversation: Memcon with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, July 10, 1993, Tokyo 1993-07-16
Source: U.S. Department of State declassification M-2006-01499
This is a copy of a cable containing the memcon between Yeltsin and Clinton with a cover
note from Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Strobe Talbott instructing him to review the
memcon before his forthcoming meeting with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov. In
the handwritten notes he also records his impressions from the meeting. He is "struck by [ ]
B[ill] C[linton]'s command of the issues [ ] his dominance in [meeting] (hard to do with
Yeltsin), and "no rhetoric or posturing on either side."
This memcon is important because it shows the impressive variety of issues on which Clinton
and Yeltsin had a productive exchange and agreed to cooperate: replacing COCOM with a new
regime; a deal on highly enriched uranium (HEU) that Russia was going to remove from the
nuclear warheads being withdrawn from Kazakhstan; Ukraine and Belarus and partly return to
Ukraine as fuel for nuclear power stations and partly sell to the United States in the
framework of the Megatons for Megawatts program; working with Ukraine to return the nuclear
weapons to Russia; progress on CTBT; non-proliferation, and specifically limiting Russia's
sales of reactors, missiles, and submarines to Iran and India; getting North Korea to the
negotiating table; peacekeeping in Georgia and Nagorny Karabakh; and the withdrawal of Russian
troops from the Baltics.
On the latter, Yeltsin made an official request that the U.S. side conduct an investigation
of the laws in Estonia to determine if they discriminate against ethnic Russians (Christopher
in his cover note recommends giving Yeltsin a proper legal response even if it is negative).
The breadth of issues helps one understand that Yeltsin truly was an indispensable partner for
Clinton across the range of U.S. priorities in the former Soviet Union and even globally. Only
once is there a signal that Yeltsin is in a complicated place domestically. Mentioning that the
Supreme Soviet has just passed a bill declaring Sevastopol a Russian city, Yeltsin says,
characteristically, "Thank God no one takes the Supreme Soviet seriously!"
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telcon with President Boris Yeltsin of
Russian Federation. 1993-09-21 Source: U.S. Department of State declassification M-2006-01499
Clinton calls Yeltsin immediately after the Russian president makes a speech announcing his
Presidential Decree 1400-dissolving the Parliament and setting the date for early elections to
a new legislature and a referendum for the draft Constitution. Clinton expresses his full
support for Yeltsin but also a concern about the fate of reform and democratic process in
Russia. In response, Yeltsin paints a black-and-white picture of the political struggle saying
that the Supreme Soviet "has totally gone out of control. It no longer supports the reform
process. They have become communist." He assures his U.S. partner that "there will be no
bloodshed," and that "all the democratic forces are supporting me." Clinton underscores the
importance of holding the elections "in a fully democratic manner," and providing the
opposition full access to free press without hindrance. Yeltsin promises to stick to democratic
principles and reiterates his commitment to peaceful solutions. Clinton mentions that a $2.5
billion assistance package is being considered by Congress at the moment and the preservation
of democratic order would be important for its passing. Yeltsin promises that now the "reforms
will go much faster" and thanks the U.S. president for his continuous support. Document 04
Ambassador Thomas Pickering Oral History Excerpt 2007-02-19 Source: Foreign Affairs Oral
History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, Virginia,
www.adst.org , https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Pickering-Thomas-Reeve.pdf
, pp. 357-362 ( 15th of December, the Ides of December 2006) and pp. 386-391 (
19th of February 2007) . This extremely useful oral history collection includes
interviews with more than 2,000 former U.S. diplomats. The interviews with Tom Pickering took
place over an extended period from 2003 to 2007 after his retirement from the Foreign Service,
and produced a transcript totaling 722 pages ranging from his ancestry to postings as far
afield as Zanzibar and San Salvador. Pickering served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1993 to
1996, among the most momentous years in Russia's post-Soviet history, and a large section of
the oral history covers his time in Russia. The particular pages related to the October 1993
events are in two parts, one from pages 357 to 362 on the overall policy and the
Clinton-Yeltsin relationship, and the other, his extremely detailed eyewitness account of the
assault on the White House, from pages 386 to 391. Pickering recounts his strong advice to
Washington that there was "no choice" other than to back Yeltsin. He says, "There are some who
argue that he, Yeltsin, was illegal in his actions and preemptory in his decisions and wrong in
the outcomes. I totally disagreed with that . Were Yeltsin to have failed to do what he did,
there was a good chance that there would have been another effort at the top to return Russia
to communism. I cannot but believe that would have resulted in greater bloodshed and a long
civil conflict." (p. 362) On the possibility of a negotiated settlement, Pickering comments,
"[T]here were talks back and forth, not very fruitful ones because the Russian government then
was in a position of deciding whether it was going to treat with these people and deal with
compromises or take back the White House. They decided that they were going to take back the
White House. They had the troops and the capability of doing that."
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telcon with President Boris Yeltsin of
Russian Federation. 1993-10-05 Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library declassification
2015-0782-M-1
This phone call takes place on the day after Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the
building of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow(the "White House, the same building outside which
Yeltsin had stood on a tank to reisist the hard-line coup attempt in August 1991), Clinton
calls him to express support and inquire about the Russian president's plans for the upcoming
elections and political settlement after the constitutional crisis. Yeltsin calls his opponents
"fascist," putting all the blame on the opposition, telling Clinton that the supporters of the
Parliament "brought to Moscow a gang of people from the Transdniester region, the Riga
OMON-these were special forces. They had them come here, gave them machine guns and grenade
launchers, and had them fire on peaceful civilians." He says he had no alternative than using
force. Yeltsin expresses regret that "some people were killed," [ ] "thirty-nine people have
now been killed on our side," (estimates of casualties range in the hundreds) but assures
Clinton that now both the transition to democracy and market reform will move faster and he
might call for early presidential elections because at the time "no real rivals to me are
visible." (Vice President Rutskoy and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov were in
prison, the prosecutor general was forced to resign and the Constitutional Court was suspended
after its Chairman declared Yeltsin's decree 1400 unconstitutional.) None of that appears
to undermine Yeltsin's democratic credentials in Clinton's eyes. Clinton never asks about the
loss of life among civilians and the opposition. He says just what Yeltsin wants to hear: "you
did everything exactly as you had to and I congratulate you for the way you handled it." The
Russian president responds: "Thank you for everything. I embrace you with all my heart."
Memorandum for the President from Anthony Lake: Clarification on Your October 5
Telephone Conversation with President Yeltsin. 1993-10-07 Source: William J. Clinton
Presidential Library declassification 2015-0782-M-1
This memo from National Security Advisor
Anthony Lake clarifies two items in the October 5 conversation with Yeltsin (see Document 4).
When Yeltsin referred to armed persons from Riga and Moldova who came to Moscow to support the
opposition, Lake points out, they were "from the elite Russian security forces stationed in
Riga and Moldova," not representatives of the Moldovan or Latvian governments. The second
important correction refers to the fact that Yeltsin did not answer Clinton's question about
freedom of the press in the period before the scheduled December elections. Yeltsin only said
that there "would be no restrictions on the elections," and his interpreter translated it as
"no restrictions on the press." In fact many oppositional newspapers were banned. President
Clinton writes on the memo: "OK-but it wasn't the time for me to raise the newspaper issue on
the 5 th ."
Cable from American Embassy Moscow to Secretary of State: Secretary's Visit to
Moscow: Domestic Political Dynamics. 1993-10-19 Source: Department of State Declassification,
Date/Case ID; 6 MAR 2003 200001030
Chargé d'Affaires and future Ambassador to Russia James Collins sends Secretary
Christopher a briefing cable in advance of his visit to Moscow where he is expected to meet
with Yeltsin and other government officials. This is the first visit of any Western senior
official to Moscow after Yeltsin's dissolution of the Parliament and the October 3-4 bloodshed
in the center of Moscow. In the cable, Collins describes the pre-electoral landscape in Russia
on the eve of Christopher's visit. Although 92 parties are registered for the election, that in
itself does not guarantee free and fair elections.
The cable describes Yeltsin's decision to push through the new "half-baked" Constitution,
which concentrates the "preponderance of authority in the hands of the chief executive."
Collins points out that "even many reformers worry about establishing a new Russian democracy
so heavily tilted toward presidential power." The cable describes the split within the
reformist camp into "radical" and "cautious" reformers, the confusion at the regional levels
regarding whether the elections would be held for regional legislatures, and the continuing ban
on nationalist and right-wing parties and their newspapers.
Collins notes the personal nature of the confrontation: "Boris Yeltsin's face during his
October 6 speech was proof the Russian President had cast his hardline opponents into a
personal anathema." He also raises concern about the methods used by Moscow police and city
government in implementing the state of emergency, such as "systematic police cleansing of
non-Russian people from Central Asian and Caucasian states," and racist remarks about
dark-skinned people by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. In the end of the cable, Collins cautions
that although the actual voting is likely to be fair, "the question will be the democratic
content of the entire electoral process."
Cable from American Embassy Moscow to Secretary of State: Your October 21-23
Visit to Moscow-Key Foreign Policy Issues 1993-10-20 Source: U.S. Department of State.
Date/Case ID: 04 MAY 2000 200000982
In the follow-up to the previous cable (Document 6), Chargé d'Affaires Collins
reviews foreign policy issues Christopher is expected to cover in Moscow in his meetings with
Yeltsin and Kozyrev and emphasizes that Yeltsin is looking for gestures of support from the
United States. New elections are scheduled for December and Yeltsin needs all the support from
the West he can get. Collins advises the secretary of state to be sensitive to Yeltsin's and
Kozyrev's need for Russia to be seen domestically as a partner with whom the West consults and
does not just take for granted, and he lists some controversial issues: NATO expansion, the
post-Soviet space, and Ukraine.
On NATO, Collins notes that the Russians are aware that the U.S. internal debate is reaching
a crucial moment about expansion and they want to be assured that the door is open to Russia,
not just to East Europeans. In Collins' view, "what the Russians hope to hear from you is that
NATO is not moving precipitously and that any policy NATO adopts will apply equally to them."
Their "neuralgic" attitude stems from the fear that they will "end up on the wrong side of a
new division of Europe." Therefore, Collins counsels Christopher to make sure the Russians know
that the U.S. is actively promoting Russia's "complete reintegration into the family of Western
states."
Secretary Christopher's Meeting with Foreign Minister Kozyrev: NATO, Elections,
Regional Issues 1993-10-25 Source: U.S. Department of State. Date/Case ID: 11 MAR 2003
200001030
On his trip to Europe to explain the U.S. position on NATO expansion, Secretary Christopher
comes to Moscow after meetings in Budapest. He and special ambassador Strobe Talbott meet with
Foreign Minister Kozyrev and his deputy, Yuri Mamedov, before they visit Yeltsin at his country
residence. Christopher raises concerns about the fairness of the upcoming elections with his
Russian counterparts. He mentions that the United States has $12 million to contribute and is
willing to send monitors or observers, which Kozyrev welcomes, saying they might help to guard
against fraud by communist-leaning local authorities in rural areas where "the old kolkhoz
mentality" still prevails. Christopher puts special emphasis on ensuring a free press since the
order banning opposition newspapers was still not lifted. Kozyrev does not have a definitive
answer to the question regarding banned newspapers and he says only six or seven political
organizations will be banned from participating in the elections.
In this memo about the Kozyrev meeting, Christopher is very brief about the NATO discussion.
He tells Kozyrev that the U.S. is sensitive to the Russian position and has developed a new
proposal as a result: the Partnership for Peace (PFP), which would be open to all countries on
an equal basis. Christopher does not directly address Kozyrev's concern about the decision
regarding expansion, but, misleadingly, lets it sound as if PFP is the alternative for the time
being.
The rest of the conversation deals with crucial issues on which the United States needs
Russian cooperation, such as support for Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and the withdrawal of
nuclear weapons from Ukraine.
Secretary Christopher's Meeting with President Yeltsin, 10/22/1993, Moscow
1993-10-22 Source: U.S. Department of State. Date/Case ID: 08 MAY 2000 200000982
Christopher is taken to Yeltsin's country house, Zavidovo, for a meeting that lasts only 45
minutes. Yeltsin has most likely already been briefed by Kozyrev about his conversation with
the secretary of state. In the beginning of the conversation, Yeltsin reviews the events of
September 21-October 4 in Moscow and expresses "special appreciation to President Clinton and
Secretary Christopher for their early and very supportive backing. The Russian president talks
about the upcoming elections, which he calls "the first free and fair election for the
parliament since 1917," and assures Christopher that the country has calmed down after the
crisis. Yeltsin praises the new Constitution that is "up to the standards of the best Western
democracies," which would allow them to "end the old totalitarian regime with the power
assigned to the soviets." He also welcomes the Clinton visit to Moscow planned for January
1994.
Christopher starts with strong praise for Yeltsin's handling of the constitutional crisis
with the Parliament, passing on "high appreciation" and emphasizing that Clinton is "extremely
supportive" of his "superb handling of the crisis." According to Christopher, Clinton "admired
the restraint" that Yeltsin has practiced since September 21 and that in the end he acted in a
way that "caused the least loss of life." He adds that "on Sunday October 3, the President also
closely followed events and wanted to tell President Yeltsin that [ ] our thoughts were with
you in Moscow all day." Christopher offers technical assistance for the election and notes that
"there are already numbers of our experts here who could be helpful but we would like to assist
in any way in which we could do so." Essentially, Christopher lauds Yeltsin's handling of the
crisis and never raises any concerns mentioned in Collins' cable (see Document 6, above) about
irregularities in the electoral process or the nature of Yeltsin's constitution.
At the end of the conversation they briefly touch on the sensitive question of NATO
expansion. Christopher leaves Yeltsin with the impression that the Partnership for Peace is an
alternative to expansion (see Document 8 in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book
No. 621 [tk: Rinat, please add link]). Yeltsin is extremely pleased with everything Christopher
says at the meeting. He concludes "by saying that he appreciated immensely President Clinton's
early continuing and extremely generous support and that he wanted to pass on his highest
esteem for the President."
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telcon with President Boris Yeltsin of
the Russian Federation. 1993-12-22 Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library
declassification 1015-0782-M-1
Clinton calls Yeltsin to check on the political situation after the elections and talk about
his upcoming visit to Russia in January 1994. At the beginning of the conversation both
presidents put the best spin on the disastrous election results where the nationalist Liberal
Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky finished with 23 percent, the Communist Party of
Gennady Zyuganov with 12 percent and Yeltsin's party, Russia's Choice, headed by Yegor Gaidar,
only got 15 percent. Clinton is concerned about Yeltsin's ability to continue his economic
reform with the strong nationalist-communist-agrarian opposition in Parliament. Yeltsin assures
him that he is committed to the reform and will be able to work with the Parliament,
"especially since the working relationship is supported by a strong democratic foundation in
the new constitution." He says that now "there is no room for extremism or fascism in the new
parliament." At the same time, he asks the U.S. president not to invite opposition party
leaders to a meeting when Clinton comes to Moscow "so as not to give them an exaggerated
opinion of themselves." Clinton tells Yeltsin that they decided not to talk much about
Zhirinovsky and "to play him down."
The rest of the conversation focuses on preparations for the upcoming summit with Clinton's
three-part agenda: "economic assistance to support your reforms; our common effort to convince
Ukraine to go non-nuclear; and our foreign policy agenda." He promises to start a "quiet study"
of how to increase IMF and World Bank assistance to Russia. Yeltsin is grateful for the support
and emphasizes the importance of cooperation on denuclearization of Ukraine. He
enthusiastically accepts Clinton's program.
Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev Oral History Excerpt 2015-00-00 Source: Interview
conducted by Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh and ultimately published in their book, Gaidar's
Revolution: The Inside Account of the Economic Transformation of Russia (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2015), pp. 297-333.
Two of Yegor Gaidar's close associates during the "second Russian
revolution" of 1989-1992 went back 20 years later, after Gaidar's death, to interview 10 of the
other key players in that period, including the Defense Minister Pavel Grachev (the only
American interviewed was former Secretary of State James Baker). Aven and Kokh published short
versions of each interview in the Russian edition of Forbes between 2010 and 2012, and
longer versions in their book. In the biographical listing in the back of the book, the authors
sneer at Grachev as a corrupt incompetent, while for most others listed they simply provide the
dates and titles of their positions. But they give Grachev more than 30 pages of space to
recount his versions of multiple controversial topics. This excerpt, titled "The Army and the
Putsch of 1993," from pages 325 to 330, includes Grachev's story of his 3 a.m. discussions with
Yeltsin and his security chief Korzhakov, during which "we drank a little," leading to the
assault on the White House. Grachev says he personally gave the orders for a tank to fire
"inert" projectiles into specific windows in the White House, after which "a fire started. It
was beautiful." When Aven asks how many they killed in the assault, Grachev answers, "a lot."
When Aven says, "from 200 to 400, by various estimates," Grachev responds, "many, in short."
Notes
[1] The main editor of Novaya Gazeta , Sergey Kozheurov, elected for the second
time in November 2017, was the founding editor of the newspaper from 1993 to 1995.
[2] Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy , (New York:
Random House, 2002) p. 55
"... Professor Goldman talked at length about the genesis of the 'oligarchs', Russia's largest and most controversial businessmen. In the last few years, Russia 'delegated' 19 billionaires to the Forbes' World's Richest People list – more than Britain or France, for instance. In examining this unique Russian phenomenon, Marshall Goldman emphasized that the 'oligarchs' propelled themselves to riches after the start of perestroika in 1987. Coming from the ranks of Soviet government officials or black market dealers, these people took advantage of immature regulatory environment to build wealth, first through financial and export-import operations, and then by privatizing the country's natural resources and mass media. ..."
"... Oligarchs reached the peak of their influence in the late nineties after they ventured into politics and helped re-elect Boris Yeltsin the President of Russia. Ironically, the demise of the oligarchs follows the same route but in reverse: stripped of their media assets by President Putin, they lost their political weight, and are now gradually losing control over natural resources. The recent arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky served as an obvious indication of this trend. ..."
"Russia is not a normal country," said Professor Marshall Goldman, an internationally
recognized authority on Russian politics and economics, in his meeting with HBS students on
February 9th. Professor Goldman of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University
came to campus to talk about his recent book "The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes
Awry".
The event, hosted by the Eastern European Association, attracted significant interest from
the HBS community. Surrounded by dozens of students in a packed room at Cumnock Hall, Professor
Goldman shared his prospective on the past and future of the Russian reforms, and answered a
number of intriguing questions. His expert opinion was sought to add academic clarity to the
recent publicized debate around 'the real facts about Russia'.
In his lecture, Professor Goldman gave a critical assessment of the approach to the economic
reforms taken by the Russian government after the collapse of Soviet Union. Citing the examples
of Poland and China, he argued that more gradual liberalization and privatization would
generate wider social benefits in a less corrupt environment.
In addition, Marshall Goldman didn't miss the opportunity to pick on 'the
guys across the river', referring to Harvard Professors Andrei Shleifer and Jeffrey Sachs (now
at Columbia) who consulted Russian authorities in early nineties and advocated 'shock therapy'
reforms. He also quoted Shleifer's recent publication about Russia, 'A normal country'.
Professor Goldman talked at length about the genesis of the 'oligarchs', Russia's largest and
most controversial businessmen. In the last few years, Russia 'delegated' 19 billionaires to
the Forbes' World's Richest People list – more than Britain or France, for instance. In
examining this unique Russian phenomenon, Marshall Goldman emphasized that the 'oligarchs'
propelled themselves to riches after the start of perestroika in 1987. Coming from the ranks of
Soviet government officials or black market dealers, these people took advantage of immature
regulatory environment to build wealth, first through financial and export-import operations,
and then by privatizing the country's natural resources and mass media.
Oligarchs reached the
peak of their influence in the late nineties after they ventured into politics and helped
re-elect Boris Yeltsin the President of Russia. Ironically, the demise of the oligarchs follows
the same route but in reverse: stripped of their media assets by President Putin, they lost
their political weight, and are now gradually losing control over natural resources. The recent
arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky served as an obvious indication of this
trend.
In examining the current situation in Russia, Professor Goldman deplored the excesses of the
'rule of law' and the cutbacks on the democratic freedoms, primarily freedom of speech. At the
same time he admitted considerable advances made by Russia in the economic area. Fuelled by
high commodity prices and liberal tax reforms (with income tax at 13% flat), the Russian
economy developed briskly in the last five years, posting a whopping 7% GDP increase in 2003.
Although this growth remains driven more by greater resource utilization than by factor
productivity, Marshall Goldman was generally positive about the prospects of Russian
businesses. In answering a student's question 'Is Russia a good place to invest?', he said that
most probably yes, pointing at the burgeoning consumer market, growing foreign investment and
recent moves by Moody's and Standard & Poor's to raise Russian sovereign ratings to the
investment grade.
In closing, Professor Goldman expressed his hope that Russia will manage to keep the current
fine balance between both the liberal economic policies and sub-democratic political regime. He
also invited HBS students to attend weekly academic seminars held at the Davis Center for
Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
IMO Senate anti-BDS bill is an Israeli effort to kill free speech in the US
"Pro-Israel lawmakers in Washington, undeterred by the partial shutdown of the United States
government, are pursuing their agenda full speed with the introduction of the first piece of
legislation before the 116th Senate -- a bill that aims to stifle the free-speech rights of
American critics of apartheid Israel.
The Republican-controlled Senate's first bill (S.1) would enact penalties on entities that
engage in boycotts of Israel -- one of many measures in the United States intended to push back
on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
BDS seeks to place economic pressure on companies and institutions that support Israeli ones
operating in illegally occupied areas in Palestine, in order to pressure the Israeli government
into compliance with international law and to cease its practices of apartheid, ethnic
cleansing, and the ongoing encroachment of Israeli settlements." Alexander Rubenstein
------------
Even as this travesty of law is driven forward in the senate, US senators Cruz and Cotton
are in Israel supporting Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and official American
recognition of the annexation. These Syrian lands were seized in war by Israel in 1967 and
occupied ever since.
IMO this bill, if it became law, would be struck down by the courts as
unconstitutional.
Servants of a foreign power and enemies of the Constitution. Disgraceful. The Republic has
been utterly corrupted and these traitors should all be in jail.
Seems this Senate bill goes far beyond trying to muzzle our free speech. It attempts to
force us to buy Israeli products and invest in Israeli companies and institutions. There's
going to be some serious civil disobedience if this piece of crap passes.
Good to see the new Congress has got its priorities straight with 'Strengthening
Israel's America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019'. The anti-BDS
bit is an abomination. As it is not yet illegal to petition your senator, and with our host's
permission, I'd urge everyone to make use of the ACLU's pro-forma message of objection to the
bill. Just fill in the form online:
Unfortunately this is probably not unconstitutional. It won't be illegal to call for a
boycott of Israel, it will just be illegal to boycott Israel. An analogy: it's not illegal to
say "don't hire black people," but it is illegal to not hire black people.
Also, I bet South Africa wishes they had a better lobby.
How do Cruz and Cotton get around the UN resolutions that recognize the Golan as Syrian
territory? And if they are successful what would that do to US relations with Jordan, the
Saudis, and the Gulf States?
I suspect Cruz and Cotton are just playing to that part of their evangelical base like
Jeffress and others that seem obsessed with apocalyptic literature.
Recognizing Taiwan involved similar problems but we finessed it - I think Israel's friends
in Congress can come up with something similar for "de facto but not official recognition" of
Golan as Israeli territory. The Izzies will be happy - they like to take things inch by
inch.
As for Jordan, KSA, and the Gulfies - they have had to swallow more bitter medicine in the
past, and they will again in the future. They have nowhere to go.
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation.
Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare
of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.
In re "Our man in Havana" I think there
are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head
round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.'
It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating
one ham-fisted cover-up after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador
Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in
Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate'
-- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about
it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying
Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with
Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem
to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating
their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened
in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world
(with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though
there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse
is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).
"... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
"... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic
Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.
The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine
and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.
This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science
but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and
provide fundamental knowledge.
Elements of fascism doctrine are noe constituent part of any Western national security state. In a sense fascism as a
derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for
this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but
the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US
citizens after the 9/11. Use of fascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute project.
Notable quotes:
"... "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. ..."
"... Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. ..."
"... In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. ..."
"... It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole ..."
"... Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime? ..."
It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism:
A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary
of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.
The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra
convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.
Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people
don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering
not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbαn, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.
To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chαvez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea
in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men
(and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.
However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II,
people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils.
In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist
Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but
form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying
[1] Albright
even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch
painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that
Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.
Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with
those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf States.
Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist
state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right
would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated
to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.
This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding
universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment
does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too
big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex,
the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I
suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign
enemies for governments domestically.
Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments
present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln,
De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims
of being "non-authoritarian."
In semi-democratic Venezuela or authoritarian Cuba? In democratic India or authoritarian China? In Atatόrk's secular dictatorship
or Erdoğan's Islamist democracy? In authoritarian Yugoslavia or democratic Bosnia? In democratic Jamaica or authoritarian Singapore?
Try to be honest (with yourself).
I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical
of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the
book review already up by
Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think
are an interesting subject.
The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal
democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize
that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men
and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns
and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.
The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting
reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result,
they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average
dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)
Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence
and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up
communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at
the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek,
Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall if he'd toned that back,
and just that might have been enough I'd probably be typing in German today.
In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability.
This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and
democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As
Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness
that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether
they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in
ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally,
has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.
The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could
see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted
for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles.
Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?
The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted
and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic
line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether,
so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform
set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like
national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community but in principle these can be anything, such
as equality, eugenics, or ecology.
Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the
bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear
word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought
quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.
Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism,
and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if
found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering
your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.
Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious
that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various
Islamist rebel groups specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.
Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training
a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could
have prevented climate change.
It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do
democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and
power of the community as a whole.
Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am
an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual
right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.
I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let
us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a
much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to
do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and
corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified
museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin
American country even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist
postwar Italy of 75 million.
More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless
you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist
nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course
they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.
Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world.
Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke
already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of
people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions
will die in the future.
White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the
merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.
Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves
had to say about their values: Mussolini's
Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored
with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.
Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance.
In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization
dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy,
these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming
minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled
to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely
we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.
To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people
on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed
more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she
wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.
Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the
action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes,
including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not
whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.
Early on in her book, Albright says:
My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established
an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This
is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.
I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a
charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because
French President Franηois Mitterrand
seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the
Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."
No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly,
the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the
Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular)
, the
Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual
media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality as she claims or simply
a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.
Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism
funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including
under her tenure as secretary of State is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like
the ADL in America and
the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a
Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today.
Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.
The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find
equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.
Notes
[1]
Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."
[2]
I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.
Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of
Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom
to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website.
Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
No results containing all your search terms were found.
The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT
Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to
achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?
"Return of the Neocons" [Stephen Wertheim, New York Review of
Books ]. "In Washington, D.C., liberal foreign policy hands have reacted to Trump's
presidency less by reaching out to ordinary citizens than by crossing K Street to make common
cause with their neighborhood neocons. Among otherefforts ,
the Center for American Progress (CAP), the leading Clintonian policy shop, is now issuing
joint reports
with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the leading neocon incubator, which this year
sent John Bolton to be National Security Adviser. CAP donated $200,000 to AEI in
2017. " • Neera Tanden even now making sure that Wertheim never eats brunch in this town
again .
In fact, over the course of 2018, Inhofe has made 57 individual stock trades, according to
Senate disclosure forms .
The value of these trades totaled somewhere between $1.72 million and $4.11 million. In 2017,
according to Inhofe's annual
report , he made another 52 trades.
Congress attempted to prevent legislators from insider trading with the 2012 STOCK
Act , which prohibits members and their staffs from exploiting insider information
discovered in the course of policy deliberations. But unlike corporate "insiders," members of
Congress are not required to establish arms-length trading plans --
nor has the House fully cooperated with efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission
to investigate potential wrongdoing.
When compared to corporate insiders, members of Congress are exposed to a much broader array
of insider information which implicates a wide range of companies. Given that members of
Congress hold a unique position of public trust, Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sherrod Brown,
D-Ohio, both potential Democratic presidential candidates, want to put a stop to all the
trading. Last week, they introduced
legislation that would permanently ban members of Congress and senior staff from trading
individual stocks.
"We should not be in the position of thinking about legislation in the context of personal
investment," Merkley told The Intercept in an interview. "As long as you own stocks, it's hard
to rule out of your mind. And the public sees it as a conflict of interest."
There's only one thing necessary to maintain the respect and affection of DC's ruling political and media class: affirm standard
precepts of US imperialism & militarism. You can work for Trump, or cheer menacing authoritarians, and you'll still be revered
as long as you do that:
Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley
Congratulations to Brazil's new President Bolsonaro. It's great to have another U.S.-friendly leader in South America, who
will join the fight against dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, and who clearly understands the danger of China's expanding influence
in the region.
"... Very interesting. It is understandable that Trump does not read briefings, if all he is fed is a variety of permanent war options at odds with his strategic goals. ..."
"... Trump had lunch with Lindsay Graham who has allegedly said that Trump is "reconsidering ". The Neocons haven't given up.. ..."
Gareth Porter, in an article published in the American Conservative, definitively shows that
Trump's Dec. 19 announcement of the US withdrawal from Syria was, in fact, the end of a fight
of at least a year, between Trump on the one side and his national security team, lead by
Mattis and Dunford on the other. Published accounts of the policy process over the past year
"show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been
playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our
indefinite presence on the ground in Syria ," Porter writes. "The entire episode thus
represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national
security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed
military deployments in a war zone . The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a
different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course,
one that does not involve a permanent war state."
Porter cites an April 2018 Associated Press account of an NSC meeting at which Trump's
impatience with his national security team boiled over. At that meeting, Trump ordered them
unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy. Instead, they framed
the options as a binary choice -- either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in
order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State. Mattis and Dunford, Porter
continues, were consciously exploiting Trump's own defensiveness about a timeline–he had
attacked Obama during the 2016 campaign for imposing a timeline in Afghanistan–"to press
ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it."
"The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the
Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations
created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in
the Middle East and Africa, Trump's national security team is committed to doing the opposite,
" Porter concludes. "Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the
foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That
means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war
years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key
positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could
decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war
state we find ourselves in today."
Trump has called the bluff of the permanent warfare crowd and now has his decision, but the
possibility of sabotage by that crowd's assets inside the Pentagon cannot yet be discounted.
This is indicated by an exclusive Reuters report claiming that planners at the Pentagon are
proposing that the YPG be allowed to keep the heavy weapons that the US has supplied it with,
though Reuters' sources stress that the planning is still at an early stage and nothing's been
decided yet. And yet, there must be a reason why this is being reported now. It obviously would
throw a monkey wrench in the arrangements that Trump is trying to make with Erdogan to keep
eastern Syria stable in the wake of the US withdrawal. It would also represent a back down from
US promises made earlier to the Turks to retrieve the weapons and Erdogan would throw a fit.
Certainly, the idea that the U.S. military can retrieve all of the weapons that it handed over
is a dubious one, at best , and there are legitimate questions about whether or not Turkish
troops could really operate in the Middle Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border, hundreds of
kilometers from the Turkish border.
But the key to the proposal is this: The recommendation "is a rejection of Trump's policy to
withdraw from Syria," a person familiar with the discussions told Reuters. So, really, it is an
attempt at sabotage.
Very interesting. It is understandable that Trump does not read briefings, if all he is fed
is a variety of permanent war options at odds with his strategic goals. The Syrian war that
matters is clearly now being fought within the USG and Trump has won the latest battle. As
Porter says, this war will only be won if Trump can successfully replace key Borg positions
with people of his own.
If the pullout can be completed without being sabotaged, Russia ought
to be able to seamlessly step in guarantor of peace - and the SAG and Iraq between then can
finish IS. The permanent war crowd with then just have to vent their frustrations elsewhere.
A good outcome for all.
He was IMO suckered into taking a lot of these people because he didn't know anyone in
government. His problem will be to find people not already working for the other side.
"that the YPG be allowed to keep the heavy weapons that the US has supplied it with"
I would love to find out what those "heavy weapons" were exactly. I have been putting up
comments all over the place saying that as far as I have been able to find out the US has not
supplied anything with a barrel bigger than an 80mm mortar or a vehicle heavier than a MRAP.
Up to now no-one has contradicted me. The reason the US did this was precisely this
situation, not to upset the Turks if gear was left behind.
Am I wrong? Is this equipment now regarded as "heavy weapons"?
I have looked as to where I might post my comment on this important site; this article seems
to be the best fit for my comment on another site about the retirement of Gen Kelly and a
link to an interview with Gen Kelly (I hope Col Lang will be lenient in allowing a secondary
posting of my comment from another site):
On the subject of trump this AM, zerohedge has a summary of an interview with Gen Kelly
which occurred just prior to his departure-to say that it was "bone crushing hard" probably
is a long way from describing the difficulty of that Chief of Staff job in a chaotic white
house working for a chaotic individual.
I have just a ton of respect for Gen Kelly-even in this totally mucked up country with all
of its unending flustercucks, there are individuals still willing to step up and try,
emphasis on try, to restore some sanity to the situations. God speed, Gen Kelly!!
Two factors not mentioned are the SAA and support from Russia. Turkey may be somewhat off the
hook for a deep thrust if Syrian forces move in and convince the YPG to stand down, by force
or otherwise. As Col. Lang points out, starving the YPG of ammunition is a practical
approach. If the PMU links up with Syrian forces to secure the eastern border areas, the
Kurdish interests should be balanced out. My point being that the so-called vacuum left for
Iran to fill is an overplayed shadow puppet.
If anyone still thinks that Donald Trump has some master plan to kill off his Deep State
adversaries they should check themselves into therapy. I know withdrawal is hard, but admitting
you have a problem is the first step to curing it.
He doesn't have a plan. He may fight them but it won't be with any kind of master plan to
trap them in some beautiful bit of political judo.
Frankly, Vladimir Putin he is not.
No, Trump is winging things at this point. While he still has the office he's trying to do
some of the things he promised. Doing that may keep him in power for a few more months.
But with his walking back the timetable for pulling troops out of Syria after a visit from
Lindsay Graham (R-MIC/AIPAC) should tell you all you need to know about Trump's willingness to
stand up to the pressure he's under.
Add to that the opening salvo from Mitt Romney (R-Wall St.) and it becomes pretty clear that
Trump was told what the score really is. When, not if, the Democrats push for impeachment or a
25th Amendment proceeding against him Graham and Romney will lead a GOP revolt against him,
siding with Senate Democrats to get rid of him.
That's been the point of this from the beginning. Pat Buchanan and I both talked about this
from the moment he was elected. Pat reminding us of what happened to Nixon who was hounded out
of office because he did the unthinkable -- ending the Vietnam War.
I've been simply looking at this from the standard libertarian perspective that "War is the
health of the state" and Trump's opposition to our Middle East follies would net him nothing
but contempt.
The Makinder "Heartland" view of Geopolitics holds complete sway in Washington, Downing St.
and the Pentagon. And as such, the Middle East is the access point to the Heartland and that
means destroying both Russia and Iran to ensure that Germany never joins them.
This is why The Swamp will not let Trump make nice with Putin. It's why the British deep
state and intelligence community was so eager to help Hillary Clinton fabricate the Russiagate
controversy through the creation of the Steele Dossier.
It's why outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, would only
entertain a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as the U.S. maintained all of
its military presence there.
In other words, accept our colonial presence here to ensure you stay in the 19th century and
we no longer have to fight openly.
If for nothing else, Trump's firing Dunford was a brief bit of joy that may outlive his
presidency. Not much else will.
Look, the Deep State is vast and cruel. Nancy Pelosi's first act as Speaker of the House was
to declare open season on Trump. She'll wait until the Mueller report to start the process but
she seems pretty confident she'll get what she needs.
Michael Cohen likely provided the road map to Trump's shady business dealings (far beyond
his pecadillos) which will be used against him. Impeachment isn't a legal proceeding, it's a
purely political one.
There is no standard of proof. If you're hated by enough of the right people, you're done.
That's it. In a time of unlimited corruption counting on people to act honorably is a fool's
game.
And Trump at this point is the head fool.
You don't announce something like the withdrawal from Syria and all that that entails only
to walk it back 10 days later because someone threatened you.
In fact, Trump's best, and frankly, only course of action now is to go on the offensive. And
Elizabeth Warren memes, no matter how entertaining, are not getting this done.
As I lay out in this video, the threat of exposing all of the corruption is his best play.
It may cost him everything but if he's going down the best thing he can do to MAGA is take as
many of them down as possible.
Spot on Tom. Ending a Predator Class war for global hegemony (the Makinder World Island
quest) is a capital offense for any President. That's why JFK was offed... (the Nixon tale is
not credible... Nixon sabotaged LBJ's negotiations with the N. Vietnamese and with Kissinger
dragged on the war until the US was kicked out in '75).
Trump could appeal to the American people over Syria and Afghanistan claiming that as the
Peace President he is being threatened... Maybe DoJ gets cleaned out; Mueller has
nothing.
Order the acting AG to appoint Special Prosecutors for Clinton, Feinstein and Pelosi and
others for their treason and their Chinese Business Dealings
Declassify all of the JFK and other documents that you promised to release, the Mexican
stand off ends the day Trump leaves office and they bankrupt and imprison him and his
family.
Name the CFR, and all other Globalist Organizations and NeoCons, as Foreign Agents and
force register all of their members as Foreign Agents.
Pull the Security clearances from all people not currently employed by the Govt,
especially the CFR members and similar organization.
Name the ADL and SPLC as Hate Groups and appoint a special prosecutor to go after
them.
PS Stop appointing people who want you dead in the key positions in your government
PPS Pardon Assange and give him diplomatic passage to some country that won't extradite
him like Iceland or perhaps Switzerland.
We will stay because our Israeli bought government wants it. They will never allow Trump
to exit Syria.
Here is a list of politicians who carry Israeli Citizenship ... Good to know and explains
a lot
112 CONGRESS
THE US SENATE [13]
Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) Barbara Boxer (D-CA) Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA) Al Franken (D-MN) Herb Kohl (D-WI) Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) Joseph Lieberman
(Independent-CT) Carl Levin (D-MI) Charles Schumer (D-NY) Ron Wyden (D-OR) Michael Bennet
(D-CO)
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES [27]
Gary Ackerman (D-NY) Shelley Berkley (D-NV) Howard Berman (D-CA) Eric Cantor (R-VA) David
Cicilline (D-RI) Stephen Cohen (D-TN) Susan Davis (D-CA) Ted Deutch (D-FL) Eliot Engel (D-NY)
Bob Filner (D-CA) Barney Frank (D-MA) Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) Jane Harman (D-CA) Steve
Israel (D-NY) Sander Levin (D-MI) Nita Lowey (D-NY) Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Jared Polis (D-CO)
Steve Rothman (D-NJ) Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) Adam Schiff (D-CA) Brad
Sherman (D-CA) Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) Henry Waxman (D-CA) Anthony Weiner (D-NY) John
Yarmuth (D-KY)
Here is a list of Israel's 'contributions' to US senators
Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used
to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually
ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia
of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its
authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New
York Timesas a
group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S.
military and the intelligence agencies.
Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being
after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan,
for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that
purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also
worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by
NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and
USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims.
This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well
as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in
Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had
" orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore
campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT
This scandal is being perpetrated by the
United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a
splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation,
Hamilton 68.
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es
piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the
organizers boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He
dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT
There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots
weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly
responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in
a
textbook case of psychological projection ,
brainwashing, and
Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your
own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the
Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore
what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up
caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case
of all those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.
One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the
sooner it's over the better for everyone.
"... At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like. ..."
"... I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive. ..."
"... Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud. ..."
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
"... Senate Resolution on December 19, 2019 which calls for "a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline ..."
"... Calling for a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. ..."
Senator Ron Johnson (R- Wis) and Richard Durban (D-Ill) and 39 of their colleagues introduced a Senate Resolution on December
19, 2019 which calls for "a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline" as shown
here :
Here is a list of co-sponsors of the resolution:
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), ranking member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation; and Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Ben Cardin
(D-Md.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Christopher Coons (D-Del.), James Risch (R-Idaho),
Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.),
Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.),
Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Doug Jones (D-Ala.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.),
Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Roger Wicker
(R-Miss.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), John Thune (R-S.D.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.), and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.).
Here is the resolution (currently unnumbered) in its entirety:
Calling for a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the
Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
... ... ...
Whereas the United States has important national interests in the Black Sea region, including the security
of three NATO littoral states, the promotion of European energy market diversification by ensuring unfettered European access
to energy exporters in the Caucuses and central Asia, and combatting use of the region by smugglers as a conduit for trafficking
in persons, narcotics, and arms;
Whereas the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a proposed underwater natural gas pipeline project that would provide
an additional 55,000,000,000 cubic meters of pipeline capacity from the Russian Federation to the Federal Republic of Germany
through the Baltic Sea;
Whereas the Russian Federation's state-owned oil and gas company, Gazprom, is the sole shareholder of the Nord
Stream 2 project;
Whereas, in 2017, there was spare capacity of approximately 55,000,000,000 cubic meters in the Ukrainian gas
transit system;
Whereas Gazprom cut off natural gas exports to Europe via Ukraine in 2006, and again in 2009, over supply and
pricing disputes with Ukraine's state-owned oil and gas company, Naftogaz;
Whereas transit of Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine declined precipitously after the completion of
Nord Stream 1 in 2011, falling from 80 percent to between 40 and 50 percent of Russia's total exports to Europe;
Whereas, in 2017, Russian gas accounted for 37 percent of Europe's natural gas imports, an increase of
5 percent over 2016;
Whereas, on December 12, 2018, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning both the
Russian Federation's aggression in the Kerch Strait and the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; and
Whereas, on December 11, 2018, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution calling upon
the European
Union to reject the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and urging the President to use all available means to promote energy policies in
Europe that reduce European reliance on Russian energy exports:
... ... ...
(9) applauds and concurs with the European 2 Parliament's December 12, 2018, resolution condemning Russian aggression in the
Kerch Strait and
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, calling for the pipeline's cancellation due to its threat to European energy security, and calling
on the Russian Federation to
7 guarantee freedom of navigation in the Kerch Strait;
and
(10) urges the President to continue working with Congress and our allies to ensure the appropriate policies to deter the Russian
Federation from further aggression.
Fortunately, these two neocons can make all the proclamations they want but without President Trump's support it's all just
words; neocon virtue signalling. And of course President Trump won't support what they're doing because he campaigned on and governs
as an anti-war president.
Ron Johnson is a Bushie neocon who actively supported the neocon ‘Jebe! (Please Clap) Bush while Durbin is a Hillary Clinton
neocon who actively supported that drunken, corrupt, warmongering shrew.
Thank all that's holy that we have a genuine anti-war POTUS in office and not either of those two neocons, both of whom were
utterly in the pockets of defense contractors.
Thanks for your research on relevant naval law. The Ukrainian vessel is reported to have violated the ongoing protocol by failing
to take on a Russian pilot as it transited the strait and an important bridge could potentially have been attacked by those vessels.
This was a provocation by Ukraine that seems to have its desired effect on the U.S. Senate. For essential background on the Ukrainian
civil war, I recommend reading Stephen F. Cohen's article in the Nation in 2014, titled "Kiev's atrocities and the Silence of
the Hawks." https://www.thenation.com/article/kievs-atrocities-and-silence-hawks/
So read the headline in The Washington Post , Aug. 18, 2011.
The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:
"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is
standing in their way... the time has come for President Assad to step aside."
France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad
must go!
Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron who are gone.
Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says
President Donald Trump.
But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get
slaughtered."
Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed the intervention that were
we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get
slaughtered"?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary
to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban.
Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post today, the
"remnants of al-Qaeda work closely" with today's Taliban.
It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with these alternatives
:
Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul,
or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.
Who got us into this debacle?
After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its president, the Iraqi
Parliament, calling this a "U.S. disregard for other nations' sovereignty" and a national
insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.
George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMD he did not
have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic
world.
Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the fighting of a decade
ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of
members in the parliament.
Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes, precision-guided
munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that
degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.
Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the
fighting.
Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been
collaborators, done to make Americans safer?
Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and helped
to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.
Told of news reports of Gadhafi's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came,
we saw, he died."
The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya's
crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not
preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
The price of all these interventions for the United States?
Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.
For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, pogroms against
Christians, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.
How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or
Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the Middle East and North Africa
found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of
America.
The fruits of American intervention?
We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that
if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be
massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will
notch a victory.
In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump
enraged our foreign policy elites , though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon
enough.
In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century,
The New York Times wrote,
"As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way
forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created."
Probably not. It is just the the USA imperial interest and Israeli interests highly correlate in this region.
Notable quotes:
"... Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel. ..."
"... And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple as that. ..."
Mr. Giraldi ends on a hopeful note, that readers of Bret Stephen's article will conclude not that Trump is bad for Israel, but
that Israel is bad for America. Alas, wishful thinking.
Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies
that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel.
And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple
as that.
IOW time is running out for the neo-cons, and they're only going to get Iran destroyed
and hold onto power in the US through an outright Bolshevik style coup against the public
(some kind of fabricated National Emergency).
Well, we already had one "fabricated national emergency" -- the 9/11 false flag. Do you
think there'll be yet another? I mean something big, not like the Skripal thing.
As usual Philip Giraldi out writes the NYT hacks. Stephens and his cohorts at the Times are
constantly kvetching about Israel then they scream anti-Semitism if it's pointed out. It's
exhausting. I'm exhausted with neocons.
Trotskyism : the political, economic, and social principles advocated by Trotsky
especially the theory and practice of communism developed by or associated with Trotsky and
usually including adherence to the concept of worldwide revolution as opposed to socialism
in one country.
Pro-Zionist liberals such as those at the New York Times have the dilemma of how to
oppose President Trump, who pursues pro-Zionist policies. A solution seems to be to argue
that Trump is not really that pro-Zionist.
Inspired by the Scofield Bible, it is, regrettably, a fundamental belief of millions of
voters that Israel is good for America.
In John Hagee's words , '50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with
five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel.'
The linked article concludes: 'Not least among the many victims of the Scofield Bible are
5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by America's
Zionized Christians. Thanks to their indoctrination by Scofield's unholy book, they believe
that Palestine belongs not to the Palestinians -- many of whom are fellow Christians -- but
exclusively to "God's chosen people".'
I'm pleased to say I was not for moving the embassy and as for the Iran deal it was
better than the alternative, with the potential for further talks down the road. Stephens
didn't approve but both aspects of US foreign policy were good for the US. So why would we
expect him to?
Where the clash is going to come is the Democratic party is not going to put up with this
rubbish anymore. Yes there will be some holdovers (Schumer, Cardin et al.) but blanket
support is not going to play with the next congress. They will lose donor support as well as
media acceptance –from the Times– but Christian Zionism isn't a factor for Dem's
and constituents see that a brutal Israeli government that is focusing on attaching itself to
kindred spirit states led by strongman types, doesn't deserve support.
when we here about israel as the problem it is really not israel the country but israel the
people. they are spread out over many countries but all still believe in their cult of israel
i have read many times how the majority of them are not even ancestors of israel but are
instead converts form centuries ago there are lawsutis in the US against the government aid
to israel which vilotlates US law on providing aid to an undeclares nuke power,,,and against
aipac for not registering FARA,,,they have gone nowhere In my opinion, their whole power
comes from media control when the media goes on and on about bogus Russian influence and says
nothing of israel influence you know you have a problem
The World will never be free and peaceful until we can liberate AMERICAN & European
politcal, economic, military, intelligentsia, educational & cultural DECISION MAKING
CENTERS from destructive & inhuman ZIONIST lobby. As Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimr
wrote in their unique & worldwide known "US FOREIGN POLICY AND ISRAEL LOBBY" not only
these lobbying organizations are anti US interests but they are as well against the long term
interests of ISRAEL itself.
Briefly we should free mind of American people before all to have a ideal and productive
world.
Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the
truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most
Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening
to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand,
there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human
bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid
"ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress
are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your
power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep
it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the
truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most
Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening
to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand,
there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human
bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid
"ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress
are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your
power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep
it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
This is what I said on Pat Buchanan's page about a comment, very apropos to this article,
also from the NY Times "That comment from the NY Times exposes how aligned the globalist
leftist elite is with the NEOCON globalist elite. There's 'no daylight' between characters
like 'Linda' Graham and 'Up Chuck' Schumer when it comes to globalist hegemony. Thank God for
Donald and keep America First!" The comment that Pat made his point on was this: 'In
Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The
New York Times wrote', "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new
generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already
created." This is what Pat attacked in his column.
Correct me if I'm wrong but America still has NO formal alliance treaty with the Jewish
State, no?
And finally 'Bret Stephens'; How clever they are with their names.
@Hamed
Ghashghavi The problem 'Hamed from Tehran' is that the Main Stream Media and the
political class in the USA is almost completely owned by the rich 'Zionist Lobby'.
For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the
dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.
Aid to Palestinians: another $500 million.
Tax deductible funds going towards settlement expansion: several hundreds of million if
not billion.
Aid to Jordan. Aid to Lebanon.
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
I predict proactive Jewish Lobby Stink-Think Tanks have engineered plans to dramatically
influence Democrat Congress & presidential candidate elections, and which are underway
now.
Elections come and go but the Zio stump-song remains the same.
First, and as you should well understand Mark, particular campaigns for US Senate cost
$millions simply to get a candidate's mere "name" in front of ever longing & frustrated
American voters.
Of course, such efforts are enhanced by manifold "special interests" and billionaire
campaign contributions.
Regrettably, U.S. election campaign "donor support" (uh, speech?) trumps the will of the
paltry amount of Americans who indulge voting, and our Zionist Corporate Media obliges the
biggest beneficiary winner$, and can finagle ideologically blind & typically
GOP-Christian Zionist's to bloc vote for, i.e., brand-name & repackaged Zio Democrats,
Pocahontas, Bloomberg, Biden, Bob Casey, etcetera.
In short, Mark, the "brutal Israeli government" expertly followed Protocols of Zion by
neutering U.S. Congressional & Presidential democratic elections, and the Zionist
Corporate Media entertainingly promotes the THEATER.
National rejection of the great "rubbish" work of, for one little example, NYT's Bret
Stephens, is a giant step toward how America could become gallant/noble again, and afterward
repent & focus upon strivation to "greatness."
The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve
the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned
up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.
A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining
Palestinians.
This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States
into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the
Palestinian issue that they created.
"I still say that US and Russia should come to Israels help in hour of need.
But Israel also should stop behaving like rotten spoiled child."
Russia can provide the "Jewish Autonomous Oblast" (already exists), and the U$A can
provide the means to move them there. Of course the FORMER Israel will have to pay for
everything.
I support Great Britain and France, that does not mean I approve of colonial behavior or
trouncing British or French identity. I can certainly support the existence of Is areal and
chagrin their attacks and encroachments onto Palestine uninvited and without compensation
or shooting protectors for the matter.
I tend to agree with you on this. No matter what one thinks of the morality of the events
of 1948, most of today's Israeli Jews were born on the land and have a right to live there.
They're no more responsible for the sins of their grandfathers than a modern German, except
to the extent that they help perpetuate continued injustice.
With that said, what frightens me is the extent to which some of them have been emboldened
by a combination of unchecked ethnocentrism and a sense of immunity from scrutiny and
criticism. Particularly in the realm of ethnic bioweapons. Most of the leading DNA analysis
companies seem to be Jewish-owned. It seems to be an area of emphasis with them. It was
reported 20 years ago that Israel has an anti-Arab virus. Who else might be a target?
Israeli participation in spyware and their access to raw NSA data is also concerning. How
do we know that the data isn't be used to intimidate Americans from speaking out, or to
siphon money from ordinary investors by insider trading?
@polistra Israel
is hardly a normal country. It is an Apartheid Colony. That's why it needs American support
and will need it for the foreseeable future. It uses its co-religionists in the US to
maintain an iron grip on US mideast policy, making sure that it is at the heart of it and
that almost no dissenting voices can ever be elected in the US or get any mainstream media
access. If that sounds like a normal country to you, I have a bridge for sale.
but as far your critisisms of Israel policy and 'undemocratic' and 'illiberal' stances
and actions.
well guess what
You're missing the thrust of Giraldi's position. Israel can do whatever it likes as long
as it doesn't entangle the US in their fight. But, as you well know, Israel is not interested
in fighting this fight alone. It has dragged others into it, including the US. As long as the
American taxpayer is forced to pay an annual tribute of ~$4B, they have every right to
condemn Israeli policies that clearly don't align with their values. So, get used to it.
Israel is no friend of America , never was , never has been and never will be, and just a few
examples, JFK was shot and killed in full view of Americans for his executive order 11110
which would have restored America to constitutional money bypassing the FED, who benefits?
The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel killing 34 and wounding 174 in an attempt to blame
the attack on Egypt and bring the U.S. into the war against Egypt and of course Israel lied
about the attack and got away with it!
... ... ...
Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
You have to hand it to the Israelis for conquering like Romans.
As for the US in Syria, it has always had the potential for handing us a "Charge of the
Light Brigade" moment where, like in the Crimean War, we manage to keep the Russians and the
Iranians checked in the region for a few years, but at a cost where even the dulled senses of
the US voter can't escape the toll taken to achieve this fleeting "strategic objective."
@bucky Aware,
Bucky said: "This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the
United States into a war with Iran."
Appreciate your posting of the wise sentences, above, bucky. Thanks.
Israel will never allow their territory expansion/M.E. hegemon goals to get interrupted by
mere U.S. elections.
The will and desires of American voters are easily manageable, manipulated, & another
major & fear-provoking "Homeland" False Flag attack, and voila, it's Fire & Fury upon
Syria and Iran.
Well, Israel itself isn't bad for us. Israel is a normal country defending its own
interests fiercely. Every country SHOULD defend its own interests fiercely
But it is HOW they defend those interests that is problematic. Hungary has insisted
that they will never tolerate a large number of migrants in their country. Hungary will be
for Hungarians. They do not wage wars, they do not commit ethnic cleansing in other people's
lands. They have merely closed their borders and that is a peaceful way in which they
fiercely protect their interests. The same goes for Japan. Despite a stagnating economy
caused by plummeting birth rates, the Japanese insist on a strict no immigrant policy. That
is a peaceful way of fiercely protecting their interests.
Israel on the other hand is anything but peaceful. They engage in ethnic cleansing and
drag the US (and whoever else they can con) into their conflicts. If we are looking for a
foreign example to emulate, there's no question about it – we should emulate Japan and
not Israel. Japan is a civilized nation where the people genuinely love their country. Israel
is a thuggish and fascist state that justly deserves all the opprobrium they shamelessly
whine about.
The level of alienation of Palestians probably reached that stage at which reconciliation is impossible.
Notable quotes:
"... This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the Palestinian issue that they created. ..."
The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve
the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned
up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.
A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining
Palestinians.
This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United
States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the
Palestinian issue that they created.
For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the
dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.
Aid to Palestinians: another $500 million.
Tax deductible funds going towards settlement expansion: several hundreds of million if
not billion.
Aid to Jordan. Aid to Lebanon.
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
@bucky It's more
that that, specifically to Izruel . If you include 'Non Governmental Agencies', the
'Charaties' and hedge funds funneling unknown amounts of ZOG bucks to the land of Zion plus
other underhanded methods of getting money to their Zionist bretheren, it's in the tens of
billions .
Other than
brain-dead Christian fundamentalist, it come's as no surprise that Jews who wrote the Old and
New Testament, granted themselves special permission to violate virtually every moral law and
restriction known to mankind, including the right to steal land and resources belonging to
others. While, at the same time, giving themselves the right to condemn anyone daring to
point-out their lying and deceptive ways.
Realist, January 1, 2019 at 7:44 pm GMT
@bucky
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
Middle East involvement costs trillions of dollars.
Neoliberal "helpers" from Harvard were dangerous and ruthless predators... And the whole help
now smell with CIA controlled operation for weakening and possibly dismembering Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, ..."
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA
and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be
dealt with.
The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking
them and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building
hostility against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western
people are being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie
with Russia and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A
war for our hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war
against Russia is a vital necessity.
It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population
had chosen Trump for that reason.
You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip
on the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to
face very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless
or poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential
threat.
Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember
their situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.
The Chicago boys were telling the Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made
out of the word democrat a synonym of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a
disaster. Then, they woke up and started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of
democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky (?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in
Russia he stole something like Rosneft. This guy and others of the same sort were described
in the west as heroes, pioneers and so on. They were put back into submission to the law. The
western silence about their stealing, lies and cheating is still deafening me.
It was the first Russian crime. The second one was to survive the first batch of sanctions
against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions). They not only survived they thrived. It
was against the western leading economic ideology. A third crime was to push back Saakachvili
and his troops with success.
The fourth was to put back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world
politics and history. They were not following the script written for them in Washington and
Brussels. They were having a political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst
of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making
it.
More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying
questions (western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of
journalism - remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why -
very curious to discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the
other side their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel
bored reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his
salary was decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready.
They had to fight it.
It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside
their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a
crime of treason to them in war time.
I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds.
I do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness
because those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the
consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless
and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a
very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the
immediate and maximal profit.
You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet. That country must not
be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of
Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin,
stopped the looting .........connect the dots.
"... They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Donald Trump is Bad for Israel ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
American journalism has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and
out-and-out lies. The public, though poorly informed on most issues as a result, has generally
figured out that it is being hoodwinked and trust in the Fourth Estate has plummeted over the
past twenty years. The skepticism about what is being reported has enabled President Donald
Trump and other politicians to evade serious questions about policy by claiming that what is
being reported is little more than "fake news."
No news is more fake than the reporting in the U.S. media that relates to the state of
Israel. Former Illinois congressman Paul Findley in his
seminal bookThey Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's
Lobby observed that nearly all the foreign press correspondents working out of Israel are
Jewish while most of the editors that they report to at news desks are also Jews, guaranteeing
that the articles that eventually surface in the newspapers will be carefully constructed to
minimize any criticism of the Jewish state. The same goes for television news, particularly on
cable news stations like CNN.
A particularly galling aspect of the sanitization of news reports regarding Israel is the
underlying assumption that Israelis share American values and interests, to include freedom and
democracy. This leads to the perception that Israelis are just like Americans with Israel's
enemies being America's enemies. Given that, it is natural to believe that the United States
and Israel are permanent allies and friends and that it is in the U.S. interest to do whatever
is necessary to support Israel, including providing billions of dollars in aid to a country
that is already wealthy as well as unlimited political cover in international bodies like the
United Nations.
That bogus but nevertheless seemingly eternal bond is essentially the point from which a
December 26 th op-ed in The New York Times departs. The piece is by one of
the Times' resident opinion writers Bret Stephens and is entitled
Donald Trump is Bad for Israel .
Stephens gets to the point rather quickly, claiming that "The president has abruptly
undermined Israel's security following a phone call with an Islamist strongman in Turkey. So
much for the idea, common on the right, that this is the most pro-Israel administration ever. I
write this as someone who supported Trump moving
the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who praised his decision to
withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal as courageous
and correct . I also would have opposed the president's decision to remove U.S. forces from
Syria under nearly any circumstances. Contrary to the invidious myth that
neoconservatives always put Israel first, the reasons for staying in Syria have everything to
do with core U.S. interests. Among them: Keeping ISIS beaten, keeping faith with the Kurds,
maintaining leverage in Syria and preventing Russia and Iran from consolidating their grip on
the Levant."
The beauty of Stephens overwrought prose is that the careful reader might realize from the
git-go that the argument being promoted makes no sense. Bret has a big heart for the Kurds but
the Palestinians are invisible in his piece while his knowledge of other developments in the
Middle East is superficial. First of all, the phone call with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan had nothing to do with "undermining Israel's security." It concerned the northern
border of Syria, which Turkey shares, and arrangements for working with the Kurds, which is a
vital interest for both Ankara and Washington. And it might be added that from a U.S. national
security point of view Turkey is an essential partner for the United States in the region while
Israel is not, no matter what it pretends to be.
Stephens then goes on to demonstrate what he claims to be a libel, that for him and other
neocons Israel always comes first, an odd assertion given the fact that he spends 80% of his
article discussing what is or isn't good for Israel. He supports the U.S. Embassy move to
Jerusalem, the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, both of which were applauded in Israel
but which are extremely damaging to American interests. He attacks the planned withdrawal from
Syria because it is a "core interest" for the U.S., which is complete nonsense.
Contrary to Stephens' no evidence assertion, Russia and Iran have neither the resources nor
the desire to "consolidate[e] their grip on the Levant" while it is the United States has no
right and no real interest to "maintain leverage" on Syria by invading and occupying the
country. But, of course, invading and occupying are practices that Israel is good at, so
Stephens' brain fart on the issue can perhaps be attributed to confusion over whose bad
policies he was defending. Stephens also demonstrate confusion over his insistence that the
U.S. must "resist foreign aggressors the Russians and Iranians in Syria in this decade,"
suggesting that he is unaware that both nations are providing assistance at the request of the
legitimate government in Damascus. It is the U.S. and Israel that are the aggressors in
Syria.
Stephens then looks at the situation from the "Israeli standpoint," which is presumably is
easy for him to do as that is how he looks at everything given the fact that he is far more
concerned about Israel's interests than those of the United States. Indeed, all of his opinions
are based on the assumption that U.S. policy should be supportive of a rightwing Israeli
government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has recently been indicted for
corruption and has called for an early election to subvert the process.
Bret finally comes to the point, writing that "What Israel most needs from the U.S. today is
what it needed at its birth in 1948: an America committed to defending the
liberal-international order against totalitarian enemies, as opposed to one that conducts a
purely transactional foreign policy based on the needs of the moment or the whims of a
president."
Stephens then expands on what it means to be liberal-international: "It means we should
oppose militant religious fundamentalism, whether it is Wahhabis in Riyadh or Khomeinists in
Tehran or Muslim Brothers in Cairo and Ankara. It means we should advocate human rights, civil
liberties, and democratic institutions, in that order."
Bret also throws America's two most recent presidents under the bus in his jeremiad, saying
"During the eight years of the Obama presidency, I thought U.S. policy toward Israel --
the
hectoring , the incompetent
diplomatic interventions , the moral
equivocations , the
Iran deal , the backstabbing at the
U.N. -- couldn't get worse. As with so much else, Donald Trump succeeds in making his
predecessors look good." He then asks "Is any of this good for Israel?" and he answers
"no."
Bret Stephens in his complaining reveals himself to be undeniably all about Israel, but
consider what he is actually saying. He claims to be against "militant religious
fundamentalism," but isn't that what Israeli Zionism is all about, with more than a dash of
racism and fanaticism thrown in for good measure? One Israeli Chief Rabbi has called black
people "monkeys" while another
has declared that gentiles cannot live in Israel. Right-wing religious fundamentalist
parties currently are in power with Netanyahu and are policy making for the Israeli Government:
Shas, Jewish Home, and United Torah Judaism. None of them could be regarded as a moderating
influence on their thuggish serial financial lawbreaker Prime Minister.
And isn't Israel's record on human rights and civil liberties among the worst in the world?
Here is the Human Rights Watch's assessment of Israel :
"Israel maintains entrenched discriminatory systems that treat Palestinians unequally. Its
50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza involves systematic rights abuses, including
collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force, and prolonged administrative
detention without charge or trial for hundreds. It builds and supports illegal settlements in
the occupied West Bank, expropriating Palestinian land and imposing burdens on Palestinians
but not on settlers, restricting their access to basic services and making it nearly
impossible for them to build in much of the West Bank without risking demolition. Israel's
decade-long closure of Gaza, supported by Egypt, severely restricts the movement of people
and goods, with devastating humanitarian impact."
Israel, if one is considering the entire population under its rule, is among the most
undemocratic states that chooses to call itself democratic. Much of the population living in
lands that Israel claims cannot vote, they have no freedom of movement in their homeland, and
they have no right of return to homes that they were forced to abandon. Israeli army snipers
blithely shoot unarmed demonstrators while Netanyahu's government kills, beats and imprisons
children. And the Jewish state does not even operate very democratically even inside Israel
itself, with special rights for Jewish citizens and areas and whole towns where Muslims or
Christians are not allowed to buy property or reside.
It is time for American Jews like Bret Stephens to come to the realization that not
everything that is good for Israel is good for the U.S. The strategic interests of the two
countries, if they were openly discussed in either the media or in congress, would be seen to
be often in direct conflict. Somehow in Stephens' twisted mind the 1948 theft of Palestinian
lands and the imposition of an apartheid system to control the people is in some way
representative of a liberal world order.
If one were to suggest that Stephens should move to Israel since his primary loyalty clearly
lies there, there would be accusations of anti-Semitism, but in a sense, it is far better to
have him stick around blathering from the pulpit of The New York Times . When he
writes so ineptly about how Donald Trump Is Bad for Israel the real message that comes through
loud and clear is how bad Israel is for America.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected].
"... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
"... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
"... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
"... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
"... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
"... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
"... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
"... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
"... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
"... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
"... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
"... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
"... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
"... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
"... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancι system won't changeit just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
"... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses
"A Foreign-Policy Problem
No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon
himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and
David Brooks lamenting the decline of
American power.
In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David
Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have
been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..
I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to
emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance
of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence
of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.
At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar
writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of
Amos Elon's
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World
War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves
blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.
This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers.
(Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that,
driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging
that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves
into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie
fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated
the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .
Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so
much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else
to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed
their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders
like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles]
Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.
Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't
touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism
in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one
speaks about.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm
"Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position
by changing their neighbours".
The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth.
For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to
grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to
prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.
Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never,
I guess.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm
P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that
I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11,
which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that
wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.
Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s,
using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.
Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.
Finally, talking about Israel which Sleeper ignored and the hardline positions that the political class in America have
adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes,
they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.
But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.
Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater
role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of
'48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective
Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.
And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war
would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still
have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
I also think that's an oversimplification.
But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons
is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting
the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.
Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm
There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling
out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically
talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.
Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm
"some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"
Have to take issue with that the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to
their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.
Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am
@ Bumblebye
Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves,
despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior
officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat
troops.
It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been
able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated
and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts,
and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.
Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm
PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little
difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which
are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.
The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's
emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.
Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal
emphasis on an American dominated global empire.
So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a
system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of
corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting
topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence
of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that
10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with
them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the
same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over the
Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself
is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political
movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands
of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished
during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify
with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
(I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine
than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)
I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was
highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these
links:
" and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>
Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst,
the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.
That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.
And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have
the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.
As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO.
Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary
on this did not help your analysis and its conclusion.
There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism
"in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.
Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment?
Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.
And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering
sanctions on Russia.
Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.
Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores
in the US Congress.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes
that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition
with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on
the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over
the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel
itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support
the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed
many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those
left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any
of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their
freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.
What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that
one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify
with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government.
You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of
the Bandera organization.
Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan?
It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre
was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were
later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day
displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.
Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were
almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed.
Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.
Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this
is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia.
Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic
for that government.
Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate.
Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.
If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion
and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia
and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.
My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to
allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.
But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.
Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US
between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that
experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine
as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws
family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?
ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust
him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that
expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with
the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists
today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.
But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for
freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic,
but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian
foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)
Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the
past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists
are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the
Ukrainian desire for freedom.
What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding
to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?
(I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification
what the US is doing.
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play
the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does
not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to
do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let
the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"
The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that
embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop,
confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have
us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock
it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.
Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully
through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national
security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This
meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily
the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want
to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam
and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.
The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be
to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater
Israel line.
Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily
involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country.
They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to
get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend
and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed
at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note
my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible
for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided
in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.
The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future.
It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to
continue running with the Neocons.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.
What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't
offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened
to "totally obliterate" Iran.
What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .
But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.
"I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who
reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."
@ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"
Strange
"state into the Armageddon .. "
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to
play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "
Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.
" (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they
want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act
like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper
does not say that."
You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".
BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere
I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.
Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on
the left of most foreign policy positions.
Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time
was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all
middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet
they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.
But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct
from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?
Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from
hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.
Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the
onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.
@ lysias
Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has
said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to
cut off any aid to Israel.
Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will
not change because US political campaign fiancι system won't changeit just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.
The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly
paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.
But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist
tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"
But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it
here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence
of the manifest destiny.
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighborthe equivalency of mass murderthe impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle
for access to the basics
... ... ...
The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of
our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access
to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing
just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality
or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even
guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more
to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring
an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then
maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its
day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees.
Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying
their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend
a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser.
It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's
been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some
light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42
We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always
choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in
each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19
Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet
given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through
their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10
Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic
systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not
having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy,
nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work
doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations.
I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial.
We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power,
we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we
need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think
it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism.
It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
AmyInNH -> tommydog
They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have
many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations
can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based
green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment
insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the
fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.
No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion
that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The
linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college
graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed
stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero,
as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever),
and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to
racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college
graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing
jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become
homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white
ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply
not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where
I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want,
but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling
to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed
oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of
economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that
blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have
enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit
of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no
reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless
or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many
of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23
I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of
the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly
supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until
we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What
does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization
of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill
others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power
is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability,
while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society.
A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice
prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few,
as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt,
and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the
people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15
You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side
of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly
isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53
Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out
your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension
fund go?
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government
also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighborthe equivalency
of mass murderthe impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by
the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership
class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument
that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building
within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power
(power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited
from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies
and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules policy changes they've used their
wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician
and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the
rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs,
like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely
on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and
for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through
the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule,
as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans
own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent
of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious
value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive
assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs
and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will
continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive
capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages
and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent
majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy
is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic
growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives
are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP
class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have
on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP
universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed
in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American
economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital
asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive
opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in
the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists
are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I
would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their
kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does
seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty
and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion
of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a
wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the
wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you
are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and
rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive
taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater
equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and
they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone
else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied
externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually
read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their
local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as
a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together
and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans
and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the
United States". That means that 100 families most of whom are white have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking
around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino
population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more
money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300
to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans
to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people
and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted
with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on
their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the
17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next
in line."
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported
by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted
from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but
much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow
(miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting
pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for
their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say,
"life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender
or both.
Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally
enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most
in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these
facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means
capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that
ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various
institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially
recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just
mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME,
unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed
to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to
office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder:
If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again,
if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block,
often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary
changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk
about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it
has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism
by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal
contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08
Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might
find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere
in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that
you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have
a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt
to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to
qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state
that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage
of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your
employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but
you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that
toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap
pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really
live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08
The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by
Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term,
O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and
distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help
put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism.
Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40
So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those
who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap
if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions,
for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist
societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus
value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't
an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were
won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements
to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful
beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even
permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to
the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic
systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via
the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity
or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation
if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to
favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't
end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure
would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this.
If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no
one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption
of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society -
one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two
tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong
to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships
across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated
capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published
in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written
by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones
and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16
Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making
profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery
by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction
is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as
the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12
I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate
that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about
it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study
for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make
it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12
As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national
and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have
nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the
same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from
their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments
to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or
credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1
vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful
and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that
capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42
"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not
have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal
government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow
on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free
to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism
eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording
device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record
it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in
the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers
(44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households
in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a
voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only
the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove
the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's
first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.
In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA
had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's
accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later
Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor
Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to
attack the US.
The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team
B caused.
Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low
yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia
of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating
former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a
convincing case that Washington is asking for war.
I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward
Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring
us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless
repetition."
Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the
Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of
cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.
The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media
and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media
to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful
use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo
Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.
The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential
election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential
election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.
Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies,
and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on
grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three
decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.
I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people
who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.
As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were
independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation
could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.
If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying
to lift, read his book.
If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts
of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.
If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom
truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.
If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.
It is very interesting and educational to read this pre-election article two years later and see where the author is
right and where he is wrong. The death of neoliberalism was greatly exaggerated. It simply mutated in the USA into "national
neoliberalism" under Trump. As no clear alternative exists it remain the dominant ideology and universities still
brainwash students with neoclassical economics. And in way catchy slogan "Make America great again" under Trump
means "Make American working and lower middle class great again"
It is also clear that Trump betrayed or was forced to betray most of his election promises. Standrd of living of common
americans did not improve under his watch. most of hi benefits of his tax cuts went to large corporations and financial
oligarch. He continued the policy of financial deregulation, which is tantamount of playing with open fire trying to
warm up the house
What we see under Trump is tremendous growth of political role of intelligence agencies which now are real kingmakers and can
sink any candidate which does not support their agenda. And USA intelligence agencies operated in 2016 in close cooperation
with the UK intelligence agencies to the extent that it is not clear who has the lead in creating Steele dossier. They are
definitely out of control of executive branch and play their own game. We also see a rise of CIA democrats as a desperate
attempt to preserve the power of Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ('soft neoliberals" turned under Hillary into into warmongers
and neocons) . Hillary and Bill themselves clearly belong to CIA democrats too, not only to Wall Street democrats, despite the fact
that they sold Democratic Party to Wall Street in the past. New Labor in UK did the same.
But if it is more or less clear now what happened in the USa in 2016-2018, it is completely unclear what will happen next.
I think in no way neoliberalism will start to be dismantled. there is no social forces powerful enough to start this job, We
probably need another financial crisi of the scale of 2008 for this work to be reluctantly started by ruling
elite. And we better not to have this repetition of 2008 as it will be really devastating for common people.
Notable quotes:
"... the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion. ..."
"... It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present. ..."
"... In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years . ..."
"... On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. ..."
"... As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable. ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both. ..."
"... According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. ..."
"... The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement. ..."
"... Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation . ..."
"... those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s. ..."
In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues
that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?
The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The
crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks
were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour
was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary
policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade,
with no end in sight.
After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism
manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic
disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left
had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic
in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic.
But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and
business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters
of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the
political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It
marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.
But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial
crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the
late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services
and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby
creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned
as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye
turned to corporate evasion.
It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic
period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism,
when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this
had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue
on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that
is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long;
the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.
But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced
very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income
while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than
it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has
stagnated for over 30 years .
A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average,
between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real
incomes between 2005 and 2014.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against
labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded,
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the
Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions;
the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine
the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of
countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late
70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none.
As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by
the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat
denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent
essay
in Foreign Affairs : "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens
that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is
generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s.
Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left
behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which
they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing
elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly
remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans
described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup
poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat
in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment.
The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.
The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labor movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US
and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain.
The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as
an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Indeed, Ukip has been as important in the form of immigration and Europe in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party.
In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the
former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of
politics.
The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly
strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done
better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely
one of secular stagnation .
Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well
beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced
in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse
off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate they
are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes,
just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.
A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the
mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western
financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States,
with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty's
Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of
Tony Atkinson
and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK,
Ha-Joon Chang , for long isolated within the economics
profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.
Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial
Times 's Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals
and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognize that we are at
the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC's Today programme, in the rightwing
press or the parliamentary Labor party.
Following Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of
Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election.
The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the
zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete
break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment
is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme
forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.
But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman , what is the point of a social democratic party if
it doesn't represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically
they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his
reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of
New Labour.
The rival contenders Burnham, Cooper and Kendall represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60%
of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian
leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the
reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried with might and main to remove Corbyn.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end
of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour,
had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour
turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an
authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also
his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand
the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political
environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of
a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party
is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning
away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which
countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness
to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world,
where are they going to turn?
Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.
Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere,
Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination
and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes
that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest
around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened
the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP
and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His appeal, above all, is to the white working
class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the
1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been
neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich
and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival
of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by
Bernie Sanders , who ran Hillary Clinton extremely
close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively
chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long
supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and
the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed
since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal "Make America great again" is his position on foreign policy. He believes that
America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is unfair,
with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's
European members as prime examples. He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting
the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure.
Trump's position
represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation
ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments
must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left.
He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump's appeal is to a
white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful
towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.
A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness
and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose
45%
tariffs on China , if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era
of protectionism.
Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not
mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much
else will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the
nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining
ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our
own national problems". And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.
"... The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe ..."
"... The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask. ..."
"... Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. ..."
"... Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised. ..."
"... Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. ..."
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is
created and distributed around the globe
Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT First published on Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT
The IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's
fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Boris Roessler/DPA FILE T he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some
of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the 130bn first bailout of Greece was
"bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived
happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in
"the Troika" the European Commission and the European Central Bank when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF,
put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with
horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes
no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity",
have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be
coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge
is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more
quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have
been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment",
as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course,
its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the
Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless,
to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves
and anyone else who will listen that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial
and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules,
and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments
have been obliged to limit their activities yet further some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task,
supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market a group of consumers and the more sophisticated
the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured,
law-abiding and financially secure people people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material
aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal
idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to
food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up
bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have
to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon
and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they
avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder
value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them
for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister,
Anna Soubry
, suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The
compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they
all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time thus having the leisure
to consume the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors
that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism
is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily ecstatically tell you that there's nothing more important
than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up.
It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima
facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not as it is so often presented evidence
that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services that Britain
enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all
else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things
have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone
is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who
came up with that theory , did not agree
that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal
allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their
folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead
of waking up, smelling the coffee and realizing that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
"... I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or "liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector. ..."
"... Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this project is "outsourcing". ..."
"... As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next rent-seeking opportunity. ..."
"... In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus". And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!") fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions. ..."
"... And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty - inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs. ..."
"... "Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition that occurs is not for price but for profit. ..."
"... We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists, when the "leader" knows everything? ..."
"... There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress', between wars, it seems. ..."
"... Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted') deep in the heart of economics. ..."
"... In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet few social justice advocates have heard of it. ..."
"... George gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living memory, by the modern aristocracy. ..."
"... In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the living world on which s/he depends. ..."
I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or
"liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project
more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an
authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and
inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long
debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the
energy sector.
Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this
project is "outsourcing". If you've had a look at The Canberra Times over the last couple of
weeks there have been quite a few articles about outsourcing parts of Medicare and Centrelink, using labour hire companies and so on – is this part of a current LNP plan
to "sell off" parts of the government before Labour takes the reins in May?
As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and
financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next
rent-seeking opportunity.
Neoliberalism "dead"?
I think not.
It is riveted on the country like a straitjacket.
Which is exactly what it was always intended to be, a system gamed and rigged to ensure the
wage-earning scum obtain progressively less and less of the country's productive wealth,
however much they contributed to it.
The wage theft and exploitation Neoliberalism fosters has become the new norm.
Neoliberal idealogues thickly infest Federal and State Treasuries.
In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic
pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus".
And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!")
fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as
IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions.
The IPA itself has moles in govt at every level--even in your local Council.
Certainly in ours.
Neoliberalism is "dead"?
Correction.
Neoliberalism is alive, thriving---and quick to ensure its glaring deficiencies and
inequities are solely attributable to its opponents. Now THERE'S a surprise.....
Agree! And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology
about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty -
inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts
to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs.
Neoliberalism will not be dead until the underpinning of neoliberalism is abandoned by ALP
and Greens. That underpinning is their mindless attachment to "budget repair" and "return to
surplus". The federal government's "budget" is nothing like a currency user's budget.
Currency users collect in order to spend whereas every dollar spent by the federal government
is a new dollar and every dollar taxed by the federal government is an ex-dollar. A currency
cannot sensibly have "debt" in the currency that it issues and no amount of surplus or
deficit now will enhance or impair its capacity to spend in future. A currency issuer does
not need an electronic piggybank, or a Future Fund, or a Drought Relief Fund. It can't max
out an imaginary credit card. It's "borrowing" is just an exchange of its termless no-coupon
liabilities (currency) for term-limited coupon-bearing liabilities (bonds). The federal
budget balance is no rational indicator of any need for austerity or for stimulus. The
rational indicators are unemployment (too small a "deficit"/too large a surplus) and
inflation (too large a "deficit"/too small a "surplus"). Federal taxation is where dollars go
to die. It doesn't "fund" a currency issuer's spending - it is there to stop the dollars it
issues from piling up and causing inflation and to make room for spending by democratically
elected federal parliament. The name of the game is to balance the economy, not the entirely
notional and fundamentally irrelevant "budget".
"Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do
their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even
where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition
that occurs is not for price but for profit.
And changing the electoral system? Yes indeed. After years of observation it seems to me
that the problem with our politics is not individual politicians (although there are notable
exceptions) but political parties. Rigid control of policies and voting on party instruction
(even by the Greens) makes the proceedings of parliament a complete waste of time. If every
policy had to run the gauntlet of 150 people all voting by their conscience we would have
better policy. The executive functions could be carried out by a cabinet also elected from
those members. But not going to happen - too many vested interests in the parties and their
corporate sponsors.
With the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil (even though nearly 30% of electors refused to vote)
it may be a little presumptuous to dissect the dead corpse of neoliberalism, as Richard
Denniss' hopes that we can.
What is absolutely gob-smacking is that Brazilians voted for him; a man that Glenn Greenwald
describes as "far more dangerous than Trump" , that Bolsonaro envisages military
dictatorships as "being a far more superior form of government" advocating a civil war
in order to dispose of the left.
Furthermore, the election of this far-right neoliberal extremist also threatens the Amazon
forest and its indigenous people; with a global impact that will render combatting climate
change even more difficult.
Locally, recent Liberal Party battles over leadership have included the neolib factor, as the
lunatic right in that party - who I suspect would all love to be a Bolsonaro themselves -
aggressively activate their grumblings and dissension.
Oh, Richard how I wish you were right; but in the Victorian election campaign - currently
underway - I have seen Socialist candidates behaving in a manner that doesn't garner hope in
a different way of doing politics.
The fact that 'our' democracy is based on an adversarial, partisan system leaves me with
little hope.
Alain Badiou wrote that "ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial
conservatism using democratic phraseology" ; and until that imposition is discarded 'our'
democracy will remain whatever we are told it is, and neolibs will continue to shove their
bullshit down our throats as much as they can.
We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new
adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to
Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South
Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus
infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists,
when the "leader" knows everything?
Have the people of the world abrogated their democratic responsibility?
Or is it the gerrymandering chicanery of US Republican backers/politicians( so long as you
control the voting machines ) that have sent the ugly message to the world, Power is yours
for the making and taking by any means that ignores the public's rights in the decision
making process. Has the "neo-liberal" world delivered a corrupted system of democracy that
has deliberately alienated the world's population from actively participating fully in the
full awareness that their vote counts and will be counted?
Do we need to take back the controls of democracy to ensure that it is the will of the
people and not a manipulation by vested interest groups/individuals? You're darn
tootin'!!!
A thoughtful piece. Thanks. There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which
have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary
relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress',
between wars, it seems.
Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the
latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual
origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone
wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted')
deep in the heart of economics.
Instead of trying to understand Neo-Classical Economics it is perhaps more instructive to
understand what it was built, layer by layer, to obscure. First the Land system, then the
Wealth system, and finally the Money system (hived off into a compartment - 'macroeconomics').
Importantly, three entirely different categories of "thing" .
In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world
by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only
published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet
few social justice advocates have heard of it.
George set out to discover why the worst poverty always seemed to accompany the most
progress. By chasing down the production process to its ends, and tracing where the proceeds
were going, he succeeded spectacularly. From Progress and Poverty , Chapter 17 - "The Problem Explained"
:
Three things unite in production: land, labor, and capital. Three parties divide the
output: landowner, laborer, and capitalist. If the laborer and capitalist get no more as
production increases, it is a necessary inference that the landowner takes the gain.
George
gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic
history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living
memory, by the modern aristocracy.
In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity
from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical
Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the
living world on which s/he depends.
Einstein was a fan of George, and used his methods of thought-experiment and powerful
inductive reasoning to discover Relativity, twenty years later. Henry Georges brilliant
insights into Land (aka nature), Wealth (what you want, need), and Money
(sharing mechanism) are as relevant as ever, and until they are rediscovered, we are likely
to re-run the 1900's over and over, with fewer and fewer resources.
"The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and
economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has
gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the
rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main
themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:
US imperial strategy as an outgrowth of British imperialism, and its transformation
following the collapse of the Soviet Union;
the significance of the creation of Israel with respect to the imperial
project;
the repositioning of Russia in world politics after the collapse of the Soviet
Union;
the emerging role of China and Iran in Eurasia;
the emerging opposition to the US and NATO.
This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding
from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great
Games"."
Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:
It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist
mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show
their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year
unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide
the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.
One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May's negotiations- the
"deal"- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit
may soon lie in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as
the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June
27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in
their own "Grexit" referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous
politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding
divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the
House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain. Brexit:
Theresa May Goes Greek! "deal" -- would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true
national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels. Brexit:
Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review
Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron's Brexit
vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU
by the Cons and "new" labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK
voter.
So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron the Cons New Labour
The Lib- Dems and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the
unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen . Brexit had passed by popular
vote!
David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.
After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit
would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to
read
Article 50 - the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was
very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an
article published four days after the night Brexit passed,
" A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," provided
anyone thus reading Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to
see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit.
Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along
with the other twenty-seven member nations and that effectively Ms May and her Tories
would be playing this game using the EU's ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven
during the negotiations.
In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than
ever.
Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and
then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very
publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest
to sleep in Cameron's now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out
to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by
Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review
So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on,
that "Brexit means Brexit!" A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help
her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of "old"
Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her "soft" Brexit negotiations for the
litany of failures that ultimately equaled the "deal" that was strangely still called
"Brexit."
Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their
colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee
hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would
begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.
What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would
also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own
government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the
New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel , the
quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their
phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British
press began their work as well.
Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley -
The Unz Review
This article by Brett Redmayne is certainly right re the horrific sell-out by the Greek
government of Tsipras the other year, that has left the Greek citizenry in enduring political
despair the betrayal of Greek voters indeed a model for UK betrayal of Brexit voters
But Redmayne is likely very mistaken in the adulation of Jeremy Corbyn as the 'genuine
real deal' for British people
Ample evidence points to Corbyn as Trojan horse sell-out, as covered by UK researcher
Aangirfan on her blogs, the most recent of which was just vapourised by Google in their
censorship insanity
Jeremy Corbyn was a childhood neighbour of the Rothschilds in Wiltshire; with Jeremy's
father David Corbyn working for ultra-powerful Victor Rothschild on secret UK gov scientific
projects during World War 2
Jeremy Corbyn is tied to child violation scandals & child-crime convicted individuals
including Corbyn's Constituency Agent; Corbyn tragically ignoring multiple earnest complaints
from child abuse victims & whistleblowers over years, whilst "child abuse rings were
operating within all 12 of the borough's children's homes" in Corbyn's district not very
decent of him
And of course Corbyn significantly cucked to the Israel lobby in their demands for purge
of the Labour party alleged 'anti-semites'
The Trojan Horse 'fake opposition', or fake 'advocate for the people', is a very classic
game of the Powers That Be, and sadly Corbyn is likely yet one more fake 'hero'
My theory is, give "capitalism" and financial interests enough time, they will consume any
democracy. Meaning: the wealth flows upwards, giving the top class opportunity to influence
politics and the media, further improving their situation v.s. the rest, resulting in ever
stronger position – until they hold all the power. Controlling the media and therefore
the narrative, capable to destroy any and all opposition. Ministers and members of
parliaments, most bought and paid for one way or the other. Thankfully, the 1% or rather the
0.1% don't always agree so the picture can be a bit blurred.
You can guess what country inspired this "theory" of mine. The second on the list is
actually the U.K. If a real socialist becomes the prime minister of the U.K. I will be very
surprised. But Brexit is a black swan like they say in the financial sector, and they tend to
disrupt even the best of theories. Perhaps Corbin is genuine and will become prime minister!
I am not holding my breath.
However, if he is a real socialist like the article claims. And he becomes prime minister
of the U.K the situation will get really interesting. Not only from the EU side but more
importantly from U.K. best friend – the U.S. Uncle Sam will not be happy about this
development and doesn't hesitate to crush "bad ideas" he doesn't like.
Case in point – Ireland's financial crisis in 2009;
After massive expansion and spectacular housing bubble the Irish banks were in deep
trouble early into the crisis. The EU, ECB and the IMF (troika?) met with the Irish
government to discuss solutions. From memory – the question was how to save the Irish
banks? They were close to agreement that bondholders and even lenders to the Irish banks
should take a "haircut" and the debt load should be cut down to manageable levels so the
banks could survive (perhaps Michael Hudson style if you will). One short phone call from
the U.S Secretary of the treasury then – Timothy Geithner – to the troika-Irish
meeting ended these plans. He said: there will be no haircut! That was the end of it.
Ireland survived but it's reasonable to assume this "guideline" paved the road for the
Greece debacle.
I believe Mr. Geithner spoke on behalf of the financial power controlling – more or
less-our hemisphere. So if the good old socialist Corbin comes to power in the U.K. and
intends to really change something and thereby set examples for other nations – he is
taking this power head on. I think in case of "no deal" the U.K. will have it's back against
the wall and it's bargaining position against the EU will depend a LOT on U.S. response. With
socialist in power there will be no meaningful support from the U.S. the powers that be will
to their best to destroy Corbin as soon as possible.
My right wing friends can't understand the biggest issue of our times is class war. This
article mentions the "Panama papers" where great many corporations and wealthy individuals
(even politicians) in my country were exposed. They run their profits through offshore tax
havens while using public infrastructure (paid for by taxpayers) to make their money. It's
estimated that wealth amounting to 1,5 times our GDP is stored in these accounts!
There is absolutely no way to get it through my right wing friends thick skull that
off-shore accounts are tax frauds. Resulting in they paying higher taxes off their wages
because the big corporations and the rich don't pay anything. Nope. They simply hate taxes
(even if they get plenty back in services) and therefore all taxes are bad. Ergo tax evasions
by the 1% are fine – socialism or immigrants must be the root of our problems.
MIGA!
Come to think of it – few of them would survive the "law of the jungle" they so much
desire. And none of them would survive the "law of the jungle" if the rules are stacked
against them. Still, all their political energy is aimed against the ideas and people that
struggle against such reality.
I give up – I will never understand the right. No more than the pure bread
communist. Hopeless ideas!
" This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs
Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an
outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the
most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is
the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate. "
Here I stopped reading, maybe later more.
Nonsense.
What USA MSM told in the USA about what ordinary British people said, those who wanted to
leave the EU, I do not know, one of the most often heard reasons was immigration, especially
from E European countries, the EU 'free movement of people'.
"Real' Britons refusing to live in Poland.
EP member Verhofstadt so desperate that he asked on CNN help by Trump to keep this 'one of
the four EU freedoms'.
This free movement of course was meant to destroy the nation states
What Boris Johnson said, many things he said were true, stupid EU interference for example
with products made in Britain, for the home market, (he mentioned forty labels in one piece
of clothing), no opportunity to seek trade without EU interference.
There was irritation about EU interference 'they even make rules about vacuum cleaners', and,
already long ago, closure, EU rules, of village petrol pumps that had been there since the
first cars appeared in Britain, too dangerous.
In France nonsensical EU rules are simply ignored, such as countryside private sewer
installations.
But the idea that GB could leave, even without Brussels obstruction, the customs union,
just politicians, and other nitwits in economy, could have such ideas.
Figures are just in my head, too lazy to check.
But British export to what remains of the EU, some € 60 billion, French export to GB,
same order of magnitude, German export to GB, far over 100 billion.
Did anyone imagine that Merkel could afford closing down a not negligible part of Bayern car
industry, at he same time Bayern being the Land most opposed to Merkel, immigration ?
This Brexit in my view is just the beginning of the end of the illusion EU falling
apart.
In politics anything is connected with anything.
Britons, again in my opinion, voted to leave because of immigration, inside EU
immigration.
What GB will do with Marrakech, I do not know.
Marrakech reminds me of many measures that were ready to be implemented when the reason to
make these measures no longer existed.
Such as Dutch job guarantees when enterprises merged, these became law when when the merger
idiocy was over.
The negative aspects of immigration now are clear to many in the countries with the imagined
flesh pots, one way or another authorities will be obliged to stop immigration, but at that
very moment migration rules, not legally binding, are presented.
As a Belgian political commentator said on Belgian tv 'no communication is possible
between French politicians and French yellow coat demonstrators, they live in completely
different worlds'.
These different worlds began, to pinpoint a year, in 2005, when the negative referenda about
the EU were ignored. As Farrage reminded after the Brexit referendum, in EP, you said 'they
do not know what they're doing'
But now Macron and his cronies do not know what to do, now that police sympathises with
yellow coat demonstrators.
For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance
cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.
@Digital
Samizdat Corbyn, in my opinion one of the many not too bright socialists, who are caught
in their own ideological prison: worldwide socialism is globalisation, globalisation took
power away from politicians, and gave it to multinationals and banks.
@niceland The
expression class war is often used without realising what the issue is, same with tax
evasion.
The rich of course consume more, however, there is a limit to what one can consume, it takes
time to squander money.
So the end of the class war may make the rich poor, but alas the poor hardly richer.
About tax evasion, some economist, do not remember his name, did not read the article
attentively, analysed wealth in the world, and concluded that eight % of this wealth had
originated in evading taxes.
Over what period this evasion had taken place, do not remember this economist had reached a
conclusion, but anyone understands that ending tax evasion will not make all poor rich.
There is quite another aspect of class war, evading taxes, wealth inequality, that is
quite worrying: the political power money can yield.
Soros is at war with Hungary, his Open University must leave Hungary.
USA MSM furious, some basic human right, or rights, have been violated, many in Brussels
furious, the 226 Soros followers among them, I suppose.
But since when is it allowed, legally and/or morally, to try to change the culture of a
country, in this case by a foreigner, just by pumping money into a country ?
Soros advertises himself as a philantropist, the Hungarian majority sees him as some kind of
imperialist, I suppose.
For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures
manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.
Well , I am reading " The occult renaissance church of Rome " by Michael Hoffman ,
Independent History and research . Coeur d`Alene , Idaho . http://www.RevisionistHistory.org
I saw about this book in this Unz web .
I used to think than the rot started with protestantism , but Hoffman says it started with
catholic Renaissance in Rome itself in the XV century , the Medici , the Popes , usury
This whole affair illustrates beautifully the real purpose of the sham laughingly known as
"representative democracy," namely, not to "empower" the public but to deprive it of
its power.
With modern means of communication, direct democracy would be technically feasible even in
large countries. Nevertheless, practically all "democratic" countries continue to delegate
all legislative powers to elected "representatives." These are nothing more than consenting
hostages of those with the real power, who control and at the same time hide behind those
"representatives." The more this becomes obvious, the lower the calibre of the people willing
to be used in this manner – hence, the current crop of mental gnomes and opportunist
shills in European politics.
I would only shout this rambling ignoramus a beer in the pub to stop his mouth for a while.
Some of his egregious errors have been noted. and Greece, anyway, is an irrelevance to the
critical decisions on Brexit.
Once Article 50 was invoked the game was over. All the trump cards were on the EU side.
Now we know that, even assuming Britain could muster a competent team to plan and negotiate
for Brexit that all the work of proving up the case and negotiating or preparing the ground
has to be done over years leading up to the triggering of Article 50. And that's assuming
that recent events leave you believing that the once great Britain is fit to be a sovereign
nation without adult supervision.
As it is one has to hope that Britain will not be constrained by the total humbug which
says that a 51 per cent vote of those choosing to vote in that very un British thing, a
referendum, is some sort of reason for not giving effect to a more up to date and better
informed view.
@Digital
Samizdat Hypothesis: The British masses would fare better without a privatized
government.
"Corbyn may prove to be real .. .. old-time Labour platform [leadership, capable to]..
return [political, social and financial] control back to the hands of the UK worker".. [but
the privateers will use the government itself and mass media to defeat such platforms and to
suppress labor with new laws and domestic armed warfare]. Why would a member of the British
masses allow [the Oligarch elite and the[ir] powerful business and foreign political
interests restrain democracy and waste the victims of privately owned automation revolution?
.. ..
[Corbyn's Labour platform challenges ] privatized capitalist because the PCs use the
British government to keep imprisoned in propaganda and suppressed in opportunity, the
masses. The privateers made wealthy by their monopolies, are using their resources to
maintain rule making and enforcement control (via the government) over the masses; such
privateers have looted the government, and taken by privatization a vast array of economic
monopolies that once belonged to the government. If the British government survives, the
Privateers (monopoly thieves) will continue to use the government to replace humanity, in
favor of corporate owned Robots and super capable algorithms.
Corbyn's threat to use government to represent the masses and to suppress or reduce
asymmetric power and wealth, and to provide sufficient for everyone extends to, and alerts
the masses in every capitalist dominated place in the world. He (Corbyn) is a very dangerous
man, so too was Jesus Christ."
There is a similar call in France, but it is not yet so well led.
Every working Dutch person is "owed" 50k euro from the bailout of Greece, not that Greece
will ever pay this back, and not as if Greece ever really got the money as it just went
straight to northern European banks to bail them out. Then we have the fiscal policy creating
more money by the day to stimulate the economy, which also doesn't reach the countries or
people just the banks. Then we have the flirting with East-European mobsters to pull them in
the EU sphere corrupting top EU bureaucrats. Then we have all of south Europe being extremely
unstable, including France, both its populations and its economy.
It's sad to see the British government doesn't see the disaster ahead, any price would be
cheaper then future forced EU integration. And especially at this point, the EU is so
unstable, that they can't go to war on the UK without also committing A kamikaze attack.
@Brabantian
Thank you for your comment and addition to my evaluation of Corbyn. I do agree with you that
Corbyn has yet to be tested for sincerity and effectiveness as PM, but he will likely get his
chance and only then will we and the Brits find out for sure. The main point I was hoping to
make was that: due to the perceived threat of Labour socialist reform under Corbyn, he has
been an ulterior motive in the negotiations and another reason that the EU wants PM May to
get her deal passed. Yes, I too am watching Corbyn with jaundiced optimism. Thank you.
"... The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.) ..."
"... Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either. ..."
"... American Jewish Committee ..."
"... Contemporary Jewish Record ..."
"... If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying . And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren ..."
"... Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech. ..."
"... believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. ..."
"... nations derive their strength from their myths , which are necessary for government and governance. ..."
"... national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate . ..."
"... to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil ; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. ..."
"... deception is the norm in political life ..."
"... Office of Special Plans ..."
"... The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy. ..."
"... the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you) ..."
"... the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another) ..."
"... General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran". ..."
"... Among them are brilliant strategists ..."
"... They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others. ..."
"... They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy ..."
"... They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government. ..."
Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the
deep state, that addresses the question of
"Who Are The Neoconservatives."
If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners
of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.
First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put
on your thinking cap and don't react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or
a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture
and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the
KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.
My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became
convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different
from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating
from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level-i.e., not based in even the most
rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.
Who the hell are these people?!
Goyenot's main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):
1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power.
Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)
Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political
strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious
tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian
means.
This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It
is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement
to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.
Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable
label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives
do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together
either.
He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet
level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private
writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America's war policies are actually Israel's
war goals. (Examples provided.)
2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical
Zionists.
The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative")
Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of
the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee,
which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest
American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: "If there
is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism
is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find
horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born
among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants'
grandchildren".
3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level
Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest
on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great
admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely
effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his
thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.
Other major points:
believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved
for superior minds.
nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for
government and governance.
national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality:
they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate.
to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between
good and evil; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation.
As recognized by Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt in an article "Leo Strauss and the World
of Intelligence" (1999), for Strauss, "deception is the norm in political life"
the rule they [the Neocons] applied to fabricating the lie of weapons of mass destruction
by Saddam Hussein when working inside the Office of Special Plans.
George Bushes speech from the national cathedral after 9/11 exemplifies myth-making at its
finest: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world
of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful,
but fierce when stirred to anger. . . .[W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant
us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God
bless America.
4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the
Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.
the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you)
the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another)
the second coming of Christ myth
the establishment of God's Kingdom on Earth through global destruction/war (nuclear war for
the Glory of God)
[The]Pax Judaica will come only when "all the nations shall flow" to the Jerusalem
temple, from where "shall go forth the law" (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world
order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative
circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant
King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around
a "theopolitical" project, one that would consider Israel "the key to the harmony of civilizations",
replacing the United Nations that's become a "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third
World dictatorships": "Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it
with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [...] We believe
that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make
it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace
and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets". Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit,
including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.
Jerusalem's dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet
Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight "all nations" allied
against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception
of Jerusalem, who "shall remain aloft upon its site" (14:10).
With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is
a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: "The United States
must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both
Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will
lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ".
And Guyenot concludes:
Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and
the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist
clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month
after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists
"that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then
Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran".
Is it just a coincidence that the "seven nations" doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of
the biblical myths? [W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than yourself
[ ] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them."
My summary:
We have a group that wishes greatly expanded power (to rule the world??)
Among them are brilliant strategists
They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is
founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others.
They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy
This is not a spiritual movement in any sense
They are utilizing religious myths and language to influence public thinking
They envision "winning" in the aftermath world war.
They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government.
"... What sticks in the neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses, and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow! ..."
"... Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church. ..."
"... when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s, that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy ..."
"... The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior. ..."
"... If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares about them. ..."
"... Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy, but I digress... ..."
"... There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years. ..."
"... I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy. Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove ..."
"... 97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries. ..."
"... The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's Income. ..."
"... To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around 250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with debt. ..."
This private good, public bad is a stupid idea, and a totally artificial divide. After all,
what are "public spends"? It is the money from private individuals, and companies,
clubbing together to get services they can't individually afford.
What sticks in the
neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses,
and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow!
Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it
will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required
to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or
Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because
that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and
it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be
made a fully fledged bastard.
Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a
neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot
be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self
serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.
It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In
the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the
century plague.
"Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has
won and countless people have gained as a result."
I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the
Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves with
working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action. Cuba has hung on because people
there compare themselves with their nearest capitalist neighbor Haiti and they don't want a
piece of that action. North Korea well North Korea is North Korea.
Isn't it this beneficial capitalism that is being threatened now though? When the wall
came down it was assumed that Eastern European countries would become more like us. Some have
but who would have thought that British working people would now be told, by the likes of
Kwasi Kwarteng and his Britannia Unchained chums, that we have to learn to accept working
conditions that are more like those in the Eastern European countries that got left behind
and that we are now told that our version of Capitalism is inferior to the version adopted by
the Communist Party of China?
@bullwinkle - No , when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s,
that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008.
Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs
with a veneer of democracy.
This type of government began in America about 150 years ago with the Rockefellers,
Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Ford etc who took advantage of new inventions, cheap immigrant labour
and financial deregulation in finance and social mores to amass wealth for themselves and
chaos and austerity for workers.
All this looks familiar again today with new and old oligarchs hiding behind large
corporations taking advantage of the invention of the €uro, mass immigration into
western Europe and deregulation of the financial "markets" and social mores to amass wealth
for a super-wealthy elite and chaos and austerity for workers.
So if we want to see where things went wrong we need only go back 150 years to what happened
to America. There we can also see our future?
The beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won
Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught
anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of
understanding.
especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and
countless people have gained as a result.
At one and the same time being privatized and having their funding squeezed, a direct
result of the neoliberal dogma capitalism of austerity. Free access is being eroded by the
likes of ever larger student loans and prescription costs for a start.
they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than
governments
Let's not get carried away here. Let's consider some of the things governments can do,
subject only to a 5 yearly check and challenge:
force people upon pain of imprisonment to pay taxes to them
pay out that tax money to whomever they like
spend money they don't have by borrowing against obligations imposed on future taxpayers
without their agreement
kill people in wars, often from the comfort of a computer screen thousands of miles
away
print money and give it to whomever they like,
get rid of nation state currencies and replace them with a single, centrally controlled
currency
make laws and punish people who break them, including the ability to track them down in
most places in the world if they try and run away.
use laws to create monopolies and favour special interests
Let's now consider what power apple have...
- they can make iPhones and try to sell them for a profit by responding to the demands of
the mass consumer market. That's it. In fact, they are forced to do this by their owners who
only want them to do this, and nothing else. If they don't do this they will cease to
exist.
The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good
for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more
shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior.
If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The
government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to
spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster
lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares
about them. Remember, that Green Energy is big business, just like Big Pharma and Big Oil.
Most government shills have personally invested in Green Energy not because they care about
the environment, only because they know that it is a safe investment protected by government
for government. The same goes for large corporations who befriend government and visa
versa.
@NeilThompson - It's all very well for Deborah to recommend that the well paid share work.
Journalists, consultants and other assorted professionals can afford to do so. As a
self-employed tradesman, I'd be homeless within a month.
@SpinningHugo - Interesting that those who are apparently concerned with prosperity for all
and international solidarity are happy to ignore the rest of the world when it's going well,
preferring to prophesy apocalypse when faced with government spending being slightly reduced
at home.
@1nn1t - That is a point which just isn't made enough. This is the first group of politicians
for whom a global conflict seems like a distant event.
As a result we have people like Blair who see nothing wrong with invading countries at a
whim, or conservatives and UKIP who fail to understand the whole point of the European Court
of Human Rights.
They seem to act without thought of our true place in the world, without regard for the
truly terrible capacity humanity has for self destruction.
Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is
somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy,
but I digress...
The main problem with replacing neoliberalism with a more rational, and fairer system,
entails that people like Deborah accept that they will be less wealthy. And that my friends is the main problem. People like Deborah, while they are more than
happy to point the fingers at others, are less than happy to accept that they are also part
of the problem.
(Generalisation Caveat: I don't know in actuality if Deborah would be unhappy to be less
wealthy in exchange for a fairer system, she doesn't say)
Good critique of conservative-neoliberalism, unless you subscribe to it and subordinate any
morals or other values to it.
She mentions an internal tension and I think that's because conservatism and neoliberal
market ideology are different beasts.
There are different models of capitalism quite clearly the social democratic version in
Scandinavia or the "Bismarkian" German version have worked a lot better than the UKs.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign
that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the
problem.
How is it a sign of that? We are offered no clues.
What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never
going to return;
Try reading a history of financial crashes to dislodge this idea.
... even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more
savagely.
This may or may not be true but here it is mere assertion.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at
governments that run up debt.
At this point I start to have real doubts as to whether Deborah Orr has actually read even
the Executive Summary of the Report this article is ostensibly a response to.
All the comments that follow about the need for public infrastructure, education,
regulated markets and so on are made as if they were a criticism of the IMF and yet the IMF
says many of those same things itself. The IMF position may, of course, be contradictory -
but then that is something that would need to be demonstrated. It seems that Deborah has not
got beyond reading a couple of Guardian articles on the issues she discusses and therefore is
in no position to do this.
Efforts are being made to narrow the skills gap with other countries in the region, as
the authorities look to take full advantage of Bangladesh's favorable demographics and help
create conditions for more labor-intensive led growth. The government is also scaling up
spending on education, science and technology, and information and communication
technology.
Which seems to be the sort of thing Deborah Orr is calling for. She should spend a little
time on the IMF website before criticising the institution. It is certainly one that merits
much criticism - but it needs to be informed.
And the solution to the problems? For Deborah Orr the response
... from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth
is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are certainly no leads on
this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray. And what a strange reference that is.
John Gray, in his usual cynical mode, dismisses the idea of progress being achieved by the
EU. But then I suppose that is consistent from a man who dismisses the idea of progress
itself.
... Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic.
The first step in serious political analysis is to understand that the people one opposes
are not crazy and are not devoid of logic. If that is not clearly understood then all that is
left is the confrontation of assertion and contrary assertion. Of course Conservative
neoliberalism has a logic. It is one I do not agree with but it is a logic all the same.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this [the need
for public investment and a recognition of the multiple roles that individuals have].
Wrong again.
It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a
market.
And again.
This stuff can't be made up as you go along on the basis of reading a couple of newspaper
articles. You actually have to do some hard reading to get to grip with the issues. I can see
no signs of that in this piece.
@NotAgainAgain - We are going off topic and that is in no small part down to my own fault, so
apologies. Just to pick up the point, I guess my unease with the likes of Buffet, Cooper-Hohn
or even the wealthy Guardian columnists is that they are criticizing the system from a
position of power and wealth.
So its easy to advocate change if you feel that you are in the vanguard of defining that
change i.e. the reforms you advocate may leave you worse off, but at a level you feel
comfortable with (the prime example always being Polly's deeply relaxed attitude to swingeing
income tax increases when her own lifestyle will be protected through wealth).
I guess I am a little skeptical because I either see it as managed decline, a smokescreen
or at worst mean spiritedness of people prepared to accept a reasonable degree of personal
pain if it means other people whom dislike suffer much greater pain.
"There is a clear legal basis in Germany for the workplace representation of employees in
all but the very smallest companies. Under the Works Constitution Act, first passed in 1952
and subsequently amended, most recently in 2001, a works council can be set up in all private
sector workplaces with at least five employees."
The UK needs to wake up to the fact that managers are sometimes inept or corrupt and will
destroy the companies they work for, unless their are adequate mechanisms to hold poor
management to account.
Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has
won
There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are
socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic
capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years.
I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy
of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain
infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy.
Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove, y'see.
@JamesValencia - Actually on reflection you are correct and I was wrong in my attack on the
author above. Having re-read the article its a critique of institutions rather than people so
my points were wide of the mark.
I still think that well heeled Guardian writers aren't really in a position to attack the
wealthy and politically connected, but I'll save that for a thread when they explicitly do
so, rather than the catch all genie of neoliberalism.
@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20
years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure
capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false
value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.
If the pure market is a fantasy, how can deregulated capitalism have failed? Does one not
require the other? Surely it is regulated capitalism that has failed?
97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the
banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let
the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries.
The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than
the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's
Income.
@1nn1t - Some good points, there is a whole swathe of low earners that should not be in the
tax system at all, simply letting them keep the money in their pocket would be a start.
Second the minimum wage (especially in the SE) is too low and should be increased.
Obviously the devil is in the detail as to the precise rate, the other issue is non
compliance as there will be any number of businesses that try and get around this, through
employing people too ignorant or scared to know any better or for family businesses - do we
have the stomach to enforce this?
Thirdly there is a widespread reluctance to separate people from the largesse of the
state, even at absurd levels of income such as higher rate payers (witness child tax
credits). On the right they see themselves as having paid in and so are "entitled" to have
something back and on the left it ensures that everyone has a vested interest in a big state
dipping it hands into your pockets one day and giving you something back the next.
@Uncertainty - Which is why the people of the planet need to join hands.
The only group of people in he UK to see that need were the generation that faced WW2
together.
It's no accident that, joining up at 18 in 1939, they had almost all retired by 1984.
To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around
250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to
the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with
debt.
It is entrapment which impoverishes nations into the surrender of sovereignty,
democracy and national pride. In no way should we contribute to such economic immorality and
the entire economic system based on perpetual growth fuelled by consumerism and debt needs
top be denounced and dismantled. The adverse social and environmental consequence of
perpetual growth defies all sensible logic and in time, in a more responsible and enlightened
era, growth will be condemned.
This is from 1999 and in 2018 we see that Mills was right.
Notable quotes:
"... Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. ..."
"... the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military. ..."
"... Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." ..."
"... In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States. ..."
"... The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. ..."
"... Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military ..."
"... Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former. ..."
"... Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. ..."
One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of
the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent
military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite
was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and
forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had
become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by
the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the
economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force.
Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference.
And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and
appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.
Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life
constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public
opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are
attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was
nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to
accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "
War or a high state of war
preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States,"
Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a
genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the
military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed
permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical,
and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.
Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the
military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most
congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government
spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which
manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms
market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die,
even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there
is no demonstrable military need for them.
Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America
plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster
its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the
possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either
refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the
lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of
communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to
mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential
investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the
United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.
The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a
dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time
Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and
consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those
proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three
million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that
number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that
both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more
dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.
And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American
life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever
they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their
employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice
between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always
choose the latter over the former.
Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in
American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now
it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with
economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own....
"... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
"... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
"... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
"... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
"... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
"... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
"... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
President Donald Trump's
recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign
policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision,
similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not
be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced
a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a
world power.
Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends
or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests.
It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests
of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi
Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader
of the free world."
Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the
three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual
American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that
sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible
danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy
tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.
The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...
... ... ...
All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one
works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive
debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on
deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where
none exists.
So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of
all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less
safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now
four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive
at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address
, counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington
might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment
of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary
common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former
into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly
for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street
has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth
and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And
If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's
benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money
back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying
the bloated budgets.
... ... ...
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected]
.
but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal
country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.
Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute
the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.
To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a
trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized
world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among
other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone
of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.
Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give
him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick
it in their face).
Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.
Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements.
Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller
just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.
1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.
2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples
who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.
The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out.
Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination.
When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.
What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons.
As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'.
No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost)
completely by internal politics.
This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half.
All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA.
Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.
What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole
war.
Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.
Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people.
British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet
members knew about it.
One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy,
at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep
State that then existed.
The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked.
The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position.
But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically
impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies
in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..
That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.
"The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American
cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from
candidate Trump :
'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over
our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals,
massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually
unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their
immorality is absolutely unlimited.'
"... And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker is either losing money or losing their job? ..."
"... the monetisation of everything and the use of language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the norm, but the only way. ..."
"... Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of 'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious 'elite'. ..."
"... I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's being said. ..."
And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management
speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker
is either losing money or losing their job? Or some manager is about to award themselves
a bonus?
@gyges1 - No, she is surely railing against the monetisation of everything and the use of
language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the
norm, but the only way.
Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit
claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of
'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious
'elite'.
Language matters and its distortion is a political act.
But without these Exciting New Word Uprating Initiatives, we can never win The Global Race...
or something.
I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's
Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered
precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal
Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings
become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's
being said.
(By the way, the link's to Amazon, but, obviously, you may find you have a better
"Customer Experience" if you get from somewhere less tax-dodgy.)
"... I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina. ..."
"... The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor? ..."
"... It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home. ..."
"... The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it. ..."
"... We have become so embedded in the language of individuals, choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy" and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest. If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive. ..."
@finnkn - Apologies. I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant
and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared
in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina.
The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored
by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu;
paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism
was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor?
To be clear: I am arguing that the direct effects of 'actually existing neoliberalism' are very far from benign. I do not argue
that the militarisation of Central and South America are the direct consequence neoliberal theory.
@finnkn - Well I think many would. It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored
military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation
as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home.
Neoliberalism was first practiced in authoritarian states; the states in which neoliberalism is most deeply embedded are (surprise,
surprise) increasingly authoritarian, and neoliberalism solutions are regularly imposed on client/vulnerable states by suprastructures
such as the IMF, the EU, and the World Bank. Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith were very clear that the potential for degeneracy
existed. We have now reached that potential; increasingly centralised authority, states within states, the denuding of democratic
institutions and crony capitalism. Neoliberalism in practice is very different to neoliberalism in practice. Rather like 'really
existing socialism' and Marxism.
works best in authoritarian states because (in practice, if not in theory
As the statistics on that link show, there are certain countries (notably Russia and the Ukraine) where the +65 age group disapprove
of the change to democracy and capitalism. In the majority, however, people of all ages remain in favour.
For 'job' read 'bribe' (keep your mouth shut or lose it), for 'management' read 'take most of the interest out of the job
for everybody else and put them on a lower scale', etc. I guess you get my drift.
It's sad that you have such a negative, self-hating attitude towards your work.
Work is usually and certainly should be a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has or could
have moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core
Spoken like a true champagne socialist in a creative industry. How do you find meaning and fulfillment, or creative values, in
emptying bins, cleaning offices, sweeping the streets and a whole load of other work which needs doing but which is repetitive,
menial and not particularly pleasant?
There are two ways to get people to do work that needs doing but wouldn't be done voluntarily: coercion or payment. I think
the second is a more healthy way to run a society.
I've thought pretty much the same myself. Democracies can be good or bad (as the Greeks knew well)...but in our politic-speak
it is used to denounce and make good; as in "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East"...it is intended to make us feel
something good about Israel, as it humiliates the Palestinians and steals their land.
In ancient Greece....'tyrant' simply meant
'usurper' without any neccessary negative association....simply someone who had usurped political power...they recognized that
tyrannies could be good, bad or indifferent.
In Rome, dictator simply meant the cahp that took over fpr periods of six months at a time, during times of crisis.
I used to vacation in Yugoslavia in Marshall Tito's time....it was a wonderful place, beautiful, inexpensive and safe...very
very safe. What came into the power vacuum after he died in 1980...what happened to the country? I'd argue that his was a good
dictatorship or tyranny....
I'm also not too sure what the 90% of people unaffected by and uninterested in power politics in any given country feel about
the 'liberation' of Libya and Iraq from their prior dictatorships...I'm sure that plenty of people whose previously steady lives
have been wrecked, are all that thrilled.
I have recently been exercised by the right's adoption of "Social Justice". In the past it was the left and churches who talked
of social justice as a phenomenon to empower the poor and dispossessed, whether in this country or the developing world. Social
Justice was a touchstone of Faith in the City, for example, but it seems now to be the smoke screen behind which benefits are
stipped from the "undeserving poor".
Most of this crap comes from America. Crappy middle-management bureaucrats spouting "free-market" bollocks.
The efficiency of the private sector - some nob with a name badge timing how long you've been on the toilet.
Freedommm!!!!
It is not just neoliberalism. Everyone is at it - sucking the meaning out of words. Corporate bullshit, public sector bullshit.
Being customers of your own government is a crime that everyone is guilty of. This is what Orwell railed against decades ago,
and it has got worse.
Case in point; just look at the way in which the Cameron set about co-opting words and phrases justifiably applied to his own
regime and repurposed them against his detractors.
For example, people who took a stand against the stealth privatisation of the NHS were branded as "vested interests", quite
unlike the wholesome MPs who voted for the NHS bill who, despite the huge sums of money they received from the private healthcare
lobby, we are encouraged to believe were acting in our best interests by selling our health service to their corporate paymasters.
Or the farcical attempt to rebrand female Tory MPs as "feminists" despite their anti-social mobility, anti-equality, anti-human
rights and anti-abortion views.
The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used
it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid
profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it.
@Obelisk1 - You have single-handedly proven Massey's argument. We have become so embedded in the language of individuals,
choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy"
and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest.
If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive.
Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation
to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.
But in the eyes of the economic right, that is precisely the case. Adjectives like altruistic, caring, selfless, empathy and
sympathy are simply not in their vocabulary. They are only ever any of those things provided they can see some sort of beneficial
payback at the end.
maxfisher -> Venebles 11 Jun 2013 06:20
@Venebles - I was simply joining many commentators in the mire. Those that dispute the neoliberal worldview are routinely dismissed
as marxists. I thought I'd save you all the energy, duck.
I'm not sure that the families of the disappeared of Chile and Argentina would concur with you benign view of neoliberalism
and its effects.
CIA democrats of which Obama is a prominent example (and Hillary is another one) are are Werewolfs, very dangerous political beasts,
probably more dangerous to the world then Republicans like George W Bush. But in case of Ukraine, it was easily pushed into Baltic orbit,
because it has all the preconditions for that. So Nuland has an relatively easy, albeit dirty task. Also all this
probably that "in five years we will be living like French" was pretty effective. Now the population faces
consequences of its own stupidity. This is just neoliberal business as usual or neocolonialism.
Notable quotes:
"... populists on the right ..."
"... hired members of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties ..."
"... Disclaimer: No Russian, living or dead, had anything to do with the posting of this proudly home-grown comment ..."
Let's recap what Obama's coup
in Ukraine has led to shall we? Maybe installing and blatantly backing Neo Nazis in Ukraine might have something to do with the
rise of " populists on the right " that is spreading through Europe and this country, Hillary.
America's criminal 'news' media never even reported the coup, nor that in 2011 the Obama regime began
planning for
a coup in Ukraine . And that by 1 March 2013 they started organizing it
inside the
U.S. Embassy there . And that they hired members of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties , Right
Sector and Svoboda (which latter had been called the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine until the CIA advised them to change
it to Freedom Party, or "Svoboda" instead). And that in February 2014 they did it (and here's the
4 February 2014 phone call instructing the U.S. Ambassador
whom to place in charge of the new regime when the coup will be completed), under the cover of authentic anti-corruption demonstrations
that the Embassy organized on the Maidan Square in Kiev, demonstrations that the criminal U.S. 'news' media misrepresented as
'democracy demonstrations ,' though Ukraine already had democracy (but still lots of corruption, even more than today's U.S. does,
and the pontificating Obama said he was trying to end Ukraine's corruption -- which instead actually soared after his coup there).
But wait there's more .... Remember
that caravan of refugees making their way through Mexico? Guess where a number of them came from? Honduras. Yep. Another coup that
happened during Obama's and Hillary's tenure.
In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
used a review of Henry Kissinger's latest book, "World Order ," to lay out her vision for "sustaining America's leadership
in the world." In the midst of numerous global crises, she called for return to a foreign policy with purpose, strategy and pragmatism.
She also highlighted some of these policy choices in her memoir "Hard Choices" and how they contributed to the challenges that
Barack Obama's administration now faces.
**
The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into
the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress
have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted
the country's democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the
U.S.-backed post-coup government "rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries," opening the door for further "violence and anarchy."
The homicide rate in Honduras, already the highest in the world, increased by 50 percent from 2008 to 2011; political repression,
the murder of opposition political candidates, peasant organizers and LGBT activists increased and continue to this day. Femicides
skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened
amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras' police and government. While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence,
Honduran security forces have engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.
Despite this, however, both under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department's response to the violence and military and police
impunity has largely been silence, along with continued U.S. aid to Honduran security forces. In "Hard Choices," Clinton describes
her role in the aftermath of the coup that brought about this dire situation. Her firsthand account is significant both for the
confession of an important truth and for a crucial false testimony.
First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office.
"In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa
in Mexico," Clinton writes. "We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could
be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot."
Clinton's position on Latin America in her bid for the presidency is another example of how the far right exerts disproportionate
influence on US foreign policy in the hemisphere. up 24 users have voted. --
Disclaimer: No Russian, living or dead, had anything to do with the posting of this proudly home-grown comment
@snoopydawg@snoopydawg
Obama, Hillary and the rest of that administration knew it was a coup because that was the goal.
"..4. (C) In our view, none of the above arguments has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution. Some are outright
false. Others are mere supposition or ex-post rationalizations of a patently illegal act. Essentially: --
the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the country;
-- Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a Honduran president;
-- Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process;
-- the purported "resignation" letter was a fabrication and was not even the basis for Congress's action of June 28; and
-- Zelaya's arrest and forced removal from the country violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the prohibition
on expatriation, presumption of innocence and right to due process. " https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TEGUCIGALPA645_a.html
That evil woman thinks she has the right to preach to others about how to handle the very fallout from the horrific disasters
that she HERself created? Hillary, look in the mirror, you evil woman.
Clinton said rightwing populists in the west met "a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and
where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.
" The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or
other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don't want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told
what to do and where to go and how to live and only given one version of reality.
"I don't know why at this moment that is so attractive to people, but it's a serious threat to our freedom and our democratic
institutions, and it goes very deep and very far and we've got to do a better job of shining a light on it and trying to combat
it."
This arrogance of looking down on the populace is very part and parcel of the neoliberal attitude of the ruling class takes
to the rest of us peons. They created this unreality for the American people and have suppressed our right to know what is really
happening in the world. Obama destroyed the Occupy Movement with violent police attacks and kettling. And then disgustingly, Clinton
comes out with her hubristic victim blaming.
The Clintons are nearly single handedly responsible for much of the destruction of the American middle class and the repression
of poor and black people under Bill and the violent destruction of many countries under Hillary. And yet neither Clinton is willing
to own up for all the human misery that they have caused wherever they go. Unfortunately, the one place they refuse to go is just
away forever.
The belief that HRC & her circle are principled & progressive is just as fictitious as the belief that they lost to a reality
TV host because of stolen emails, social media trolls, & a (fictitious) conspiracy between the reality TV host & the Kremlin:
https://t.co/iyTC1M6uws
Clinton says Europe should make clear that "we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge & support." Isn't this
the attitude we denounce Trump for? Speaking of irony, Clinton's regime wars in Libya & Syria (& Iraq, indirectly) fueled the
migration she wants to stop. https://t.co/CIkkGRRKNd
This ego-maniac sees the world's problems - which she had a huge hand in creating - only through the lens of her electability.
Apparently, the only problems the world has are the one's that keep her from sitting in the Oval Office. Everything else is
fine. She is deplorable.
That evil woman thinks she has the right to preach to others about how to handle the very fallout from the horrific disasters
that she HERself created? Hillary, look in the mirror, you evil woman.
Clinton said rightwing populists in the west met "a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do,
and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality.
" The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king
or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don't want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to
be told what to do and where to go and how to live and only given one version of reality.
"I don't know why at this moment that is so attractive to people, but it's a serious threat to our freedom and our democratic
institutions, and it goes very deep and very far and we've got to do a better job of shining a light on it and trying to
combat it."
This arrogance of looking down on the populace is very part and parcel of the neoliberal attitude of the ruling class takes
to the rest of us peons. They created this unreality for the American people and have suppressed our right to know what is
really happening in the world. Obama destroyed the Occupy Movement with violent police attacks and kettling. And then disgustingly,
Clinton comes out with her hubristic victim blaming.
The Clintons are nearly single handedly responsible for much of the destruction of the American middle class and the repression
of poor and black people under Bill and the violent destruction of many countries under Hillary. And yet neither Clinton is
willing to own up for all the human misery that they have caused wherever they go. Unfortunately, the one place they refuse
to go is just away forever.
@gulfgal98 Because they just HAVE to get a rich, far-right, patriarchal white woman elected at any cost for the sake
of 'making history'. If these idiots really wanted to make history, they'd work like hell to put someone in charge who actually
had the balls to hang the pigs and their collaborators for their crimes.
The belief that HRC & her circle are principled & progressive is just as fictitious as the belief that they lost to a
reality TV host because of stolen emails, social media trolls, & a (fictitious) conspiracy between the reality TV host &
the Kremlin: https://t.co/iyTC1M6uws
Clinton says Europe should make clear that "we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge & support." Isn't
this the attitude we denounce Trump for? Speaking of irony, Clinton's regime wars in Libya & Syria (& Iraq, indirectly)
fueled the migration she wants to stop. https://t.co/CIkkGRRKNd
This ego-maniac sees the world's problems - which she had a huge hand in creating - only through the lens of her electability.
Apparently, the only problems the world has are the one's that keep her from sitting in the Oval Office. Everything else
is fine. She is deplorable.
"... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a
trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service
" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from
Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established
in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated
Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's
historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report
on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network
RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb
hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget
of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists,
military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference
in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin,
with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing
Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked
documents states. -
RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway,
Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its
sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts
embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government
agencies."
The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the
US State Department , the
documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian
sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. -
RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block
the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half
hours to accomplish, brags the group in the
documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian
and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca
in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them according to the leaks academic Miguel Αngel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to
geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." -
RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist
reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is
use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko
buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also
explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated
that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the
people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent
sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion
firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those
who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape
Karma.
The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national
leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru
communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of
Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair
and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and
that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in
a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going
around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war.
Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.
"250,000 from the US State
Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third
Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like
project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way
to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some
politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is
a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate
ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered
in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport
layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG
NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to
companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in
turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool
the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose
Law Firm."- patriots4truth
When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with
plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting
memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news
and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are
exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms
for political speech, especially without using True Names.
Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating
here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most
surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is
remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is
what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed
fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of
the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means
justify the ends".
Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to
overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin.
This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is
obviously a Russian spy.
Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy
leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire
accounts.
This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have
such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the
WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to
find it?
Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to
the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the
latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious
people.
Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of
accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I
wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living
and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living
conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained
deaths.
England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for
the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets
because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to
flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as
usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and
agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism).
The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers
are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to
the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity
Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel,
scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian
interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes,
the documents claim.
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole
west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating
about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in
2001?
His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some
totally obscure Jewish activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. If that doesn't qualify him
as an "insider," I don't know what does.
Excerpts from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy :
Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power
Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the
greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly.
We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until
the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario,
the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant
advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power
is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft
money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to
Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with
selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.
Jewish voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the
nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los
Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more
quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a
matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms
us.
All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to
play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very
scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least
a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the
new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often
competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new
immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south
Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go
before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent
enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no
melting pot!
For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in
a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions
that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American
alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided
Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is
that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger
Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not
think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans,
Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Jewish legislative
representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S.
Senates with 10 Jewish members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court
to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be
we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually
believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will
go to Israel?
How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole
west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.
This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating
about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in
2001?
His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some
totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National
Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him
as an "insider," I don't know what does.
Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a
Misguided Immigration Policy :
Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power
Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the
greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly.
We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until
the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario,
the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant
advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power
is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft
money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to
Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with
selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.
Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the
nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los
Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more
quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a
matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms
us.
All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to
play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very
scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least
a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the
new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often
competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new
immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south
Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go
before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent
enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no
melting pot!
For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in
a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions
that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American
alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided
Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is
that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger
Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not
think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans,
Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative
representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S.
Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court
to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be
we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually
believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will
go to Israel?
If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know.
What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.
Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the
USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'.
That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see
this.
About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that
western power is diminishing.
So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing
too.
NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other
hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.
While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.
The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on
this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people
on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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CTG_Sweden 19 minutes ago ( Edited ) remove Share link Copy But so far they haven´t been kicked out of Iran, like a considerable portion of the Palestinian Christians in Palestine/Israel back in 1947-48. 30 % of the Palestinians who were driven out from Israel were Christians. Nor have they been starved to death like the Christians who owned farmland in Russia/Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s when Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Stalin´s "brother in law" Kaganovych ruled over Russian/Ukrainian farmers. But I agree that Europe still is a better place for Christians than Iran. But does a person like Barbara Lerner-Spectre want to keep it that way? Well, I´m not so sure about that. CTG_Sweden 17 minutes ago remove Share link Copy
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg"> Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us Younger evangelicals, those under 45, have been slowly but steadily moving away from Trump during the past two years or so, unhappy about his example. A key topic that has driven them away is immigration. Loving your neighbor as yourself has always been a bedrock Christian value. And Trump's stance on immigrants (especially those of color) has upset the younger generation of evangelicals, with two-thirds of them saying in surveys that immigrants strengthen our country, bringing their work ethic and talents with them from Mexico or Central America or Syria. Climate change is another issue that has caught the imagination of younger evangelicals. "I can't love my neighbor if I'm not protecting the earth that sustains them and defending their rights to clean water, clean air, and a stable climate," Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, told Grist . Needless to say, Trump's contempt on this subject grates badly on these young Christians. Perhaps naively, Americans have always looked to the presidency for exemplary moral behavior, and when there are obvious personal or moral failures, as with Nixon and Clinton, there is disappointment, even anger. But if you're a Christian -- and I lay claim to this for myself -- you understand that it's human to fail at perfect behavior. There is always forgiveness. And, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Humility is endless."
<img alt="Faith could bring us together. But too often it divides us"
src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191121180252-20191121-fractured-states-religious-leaders-large-169.jpg">
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